Branson Statement About KBTU and Mikhail Akulov

The first trick here was that they took the monthly salary and multiplied it by 12 to get an “annual” salary. But the contract was only for 10 months. So even the gross for the academic year was only 10/12 (5/6) of what they called the “annual” salary.

The second trick was that what was called “net” was actually before taxes, which are a flat 20% for foreigners whose Ph.D.’s have not been nostrified (see #5 below). (What is the salary the “net” from, if not taxes, you might ask? I asked Dr. Akulov the same question after finally receiving the written contract. He never answered.) So, for every $12 of the so-called “annual net salary,” the gross was really only $10, and the net was actually only $8 ($8/$12 = 2/3).

There is no trick here except lying.

Although I resented having been misled about my salary after finally receiving a written contract, I reasoned that if I could manage to have my degree nostrified during the first year, then in the second year (1) my taxes would go down from 20% to 10%, (2) I would be eligible for an 11-month contract instead of a 10-month contract, effectively raising my pay another 10% per year, and (3) I would receive this 10% pay raise. Do the math, and this means that if I could get through the first year, my annual net salary would get up to 90.75% of what they had quoted me, rather than only 2/3 or 66.6%.

Ultimately, I decided that this 90.75% of the original quote would still make the offer worth it, so I persevered through the first year, despite grave misgivings about this deception, and later about numerous other issues I encountered.

(Without this 10% pay raise, but with an 11-month contract and a decrease to 10% taxes, my annual net salary after the first year would be 82.5% of what they had quoted. Better than the 66.6% it was during the first year, but still pretty far short of the original quote.)

However, after my first academic year, when I reminded Dr. Akulov of what he had said in this email, he said he would try to “pull some strings,” “call in some favors,” “see what he could do,” “it won’t happen immediately,” “the paperwork will take a few months,” etc.

The last time I inquired, I was supposedly going to receive the 10% pay raise some time in the Spring semester (over halfway through my second academic year, rather than before its beginning). However, I resigned before I could discover whether this was actually true.

Either way, it is quite clear that there is not in fact any standard “practice” of a “raise” / “10% augmentation at the end of a school year” as was claimed. If there were, it would not have required calling in favors and delaying for so long. (No one else I spoke to at KBTU said they had ever heard of such a practice either).

There are about three tricks here.

The first trick is that they pack 3 or 4 sections of students into a huge lecture hall for a 2-hour lecture once per week. Then they break them out into individual discussion sections once per week. But only the hours you are literally in a classroom are counted.

For example, in the US system, 3 or 4 sections would count as 9 or 12 hours of instruction per semester. With 20-30 students per section, that would mean about 60-90, or maybe 120 maximum.

At KBTU, those 3 or 4 sections would be packed into one large lecture hall for a two-hour long lecture once per week, which would only count as 2 instructional hours. Then you would meet with those sections individually for a one hour discussion once per week, adding 3 or 4 instructional hours. Thus, the 3 or 4 sections would count as a total of only 5 or 6 “hours of instruction” at KBTU, rather than 9 or 12 as they would in the US.

Effectively, this allows them to roughly double your work load right off the bat.

The second trick has to do with the way classes are scheduled, and the fact that you cannot go under your minimum, while it is of course ok to go over the minimum.

Whereas in the US system, professors and courses / course times are determined first, and students register for them individually, KBTU still follows essentially the Soviet system in which students in the same year and with the same major are assigned to courses and days / times in large groups, and professors are assigned to teach those courses second. The large lecture groups obviously cannot be split up between different professors, so if you are just shy of the minimum hours of instruction per year in your contract, you will have to take on an entire additional lecture group of possibly 80-100 students to hit your minimum.

The contract for an Assistant Professor specifies “22 hours of instruction” per academic year. In the US system, a typical philosophy course counts as 3 credit hours. So I assumed this meant something like a 4/3 load, but asked what the extra hour was about. I was told the hours must average out to 11 per semester, but that “they count office hours and some other things in there,” and that there are 2 office hours per semester. (This was false. In fact, they do not count office hours, or anything else, towards the “hours of instruction” in your contract. But…) That gave the appearance of only really needing to hit 9 hours on average per semester, thus being equivalent to a 3/3 load. Even in a worst case scenario, I assumed it might work out to a 4/3 or 4/4 load. And again, since “sections” are typically around 20-30 students, this would have meant a grading load of 60-90 students per semester, or in the worst cast 120 students maximum per semester.

So, if one’s teaching load would only add up to, say, 21 hours, then they would have to add another entire lecture group (3-4 sections, thus usually about 80-100 additional students) in order for you to hit your minimum requirement of instructional hours. Thus, for example, I had 3 lecture groups with 3 sections each my first semester (27 hours in the US system; but only 15 at KBTU). The second semester, had I only had 1 lecture group of 3 sections (9 hours in the US; but only 5 at KBTU), I would only have had 20 hours total for the year. So I had to take an additional course to hit my minimum.

The third and final trick is that they will “reward” you for being an excellent teacher with additional teaching that you don’t want, ask not to have to take, and that they only pay adjunct-level salary for. This extra “reward” is theoretically “optional,” since it isn’t part of your contract. The catch is that whether or not your contract is renewed at the end of a year is almost entirely at the discretion of the dean (Dr. Akulov) who will be the one asking you to do it. In other departments, this may not be as big of an issue. But in the General Education Department, Dr. Akulov’s entire leadership style consists of constantly making subtle threats about your job if you express anything but approval for his agenda. So you are pretty much forced to do whatever he wants, whenever he asks for it. (This includes, for example, getting calls on your cell phone at noon during the middle of a lecture about needing to prepare a report for a meeting that will happen at 3pm when you will be teaching until 2pm, and other ridiculous demands that have to be met if you want your contract renewed. But that is another matter.)

For example, in my final semester, I would have had only a load of US-18 hours / KBTU-10 hours, with 120 students total, with just one prep. But I was given a US-9 hours / KBTU-5 hours course I had never taught before and that wasn’t even in my fields of specialization, giving me a total of 180 students in a US-27 hour / KBTU-15 hour semester. Even considered only mathematically, this would increase my work load by 50%, and when you consider the time spent prepping material much of which was completely new to me, it probably nearly doubled my actual time spent. However, the amount of pay was only about 20% of my ordinary monthly salary. Naturally, a 20% pay increase not worth a 50%-100% workload increase. I also went to Dr. Akulov before the semester began with concerns that it simply would not be mathematically possible to fit the number of hours I estimated working into the number of hours that actually exist. But literal, mathematical impossibility was of no concern to Dr. Akulov, and I was asked to teach the course anyway.

One cannot be asked to “make up” work missed for a national holiday without reimbursement at a rate of at least 1.5 times one’s standard salary. (See the Labor Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Articles 85 and 109). To my knowledge, Dr. Akulov has not been in any way censured by the university for this practice, nor, as far as I am aware, has he been made to abandon this practice.

Foreign Ph.D.’s have to be nostrified by the Ministry of Education before a university can legally employ them as professors. KBTU does not want to wait for foreign Ph.D.’s to have their degrees nostrified, because that process can take up to a year. So, they circumvent these laws through the ruse that you are a “guest lecturer,” who can be issued a 30-day triple-entry visa.

This requires one to make trips out of the country on a weekend every 30 days. Then every 90 days one must leave the country for a full week to get a new business visa. (This absence will have to be made up during evenings and weekends after one returns—see #4 above).

While on the one hand, one might think this sort of illegality isn’t very serious (like jay-walking), it is certainly something one should be made aware of beforehand as one’s livelihood for the next year is technically in violation of the law in a country where the situations under which laws are enforced, and the manner of the enforcement of those laws are extremely “flexible.”