Statement of the governing team of the University of Barcelona: for a new teaching staff policy
Recently, the governing team of the UB published two orders (Order 2/2017, Order 3/2017) that caused, at least, some disappointment among the teaching and research staff. In order to avoid assumptions and misunderstandings, this statement is published to give the reasons why these orders have been taken, and to explain how these orders combine with the objectives of the governing team in the short, mid and long terms. Information which was given over the last months in the Council of Deans and the Governing Council, but which is worth mentioning to all the university community.
Recently, the governing team of the UB published two orders (Order 2/2017, Order 3/2017) that caused, at least, some disappointment among the teaching and research staff. In order to avoid assumptions and misunderstandings, this statement is published to give the reasons why these orders have been taken, and to explain how these orders combine with the objectives of the governing team in the short, mid and long terms. Information which was given over the last months in the Council of Deans and the Governing Council, but which is worth mentioning to all the university community.
- The beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 involved a severe reduction of the income in the public sector, which became a dramatic reduction in public expenditure. This lead to the dramatic reduction in the retirement replacement rate at the universities. With this complicated situation there were only three options: 1) reducing the academic offering in bachelor and master degrees, 2) reducing the number of new registrations to study at the university, 3) lowering the cost of the teaching staff.
- Instead of allowing universities to develop their own strategies, based on the principle of university autonomy, the university set a model based on hiring adjunct lecturers to replace the retired staff. This led to a massive recruitment of adjunct lecturers to the detriment of tenure lecturers and full professors. Therefore, in the case of the University of Barcelona, between 2008 and 2016 the number of adjunct lecturers has duplicated. This rise of adjunct lecturers does not respond to the real teaching needs but to a policy that aimed to transform the teaching staff model in the UB.
- This policy led to two court orders against the UB which are critical due their de-stabilizing potential impact. On the one hand, a sentence by the Supreme Court of Justice of Catalonia warns about the fact that an adjunct lecturer cannot have management or research tasks, and if so, s/he has to be paid for aside of his/her salary as adjunct lecturer. On the other hand, a sentence by the Supreme Court (sentence 473/2017) decrees the condition of permanent (indefinido no fijo) of an adjunct lecturer who had a series of contracts to cover the structural teaching needs.
- - Our objective as a university is -and has to be- to give back the investment of society to society, but multiplied. To do so we have to offer an excellent training and research. Thinking that a university lecturer can improvise and does not need a teaching or research experience is misunderstanding the last sense of university education. But to do so we cannot accept any of the three mentioned alternatives: reducing the offerings, the registrations or lowering the teaching staff. We believe the alternative is to renew and rejuvenate the teaching staff, instead of increasing their precariousness. And this is one of the objectives of this team.
- But we continue with a dual legal limitation: we cannot increase the total amount of effectives and we cannot increase the expenditure dedicated to pay the salaries (Chapter 1) in 2017. To make it even more difficult, in 2016 these two situations were passed and this led to a lack of negotiation with the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government) to set measurements of optimizations on the teaching staff resources. In addition, the mentioned sentences warn about the fraud involved in hiring adjunct lecturers to carry out structural tasks, or the impossibility of hiring adjunct lecturers to carry out management and research tasks.
- We understand the only possible and sensible option is to recover the autonomy and create a teaching staff policy based on:
- a) Emergency actions responding to all risks coming from the mentioned legal sentences. This accounts for the two orders that created debate.
- b) In the short run, we will propose Deans and Heads of Department an integrated plan of transformation of the positions of adjunct lecturer into full-time lecturers. complemented with an efficient task of teaching reorganization. This has to allow us -regarding the academic year 2018-2019- to develop our staff model based on full-time lecturers, in which adjunct lecturers can develop their own tasks in accordance to their contract. But adjunct lecturer positions cannot be the way to enter the University of Barcelona.
- c)In the long run, we have to work on having a stable teaching staff the available financing allows us. This is also related to a claim for a new finance model. The stable personnel will determine the training offerings and the amount of registrations the university can bare. And we will adapt group splitting in some courses to the teaching force in each situation.
In this context, we ask the university community to collaborate with us to demand society the support we need to carry out our functions as University, with the necessary financing to do so and the quality we all want. And guaranteeing the generational succession, stabilization of teaching staff and maintenance of decent conditions for the entire teaching and research staff.