This is a wonderful book from Prof Robert Foley, Emeritus Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge. The author punctures the managerialism that has overwhelmed UK universities with gentle wit.
It’s cut from the same mine as many of the 21 Group blog postings, but it’s been polished to a gentler sheen — less gritty, raw ore, more finished gem-stone.
The chapter on “The Great University Subsidy Scandal” discusses how universities are subsidised by their own staff . We start with a very small, but telling, thing:
“In University administration, there are quite a number of university mobile phones, phones paid for by the University to be used for official business. I am sure that these are completely necessary, as so much work these days is carried out by mobile phone. I have yet to come across an academic who has a University phone … We talk to colleagues all over the world about research, about collaborations, about students. We double-factor ourselves using our mobile phones when logging into University admin websites” [R Foley, ‘Notes from Ivory Flats’]
Despite teaching and research being a University’s core mission, it’s assumed academics are happy to pay for their phones used for work, but senior administrators are not.
Let’s move on to PhD vivas. The choice of an external examiner is often important for the future of a graduate student. Many of us try to choose with great care, finding an academic interested in the subject and influential enough to perhaps act as a reference letter writer for the student. Much of the cost of hosting the external examiner — who may have travelled from Europe or further afield — is borne by us. Many of us routinely invite the examiner to lunch or dinner at our homes with other students and postdocs — at our expense.
“After a seminar, visiting speakers are taken to pubs and dinners. In an other profession, these would be business expenses, but in universities whilst it is possible to claim for the speaker, we often dutifully throw our debit cards into the hat, whilst often the more senior people pay for any students. External PhD examiners, who are paid a pittance for two or three days’ work and travel, are usually pleased to anoint with alcohol the heads of the happy student after the viva (while the supervisor may have bought a bottle of brandy for the unhappy ones”. [R Foley, ‘Notes from Ivory Flats’]
And finally, there is all the extra work we all do, especially the retired and young staff.
“Full-time contracts for non-academic staff are usually around 36 hours a week. But most academics work far more than this — evening and weekends are seldom work-free and I suspect that many (if not most) do not take their full holiday entitlement. While people might say that they are choosing to work because they find Sanskrit inscriptions or coding in Python so fascinating, that is irrelevant, as research is a core part of the job .. . The outcome is universities are getting far more for their buck than they deserve. Essentially, the universities are receiving Rolls-Royce service for the price of a second-hand Ford Mondeo” [R Foley, ‘Notes from Ivory Flats’]
Non-academics often work more than 36 hours a week, as well. Depending on Departmental policy, some are allowed to claim this extra work as overtime, but many are not.
However, the system is at its most exploitative for young researchers.
A deeply troubling aspect of academia is its dependence on early-career researchers cycling through a series of low-paid, short-term roles, often with the false hope — encouraged by the system and by more senior academics — that a stable, long-term position lies ahead. They work for the university doing things often for free or little reward, under the often mistaken assumption that this will help them get a permanent position. It’s a meat-grinder.
This is a pattern of exploitation that ultimately shames every one of us.
Robert Foley has written a book that is a worthy successor to Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica (which described Cambridge administration in the early twentieth century and was one of the inspirations for ‘Yes Minister’). Both books are highly recommended.
3 Comments
Outraged · 26 June 2025 at 20:46
At Cambridge, I marked six MPhil essays — each around 5,000 words, each demanding careful, graduate-level scrutiny. For this, I received £79.69. The university allotted just 3.75 hours total for the entire task. That’s 37 minutes per essay — for reading, assessing, commenting, and grading. It’s not just unrealistic; it’s insulting. I double-checked the paperwork, thinking there had to be some error. There wasn’t. This is a system that relies on unpaid labour
Eileen Nugent · 28 June 2025 at 23:33
Aside from the obvious problem of underpaying staff for their work there is now the additional problem of not accurately estimating staff workload in the process of underpaying staff.
exploited · 29 June 2025 at 08:58
At Oxford, about 10 years ago, as a young postdoc, I gave a series of 6 hour-long examples classes to final year students and I was paid nothing.
It’s commonplace that young postdocs are hoodwinked into taking on unpaid or lowly paid work, with the hinted expectation that this will provide them with “teaching experience that will strengthen the cv” and make them more likely to get a permanent position (which usually does not materialise).