No Time to Reflect! ‘Precari’ in the University with a Few Tips for Survival

The article focuses on the ‘precari’ in universities, both young academics and postgraduate students: that is, those who experience the insecurity of casualisation and the demands of management to drive their doctoral studies to completion and/or meet the annual ‘performance’ requirement of publication outputs. Precarity is invoked, accordingly, in its fundamental definition of insecure employment and income together with the accompanying psychological distress. First, I provide a brief context of current considerations of precarity, in which the trials of millennials tend to be side-lined in higher-order ‘precarity debates’, whether economic or philosophical. My return to the vulnerable younger members of the university does not end with an explication of the ‘problem’, as do many considerations of precarity. Rather, I offer a few tips for surviving the pressures of managerial time- and cost-efficiency research where the quantity of output is expected to supersede the time necessary to reflect.