The Problems of Measurement

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Athene Donald

How should we measure what is a good outcome from a university education? As David Willetts puts it in his latest report published through the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) ‘The Treasury cast their beady eye over the evidence and worry universities are not delivering the earnings boost which they used to’, demonstrating one sort of answer to the question. Another recent publication, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), considers social mobility and the lure of London using earnings as the framing of a good outcome for the individual. Is it all about money? Should it be all about the money? It seems to me a very narrow figure of merit for either society or the graduate.  Furthermore, I believe the IFS analysis is oversimplifying the interesting data they have analysed.

The IFS study explores the mobility of those with and without degrees, considered by socio-economic status and ethnic origin, but it is framed as mobility – and this is geographical mobility that is being analysed, not social mobility – as necessarily desirable, as if anyone who doesn’t move has ‘failed’, although that is not their explicit phrasing. I worry about this framing, relevant though it may be to the levelling-up agenda. For instance,

“Places with high average earnings attract graduates through migration. Graduates who grew up in places with low average earnings are more likely to move away.”

They note that non-graduates are less likely to move to London and other large cities than graduates.  Inevitably, these patterns of behaviour also lead to their final conclusion that ‘patterns of mobility exacerbate regional inequality in skills’, so that there is a ‘brain drain from the North and coastal areas’. By framing what is a good outcome of a university education in terms of money, the implicit messaging being given to graduates is ‘it’s all about the cash’. This is a travesty of what a university education should be about. The idea of public good, as opposed to personal gain, cannot be seen in that framing, but becomes relevant when trying to determine what might be done for the areas (Grimsby and Wisbech are pulled out as examples) where the current loss of graduates is marked, and social deprivation is highly visible.

Let us take the specific example of a Muslim woman who wants to stay close to her family and teach in a primary school: she will neither be a high earner nor have demonstrated an appetite for mobility, but she will be of huge benefit to her community, and an excellent role model for younger women. Such a woman should be highly valued, not put down as a statistic of someone who didn’t aspire to geographical mobility. (I wonder how the likely increasing trend to working from home, possibly home being located far distant from the location of the employer, will skew future analyses.) Interestingly, the IFS findings show that Asian women who do move earn less than those who stay put (in contrast to every other group), and that young adults of Indian and Pakistani heritage are significantly less likely to have moved by age 27 than their white peers of otherwise similar backgrounds.

Income can be measured.  Value to a local community is much harder to quantify, but it is still value. It is obvious that high paying jobs are often in metropolitan areas which will therefore act as an attractor to many, and if income is used as the only figure of merit, then the metropolitan areas look ‘good’. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that the well-heeled parts of the country are the ones to which graduates may aspire to move, which will definitely exacerbate inequality.

However, here as in so many instances, metrics should be used with care. Willetts highlights the dangers of using, as a proposed criterion for the OfS (Office for Students), graduate outcomes a mere fifteen months after graduation as a means to determine university performance, a time when many (if not most) graduates are still finding their feet in their careers. Fifteen months is far too soon, as he makes clear, and it still relies on using earnings as the figure of merit, this time to score university courses. As so many commentators have pointed out, such a metric will necessarily imply that many courses are inherently seen as low-value; not necessarily the STEM courses I typically consider on this blog, but courses in music and the arts, for instance, and those wishing to become nurses, work in the charity sector (a popular choice for Cambridge graduates I understand) or who aspire to be that primary school teacher I mentioned above.

Willetts is a great believer in universities of all complexions and wishes to see less distinction made between academic and vocational pathways, as well as less between those institutions providing either. He has, it would seem, little time for his alma mater of Oxford, or indeed mine of Cambridge, accusing them of snobbishness, in large part because they don’t teach non-academic courses (while, a little confusingly, simultaneously pointing out that engineering and law are vocational, courses very much taught here). He highlights the potential benefits to the local economy if new universities were to open up in towns from Wigan to Peterborough. Such benefits would pertain at least as much to workers in low-paid jobs as to the graduates themselves. However, the IFS study would imply such graduates would, possibly should, then migrate to the bright lights of London or Manchester, removing the possible gains to the community.

What about Oldham? I highlight this town, sitting within Greater Manchester, because it is in the process of carrying out an economic review, led by Alun Francis, the head of the local Further Education college, Oldham College. (Willetts sees FE Colleges as a great undervalued resource in the education landscape.) What can a run-down old mill town do to improve its economic performance, pushing up median wages from their current miserably low level, and to keep those young people who get qualifications at level 4 and above in the area to boost the economy? As long as the public discourse is framed in ‘geographical mobility is necessarily good’ – to paraphrase the IFS study – or graduate earnings are the only measure of the value of further and higher education, as the Department for Education appears to want OfS to think about the matter, we will not get anything approaching levelling up, because those who can, will migrate to the city lights, and those who advise them will encourage them to do so.

Apologies for early readers of this post, who will have seen that, for some reason, the text appeared multiple times. Thank you to those who drew this to my attention!

 

 

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University Traditions

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Athene Donald

This is the time of year when students are in the process of returning to their many campuses (or going for the first time as Freshers). Cambridge University term starts later than many, and as a result few students are yet back. Consequently, the University has been cramming in, in the diary but not in numbers attending, ceremonies in the Senate House to confer degrees and to celebrate those who took their degrees in absentia last summer. The occasions are not what they would once have been – no proud parents or friends in the Senate House, no clasping of the hands while the degree is conferred – but I hope they still feel like a special occasion. (I wrote about the form of my University’s ceremonies, as indeed other graduation events in which I’ve participated in different guises, in a relatively early post on this blog).

The pandemic has changed everything, across University occasions and well beyond the Senate House. A few people still seem intent on shaking hands in social situations – and I’ve been giving them a metaphorical cold shoulder – but I wonder whether the Cambridge tradition of clasping hands in the Senate House will ever return, although I certainly hope the presence of families will. There are so many aspects of life, traditional customs which may seem totally inappropriate in the future. The Continental way of hugging – be that with two or three pecks on the cheek, I was always confused which to expect from whom – which increasingly seemed to be replacing the cool British handshake, even between academics, seems as unsuitable in these pandemic days as that handshake. I don’t think the bumping of elbows is very likely to catch on, more appropriate though it may currently seem.

I am very conscious of the approaching start of the Cambridge term, with its formal sequence of events, ceremonial and pedagogical, but also looking back, almost with horror, as I realise the 50th anniversary of my own matriculation is fast approaching. While Churchill finesses what new procedure we will follow – not all freshers coming into the Master’s Lodge one after the other and shaking my hand and then my husband’s, while a couple of sentences are exchanged at close range – I try to remember what my own matriculation was like. No formal dinner, it would seem. I’ve found the letter I wrote to my mother all those years ago, and it is not very enthusiastic:

‘I may say the matriculation ceremony was a farce (I didn’t even wear a gown for it – tatty old jeans instead!). It consisted of filing into the praelector’s office and signing our name in two places – one swearing to obey the rules, regulations, ordinances [which I couldn’t spell, getting confused with ordnances] etc, and the other the college register. No pomp and ceremony and not even a glass of port.’

Was I disappointed or relieved? I’m not sure. There is no doubt that too much ceremony can overwhelm freshers who aren’t used to that sort of formality and are convinced they will get things wrong. The matriculation dinner so many colleges – including ours – do have, may simply feel like an opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance by using the wrong knife or putting water in the wine glass. I always feel sorry for those who are placed next to me, in case that makes their anxiousness soar yet higher, although I’ve had some amazing conversations with students who have done phenomenally enterprising things before they left school, or simply thought deeply about the issues that matter to them and which they are keen to discuss.

Nevertheless, myself as a fresher had little positive to say in this same letter about ‘the Mistress’s reception’ (I was at Girton College, then for women only, and which has always had a Mistress).

‘Tonight was the mistress’s reception which was another farce. A sweet looking old woman, who gave the impression of being unused to making speeches and it didn’t really look as if she was going to try to make personal contact with everyone – so we made off.’

Oh dear. Is that how people regard me, sweet and unused to giving speeches? Checking Wikipedia, I see that the said Mistress was rather younger than I am currently so ‘old’ feels, to my present self, very harsh. It is undoubtedly wholesome for me to look back at what a young student may feel about the strange events that greet them when they first arrive in this venerable University. I should remember this! I still have to write this year’s speech for the Fresher’s dinner, but I’ve been getting plenty of practice at giving speeches to other cohorts of students and alumni, so I hope I don’t resemble that ‘old’ Mistress of mine.

It is intriguing to note that, in my next letter home, I refer to being exceedingly exhausted:

‘I have just returned from playing squash for an hour at Churchill. Made a real fool of myself but at least I know better what it entails.’

As far as I recall, that was the only time I set foot in Churchill during the six years I was in Cambridge completing my first and second degrees. I was pleased to note that my opponent from that day came up to me at an alumni event a few years back, remarking (with pride, perhaps?) that he had been the one to introduce me to Churchill. We had not, to my memory, spoken from that squash day to the alumni event; he clearly had not been impressed by my squash-playing skills either. My defence is that it was my first time.

We may all be hoping for an academic year that is closer to the ‘normal’ we used to know. However, I think we also understand that all kinds of differences will assail us, ranging from what incoming students will know, how confident they are and how they settle into a life that is still going to be punctuated by mask-wearing, one-way systems in buildings and – on top of the pandemic fall out – limited food choices in our catering facilities as much as in the supermarkets. It will be a long time before we know what the new normal looks like, and what habits and customs will never return.

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‘Pure’ versus ‘Applied’ Science

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Athene Donald

When I started this blog, more than ten years ago, I imagined I would write about physics, and specifically about physics at the interface with biology. Perhaps, I thought, I would write about exciting papers I’d read; indeed, I asked a couple of other researchers in my field to join with me in doing this, to be met with little enthusiasm. In practice, things have turned out very differently. The science itself has not featured greatly here; I’ve largely written about the doing of it – who does it, how it should be done (and equally important, how it should not be done), and how it is funded; the political landscape for science; and the diversity angle. Interdisciplinary work – of the sort I was doing at the time – has certainly featured, particularly in the early days. So have its challenges, not least around funding, but not much about the science itself. I don’t regret that. I’ve had fun with writing this blog. I’m sure it has helped my writing skills (never too late) and I’ve enjoyed the interactions I’ve had, initially through posted comments although now much more usually over Twitter. But today I want to revert to something closer to my original concept, although still without detailed science.

I am prompted to write this by reading an editorial in the newsletter of the Institute of Physics’ Biological Physics Group written by my Cavendish Laboratory colleague, Pietro Cicuta, who is stepping down as Chair. I was instrumental in setting up this group nearly fifteen years ago, and I was its Chair for the first few years. As far as I can tell, this editorial is available to all, and not just IOP members, so I encourage you to read Pietro’s thoughtful views. He says

‘Today, many of us capably handle living systems within our physics departments, or in genuine cross-disciplinary environments, making entirely new research possible, for example integrating new tools and designing experiments that are as systematic as many other areas of condensed matter physics.’

In the early 2000’s, physics departments did not expect to have cell culture facilities, for instance, nor to teach material that might be called ‘biological physics’, although the field has various equivalent names (e.g. biophysics). Things have undoubtedly moved on; many departments are now well equipped with facilities for working with live organisms and with teaching relevant material.

However, I absolutely share Pietro’s concern

‘that despite the excitement of our field, the new teaching courses we developed, the fundamental progress that it is possible to achieve even with relatively small teams, the relevance to real challenges that matter to the public…. despite all this, we are still seen as one of the various sectors of “applied physics”. We have not impacted the “physics culture” very much: particle physics, astrophysics or cold atoms are not considered as physics applied to particles, stars or cold atoms… they somehow are still “the physics”.

Readers who are not physicists might wish to consider what the topics are that they immediately think physics covers, and it probably wouldn’t involve malaria (I wrote about Pietro’s work in this area in the Guardian, back in 2014 when that paper was committed to science blogs), or Covid (more on that shortly), or tumour evolution (to cite the work of another Cavendish colleague Sarah Bohndiek). On the contrary, their thoughts are more likely to turn to black holes and the Higgs’ Boson, or perhaps how to manipulate single atoms at ultracold temperatures. As Pietro says, the rest is, somewhat derogatorily, described as ‘applied’. Dirty stuff, that might be useful….not seen nevertheless as differently exciting and full of wonder.

Back in 2010, when this blog was still largely on the topic of biological physics, I asked ‘Where’s the Wow Factor?’ for this very reason: mainstream physicists think there can be no beauty or amazement in areas away from the sorts of topics I list above. Pietro’s editorial indicates how little things have changed in the last decade. Yet, physicists working in this area can contribute very substantially to our wellbeing, potentially to ‘healthy ageing’, as through work on cancer. If physics is being applied to cancer, why does that not attract a sense of amazement? It baffles me why our culture, and this includes the media in the way they report stories, see so-called applied physics as less worthy of interest than black holes. It isn’t that everyone believes ‘applied’ is bad in all disciplines, because they have made so much – rightly so – about the work of Sarah Gilbert’s team on vaccine development. ‘Pure’ (as that must be the opposite of applied, I suppose) work may have underpinned the development, but its current wow factor sits in enabling it to be applied to our real world, in moving us gratefully on from total lockdowns.

I mentioned physicists’ contribution to Covid. Here I will cite theoretical physicist Mike Cates (educated in the Cavendish, but now Lucasian Professor – the Chair formerly held by Stephen Hawking – in Cambridge’s Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics) who, early on in the pandemic, kickstarted an initiative known as RAMP (Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic) under the auspices of the Royal Society. This brought together, essentially via crowd-sourcing, over 1800 scientists who felt they had something to offer. Mike’s latest co-authored paper from this programme Efficient Bayesian inference of fully stochastic epidemiological models with applications to COVID-19 takes tools from other areas of physics to apply to this current problem, relying also on the late Dave Mackay’s (another professor at the Cavendish) work on inference. Why is all this work not seen as mainstream?

It seems to me right and proper that fields should evolve. We should remember that James Clerk Maxwell was fascinated by light and colour, but also how our eyes worked to perceive that colour (see, for instance, Basil Mahon’s biography The man who changed everything). In 1855 he presented a paper Experiments on Colour, as perceived by the Eye, with remarks on Colour-blindness to the Royal Society, and five years later he followed up with On the Theory of Colour Vision  to that same august institution. People back then were much more open-minded about what ‘physics’ might be. Certainly his work in this area, along with all his other notable achievements, did not stop him becoming the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge – when the Cavendish Laboratory was first opened – in 1871.

Somehow, in the intervening century and a half, scientific culture has become much more narrow-minded, putting us into boxes unless we fight hard. This is the problem for researchers attempting to break down disciplinary boundaries. The interface between physics and biology is one which has become much more blurred; for those of us working at that interface the work is fascinating, intriguing and infinitely worthwhile, and comes in many different flavours. But some of our colleagues seem stuck in a time-warp and, inevitably, that message may rub off on those they teach. I look forward to the world of physics in this country (other countries do rather better as far as I can tell) losing its hang-ups about pure versus applied, what is ‘proper’ physics, and what is not. I hope many members of the Institute of Physics read Pietro’s editorial and consider their positions.

 

 

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Name-calling, Favourites and Bystanders

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Athene Donald

Name-calling of any kind is painful. My first experience of it that I recall, dates back to primary school when the other kids used to call me teacher’s pet. Probably deserved as an appellation, in so far as I undoubtedly applied myself more to my lessons than some of my more troublesome peers. Nevertheless, looking back I feel aggrieved that I was so castigated because of the teacher’s slightly creepy predilection for me, obvious even to my eight or nine year old brain. Indeed, that probably upset me as much as the name-calling. I had no time for the teacher, not least because he was so ignorant he classified bats as birds.

That was merely a mild form of childhood bullying, albeit one which certainly left me feeling isolated amongst my classmates. There are many worse ways in which bullying can occur; name-calling is just one of them. I wrote previously about Jane Willenbring, who was repeatedly referred to (amongst other things) as ‘slut’ by her then PhD supervisor David Marchant during a season of fieldwork in Antarctica. Although on the surface impervious to this – according to a fellow student present at the time – it ate into her, so that a decade later she finally filed a complaint leading to his dismissal from his faculty post at Boston University. But comments eating away inside are immensely damaging. The facile statement that sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you, is just rubbish. Words can colour who you think you are and, if you are a researcher may mean you simply turn your back on research because the pain is too bad. Mentally, the labels that are applied in the insults can become part of your inner being.

Labels come in many forms. I don’t recall ever being called a slut, but I’ve had plenty of comments fired in my direction, derogatory and dismissive of me simply because I’m a woman.

“You only work on starch because, as a woman, domestic science is all you can do”

may have no explicit word of insult in it, but the message is still insulting to receive (this, after I had given a talk about several years’ worth of cutting edge physics research on starch).  PhD students who are repeatedly demeaned by peers or more senior members of their team or department are, in far too many cases, going to quit, whatever their intrinsic abilities may be. That is why I believe observing such behaviour – say, in a group meeting – and doing nothing makes that individual complicit. It is so much easier for the person who isn’t the one being bullied, or otherwise verbally attacked, to step in, than for the victim. Too often, if the latter attempts to speak up, they are accused of not being able to take a joke or, worse, the severity of the attacks increases. Such a ‘bystander’ intervention is much easier done when all that is under consideration is verbal abuse, not unwanted physical attention, but practice always makes perfect.

Catherine Sanderson has written a whole book, The Bystander Effect, about when people do and do not speak up against a bully or harasser (looking across many sectors and situations, although education is one she mentions). It provides both information on the psychological responses people experience when watching bad things unfold, and insight into how you can improve your toolkit to do something when things do go wrong in front of you. She certainly believes in the importance of practice; having ready phrases at hand makes it easier to intervene in the heat of the moment. It is always frustrating when, with the best of intentions, the moment slips by and your mind remains a blank and what you should have said only comes to you some minutes later when it’s far too late. But, as she reminds us, you can always go and give support to the victim later, even if you haven’t actually confronted the aggressor.

Bullying is well recognized, even if rarely well dealt with. It’s a problem in academia as in any workplace. But I also want to highlight a second kind of demeaning behaviour from the lead in any team, something I certainly was on the wrong end of during my first postdoc. That is, the case of a supervisor/Principal Investigator who has favourites. If you’re the blue-eyed boy or girl, you get all the attention. Any others in the group are all but ignored. This is the situation in which your work gets presented at a conference by someone else while you stay at home kicking your heels; your name does not appear where you feel it should in the list of authors on a paper; and you are not tapped on the shoulder to apply for a relevant postdoc the PI hears about, or some major fellowship scheme. This is insidious and can be quite hard to spot.

In my case, I really only worked out what had been happening much later. I am quite sure, in this specific case, a lot of the fault was down to the fact that, at the time, I was completely unmotivated. That is, however, a vicious circle. I was unmotivated not only because it was not a project that I felt any enthusiasm for, but also because, being ignored a lot of the time, there was nothing to stimulate me coming from my supervisor. I was not inspired to try harder, but just spiralled down. Luckily for me, my second postdoc was utterly different. Not everyone is so lucky.

By the time I was back in the UK with a Fellowship under my belt and grants to hand, I hired as a postdoc a student from that very same group I had worked in a few years before, with whom I’d overlapped. He regaled me with how he had been so fed up with Professor X because of the favouritism he had shown to another student, while he and others had been given very little attention, and how he’d seen that happen to me compared with another postdoc. That was a lightbulb moment for me, albeit the other postdoc had accomplished a great deal more than I had (and went on to join the faculty in the department and thence to have a very successful academic career in various US institutions).

The constant passing over of one student in favour of another is all too common, as is the unevenness with which academic benefits of any kind are handed out. I am not sure though whether it is always the case, as my freshly-hired postdoc opined in the case of our mutual professor, that this is because the supervisor only feels they can handle one student and one postdoc at a time, regardless of the size of their group. I think, too often it is simply that they respond more to one person than another, someone, perhaps who is the one that reminds them of the student they once were. In other words, they are swayed by affinity bias. Here gender and race are undoubtedly likely to play a role. All kinds of bias – against a woman doing physics, against a woman or black researcher in an otherwise all male/white research group and so on – can come into play. The upshot may be the kind of favouritism I am describing. Like name-calling and bullying, it can be immensely detrimental, but even harder to put a finger on let alone counter.

Academia, like any work-place, has a long way to go to be a truly fair and comfortable place to work. Each of us have our work to do, to support others being unreasonably treated and to make sure we are not ourselves guilty of these sins.

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Getting Universities’ People and Culture Right

Posted on August 27, 2021 by Athene Donald

Regular readers of my blog will have noticed there has been nothing to read for some time, regularly or irregularly. As for so many of us, this has been a tough year culminating, for me, in a chest infection (non-Covid) that knocked me back for weeks. I haven’t felt so ill and weak since I had ‘flu in 1990! Hence, I have lacked all energy to do anything on top of the bare essentials. A blogpost was well beyond me, even walking off the College site defeated me for quite a while. It is no doubt wholesome to be reminded of one’s fragility, particularly in the middle (or perhaps towards the end?) of a pandemic, but it is depressing to realise how much one’s physical and mental state can go into precipitate decline without warning. I am looking forward to my ‘get up and go’ being back in full strength soon.

Burnout is, of course, to be seen across academia. Our lives have been upended as we have been caught between government requirements to protect staff and students and the imperative to teach and otherwise support the student body and staff. I have not had to teach during this period, but the number of additional meetings (Zoom, naturally, occasionally broken up by Teams or even Googlemeet) required to ensure we complied with everything demanded for an establishment such as a Cambridge College, has been astonishing. I am looking forward, perhaps too optimistically, to my diary reverting to something less horrendous as we learn to live a new normal existence, whatever that may look like.

Around the time I got completely knocked off my feet this summer, BEIS published its R+D People and Culture Strategy, long trailed by Science Minister Amanda Solloway, with its sub-title ‘People at the Heart of R+D’, so here is the blogpost about this that should have been written weeks ago. How could I not be in favour of such a document? Putting people at the heart of the R+D enterprise is exactly how it should be. But…..full of laudable sentiments though the strategy is, it appears to lack any clear indication of the path from where we are now to where BEIS aspirations would take us.

It has always been heartening to hear the minister talk so passionately about the importance of people and their well-being, with her own first-hand experience of bullying in the workplace (not in the university sector) to spur her on to find ways to improve the situation. Likewise, over many years I have heard – indeed more than once shared a platform on this topic with – Ottoline Leyser talk about the importance of improving our lab culture, to eradicate the bullying and ensure all members of a research team are treated fairly and the breadth of their work respected beyond mere numbers of grants or papers. Nevertheless, fine words butter no parsnips, as my mother was prone to say.

The concluding statement about the whole document, headed ‘Making it a reality’ says ‘We invite and encourage institutions, businesses and the people who work in them and the wide range of other partners in the sector to work with us to drive change, making a difference in their own sphere of influence and thereby contributing to change across the sector.’ Such a statement would appear to lack any teeth, although one cannot argue with the intent. However, what is likely to change on the back of it? Universities should be already striving in this direction – as schemes such as Athena Swan (however unsatisfactorily revamped) and the Race Equality Chartermark highlight. These are schemes, note, that have been demoted by Solloway’s and her pair Michelle Donelan’s (Universities’ Minister) own actions, so that they cannot be linked directly to funding. So what we see is an overall plan of action that hopes for wide buy-in without any explicit mechanisms or levers attached. In this context, it is perhaps worth pointing the reader to a recent paper by Alison Phipps and Liz McDonnell in which they talk about ‘institutional polishing’ and ‘airbrushing’ as ways to look as if ED+I issues are being addressed in a university without any structural change ensuing. It is a depressing read that should give all of us wanting to work in this space pause for thought.

I would highlight two particular aspects of the BEIS paper that are admirable and need addressing, but where I can see nothing spelled out that is likely to lead immediately to change and improvement: the issues facing early career researchers (ECRs) and bullying and abuse of power in hierarchies within universities.  A consultation process with ECRs is envisaged, yet their problems are well-known already and I wonder what more will be gained from such a consultation. Many of the problems relate to the lack of permanent positions, meaning that the majority of postdocs end up not in the tenured ranks of faculty. Unless some dramatic reconstruction and expansion at the top of the academic pyramid is envisaged, or a radical decrease in the number of funded PhD students and postdocs to reduce the supply, it isn’t clear what solutions there are to this conundrum. (Neither, of course, are envisaged in the strategy document. Neither are likely to be popular.)

Sometimes people talk as if the answer was to create a new tier of permanent positions, lab managers or senior researchers with responsibility for key equipment, for instance. For those who got such a position it would be a satisfactory outcome, and there are many good reasons why research overall would benefit from their creation, instead of the hand-to-mouth, or rather grant-to-grant, uncertainty PIs face with keeping their research going on a steady basis. Nevertheless, looking back to the lecturer jobs bonanza of the 1960s, when a new swathe of universities was created, and how that led to stagnation in the job market for decades thereafter as those appointed at the time sat tight for years and practically no further jobs opened up, it is clear that such a ‘once in a lifetime’ job creation scheme would not provide a lasting solution for future generations of ECRs.

To my mind part of the needed solution is a much more honest dialogue about the nature of the pyramid, so that those embarking on a PhD have realistic expectations of what is likely to come next. The Royal Society (through a piece of work I was involved with) tried to set out such expectations and responsibilities on the sector some time ago. I’m not sure it got much traction, but it holds true. Students should be aware that, for most of them, moving swiftly, or even slowly, up the ranks to professor is an unlikely outcome, but that there are many other enticing opportunities for which their research training will stand them in very good stead. Their PhD supervisor is probably not the best person to inform them about these, given that the vast majority will only have worked in a university themselves; I would myself fit into that category. There are of course careers services available to researchers, which they should avail themselves of early on. Nothing of this gets a mention in the recent document, unless it is the idea – a good one – of facilitating porosity between academia and other sectors including industry.

The other issue, of bullying and harassment, is something I have often written about on this blog and elsewhere (e.g. see a rather personal account on this). We can – and should – all deplore this, but what does this latest document suggest should be done about it? As a colleague rather unkindly said, it is sadly vacuous. There are no teeth or levers provided, just that the sector should work together to stamp it out. That, one could argue, is how it has been for decades and that much-desired eradication shows no signs of happening. Again, to quote the document, we are told BEIS will ‘encourage the recently established Forum for Tackling Bullying and Harassment to develop sector-wide definitions for all forms of bullying; and to establish clear guidelines to inform future policy and action.’ I don’t need a definition to know when bad behaviour is going on; on the other hand perhaps some people want to hide behind formalities rather than tackle the issues; I refer the reader again to the Phipps and McDonnell paper illustrating just this point.

Sexual harassment should already be covered by clear guidelines in place in every institution. The trouble is more usually the inability to create an environment in which people feel safe bringing forward allegations, with confidence they will be appropriately treated. For every Fred Marcy convicted of such outrageous behaviour (and eventually kicked out of the National Academy of Sciences) there will be plenty of others who either are permitted to slip beneath the radar because no one feels willing to speak up for entirely understandable reasons, or whose behaviour is nevertheless tolerated because the leadership does not want to see a major player be disgraced. This is the reason why Non-Disclosure Agreements are so pernicious (as argued here by Mark Geoghegan), since a complainant can be paid off without disgrace being attached to the perpetrator, who then feels able to continue their appalling behaviour without restraint.

Bullying is perhaps harder to identify with confidence, since what a PI feels is legitimate language addressed to a researcher about ‘pulling up socks’ or working harder may feel to the recipient like unreasonable pressure. However, I am not convinced definitions will help get round this, as much as appropriate dialogue between the parties. There are times when pulling up socks really is the only way a PhD will be accomplished, after all! But this is where I believe sector-wide reconsideration of incentives is important.

The pressure an organisation puts on all its staff – multiplied during the current pandemic – can be excessive and that pressure can be onward transmitted to researchers in the spirit of the office boy kicking the cat. If all that matters for progression is the value of grants, the impact factor of journals published in (and it is surprising how many DORA-signatory organisations at the highest level still permit panels to factor IF’s in decision-making, even if it’s not written down as an explicit criterion) or size of group, then there is no incentive for a PI actually to worry about their students’ wellbeing. Narrative CVs, which UKRI are introducing, may allow panels – appointment or promotion – to assess whether an applicant has worked towards ED+I initiatives or shown particular interest in mentoring ECRs, but if no value is actually attached by the institution to such actions, such assessment may carry no weight. Expectations should have been set higher in this space in the People and Culture document, even if mandating all institutions should always pay heed to such factors might have been a bridge too far.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic. Maybe the very fact that BEIS has mentioned such thorny issues at all is a hopeful sign our institutions will change. But I, for one, will not be holding my breath that any change will be consequent on its publication, much though I’d like to be proved wrong.

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