Passing the buck

When I first considered becoming a university teacher, I was all of 19 and about to embark on my final year of undergraduate study. It was the chance remark of a teacher that set me thinking about a career which would need another 10 years of study to be fully qualified for. Looking back, it appears ridiculous — two years for a master’s, another two for an MPhil and finally a PhD that could take anything from four to six years.

It is a daunting course to contemplate and one that can no longer be approached with the traditional rubric that was applied earlier. That is the trade-off, at least in India, between a “steady” and “vocational” career versus one in a more corporate and competitive environment. While it is possible to start teaching after a master’s if one has passed the NET (National Eligibility Test), it takes away from research time required to produce a thesis for an MPhil or a PhD, especially as the stipends for research are quite low. The prospect of waiting till your mid-20s for your first official pay cheque has always been somewhat unnerving. But when I was approaching that particular obstacle course, there was the assurance of a steady career once I cleared it.

But this assurance has pretty much evaporated. The change has been swift and unsettling, even in the last five years. Central universities — the traditional employers for young teachers — have effectively shut their doors on hiring. Currently, around 4,000 posts for teaching in Delhi University (DU) alone are vacant, and while occasional circulars do hint at restarting hiring, it has so far not materialised.

The top colleges of DU are therefore being run on an ad hoc system or adjunct labour where young teachers are effectively hired for a semester at a time and are denied benefits that have been traditionally associated with a permanent teaching appointment. And while it can be argued that these teachers are paid the same gross salary as their permanent counterparts — around ₹60,000 — this does not take into account the effects of precarious employment that may be terminated at any point with little or no justification.

A teacher who has been employed on an ad hoc basis in DU for the last five years spoke to me on condition of anonymity and pointed out that, “While the more ethical colleges in DU don’t exploit their ad hocs I have heard so many horror stories. For instance, colleges will often terminate ad hoc contracts a day before the summer break to deny summer salaries. A lot of the summer work — invigilation, administrative work and so on — is done without any assurance that those teachers will be hired for the next semester.” She also points out that the revised pay scales of the Seventh Pay Commission have not been applied to college lecturers. The arrears keep piling up but most young teachers, who move from college to college, never see them even when they are eventually released.

In another Central university, in Mumbai, the situation has not deteriorated in terms of adjunct hiring, but salaries for even permanent teachers depend on the government releasing funds. While more prosperous colleges can afford to pay staff salaries out of internal budgets until the government funds arrive, the smaller colleges regularly ask staff to take significant pay cuts as compared to the pay scale they are supposed to receive by law.

The entrance of private players into the arena of higher education is another part of this puzzle. Because of the non-transparent practices of these colleges — they can pay both above and below the mandated pay scales — and the lack of unionisation among teachers, it is largely a game of Russian roulette, outside the few major players who are committed to long-term institution building.

That is not to say it is all bleak. Some private universities are indeed opening up exciting areas of research and interdisciplinary work unheard of in traditional colleges. The push towards producing research, especially in the humanities, is especially heartening. And being hired by a prestigious private university raises the possibility of a bigger pay cheque. However, the potential of these new avenues must also be weighed with the ethical costs of shutting out some students, especially from marginalised backgrounds. And honestly, it is not a cost I am entirely comfortable with, even as I resist my labour being co-opted in a precarious ad hoc system.

I don’t think anyone has considered a teaching career lucrative, but at least when I first thought about it many years ago, it had seemed a profession where one could make a steady living while following a sort of calling. But nowadays, I must admit that when young students come to me with the same slightly starry-eyed ideas of affecting lives through teaching, I give them a reality check. Teaching is now an increasingly corporate and neo-liberalised industry and they must weigh the costs of a long and painful qualification process with the realities of what awaits them at the end of that journey.

Rukmini Pande teaches at OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana

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