Ah, a question I ask myself almost daily. Now, don’t get me wrong I really do love my job — even if this particular career stage is one that I’m not exactly amazing at — but one of my areas of research is the academic culture. This means I spend more time than most thinking about how we do research and the culture in which we do it. In this post, I will outline some the key issues of working in academia.
Before we start, this is not designed to deter potential PhD applicants, but I do believe it is essential to be fully informed going into this career. It’s worth noting that, despite what I’m about to say, I am still currently in this career and I’m actively writing grants and fellowships to try and gain an independent position…whilst also being very open to leaving academia in the next year. I might also write a follow up about the positives of an academic career to provide some balance. So lets get into this.
Mental health
Underpinning (and all too often caused by) all of the below is poor mental health. This impacts just about every stage of academia but has most often been studied in PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty. There are no shortage of studies proving that this is a major issue. Personally I regularly get into arguements with PIs and (particularly sadly) people at earlier career stages who should know better over this. Too many refuse to acknowledge these issues and dismiss those who speak out as “trouble makers” or “malcontents” who must hate academia. For the record, speaking out and offering solutions is done because I love academia and what it could, and should, be.
Bullying / abuse / power-dynamics
“early career researcher (ECR)” — let us just sit with this one for a moment. Somebody not familiar with academia would probably be highly confused that a 35+ year old who’s been in the career for over 10 years, has a PhD and multiple years of postdoc experience would still be considered “early career”. It isn’t just absurd, it’s insulting. But this is symptomatic of a larger problem. By calling people “early career” and framing postdocs as “training positions”, it is easier to justify the low pay and overwork. From the outside, academia often looks like a liberal paradise. The reality however is that academia as a structure is incredibly conservative and reluctant to change. Hierarchy and power-dynamics are at the heart of this reticence to change.
Then there is the abundant bullying and abuse that occurs. This abuse is everything from gaslighting (which I’ve experienced myself) and micromanagement to sexual assault. There was a very high profile case recently involving David Sabatini and this is unfortunately barely the tip of the iceberg. There was a recent example on Twitter of a female PhD student who was instructing on a course. The student recieved highly sexist and abusive feedback — and this is a widespread problem that female academics face on course feedback/evaluations.
These things are perpetuated by those in power who consistently refuse to do anything about such behaviour because those big names bring in money and reputation…as if there aren’t hundreds of other perfectly talented people who couldn’t do the same if given the chance. Until there are consequences for such behaviour it will continue to force good people out of academia.
It’s 7-jobs in one
Don’t believe me?
1. Researcher
2. Teacher
3. Administrator
4. Project manager
5. Team manager
6. Public engagement officer / sci-commer
7. Writer
And you have to be good at them all — without any formal training in any aspect I should add!
Exploitation
Unfortunately (key word of this article!) the way that academia is structured, those who most benefit from the system are PIs. Those below that career stage are therefore frequently exploited as little more than cheap or even free labour. There’s no real professional development for PhDs or postdocs and no benefit to doing anything other than working all out to get as many “high impact” papers as possible with the 3 year contract.
And it doesn’t end when you leave a position to move onto your next. There is an unwritten expectation that you will continue to work on your previous project to help finish it which often means writing papers long into your new position. This isn’t covered by your new salary and can conflict with your new responsibilities. This means that you must finish off your previous work for free and in your own free time.
Exploitation is perhaps a harsh way of saying goodwill. But given the other issues I’m highlighting here it is perhaps clear as to why that goodwill is disappearing.
Long hours
One of the biggest benefits of academia is that you get a lot of flexibility as you’re in charge of your own time. Or that’s the myth anyway…Anybody who works with animals or (difficult) cell cultures will tell you that you run on experiment/organism time. This can mean very long days — just look on Twitter which always cycles back to competing on who works the most hours — but also working weekends or even nights. I’ve had periods where I worked 7 days a week or days where I was in the lab for 15+hours & days that turned into nights (anyone for a 3am time point?). In fact there are still certain experiments (read most) that for me mean very long days as there is no other way of doing such time points. This is easier if there’s a team who can share the workload, which thankfully I mostly have, but if you’re alone or working in a not so supportive team then say goodbye to any free time you once had.
Got a paper or grant due? Then you’re likely going to be writing that over the Christmas/holiday/birthday break and on any vacation you may take. Now this last one is optional, but far too many people (including me) fall into this trap. Or at least justify it as a “trap”. The reality is that far too many funders release grants and fellowships over such breaks — early Jan should not be a submission date for a career defining fellowship or grant and yet it so often is. This last point of course hurts female scientists the most as they often also have full time family commitments over that period.
Poor pay (relative to comparable expertise and education)
3 degrees, 7.5 years of education and a further 4 years of postdoc “training”. Yet I earn less than many who left undergrad for a career and I earn relatively little more than people without any education. We’re all in the same position here as postdocs. The academy makes many excuses for this low pay but, as you’ll see from elsewhere in this post, those excuses don’t hold up to any inspection. I wont talk too much on this as there is an excellent article touching on pay and “training” here. None of this is to say that the pay is bad relative to my childhood background — it’s more than anyone in my family will ever earn — but it is low given the training, education and expertise required. It is low given how much academia takes. It is low given that scientists got us out of a global pandemic.
For me the low pay impacts my living situation hugely. Being in London, the rental market is completely insane and out of control. Almost 50% of my take home wage each month goes on rent/bills and I do not live alone and I do not live somewhere particularly nice either. This also means that each month I must choose between socialising and putting money into my savings, you know for a future or holidays. Oh and I no longer pay into my pension either and I’m far from being the only postdoc in London without a pension. Academia is quite literally taking from my future.
Requirement to move/relocate
The low pay is further impacted by the short contracts. 3 years for a postdoc (max 5) is standard in the UK. This means all postdocs are under a constant pressure and huge instability. Life is effectively on hold for many during the postdoc years. Did I mention those postdoc years can easily last 8+ years (and the length is increasing)? A decade of ones life on hold, full of insecurity, low pay, limited career progression and basically no training. It’s an awful lot to ask of anyone. Not to mention that for female academics, the postdoc years are often the prime child bearing/rearing years. This makes having a family and successful academic career highly challenging. This is all made worse by funders who place an emphasis on moving between institutions. Personally, I’ve lived in 3 cities in the past 4.5 years alone. With each move comes starting your life over all again; new job that often means you need to rapidly learn a new subfield, new city, no/few existing friends in that new city.
Lack of formal training
If you’re in a PhD programme or have come out the other end then this will be overly familiar. There is a training fallacy in academia that exists at every stage. It is a system in which nobody is given appropriate (if any) training for their current or future role. It gets less enticing still if you wish to leave the PI-track and move into a non-Ac role as the academy still has no idea how to prepare people for this, despite it being the most common path.
Worse still, most promotions and fellowships are given based on papers published, luck and scientific ability. Yet as one moves up in academia the things that become important are your ability to manage a project, to manage and train people and effectively run a small business. None of this is assessed or even required to demonstrated before you’re put into positions requiring these skills. This results in a completely broken system where individual careerism is the most important thing — to most but certainly not all, there are some brilliant PIs out there.
One final point on the lack of training. This leads to huge gaps in knowledge of how we do science (metascience) and why things work the way they currently do. A good example is the publishing industry. Far too many scientists have a surprising lack of understanding as to the history of peer review and publishing. For example, most don’t know that the publishing system as it is was created post-WW2 by Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislane Maxwell, of Epstein infamy). Or that the academic publishing business sits somewhere between the music industry and movie industry in terms of the money involved — which I find mindblowing. If we don’t know why things are broken then no wonder people rely on “my experience” and ignore the evidence.
Funding & lack of jobs
Funding in academia is constantly fraught. No-government funds science appropriately, which in light of the COVID pandemic is particularly egregious. But there are also numerous problems with the way the funds are distributed and used.
For example, in the UK one of the major funders, the Welcome Trust, have recently revamped their funding schemes for early careers and introduced a 3-year post PhD limit for applications to one of their major fellowships. This decision makes a huge number of early career researchers ineligible and is difficult to square with how science works these days (requiring more time and more data to publish papers). Thankfully, most other funders in the UK have removed age-limits on their fellowships. But this kind of decision also creates a huge inequality in the system with lucky postdocs being awarded a fellowship to start their own lab over much more experienced postdocs and those who can actually demonstrate they could do the job of PI, rather than just publish some papers and write a fellowship. Personally, I think we’re going to see a lot more abuse from this too due to the nature of the kind of people who will be awarded these early fellowships before they’re ready but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Funding is also most often awarded to those coming from big name labs who have the resources to spare for preliminary data and have enough lab members that they can generate large (“high-impact”) papers. This is yet another element of “luck” that flows through the entire academic career. Those who are successful often don’t like this because they feel it takes away from their achievements and hard work. I’m not trying to do that but if so much of the academic career wasn’t down to luck then we wouldn’t be losing so many brilliant scientists.
The funding situation also means there are few permanent positions, particularly beyond the post-doc stage. Unfortunately, this impacts minorities, women and 1st-gen groups the most.
Lack of positivity / unappreciation
Ironic ending this piece by commenting on a lack of positivity so this will be the penultimate section instead. Other than bullying, this is perhaps the section most dependent upon the PI in question. Some bring amazing positivity and appreciation. For example, my current PI is very clear that he appreciates me — and this makes a huge difference on a day to day basis. There’s another PI in the department who is perhaps the nicest and most positive person I’ve ever met. However, others in the department are clear that they do not appreciate me and are actively disrespectful. This also has a big impact in my daily working environment. The problem is that too many are stuck on the notion that success in academia is papers. Anything else is a distraction or waste of time.
Now from a pure career perspective this is kind of true — we’re not really judged on much else. But from a moral, ethical and humanity view this is wrong. But it also means most efforts to actually improve a department or academia more widely are actively unappreciated. I work in a place where you’re value is largely just how many hours you work. It’s incredibly toxic and forces new hires into working long, unsustainable, hours. It also directly leads to abuse.
But let’s move away from my experience and look at the evidence. There are no shortage of people coming forward to state that they haven’t been given the recognition they should have, often in the form of being excluded as an author from papers. But it goes much further than this, particularly (again) for women and minorities. Female academics do the majority of the tasks that keep academia running, such as sitting on committees and those things that contribute to the culture of a department. However, these tasks are almost completely unrecognised and certainly not appreciated or valued in tenure applications or promotions. For minorities, DEI work often falls to them. This work can also come at the cost of research output for these groups, making them less competitive in a system that only values one thing.
Metrics, metrics, metrics
The competition for positions and grants has lead academia to focus on papers and citations as the primary indicators of success. This is influencing how research is conducted and presented, and makes it hard to complement traditional publishing with new ways to share knowledge. In effect, academia is still largely stuck in a pre-internet age. As more metrics are devised, academics find themselves under even more pressure. Far too many PIs push this pressure onto their lab members, creating some of the issues above. Many more don’t do this but suffer from the pressure — in a job that really shouldn’t have a whole lot of pressure or time sensitive stress. The worst bit of it all is that evidence continually shows, overwhelming, that the types of metrics we use are not effective. And with so many being based on a publishing system (Robert Maxwell remember) that is completely out of control and wholly unfit for purpose.
Ultimately, many of these issues boil down to egotistic narcissists, sorry I mean careerists, striving for personal gain above the advancement of knowledge or training of others. But we (or rather funders, PIs and institutions) are directly responsible for this and for just how broken the whole system is. Change is too slow and difficult, perhaps it’s time to burn it all down and build back something that actually works.
A (rather important) note to all of this. Many people in academia will offer advice but take care what advice/who you listen to. A) Many people are indoctrinated and don’t see any real problems with academia, B) many others will “play the game” and as they benefit from how things work don’t believe in change or that the issues are not that bad and C) far too many conflate experience with evidence. If the evidence does not support an individuals experience then that person should really re-think why that is. D) Those who’ve had bad experiences will struggle to give you a balanced opinion. Of course I have my own viewpoint and biases; I highlight the issues not to complain but because I love academia and what is could and should be.
Rippling Ideas 