Which is worth more, a journal article or a chapter in an edited book?
To those of you who know which particular academic bean-counting exercise I’m talking about, my heartfelt sympathy (I sat in on one of those conversations yesterday lunchtime).
In the meantime, here’s something to raise academic morale. Not.
8 comments on “Question”
“When they discover that not only are the pressures as intense – if not more so – than in other professions, but that much of their workload has been reduced to bureaucracy, they feel cheated that the contract has been violated. They are in effect mourning the loss of the job they thought they had.”
I can sympathise with that I’ve been having the same feelings about what I thought the PhD would do for me.
I love this bit though: “Joanna Bryson is a computer scientist who has worked in three Ivy League institutions in the US and is now settled in Bristol. She is at the other end of the paper trail. ‘The major source of frustration is the lack of administration – secretarial resources are seen as something that can be cut here. People do their own photocopying. In America, there tends to be a secretary for every two or three professors,’ she says.”
Not at the 98% of schools that aren’t Ivy League! (I realize this wasn’t the main point of the article, it just struck me.)
Claire: I worry about this too. I’ve made a sort of pledge for once I’m in a real lecturing job (fingers crossed that I get one, of course): I am *not* going to struggle on with it for years if I hate it. I hope I won’t hate it; I want the freedoms and autonomy that do still exist in academia; I want to research and write; I might even enjoy teaching (well, sometimes I do already) when I stop being quite so scared of it. But I already have a good idea of what I’m letting myself in for; so hopefully I won’t suffer that terrible let-down.
New Kid: You know – anybody with experience of both want to chime in here? – while we ordinary middle-rankers here tend to jealously view Oxbridge (and to some extent the other ‘Russell Group’ universities), I don’t think there’s quite the same gulf between them and everyone else as between the Ivy League and ‘the rest’ in the US. (Though we do have struggling ex-polytechnics at the bottom of the hierarchy; I’ve never experienced that situation either.) Nor do we have the same split between ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ universities (but it may be coming…).
Actually, that mention reminds me that it’s not so long since I read an article about academics coming to Britain from the US who were emphasising how much *less* stressful it is to work here – yes, there’s bureaucracy, it’s hard work, but none of the tenure-track pressures. I think I linked it in a post here, but I don’t have time to look it up now. (I have to go to my first departmental seminar (on Orderic Vitalis, about whom I know next to nothing) of the semester, after which we go for BEER and FOOD. Yippee.)
New Kid — yes, that made me laugh, too. We have one secretary for a multi-disciplinary department: English, Philosophy, and Languages. I’m sure that is more the norm. Reading the article I wondered how a similar survey would play out in North America; not much different, I expect.
New Kid — the article wasn’t entirely accurate (the Guardian? Accurate? They’ve mentioned me three times this year (once in a correction) and haven’t got my institution right yet) — I’ve only been at one ivy league institution, but it’s true the other two were private universities too. But still, when I was in business, I actually got in trouble for doing things that less qualifed people could do, because I was wasting the company’s money (I just saw it as having a break & still being useful…) but now I’m *much* better qualified, but there’s just not that much institutional support to let me do the things that would bring money into the university (e.g. research, grant writing, industrial relations.) Currently in the UK, if you are doing research without having a grant pay for it, you are stealing from the taxpayers who hired you to teach (and I guess teaching includes photocopying!) which certainly isn’t what I got a PhD to qualify myself to do, at least not exclusively.
I’m deeply worried about the fact that a) Labour has put secondary school people in charge of higher education and b) they want 50% of the population to go to university — it really does seem like they want university to become school, and research to go somewhere else. If they think that’s a good idea, they should see what the German system (MPIs for the lead researchers and nothing for the Unis) has done to their brain-drain problems for academics.
I’m not sure what you mean by a view that “if you are doing research without having a grant pay for it, you are stealing from the taxpayers…”. Perhaps it works differently in your field, but the humanities, including history, are full of people who are expected to keep up their research (not least for the RAE bean counters) and rarely get grants for it at all (except peanuts to cover travel expenses and the like). After all, it’s the taxpayers who pay for most of those grants (outside the sciences anyway). But I’m with you in being really worried that we’re heading for a big teaching (or, more likely ‘training’)/research divide. That might be less marked, again, in humanities fields where research is mostly a small-scale individualistic enterprise, but since it will happen at the level of the institution (not the department or field), everyone will be affected.
Sorry — I was referring to the new research transparency exercises — if you do happen to get a grant, but you don’t bill for at least some of your own salary on it, then by the new accounting you are apparently *losing* (not bringing in) money. I could see this if you overstretched yourself and someone had to hire more teaching assistants, but at least here at Bath you can bring money into the university (with overheads) and your grant award notice will show you how much you are *losing* the university by offering to do research for free and/or by failing to get 100% overheads for your postdocs.
Ah, bureaucrat logic…