It’s Time to Resist the Pressure

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Athene Donald

As part of my university’s preparation for the transition to open access, there is a project being run out of the University Library to look at how academics approach publishing. (Fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry has written much on the topic of open access if you’ve somehow not caught up with the topic.) As part of that project I was interviewed on my publishing ‘strategy’. In so far as I have a conscious one, I realise how much the way I have been wont to approach writing papers may be at odds with the sort of pressures under which someone like the early career Sylvia McLain (another of the OT stable of bloggers) is clearly reeling. That, I suspect, is because I was introduced to paper-writing in an earlier, gentler era and I have not felt it necessary (at least to date) to reconsider my methods.

I do think there are substantial differences in approach between disciplines, possibly even between sub-disciplines. My interactions with biologists suggest they are far more likely than physicists to want to hold back any publication until they can conceive of sending it to a journal such as Cell or Science, rather than writing up a nice piece of work sooner rather than later and sending it to some decent (if not stellar) journal as soon as there is a good story to tell. Even so, it seems that biologists regularly expect the paper to come back from the editor with a request for further experiments. That was unheard of in physics in the past – or at least I’ve never personally known it to happen as an author, referee or editor. Referees, in my experience, are keen to ensure there is clarity, that the conclusions follow from the results and to check there are no gaping holes or flaws. But if there are the paper is rejected, not sent back for further experiments to be done. If that were done in my field I believe it would be regarded as a new submission.

Another relatively new tendency, or at least it has got much more common, is to argue with the editor. Editors seem increasingly prone to take one negative report as dominant over, say, two other positive ones and recommend rejection outright rather than give the author a chance to respond. That also seems a change, but one that simply encourages argument.  I suspect that this is simply a manifestation of editors being busy people and taking the easy way out; then they wait to see how angry this makes the authors.  Those that argue may well win, but if you are junior/insecure/less assertive maybe you’ll just go away with your tail between your legs. I suspect editors used to be more willing, or possibly have more time, to carry out their own personal arbitration between referees’ responses and this situation was less likely to occur.

Which takes me on to impact factors. I started this post before Stephen Curry’s most recent post. Impact factors have featured largely on his blog last summer and again today (do read this latest post of his and join his push-back).  They are clearly pernicious and again, I have been able to indulge in the luxury of not caring. Initially, because such a number did not exist; more recently because I am not seeking tenure, promotion or anything similar. I would like to continue to indulge in that luxury, but I now realise I may be doing my students a disservice by taking that attitude. Or, on the other hand, I may be teaching them the value of caring for the science itself, and not some spurious metric that seems to have been originally dreamed up in order to amplify a journal’s prestige (and hence the number of library subscriptions). A past editorial  from PNAS (which recently resurfaced through Twitter) pointed out

‘too many of our postdocs believe that getting a paper into a prestigious journal is more important to their career than doing the science itself’

– clearly an unhealthy state of affairs. So it is up to us, particularly the more senior, not only to push RCUK to state categorically that impact factors will not be used in the assessment of researchers in the future, as Stephen urges and as is the stated case in the current REF guidelines,but also to reinforce that position any time we find ourselves in a position of ‘judging’ others: appointments, promotions and so on. We should not use impact factors as a spurious proxy for judging the science itself.

The consequences of actions around publishing are full of such spurious metrics, spurious because they imply a precision that is sadly lacking. Impact factors are just one such; h factors are another. Even the order in which authors’ names appear on papers can be a minefield. These are all of dubious value because, in so many evaluation committees – wherever they may appear but certainly including the REF, appointments and promotions committees – the evaluators are too often lumping together individuals from different areas whose culture may be significantly different. So, one field (say synthetic chemistry) may publish a huge number of short letters describing innovative methodologies to produce 0.1mg of a new substance which one day might turn out to be the new next best thing. Another may expect lengthy papers which could only be produced by a huge team working for several years (perhaps because a new transgenic organism needs to be produced for their experiments and several generations of this are required). Comparing sheer number of publications is meaningless and I would contend so would be the use of the h factor in a simplistic way. Yet I sit in committees and hear people solemnly say that X has an h factor of only 4 but Y has an h factor of 27; for a serious pure mathematician I am told an h factor of 4 is not necessarily unusual, whereas it would be extraordinary in synthetic chemistry. Too often the conversation ignores these significant differences, which can be appreciable even within different domains within a single subject.

I have frequently argued against the slavish use of these crude measures at those committees I attend, although of course a quick look may sometimes be in order to confirm an otherwise subjective evaluation. I urge all of you who likewise participate in committees within or beyond your institutions to take a similar robust view. I get fed up with my physicist colleagues who have, for many years and long before impact factors raised their ugly heads, stated so-and-so cannot be a serious applicant for a job/promotion or whatever if they’ve never published a PRL (Physics Review Letters for the uninitiated). I have frequently told them this is silly. I don’t believe this is just sour grapes because I don’t have any papers in the journal to my name; it is because PRL follows fashions and requires a certain style of physics which doesn’t fit everyone’s research. I can say in all honesty I read many submissions to the last RAE where people obviously believed a PRL would, simply by virtue of it appearing in that journal, score highly and who didn’t stop to think how boring or incremental their papers were. I was duly bored not infrequently and the papers did not necessarily get the score their authors probably naively anticipated.

As I say, I was initiated into publishing in a very different world, where metrics weren’t visible, where everything existed only in hard copy and transmission of information occurred through the old-fashioned post or by sitting long hours in the library pouring over a dusty tome; a Xerox machine was about as hi-tech as it got. Sounding like an old fogey I have to say that this lack of instantaneous information, whilst it certainly didn’t facilitate research, collaboration or the gleaning of new knowledge rapidly, did mean (I suspect) that one judged a paper by its content, not the number of citations or the impact factor of the journal in which it appeared.

On the very same day I was interviewed about my publishing strategies, I also attended a dinner discussion, led by Philip Campbell, Nature’s Editor-in-Chief, about scientific misconduct. As with open access, much has been written (and recommended) about this subject, but there is no doubt in my mind – or in Philip Campbell’s – that the high stakes involved in publishing in the ‘right’ journal (of which his own is likely to be seen as one) can lead to sloppiness and far worse in the behaviour of authors. Once again, the metrics that have insinuated their way into the competitive academic environment encourage sharp practice in the over-anxious. Of course, the possibility of dodgy goings-on have always been there and are perhaps most obvious on a regular basis in the plagiarism that besets essays and other types of submitted student coursework. But, high profile cases like Hendrik Schön are in a different league because the fabrication of data can be so extensive. Was that due to pressure within Bell Labs? The commentators seemed to imply as much.

Senior academics should be doing all they can to resist the tendencies they encounter, wherever that may be, to use dubious quantitative data as a simplistic measuring tool. If we don’t, we are guilty of facilitating a culture which will be detrimental to the future of research and the individuals sucked into the whirlpool of impact factors, citations and claims of ‘my h factor is bigger than yours’.  We haven’t yet quite reached the position where we are solely judged on such dodgy numbers. Let’s make sure we never do.

 

 

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments

Saying What You Mean to Say

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Athene Donald

Some years ago I came across a psychology paper which suggested that letters of reference are subtly (or even not-so-subtly) gendered. I had never thought about it before, but it made me think much harder about the adjectives and roles I wrote about for both men and women when I write my own references. The original research explicitly considered academic letters of reference, looking at common adjectives used to describe both men and women. It even considered how these letters affected the actual hiring decisions, so by implication this therefore means it also evaluated the impact of the actual words used.

In general, women were found to be more likely to be described by rather passive and emotive words (words referred to as ‘communal’ adjectives) including affectionate, tactful, sensitive and helpful. These are words that may indeed correctly describe any individual. In themselves they are not negative words, but they may not be seen as central to an academic job. This should be contrasted to the words frequently used to describe men, words which were more likely to be ‘agentic’ words, i.e. words which stress the active sense of doing, rather than merely being; these turned out quite often to be words which might be correlated with strength. Adjectives that fit into this category include assertive, dominant, ambitious and intellectual. These words convey a sense of mastery and power, rather than a passive sense of nurturing as with the communal words.

These different adjectives should be set against some mythical ideal of what the scientist superstar might be expected to resemble. Surely mastery would widely be regarded as a ‘better’ (more relevant) virtue than caring for others or being tactful? Hence, if we really do write our letters of reference in these two, distinct and gendered styles, we may be fuelling, completely unintentionally, gender disparities in hiring. I see this as another form of unconscious bias, but one which seems not to be widely recognized by the writers or recipients of such letters. Of course, for a department hiring new staff, taking on yet another superego may not be good for departmental dynamics even it helps the grant income figures. Many people seemed to recognize the selfish academic jerk of my earlier post, and this character may too often be associated with all those agentic words, such as dominant, assertive and ambitious. Does the ambitious person just meekly accept an extra dose of teaching because someone else is on leave, or does their assertive/aggressive self come to the fore? Too often I fear the latter is true. Is this good overall for a department? Maybe, but that will depend on many factors which are almost certainly not those factors that were initially taken into consideration at the hiring stage.

However, the wisdom of hiring decisions is not my concern in this post, it is those pesky letters of reference themselves. I have been reading a heavy diet of these recently, covering people across the range of seniority and, given my awareness of the paper to which I referred earlier, I started to get sensitive. Who was being described as nurturing? Interestingly, both men and women were being described in this way. When a man was being described as collaborative and consultative, was it significant the reference had been written by a woman? Would a man have done the same? What about the woman referred to as radiating self-confidence? Would a man have been described in the same way? It would have been interesting to deconstruct and analyse all these descriptions, but I wasn’t convinced by my internal analysis that the easy split into agentic and communal words by gender (still) applied. (Mind you, if you want to be appalled by a counter-example of overt sexism in a letter of reference, I point you to a recent post on the What’s It Like to be a Woman in Philosophy website.)

The trouble is, a few choice phrases can damn someone for ever. I was particularly struck by the description of someone as ‘unfair… and a megalomaniac’ and another who had done a lot of ‘silly, inconsequential things’; a third was said to have an ‘aggressive articulate style [which] can be quite forbidding to those of a weaker constitution’– surely all those phrases must have been considered carefully. You don’t write such damning things by accident (but perhaps not everyone sees these statements as damning, particularly the last example). On the other hand if referees use words such as modest, private, quiet and undemonstrative (interestingly in my sample I saw all these words applied to men, unlike the examples in the original paper) is this good or bad? Is a highly-strung individual someone you want to have around (again describing a male)? Do we need to know these things? How will it affect the reader and what is intended to be conveyed?

The more I mulled over this, the more confused I got. What am I trying to judge? Are the letters helpful? Academia is unusual in that serious letters of reference are still collected, and not just the bland nothings which industry seems to require, asking for no more than simple things such as was your postdoc a good timekeeper, worked for you between the dates recorded on their application form and hasn’t (as far as you know) got a criminal record. I have always valued getting comprehensive references which tell me about the individual’s science, their skills (do they drop the sample on the floor, have they done more than one kind of microscopy, are they good at writing – that sort of thing for a postdoc; have they won grants and been able to forge collaborations for a lecturer etc). But I’m beginning to wonder if I’m always going to be swayed by peripheral comments which tell me more about the referee than the person I’m actually interested in, the applicant. How florid their prose is (or, as was said recently of one, that a panel member thought the referee was drunk when he wrote the reference), how vivid and extensive their supply of adjectives. Is this useful, or am I – as Daniel Kahneman has said of many selection strategies – just being fooled because it looks like I’m getting good evidence.

I feel I no longer have any clear sense of this. I started off persuaded that there were simple gender differences and one should be able to read between the lines to overcome any such inherent if unconscious bias. I ended up worrying that in most letters there are emotive words – positive or negative – that can colour my perception without necessarily having any relevant content.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Building the Evidence

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Athene Donald

Evidence-based policy has become something of a catch phrase recently. My own MP, the scientist and my former departmental colleague Julian Huppert, used the phrase in his maiden speech, pledging  to support it, albeit other MPs may be less persuaded by its importance. The phrase also sits at the heart of Mark Henderson’s book The Geek Manifesto, so it perhaps isn’t surprising to find Mark, in his role as Head of Communications at the Wellcome Trust, being instrumental in setting up a dinner table discussion around ‘Evidence in Education’, at an event hosted by Mark Walport this week. (As it happens, under the Geek Manifesto Pledge, in which 325 of us pledged to send a copy to an MP of our choice, I chose to send mine to Michael Gove. I did not get a response. )

I actually feel that the chapter on education in The Geek Manifesto is rather light in comparison with some of the other chapters. Perhaps at the time of writing Mark hadn’t spent as much time thinking about the issues involving schooling as he had about some of the other topics; or perhaps, because of my own involvement with the education agenda, I know more about the issues than about those in some of the other chapters.  I don’t usually blog about education matters since, as Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee, I don’t believe it is appropriate for me to comment on many of the current hot topics surrounding the curriculum, and the proposed changes to both GCSE’s and A levels emanating from the Department for Education. But Mark has encouraged those of us at the dinner to write about the event, albeit under Chatham House Rules (so that I won’t be telling you who said what) so I’m following up on that encouragement. However, it will hardly be surprising if I tell you that there was a consensus that getting good evidence and carrying out well-posed research in education is something for which there is a crying need, but relatively little is yet being carried out.

It being a Wellcome event, many comparisons were drawn with the situation with (clinical) medicine. Here evidence is typically garnered by Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT’s). These may have at their heart the reality that medicine is a far from exact science, but they are a crucial way in which our knowledge increases. Could the same be used routinely to uncover what actually ‘works’ when it comes to teaching? One example of such a trial, that Wellcome themselves have recently initiated in conjunction with the National Science Learning Centre, concerns an exploration of how effective Continuous Professional Development may be for primary school teachers. This project is specifically looking at the effectiveness of a new 24 day programme aimed at helping teachers without science degrees gain confidence in teaching science in primary schools. This is an important matter, given the shortage of such teachers with any sort of formal scientific training beyond GCSE.

One theme that came out time and time again over the dinner table was the very different nature of the teaching and medical professions. The latter has a well-defined infrastructure involving professional bodies such as the BMA, professional journals such as the BMJ and funders beyond government including the Wellcome Trust; the equivalents for the teaching profession don’t really exist and the career structures are different too. Is this infrastructure necessary to facilitate a research culture? What would it take to create a culture within the teaching community that rewarded practitioners moving from full time in the classroom to carrying out research and then back again, and would that solve the current problem of lack of research evidence? The phrase ‘researcher – practitioner’ was bandied about. However we also need to ask if our teachers, by and large, have the confidence and ability in research methods or statistical analysis to make this viable anyhow?

More politically, one can ask if as a nation we could move away from diktats from government which, correctly or not, are seen as ideological and not obviously based on evidence. Again the distinction with medicine is very clear; no government official would try to lay down what is ‘best practice’ in the surgery or operating theatre, yet by implication such guidance is often offered by the DfE when practices such as the literacy hour or the teaching of phonics are introduced. The question was raised whether the government is simply stepping into the void which in medicine is plugged by the BMA.

The discussion came back to this theme of the (lack of) research infrastructure in education repeatedly, but the specifics of which questions need to be answered were less readily teased out. From my perspective I found the conversation a little frustrating as it rarely was STEM-specific, more often appearing to concentrate on topics such as struggling readers (as manifest by the examples I give above) where there already is ample evidence of what works and what doesn’t. I would have welcomed a more focussed look at the problems that are relevant to our rather poor standards in numeracy across the board, or considered what science teaching is effective in maintaining a child’s innate curiosity about the world around them as they move from primary to secondary school. Here we do have some data on trends and it tends to show this is a critical stage at which children lose interest in science despite enthusiasm at younger ages.

Wellcome will be continuing to explore these themes. They are clearly close to Mark Walport’s heart and I would expect that his interest in the importance of securing sufficient numbers in the scientific pipeline will continue as he moves to take up his new role as the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor in the next few weeks. If, in that role, he can facilitate better evidence-gathering and a clearer appreciation amongst politicians across the political spectrum of why this matters in our classrooms as much as in our hospitals, then maybe in due course we will see a development of the researcher community and a higher value placed on research involving the necessarily large numbers to convey confidence in the outcomes (ie not merely from single schools, which will always have their own particular features and  cultures which may make findings impossible to replicate elsewhere). That would be an encouraging step forward.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Leadership Strategies for Dealing with Jerks

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Athene Donald

My last post about jerks in academia struck a chord with many but also raised questions – jerks abound, yes, but what should we do about them? What can we do to ‘out’ them and so to attempt to ameliorate their behaviour? I said that I believed strong leadership was crucial so in this post I’ll expand on what it might be possible to do.  Leadership in higher education is a strange beast, as spelled out in a recent article in the Guardian. Academics are driven by love of their subject and they tend not to react well to others telling them what to do – that would certainly be the case if someone wanted to drive their research direction. An ex-head of my department used to say of attempting to steer the department as a whole that it was like herding cats – a phrase that I suspect many in similar positions would use. Many academics simply don’t care about the big, departmental picture, they only want to solve their pet problem, get their experiment to work or write up their Big Idea. And that is where jerkish attributes can start to creep in, whether or not with conscious or malicious intent.

So what can a head of department do? Another phrase I have heard used regarding these tiresome people is that heads of department have no sanctions. I only partially agree with that statement, I think it’s a cop-out, a pale excuse for not even trying to do anything. Cultural/peer-group pressure does matter. (Note that I have not been a head of department myself, so these are only theoretical thoughts, not ones I have had an opportunity myself to put into practice to try out their effectiveness.)  Let me give you an example contrasting two different departments in Cambridge. In my own, all faculty are required to teach, without exception. People from outside are sometimes surprised to find that someone as senior as the Cavendish Professor, Sir Richard Friend, despite having so many other irons in the fire including 3 spin-out companies, does his fair share of teaching and examining. He regards it as his duty and quite recently wrote (and delivered) an entirely new course on Energy.

Contrast that with another science department in the University, equally full of superstars as my own but where they are allowed to buy themselves out of their teaching duties, literally ‘buy’ or just by being difficult I don’t know. Consequently the early-career potential superstars of tomorrow have to shoulder a greater burden of teaching than they otherwise would, to their own detriment. Now the senior professors no doubt say (as I’ve heard at least one mutter) ‘’the best thing I can do for the department is pull in the grants/write Nature papers”. I believe that is a self-serving justification, an attempt to fool themselves that their selfish behaviour is acceptable.  Why is their need to write papers or grants more warranted than for those setting out on their careers? Shouldn’t they be thinking of how they would have felt 20 years earlier in a similar situation?The thing is, in my department, because it is the expectation that everyone will contribute to the teaching load, everyone does do it, more or less competently but with good grace. In the other department it is a source of friction. Who is allowed off? At what stage of seniority can you start pulling rank and say ‘no’? The head of department who originally allowed this to happen made a grave mistake and one it is extraordinarily difficult to turn around.

That is one specific example of where the leadership can establish a framework in which everyone settles in and just acquiesces in an acceptable state of affairs. I would rue the day if any subsequent head of my own department changed the norm.  The most recent development on this front, which should strengthen things further, has grown out of our department’s Athena Swan application. We are currently a Silver Award holder and in our last submission’s action plan we stated we would set up a workload model. This we have now done, so that the head of department is able to see exactly who is doing what. The model covers a great deal more than simply teaching and examining (which we had always monitored through an annual survey): it now includes administrative work within the department and beyond, all those committees that occupy time centrally and in the department; it includes responsibilities such as running one of the major groups (of which there are around 10 in the department), outreach, mentoring and appraisal; and it includes any teaching in college. Each of us can see where we sit on the histogram which includes everyone else, although we can’t actually identify any of the other individuals on it. It means that the head of department has ammunition to prod the more idle members of the department into accepting a little more responsibility and a few more tasks. It is too early to know how well it will work – and one can always argue about how different activities should be weighted –  but it does at least provide a good starting point for considering who are the good citizens and who the lazy devils are who need a stiff talking to. Outside Cambridge such a model may be quite normal, inside it is something of an exception.

Other departments could probably cite other expectations of the norm which ‘enforce’ appropriate behaviour. But let me turn to another topic, which I touched on in the last post, that of promotion. Here it is the university as a whole that needs to set expectations, with whoever sets the criteria for promotion needing to think beyond the obvious paper-writing/grant-winning/research set of activities. I am in the middle of reading the paperwork for this year’s cycle in Cambridge, so let me share some specific facts about Cambridge’s new procedures (these are public documents, as far as I know available beyond Cambridge without password).

For promotion, a threshold must be reached (and of course just reaching the threshold won’t be sufficient due to the numbers applying, exceeding it is usually required) in each of three categories: research (which has 3 times the weight of the other headings), teaching and ‘general’. For promotion to professor, the requirement in this last category is

There must be an effective contribution to the subject other than in teaching and research. This may include administration and, where appropriate, management of research groups, and the creation and management of multi-institutional/national/ international research facilities. It may also include contributions to the subject made more widely, for example, widening participation activity and the design and delivery of outreach programmes, also editorial work, and clinical work (if applicable).

So a wide range of activities can be highlighted in this section, including quite explicitly outreach and widening participation. But, and this is the crucial thing, if an applicant can’t find anything virtuous in terms of good citizenry to insert here, their application will fail. It is not sufficient to say they are wonderful in research with prizes galore to their name, a fistful of papers in Science and Nature and millions of pounds in grant income; they will fail if they can’t demonstrate at least some modicum of good behaviour under this ‘general’ heading (and of course have some decent quality teaching to their name too). This is a good start in stopping jerkish behaviour setting in too soon and has come about over the years because the leadership within the University has realised that these activities need to be valued, not just assumed to go through on the nod, as I suspect happened in years gone by.

Unfortunately, I fear too often some of the worst offenders are those who have already reached the giddy heights of a professorship. However, maybe those who are progressing through the system, having to think about their behaviour now at an early stage, may be less likely to fall into bad habits if they know promotion depends on contributing something to the greater good. Of course, some of the things in the above list can still be carried out entirely selfishly – running a research group really is a sine qua non if you’ve got a team together to write all those top-notch papers and may serve your own interests more than those of the department; organising conferences can simply be an opportunity for a bit of networking and trading invited talks. Nevertheless, the list also implies that those who do some of the stuff that others may regard as drudgery, including outreach but also the perhaps less attractive administrative tasks such as admissions or safety committees, will get due credit. That may help to sweeten the pill just a little for those who find (too) much of their time is absorbed by these activities.

I would be interested to hear what other departmental or instutional strategies people are familiar with that may serve to encourage good behaviour and ‘punish’ bad. I am sure there must be good examples that have been developed to suit different environments, and I hope people will add these in the comment stream as a way of disseminating best practice.

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Time to Eradicate the Academic Jerk?

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Athene Donald

There have been several articles/blogposts recently pointing out that scientists are just like everyone else. For instance, they have emotions (see this Observer article from last week detailing the ups and downs of research life); and they get stressed, as fellow Occam’s Corner blogger Stephen Caplan pointed out, just like people in any other career. It is perhaps a bit sad that it needs to be stressed that scientists aren’t a breed apart, but the world – in particular the media – do seem a bit inclined to regard us as ‘different’. Unfortunately, if we are just like the rest of the world, that includes the fact that a certain proportion of us are also bound to be jerks.

A recent post by Thesis Whisperer asked if you get further in academic life by being a jerk. I don’t think this simply referred to scientists, but it certainly would include them. It provoked many, many comments most of which certainly recognized the ‘jerkiness’ of many of their colleagues, but not all of whom agreed this was the way to get on. I think this observation is also mirrored by office politics anywhere.

Nevertheless, if you want a concrete example of a spectacularly successful scientist who is anything but a jerk, look in this week’s Observer for the profile of neuroscientist and autism expert Uta Frith. A couple of weeks ago, when I was fortunate enough to attend the ceremony at which David Willetts conferred an Honorary DBE upon her, I learnt that Uta is a Fellow of three national academies (the Royal Society, which is where I have met her as her field is far from mine, the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences); she is also married to a man (Chris Frith) who is himself a fellow of the first two of these. She has a ‘family’ of many successful ex-students (as well as a family in the conventional sense) who clearly see her as a wonderful mentor and friend: I know because I keep bumping into these women (unusually, all women as far as I recall) and they tell me so. As the Observer succinctly put it ‘Lack of empathy is not something Frith suffers from herself’. My own personal experience tells me that too. Uta is the exact opposite of a jerk, a wonderful role model, inspiration and friend to many, and it clearly hasn’t held her back.

Uta and Willetts

Despite this obvious counter-example, academia obviously does have its fair share of jerks. The question is, can we do anything about it? I think a crucial first stage has to be to seek out ways of not rewarding the selfish, the loud-mouthed, the bad-mouthed and the downright nasty. We’ve all met characters like that, but if progression up the greasy academic pole required a fair smattering of good citizenship, demonstrated leadership of others and not just looking after your own little clique coupled with oversight of your personal but perhaps ill-gotten research grants, gained by doing down competitors, then maybe jerks would start to diminish in number. It does seem to me to be entirely possible that good citizenship can, in some shape or other, be amongst the criteria for promotion; my own university is certainly pushing it up the list of attributes required.

Historically, research success has tended to be the most important criterion, trumping anything else. Teaching was traditionally seen as a poor relation for a fast rise up the ladder, and that is bad enough. The ‘general’ contribution often hardly got a look in. Yet every academic department would grind to a halt if that ‘general’ stuff was done by nobody. It may include admissions, student liaison, mentoring of early career staff or working on the inevitable assessments – RAE, REF, TQA that kind of stuff familiar to the UK community; it shouldn’t be beyond the capacity of anyone to contribute something useful on some front or other. But many jerks perfect the art of such uselessness that they end up escaping what may seem like chores by their apparent complete ineptitude. This incompetence, of course, immediately disappears when it comes to something they actually want to do, like write a grant proposal or attract the brightest research students of the year to their own group. Such behaviour is very transparent. It should be obvious to any promotion panel when individuals play this game.

If such jerkish behaviour ceased to be rewarded in ways the jerks believe it should be, then maybe, just maybe, we would see a diminution of their numbers. And if jerks weren’t succeeding it would seem likely the next generation would realise that misbehaviour of this sort doesn’t pay dividends. That, as a grad student, trampling on those around you, nicking their apparatus without a by-your-leave and bad-mouthing other students’ presentations, was not the way to win favour and move a notch up the scale. Maybe we can make it a message that those with latent bad behaviour can pick up early enough so that they are able to stamp on their own failings before they are too deeply embedded in their psyches.

I think this is certainly a case where strong leadership by example, by departmental senior management teams, might make a big difference. Unfortunately, the current world can too often have departments in which the worst offenders hold too much power, too much money and have been securely established as the departmental golden boys (or girls). They have achieved this by virtue of the fact that they get their way in the world by their brutish behaviour and so acquire the resources necessary in order to make yet further progress. But a few committed senior individuals creating, as the Thesis Whisperer put it, an explicit Circle of Niceness could yet work wonders in transforming each individual department and hence the wider world.

Office politics are no different in academia than in Ricky Gervais’s Office. What is different is that academia relies on competition. The idea that the ‘best’ will rise to the top and the failures will drop out holds more currency in academia than in the average open plan suite of rooms of a Prudential or Marks and Spencer’s office. Nevertheless, we could try to redefine some parts of what ‘best’ means to include a little more humanity, give space for more emotional engagement such as in support for others, and an appreciation of service to the community and not just self. I’m with Thesis Whisperer on the importance of valuing niceness and not acquiescing in bad behaviour, wherever it rears its ugly head in our universities.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments