Humanities takes undesignated working hours from 48 temporary lecturers

Permanent staff used to be allowed to use 10 percent of their working hours as they saw fit, but the faculty has decided to take this possibility away to save money. Without undesignated hours, lecturers can dedicate more time to teaching, which will enable the faculty to maintain a hiring freeze for as long as possible. Temporary lecturers would be exempt from the new rule: the faculty announced earlier this autumn that they would only lose 5 percent of their undesignated time.

The faculty board has since changed its mind. Members of the faculty council found this out thanks to an email sent by the Media & Cultural Studies departmental board to its teachers. 

Undesignated time has now also been revoked for temporary lecturers with "robust contracts". These are four-year appointments of at least 0.7 FTE. In total, 48 people will be affected.

Difficult to digest
In last week's faculty council meeting, councillors couldn't hide their disappointment to have learned about the additional measure in a roundabout way. They were concerned that temporary lecturers were being asked to make a sacrifice. After all, those employees can't reap the benefits of the measure as they will no longer be working at UU when the faculty manages to get its finances together – which is expected to happen in three years.

In addition, council members argued that temporary lecturers do not have a designated time for research, which makes them less flexible than permanent staff. Lecturers often sacrifice part of their research time to prepare for classes, although that's far from ideal. 

Council member Reinier Vriend called the state of affairs "hard to stomach". In his own words, "We had agreed to plans that would affect temporary teachers relatively less, and now we're hearing through a department that this is not the case after all. The faculty board is presenting this to us 'for our information' only. This is regrettable."

Ugly story
Dean Thomas Vaessens acknowledged that the measure wasn't pretty. However, he says that departmental boards saw no other way to finalise the teaching schedule without incurring additional costs. According to the dean, the faculty is doing all it can to avoid redundancies. "I understand the anger and frustration. It's an ugly and unpleasant story."

According to the dean, the additional measure has not been submitted to the faculty council because the council had already agreed to the main points of the budget. Vaessens noted that the faculty always said certain measures could be changed. "We said at the time that we could not finalise everything."

The councillors then called on the dean to at least ask the departmental boards to spare part-time lecturers if there is the slightest possibility of doing so. They believe that many permanent staff members feel for their temporary colleagues. The dean promised to do that.