Part-Timers

We’re part-timers at heart, postgraduates. We should only ever have been part-timers. We found our level as part timers.

We should have kept to our lane. To our natural level. A full-time position: not for us. A full-time job: undeserved! Unwarranted!

Didn’t we have lower IQs than full timers? Weren’t we most intellectually dysgenic? More prone to philosophical mutation?

Hadn’t it always been survival of the fittest in academia – and rightly so? Hadn’t it always been about the law of the academic jungle?

There were norms to be enforced, postgraduates. Gates to be kept closed. We needed to keep to our lanes! To our paddocks! Where we would work under the direction of the full-timers. Where we could be supervised and indeed closely monitored by full-timers. Where we could be kept in place and indeed constantly reminded of our place by full timers. As it should be!

We needed to stay at our level, postgraduates. Where, after all, we’d do our best work. Where we’d work to our abilities. Where we’d be happiest!

Part-time wallahs. Academic coolies. University chandalas, disgustingly busy. Vermin-like. Scavenger-like. Lasting only a few years, before burn-out. Before falling onto the ex-academic scrapheap. But that was as it should be.

Just so long as we were academically sterile, postgraduates. So long as we could never make more of our kind. No postgraduate supervision for us! No cultivation of MA students. Of PhD students! Who might get jobs! Who might become lecturers themselves, one day!

Undergraduate teaching only. First year teaching! There should be no one we lead astray. Whose heads we fill with dubious ideas!

But Cicero broke us of our pens, postgraduates. From our place in the pecking order. Which was really the natural order. Cicero freed us. Gave us full-time contracts. Put every kind of undergraduate teaching before us. And postgraduate teaching – you guys! Why was that allowed?