Don’t Become a Lecturer: Inside Indonesia’s Growing Academic Precariat

A viral hashtag on Indonesian social media has crystallized a quiet crisis unfolding inside the country’s universities. #janganjadidosen, which translates roughly as “don’t become a lecturer,” spread across the platform X as academics and students traded stories of delayed salaries, unpaid allowances and careers that promised prestige but delivered precarity. The phrase struck a nerve because it inverted a long-standing national assumption: that lecturing at a state university is a secure, respectable and comfortable profession. A new ethnographic study published in the journal Higher Education now provides the first sustained, on-the-ground account of why that assumption is collapsing, documenting how lecturers at a prominent state university in Yogyakarta struggle to sustain their livelihoods within institutions that outwardly appear stable and homogeneous.

The research, led by Ririn Purba of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) together with colleagues in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, adopted a deliberately intimate methodology. Rather than surveying salaries from a distance, the team embedded itself in the daily rhythms of campus life at one state university, using participant observation, in-depth interviews and informal conversations with lecturers over an extended period. Ethnography of this kind captures what payroll statistics cannot: the anxiety of waiting for a remuneration payment that arrives late, the quiet calculations about whether a second job is feasible, and the social embarrassment of holding a doctorate while earning less than a neighbor in the private sector. The study was conducted as part of the first author’s master’s research at Universitas Gadjah Mada, with informed consent and anonymity protections approved under formal research permission.

The analytical backbone of the paper is the sustainable livelihoods framework, an approach developed originally for studying rural poverty and adapted here to academic work. In that framework, a livelihood consists not merely of income but of the full bundle of assets a person can mobilize: human capital such as qualifications, social capital such as networks, physical and financial assets, and the institutional structures that determine whether those assets can be converted into security. Applying this lens to lecturers reveals a striking paradox. Indonesian academics possess exceptional human capital, often including doctoral degrees and international publications, yet the institutional rules of their universities systematically block the conversion of that capital into economic stability. The result is what the researchers call an intellectual precariat: highly educated workers whose employment conditions resemble those of informal laborers.

Technically, the study distinguishes between macro-level policy and what it terms micro-institutional dynamics. At the macro level, Indonesia’s higher education system has been reshaped by neoliberal governance reforms, including the introduction of PTN-BH status, a legal category for state universities with autonomous, business-oriented governance. Under this model, universities are expected to generate a growing share of their own revenue, tuition fees rise, and internal remuneration systems become tied to performance metrics and institutional cash flow. Government Regulation Number 4 of 2014 governs how higher education institutions manage their finances and personnel, and it is at the level of institutional implementation that the researchers found the sharpest inequalities. Two lecturers with identical qualifications and workloads can receive dramatically different pay depending on their contract type, faculty unit, or standing within internal patronage networks.

This finding about ostensibly homogeneous institutions is among the study’s most significant conceptual contributions. A state university appears, from the outside, to be a single employer with uniform rules. The ethnographic data show instead that micro-level dynamics, the informal hierarchies, the discretionary allocation of teaching hours and project opportunities, and the uneven distribution of institutional allowances, generate systemic inequality within the same campus. Junior and non-permanent lecturers absorb the heaviest teaching loads while receiving the smallest and least reliable shares of remuneration. Seniority and connection, rather than transparent criteria, often determine who gains access to the institutional benefits that make an academic career viable. The walls, as one framing of the study puts it, are closing in on those at the bottom of the internal hierarchy.

The economic picture emerging from Indonesian sources corroborates the ethnography. A first national survey mapping the welfare of academics, reported by The Conversation Indonesia, documented wide disparities in lecturer income across public and private institutions, with many respondents reporting earnings that fall short of regional living-wage benchmarks. In Yogyakarta, where the study took place, regional minimum wage analyses have highlighted the gap between academic salaries and the actual cost of living. The tension spilled into public view in early 2025, when lecturers who are civil servants demonstrated in Jakarta demanding that their professional allowances, known as tukin, be paid reliably into their accounts, a protest that national media covered extensively. For a profession whose members train the nation’s doctors, engineers and teachers, the visibility of these grievances marked a turning point in public perception.

The study situates these local observations within a global literature on academic precarity. Scholars such as Guy Standing have described the precariat as a new class defined by insecure labor and the erosion of occupational identity, and researchers including Burton and Bowman have applied the concept to the neoliberal academy, where tenure-track positions shrink while contingent appointments expand. Comparable studies from Malaysia, Spain and New Zealand document freelance academics, unsustainable public universities and the anxieties produced by performance-based funding. The Indonesian case adds a distinctive dimension: precarity here is not primarily the product of a shrinking tenure system, as in North America, but of institutional remuneration structures that delay, divide and condition payments even for staff who hold formal positions. Academic inbreeding, the tendency of universities to hire their own graduates into junior posts, further concentrates vulnerability among young scholars with few outside options.

The theoretical stakes extend beyond higher education policy. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, the authors show how individual lecturers’ daily coping strategies, taking extra teaching, postponing family plans, chasing administrative approvals, simultaneously reproduce the very institutional structures that constrain them. The framework of rentier capitalism, developed by Brett Christophers and others, also informs the analysis: universities increasingly behave as asset-holding entities that extract income streams from tuition and status rather than investing in the productive capacity of their academic workforce. Under this reading, the lecturer’s livelihood becomes a residual claim on institutional revenue, paid after buildings, rankings and administrative priorities are satisfied. The emotional toll documented in the ethnography, including chronic job insecurity and the erosion of professional identity, mirrors findings from studies of anxiety production in neoliberal universities.

What makes the Indonesian case resonate internationally is its timing. Higher education systems across East and Southeast Asia have pursued global competitiveness through ranking regimes, performance funding and institutional autonomy, policies championed from China to Vietnam to Singapore. The Yogyakarta study suggests a hidden cost of that model: when universities are restructured as competitive enterprises, the people who deliver teaching and research become flexible costs to be managed rather than careers to be secured. The authors argue that current institutional policies, far from ensuring security and promoting advancement, frequently exploit lecturers and manufacture the very precarity that the #janganjadidosen hashtag made visible. Their findings contribute a conceptual vocabulary, intellectual precariat, micro-institutional inequality, livelihood vulnerability, that can be applied wherever academic labor is being restructured under market logics.

The practical implications are equally direct. If Indonesia wants to retain its best scholars, the study implies, remuneration systems inside autonomous state universities require transparency and enforceable floors, not just national allowance schedules that arrive late or partially. Ethnographic evidence of this kind is difficult to gather, because lecturers fear retaliation for speaking candidly, and the researchers note that confidentiality agreements restrict the availability of their data. Yet the willingness of informants to share their stories, and the resonance of a hashtag that warned a generation away from the profession, indicate that the issue has moved from faculty corridors into national debate. The walls, the study’s title suggests, are closing in; whether they are pushed back will depend on whether policymakers treat lecturers’ livelihoods as infrastructure for the nation’s future rather than as a line item to be minimized.

Subject of Research: Economic and structural vulnerability of lecturers' livelihoods in Indonesian higher education

Article Title: “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia

Article References: Purba, R., Erwinsyah, R. G., Yumantoko, Belvage, R. H., Wahyono, E., Solekhah, N., & Aldyan, R. A. (2026). “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Keywords: academic labor, intellectual precariat, Indonesia, higher education, neoliberal governance, lecturer salaries, ethnography, livelihoods, Yogyakarta, university autonomy, job insecurity, sustainable livelihoods framework