Temporary lecture contracts are back with a vengeance
In 2022, the UvA announced with great fanfare that it had adopted a new policy regarding teaching vacancies: fewer temporary positions and more permanent ones. “But after a good start, we are back to square one,” writes a group of UvA lecturers.
It looked too decent to be true. On May 22 2022 then chairperson of our university, Geert ten Dam, retracted 10-15 vacancies for lecturers at the Faculty of Humanities. The vacancies for short contracts were exploitative, or in the words of Ten Dam “contrary to the new UvA lecturer policy”. Three years later, temporary hiring is back, having never truly disappeared in the first place. By allowing this to happen, the UvA circumvents the docentenbeleid that it actually designed itself.
Dual system
For decades there has been a dual system - one for lecturers, and one for researchers and management. The latter has tenure and does not teach much. The first group does the teaching, but is hired as much as possible on temporary contracts, preferably for one year or less. These lecturers are supposedly needed as a ‘flexibele schil’ [‘flexible shell’]. Flexibility, however, is never needed for research-cum-lecturing vacancies or management. Apparently there is a constant amount of research and a fixed quantity of management to do each year, every year. Teaching seems to be the exception – for reasons that are neither clear nor substantiated.
While temporary lecturers might be necessary in certain situations (for example if a colleague falls ill), most of the work done by temporary lecturers proves to be quite permanent. However, UvA does not need to prove why a certain situation calls for a temporary hire. Instead, they hire and let you go, regardless of whether your job still exists after you leave. This indicates the real problem. Lecturers are being put in a precarious position, simply because the employer has the power to do so.
Unions
What unions didn’t pull off - because they didn’t try - Casual UvA did. Casual UvA, a collective of (mostly junior) lecturers, organized a grading strike in 2022 and 2023. This was embarrassing for managers, but more importantly it showed who is doing the work, who is doing grading and lecturing, and who - when organized - has the power: lecturers! In other words, as those who raise and care for the student body, lecturers are the main producers of educational value at the university.
Compromise
The docentenbeleid was the compromise between Casual UvA and the Executive Board. The main promise that contracts would have a minimum length of four years did not do away with exploitation, nor with the Great Wall dividing (assistant-) professors/managers and lecturers. Casual UvA could live with it because - if respected - it did indeed mean a substantial improvement and some security. The Board could live with it, because the principle that lecturers are hired on temporary contracts remained intact. The downside was that it could not depose lecturers immediately in times of financial dire straits (subsequently shifting the work on remaining lecturers and assistant-professors). Be that as it may, after many meetings with ondernemingsraden (works councils) and many reports on how to interpret and implement the docentenbeleid, it has now been successfully rolled out… Or hasn’t it?
Back at square one
After a good start, we seem to be back at square one. Many junior lecturers (with the rank: D4) are again hired for less than the minimum of four years, too often for 1 year contracts with uncommon teaching hours (less than 0.8 FTE, the standard 30.4 hour week for D4’s). Such hiring practices reveal the implicit, structural perspective of the UvA that D4’s are a modular and disposable unit of labor, a temporary stopgap stretched thin to fill logistical holes in the university.
Looking at the numbers of the Spring 2025 Evaluation of the lecturer policy, such breaches of the docentenbeleid are especially visible in the Faculty of Humanities (FGw), whereas the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG) has many temporary employees, both absolute (136 fte) as well as relative (47% of all lecturers).
Faculties plead force majeure and invoke exceptions of Piek, Ziek en Uniek (“top, ill and unique”) to justify their hiring practices. The latter enables one-year-contracts in case of extreme inflow of students, long-term sickness, or (temporary) need for unique skills. The exception has quickly become a pattern, barely three years after the aforementioned words of Ten Dam. The Piek, Ziek, en Uniek commission operates intransparently and seldom invokes the exception for vacancies for assistant professors or managers. This is not inevitable: the Faculty of Economics and Business shows that the provision of permanent contracts is a choice, as most lecturers with a D4-contract are actually offered tenure (with a D3-contract).
What is to be done?
Well, the first lesson is that while many administrators are sincere - and sometimes indeed have little maneuvering space - the lecturer policy has not been successfully implemented. The second lesson is that kindly asking for decent contracts doesn’t work. Sadly, but hardly surprisingly for at least those who have experienced the broken promises following the Maagdenhuis-liberation in 2015, the university only treats its lower echelons respectfully if workers use their power. This power is difficult to organize - and universities know it - but it is real. While all lecturers are individually powerless, collectively they make the programs run, of course in good cooperation with excellent assistant, associate, and full professors, from whom we have learned a lot.
Power politics
We, and the colleagues of our programs who we represent, hope that the Executive Board and the seven faculty-boards will ultimately respect the docentenbeleid, in spirit and letter. We hope so because, rather than organizing, we want to use our time and energy to do what we love: to teach. While we don’t find the docentenbeleid sufficient, we demand nothing less than it. We will, therefore, not wait for the UvA to replace petty power politics for good faith. Faculty members across departments are now organizing themselves to have the docentenbeleid honored at the UvA.
Sam Hamer, Gertjan Hoetjes, David Hollanders and Antoine Germain wrote this contribution on personal title, together with Elise ter Elst, Brogan Latil and Andro Rilovic. They are all lecturers at the Faculty of Humanities (FGw) and the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences (FMG).
