Like all other issues of this nature, the question of university lecturers’ salaries is being considered in a vacuum. The lecturers are demanding more money. But what are they offering in return? It appears to be nothing beyond what they are providing already. And here lies the problem: some lecturers deserve better pay. Others deserve less. Some even deserve to lose their jobs so that better lecturers can replace them, in the best interests of the students. When good lecturers unite with bad, they are doomed to fail. Theirs is not a common cause, though they think it is, because some of them are campaigning for just remuneration while others are campaigning for unjust rewards.

By objecting to any attempt to tie them in to a gauge of their performance, bad lecturers are trying to maintain a status quo in which they get away with murder, while good lecturers are undermining their own interests because they are the very ones who stand to gain from performance monitoring and performance-adjusted pay. Academics, some of them say, should not be assessed like people who work in the entirely different field of private sector business. They are demanding salaries far in excess of those that are the norm in the private sector even for extremely demanding positions subject to constant assessment, with the ever-present risk of being fired or made redundant. University lecturers are strangers to these pressures and will remain so, yet they are demanding salaries far in excess of those paid to people for whom such pressure is a part of daily life.

I was quite taken aback when I saw the numbers being waved around by representatives of university lecturers some weeks ago. They were astronomically high, shockingly so. It wasn’t the numbers themselves that shocked me, but what those numbers told me about the people who decided on them: that they are completely and utterly divorced from reality. They bore no relation at all to salaries in the private sector, paid to people with the equivalent educational background and in high-pressure jobs. When I brought this up with a couple of lecturers I know, the retort was that I shouldn’t make comparisons with the private sector, because the university is the university and private business is private business.

When people who work only within the university environment say things like that, they don’t help their cause. They come across as having little or no understanding of the real world that lies outside protection from reality by heavy unionisation and being on the State payroll. You don’t fix your price. The job market does. You don’t tell the job market how much you’re worth. The job market tells you. The lecturers and their representatives may have climbed down from their extraordinary claims and fixated on some figures that are more realistic – no numbers have been bandied about recently – but they are still arguing their cause based on the unrealistic belief that they can set their own price. They can’t. The market pays people what they are worth in that market. Lecturers at our university will find that they are worth more in other markets and less in others, including this market. They are now discovering the problem inherent in fighting as a single phalanx, the good with the bad, rather than arguing in favour of performance-related pay: that the result of this is that they are not paid according to their individual worth, but according to the average worth within the group. If there is a heavy presence of bad lecturers who are worth little, this drags down the average worth, and so the good lecturers end up being paid less than they are worth.

In battles of this nature, the talk is usually of ‘what we deserve’ when what it is really all about is what they are worth. Lots of people think they deserve more, but they are loath to think in terms of what they are worth in the market. The true test of what university lecturers are worth, rather than what they deserve, comes not from figures arrived at around a discussion-table, with a calculator, a sense of entitlement and a lot of anger, but from the marketplace. If each and every one of those lecturers were to take the plunge and put themselves out there for work, how much could they expect to be paid? Certainly not the huge sums they were shouting about when I was listening last. Some of them will be considered completely unemployable and will have to live off unemployment benefits. Others will have to take boring desk-jobs at an even lower salary than their present one. Others still will find themselves constrained to take employment, which they consider beneath their capabilities, just to take home the money and pay the bills – like thousands of people do on these islands. Only the rare few will command from the private sector the kind of salaries they expect from the university, for which read the government.

My private-sector mentality causes me to recoil at any suggestion that those who perform miserably – or who, like several university lecturers I know and know of, barely perform at all – and those who perform beyond the call of duty should be paid the same amount and given the same privileges. What incentive is there to do your job, beyond the entirely personal and private pressures of conscience, morality and a sense of duty, when however little or however much you do the same amount is going to plop into your current account at the end of the month? There are some lecturers who are never available to students, who don’t turn up for lectures or who don’t bother to turn up at the appointed time but much later, who take weeks and months to correct assignments and let students know their grades, who give no guidance at all, who turn up, sit down and proceed to read from a set text, never deviating from it and not encouraging discussion. I could go on, but won’t. The point is that this behaviour won’t change if they are paid more money. The opposite will happen: if they perceive that they have been rewarded for substandard performance, their behaviour will become more outrageous and unacceptable and not less so.

And this is the crux of the problem. The good lecturers, those who talk to their students, who take the trouble to prepare good lectures, who read and impart their knowledge, who take a prompt and efficient interest in assignments, who juggle their responsibilities well and with the barest minimum of assistance, who encourage students to take advantage of the now myriad opportunities to spend a semester or two at another university elsewhere (instead of placing as many obstacles as possible in their way), are being dragged down with the indifferent and the downright awful or hopeless.

The lecturers are fighting this battle together on the principle that united they stand, divided they fall. The mistake they make is in their definition of unity and division. If the good unite together against the bad, they are going to be successful. Otherwise, the good are going to carry on being dragged down by the bad and the inadequate. It is precisely because the good are uniting with the bad on the issue of bigger salaries, on the basis that they are all lecturers, that they have no credibility in this matter and even less support. It’s true that they have precious little choice: lecturers have to act as one group or not act at all. Yet there are intelligent means by which the good may unite together, edging out the bad, without going to the unwise extreme of sorting themselves out into the two categories of good lecturer and bad lecturer with perhaps a third category called ‘has potential’. This is to suggest – rather than run away from and scream and shout against – performance-monitoring and performance-related pay. That way, good lecturers are rewarded and bad lecturers either get a grip on themselves or tread water on the same salary for the rest of their working lives. I would suggest going one further and ensuring that jobs at the university are no longer seen or treated as a sinecure. If bad and inadequate lecturers are not removed to make way for those who are good, thousands of students suffer the consequences over the years, and the employment market outside the university ends up saturated with sub-standard graduates. This is happening already.

Yes, I think lecturers who work hard, who have genuine interest in their students and who go out of their way to bring them along should be paid more than they are at present. They are worth more than they receive. They also need the monetary incentive, which helps build enthusiasm. But I certainly don’t think that the laggards, the shirkers, the lazy bums and the ones who seem to be permanently asleep or in a daze, or who skive off lectures and never give tutorials because they are too busy elsewhere should benefit alongside the good lecturers, purely on the basis that they all do the same job. The point is that they do not do the same job. Some perform and others don’t.

There is so little respect for students that a few years ago, an entrepreneurial student group started a ‘bushfire telegraph’ initiative, alerting student-subscribers by means of text-message when lectures were cancelled unexpectedly. Every morning they would get in touch with the department secretaries and ask for information on which lectures were to be cancelled that day. The initiative eventually had to be wound up when even the department secretaries didn’t have this information or refused to cooperate efficiently with the students. So now it’s back to square one, with students taking two buses – despite the urban legend, they don’t all have cars or a driving licence – and leaving home at 6.30am to make it in time for an 8am lecture, only to end up sitting the room for 20 minutes and left to conclude that, oh, the lecturer couldn’t make it – again.

The principle of equal pay for equal work isn’t only about gender differences. It also means that if you expect to be paid as much as X then you have to work as much as X. Raising salaries is not going to solve this fundamental problem of some lecturers working hard while others appear to live in some alternative universe where it is possible to collect a salary for floating around for most of the day while he who pays the piper is not permitted to call the tune, or even to check whether the piper is actually playing at all. Let’s say I’m a university lecturer who works hard and takes great interest in my students, and that tomorrow the government puts my salary up to the extraordinary level I have demanded, and also agrees to the even more extraordinary annual increments. For a while, I’m going to be happy about it, thrilled even. Then I’ll begin to notice that colleague X and colleague Y, who have had their salaries bumped up by the same amount, are still not working and still not taking an interest in their students. And I’ll look at myself and think: here I am, working all the hours God sends, spending evenings marking assignments and weekends planning lectures, while David and Susan bum around all day doing just enough to get by, and sometimes not even that, and they’re paid the same. And guess what? The anger and resentment will begin to simmer again.

Because if lecturers are true to themselves, they will admit that their anger is not so much about what they are paid, but that the good are paid as much or as little as the bad. The bad ones are in there agitating alongside the rest, because if they are being paid for doing next-to-nothing now they might as well try to get even more money for doing the same. But what the good ones are really saying is that they want recognition for all the hard work they do, and rightly so. When they ask for a high salary and yearly increments, it’s not just about the money. What they are demanding, at root, is recognition. The mistake they make is to demand this recognition for all, even the losers who flop around all day and behave like they need to be injected with adrenalin.

The way things are, of course students have turned against their lecturers instead of backing them up in their call for higher salaries. Very many lecturers are not respected by their students, who feel aggrieved because they know they are being sold short. A few lecturers are still reading out – yes, reading out, as though their adult students are illiterates who can’t read a print-out themselves – from the same ‘notes’ they were using 15 years ago. Others are drafted in to teach on the basis that they have a master’s degree in the subject and a friend of a friend who got them the job, but have absolutely no communication skills to speak of. With all the opportunities for student exchanges that EU membership has brought with it, students are spending more time at universities elsewhere and this opens their eyes to just how much better the teaching and facilities are ‘there’ – except for Italian universities, where things are worse.

I imagine that the students would very much like to support the calls for greater pay by their favourite lecturers, the ones who take an interest in their progress, and who spend time developing lectures and marking assignments. But they know that in doing this, they will also be supporting, inadvertently, the same calls for greater pay by the lecturers they dislike because they are so hopeless at their job.