Universities are being hollowed out

This letter was just published in the Irish Times

The parlous impact of managerialism on the sector is only too obvious: 52.4 per cent of all staff in Irish universities are not academics yet academics have seen a huge rise in their administrative duties to the detriment of time for research, teaching and contact with their students; the huge salaries commanded by presidents of universities, who see themselves as captains of industry, contrast ignominiously with the relative pittance earned by the rank-and-file lecture staff; and the cynical reduction of the number of tenured staff has resulted in 45 per cent of academics being employed part-time on salaries as low as perhaps €30 an hour, with no job security and no facilities to develop their teaching and research (many do not even have borrowing rights for the university library, a place to hang their coat, or an allowance to cover marking).