Is it Ever Safe to Shed the L-plates?

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Athene Donald

I well remember that moment of transition when moving from undergraduate to postgraduate; that moment when my tutor asked me to call them by their first name (perhaps a rite of passage no longer so exciting, since first names are used so commonly by all students) coupled with the feeling that surely I must finally understand my subject because I had a degree to my name. It was swiftly followed by the realisation that I knew absolutely nothing, and there was still a mountain to climb before I got my PhD.

Then, a few years later, I can recall being a postdoc, a position of quasi-superiority over PhD students who might, if they felt so inclined, come to me for advice. Except I was 24 and a postdoc in the USA where PhD’s take much longer than the UK, so actually I was still pig-ignorant compared to them. It was more a question of me needing their help (but despite that I got a much better rate of pay, which seemed a bit unfair).  When I hit 25 I remember thinking, right I’m an adult now, can’t pretend to be a studenty sort of person anymore, but of course I was just the same person as I was at 24 years and 364 days. The transitions are arbitrary and what matters is as much internal as external. Rites of passage may help – holding that PhD degree in one’s hand does pay testament to years of hard work – but the reality is each phase is just that. One never reaches journey’s end of excellence and, in my view, it would be really boring if one did.

It seems to me that at every stage of the way, one is always a fresh novice, starting from scratch on some new challenge. Just when you’ve mastered one thing you’re asked (or volunteer yourself) to do something totally different for which you’ve had no preparation, a bit like all those celebs on Strictly Come Dancing; at least most of us don’t have to do it – whatever the ‘it’ in question may be – live in front of an audience of several million people. I certainly feel like that about my blogging. My entry into the field was pretty accidental, or at least ill-thought through, but I have recently passed the 2 year mark (I wrote a bit about how I started here). I still feel a novice, that there is much to learn, but by and large the comments I receive are immensely encouraging and I’ve gained confidence that my writing is serving a useful purpose for some people, with different posts striking chords with different individuals. This makes it all worthwhile.  Nevertheless, each piece of writing I now do (which extends not just to the Occam’s Corner blogs on the Guardian, but  recently to printed broadsheets and other blogs sites too), I feel  I have to approach afresh, reconsider my style for each different audience. So, I’m a novice again at each new venture, although certainly with more confidence than when I first set out.

This post is prompted by finding myself falling into yet new ‘spheres of action’, about which I’m sure I’ll blog in the future when they are well and truly underway but which I’ll leave unnamed for now. I’m not sure if the world is divided into those who never feel fear that they’ll fail and those who nearly always do, or if the former group just disguise their fears better. I do feel it is important to realise that there is always more to learn (unless, perhaps, if you’re on a production line or some other repetitive job) and that you will never truly be ‘expert’. It doesn’t matter if you look at someone and think they’re the bee’s knees, those knees may well still tremble from time to time. Look at that plenary speaker at the podium, and (s)he’ll probably have had a bad night’s sleep in advance of their performance; watch an adept act of persuasion on a committee in your department and you may not realise the individual comes out sweating and asking for reassurance they did a good job; and all those committee chairs I’ve written about previously, at least some of them will know full well they did a lousy job and should not throw their L-plates away just yet.

I feel fantastically fortunate that somehow I find myself, not just doing the science I’ve loved all my life, but a whole slew of new activities which stretch me in different ways. I feel simultaneously spoilt, for instance, that the Royal Society has given me opportunities to get stuck into all kinds of new things and worried I don’t know what I’m doing (as I described before about a previous situation here). I think this is normal and the only thing to do is to get on with the scary new challenge. But, and this comes back to what I wrote previously about impostor syndrome, you have to use the fear to your advantage, as an actor might with stage fright, to get the adrenalin going. If it’s fight or flight time, the choice is obvious – get stuck in and give it your best.

I have about half a dozen talks lined up in the months ahead to different organisations’ Women in Science/Leadership sessions, mainly at universities but a couple are not. I feel it needs saying all the time – and not just to women – you will only get better at something if you try it out for size. Running away is not a solution. But, and this is a big but, do not assume either that things will necessarily work out first, second or third time; nor that those people you admire succeeded painlessly and at the first shot either. I’m still learning and I love that, but it does mean that constantly I feel as if I need those L-plates reapplied.

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Falling Down the Cracks: The Challenge for Interdisciplinary Science

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Athene Donald

Let’s hear it for interdisciplinary science. Everyone says what a good idea it is. The research councils strategic plans tend to laud it. And yet, and yet….Do they mean it?

Last week I attended an excellent conference in Oxford. Entitled Physics Meets Biology, it was organised by the Biological Physics Group (BPG) of the Institute of Physics. As its name suggests, and as the group organising its name also suggests, this is inherently interdisciplinary science.  It’s exciting stuff (you can see why I think so on my first blog at the Guardian), the field is moving and expanding and more and more groups are establishing themselves in the UK in this area. The BPG was set up in 2007 – I was its first chair, but passed the baton on a couple of years ago to Andrew Turberfield  – and this was the third in a series of conferences with the same name, run at 2 yearly intervals. During the 5 years of its existence the group has built up a thriving community, or perhaps more accurately acted as a focus to bring together disparate groups which were already extant. There’s lots of neat stuff going on in the UK and what really struck me at this year’s meeting was the number of different centres which were presenting talks and posters; there were also a good number of early career researchers. When there are a few key centres dominating an area it seems to me that there is the danger of heading for fossilisation. When the research base is broad and the average age relatively young, it means that new blood, new ideas are constantly entering the field. Many of the invited speakers were international, but the bulk of the attendees were UK based. The organising committee had ensured a good gender balance of excellent speakers, and there was no sign of women holding themselves back in the questions sessions either.

One of the invited speakers was Doug Kell, Chief Executive of the BBSRC (he has written briefly, but enthusiastically, about the meeting on his own blog). He gave an interesting talk largely derived from his early work, well before he assumed the mantle of running the Research Council, particularly looking at bioinformatics approaches rather than physics per se. (For any international readers, it is probably worth spelling out that the BBSRC stands for the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council, because one of the US invited speakers asked me afterwards what the acronym meant; it is too easy to take these things as read.) The few slides he did show from the BBSRC perspective disappointed me, though. He quoted some large number of millions of pounds that he alleges the BBSRC are spending on ‘biophysics’, and then elucidated that most of that was spent in Biochemistry Departments. Without wanting to denigrate what may be being funded under this programme, it is disappointing to realise just how little appreciation there is of the difference between the kind of research being discussed at this meeting and that traditionally done in Biochemistry departments. Biological physics, as the BPG mean it, is not the same as traditional biophysics of the nerve impulse/ion channel/measuring signalling pathways variety done in Biochemistry and allied departments, even if it is now coupled with cutting edge fluorescent microscopy.  The latter gets funded quite substantially by the BBSRC as Doug pointed out; rather little of the former kind of biological physics does.

One difference, that may seem subtle but is actually quite fundamental, is that much of the biological physics that was presented at this meeting would probably appear in a grant proposal as ‘we want to see what happens when we do X’, or ‘we have a new tool that should cast light on Y’. It might be worded a little more precisely, but it often is not of the ‘my hypothesis is that…’ variety, and hypotheses are rather explicitly required (eg on referee forms) by the BBSRC. I have been annoyed by this ever since I sat on some previous manifestation of a BBSRC committee more than 10 years ago. Then, if the hypothesis was stated as ‘if gene A is down-regulated I predict there will be an effect’ it seemed to be regarded as adequate, even if what that effect was likely to be was never explained. If it was,’ I can now image at unprecedented resolution and with chemical specificity and I will examine what happens when I add molecule J to cell K’, the lack of a hypothesis meant no grant was likely to be awarded. Yet, in many cases I would hazard a guess that the second proposal was an awful lot more exciting than the first, which too often can look like nothing more than sausage machinery. It is deeply disappointing that a tribal hang-up about hypotheses still lingers round the BBSRC, even though the nature of so much of science has changed. Physics, indeed the EPSRC, do not have this same fixation.

I pushed Doug over dinner about the fact that the figures he quoted did not relate to ‘biological physics’ as this particular community meant it, and our work tended to sit uncomfortably at the join between BBSRC and EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) . I wasn’t expecting to make much headway because it’s an(other) argument I‘ve had before with senior BBSRC staff. The answer I got was similar to the one I got when still Chair of their Committee C a couple of years back: ‘Why should our particular interdisciplinary field be regarded as in need of attention more than any other, or deserving of special treatment?’ I find this answer deeply disturbing. It is implicitly saying that they know that there is a problem, but because there are many junctions where there may be problems, they regard it as too difficult to do anything and so they’ll look the other way and stick with the easy mainstream topics.  Other concrete examples where interdisciplinarity causes problems, to my certain knowledge, can be found in the way research around good health, as opposed to disease, is handled;  this is neither within BBSRC or MRC remits and yet ought to be something that is viewed as crucially important. A second example is what happens for topics that sit between BBSRC and NERC (National Environmental Research Council).  In other words, whatever the problems may be within a single research council and its constituent grant-giving committees, it is infinitely worse when an area sits at the interface with another Council. Yet, reading their strategy documents over many years, lip service is paid to the importance of interdisciplinarity. In practice there are far too many cracks down which excellent science can disappear.

Of course, the BBSRC is not alone in failing to match action to its words on this front. When Dave Delpy took over as Chief Executive at EPSRC I heard him say that he appreciated there was a problem with the refereeing of interdisciplinary proposals, and that maybe a specific group of people who were capable of taking an overarching view of things – as opposed to some narrow proprietary interest – should be identified to be charged with refereeing such applications. It sounded plausible, but there has been no movement on this front that I am aware of. All I hear is that, since it is the community that is doing the refereeing, the problem must lie with the community. I am not convinced. It is EPSRC staff who choose the referees (even if applicants nominate some, they aren’t necessarily used and others will be added into the mix by the staff).If EPSRC personnel play ‘safe’ and ask for people from the core disciplines (or even if they do this because they aren’t familiar enough with the science to know any better), and if they don’t keep track of the fate of those applications that don’t fit squarely in obvious categories to see if they are being systematically disadvantaged by the referees chosen, no progress will ever be made.

It is interesting that the EPSRC has recently identified the Physics of Life as one of its so-called Grand Challenges. At the moment this exists as nothing more than a network, funded initially at a level that will simply facilitate meetings to bring the community together to allow them flesh out what key questions should be tackled, coupled with a bit of inter-lab travel for feasibility experiments and discussions. I trust that this means that, as the network does identify key questions and routes to their solution, appropriate funding, possibly ringfenced, to allow the research to be carried out will be put on the table. If not, this effort is doomed to failure. Maybe my pessimism over what has happened in the past in this field now belongs to the past; it would be nice to think so. I will certainly be interested to see what transpires. But if, as has happened too often previously to me and many of my colleagues, disputes arise as to whether proposed research fully fits into the EPSRC remit or has too much biology in it to find a home there or, because it mentions words like cancer or other diseases, it is really MRC work, then real innovative science to solve the Grand Challenge will be blocked. That is where ‘falling down the cracks’ is so particularly frustrating.

These arguments, in case there is any doubt, have nothing to do with the long-running sore about Impact. In fact I think the field of biological physics is rich in examples of how there may be long-term impact from the research being carried out, but that is neither here nor there for the points I am trying to make. A large part of my frustration with both research councils is that they seem to think an argument that says all proposals will be found a home in one or another is a sufficient response to the problem of the discontinuity between them – it isn’t. Finding a home means that applicants end up having to distort their science (and therefore not necessarily apply to do the best science they could; I am of course referring simply to responsive mode proposals here) to fit one remit or the other. Otherwise they are told it is ‘too biological’ for EPSRC, but ‘not biological enough’ for BBSRC. But it is also the case that the refereeing and panel process  are not suited to deal with interdisciplinary projects. The style of writing may differ from mainstream topics, but of itself that tells the reader nothing about the quality of science. It is merely interpreted as ‘failing’ because single subject science is seen as the correct default position. That is like saying women make ‘bad men’ because they’re different. In social sciences this is known as the deficit model, and is as bad an argument for science as for gender.

I am told not infrequently that the research councils are doing the best job they can; that they try hard to satisfy everyone. Those statements may be true, but that doesn’t make it a level playing field for people moving into new areas which aren’t properly represented on referee lists, or on panels actually giving grants out. I am afraid this is just a manifestation of ‘regression towards the mean’, where the mean defines mainstream science. It is a sure-fire route to stifle novel science and simply maintain the status quo.

Although this post is written largely around one specific scientific angle, I think the problems are endemic for any science at the interface between disciplines or research councils. It is a generic problem. We should have a seamless funding landscape and we do not. (The US is now doing much better on this front either than we are, or than they used to do, at least in the area of what I think they call the Physics of Living Systems.) Watching the way some chemists, synthetic chemists in particular, have reacted to any suggestion that funding in their (one might say traditional) field might be slightly cut, indicates just how much conservatism is endemic. They have acted as a lobby group, though not necessarily very successfully. Maybe it is time those of us who do not fit squarely into any box to stand up and be (even more) vociferous too. Not to use special pleading for our field to be particularly protected, but to call for practices to be as fair to us who work at the margins of any given discipline and who cross boundaries, as for those who sit squarely in the middle of some well-established subject. As things stand that is not the case, it hasn’t been the case in the recent past, and the research councils show no obvious sign that things are likely to change radically to back up those warm statements about the importance of interdisciplinarity.

On a completely different topic, readers who enjoy my thoughts on gender issues may be interested in my recent guest blog over at the BMJ website: ‘Science it’s a Girl Thing’ is not a cure.

 

 

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Were You Inspired?

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Athene Donald

When someone sticks a microphone in front of you, it is all too easy for the truth to out, despite one’s media training. I have frequently been asked one particular question during interviews, but somehow this week I didn’t nuance my answer. Confronted with the question ‘who inspired you to become a scientist?’ out came the unconsidered answer ‘no one’. But it’s true. I went into science without thinking about those great men – and of course they almost all were men – who had gone before, who had done such heroic things and whose splendid deeds I was supposed to want to emulate. I wanted to be a scientist because I was interested in the science; I didn’t – at the time – delve into books about who had done what and when, so I could learn about those giants on whose shoulders I aspired to stand. Obviously names sank into my consciousness, how could they not, but they weren’t flesh and blood, in my eyes, people whom I wanted to emulate. They were just names. That was obviously very short-sighted of me and perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit it now, but my mind goes a blank when I’m asked to name a hero/heroine from my childhood past.

So, no one directly inspired me. Role models also came later, much later. As I slowly matured into a practicing scientist, as opposed to someone who broke everything I touched (which at the start of my PhD I most certainly did), I started to look more carefully at the way those more senior around me acted, led and mentored, as well as did their science. Perhaps then, for the first time, I started to feel inspired. I have written in the past about a couple of inspirational gentlemen I was fortunate enough to be encouraged and nurtured by – but these were people, Sam Edwards and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes – I got to know when I was already an independent researcher. I’m curious to know if I’m unusual in lacking an idol from the past on whom to fixate as I decided my career choice, or if such inspiring individuals are more talked about than real – I’d like to hear your comments on this, so maybe I can give a more coherent response the next time someone approaches me with the dreaded mike. I certainly got the impression my interviewer’s jaw metaphorically dropped when I let slip my blunt response.

For some people it is the spokes-men and –women for science who jump out of our TV screens who are so important. In my case that could have been Gerald Durrell or Desmond Morris (and later David Attenborough), but these were in the wrong field to be very influential on me as an aspiring physicist.  Perhaps the next generation of physicists will indeed say that it was Brian Cox who made all the difference to them as teenagers when making career choices after having seen his series; or maybe it will have been watching Jocelyn Bell Burnell speak so quietly and impressively in the Beautiful Minds programme about her that opened their eyes to the possibilities for women in science. Clearly the more science that is on the TV, the more that possibility is there for early inspiration. It is for that reason that a year or two back there was so much discussion about ‘where is the female Brian Cox?’, but I wasn’t convinced then by that argument and I guess that is still my position.

I have heard many people, and more particularly women, say how important role models are or have been to them. These, I suspect, are not great individuals from the past, or even those who smile at them from the TV, but the living people they see a few notches further up their chosen career path. It would be nice to think the humanising interviews that Jim Al Khalili has been carrying out for his Life Scientific radio programme will broaden how people perceive some senior scientists and offer them a greater choice of impressive researchers to look up to. Too often such people can seem featureless (or perhaps I mean characterless) if only viewed on a far distant podium at some huge conference. I think this radio series has been able to present a wonderful mix of the passion scientists have for their field of research, with their own individual voices discussing their sometimes tortuous career paths. Maybe some school children will hear these programmes and be able to say in future years about how Professor X inspired them when they heard them being interviewed. Perhaps that is precisely what I didn’t get: a feeling of the scientists whose names I read in textbooks as real people. So, is that a lack in me? Or do many of you equally feel the honest answer to

‘who inspired you?’ is  ‘no one’?

If you are not a frequent reader of society columns, Hello and the like, you may want to skip the rest of this post. It contains shameless name dropping but no solution to the tricky question of how Sherlock Holmes’ death was faked at the end of the last BBC series.

The occasion of this rather off-the-cuff interview was an event to launch the Discovery Channel’s new series, starring Stephen Hawking. Known as ‘Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design’, it has a lot of physics (from Galileo and Newton to String Theory), but remarkably little biology. It identifies a number of Hawking’s heroes and illustrates them with little vignettes. I’m afraid Hawking makes some rather stark statements including ‘Philosophy is Dead’ and ‘I think science can explain the Universe without the need for God’ – which are likely to raise some eyebrows; the former in particular was not met with universal enthusiasm by those attending the event. The first programme goes out next week (September 13th on the Discovery Channel) in the UK, but I have had the privilege of viewing all three episodes already, by way of ‘homework’, before I engaged in the evening’s other entertainment: a panel discussion.

This panel consisted of Martin Rees, Will Self, Adam Rutherford and myself, all pushed and pulled into some semblance of order by Dara O Briain. The topic of our debate was

What will be the most important questions for science in the next 40 years?

You’ll be able to judge that that was an easy subject to construct light badinage around to an audience of newspaper feature editors and the like. It seemed, in advance, a very daunting challenge. In fact, I really enjoyed myself. We were a very diverse bunch, each with our own particular take on things. Adam Rutherford seemed to feel slightly perturbed to be the ‘token biologist’, as he put it, but Martin Rees and I both saw biological challenges going to be absolutely key to the future.

It was of course a publicity event for the programme rather than serious science. But, as one of the Channel’s senior executives put it to me, they want their programmes to draw people in who aren’t scientists and of course part of that is getting people talking about it. It has already been pointed out to me through Twitter (thank you Stephen!)  that you can find me lurking in the pages of the Radio Times online, posed for all intents and purposes as if on a red carpet at some celebrity do – the celebrity of course being Stephen Hawking. Indeed, you can see me standing shoulder to shoulder not only with Dara O’Briain but also Benedict Cumbernatch, who is doing the programme’s voiceover. And no, I didn’t ask him how his death was faked at the end of the last series of Sherlock Holmes. Not being a celebrity-watcher (even if I did watch the Sherlock Holmes series) I was still concentrating on the serious side of things, engaging Andrew Miller, chair of the Commons Science and Techology Select Committee, in discussion about the need to get scientists and policy makers closer together.

So, did anyone inspire you in your youth? I am looking forward to a lively comment stream – don’t let me down!

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , , , , | 25 Comments

Blood and More Blood

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Athene Donald

Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge is understandably proud of its tradition in medicine. One of its illustrious alumni is William Harvey, who studied there in the 1590’s before going on to publish evidence to demonstrate the circulation of blood. One thing that struck me when reading Thomas Wright’s biography of him, Circulation, is just how recognizable the college remains. The trio of gates that marked his progression as a student are still extant: each student enters through the Gate of Humility and then passes through the Gate of Virtue, but cannot use the Gate of Honour until successfully graduating. That last Gate is still mainly kept shut, but opening as it does onto Senate House Passage it means processing graduands have the shortest distance of those from any college to walk before entering the Senate House for the ceremony. This means they are least likely to get drenched or frozen (for those graduating during the winter months, or even some summers). However, it also means that they are one of the colleges most likely to be surrounded by throngs of tourists.

But, if the college is superficially little changed (leaving aside the addition of the Waterhouse Building, and the fourth ‘gate’ helpfully known as the Gate of Necessity due to its proximity to the lavatories), Harvey’s life – and more particularly his approach to research – are wildly different from today’s researcher. He was clearly a non-conformer in his life, ultimately (if initially timidly) rejecting the orthodox views of his fellow Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians who were committed to following Galen’s  traditions and teachings, which were by then already more than 1000 years old . He was socially ambitious, always aiming higher (he ended up as Physician to Charles I) but came from yeoman stock, and it would seem these relatively humble beginnings and social insecurity were part of what drove him on. And driven he clearly was, determined to get to the bottom of what was going on with the heart and the blood. To a modern reader, his methods are distinctly chilling. This biography spares few details of his dissections, the vivisections of a wide variety of different animals from the humble (and cold-blooded) eel to dogs – and of course the dissection of numerous human corpses, usually those of executed criminals, often over several increasingly malodorous days.

In these days of imaging of the human body in many non-invasive ways, it is all too easy to forget just how difficult it was for Harvey to piece together the jigsaw that enabled him to come up with the idea of ‘Circulation’. Today, the flow of blood through the heart valves and along the arteries, can be precisely quantified by Doppler ultrasound for instance (I know, I’ve watched my own blood flow being monitored as my heart pumped away, and a strange experience it was too, though of course I was really more interested in trying to tell from the operator’s face if my heart was behaving as it should). Back then the vivisections were necessary in order to enable him to  piece everything together and publish, in 1628, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Concerning the motion of the heart and blood), usually just known as De Motu Cordis. It all seems so obvious now that it is hard to realise quite how radical his ideas were – and how they flew in the face of Galenic teaching and therefore, according to the oath he took when Harvey was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians, inadmissible.

Because they were counter to the central tenets of ‘physick’ as it was practiced then, his ideas were rejected for many years. He went to great lengths – with many dissections conducted in front of his peers, in the hope of convincing them – to try to win people around but, as with any startling new theory, it took him a long time to find acceptance. He worked hard at quantifying the amount of blood that the heart expelled, to demonstrate the impossibility of so much constantly having to be regenerated if it wasn’t being recirculated. But the habit of quantitative measurement was not so ingrained then as now. After Harvey had gone to great lengths in one showcased vivisection at the University of Altdorf involving a dog, to measure the amount of blood expelled, he eagerly sought the views of the Professor of Medicine there, a friend from his days as an anatomy student in Padua, Caspar Hoffmann. He hoped for support for his ideas, but instead was given the following put-down (the basis for this quote is not given in the book, which lacks specific references, although general sources are given)

Why do you doff the hat of an anatomist, and suddenly put on the hat of an accountant, relying on calculations of how much blood can be transferred from the heart to the arteries in the space of an hour?

This is illuminating on a couple of fronts: firstly, I would not expect most modern-day accountants to get very far in carrying out that calculation (even leaving aside the vivisection), but secondly it vividly indicates just how different ‘science’ in the early 17th century was in its attitude towards hard numbers compared with now. Arithmetic was seen as something useful for navigators, or perhaps instrument makers, but not for the higher sciences such as anatomy. That was certainly how Harvey’s own alma mater of Cambridge saw it at the time, and Hoffmann was clearly no different.

Of course, in the end all those doubters were proved wrong and Harvey’s ideas were vindicated. These days, no ethics committee would permit the experiments to be done, so it is as well we are now so well-supplied with alternative ways of studying our inner workings.  I am grateful to the Leeds team who gave me this book as a ‘thank-you’ for talking to them at the Athena Swan event I described a few months back. I certainly enjoyed reading about Harvey and learned a lot from the book about his life and times, and also about the practice of ‘science’ consistent with those times.

 

Posted in Book Review, History of Science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

If You Want a Job Done….

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Athene Donald

.…ask a busy person is the usual way to complete the phrase. But although this may be wise for the person wanting the job done, it’s tough on those paragons who repeatedly get asked to take on new duties. Hence the importance of a workload model to ensure that good citizens are not getting submerged beneath a mountain of committee work whilst others swan around with few chores to weigh them down. I am reminded of this because it’s that time of year when committees need to have their membership refreshed, so people cast their eyes around the department, faculty, school, institution or whatever organisational unit is appropriate to see who would be good on Committee X.

Of course as soon as you start considering the matter (and it really doesn’t matter whether you are thinking about the student liaison committee, or seeking out some humdinger of a senior professor for a high level international role, the same principles apply) you realise that many individuals have reputations which make their desirability as a member distinctly dubious. When I look at a list of epithets I have heard used recently about senior (I hesitate to say ‘respected’ given the epithets) colleagues in my own and other universities and across the disciplines, it makes for dismal reading: ‘behaving like an animal cornered’, ‘disengaged’, ‘needs to go on an anger management course’, ‘languid’ and ‘a selfish brat’ being just a few phrases I have heard being used in connection with members of the professoriat around the country.

The reality is that academics are simply human and have the same foibles as the rest of the population. But we are also trained to be competitive and unfortunately too many individuals learn strategies which may help them to compete on the research front, at the expense of the common good of other duties such as teaching.  So, the professor (not a physicist, before people start playing guessing games) described as languid, was further described as

doesn’t exactly put himself out for others in my view… not a team player. Some would even say lazy.

But the reality is he has a huge amount of output in print, usually as sole author, because that is what he chooses to concentrate on and on which his reputation rests.

The fact that not all professors are ideal role-models is nothing new, as a couple of random historical examples will show. Centuries ago, around the turn of the 17th century, the famed Paduan anatomist Fabricius was apparently ‘like a lazy horse who had to be spurred on’, according to William Harvey’s recent biography by Thomas Wright. When complaints were made he retaliated by cancelling the public dissections at short notice, these being a necessary part of the training for would-be physicians like Harvey.

Much more recently, and in my own University of Cambridge, John Henslow – a man responsible at least in part for enthusing and supporting the young Charles Darwin – apparently became a very delinquent Professor of Botany. Having started off enthusiastically when first appointed, his involvement with the University – to which he was still attached – got more and more remote once he’d taken on a new role as Rector of Higham in Suffolk.  Too far away for him to be able to ‘commute’, for some years he only spent 5 weeks a year in Cambridge. Thus technically he fulfilled his lecturing requirements, although only to a handful of students, but people were not impressed, as a letter from Charles Babington (a future Professor of Botany in Cambridge) makes clear in an 1846 letter:

Never was botany at so low an ebb as now in this place. A non-resident Professor, who only comes here for five weeks (as he calls it), going away on Saturday morning in each week, and returning Monday evening. I have been taking a party of our few naturalists for a short excursion on each of the last four Saturdays, but never got more than twelve to accompany me, all of them quite beginners.

(These facts I gleaned from an interesting biography of the man by Walters and Stow). At least in his case he had the justification that he seems to have been a very committed Rector, including being active locally about education for his congregation.

It is easy to identify that class of professors who are only interested in research at the expense of teaching but, to return to the committee work, there are others who see committees as a useful power base. These are also potentially dangerous. If someone wants to take on a particular responsibility – particularly if it’s chairing a committee – this may be for entirely benign, public-spirited and excellent reasons, or it may be because they see a way of getting their hands on resource control. Again, nothing new here, office politics of any sort would throw up something similar. I think the difference is that the joys of academia being such that many people would try very hard not to get stuck on many committees, there can be something of a power vacuum for the few with Machiavellian tendencies of this sort to slot into.

Perhaps someone believes if they chair the committee that doles out the annual quota of PhD studentships they can quietly ensure they and their cronies do rather well. Ditto on a space allocation committee – that way they’ll make sure their sub-field is thriving at the expense of others (and sometimes this may be literal expense as well as figurative). This, long-time readers of my blog will recognize this person as the ‘Chair with Favourites’ from an earlier post which depicted the characteristics of committee chairs. In that earlier post you will also find the Inefficient Chair, who tends to be the one the department lights on in desperation because no one else will take on some poisoned chalice or, even more probably, some deadly dull but necessary committee. I fear the Health and Safety Committee too often falls under that heading.

So, that workload model  I referred to at the start of this post is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure the smooth-running of a department.  Heads of department do not always have the sanctions they need to make sure everyone makes a reasonable contribution to the greater good. My suspicion is that readers from industry will read these sentences in horror because, by and large, companies do not tolerate this degree of ‘individualism’, for which frequently you should read ‘selfishness’. But because universities, by their very nature, celebrate and reward individualism, competitiveness and single-mindedness, it is hard to see our academic world changing radically any time soon.

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