Anonymous said...
Refused 13 percent? Wow. That does seem a bit greedy. How long has it been since their last raise? What is the education budget and is it really going to education (instructor salaries, equipment, decent buildings) or is it being funneled into the fringes like sports stadiums and administrator junkets?
There is a wonderful paradox in the funding of UK higher education.
The amount of funding a course receives depends on the number of students taking it.
Now, this makes perfect sense to the mindless morons who have degrees in administration, because they have fewer brain cells than a tapeworm.
However, to those who actually do the work, it means this:
Student numbers fluctuate. Once in a while, a course will have a bad year, with few students.
So that course will have its funding cut. Field trips are cancelled. Lab work is curtailed.
"Oh," say the suits, "Increase student numbers next year and we'll increase your funding again."
Too late. Word is out. The students taking the course this year pass out the information that the course is crap. There should have been field trips, more lab work, better projects.
Also, with reduced funding, there's no spare cash to advertise the course.
Next year, numbers drop further. Funding is cut further. More practical work is cancelled.
The course is now in a spiral from which it cannot recover. The suits cancel it, since there's 'no demand'.
After this year's strikes, many courses have begun the spiral. What did the lecturers really think they would achieve? What they have succeeded in doing is destroying their own jobs. Striking is not the answer. I have heard it said, and I repeat it here:
"There is nothing wrong with administration that can't be fixed with a shotgun and a couple of hand grenades."
The parasitic administration will still hang on, siphoning money from those who earn it, and paying themselves very nice salaries from the proceeds.
However, they really could benefit from some scientific knowledge.
When a host dies, its parasites die soon afterwards.
5 comments:
"The amount of funding a course receives depends on the number of students taking it."
How stupid is that? So if only a few guys at the med school want to be heart disease researchers, the admins figure "funding that department is wasteful" and let it go? What happens when their arm goes numb and they can't breath all of a sudden? There are some professions you don't need too many of, but when you need them, they are key. If you underfund the classes the people aiming at those careers need...not good.
Oh, it gets better.
Popular courses get more support. Currently, the UK produces eight times as many forensic scientists as there are jobs to fill, and that disparity is increasing.
Because of the popularity of forensic-based TV shows, there are lots of applications for these courses. So, lots of funding, to produce highly qualified people we don't need.
You could ask the suits why this is so, but keep in mind the suits are empty.
People you don't need, who will find out that Crime Scene Investigation is not as it appears on TV and won't last long on the job.
It takes a certain personality type to walk into rooms/fields/hellholes, week after week, and spend hours standing in blood, breathing smells indecribable, documenting the location of each body part. It takes a certain personality type to calmly take photo after photo of murdered children while the relatives stand weeping and praying on the street outside. Things that send tough street cops into shock or out to the curb to vomit must be handled with detached professionalism. You have to have something in your personality that allows you to appear unaffected and you have to have someone waiting at home to hold and soothe and love you when you leave your work clothes in the garage before entering the house.
Crime Scene Detectives burn out quick. It is a psychologically demanding job. You deal with things on a weekly basis most people would be traumatized by if they saw once.
Unlike a doctor or a nurse, there is nothing you can do for the victims, because by the time you come on the scene the living are gone.
You must calmly face the badgering and battering of attorneys while on the witness stand - over and over and over again. You must never cry or feel. At least not until you are safely in the dark quiet of your bedroom wrapped in your spouse's arms.
And you do all this for relatively meager compensation. If they had any sense, those forensics students would become insurance salesmen.
Much the same happens in parapshychology: many students expect to become the next Harry Price, or to have their own TV show, the moment they qualify.
Most arrive expecting to learn the para without bothering about the psychology, and are horrified to learn that 99% of the cases we see have perfectly normal explanations.
They want to talk to ghosts. They don't want to track down vibrations from worn motor bearings or underground streams.
Most of them don't last the first year.
Everybody is looking for a glamorous job. But even in the most exciting fields the hard work/boredom stretches long between the thrilling bits.
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