Insights into life of academics at private higher education institutions in Cambodia in light of neoliberalism

Abstract This study aims to shed light on the inherent natures of academic life at private higher education institutions in Cambodia in light of neoliberal education discourse. A phenomenological approach was adopted and a series of systematic in-depth interviews was used as the main method for data collection about life of academics. The overall anecdotes about life of the academics have revealed many downsides in this profession, incorporating unfavorable working conditions, inappropriate employment practices, poor institutional arrangement and unsupported system to nurture the life of academics as the intellectual stimulus. Institutional capacity of private universities has been critically questioned as the so-called patronage system or principal–agent relationships have reportedly existed along the functioning of the institution. The underlying system in which academics have been overwhelmingly employed under casual basis coupled with low hourly wage, and professional development for academic excellence has never been treated as a part of professional identity, has made this profession precarious and undesirable among the intellectual individuals in Cambodian society. Reciprocally, academic profession has been treated as a spare job for additional incomes by many academics, which in turn has posted a severe threat to the legitimacy and accountability of the private universities in Cambodia.

This article highlighted the key challenges that academics at private higher education institutions in Cambodia encountered and how these academics responded to these challenges. The data from the interviews of 16 academics working at different private universities in Cambodia revealed that private academics in Cambodia have suffered from low teaching wage and inappropriate working conditions. In addition, they did not get any supports to undertake professional development and engage in research in order to promote their scholarship of teaching and research. These issues have been derived primarily from poor institutional capacity and leadership at private universities and unfair competitions between private and public universities. As a result of this, many qualified private academics started to leave this profession while the others have treated this career as their secondary career by teaching when they are free from their primary career. The work environment of academics at private universities in Cambodia has made this career vulnerable and unattractive for future talented individuals to enter this profession.

Higher education and academic life in Cambodia
The expansion of higher education in Cambodia for the last two decades (Williams et al., 2014) has produced a huge number of skilled labours and human resources for the country albeit limited quality. In addition, the role of the private universities in sharing this growth cannot be overlooked since the private universities have greatly outnumbered their public counterparts in providing higher education services (Williams et al., 2014). However, quantity gain of HEIs has been subjected to quality lose due to short history of higher education in Cambodia (Kitamura, 2016). The rapid growth of private universities has been directly linked to the neoliberal education discourse, which assumed that the minimal role of the state would ensure the efficiency use of resources, greater accountability in service provision, free and fair competition (Marginson, 1997). Neoliberalism has been superior to its predecessors, classical liberalism, on the basis that the former ensures necessary roles of states in enabling the efficient functioning of the market by nurturing appropriate laws, conditions and institutions whereas the latter adopts a policy of laissez-faire, allowing the markets to substitute roles of the state (Olssen et al., 2004). Markets and social institutions evolved naturally over a long period of time and underwent tremendous changes before becoming mature enough to replace the roles of state. However, given limited history of higher education in Cambodia, institutional capacity and organizational norms of HEIs remained too limited to nurture appropriate conditions for the faculty to provide quality services. For instance, numerous young faculty members have demonstrated their limited ability to carry out research on their own, given limited institutional supports . In addition, the qualifications of the teaching staff at HEIs remain extremely limited (Chen et al., 2007); moreover, a large proportion of academics, especially the younger teaching staff has persistently demonstrated their strong dissatisfaction on this profession (Kitamura & Umemiya, 2013). This can be expounded by the dominant discourse of the global division of academics as the tenured and non-tenured of neoliberalism (Mariya, 2015) or in Cambodian higher education context, between the government academics and private academics, which accelerates the marginalization and suppression and impoverishes a huge number of academics, particularly those at private HEIs. Lecturers at public HEIs in the capital have produced greater publications than their private counterparts due to favourable working hours whereas the casual teaching staff working for the private HEIs had to teach much longer hours with the mean of 17.78 hours per week than their government servant counterparts with the mean of 13.3 hours per week (Kitamura & Umemiya, 2013) and 18% of academics had to teach more than 24 hours per week (Chen et al., 2007). Despite many hours of teaching, a substantial number of casual instructors at private HEIs are still struggling to make ends meet, forcing as many as 58.5% of them to moonlight for additional income (Kitamura & Umemiya, 2013;. Low hourly wage or payment is the major determinant for the long working hours and job diversification among many causal instructors since according to CDRI (2010), hourly wage for instructors at HEIs ranged between 6 USD and 8 USD for those having bachelor's degree, and between 8 USD and 15 USD for those holding master's degree and between 15 USD and 20 USD for those holding PhD degree. Given this extremely low hourly wage, increasing teaching time does not compromise income growth for the younger instructors, especially those holding only bachelor's degree. This hourly wage is usually justified by the fact that private universities receive no fund from the government and rely entirely on low tuition fees from students which fell between 200 USD and 750 USD per year (HRINC, 2010).
Although both tenure and casual academics have equally been offered some health benefits through National Social Security Fund, which covers some basic medical costs (National Social Security Fund, 2022), the deplorable working conditions of the casual instructors combined with extremely low wage payment have constituted numerous downsides and have posted serious threats to the quality of teaching and learning at universities (Kitamura, 2016) as several qualified lecturers holding world-class credentials and have produced publications have been pushed to denounce teaching and seeking jobs outside HEIs (Ros & Olekslyenko, 2018). More importantly, the meritocracy system has not been applied at the HEIs . Since the academic career in Cambodian HEIs has been made less stable and less desirable by such employment conditions and practices, this career could no longer be a career of choice for many younger brilliant individuals. This practice would also allow many unqualified and less intellectual individuals to make their way to the intellectual centers where they will be able to offer only third-rate services of teaching and fourth-rate research and innovation. If this is the case, the conventional mission of the universities, which is to deliver high quality teaching and contribute the world knowledge through research and innovation may no long exist (Altbach & Musselin, 2008). Had the unsuited for academic work been eliminated and had career paths been paved for the "the best and the brightest" through more promising career and appropriate rewards (Coates & Goedegebuure, 2012), the younger generation would find it hard to build up their competency for knowledge-economy through universities. Some critics also warned against the potential adverse impacts of current treatment of HEIs on academics (Ros & Olekslyenko, 2017). However, gender disparities in terms of pay inequality and different treatments between female and male academics have not been reported in HEIs in Cambodia (Maxwell et al., 2015), while some social barriers, which female academics encountered such as work-life balance and family commitment, have refrained some female academics from engaging in research and publication to fulfil the scholarly role (Heng et al., 2022). Despite this, the number of female academics is disproportionately less than their male counterparts since only 24.46 percent of the total 16,167 academics are females (MoEYS, 2019).In conclusion, the justification of the current working conditions of the academics under the role of free market without appropriate institutions and supporting systems is extremely intolerable as academic profession in Cambodia has been persistently pushed to the margin, particularly those at the private HEIs. However, further in-depth empirical evidence about life of private academics and their interpretations of the underlying factors that have shaped their current professional life remains needed to support this conclusion.

Neoliberalism in higher education
Neoliberalism is rooted from a capitalist economic theory of free market, under which the role of state is minimized and the market is believed to induce "competition as the structuring mechanism through which resources and status are allocated efficiently and fairly," (Olssen et al., 2004, p. 137). Higher education reforms across the globe have been perceived in light of the contestable discourse of neoliberalism, in which higher education has been increasingly treated as commodity, which the users are obliged to pay (Olssen et al., 2004). The key justification in this thesis is knowledge economy or human capital theory, in which wealth of the individuals is primarily dependent on the knowledge and skills gained from the investment in education (Spring, 2009). Mass privatization of higher education has been progressively proliferated worldwide while higher education funding has been shrunk in the wake of this. Given this, universities worldwide have been pressured by the market to be greater cost-effective, cost-saving and profit-oriented (Dickeson, 2010) whereas the conventional role of university as a social institution to generate and disseminate knowledge to students has been replaced by a quasi-market university, whose mission is to trade services for profits (Taylor, 2017). As a result, higher education has become a competitive market for service providers within and across the border or even among different departments within the same institutions (Olssen et al., 2004). Through this competition, corporate model universities are required to enhance their rate of innovation, efficiency use resources, quality services, flexibility in service provision, responsiveness to students' needs and greater accountability to the industry and government (Marginson, 1997). However, relentless shortcomings have been directly or indirectly linked to the business-like universities, whose impetus has resulted in exploitation of the intellectuals, erosion of intellectual role of academics and diminishing the culture of trust (Olssen & Peters, 2005). More importantly, the noble institutions with selfregulations and professional autonomy have been replaced by corporate managerialism, in which performance appraisal of academics have been subjected to thorough scrutiny (Olssen et al., 2004;Taylor, 2017). Academic profession, in this sense, has been greatly devalued and their working conditions have been unstable and precarious as corporate model universities have treated the academics as "fungible assets" (Taylor, 2017) and academic career has overwhelmingly been casualized (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Given the perpetuation of this trend, the conventional role of university lecturers as intellectual stimulus with high prestige and economic standing may be no longer the case for many lecturers.

Research methodology
Phenomenological approach (Snape & Spencer, 2003) was used to understand life of the lecturers at private HEIs in Cambodia and their insights into what have shaped their present life as academics. Given diverse characteristics of the lecturers at HEIs in Cambodia, judgmental sampling (Tranter, 2010) was used to recruit 16 participants for the study. The participants were recruited on basis of their academic status at private universities. They, furthermore, must be either the merely casual lecturers or the casual lecturers with a full-time non-teaching job. Of the 16 lecturers selected, 8 of them hold full-time positions at other non-educational institutions, who spare their time working as casual lecturers whereas the other 8 are merely casual teaching staff working at various universities. The participation in this study was fully voluntary and the consent forms, which succinctly explained the objectives of the research project and what the participation entails, were delivered to the participants requesting them for their signatures (Habibis, 2010). A series of systematic in-depth interviews (Legard et al., 2003) was conducted between February and May 2021 to generate primary data for this study. The main discussions in the interviews incorporate the descriptions of their career path as a lecturer, their perceptions on this career, how they see themselves in this career now, their working conditions, contractual terms and conditions, employment practices at HEIs and what have shaped their present conditions as private casual lecturers. With prior consent from the participants, all the interviews were recorded to prepare the data for the analysis. All the interviews, transcripts and analysis were conducted in Khmer language and they were then translated into English. The interview transcripts were analyzed by a means of thematic analysis (Willis, 2010). A combination of deductive and inductive approach to data analysis were used throughout the data analysis process. Open coding and axial coding were applied to organize the data into groups in order to generate the overarching themes for this study. To comply with the ethical standard of social research, the research proposal was submitted to the university for ethical approval and was subsequently permitted. The anonymity of the participants and confidentiality of the data in the interviews were fully protected to ensure that no participants' identity can be identified via the given information (Basit, 2010).

Participants' profiles
Given a clear distinction of the participants in terms of their employment status, it is worthwhile to divide them into two different groups. The first group of the participants are herein called the primary academics, which refers to those whose primary job is teaching at various universities in Cambodia. They have been presented by PP, which refers to the participants whose teaching is their primary career. The second category of the participants refers to those having full-time nonteaching jobs and working as casual lecturers. The second group of participants are herein called the secondary academics. They have been represented by PS, which refers to the participants whose teaching is their secondary job.

Results
A great deal of significant insights into the life of academics at private universities in Cambodia has been explored and revealed through a phenomenological approach. These perceptual and cognitive realities have been thoroughly analysed and meaningfully denoted with some overarching themes through a combination of deductive and inductive methodology in data collection and data analysis process. Three predetermined themes aimed to understand how the present academics perceive their life as academic, their working conditions, and the employment practices, have been achieved through deductive approach whereas their epistemological assumptions about what has shaped and conditioned their current professional life have been generated through inductive method.

Academic life
The dominant discourses representing the status quo of academic profession at private HEIs include "a dead-end, mechanical, tough, stressful and instable job". Throughout the interviews, many participants revealed their desperate needs to get out of this profession or to engage in it as peripheral as possible. As one primary academic explained: "I have been planning a small business with my wife so far, and if it goes well, I will focus on my business . . . . I may still continue to teach a few classes in the evening or weekend." (PP10) Some have seen their self-worth deteriorating through engaging in this career.
"I feel I have no value for myself as a lecturer and I want to leave this job as soon as possible. I used to give up teaching for one year to run my own business, but I failed so I came back" (PP16).
Some have talked about their plans to seek full-time management positions in other education institutions while others raised their wish to seek some business opportunities. "I want to have a small business in the future, but I still want to contribute to higher education through my teaching. I love this job so much," said one of the primary academics (PP6).
The secondary academics oftentimes expressed their less dismay about their present condition in this career, referring to the reciprocity between them and this career. For them, the way the universities treat them seems to have less effects on their overall satisfaction about their career as they have treated teaching as their "secondary job" and a means to make additional incomes. They also see this career as a way to improve and remember their knowledge.
"Teaching is just my secondary job and I teach to make additional incomes. It is my government job that is my primary choice . . . . . . . I like teaching because it keeps me reading, so I can improve my knowledge and it also helps me remembering" (PS1).
Across the interviews, only once has this academic profession been regarded as one of the highly valued professions while generally this was not the case.

Working conditions
The overall depictions of the contemporary working conditions of the academics at private HEIs have been undesirable and intolerable although in some cases the secondary academics expressed their preference for the flexible schedules and the current employment practices. The pervasive discourses dominating and representing life of the academics were "low wages, long teaching hours, physical fatigue, teaching too many courses, underemployment, unfair treatment, instability and insecurity." Wage has been seen to be the primary determinant of the overall discontents in this profession. More importantly, both the absolute and relative implication of low wage has been extensively used to describe the desperate struggle for "both social and physical survival by many academics," citing that "the wage rate of the academics has been stagnant for the last 10 years and this wage rate has not been adjusted against the increasingly high inflation rate in Cambodia" (PS 3 & PS1). Underpaid wage has also been the primary sources for many other variables of the working conditions, given the inextricable and inherent nature of the causal linkages among these variables. As one of primary academics commented. . "Sometimes I have to teach five or six courses in one semester at different universities. This really affects my time for planning the lessons, preparing quizzes and other assessments, especially the time for grading the students' work". (PP 16) Another attribute, which was oftentimes raised up as one of the primary motives for their discontentment, was their suffering from underemployment by their institutions, quoting the way their institutions treat them have not been commensurate for what they have contributed to the institutions. All of the primary academics have expressed their desires to have more classes to teach due to the fact that their sole incomes were based on their teaching wages. Some have secured their incomes by diversifying their teaching at as many different universities as possible whereas the others who could not diversify have expressed their anxiety and distress about their uncertainty from one term to another. For example, some primary academics have explicitly stated "I have always been worried about how many classes I would get for each new term for almost 10 years." (PP6). Dealing with the uncertainty of their employment status in terms of both instability and underemployment, some of the primary academics have articulated their desperate wishes to get out of this present situation. However, some secondary academics did not wish to have more teaching classes, claiming that they teach because they love this profession not for money.
The present working conditions of the academics have also been exacerbated by the perceived biased treatment from the contemporary management and leadership practices at private universities. Both primary and secondary academics, have claimed that the way in which teaching assignments or teaching schedules were given for them was rarely based on genuine individual performances but rather on others factors. These factors incorporate "the availability of the classes, results of the course satisfactory surveys and more importantly from maintaining good relationships and networking with the deans." It is a common knowledge for everyone working at private HEIs in Cambodia that the deans for each faculty are the only ones who have full authority to prepare the schedules or teaching assignments for all the lecturers in their faculty. Thus, the number of the classes given to each lecturer rests totally on the deans' final decisions. Some lecturers have expressed their deep resentment for such as a practice, referring that their income and destiny have been on the hands of one person. As one primary academics explicitly put in "I hate this profession. I don't like my incomes to be controlled by one person." Some have perceived such a practice as a patronage system, arguing that this system allows the deans to end up keeping only the people in their networks, so that they can benefit from each other. For instance, one primary academics indicated that "some deans need the supports from lecturers for some decisions, so more or less, they need the people who they can trust" (PP10). Another went on to say that "the deans also have relatives and friends and between their relatives and friends and other lecturers, they would think about their relatives and friends first." (PP2).

Employment practices
Across the interviews, the participants conveyed their difficulty in getting employed into the teaching profession at the universities in Cambodia, pointing out to the way in which the universities have used to recruit the teaching staff has been resting totally on the networking of those who hold key power and decision at the universities. Most of them admitted getting into this teaching career through their personal networking rather than through formal search process. "I have worked for four different universities now and I got all of these jobs through my personal networks" (PS13). Some commented that the search process has been rarely used in the recruitment process, given the efficiency and convenience of personal networking in the recruitment process.
In general, the secondary academics have conveyed their personal preferences for the casual basis in their employment terms since they have seen this employment status to contribute to their personal freedom and compatible with their full-time jobs. The practices of employing the lecturers from other professions have been discussed in great details across the interviews, revealing some perceptual dichotomies between the secondary and primary academics. While the former sees this practice as the way to promote the university reputation and quality of teaching, the latter sees this practice as persistently deteriorating the quality of teaching and deprofessionalizing the academic profession. As a secondary academic frankly stated. . "The lecturers who hold high positions in the government, companies and nongovernmental organizations can help promote universities images and attract the student enrolment because the universities have the lecturers who are the real practitioners. They can also help students get the jobs and internships at their workplaces" (PS15) Apart from this benefit, secondary academics have also perceived themselves to have superficially surpassed their primary counterparts in terms of their real hand-on experiences. As another put in: I think most of the lecturers have a full-time position at other institutions, except lecturers of English . . . . The lecturers who have a full-time position at other institutions has both knowledge and hand-on experiences at their work places, so they can share their real practices from their workplaces with the students while the purely teaching staff [primary lecturers] does not have real practices or experiences and they only teach from the books (PS13). Some secondary academics have expressed their doubt over this employment practice but have attributed this practice to the insufficiency of the professional academics or experts for some courses and the university's financial hardship to hire full-time lecturers.
"There are very few PhD holders in Cambodia. if they work full-time at one place, the other places will not have PhD lecturers to teach, so they [the universities] have to share their teaching staff or scarce resources. Another reason is that universities do not have money to employ full-time lecturers." (PS3) In spite of several positive accounts from the secondary academics over this employment practice, the primary academics have raised their concerns, citing that employing casual academics from other professions has negatively affected the quality of teaching and learning at university. They pointed out to the fact that those academics have neither sufficient time nor pedagogical knowledge to prepare the lessons, quizzes and assessments, given their full-time employment status and academic backgrounds. Some recalled their real experiences learning with such lecturers in their master's degree: "I used to study with some lecturers who hold excellency titles while I was doing my master. They never lectured . . . .They just let the students present the lessons from the books . . . They kept talking about their experiences . . . .and they were always busy . . . . . . Sometimes they went on a mission abroad for a few weeks" (PP9).
Another reason drawn against this employment practice was the absence of pedagogical knowledge, particularly in the areas of teaching methodology and assessment methods. Some of the ways in which the secondary academics themselves have raised up during the interviews as their methods of classroom assessment also confirmed this. As one secondary academic described his or her assessment method: "I usually give most scores to presentations. If any students in my class missed the presentations, they would fail courses. I do not focus on quizzes or exams, but presentations . . . .I think at universities, quizzes and exams are not important" (PS 13).
Some primary academics also raised up their concerns over this employment practice to post a threat to the quality of teaching at university as the teaching staff from other institutions may come just to share their practices, which can sometimes be very traditional and violates the role of the university in transferring established specialized knowledge and skills to the students. As one of primary academics expressed his or her concern: I think those lecturers who already have full-time positions at other institutions may come to share their practices, which sometimes are very traditional and this can affect the students when graduate, they might follow the practices from those lecturers . . . one more because they work full-time, sometimes they do not have time to read and prepare the lessons, so they just talk about their experiences (PP5).
Not only have all the academics expressed their opposing views over the employment practice, different accounts and arguments have also been given to their employment contracts. For instance, all secondary academics have expressed their strong preferences for the current employment contracts while very few primary academics have held similar insights. For instance, several secondary academics gave similar comments to this: "I am really happy with the employment terms and contracts. They fit well with my full-time job. I like the flexible schedules which allow me work for both my full-time job and teaching." (PS8) However, many primary academics revealed their contrasting views, referring to the contracts as having been made in favour of the universities. They attributed the current employment contracts to their vulnerability and instability in this profession. As one primary academic explicitly stated: . . . .the contracts are made in favour of the universities. Nothing has been in favour to me. For example, the universities can sack any lecturers at any time without any compensation and when they do not have any classes, the lecturers have to stay unemployed. I think lecturers have no values in this kind of contracts (PP16).
Some primary academics expressed their desire to have a more promising or stable employment such as fixed employment terms, which clearly state how many hours they would be offered, rather than facing the uncertain prospects from one term to another. As one primary academics complained: ". . . . . . sometimes I got my schedules on the first day of the term and sometimes I have three classes and sometimes I have one class, which makes me worry most of the time. . . . . . . . . . I think it will better if we get fixed contract, specifying how many hours we are given each term (PP16).

Professional development
The general description about the current status quo of the professional development has revealed that the participants are fully aware of the integral roles of the professional development in academics life. However, the overall picture of the professional development has been represented by numerous pitfalls and shortcomings. The participants argued that the universities have not treated this as a part of the profession and they have not had professional networks to get information about the available professional development programs or to join the available research projects. Some commented. . "The university do not have any money for professional development for the lecturers. The university is not a research university, but a teaching university. They [the university] have the office of research in this university, yet I do not know what they do" (PP14).
The articulation of their limited ability to carry out research projects on their own coupled with their concerns over the depreciating values given to local researchers and local publications have been also frequently cited as their main motives for not doing research. As one primary academic commented, "I think the value for local scholars is very low here. When talking about research, only international researchers are given credits and values, so if you want to do research, you need to have international partners. (PP 11). Another went on, "I am not sure about how to conduct research and publication process as my degrees were the course work degrees, not research degrees" (PP4). The discourse of time and value have been voiced as also the stumbling block for not engaging in professional development activities and research. As one secondary academic explained, "I do not have time for research. It is a waste of time since I do not want a PhD or professor title in this profession. I don't know what I need this for" (PS1).

Underlying factors
Probed into the underlying factors, which have conditioned and shaped the contemporary life of the lecturers at private universities in Cambodia have revealed numerous key understandings. Given hierarchy of the influences, these essential attributes have been painstakingly analysed and typified into two different layers: the macro factors and meso factors.

At the macro level
At the national level, the present life of the academics at private HEIs has been perceived to be attributed to unfair competitions between private and public universities, no funding from the government and development partners for private universities and nonexistence of national supporting policies for nurturing the working conditions of the academics. The participants have disclosed their full awareness about the current financial hardship of private universities, attributing this to the total dependency on low tuition fees. They also acknowledged that raising revenue from tuition fees alone would not suffice for the university operation and it would be hard for private universities to raise the tuition fees from the students either as many students would opt for public universities, which charge lower fees. One participant commented: I think private universities cannot increase teaching wages for the lecturers as they are facing financial difficulty due to low tuition fees. I think they cannot raise tuition fees due to public universities. Public universities do not need to pay for property rents, electricity and water bills and they also receive a huge amount of fund from the government and development agencies, so they can survive on low tuition fees (PP8).
Some participants argued that private universities should be eligible to receive funds and grants from the government as their public counterparts do, given that private universities help the government to develop human resources for the country. As one participant indicated, "human resource is one of the main engines for economic growth and tax revenue as productive workforces generally earn higher incomes and pay more taxes, which helps increase the government revenue" (PS3).
The case of no supporting policies from the government to protect the interests of the private lecturers has been occasionally raised up. Some primary academics have seen this as the one of sources for their vulnerability in their employment contracts and unfair treatments from their institutions. One participant, for instance, indicated, "I think we do not have any policy frameworks from the government to guide the current practices of employment, especially the way in which the lecturers should be treated and offered the classes rather than giving the absolute decision to the deans" (PP 10).

At the meso level
At the institutional level, the operation of private higher education institutions in Cambodia has been described by the participants to be comparable to a typical business enterprise and other profit-oriented institutions. More importantly, weak institution and poor leadership have been mentioned frequently to be the major determinant for the current status quos of the academic life. The participants have strongly emphasized that the private universities have focused too much on profits and not about the quality. For instance, although wage has been recognized to have a strong and healthy relationship with quality, the participants have expressed the uncertain prospects for wage raise for the academics, given "too much profit-driven from the universities' owners" (PP 16).
However, some attributes low wages of lecturers to the robust public universities. As one participant commented. . I think if the universities want quality, they have to pay enough for the lecturers by increasing tuition fees to more than 1,000 USD per year. I see some universities charge higher than this, and they can offer higher pay for the lecturers too. However, because public universities charge lower, I am not sure if this is possible. (PP 8) In addition to business-like enterprise of private universities, weak institution and poor leadership at private universities also have failed to nurture the practices of the academics. As another participant put in: I think that in a third world country like Cambodia, the institution is weak and no matter how qualified the lecturers are, where they graduated from and what degrees they had, they are sooner or later will perform the same and teach the same. They rarely care about the quality, assessment grading and giving feedbacks to students (PS5).
Given weak institution, some felt that the system of meritocracy has not been adopted at private universities in Cambodia. For instance, many participants agreed that there is no formal evaluation and performance appraisal, except the satisfactory survey for each course. In addition, the consistency and reliability of this course satisfactory surveys remains sceptical and mysterious. As indicated by one participant, "I have never seen my survey results for my courses. The universities said they collected the surveys from the students, yet I never know my results" (PP16). Another explicitly stated, "there is no formal performance appraisal ever existed here. You are given classes based on the feeling of the deans" (PP7). Others have seen the current leadership practices to have contributed largely to the current status quo of the life of the academics, citing that the existing structures of management and leadership at private universities follow autocratic style and sometimes nepotistic. For example, one participant indicated, "the deans have absolute power to offer the classes, and if they are not happy with you, your income is over" (PP7). Another commented, "some deans and people in management level are not qualified and they hold these positions because of their networks not because of their ability" (PP12).

Discussions and conclusion
The underlying premises of flexible working hours, accountability, more efficient use of resources, competitiveness, and free market-driven model of universities under neoliberalism have been publicly criticized to have transformed life of many academics into a modern sweatshop model of exploitation, in which academics have been increasingly employed under casual basis with low hourly wage and flexible short-term contracts (Marginson, 1997;Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004;Wright & Rabo, 2010). The strong empirical evidence of job insecurity, casual basis of employment, low wage, underemployment, stress and hopelessness, which have been consistently self-reported across the samples in this study, has confirmed the existence of this modern working conditions of the intellectuals. As a result of this, many academics who graduated from world ranking universities and have published academics papers in international journals, have been reportedly leaving the academic career (Ros & Olekslyenko, 2017). This precarious nature of the academic profession, which has been directly linked to corporate model universities, has made this profession less prestigious and undesirable among the intellectual individuals, leaving a huge gap for the mediocre to fill in the impoverished roles (Mariya, 2015). As the primary academics in this study have conveyed their desperate needs to get out of this profession and to seek stable full-time jobs while maintaining teachings as their spare job, this has created a relentless trend of academic status movement from the primary to the secondary. Within this impending scenario, many private higher education institutions in Cambodia are being overwhelmingly served by the periphery academics who treat this career as their secondary choice for additional incomes. This current trend has been accelerated by self-inflated values and false competency of the secondary academics who have misguidedly attributed their academic competency and values to their full-time jobs, social status, monetary and material success. Rather attributing their academic excellence to inquiry-based knowledge through research and publication Ros & Oleksiyenko, 2018), many secondary academics have seen their experiences from their full-time jobs and positions as the way to build up their academic competency. Under the corporate model, private universities in Cambodia have been immensely dominated by secondary academics and their version of reality and academic competency has formed "mimetic processes" (Meyer, 1977), which asymmetrically shaped the university cultures and practices. As the primary academics and those younger academics are gradually marginalized, they are being constantly subjected toward these mimetic processes, forcing them to follow the same path of the majority. Thus, their satisfaction in teaching can only be met by treating this profession as a secondary job. As the longer they stay in this profession, the more likely that they can treat this as their secondary choice and the happier they become as academics, this helps explain why the degrees of satisfaction in academics career increases with age (Kitamura et al., 2016). While existence of formal and informal nepotism and cronyism has been widely acknowledged in this study, this downside of social capital or patronage system in HEIs can also justify the higher level of satisfaction among senior and older lecturers as the longer they have stayed in teaching career, the stronger networks they have established, which in return contributes their job security which has not been secured by their contracts or tenure. The existence of a strong patronage system has functioned in the same way as principal-agent relationships, (Olssen & Peters, 2005) in which many academics become the agents while the deans and those holding key decisions become the principals. While many lecturers complained that the results of their course satisfactory surveys have never been disclosed, the principals in this case may have withheld the survey results in order to protects their personal agents who may have received low scores on the surveys, but appeared to have more classes to teach.
This configuration of academic profession in Cambodian higher education context has, furthermore, cast doubt over the legitimacy of this profession as a full-fledged profession, given the current employment practices of the lecturers (Wright & Rabo, 2010). Similarly, private universities in Vietnam, which are also known as people-funded universities, have been blamed for lowering the quality of higher education in Vietnam by employing mostly adjunct academics who failed to undertake professional development and improve their teaching quality (Chau et al., 2020). In Cambodia, as both primary and secondary academics have hardly ever engaged in research or any forms of professional development , this has posted a serious issue to the legitimacy over their professional commitment and established specialized knowledge and expertise to stay in this profession. Some critics additionally questioned the legitimacy of these higher education institutions (Stewart & Spille, 1988) for employing such academics, arguing this as creating a system of exploitation on students and community (Mariya, 2015).
However, since private academics have self-reported in this study as the victims of the embedded system, which has been resulted from an unlevel playing field between the private and public universities and between private and public lecturers or the tenured and non-tenured lecturers, private lecturers have been trapped in vicious cycle of victims. While public universities have reportedly received a huge amount of fund and grant from the government and the development partners, and are operated under public premises and facilities, (Chen et al., 2007;Ros & Oleksiyenko, 2018), private universities have never received any fund or grant. Relying solely on low tuition fees from the students (Chen et al., 2007), which has deteriorated their financial situations and has placed them in an impending dilemma between bankruptcy and austerity, private universities in Cambodia are facing an uncertain prospect of existence, which finally might leave public universities to monopoly the services. Public and tenured lecturers at public universities have received their hourly wage income in addition to their based salary from the government (Kim, 2013) and those in management positions have also received additional payment for their management positions whereas private universities are continually facing financial deficits to pay their causal teaching staff and low paid administrative staff on time. Low payment coupled with the existence of the so-called patronage system and principal-agent relationships at private HEIs may have destroyed the institutional norms and capacity to provide the quality of teaching and learning. As the institutional capacity of many private universities to nurture the academic excellence among the faculty members are still tremendously limited, the role of these universities may, in the long-run, may be switched from serving knowledge to serving degrees (Capogrossi, 2002). Without private universities, however, public universities would inevitably monopoly the higher education market. If this is the case, the neoliberalism of higher education may be become neo-monopoly of higher education.
Given the in-depth nature of this study with only 16 participants, the study is subjected to some limitations, the first of which is that the findings presented in this study would not serve any possible generalization beyond the interpretation per sec. Another limitation is that the epistemological interpretivist and ontological constructivist framework adopted in this study means that the researcher's position as a social observer, interviewer and meaning maker may influence the nature of reality in the study. Finally, any policy implications drawn from this study may be subjected to these limitations.

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The author received no direct funding for this research.

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Citation information
Cite this article as: Insights into life of academics at private higher education institutions in Cambodia in light of neoliberalism, Songleng Chhaing, Cogent Education (2022), 9: 2062891.