Career development or career delay? Postdoctoral fellowships and the de-professionalizing of academic work in South African universities

Abstract

This paper argues that the South African postdoctoral fellow system is de-professionalising academic work by constituting postdocs as students who receive training from the university rather than employees who work for it. Ironically, it obscures this de-professionalisation with a discourse of postdoctoral fellowships as ‘professional development’ opportunities. This case is made through a critical discourse analysis which contrasts the way universities construct postdoctoral fellowships on their websites with a structural analysis of the functions postdoctoral fellows fulfil within a commodifying higher education system. Postdocs produce research outputs for universities more cheaply than employees, and in a way which makes universities score better on various metrics that only count permanently-employed academics. Considering Fairclough’s ideas about the relationship between semiotic and other elements of institutions, the discourse of ‘professional development’ serves as a delaying and distracting tactic which keeps us from asking whether academic scholars should be supported by stable employment.

Keywords:

• Academic profession
• postdoctoral fellowships
• de-professionalisation
• professional development
• critical discourse analysis
• human capital theory

Introduction: critiques of human capital theory in higher education

In the sociology of education there is a longstanding critique of higher education policies based on human capital theory, which posit that skilling and educating the labour force (‘investing in human capital’) will lead to economic growth for nations and prosperity for individuals (Brown 2003, 2013). The belief in the economic power of education is one factor underpinning the shift towards massifying higher education systems rather than reserving a university education for a small elite. In recent years, human capital reasoning has been applied to PhD training (Servage 2009), with many higher education systems aiming to graduate more PhDs in the belief that this will create the skilled workforce necessary to sustain the transition to a ‘knowledge economy’ (OECD 2021).

However, critics have long pointed out that changing supply-side dynamics in the labour market does not necessarily create more jobs or economic growth, or open up more avenues for innovation (Allais 2017; Brown 2003; Newfield 2010; Tomlinson 2008). This view is based on the argument that the real value of education for jobseekers in the labour market is not the inherent value of the skills or knowledge gained in the degree, but rather the signalling value that the qualification has for employers who use degrees as a way of distinguishing candidates presumed to be more capable from those presumed less capable. Rather than being a guarantee of mass upward social mobility or increased productivity, then, the massification of higher education has led arguably to ‘credential inflation’ (Collins 2002), in which gaining a particular educational achievement (such as an undergraduate degree) no longer gives an individual job seeker a competitive edge over others in the labour market. For middle-class and working-class families in Global North countries at least, there is now a problem of ‘social congestion’ (Brown 2013: 683) in which the number of jobseekers with higher education credentials is too great for the number of middle-class or professional jobs available to absorb them.

Although critics have argued that the credential inflation thesis may give an overly economistic and individualistic view of the value of higher education (Tomlinson and Watermeyer 2020), this paper uses credential inflation insights as a way into examining changes within the academic profession in South Africa, with specific reference to the postdoctoral fellowship system in that country. There has been a proliferation of recent research on the casualisation and de-professionalisation of academic labour in the Global North, and a growing recognition that a PhD no longer guarantees a secure academic job or professional status and income (Kimber 2003; Courtois and O’Keefe 2015; May, Peetz and Strachan 2013; Gill 2014; Kerr 2021). This work has mainly not engaged directly with the credential inflation thesis or critiques of human capital theory. Nevertheless, it has clearly illustrated how, in certain countries such as the UK, Australia, the US and Canada, there is now a huge oversupply of PhD graduates relative to the number of permanent academic vacancies available annually, and this oversupply is directly connected to the decline of working conditions for PhD-qualified academics (Malloy, Young and Berdahl 2021; OECD 2021). Moreover, perverse incentives are at work in generating this oversupply, insofar as universities, departments and individual academics benefit in various ways from maximising the number of PhD students they supervise and graduate (Malloy, Young and Berdahl 2021). Academia is thus one sector where the oversupply of PhDs has eroded the degree’s signalling value, as the erstwhile securities of the academic profession have been lost to the extent that now only a small fraction of PhD-qualified academics has job security and realistic prospects for professional advancement (Kimber 2003; Newfield 2010; May et al 2013).

Human capital rationales in South African higher education policy

Despite these warning signs from the Global North, in South Africa questions about the relationship between PhD production and the casualisation of the academic workforce have barely made it onto the academic or policy agenda in any serious way (Kerr 2021). This is despite indications that around two thirds of academic employees in the 26 public universities in South Africa are in non-permanent appointments (CHE 2020); that the majority of those academics already in permanent employment do not have PhDs, and many are not active researchers (Mouton 2018); and that universities already host several thousand research-active postdoctoral fellows who have PhDs but are not actually university employees (Kerr 2020). South African higher education policy continues to assert the human capital theory orthodoxy that the country needs more PhDs per capita to sustain a transition to a ‘knowledge economy’ and in order to promote ‘innovation’ (Blankley and Booyens 2010; DST 2016). A recent OECD research report on precarious research careers—in which South Africa was one participating country (OECD 2021)—states that ‘The emergence of the knowledge economy has prompted policy makers to support policies to increase investment in higher education, research and technology’ (23). It goes on to claim that ‘The knowledge economy requires a highly qualified labour force and this has translated into the significant growth of higher education, and more specifically in doctoral education and doctorates awarded’ (16). Yet the report also recognizes that ‘One of the factors driving the precarity of academic research careers is the increasing number of doctorate holders seeking academic research positions’ (23). For South Africa, the career prospects of academics who do get PhDs is an urgent question given that in many countries it can no longer be assumed that a PhD or temporary academic work experience leads to secure academic work later on (Kimber 2003; May, Peetz and Strachan 2013; Bozzon, Murgia and Poggio 2019; Kelsky 2015; Benton 2009).

This paper thus examines processes of PhD credential inflation in South African higher education, focusing specifically on the mechanism of the postdoctoral fellow system in that country. Unlike in the UK and other contexts, where ‘postdoc’ is a relatively broad term that can refer to many types of temporary work in the years following a PhD, ‘postdoc’ or ‘postdoctoral fellow’ in South Africa is a much more specific designation. Postdoctoral fellows occupy a unique position in the university system which is unlike that of academic employees, even those on fixed-term contracts, because postdocs at most South African universities are officially registered as postgraduate students, and are not employed by the university (Simmonds and Bitzer 2018). This difference between postdocs and employees essentially hinges on universities’ exploiting of a loophole in the South African Income Tax Act. The Act makes a distinction between taxable income that is received for work or ‘services rendered’ to an employer, on the one hand, and, on the other, income in the form of scholarships or bursaries, which is given to enable a person to study, and is exempt from income tax (Mail & Guardian 2008; SARS 2012). When postdoctoral fellowships were first introduced in some South African universities in the late 1990s, it was decided that the recipients would be classified as students, receiving non-taxable scholarships, because they were supposed to be undergoing a form of elite or advanced training under the mentorship of a senior academic.¹ In practise, however, the training element has now largely fallen away, and the activities which postdocs are required to undertake—mostly research—are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the research activities of employed academics (Kerr 2020). There is a relatively high degree of uniformity across universities in conditions and expectations of postdocs: normally postdocs are appointed on a one-year basis with renewal for further years being dependent on having produced two academic journal articles in a year, or a monograph over the course of three years, or on showing evidence of adequate progress made towards these goals. Postdocs may do a maximum number of extra, paid hours of lecturing (normally 12 hours per week), but should not be used by a department to cover its regular teaching. In some departments, however, postdocs are in practise required to supervise PhD and masters students, and/or teach undergraduate or postgraduate lectures, for which they are not paid extra. Postdocs’ scholarships are funded either by the university they are affiliated with, or by external funders such as the National Research Foundation (NRF), philanthropic funders, or industry; in most cases, these scholarships are significantly lower than an entry-level permanent lecturer salary, for which a PhD may or may not be a requirement. These stipends are also stagnant—they do not increase from one year to the next and postdocs are not part of any collective bargaining forums—and postdocs also do not receive employment benefits such as medical insurance or a pension (Simmonds and Bitzer 2018).

For the purposes of this article, the key point here is that because postdocs still do not pay income tax, universities cannot recognise their research and other scholarly activities as work (Kerr 2020; Mail & Guardian, 23 September 2008). If they did recognise this as work, either the system would be overtly illegal, or else postdocs would have to start paying income tax. In most discussions of ‘de-professionalisation’ in academia so far, this term has referred either to the way academics have lost control over their conditions of work, and have lost institutional trust as a result of audit culture and managerialism; or to casualization and a concomitant loss of job security and middle-class status (McCarthy, Song and Jayasuriya 2017; Barcan 2013; Kimber 2003; May et al 2013). These factors undoubtedly also apply to the academic profession in South Africa, where around two thirds of employed academics are in fixed-term appointments (CHE 2020), and those in secure employment are subject to increasing alienation from their work due to managerialism and the instrumentalising of teaching and research (Harley 2017; Stewart 2007). However, in this paper the term ‘de-professionalisation’ is used in a slightly more literal sense, to refer to the way that postdoctoral fellows are not in fact employees of the university at all, and they do not earn salaries for their efforts. Rather, postdoctoral fellows are often referred to as ‘postdoctoral students’ who are said to be in need of further professional development before they are ready for an academic job. In this way, postdocs’ scholarly activities are transformed into a kind of ‘non-work’.

In the next section, a close analysis of the text of a number of university webpages dedicated to postdoctoral fellows is offered. This analysis illustrates a high degree of consensus among South African universities that postdoctoral fellows are (a) expected and required to do research, but also (b) are said to be gaining career development and preparation for an academic career or job which implicitly starts sometime in the future. This analysis is followed by a discussion of several other elements of the South African higher education context which the websites themselves do not mention, but which offer an alternative diagnosis of the purposes postdoctoral fellowships serve in this system. Together, these two analyses (one discursive, one structural) follow Fairclough’s principles of critical discourse analysis, which sees discursive or semiotic elements of social phenomena as being in a dialectical relationship with other elements which cannot be reduced to semiosis. Fairclough argued that

social relations, power, institutions, beliefs and cultural values are in part semiotic, i.e. they internalize semiosis without being reducible to it. This means for example that, although we should analyse political institutions or business organizations as partly semiotic objects, it would be a mistake to treat them as purely semiotic, if only because then we couldn’t ask the key question: what is the relationship between semiotic and other elements?… The nature of this relationship … needs to be established through analysis. (2013, 11, emphases added)

This orientation enables us to ask productive questions about the relationship between, in this case, the way postdoctoral fellowships are discursively presented on university websites—a key genre of university communications—and the other functions these fellowships serve within the university system which those websites may or may not mention. I will argue that the discourse of professional development obscures the de-professionalising of academic work that is already taking place through this system—a de-professionalising that occurs even though universities greatly desire what postdocs can do (produce and publish research). They desire this because research brings in monetary and reputational capital, and universities are incentivised to maximise ‘research outputs’ while minimising the cost of these outputs (Kerr 2020; Muller 2017). In this way, the postdoctoral fellow system helps public universities to address multiple competing demands placed on them that have little to do with preparing early career academics for a future permanent job (though they may incidentally achieve this).

Methods for textual analysis of university websites

I first became interested in the language in which postdoctoral fellowships are described while I was a postdoc myself. I started searching online for postdoctoral fellowships partly because I was looking for future work opportunities for myself, and partly because of my academic interest in the casualisation of academic work. Initially I was struck by the website of one university which described a postdoctoral fellowship as an ‘internship’ or ‘apprenticeship’. This raised a red flag, because I had already done a two-year internship, after my masters degree as part of the professional training as a research psychologist, seven years previously. How then could I still be an ‘intern’ after all these years of work and after getting a PhD? On reading more university webpages, it became clear that they contained some common themes. I then did a systematic Google search for the name of each of the 26 public universities with ‘postdoctoral fellowship’ or ‘fellow’. This led me to 13 webpages dedicated to postdoctoral fellowships, usually under the site’s Research or Postgraduate division. The other 13 universities’ websites apparently did not have a dedicated postdocs’ page, although they did have other evidence of hosting postdoctoral fellows such as announcements of specific postdoctoral vacancies or funding calls. Because these did not contain a general description of the purpose of postdoctoral fellowships, however, and thus were part of a different genre of university communications discourse (i.e. calls for funding applications), this analysis will be limited to the webpages dedicated to generically introducing postdoctoral fellowships at the universities.² The webpages quoted below were accessed between October 2019 and October 2021, and at the time of writing were all still accessible through the links provided.

The postdoctoral webpages typically contain a few paragraphs of introductory information about the purpose of postdoctoral fellowships in terms of the university’s research strategy, what is required of postdocs, how the fellowship benefits the postdoc, and contact information for further inquiries. A few state the remuneration postdocs can expect. The contents vary in length from short paragraphs of about 150 words to longer pages of about 1000 words. Notwithstanding slight differences in wording and length, however, the content of these sites turned out to be so similar as to constitute a kind of postdoctoral ‘genre’ (cf Fairclough 2013). The analysis below focuses on two themes which appeared in almost all of them. The first theme is a claim that postdoctoral fellowships benefit the university by bolstering its research output, research profile, or research excellence. The second theme is the claim that postdoctoral fellowships benefit newly-graduated PhDs by giving them experience, training, or professional development which will prepare them for a future academic career. Some webpages use terms like ‘internship’, ‘apprenticeship’, ‘experiential learning’, or ‘mentored training’, thus overtly construing postdocs as learners rather than as qualified or credentialled professionals. The benefit of this type of close textual analysis is that it establishes that there is in fact a ‘genre’ of university communications about postdocs in South Africa, which contains a clear discourse of ‘professional development’. Because of space limitations, only one of the webpages has been reproduced in full here as an example (the others can be viewed by following the links provided). However, all the webpages and documents are quoted to illustrate each of these two themes, and to show where some pages deviated minimally from these patterns. Thus, this analysis offers a comprehensive account of all the available university webpages on postdoctoral fellows.

Descriptions of postdoctoral fellowships on university websites

Besides boosting the research output of the University the purpose of a Postdoctoral Fellowship is to assist with the professional development of recent PhD graduates preparing them for an academic career. To some extent it can be considered as a two year academic ‘apprenticeship’ or internship. While undertaking the internship the Postdoctoral Fellow will undertake independent research as well as participate in the academic activities of the hosting School. (University of the Witwatersrand postdoctoral fellows webpage³)

Two themes feature in this and almost all the postdoctoral webpages. The first theme is that postdoctoral fellowships are said to benefit the university by bolstering its research output, research excellence, or research visibility. All the webpages, with only two partial exceptions, contained something in this vein. The University of the Witwatersrand, quoted above, points out that one of the purposes of postdocs is ‘boosting the research output of the University’. The University of Johannesburg webpage says postdocs were ‘established as part of the University’s broader strategy to bolster its research capacity for enhanced research excellence’. The University of the Free State claims that that ‘Postdoctoral fellows are appointed to strengthen the research capacity within the UFS’ and that one purpose of these fellowships is ‘To place the University of the Free State at the forefront of research and innovation’.⁴ Rhodes University notes that postdoctoral fellowship is intended to ‘foster existing research and scholarly or creative activities within Rhodes University departments’.⁵ Stellenbosch University, similarly, states that ‘Postdoctoral Research Fellowships are usually awarded to individuals within five years of receiving a doctoral degree for the purpose of engaging in a period of dedicated research’ and that ‘Postdoctoral fellows play an increasingly important role in furthering the research of the University’.⁶ Likewise, the University of Pretoria notes that postdocs ‘make an indispensable contribution to research productivity and enhances the University’s international profile’⁷; and Nelson Mandela University states that postdocs are there ‘To increase the research productivity of units and entities within Faculties at Nelson Mandela University through the specific expertise and value that Postdoctoral Fellows add’.⁸ The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s (UKZN) webpage says that ‘UKZN prides itself in its postdoctoral-fellows community who are engaged in a range of cutting edge and socially relevant research projects, making them key partners in realising our vision to become the Premier University of African Scholarship’.⁹ North-West University’s (NWU) postdocs webpage states that ‘the aim [of the postdoctoral fellowship] is to promote and stimulate research activities at the NWU’.¹⁰ The website of Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) states that ‘The core mandate [of postdoctoral fellows] is to assist in increasing CPUT research output in terms of student throughput, published material and technology innovation’.¹¹ There were only two partial deviations from this pattern: the University of Cape Town¹² also states that postdoctoral fellows are required to undertake research but do not make explicit statements about how this benefits the university. The University of Zululand page notes that postdoctoral fellowships are ‘intended to enhance the intellectual environment at the University’ but does not specifically mention research. Nonetheless, practically all the universities which have postdoctoral webpages make it clear that research is the main activity postdoctoral fellows are expected to undertake.

A second theme that was present in most of the webpages is a series of linked claims that postdoctoral fellowships (a) benefit or help the fellow (b) through opportunities for career development, professional development, learning, research experience, and/or mentorship, and/or (c) which will prepare them for a future academic career and/or job. In this way, postdocs are positioned as not yet professional academics. For example, the University of Zululand notes that postdoctoral fellowships provide ‘opportunities in diverse fields for recent doctoral graduates to develop their research skills and prepare them for an academic career’. The University of Johannesburg’s page states that ‘A post-doctoral fellowship is a transitionary phase, intended to bridge the gap from doctoral graduation to employment. As such the main aim of the fellowship is to fast track further development and honing of PDRFs’ research and professional skills in preparation for future academic or another professional career’. The University of the Witwatersrand states that ‘Besides boosting the research output of the University the purpose of a Postdoctoral Fellowship is to assist with the professional development of recent PhD graduates preparing them for an academic career. To some extent it can be considered as a two year academic “apprenticeship” or “internship”’. Stellenbosch University also claims that ‘The main goal of a postdoctoral research fellowship remains the development and honing of research and professional skills in preparation for a future academic or other professional careers’. UCT similarly claims that postdocs ‘are individuals who undertake research and gain professional experience for a future academic career, under the supervision and mentorship of a principle investigator… Postdoctoral research fellowships provide an opportunity for experiential learning in research, as a path to further academic and professional development’. North West University states that one purpose of postdoctoral fellowships is to ‘attract recently-qualified researchers like yourself to the NWU to enable them to develop their own research skills as an introduction to a full-time academic career’. The University of Pretoria webpage states that ‘Postdoctoral Research Fellows are candidates who have completed their doctoral degree studies and are developing their careers as academic researchers in particular fields of research under the supervision of seasoned academic researchers’. The University of KwaZulu-Natal page states ‘We trust that your experience of being a postdoc at UKZN will be a positive catalyst towards an enriching research career’.

A partial exception to this pattern was Nelson Mandela University’s page, which states that ‘the benefit to the postdoc will be the opportunity to build a research profile and strengthen skills and capacity as a recently-qualified Doctoral graduate’, though it does not mention a future career or employment. Similarly, the University of the Free State’s page states that one purpose of these fellowships is ‘To enable outstanding doctoral graduates to obtain experience of research and innovation at a higher education institution’, but it does not specifically mention a future job or career. Other exceptions were the webpages of Rhodes University and Cape Peninsula University of Technology, which stated the research expectations but did not state how the fellowship benefits the fellow and also did not use career development language. Nevertheless, taken together, the language of career and/or professional development towards readiness for a future academic or research career is a prominent theme on university webpages about postdoctoral fellows.

The context in which postdoctoral fellowships operate

What can we make of these webpages dedicated to postdoctoral fellowships, with their expectations that postdocs advance the university’s research enterprise, and their more or less explicit promises about career preparation and future academic jobs? If we take them at face value, they suggest that the future looks bright for postdocs. The benefits that they promise—career or professional development, mentorship, improvement of research skills, and in numerous cases, employability—are presumably supposed to appear as self-evident goods. However, Fairclough’s recommendation to interrogate the relationship between the discursive or semiotic elements of institutions, and other aspects of those institutions which cannot be reduced to semiotics, generates a number of productive questions to which the webpages themselves do not supply answers.

First, the sites do not explain how is it that a person who already has a PhD—which has traditionally been the marker by which an academic establishes themselves as a mature, experienced and competent member of the scholarly community—and who is performing one of the central university tasks (research)—is still considered to be an apprentice and learner, and in need of yet further development before becoming a fully-fledged professional. This is an especially pressing question given that in South Africa most permanently-employed academics still do not have PhDs (Mouton 2018). A second and related silence in the webpages is the lack of an explanation for postdocs’ specific conditions of non-employment. Although they claim that postdocs make an important research contribution, none of the websites overtly mention or explain why such researchers cannot then be hired on otherwise normal academic conditions of employment but with the specific condition of focusing on research rather than teaching. By and large the webpages also do not mention that postdocs receive fixed stipends which are generally significantly lower than the salary of an entry-level PhD-qualified lecturer; do not increase from year to year to match inflation; and come with no benefits such as a pension or medical insurance. A minority of the sites (for example, University of the Free State) do state these conditions upfront, but even those that do, do not offer an explanation for why the postdoc will not be a university employee.

A third way that these webpages can be interrogated is in their claim that postdoctoral fellowships are ‘bridging the gap’ between a PhD and an academic career and/or employment—for example, the University of Johannesburg’s claim that ‘A post-doctoral fellowship is a transitionary phase, intended to bridge the gap from doctoral graduation to employment. As such the main aim of the fellowship is to fast track further development and honing of PDRFs’ research and professional skills in preparation for future academic or another professional career’. Here we could just as well ask why this gap is there in the first place, and whether it might be more accurate to say that postdoctoral fellowships and other kinds of insecure work are producing the gap between PhD and academic employment. Importantly, such claims also overlook the way that many postdocs have already established themselves as accomplished academics in the absence of secure employment (or any employment), raising questions about the relationship these sites presume to exist between work, job and career.

In the next section, some likely answers to these questions are supplied. The section describes a number of intersecting policy imperatives acting on South African higher education, which, although not directly related to postdoctoral fellows, have implications for postdocs and constitute the context in which the postdoctoral fellow system operates. Numerous observers have long recognized that ‘South African higher education reels under contradictory demands—which tend to be conflated, but proceed from very different premises’ (Bertelsen 1998, 138; see also Soudien 2014; Hlengwa 2019), yet few have closely interrogated the incoherencies that these contradictory demands generate for specific groups of academics (cf Swartz, Ivancheva, Czerniewicz and Morris 2019). In effect, I will argue that postdoctoral fellows are acting as a kind of shock absorber for a number of policy imperatives which work at cross purposes to each other; but in the process the effect of these fellowships is to delay and defer the moment at which PhD-qualified academics are treated as competent professionals.

Government funding, national rankings and the instrumentalizing of academic research

South African higher education after apartheid has followed international trends towards corporatization and the instrumentalizing of academic work through financial incentives that encourage increased research ‘outputs’ (Bertelsen 1998; Harley 2017; Stewart 2007; Muller 2017). South African public universities are partially state-funded, although state funding has not kept pace with the increase in student numbers since the end of apartheid, meaning that funding from government has declined as a proportion of total university income (other sources being student fees and third-stream income) (Swartz et al 2019). To some extent, income is dependent on productivity: the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) introduced a research incentive system in 2004, whereby each university receives an amount of money in direct return for each academic journal article its employees or affiliates publish, and for every PhD student it graduates (Muller 2017). Currently, the monetary value of one academic article published in a journal that is on the government list of acceptable journals is around R130,000, while the financial value attached to a graduated PhD student is approximately R200,000. Though postdoctoral stipends vary across universities and funders, R130,000 is approximately half the value of an average annual postdoctoral stipend; hence, postdocs are normally required to produce two journal articles a year. If they do so, the research publications they produced are essentially cost-neutral for the university. And if the postdoc’s stipend is externally funded, the university will have earned a ‘profit’ from the postdoc’s work. Hence ‘the financial status of postdocs [as low earners and non-employees] could be regarded as advantageous for the host institution’ (Simmonds and Bitzer 2018, 277). In this way, there is a financial cost-benefit calculation which universities make when deciding whether or not to host postdoctoral fellows, of which the university webpages generally make no mention.

There is a second way in which postdocs service the competition for research outputs among universities through their specific status as non-employees. This is the way that the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) ranks South African universities nationally in terms of their ‘per capita research output’, which the DHET calculates by dividing each university’s postgraduate graduations and total academic publications by its number of permanent staff only (see DHET 2019, 47). This is obviously an incorrect operationalisation of ‘per capita’: not only does it negate the contribution of all non-permanent academics (including postdocs, fixed-term contract staff, and students who publish), but it also arguably incentivizes the universities to have a greater proportion of their productive academics in postdoctoral positions rather than as permanently employed academics because this will mean its final output score, and its place in the ranking table, is higher (Kerr 2020).

Auditing racial transformation in South African higher education

Since the early years of the post-apartheid dispensation in the 1990s, one issue that has been front and centre in South African higher education is the question of racial transformation of the student and academic staff bodies (e.g. Mabokela 2000; Durrheim et al. 2004; Soudien 2008; Nel 2012; Tabensky and Matthews 2015; Van der Merwe and van Reenen 2016; Maseti 2018). Unlike other parts of the public service in South Africa, which rapidly transformed from being mostly white to mostly black soon after the transition from apartheid to democracy, and unlike the university student body which also changed relatively quickly as student numbers expanded and black students made up a greater proportion of the student population, academic staff demographics were slower to change. Until about 2014, white academics constituted over half of all academics in the country’s universities (CHE 2020). The numbers and proportion of white permanent and temporary academic staff are slowly declining, while the number and proportion of black academics is rising slightly faster. However, given that white people make up only about 9% of the South African population, they are still highly overrepresented. Black academics in permanent employment continue to be concentrated in the more junior ranks of lecturer and senior lecturer, and are relatively scarce among associate professors and professors (CHE 2020). This underrepresentation of black people in the academic profession came under criticism during the student protests which rocked South Africa in 2015 and 2016, under the banners of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall (Soudien 2018).

The legal and policy context for racial transformation in higher education is the Employment Equity Act and related post-apartheid labour legislation, which was intended to redress the underrepresentation of black people in the skilled workforce. The Act makes a distinction between fair and unfair discrimination: unfair discrimination on any grounds is outlawed, but fair discrimination is allowed, and, indeed, encouraged, in the interests of racial transformation. The three categories of persons who must be prioritized for employment where possible are black people, women, and people with disabilities. These three categories are called ‘designated groups’. It is now commonplace for academic job advertisements to state that the selection committee will prioritize applicants from designated groups as necessary to meet the university’s employment equity goals. Universities are required to have an employment equity plan and to show annual progress of how their workforce is shifting towards better racial representivity.

Importantly for the purposes of this paper, however, the auditing of employment equity and staff demographics once again only applies to permanent academics. Because of the simultaneous drive for ever more research outputs, however, the ‘invisibility’ of academics outside permanent employment in the racial transformation metrics arguably incentivises universities to recruit academics who are ‘research productive’ but not necessarily members of those designated groups into positions that will not be audited for purposes of racial transformation. Because postdoctoral fellows are not university employees but students, they are not important for purposes of auditing staff racial transformation, and calls for applications for postdoctoral fellowships therefore do not typically contain the same caveats about prioritizing members of designated groups. In this way, research-productive postdocs not from designated groups can service the competition between universities for ever more research outputs while not appearing to undermine the university’s efforts towards racial transformation. An anecdoctal view of the system suggests there may be similar underrepresentation of black South Africans among postdocs as among the permanent academic staff (Kerr 2020), suggesting that the postdoc system is not helping significantly with racial transformation in higher education.

Beyond instrumental and intrinsic value: the misrecognition of scholarship

As Fairclough (2013) argued, the relationship between the semiotic elements and other elements of institutions needs to be established through analysis. The above account has illustrated some of the functions which postdoctoral fellows in South Africa serve for universities in a context where academic research has been thoroughly instrumentalised and commodified by ranking and funding systems, and where racial transformation is audited through counts of the demographics of permanent academic staff only. In this context, having a proportion of productive researchers outside of employment enables universities to reap the benefits of their highly-skilled work for ranking and funding purposes in a way that minimises the financial costs to the university and avoids employment equity constraints on whose research outputs can be harvested. In this way, postdoctoral fellows effectively act as a kind of ‘shock absorber’ for some of the ‘contradictory demands’ placed on South African higher education. They allow universities to attend to all these demands simultaneously, but at the cost of postdoctoral fellows’ job security, income and professional status.

This analysis is notably different to the way universities themselves present the purposes and benefits of postdoctoral fellowships—as ‘professional development’ opportunities which will benefit early-career researchers by preparing them for a future academic job. The claim advanced in this paper is that while some postdoctoral fellows may indeed incidentally later get permanent academic jobs,¹³ ‘professional development’ for early-career academics is not the main reason why universities offer postdoctoral fellowships, but is rather a post-hoc justification for their non-employee status. The discourse of professional development is therefore highly misleading, insofar as it centres postdoctoral fellows as though the university system is concerned with the professional future of each individual postdoc. In fact, universities are obliged to construe postdocs as learners, and the work they do as non-work, lest they find themselves on the wrong side of the Income Tax Act. The South Africa postdoctoral fellow system is thus arguably fraudulent in its entirety: it takes advantage of a law which was not intended as a way of letting off large numbers of academics and their universities from paying employees’ income tax. Yet this is essentially what the system now does. The promise of future employability also blurs the distinction between what is ‘training’ and what is ‘work’, and justifies the delay in treating postdocs as fully-fledged professionals. Thus the discourse of professional development works to obscure how postdoctoral fellowships are de-professionalising and devaluing academic work in a way which does not work in the best interests of the academics who occupy these fellowships. Instead, it generates career incoherence for postdocs, who are often told they are an ‘elite’ group of researchers and that they make a very valuable contribution to the university, yet are simultaneously excluded from actual career progression structures in universities (cf Simmonds and Bitzer 2018; Kerr 2021).

The (mis)representation of postdocs’ prospects on South African university websites also seems a clear example of what Bozzon, Murgia and Poggio (2019) have called the ‘economics of promises’ in higher education. In their discussion of the shift to a precarious academic workforce in Europe, Bozzon et al note how young academics are often asked to do various kinds of under- or unpaid work for their academic seniors or university, with the implication that this will open doors to more secure work later on. Yet, in reality, these promises should not be taken at face value: ‘the mechanism of promises cannot be considered a simple part of a learning process, where one is ‘learning the ropes’, because the goal here is not to prepare the new-comers for stable and paid jobs, but to replace such jobs with precarious and unpaid ones’ (37–38). The theme of temporary academics and postgraduate students having been misled about their academic career prospects comes up in several places in the literature on the casualisation of academic work (Benton 2009; Rothengatter and Hil 2013; Courtois and O’Keefe 2015; Kelsky 2015). These authors note that the exploitative aspects of university work are often sustained by misleading myths about what an academic career will be like, and that postgraduate students are oftentimes ill-informed about their actual career prospects. Meanwhile their academic seniors often have no reason to disabuse them, since departments and universities depend heavily on a steady supply of cheap postgraduate teaching labour, or, in our case, research labour. This means that what universities suggest, imply, or state explicitly about postdocs’ career prospects in their official communications is not merely a petty or incidental concern, but rather has major implications for postdocs’ career expectations; and thus that postdocs and insecure academics would be wise to learn which aspects of higher education discourse to trust and which to treat with scepticism.

This paper has also illustrated problems with human capital reasoning in South African higher education. While higher education policy continues to claim that South Africa needs more PhDs for the transition to a ‘knowledge economy’ (DST 2016; Mouton, 2018), the country’s higher education system is currently unable to offer basic professional working conditions for many of those whose research activities require them to have a PhD. Indeed, the same system which desires more PhDs also incentivises universities to keep these PhDs outside of secure employment. If PhD-qualified academics in South Africa can look forward to years of student status and a relatively low, stagnant income, this has obvious implications for the attractiveness of getting a PhD and pursuing a career in academia (OECD 2021).

Of course, critics would note here that access to a secure academic job is not the only value or reward that should be attached to a PhD or a postdoctoral fellowship. But the point is that because human capital thinking—and by extension the postdoctoral fellow system—treats PhD degrees instrumentally, as a means to some other ends—innovation, economic growth, and so on—they offer a very minimal understanding of the value of scholarship, or of the academic profession itself. Because the postdoctoral system promises that good things—i.e. the real beginnings of a career—always lie somewhere just over the horizon, it is unable to recognise that postdocs may in fact already be scholars. Those who criticise the straw-man argument that a postdoctoral fellowship should ‘lead to’ an academic job, on grounds that this is a ‘narrow’ understanding of the purpose of a fellowship, simply repeat the idea that a postdoctoral fellowship is a means to an end—just perhaps other, broader ends—and thus uncritically accept the delay tactics of the system on its own terms. This amounts to a kind of temporal unbundling of the academic profession. This critique fails to understand that the real question is not about the instrumental versus intrinsic value of education, or whether a postdoctoral fellowship ‘should lead to’ an academic job later. Rather, it is a question about whether the university system is able to recognise and affirm the scholarship of people who are already doing the work, and often have already internalised the identity, of scholar-academics. It is a question about whether we believe that academic scholars should be supported by stable employment.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sara Black, Leslie Swartz, Stephanie Quinn and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Prof Wieland Gevers for explaining the origins of the postdoctoral fellow system in South Africa. Any errors remain mine. This research was funded by a DSI-NRF Innovation postdoctoral fellowship, grant number 120749.Views expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not to be attributed to the NRF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research in this paper was supported by a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, grant number 120749.

Notes

1 Personal communication with Prof Wieland Gevers, 2020.

2 Most of the universities which did have such a page were historically white, research-intensive universities, whereas the historically black universities and universities of technology were less likely to have such a page. For further discussion of South African universities’ different institutional types and institutional histories, see Boughey and McKenna (2021).

3 https://www.wits.ac.za/research/postdoctoral-fellows/.

4 https://www.ufs.ac.za/research/research-at-the-ufs-home/research-impact/postdoctoral-research-fellows.

5 https://www.ru.ac.za/researchgateway/postdoctoralfellows/.

6 http://www.sun.ac.za/english/research-innovation/Research-Development/postdocs.

7 https://www.up.ac.za/postdoctoral-research.

8 https://rd.mandela.ac.za/Postdoctoral-Fellowships/Internal-and-External-Funding-Opportunities-Cont.

9 http://research.ukzn.ac.za/postdoc-at-a-glance/postdocataglancepdrf.aspx.

10 http://services.nwu.ac.za/research-support/post-docs.

11 https://www.cput.ac.za/research-technology-and-innovation/postgraduate.

12 http://www.uct.ac.za/main/research/postdoc-research-fellowships.

13 To the best of my knowledge, there is not yet any data available in South Africa showing what proportion of postdoctoral fellows do in fact end up in secure university employment.