Saturday 1, April 2023

The plight of academics

This article explains how tough it is to be an academic at Oxford. The subject of the article, Henry, has been seriously let down by the university, and is deserving of sympathy. I feel sorry for the guy, but my sympathy is tempered with the thought that it’s hardly a secret that going into academia is a very unattractive financial prospect. A decade ago, I met up with a contemporary of mine who almost the only one of our cohort to go straight into a permanent academic job. He was still doing it several decades later, and made a trip to use the Bodlian Library most weekends to do research, which he much preferred to teaching.

One thing he mentioned to me was that Oxford housing was effectively unaffordable to anyone on a normal academic salary. I was so far out of academia myself, I had no idea what level he was talking about. In my day there were hardly any professors, but I have noticed that they are now much more common than they used to be. Anyway, he said he would refuse a post, even if offered.

Part of the problem is that we are producing far, far too many PhDs (and DPhils). Academics need PhDs, especially in the sciences, to help them boost their publishing output. In the past, a PhD could be completed in a moderate time: after a four-year undergraduate course, submitting a DPhil thesis within six terms was a wholly realistic goal, especially when one’s supervisor chose a project that was well chosen. It is interesting that Henry ended up in academic administration. There always seem to be well-paid jobs in academic administration. In the USA, the population of academic administrators, and their salaries, has exploded. Maybe they are all academics manqué, and wish to extract their revenge on those they would have become.

It is interesting that the article says that the big problem is that academically successful students from poorer backgrounds get suckered in to embarking on this career path. As someone who got a scholarship to Oxford from an very poor household, I can fully understand how this happens. Kids whose parents went to Oxford know that becoming an academic is, for the vast majority, a major mistake. The competition to get a permanent academic job is probably close to the sort of competition there is for jobs at investment banks. Winning the competition leads to years of gruelling, unsatisfying work (mostly), but at least as an investment banker you get a big financial compensation.

It is hard to blame academics. When they take on a PhD student, they are only offering the student an opportunity they were given themselves at an earlier stage in their career, and for some academics, their ability and disposition makes being a university lecturer the optimal career choice. The problem is that a lot go into it who are either not suited, psychologically, or not sufficiently gifted academically. The tails of a normal distribution stretch out a long way in both directions. I realized fairly early on into my PhD that I probably wasn’t going to make it, which gave me a shot at having a career which was more suited to my abilities.

Even in the 1980s it was universal for all corporate recruiters to mandate an aptitude test. In universities, it’s sufficient to pass exams and submit a thesis of the requisite standard. Maybe universities could learn something from the corporate world. I would probably help if they gave candidates for PhD programs some statistics on how many of their predecessors actually make it. The problem is that if you are a candidate for a PhD program at a prestigious university you have probably never failed at anything you have previously attempted in your life up to that point, so you probably lack the humility to recognize that better men than you have failed to make it to a professorship, and that jobs in the real world are frequently both better paid and more rewarding.