Mark Scott suggests students email their teachers

Mark Scott wrote to students Friday advising second semester classes will be on-line during the present unpleasantness and suggesting ways to replace the “face to face chats that you may have with your teachers in and around class.” He recommends email, “the most common mode of communication at Sydney.”

To which the Uni Sydney Casuals Network responded, “this is also asking casual teachers to do even more unpaid work. If the new VC is serious about helping students to learn effectively, he should engage with the” (NTEU and them) “about paying staff properly for this work.”

Just a week-in Professor (of practice) Scott may not have got to the file about casuals being paid the enterprise agreement rate for tasks but not for all of the hours needed to do them (CMM May 19).

As Yaegan Doran from the Uni Sydney Casuals Network  told a Senate inquiry on March 10, if casual academic staff  worked the hours paid for, “we basically, wouldn’t be able to do our job.” Among things that would not get done, “we wouldn’t respond to students’ emails.”