Pension pays, Essex profits

Universities are juggling staff to get dynamic deals. Lucy Hodges talks to two men who like a break with tradition. Bernard Ready was chief research officer in the department of chemistry at Essex University. He took early retirement at 56 but has gone back to teach on a casual basis.

"It's been quite good for me in the sense that I'm living on my pension and am still teaching," he says.

His job had changed by the time he left. Chemistry was a department outside his discipline; originally he was a control engineer in the aircraft industry. He got into chemistry when he met a chemistry professor who wanted him to become involved in instrumentation for polymer chemistry. With the same professor, he ended up at Essex and began teaching after a time. He was full-time at Essex for 24 years, from 1968 to 1992, engaged in a combination of instrumentation and teaching.

His motives for leaving were to do with the changed atmosphere. He declined a move sideways to the computing department. All Mr Ready's colleagues of the same generation in chemistry have taken early retirement. Performance and workspace are forever being measured but the criteria are inevitably superficial, he says. Young academics came into universities because of the freedom it gave them to pursue their own research, and it worked. "Half of all significant inventions since the last war originated in Britain. The present system is leading to a separation of the teaching and research that produced that remarkable record. There is less freedom and more frustration among university staff now. Student assessment of teaching is a useful improvement but it doesn't really tell us a lot more than we knew."

For the past four years Mr Ready has been receiving his full pension, which was very close to his maximum because of his length of service. He was also given a contract to teach computing to chemists for two days a week during term on a quarter of his previous salary.

"It's a good deal," he says modestly. That contract has now expired. This term Mr Ready will carry on teaching first-year students on an hourly basis. He likes working with computers as it changes every year, he says. But Mr Ready does not think the casualisation of the workforce makes sense economically. It may be good for him and the university because his income comes out of the pension fund. But it does not make sense in the long run.

"My colleagues in a few years time will probably be told the pension funds can't support them," he says. "There are huge numbers of people taking these early benefits. Everything is about taking a short-term view of things."

Mr Ready looks back to a time when universities were quite different. Salary was never the most important issue, but the resources available for research certainly were. "There was a time when university lecturers used to lobby privately to get what they wanted and generally did quite well," he says. "But that period ended. Essentially we have all become polytechnics. The formula for room space is now the polytechnic formula for space. The general morale among staff in universities is pretty low."

Like them Mr Ready has been nurturing his interests at home. He has been pursuing his passion, which is housing. As a Labour councillor, Mr Ready ran Colchester's housing for three years in the 1970s. He has devised a Web page on the subject, which he urges everyone to read. And when he's not sitting in front of his computer he is a voluntary computer consultant for various charities and also enjoys cabinet-making.