The Disposable Academic |
There is a particular indignity in being asked to perform the work of an academic while being treated as though one merely occupies a temporary space in an institution. In Jammu and Kashmir’s government colleges, lecturers engaged in Academic Arrangement teach, prepare students, evaluate their work and sustain the intellectual life of the institution. Yet the terms of engagement communicate another message: their labour is necessary, but their professional existence is provisional. This is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a structural feature of a system that has normalised the use of academic labour without accepting the obligations that should accompany it.
I write not as a distant observer, but as someone working as a lecturer on Academic Arrangement. Inside the classroom, one is expected to command a subject, exercise judgement, guide students and carry the authority of a teacher. Outside it, one is reminded that this authority rests on an engagement that may end with the academic session, that continuity is uncertain and that the institution can require one’s labour without offering the security ordinarily associated with a professional appointment. The lecturer is thus made academically present and institutionally absent: visible when work must be done, precarious when rights and recognition are discussed.
The official language is revealing. Government Order No. 137-JK(HE) of 2024 provides for need-based engagement, limits appointments to a maximum of one academic session and confers no right to continuation in a subsequent session. The arrangement responds to teaching requirements arising from staff shortages, new subjects and changing enrolment. The official portal continues to advertise engagements for 2026-27 under this framework. But this distinction cannot become a moral alibi for indefinite dependence on insecure labour. A temporary mechanism may be defensible as an exceptional measure. When it becomes a recurring instrument for organising essential teaching, its temporariness begins to look less like an exception and more like a governing principle.
The problem, therefore, is not simply that the engagement is contractual. Contractualisation has become a way of separating responsibility from necessity. The institution needs the lecturer sufficiently to entrust them with students and syllabi, but not sufficiently to guarantee a stable professional life. The work is continuous in its consequences, even when the contract is discontinuous in its terms. The institution, however, treats the person performing this work as........