ACADEMIC STAFF in third-level colleges are being “bludgeoned into submission” and forced to accept key concessions including much shorter summer holidays, a former president of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) has said.
In an e-mail to colleagues, Paddy Healy – a lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology – warns discussions on the Croke Park deal will see lecturers in the 14 institutes of technology forced to accept concessions including a reduction in the summer break.
Under the Croke Park deal, third-level staff are required to teach for one extra hour per week, on top of the current annual workload of 560 hours. The agreement also provides for staff co-operation with academic workload management in return for a commitment to no redundancies until 2014.
Mr Healy said current talks on the Croke Park modernisation measures were being “dragged out until institute staff have been bludgeoned into submission”.
Brigid McManus, secretary general of the Department of Education, has acknowledged there were certain rigidities in the contract for lecturers in the institutes of technology. They are required to lecture 16 hours a week, and begin summer holidays on June 20th.
In a report in June, Comptroller and Auditor General John Buckley said it was “disturbing that some lecturers have a belief that their obligations to an institute of technology are exhausted upon delivery of contract hours which are set in terms of a norm of 16 hours per week”. Earlier this year, the Dáil Public Accounts Committee heard how some academics in Irish universities could work for as few as 15 hours every week.
University chiefs said while staff do not have minimum working hours, they spend considerable time on research and other duties.
The TUI – whose membership includes both second- and third-level staff – voted against the Croke Park deal. Members agreed to lift industrial action and enter talks on the deal after the department threatened to sack lecturers at the institutes of technology.
The National Strategy for Higher Education, published next month, proposes a new workload management system both in universities and the institutes of technology where the work of staff could be more closely monitored.
In a posting on his blog former DCU president Prof Ferdinand von Prondzynski said some of the “protections” enjoyed by institute of technology staff (such as long summer holidays) were hard to defend, “or at any rate it would be unwise to defend them publicly”.