Are we in a parallel pipeline? Bringing the casualisation of academic work onto the South African higher education agenda

Abstract:In the last three decades, university systems in the Global North have been through a major shift towards greater dependence on temporary and casual academic workers, and a decrease in permanent or tenured academic jobs. This phenomenon – the casualisation of academic labour – has received almost no scholarly attention in South Africa, and statistics and literature describing the academic profession here tend to cover permanent academics only. This paper narrates two of the author’s own experiences of doing temporary academic work – a one-semester teaching contract and a postdoctoral fellowship – and considers their implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and for the sustainability of the academic profession or pipeline. Relatively poorly paid temporary academic workers are often employed in exploitative conditions precisely so as to improve permanent academics’ working conditions, which has ethical implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and transformation. Moreover, temporary academics, including postdoctoral fellows, are absent from policy documents on growing the next generation of South African academics, which focus on the potential of those already in permanent jobs. Consequently, temporary academics appear to be in a ‘parallel pipeline’ which is not necessarily leading to permanent employment. The paper proposes some explanations of what is driving the proliferation of short-term contracts of various kinds, including issues of cost, permanent staff workload, and the way Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) ranks South African universities. It concludes with suggestions for further research on the scale, purposes and consequences of temporary academic work in South African higher education.