QUOTE(babyJab @ Jun 30 2015, 03:03 PM)
Many reasons for me. Some are probably specific to my university and situation, but I can't be really sure.1. Heavy teaching load.
Teaching load looks light, but it's actually very heavy for me.
I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I spend a lot of time preparing for my lectures. I actually found that parts of the lecture materials that I inherited are plain wrong, and I spend a lot of time going through them. I hate it when lecturers just "wing it" in class, by recycling materials from other subjects, chatting bullshit, and/or teaching the wrong things to students.
I also make videos for my lectures for students to review after classes with online quizzes.
I estimate an hour of lecture takes me about 4-5 hours to prepare nowadays, including online videos and quizzes. At the start, probably 6-10 hours.
All this is still fine, but I'm supposed to handle labs and tutorials as well. This means repeating the same lab or tutorials up to 10 times for different groups of students. This is a big waste of time, but my university refuses to hire lab demonstrators and tutors. Each lab takes 3 hours, while tutorials are 1 hour each.
There's no time to develop new materials.
2. No time for quality publication and research.
Due to the heavy teaching loads, most people here rely on their students to do their research work for them.
My university doesn't really care about the quality of publication as long as you publish something. However, I do.
I don't have time to work on the quality of journal papers that I want, and students who are doing post-graduate studies are really not up to my expectations so far, mainly because of the poor quality of classes in local universities.
I don't want to play the games played by most people here in terms of publication. For them, it's survival. For me, I took a huge paycut to come to teach and do quality research.
Many just take the work of their students, and send them to low-tier journals that charge exorbitant publishing fees, but meets their KPIs.
3. Administrative paperwork.
There's too much paperwork. I feel swamped and irritated.
I wouldn't mind if I thought that they were worthwhile doing, but most are just a waste of time. The university can easily hire administrators to do them, but the management here thinks that lecturers are not doing much so they should be fully "loaded".
4. Grading "guidelines".
The university has some grading "guidelines" that they force all lecturers to follow. This would be fine if it was really just a guideline. However, it's strictly enforced, which means that you'll be forced to justify the marks repeatedly with long reports that may not be accepted by management. In which case, someone will have to remark until it meets the targets.
This has led to many manipulating the marks to meet the "guidelines" to avoid double or triple work.
For me, it's plain stupid and has led to untrustworthy data.
I've voiced out my concerns multiple times, but to no avail.
5. Plain bad management.
My university's management is so bad, that they issued instructions that put the health and safety of staff in jeopardy. This is probably specific to my current university's scenario.
I know there are many dedicated lecturers who soldier on, but they are staying in spite of the management rather than because of the management.
What I feel is that staff are looked at as cheap-ish labour here. However, I can't blame the management for this point of view as staff are so afraid to voice out their concerns. They just take it quietly. You'd be surprised that the academic staff with all sorts of professional qualifications are afraid to take a stand against management, even if ordered to do something unsafe or wrong.