Changing Academic Life RW4 Rejection, tenure and so-called excellence
In this short related-work podcast, I share the stories of two people we’ll call Alex and Blake who are facing the challenge of meeting tenure criteria. From this I reflect on the personal, professional and societal impacts entailed in this push for so-called excellence. I then discuss two different papers that point in different ways to the need for institutional and cultural level response and present ideas for practical actions – for how we can address academic rejection and what it means to focus on soundness and capacity instead of excellence. As Moore et al state, excellence is not excellent and in fact is at odds with qualities of good research.
[Note: anonymised stories have been told with the permissions of ‘Alex’ and ‘Blake’]
Related Work:
Allen et al, Journal papers, grants, jobs … as rejections pile up, it’s not enough to tell academics to ‘suck it up, The Conversation, February 3 2021. https://theconversation.com/journal-papers-grants-jobs-as-rejections-pile-up-its-not-enough-to-tell-academics-to-suck-it-up-153886
Allen, Kelly-Ann; Donoghue, Gregory M; Pahlevansharif, Saeed; Jimerson, Shane R.; and Hattie, John A.C., Addressing academic rejection: Recommendations for reform, Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 17(5), 2020. Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol17/iss5/19
Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M. et al. “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Commun 3, 16105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105
Geraldine Fitzpatrick, 2017, ‘ The craziness of research funding. It costs us all’. , TEDx TUWien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66_DRDYJz4g&list=PLq-OfvAJu5UZtNcBLLwsgmDRPbkARew6G&index=6
TRANSCRIPT: CAL Related Work 4
(00:26):
Reflections for this week are triggered by two interactions I had recently that highlighted for me the significant human impact of our so-called drive for excellence in academia and especially so for people who don't have traditional career paths or tend to do more cross-disciplinary work. Both of the people that I'm talking about are postdoc people in tenure track positions or tenured positions at two different universities in very different countries, not the UK or the US and I'm going to call them Alex and Blake.
(01:05):
So for Alex's story, Alex moved countries a couple of years ago to take up their first full-time faculty position at a university in a, in a, we can call it an Eastern European country. And this was after a long number of years on precarious short term projects with European funding. And a lot of that funding was about conducting more near to market research and involving industry partners.
(01:32):
So it wasn't always conducive to very deep, theoretical, journal papers, if you like. And so they were really excited to finally get a position that was full time in a faculty position and with the longer term output and where they could really shape their own research identity. We had a call last week as Alex was really anxious about their future prospects and wanted to talk it through. And let me tell you that Alex does really great work at the intersection of design and technology. They take a very participatory approach to their research and invite invite participants, or you might call them stakeholders or target audience to engage with them as co-design partners. So there's lots of hands on making and design and deploying technologies often with, within an activist agenda. And they really care deeply about this work and the values underpinning it. And the, the outputs of their research do tend to end up in highly ranked conferences in our field. And Alex also has a long list of international collaborators and co-authors, and they've also had some really excellent local public exhibitions and local community impacts as well. And if public engagement and impact were assessment criteria, they would definitely score really highly.
(02:55):
Alex is also really active in their peer community involved organizing workshops, being part of committees, addressing issues like equity and access. Alex also talks about loving teaching and working with students and the PhD students that they have in particular, and from all accounts, they really love Alex too. And Alex's immediate line manager also loves them and says that he's really happy with their work and loves what they're doing on all these fronts. However, this particular unit is really intent on trying to increase their research profile worldwide.
(03:35):
And this has some serious implications for Alex because even though the head of department is really happy, he also tells Alex that they still have to meet the centrally set university requirements for tenure. And that those requirements are three journal papers a year for every year in a top rated journal. And that top rated journal is, is top rated, according to a designated list produced by the university. And that's a huge ask for anybody. And what's particularly challenging for Alex is that the journals reflect the mainstream of the disciplinary area of the department, but Alex's work is very cross-disciplinary. So none of the journals in the list are ones that they would want to publish in or engage with as a peer community and the conferences and journals that they do currently publish in are not in the list, even though they're venues that are highly valued and rated within our peer community. And that whole issue of getting publications is further complicated if you like by Alex's personal commitment to trying to have a life and managing work so that they're not working 80 hours a week.
(04:57):
So Alex has put in enormous amounts of time so far into setting up all their new teaching, which we know takes a lot of effort and also in trying to get grants. Yeah, now that they're in this tenure position, and of course grants are also a criteria for tenure, but we know that the success rates for these grants are often in the single digits. And none of the proposals that Alex has been involved with so far in the last couple of years have been successful. And Alex still says, though, that they have learned a lot from doing these, and they've also helped to develop their networks, but it has meant no money. And so that's meant a lot of time talking about research and writing research plans, but not actually getting to do the research. And that means not actually having content that can form the basis of journal white papers and more over at single authored journal papers that are particularly valued in the criteria used by the so not even collaborative papers.
(06:02):
Now, it was fascinating as well as heartbreaking to watch Alex talk about their work over zoom. And when they talked about their research and their students and their teaching, and you could see and feel the energy, Alex sat up tall, their face was led up, and then they talked about their fears around not meeting tenure criteria, and then what it would take for them to even try to meet the criteria. And this would mean forcing themselves to write a paper for an audience they didn't particularly care about, or even particularly know well about work. That wouldn't actually be what they really wanted to do to get into the journal. And I just watched their body slump. I could see the anxiety in Alex's face. And as I said, it just really did break my heart. It felt like Alex was weighing up whether to sell their soul for the promise of a career in a tenured position or not.
(07:03):
And even then they were saying how getting tenure is no guarantee in their system, because they would still have to pass yearly evaluations, post tenure with similar output requirements and that they could be fired at any time. And so Alex was wanting to explore whether they should play the game or how, how should they play the game? And I know this isn't a new story. It could be the story of so many people who are caught up in our crazy academic system. And it's not my place either to give advice because Alex is the expert in their own life and own context, but we chatted about how other people who we both knew might respond differently because they're very different researchers. They had different career paths and different career ambitions and people that we also thought about might actually fit into that mainstream disciplinary mold to be happy to publish in those venues. But that wasn't Alex.
(08:05):
We also talked about what was important to them in their own work and, and connecting to what their values were and what strengths they brought to this work and what impact they really wanted to have. And that was an interesting conversation as well, because it, it connected more to what mattered and it helped to also open up what other options might be available that still connected to those things, to their values and strengths and what was important. So this is still something that Alex is going away to consider, but they're, they're really big questions to consider with big implications.
(08:46):
And so Blake, my second interaction from recently is in a very different type of university, one that considers itself already a top ranked one. Blake also moved countries like Alex to take up this position as a senior lecturer. And there were selected for this position precisely because of the great experience they brought from previous academic positions at well-regarded institutions in Europe as well as doing two startups in very cutting edge technology areas. And like Alex, Blake is also very active in their peer community, sitting on steering committees and advisory groups and, and has even been recognized as a senior member of the ACM.
(09:36):
However, because of their non-traditional career path, they understandably also have a lower H-index that might be then might be expected. And publications and grants though are going to become really important for their tenure review. Which is why this week they were feeling really, really down because they just had a grant application rejected and the system didn't allow them to respond in a way that drew out factual and process errors made by the reviewers.
(10:10):
And they're really frustrated by what they see as a system that seems to be stacked against younger researchers and researchers like themselves with non-standard paths. And the game to play in this particular system in this particular country is often having someone more senior with them with a strong track record and a good H-index as a co-investigator, but this wasn't even enough. And one reviewer said that, and to quote, that, that 'it would give more confidence if this more senior level person was the lead investigator'. And Blake was talking about how this just perpetuates the hopeless situation with funding and that it means that funding ends up being held by a very small minority of male professors. It becomes a real chicken and egg problem. And the other frustrating part that they drew attention to was that it took over a year from submission to get to this sort of final decision.
(11:13):
Getting this grant would have been so important for their tenure case and for providing research on which they could get publications to try to increase their H-index. And they're really worried now that they won't have enough when it comes to their tenure review. And even though the rhetoric of their uni says that they take account of non-standard paths, Blake knows from what they've seen, that this rarely plays out in practice. Just a quote from an email, they said that, 'it's quite amazing that heads of schools and tenure committees with bright people can't see that a non-standard equates to a lower than expected H-index'.
(11:58):
So just in the same way that the rhetoric of the grant scheme says that anyone can be successful. But this isn't the case, unless you have a very experienced PI. And I know that I've seen the same in promotion committees as well, where the policies state that research and teaching and service are all valued in different ways. But, you know, we know in practice that often research ends up being everything. And we also know that this often also plays out in very gendered ways, but that's a topic for another day.
(12:31):
So the stories of Alex and Blake are common. I know, and not just for people with non-standard career paths or doing cross-disciplinary research, that doesn't fit into a nice little box for both of them and for too many others in similar situations though, there's a huge personal cost in terms of stress and anxiety in having your confidence shattered in questioning yourself. And there's a huge cost for society in missing, out on the contributions from their work and what they can offer. They're good people, they do good work. And the craziness of these systems is also brought into sharp relief with stories like that of, I don't know if you remember from a few years ago, Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize winner, whose Wikipedia entry had been rejected by the moderator just a couple of months beforehand as not doing significant enough research. So we know that these harsh judgements are made at all levels .But as I said, it's society and science that are also missing out in really big ways. These are clever people who have enormous amounts to offer for advancing science and having real societal impact, but the systems in place require them to divert all their energies towards playing publication or grant getting games with success odds that are really hugely stacked against them. I talked about the craziness of research funding in a TEDx talk some years ago. Not that I actually got to any sort of real solutions.
(14:08):
And we also know that one of the other implications is the lack of diversity that we end up with. And we know that diversity is really important for healthy ecosystems. And this is also the case for academia. We need people who sit within disciplines, of course, but we also need people who sit across disciplines. We need people who have non-standard career paths. Interestingly, there was a Conversation's article last week by, someone called Kelly-Ann Allen and colleagues, and I'll link to this on the webpage. And they talking about a journal article that they had written where they drew attention to this toxic culture of evaluation and rejection. And the point of that, their stance is that it's not enough to tell academics to suck it up.
(14:55):
And they point to the adverse impacts of loss of great opportunity for learning and development and how these processes contribute to excessive workload and to really negative mental health and well-being consequences. And we know too that academics do have much lower levels of mental health and wellbeing compared to the general population and indeed to many other high stress professions. So that's a real issue. So Allen et al argue instead for systemic and institutional response to reduce the toxicity of this sort of culture. And they lay out various suggestions that include, you know, making success criteria clear, providing opportunities for feedback and mentoring and support having pre submission reviews and so on. And we could also add here making sure that stated policies are not just rhetoric, but making sure we hold reviewers and evaluators accountable to these policies. And the second set of suggestions is around trying to improve the timeliness of the process, for example, encouraging editors to do more desk rejects so that people have quicker turnarounds and can iterate and resubmit. And they also discuss things like forwarding on prior reviews with resubmissions to different venues here. We could also add things like, you know, having more agile grant review processes and maybe multi-stage processes that are starting to happen in some places. And the third set of suggestions goes towards looking after the mental health and a big step to this is not just recognising wins, but recognising effort and performance. Like what are the things that are within people's control and celebrating these.
(16:40):
That this toxic culture exists in the first place, though, it can be seen as part of the broader what many people are talking about is neoliberal agendas that so many of our universities are signing up to. Um, and the related push around that so-called excellence and every university is trying to be excellent in all sorts of ways. And excellence is used as the justification for having criteria like these journal outputs and so on for tenure.
(17:17):
And this reminds me, you have a great article journal article from 2017 by Moore et al called 'Excellence, R us: university research and the fetishization of excellence'. And it does a lovely job of unpacking the rhetoric of excellence and argues in the end that it doesn't actually have any intrinsic meaning, certainly not across disciplines and often not even within disciplines. And the article then goes on to posit that excellent serves maybe as a linguistic interchange mechanism, but that when it combines with narratives of scarcity and competition, it creates this hyper competition scenario that they argue is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. And they argue instead from an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity building. One of the proposals that they have that I'd love to see happening is giving everyone some sort of base level of funding. And of course, having scope in the system to give some people more based on outputs, but let's just fund everyone able to do research in some way and have a mechanism that looks at what was the outputs of that funding in order to fund future research.
(18:39):
And I love their final conclusion is about excellence not being excellent and that a cultural problem needs a cultural solution similar to the other paper about needing an organizational institutional response. And I know though that changes like this cultural level changes always take a long, long time to happen. And they're very complicated. So what can we do in