Rambles around computer science
Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time
Wed, 15 May 2019
Research careers in UK Universities: questions few are asking, part one
(Those who follow me on Twitter may have a sense of déjà vu about this, but I thought it worth elevating to blog level. I wrote most of it over a year ago... must get better at timely blogging.)
Back in September 2017 I attended the UK's inaugural National Postdoc Meeting organised by the Postdocs of Cambridge (PdOC) Society. We were fortunate to receive a flying visit from Borys, a.k.a. Professor Leszek Borysiewicz, at that time the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. This was fortunate in that it is always illuminating to hear the thoughts of those in a position of academic leadership. It was also unfortunate, in that what he had to say showed a distinct lack of leadership. Alarm bells sounded in what he piped up from the floor during the questions in the previous session, which was about career development opportunities. His contribution struck me an astonishingly ill-considered; I would later tweet-summarise his most clueless moments, of which the first two were during this question session. Freed from character limits, here the wording is elaborated slightly.
- “Postdocs shouldn't be allowed to hold grants because then the institution must commit to employ them for the duration; that's too much commitment.” (tweet)
- “This cannot be solved by making grants more portable. This would do harm by removing incentives from smaller Universities—whose grants could be poached by competitors.” (tweet)
What was most alarming was the self-assurance with which he conveyed these completely bogus arguments. He continued the theme during his own slot, with another clanger.
- “We can't avoid putting research staff on short-term contracts, because we lack the funds to create more academic positions.” (tweet)
It's difficult to overstate how wrong all this is, and doubly so as an outlook for a supposed “leader”. My responses, again more-or-less as tweeted, were as follows.
To (1) (tweet): why wouldn't institutions be prepared to commit to that employment, if the grant-winning postdoc brings in their own salary, overheads, and maybe others' salaries too? (I'm aware of the alleged <100% FEC issue; is that the reason?)
To (2) (tweet), this naturally equilibriates: grant success makes institution more attractive; some do stay, so expect net gain in research power. The institutional incentive is still very much there.
Point (3) is (tweet) the classic canard. “We can't create more academic jobs” is neither here nor there. Improving researchers' lot is not about funding more positions; it's about how a fixed research budget is spent. Current research politics say, implicitly, that we should choose to employ lots, cheaply and precariously. This maximises the raw number of research staff, but keeps turnover high and skews towards the young and inexperienced. Is this really optimal? It seems hard to believe. But it is quite well explained by the incentives faced by established PIs.
What can we do about all this? The first step is clearly to challenge these bogus arguments. Sadly, the world of higher education is full of oft-repeated lines that talk about policy as if it were a law of nature. The “FEC issue” my tweet alluded to is one such line: that “universities lose money on research, since grants bring in less than the full economic cost”. Although of course grants do not always pay full FEC as costed, it is a nonsense to say we “lose money”. Universities are funded from the public purse precisely in order to host research activities (among others). So the worst that can be said is that each research undertaking consumes some of that block funding, and must be fairly accounted internally. To say “consuming funding” is fine, but to frame it as “losing money” is overlooking the very mission of a university. There is a some argument that the FEC issue is ultimately a construction of accounting; one that (I cynically surmise) is convenient to policymakers and administrators because it keeps academics subordinate.
(I have witnessed FEC arguments deployed by administrations to create the impression “you should be grateful” or “we're doing you a favour”, then used as a devious pretext for cutting the support offered to researchers—increasing the pressure to raise even more funds. That specific issue was around the costs of “training and personal development” which, it had been argued, should be costed on grants now that ring-fenced Roberts money for training courses and the like was no longer available. Of course, such courses had been offered before Roberts money existed, and in any case would merit consumption of general funds since they obviously support the mission of the University. Even worse, creating pressure to raise external funds for such things is hiding a giant double standard: that administrative functions of the university rarely face equal challenges to justify their own costs. What grants are the administration applying for, to pay for their own staff's training and development courses? That's obviously an absurd idea, but my point is that value-for-money on overheads is already highly dubious. FEC arguments allow the administration to vent budgetary pressure back out onto academics—“raise more funds”—instead of creating internal pressures. Given the patchy quality of “training courses” and “career development” sessions I've attended, such pressure could hardly fail to be constructive. But instead, we're expected to raise funds for yet more of the same.)
Let's get back to Borys. There is a general pattern that those seeking to protect the status quo—whether owing to vested interests or plain unimaginative conservatism—often deploy “fear, uncertainty and doubt” tactics. They make a vague argument as to why an alternative “would never work”. I have always found this mindset particularly jarring when encountered among researchers, whose very job is exploring unproven ideas. But it is exactly the tactic Borys was deploying in his second point. To me it appears completely implausible that grant portability would take away incentives from institutions. Poaching is already rife (thanks to the REF, which remains unreformed on this point), But even the biggest institutions are not indefinitely elastic. Maybe indeed a certain fraction of grantholders would be poached, but that is second-order effect and is likely far outweighed by the first-order benefits of increased research income. Meanwhile, it's true that growing inequality among institutions is a problem, but measures to help postdocs receive grants would work to lessen this, not worsen it. That's because current grant-awarding policies contribute massively to the “rich get richer” phenomenon, owing partly to the weight placed on track record. Spreading grant money out further down the career ladder necessarily means putting greater weight on other factors (or perhaps greater intentional use of randomness) which will favour smaller institutions. All this is also presuming a lot about the overall system of project-based grants, which, as I'll note, is far from untouchable.
Borys painted the issue as one of funding more academic positions. That is not the issue at all. The real issue is this: how should we spend the amount we currently spend? It's rhetorically convenient to take Borys's approach, painting this issue as “postdocs making demands”—for more money, or more academic jobs, or the moon on a stick. Then it can easily be dismissed. Most of our “leaders”, like Borys, are invested in the status quo. This isn't a tirade against Borys: as Vice-Chancellors go I think he was not too bad. But even a “good” V-C was happy either knowingly to advance a bogus argument to protect that status quo, or more charitably, to attend a policy-oriented meeting of postdocs without engaging his brain sufficiently on the issues of what better policies might be.
It's not just Borys. Lack of leadership is a sector-wide problem. At the same National Postdoc Meeting, one panel included a Liz Elvidge, apparently “Head of Postdoc Development” at Imperial College London. She claimed that the dire situation is “the nature of the beast”. But it is not nature! It is nurture. It is a consequence of policy; the policies could easily be different. Of course, policies won't change if the people with influence hold opinions like these. It is a perversity typical of the present state of affairs that a reputable institution would create a “postdoc development” role whose de-facto job is to further entrench a system that is actively hostile to such development.
(The notion “professional development” is routinely used as a fig leaf. Institutions love to proclaim their commitment to professional development, to cover for their inaction on the core policy issues. We saw this yet again recently, in science minister Chris Skidmore's speech about “Securing the research talent of tomorrow” It begins to acknowledge the structural problem, but rather than facing up to it pivots straight to patching symptoms—mental health and wellbeing, “career development” initiatives—and generating mountains of worthless paper, namely the Concordat. The Concordat is full of worthy-sounding requests, but it is doomed to be ineffective as long as there is no change to the funding regime. There's no recognition from Skidmore that how the money is spent is not only the cause of the problem, but is something government directly controls.)
Today's incumbents—the ageing distinguished professors who now have the strongest academic voice in shaping future policy—mostly grew up under a different system. Where was the mandate for changing it? I'm still looking—this is a topic I'm investigating as part of my part-time PGCHE studies here at Kent (yes, I'm a student again)—but I suspect the story is one of creeping change without any meaningful mandate. Our funding landscape today is dominated by project grants, rather than personal or institutional grants. But it need not be so, and was far less so when our current senior citizens were starting out. For example, although it is rarely remarked, in Cambridge, until the 1980s it was common for academics to start their career on five-year appointments as “Senior Assistant in Research” or “Assistant Director of Research”; or as “Assistant Lecturer”. These posts have disappeared, for reasons owing directly and indirectly to funding policy changes. I will leave a full exposition of that to a future post in this series, but this 2004 report published by HEPI is a good starting reference. The story in brief is that the split of public research funding between Funding Councils (core funding) and Research Councils (project grants) has shifted substantially over the last forty years—but not on the basis of any clear mandate or strategic recommendation that I've yet managed to find. I'll report back with more detailed findings in a future post.
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