On April 1st, whoever passed by the Maagdenhuis, would notice that approximately 100 people were gathered in front of the building to demonstrate our future as junior lecturers. Who were they? Our junior lecturers. What were they doing? ‘Defending our tutoring rights’, a member of the organizational committee Casual UvA explained. What are they requesting and how does this strike influence our university life, my fellow students? We talked to two tutors and Casual UvA to get some answers!
In current times, the responsibilities of being a junior lecturer (tutor) at a university in the Netherlands are demanding. Teaching in tutorial groups is not the only obligation that people have during their contract. This teaching process is a result of preparing beforehand tutorial content and structuring its presentation slide-by-slide. In addition, junior lecturers function as mentors for their students by supporting them mentally.
In combination with the insecure temporary contracts of three years for the tutors, this particular strike came into being. By and large, these junior lecturers do not demand to stop shouldering all these responsibilities in no way. Instead, they request that the university and state authorities create a framework within which the casualisation of junior lecturers is over. Overall, strikers demand three things: permanent contracts, professional development and workload transparency.
Experience is an important value to be taken for granted and leads more coherently to quality. The more experienced the teacher, the more qualitative content during the tutorials. That is a long term goal. Short term, in case their demands are not satisfied, they will not grade students’ final assignments for the 4th period/ 2nd block of the second semester.
That kind of action could not have come into existence without the organizational committee Casual UvA, which goes under the umbrella of Casual Academy. Casual UvA forms a collective of university employees -the majority on temporary contracts and a few on permanent contracts who are sympathetic to the cause- including representatives from different departments at the University of Amsterdam. Casual UvA includes seven departments: Sociology, Future Planet Studies, Political Science, Anthropology, Interdisciplinaire Sociale Wetenschap (ISW), Human Geography and Beta Gamma. Casual Academy in partnership with action group 0.7, offers a platform in the Netherlands to indicate and organize actions with the aim of supporting academic employees’ rights regarding temporary contracts and eliminating the casualization of Dutch academia.
When contacting the UvA, they state that they ‘share these concerns and have over the past years been working on reducing numbers of temporary contracts’. Furthermore, they say that they have met with Casual and have developed a set of principles for a new teacher policy, which they want to adopt before the summer.
Want to follow the strike? You can follow Casual UvA on Twitter, Instragam and TikTok, or via the hashtag #JokesOnUni.