Perverse incentives for universities are wasting the skills and work of postdoctoral fellows - The Mail & Guardian

have PhDs, though these are unevenly distributed among universities . Since only academics with PhDs can supervise new PhDs, there are also worries about how the academic profession is going to sustain itself in the long term. Universities are being encouraged to think of “innovative strategies” to recruit PhD-qualified academics to fill this gap.

In some ways, this mirrors patterns of academic casualisation in much of the Global North, where, in a collapsing permanent academic job market, postdoctoral fellowships and other kinds of insecure posts are absorbing the oversupply of PhD graduates who have no realistic chance of finding permanent academic work. In South Africa, however, the reasons for offering postdoctoral fellowships are less clear, as most academics already in permanent posts don’t have PhDs.

If they are so short of PhD-qualified academics, why don’t universities then just hire all these postdoctoral fellows straight into permanent academic posts? Surely this is an obvious solution to all parties’ needs? Or is it? Are university managers just being un-proactive about staffing plans, or are there really two different logics at work here, such that complaints about the shortage of PhD-qualified permanent staff do not acknowledge the ways that recruiting academics into non-permanent...

Beyond cost, however, there are other benefits to universities in having a significant fraction of their academic workforce outside of permanent employment. Itbecause permanent academics are too overworked with teaching and administration to do it themselves .

DrBladeNzimande

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