Where’s Your Place in the World?

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Athene Donald

I don’t suppose there are many people in the country who currently feel grounded, confident they know how their lives will unfold and happy with that trajectory. At the moment, uncertainty seems the name of the game, responsibilities multiply and jobs – assuming you still have one – are changing radically. Not so long ago, wfh was an acronym that would have conveyed nothing and Zoom more usually meant camera shots than staring at a computer screen.

In lockdown, it would be nice to think I would have more time to read – think of all those journeys I’m not making, the cycle rides to the station and endless crowded tube trains. However, the reality is the day job does not cease. Rather, it seems on the contrary to be more intense and more difficult. However, I am finding a little time to dip into the book Clarissa Farr wrote when she stepped down as High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School, The Making of Her.

Her book ostensibly follows the school calendar, and so it starts with a chapter about starting the new academic year, specifically as a newbie. Of this period she remarks

‘a [more] fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood.’

I don’t know how many of us feel homesick, it isn’t how I’d describe myself, but that feeling of being untethered is perhaps a more apt analogy, as each of us has to cope with new and unexpected circumstances. There is a loneliness in making difficult decisions with only a disembodied colleague on the screen to confer with; a loneliness of never meeting anyone beyond your household, which might consist of you and no one else; a loneliness from not being able to hug grandparents or, in my case, grandchildren. We are social creatures however much scientists may also – at times – work single-mindedly in a bubble of lengthy and isolated late-night lab sessions or hunched over pen and paper searching for the hypothesis that joins the data dots metaphorically together. All of us value company, friendship and a lightening of spirit through conversation and jokes.

What is our place in this brand-new world, and will things evolve back to where they were? I suspect most of us appreciate only too well that the ‘new normal’ in a post-COVID world (assuming we emerge into one any time soon) will not be BAU (an acronym it took me some time to work out meant business as usual, as opposed to the German for building when working my way through planning briefs). As an appropriately academic example, let me turn to the traditional Cambridge way of conferring degrees, with a clasping of hands of each individual graduand. This is not something it is easy to imagine being re-instated in the foreseeable future, if ever, however much the other parts of a ceremony in the Senate House may return in due course, once social distancing has become such a distant memory that a full cohort of students can process along the Cambridge streets and stand shoulder to shoulder in that building.

That is, in one sense, a trivial example, affecting such a tiny minority, but it is illustrative of how small, familiar and reassuring actions may vanish. Will the traditional ‘how-do-you-do’ shake of the hand of English society, already fading fast, ever reappear? Given that it has already tended to be replaced by hugs and air kisses, even in relatively austere circles, we will have to think of new ways of greeting: the elbow knocking that briefly became de rigeur in early March perhaps. We are without a social script going forward, adding to the sense of being untethered that Farr mentions in her book. Only here we are all newbies, fresh to the COVID world where there are none of us who knows the rules any more.

So, homesickness may not describe us, but perhaps nostalgia for a sort of lost innocence before every contact became suspect, including through the very air between us as we go about our daily business. Our lives are at risk in a way I, as an English native, have never had to fear before and the consequences for our mental health are significant. Anxiety dreams may be common to many of us, whatever illogical form they take, but the waking reality can be at least as disquieting, if more logical.

As businesses, universities included, work up their plans to come out of lockdown the tension between safety and ‘getting on with it’ is worryingly present. We each have personal responsibility to think of others as well as ourselves, whatever some highly placed people may choose to think, and many decisions cannot be taken unilaterally. I will not digress into a political diatribe, tempting though it may be, but every member of a community – as a Cambridge college would happily describe itself – will need to be aware of how their actions impact on everyone else around them. We need to find ways of instilling this new sense of shared responsibility into the community without the introduction of draconian measures.

How a lab can reopen requires one set of underlying principles, which will determine how many of any given research team can set foot in the lab at any time – and how all surfaces will thereafter be cleaned before another shift arrives. I am old enough to remember the days when library books had notices inside them about what to do if someone in the household who’d borrowed the book fell ill with a communicable disease (mainly measles and mumps, I suspect back then, as polio and smallpox were certainly on their final way out). As research gets going again, how will books be quarantined for researchers wanting to use a library when a digital version is not available? How will colleges provide catering for returning students without infringing social distancing for anyone? The questions are many. In my own university – as no doubt in all around the world – these questions are being urgently worked up; solutions are not always going to be obvious.

So, if my blogposts are comparatively infrequent, you can assume my brain is not only trying to adjust to whatever our new normal is, but also it is engaged in virtual meeting after virtual meeting, wrestling with some of these very problems. Simultaneously, I need to try to ensure that the general feeling of ‘knackeredness’ that my colleagues and I are getting more comfortable admitting to (that phrase seems now to be in common parlance, at least locally) does not get overwhelmed by anxiety levels high enough to disrupt my sleep. The challenges for all of us getting through these grim weeks is immense. I wish my readers success in finding ways to remain, as Farr put it, ‘located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us’, and if that feels as yet impossible, at least to see some way back to your moorings in the not too distant future, with the help of some virtual friends Zooming away.

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Just Getting By: Coping and Learning

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Athene Donald

The pandemic is teaching each of us individually many things. Some may be things we might not want to know about ourselves: how resilient we are; how well we cope with four walls and a screen, perhaps with no other adult in sight; and how to stay optimistic in the face of global uncertainty. Other things may be more immediately useful. In that category I would certainly include mastering a range of different platforms for holding meetings, teaching, exams and just social chitchat. Personally I haven’t yet had drinks on a Google Hangout, but did do something similar with a few other heads of house over Zoom. I have also had to appreciate the complexities – and difficulties – of MS Teams when you have more than one identity, or perhaps I should call it affiliation.

That attending committee meetings (or indeed, any other kind of meeting) via Zoom is exhausting has been frequently remarked by many. Chairing a meeting over such a platform is indeed a challenge. All the things I’ve written about chairing meetings on this blog go west when body language is largely hidden (can you see that someone is tapping impatiently on the arm of their chair? No, of course not.) Nor is it easy to see who is trying shyly to contribute. Although the mechanism of a virtual Zoom hand raise is helpful, someone has to have sufficient confidence to activate that and not just sit there looking anxious and trying to catch your eye.

Indeed, I find knowing where best to ‘look’ is difficult, when the camera isn’t centre-screen but off at the top. You can’t really make eye contact, as another way of gathering subliminal messages. I’m afraid, however, that making eye contact is really most cheering when someone is rabbiting on endlessly and you want to share a conspiratorial smirk with a colleague who you know shares your views on said irritating colleague. That’s gone west. Anyhow, I really haven’t solved the lighting in my room. Sidelighting from the window whenever there is bright sunshine outside always puts half my face into deep shade which the miserable desklight I have cannot correct. Of course I could turn my ‘office’ metaphorically upside down and move my desk and everything else, but the ‘60’s built in bookshelf and desk makes that incredibly hard. A kitchen table might be easier for this specifically.

However, these new skills, such as they are, are likely to be needed for a long time yet. I remarked in my last post about the need to think much harder about the differential impact on careers for different groups of people. Since then, another carefully researched article has highlighted the pandemic challenges for academics working from home coupled with domestic responsibilities, highlighting women of course. Thinking harder about the skills we are needing to practice now and how value them on CV’s absolutely must be a focus of those drafting advertisements (when jobs finally start to appear again) and sitting on appointments or promotion panels when devising their criteria. I was interested to hear a discussion recently amongst university leadership concerning postdocs in different disciplines who had volunteered to help during the pandemic with e.g. testing facilities. The skills they were learning in order to operate, for instance PCR machines, may have little to do with their formal research projects, but surely they should get credit for good citizenry, diverse skills and – quite possibly – clearer thinking about logistics? The new normal we all know we are going to have to face, should include a radical rethink of what behaviours in an academic should be incentivised. Business as usual just won’t be good enough on this, as on so many fronts.

Logistics. A topic which this government appears to be struggling with. I am, in the spare time conferred by not travelling up and down to London as usual, working my way through Andrew Roberts’ massive and impressive biography of Winston Churchill. Reading of Churchill’s attitude towards waging war (I’m sure I’ve heard that metaphor used more than a few times in the case of COVID-19, although for Churchill it was only too literal), his eye for the smallest detail of naval positioning, the supply chains or scientific developments in radar or bombs, is obvious. Somehow we seem to have lost the ability to think through logistics adequately. Someone in my university suggested maybe we will need to think harder about setting up a future course in logistics to help leaders of tomorrow’s pandemic. Certainly, without former captains of industry – those who understand just-in-time manufacturing, or the need for local as well as national control – at the centre of decision-making, the supplies and testing so badly needed during these dark days are failing badly in the UK.

We all know these are dark days, days of fear, uncertainty and little sign of chinks of light in which we can believe. We have our good days and our bad days, neatly summed up by journalist Gaby Hinsliff over Twitter.

Tempting though it may be (and it’s a failing I’m certainly guilty of) of trying to deduce why today feels so much worse than yesterday, we really shouldn’t do this. The sun may be shining but one’s mood dark and one’s productivity low. It may pour with rain but some urgent task actually manages to absorb sufficient attention that one emerges feeling something has been accomplished successfully. I need to internalise the wise words I can write – but not necessarily believe – as we all struggle on through uncertainty.

 

 

 

 

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Yet Another Source of Inequality?

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Athene Donald

It is far too early to know what the long-term social, economic and educational impacts of the current pandemic are. However, some predictions are easier to make than others. One unfortunate but obvious side-effect is the perpetuation and accentuation of inequality. This is obviously true when it comes to schooling: if you don’t have a quiet room (or a room of one’s own, as Virginia Wolff would have it) or access to a decent computer, laptop or otherwise, and unlimited wifi, you’re going to find studying much harder than if all these are to hand. Putting it crudely, on average middle class kids will fare better than those with two long-term unemployed parents. The latter may even be struggling to provide a decent diet or ever leave their high-rise flats, with all the consequent impact on mental health and well-being. Circumstances will conspire against them when it comes to home-schooling. Disadvantage will be even more entrenched. Similar issues will arise in our university populations too.

However, there is another source of inequality that will continue to resound in the years ahead: the challenges for carers may well be masked on future CVs, but that does not mean they will not have been real. Already I have read two articles highlighting the problems for academics and there have probably been many more in different media. The first, in Nature was written by a woman, an academic social demographer who ‘studies how families manage household and paid work’. Alessandra Minello (University of Florence) states

When married mothers and fathers in the United States are compared, the former spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare. In the gender-egalitarian countries of northern Europe, women still do almost two-thirds of the unpaid work. Even among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners, women do most of the care work.

And asks, as she struggles to record online lectures while her two-year old son blows his trumpet in the background:

Will anyone in the academic community take into account our unbalanced approach to family care and work? No. All of us will participate together in open competition for promotion and positions, parents and non-parents alike.

And at that point I’d like to pause. The answer to that question does not need to be ‘no’. The evidence is accumulating – as the second article in The Lily makes plain – that by and large, as the first writer claimed, caring responsibilities are not shared equally by gender. This US article explicitly looks at what is happening right now, during the COVID19 lockdown, when it comes to academic paper submissions. It seems – for the journals and their editors considered in the article and by looking at what is being uploaded to preprint servers – the impact is already very obvious. Women are submitting fewer papers. We don’t need to rely on anecdote when this quantitative information is already visible. From Elizabeth Hannon, the deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

and from Anna Watts, keeping an eye on the preprint server at the arXiv

So, my first request is to ask all journal editors to monitor what is happening since lockdown started – shall we say March 15th, although it clearly varies by country – and for the three months after lockdown ends. It will take at least that long for those – overwhelmingly women, but by no means only them – who have been metaphorically juggling their day job with home schooling, toddler-care and other caring responsibilities, to begin to get back to their usual levels of productivity. Let’s gather hard statistics as fast as possible, by gender, and compare these with the same period last year when life was ‘normal’.

Secondly, my question is for every academic employer: how are you going to factor in this abnormal period when making future judgements about individuals? Panels need to consider not just equality – which means, as the first author implies will be the default case, treating everyone equally regardless of what this period has meant for them. They need also and at least as importantly to consider equity. Would it be unreasonable to have, for the next several years depending on how long the current circumstances prevail, a question on a CV asking what personally transpired during the pandemic? Not as a judgement on personal lives, but in order to permit due allowance to be made. It would be all the easier in a narrative CV to ask how an applicant handled juggling conflicting demands, as well as possibly dealing with shielding or their own prolonged ill health. Juggling is, after all, a fundamental skill every academic needs to have. Proof that a candidate has it should be a plus. Working when life is easy – such as when your partner is handling the childcare, home-schooling, cooking and cleaning or if you are footloose and fancy-free – should only score you so many brownie points when it comes to grants written at this time or papers submitted.

The ERC has long had a crude rule of thumb for mothers of an extra 18 months in every eligibility window per child born. Different mothers will feel this is or is not an adequate way of dealing with what are very personal circumstances, but at least there is an easily calculated allowance.  (For men, proof of time actually spent on paternity leave needs to be provided.) Should the community accept an equivalent approach to an allowance in the current crisis?

As a straw man let me propose that for every child-month you are responsible for (whether you are the father or mother, but you need to have had the responsibility; for dual-parenting couples, simply make it every two months of childcare) you can claim an allowance of either one paper, one grant or one book chapter, with some similar formula for other personal circumstances to offset the opportunities for those who have it ‘easy’ right now. (Minello proposed essentially stopping the tenure clock for the duration of the lockdown by classing it as caring leave, but I think this is an insufficient response to such challenging circumstances.)

The devil of any such scheme would not only be in the detail, but the policing of it. How many people would attempt to claim that responsibility when actually their own contribution to the household was one hour per day? Nevertheless, I’d like to start this important conversation going. How is the academic world going to ensure that all the advances that have been made on gender-equity aren’t pushed back for a generation of ECRs? What steps are they prepared to take to factor in these unprecedented days? And can they reassure the ECRs that the question ‘what did you do during the pandemic?’ is meant to permit due allowance to be factored in, not a way of tripping the candidate up or castigating them for caring about caring.

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What Should You Be Doing Now?

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Athene Donald

One of the questions you ought not to pose to someone – be it a mentor, supervisor or sponsor – is ‘what should I do?’ Because, the answer has to be: ‘that’s up to you’. There is no uniquely right career path, there is no right order in which to tick things off your career bucket list or boxes to tick all of which are the sine qua non to get you to the destination you want. There are, of course, plenty of career paths that may be wrong for you, or which take you into a dead end or facilitate career suicide, as well as a huge range of other paths that will all lead somewhere satisfactory, however different from each other. By all means ask ‘would this be career suicide?’ but my strong advice is do not ask a ‘should’ question.

I have learnt, from being at the receiving end of this question at different times, that it is an unhelpful way to explore options. The person being asked cannot tell the questioner what they should do, although they can – and should (!) – lay out a range of options as they see them. They can try to tease out how the questioner reacts to a bit of digging around the enquiry. Getting someone to elucidate why a particular option appears to be attractive with questions such as: what appeals to you about this option; where do you want it to take you in the next year or 5 years; why is it better than what you’re doing already; what skills will it teach you to get you to where you want to be in 10 years? All these may be helpful in encouraging someone to get beyond the uncertainty they appear to be facing if they pose a ‘what should I do?’ question.

I believe that many people who ask that question actually do have a preferred position, but they want someone else to validate it for them, to give them some confidence. To tell them that what they want – or perhaps fear – is indeed the right path for them and they should go ahead. But it would be better for all concerned if they approached the question with a different emphasis. For instance, by asking someone more experienced what pitfalls they might encounter if they went down the route they are tempted by. And, equally validly, ask if they do go ahead and do what they (privately) really do want to do will it cut off avenues that they didn’t mean to truncate. I know I have been as guilty as anyone else of asking these questions in the past. During times of most uncertainty I think I wanted someone else to solve my ‘problems’, but that is exactly what no one else can do. That is exactly why it’s the wrong question to ask.

Overall, though, realising that you can reach the same destination by different routes may relieve the pressure on any single decision. If I look around my fellow Heads of House in Cambridge – Masters, Principals, Provosts and so on, since different Colleges title the role in many different ways – we are a varied bunch. Admittedly I don’t suppose a single one of us set out at 21 with this as a life goal, but it is interesting to note just how wildly different our routes have been. Relatively few (much fewer than historically) are career academics. Of the five who started their roles at the beginning of this academic year, two come from Ambassadorial roles, one from politics and one from the media, plus Sally Davies who, as former CMO will, no doubt, be watching the unfolding crisis with experienced eyes. (Did I mention all five are women; it has made an enormous difference to the feel of meetings where all Heads of House are present, virtually or otherwise?) However unlikely it is that a young person may yearn to be the head of an Oxbridge College, nevertheless this example demonstrates that there are multiple paths to a particular end point.

If, as an academic or would-be academic reading this, you think that that same logic does not apply to you because you know you want to be a professor and you know there is only one way to go about it, I would still say that that is not true. Amongst my fellow Heads of House, amongst the small group of five of us (three women, two men) who are also FRSs, I would highlight Jane Clarke, President of Wolfson College, whose career path was not what you might imagine such a person would have had. She left university with a first-class degree and then went into school-teaching, not returning to study for a PhD till her 40’s. Yet still, despite that unusual start, she made it ‘to the top’ of the academic tree, winning notable prizes en route. Or, I could mention another example of a female chemist who didn’t even enter university in the usual way of things at 18 but who has also gone on to great things: Carol Robinson. FRS and currently President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, she took a long career break after her PhD to raise her three children before returning and making her research mark. She has the unique distinction of being the first female professor in both Cambridge and Oxford Chemistry Departments.

So if you are feeling desperate at home because you cannot get to the lab bench and finish some crucial experiments, or are tearing your hair out because your caring responsibilities are absorbing all your energies and there is no peace to be had, I would encourage you not to despair. These months may not, after all, derail you in the way you are fearing. You just can’t tell. Perhaps you can find some good in them. Many of you will be perfecting the art of multitasking, sitting with a toddler on your lap while attempting to prepare online teaching materials, or helping an older child with their assignments while part of your brain is mentally attempting to make sense of the last data you collected. Let me remind you, multitasking is an extraordinarily valuable skill in all walks of life and one to be prized.

Furthermore, that time when your brain is half thinking about what is going on around you in the home, but half flying off to your science, need not be time lost. I can certainly personally identify with this quote from Randy Schekman (2013 Nobel Prize winner):

My ideas often came when I couldn’t be doing anything else…Actually my best ideas come when I’m sitting in a seminar room and the speaker is droning on with an excessive detail and it’s so boring…but I can’t get up and leave….and I daydream about my own work and that’s a most productive time.

Replace seminar with child (not that I’m suggesting your child is boring, exactly, but I’m sure you know what I mean) and you can see that maybe creativity can still be achieved even in the current dire state of the world and removed from your department as you are likely to be. And then remember that all paths are different and unique and any one particular episode does not necessarily lead to the death of your dreams. Finally, put away the ‘should’s’ in your vocabulary and just try to stay afloat until the world finds its new normal.

 

 

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We’re All in This Together

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Athene Donald

If life were other, if we weren’t all ‘wfh’ and trying to stay sane as well as productive, today I would be putting the finishing touches to a talk I was due to give at the end of the week to graduate students at another university. Being the kind of person who always worries I’ll be struck down by an incapacitating migraine at the wrong moment, I tend not to leave talk-writing to the 11th hour/ on the train. So, I should currently be putting together ideas about the joys and challenges of interdisciplinary science.

Interdisciplinary science is of course nothing new. The scientists of previous centuries cared nothing for what we now term disciplines. Thomas Young (1773-1829) will be most familiar to the average physicist because of his eponymous experiment, Young’s slits, or – if more mechanically minded – the elastic modulus bearing his name. He was, however, a not very successful physician who got interested in vision and hence started thinking about the wave-like nature of light. He also – just to prove he really was a polymath who simply didn’t identify an arts-science divide – had a hand in decoding the Rosetta Stone, being an excellent linguist. Not for nothing was a biography of him by Andrew Robinson entitled ‘The Last Man who Knew Everything‘.

However, by the time we got to the mid-late Victorian age, disciplines and dividing lines started to appear in society and in education. The battles between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold pitted science against arts as to what should be taught in schools. Universities started creating new streams; at least Cambridge opted (1851) for the still-going-strong Tripos of Natural Sciences, keeping breadth in sciences, sometimes requiring a bit more too. (My memory is that in Chemistry – although not my own subject of Physics – graduate students of my day had to learn a smattering of German, because that was still regarded as the language of Chemistry research. No more.)

The wonderful thing about the Natural Sciences Tripos – which in hindsight I deeply regret I did not avail myself of – was the opportunity not to decide irrevocably upon entry that ‘you were a physicist’ or even that ‘you were a physical scientist’. The option of combining physics with some biology was there, and still is. Ultimately specialisation is required, but at least you can attempt subjects not available (typically) at A level, such as Earth Sciences or Materials Science, in your first year as well as the ‘obvious’ ones. Three subjects plus maths make up the first year and each year students narrow down their choices reaching specialisation in years 3 and 4. Contrary to what I used to believe when Physics was a 3 year course in the Tripos, the word Tripos does not imply a three part/three year programme (and for ‘clarity’ within the Cambridge system, the three parts were Parts IA, IB and II, now followed by a fourth year Part III); it instead, allegedly, refers to the three-legged stool candidates historically sat on for their end-of-degree viva.

I digress, as seems to be an inevitable part of failing to concentrate properly during lockdown. Interdisciplinarity is now back in ‘fashion’, if I can phrase it like that. My early forays into working on biological material within a Physics department were frowned upon, explicitly and fairly depressingly vociferously – this was in the ‘80s. But, of course, working at the interface with biology is now seen as entirely mainstream, even if how – for instance – to assess any such interdisciplinary working within the (paused) REF remains an issue for some. I would like to think the work of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel that I chair may have put some people’s minds at rest, but I know full well not everyone will be satisfied or reassured.

For a new research student, however, deciding how interdisciplinary to be can be an understandable worry. If you have an eye on a future academic career, is it better to stick with the straight and narrow rather than run the risk of being a jack-of-all-trades? I would recommend you follow your passion. If working on very detailed pure research in a narrow area excites you go for it, but if you like seeing connections where none have been spotted before, if your niche sits at the junction of different fields – labelled by discipline simply by virtue of the way subjects are taught at undergraduate level, as often as not, – then you should not be afraid to tackle it.

In a typically snide remark from Jim Watson about Rosalind Franklin (in a paper in Nature in 1983), he points to her ‘monodisciplinary’ approach to science as what held her back. “Rosalind Franklin was a very intelligent woman, but she really had no reason for believing that DNA was particularly important. She was trained in physical chemistry. I don’t think she’d ever spent any length of time with people who thought DNA was important. And she certainly didn’t talk to Maurice [Wilkins] or to John Randall, then the professor at Kings.”

One doesn’t have to agree with his attitude to her in particular, or women in general, to recognize that a narrow viewpoint can hold back progress in research. The person who thinks outside a disciplinary box, may just be the one who wins – as is very obviously the outcome in this case – the prize, Nobel or otherwise. Watson started off with a Zoology degree, but by working with Francis Crick – a physicist who was meant to be studying the X-ray diffraction of proteins and polypeptides – simply because he chose to (sometimes to the annoyance of Crick’s head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Lawrence Bragg), the ultimate breakthrough in analysing DNA was possible.

So, had I been preparing my talk today, instead of blogging, I would be concluding by emphasising the joy, importance and relevance of moving beyond traditional bounds of discipline. We need researchers of every variety to make progress, something as true and as urgent now in the coronavirus era as ever. Epidemiologists need to work with immunologists, mathematic modellers with structural biologists, physicists with vets. We are, quite literally, all in this together.

 

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