A health warning to lecturers
Pros
The buildings are nice. In fact the physical environment is very attractive and getting better all the time, as one would expect of an institution spending £30 million a year on bricks and mortar. If you are lucky, as I was, your immediate team might be a great group of committed, talented, and energetic scholars and teachers, and your students likewise. Belfast is a nicer city than you might think.
Cons
The academic working environment has been deteriorating rapidly and will continue to do so as the current CEO's "vision" limps like a wounded dog toward full implementation. Over the next 18 months a number incredibly wasteful, overlapping, and insular layers of bureaucracy in three faculty silos will settle in (four new deans, an operations manager, professional services teams, etc. etc. for each faculty). All this on top of the existing hierarchy. Communication and operations within and between these layers and with staff at the coalface of teaching and research is utterly dysfunctional. There is a profound disregard for and ignorance of the work and ethos of the core human resource of the University: the disciplinary researcher and teacher. Any person considering taking up a lectureship at this University should seek the following information and reflect on it carefully, comparing it to competing institutions if possible: *Is the student intake on your teaching programmes stable or declining? What are the commitments and strategies for marketing these programmes? How does the programme websites compare to its competitors? Is the University leveraging its location and its human resources effectively? *How stable is the academic team you will be joining? Are your future colleagues satisfied with the direction the University is going? How many are actively seeking work elsewhere? Have many people left the programme recently? Why? *If you are at entry level: are the requirements (teaching, admin, research) to pass probation within a two year period reasonable? How do they compare with competing institutions? What has been the recent experience of academics on probation in your programme? What tangible support mechanisms are in place to help you succeed (curricular development, teaching assistance, financial support for research material and travel, ring-fencing of research time)? *If you are an established researcher, with the aspiration to win external research grants: how does the University handle the income you will generate? Talk to current grant holders about their experience. Ask them about support for managing the paperwork and the people. Ask them whether they have actually got the relief from teaching and admin specified in the grant they have won. Find out whether the institution values your research, or just your research income. If you do your homework about working in Queen's, you may find, like I have, that there are better places to be.
