Comments on: The real lives of British academics

By: aeon skoble

aeon skoble — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 14:21:49 +0000

As to the “you knew what you were getting into” argument: that presupposes that all academic jobs are identical or that college seniors can predict the future, both of which are false. When I was in grad school, my profs had 2/2 loads, less if they had a lot of dissertations, and they made upwards of 80K. I make far less than that, and have a 4/4 load. The point is, looking at my profs when I was in grad school would be a totally unrealistic way to predict what the job might actually be like.

By: Tracy

Tracy — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 08:11:33 +0000

If academics are finding life stressful and the job not rewarding, then there is likely to be a decline in the number of academics or at least their quality, regardless of whether the academics knew what they were getting into. Assuming you think university lecturers and researchers add more in value to the world than they cost (an assumption that some readers may disagree with, but probably not all), this is a bad thing. Something of the shortage of social workers and nurses could also, I think, be attributed to potential social workers and nurses having a fair idea of what they were letting themselves in for and deciding to pursue another career. In other words, since we don’t live in a world where slavery is legal, then working conditions are of general concern for keeping good staff, no matter how well informed people are ahead of time about working conditions. In fact, better information about working conditions may make it even more important to keep jobs pleasant, not less.

By: Richard Zach

Richard Zach — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 23:56:25 +0000

Most PhD students who continue in academia are trained at top departments at top universities. When they get a job in academia, however, they’re quite unlikely to end up at an institution that’s comparable to their graduate institution. During graduate school, they see their professors, who are at the top of their field, with the salary, prestige and recognition that comes with, with teaching loads somewhere between 2 and 4 semester courses a year, with lots of secretarial and teaching support (TA’s). That’s what they hope and expect to do in their own careers. Instead, most of them will teach 5 to 8 semester courses a year, will get no TA’s and consequently do all the grading, will have comparatively little research funding or the motivation that comes with outside recognition. In many cases they won’t have graduate students, who can be a source of inspiration as well as help (research assistance). I can’t imagine what it must be like if you’re in a system that, on top of that, also imposes the RAE on you.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:14:59 +0000

FYI, I have 5 good friends from my cohort who are junior faculty (MIT, LSE, UCSC, Purdue and NWU). All 5 enjoy their jobs immensely, and keep encouraging me to join them, two of them claim to work less than 40hrs/wk. That said, none of them value teaching as much as I do, and I know I’d work much more than that as I would feel obligated to the students.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:46:18 +0000

I wasn’t trying to bash academics. Were I a superstar, that’s where I’d be headed right now, and I have a number of friends in academia on both sides of the Atlantic. I even mentioned what I think is a prestigious school (HBS) which measures success differently in order to provide ammunition for people wanting to do more than just complain. I personally really like teaching, which is why I won’t be going into academics. The complaints have more force to me if they are backed up by actual moves out of academia. When someone says “this is why I left” I listen more than when someone says “this is why I deserve more respect.” It is not like you’re chained to the job. You could quit, and pursue something else. I’m not trying to be snide, I am faced with this choice right now, and I feel academics probably isn’t for me. There’s an oversupply of people prepared to work really hard to be an academic. The way to put pressure on management is to reduce this supply by exercising your option of leaving.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:07:12 +0000

Those who just see this story as another excuse to bash academics as overprivileged whiners are really missing the point. What the article describes is the continuing impact of a massive transformation of the internal workings of the British university system whose substantial accomplishment is to degrade the quality of higher education in the UK and prevent its best employees from doing their best job. If American state legislators pressing for more pervasive systems of monitoring academic productivity in public universities would like a look at how not to go about that task, the UK is a marvelous example. It’s definitely not what anyone in the UK who was hired more than a decade ago thought they were “in for” when they became academics. That’s less important than the sheer bloody-minded counterproductivity of the system that’s been put into place. World-class programs have been broken on the wheel of petty bureaucracy, good teachers systematically discouraged from committing to their pedagogy, and research productivity reduced to a fetishistic count of articles published. As long as American private colleges and universities (not to mention some elsewhere) remain a substantially better employer, the current regime in the UK is a wonderful foundation for a disastrous brain drain. Sure, there will be enough people always to fill vacant posts, but in fairly short order if present trends continue, quite a few of them are going to be people who do a disastrously poor job of being teachers and reseearchers. Once you ruin your system of higher education, trust me, it’s pretty hard to rebuild it, not to mention expensive.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:05:06 +0000

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 18:20:58 +0000

“My personal feeling is that most people know they are not going an easy road, but do it for a number of other reasons – prestige being one of the most important ones, the standard of “once you leave you can’t come back” being another (along with “love” of the job, distate for business, desire to work alone, and be around smart people – there are probably more I didn’t list).” Sure, all of those things are probably true. Irrespective of people’s reasons for wanting to do it, and irrespective of how much they did or didn’t know before going in—and I think Chris has a good point about academics who’ve been in it for a while—none of that absolves the management of responsibility to do better. [Of course they, management, are in a difficult position too…] It’s always interesting when these kinds of topic come up (which is regularly) how often the responses basically come down to “tough shit” (it’s hard but put up with it) or “stop whining, cry baby”. Which just isn’t good enough.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:50:11 +0000

Going into academia isn’t like picking up a new career. A large part of your Ph.D. involves (or should involve) working around and with professors, and imitating various functions they have (for longs hours and no pay). Yes, the trends have made the life of a professor harder than before, but over the course of 5/6/7 years working with these people you should at least ask some of them what the trends are like and prospects for the future before signing on. My personal feeling is that most people know they are not going an easy road, but do it for a number of other reasons – prestige being one of the most important ones, the standard of “once you leave you can’t come back” being another (along with “love” of the job, distate for business, desire to work alone, and be around smart people – there are probably more I didn’t list).

By: harry

harry — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:45:47 +0000

The problem with leda’s response is this. There was a time when an academic could be rewarded well (in terms of appreciation from colleagues, students, and even managers) for devoting themselves to being a really good teacher. But all the pressures in academia (UK) are against being a really good teacher; your colleagues need you to publish (for RAE purposes) and help them administer the often Kafka-esque regulatory burden, your managers insist on the same—they want you to publish even when you have nothing much to say—and my sense is also that visibility is rewarded (someone who teaches a lot is not visible to colleagues or managers). The quality of teaching must have suffered for this, but it is not (or not only) the academics who are to blame. Not asking for sympathy for myself, I work in a large American public university which is as far as I can tell extremely well managed, and gives me ample time to do research that matters to me as well as to teach well, spend time chatting liesurelily with students etc. Suggestion: the UK looks at the best public reseacrh universities in the US and tries to figure out how they manage so well.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:43:28 +0000

Dan Simon: Not sure what the exact intent of that little tale is :-) but if it’s supposed to be that academics live in neverland and have no idea how hard it is in the real world, I suspect that’s not true. Many people I know who are academics, or are, like me finishing up grad study and doing ‘adjunct’ style teaching, etc. have had ‘real world’ jobs and are perfectly capable of making the comparison. There are some who go straight from school to university and never leave. But I suspect, increasingly, those people are in the minority. Might be wrong, though.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:26:24 +0000

“….So the Country Mouse published a long, detailed report analyzing the many sources of stress undermining his quality of life. The City Mouse was unimpressed. ‘Hah!’, he said, ‘your life is a piece of cake, next to mine’….”

By: jif

jif — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:12:05 +0000

And I thought all the micro-managing mollycoddling was an American thing. The perma-hazing PhD rituals, lecturing as a late stage grad student at a ‘prestigious university’ and the demoralizing academic job search completely turned me off academia. What other profession requires so many years of credentialing followed by several years of back-breaking tenure chasing, hundred hour work weeks, cut throat competition, and then pays you so little? The teaching is not appreciated (by either the administration or the student body), the workloads insane and beginning an academic career all but requires moving to some blighted hellhole from whence you will send out reams of applications in the hopes of escape. I’m happy to say that I took a sane friend’s (who had long before left a PhD program at NYU) advice and followed the love. Right out of academia. But I do have to say that the idea that we all knew what we were signing on for at the outset just isn’t true. It is partially self-delusional, sure, but some of the calculus in determining an entrance into academia changed over time- even in the eight years I worked on my PhD. My job prospects actually shrank, the competition got stiffer (there are more PhD’s being graduated for one thing). But the places I was interested in teaching at (public universities like the one where I did my undergrad) are hardly hiring anything but adjuncts. So, really, not what I signed up for at all.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:49:55 +0000

The ‘knew what they were getting into’ argument is a bloody stupid one anyway. People can know what they are getting into without that immediately absolving employers of all responsibility to make the lives and jobs of their employees tolerable. Everyone entering medical school, for example, knows that at some point they may have to work stupidly long hours without sleep. That doesn’t mean that employers aren’t under any obligation to find ways to make their junior doctors lives easier. The fact that young doctors work under intolerable conditions just doesn’t go away or cease to be important because those junior doctors were partially forewarned. Similarly, people in dangerous or unpleasant jobs know that the job carries risk but it’s still the responsibility of the employer to minimize that discomfort and risk. [And before someone deliberately misses the point I am not saying that academic jobs are dangerous, or unpleasant or like being a junior doctor.] In the same way, people can go into academia knowing there are problems and knowing that it might not always be easy. They can make that choice because they still really love their subject, or want to teach, or whatever. That still doesn’t mean that Universities and the government can just chuck any old crap at academics and expect them to take it because they were, at least partly, forewarned.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:38:25 +0000

I think that there might have been maybe five people in the history of paid employment who “knew what they were getting into”, but I certainly don’t know any of them.