The Perverse Dynamics of University Career: A Narrative Analysis Based on the Personal and Professional Implications

Abstract

We seek to describe some of the features and symptoms that define novice university teachers in their attempts to pursue a professional career at university. Presently, university culture revolves around the evaluation of professionals based on the quantity of work published in high-impact journals (“weight evaluations”).This situation not only has its effects at a personal level, but also on the quality of the education that teachers might wish to impart. Nine university teachers -five women and four men- with experience of between three and five years in different knowledge areas were interviewed to ascertain these symptoms. The results reflected the stress to which the new teachers are subjected, the implacable assessment programmes that are part and parcel of a professional university career, the distancing of good teaching in favour of demonstrable quality as an investigator and the possibility of suffering from teacher burnout syndrome no sooner than having commenced a professional career.