{"id":6198,"date":"2021-05-23T15:02:37","date_gmt":"2021-05-23T14:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6198"},"modified":"2021-05-23T15:02:37","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T14:02:37","slug":"do-you-know-excellence-when-you-see-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2021\/05\/23\/do-you-know-excellence-when-you-see-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Do you know Excellence when you see it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politicians toss around phrases like \u2018levelling up\u2019 and \u2018build back better\u2019, not to mention \u2018freedom of speech\u2019, with gay abandon. Such words sound so positive and authoritative, what could be the problem? As many people have pointed out, however, there tend to be internal inconsistencies, exemplified<\/a> by the University Minister Michelle Donelan\u2019s statements about holocaust deniers being acceptable under proposed free speech legislation, a position swiftly contradicted by the Prime Minister. As for \u2018build back better\u2019, one has to dig down into that to see who it\u2019s better for (property developers or the environment, to take two perhaps extreme categories of ‘end users’) and levelling up seems to mean different things to politicians from local communities (see this recent article<\/a> for a discussion about the politics of this).<\/p>\n

Academics aren\u2019t likely to fall into the same traps, are they? Well, I fear they are. To take two words often found on referees\u2019 lips: excellence and impact. The ERC is well known for only using the former, and not the latter, unlike UKRI grants in general. No doubt referees feel they know excellence when they see it (Wikipedia\u2019s first example<\/a> of the use of this phrase interestingly refers to obscenity in a US Supreme Court decision in 1964) but, guilty though I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve been in that direction when I\u2019ve sat on panels to judge grants, that somewhat subjective measure is of course exactly where bias can set in. As I\u2019ve frequently written before, if not quite in those words, that has been one of the challenges for interdisciplinary research. Panel members tend to like what they know and have confidence in (see eg here<\/a>). Interdisciplinary research may make them feel uncomfortable if only half the words make much sense to them; that makes it harder for them to recognize excellence even if it is there.<\/p>\n

I will await the analysis of outputs marked up as interdisciplinary to the REF with some trepidation, given I\u2019ve chaired the panel<\/a> responsible for trying to devise appropriate guidance both for institutions to have confidence in submitting such outputs and for the sub-panels \u2013 containing their named interdisciplinary advisers \u2013 equally to have confidence they can judge such outputs fairly. However, it is not just when grant submissions are interdisciplinary that the challenge of comparing apples and oranges arises. How does one compare a project on spins of quantum dots versus nano-electronic insulation (to take two topics at random from my own department\u2019s website)? Some grant applications can be thrown out swiftly, probably when a department hasn\u2019t done a good enough sift beforehand, although who knows which excellent ones have been thrown out for political rather than scientific reasons. Perhaps they are seen as being flawed, incremental, lacking the equipment or done by someone else already. Straying into the territory of the excellence (or otherwise) of the PI certainly risks not only the Matthew Effect<\/a>, but also bias. Maybe the referee or panel speaker has had a run in with said PI and bears a grudge\u2026.or (and I saw this once) the panel did not want to offend the person concerned \u2013 an overwhelming conflict of interest would be declared these days \u2013 so it was hard to be appropriately objective. Excellence is not quite as simple as we might all wish to believe.<\/p>\n

What about excellence in a career? It\u2019s a question on which I\u2019m personally reflecting post-retirement, since I\u2019m not sure (not least because of the Matthew Effect) that I should be judged by grant income, let alone by the letters after my name. Those criteria seem insufficient to define a life well-lived. Nor am I at all sure that phrase amounts to the same thing as excellence. When I was living in the USA, Jimmy Carter became President, with his implicit motto the title of his book Why Not the Best?<\/em> published in 1976, the year before he took up the mantle. As a young idealist, it struck me at the time as a wonderful tagline (although I never read the book), but \u2018best\u2019 like \u2018excellence\u2019 is a hard word to capture.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m left pondering, have I done enough for society, whether or not it is called impact? Does the fact I haven\u2019t invented a wonderful widget outscore on the negative side any positive points I might have scored through my work as gender champion? Was it \u2018better\u2019 or \u2018worse\u2019 (for whom, one might ask) that my research career faded out somewhat accidentally when I became gender champion simultaneously with chairing the Royal Society\u2019s Education Committee? Both those were immensely rewarding roles, if also frustrating upon occasion, but how should I have weighed up at the time the cessation of my research, particularly as I was so busy that I didn\u2019t spot for a long time that I had failed to apply for further grants? One can torture oneself indefinitely along these lines!<\/p>\n

Questions, questions, there are undoubtedly more questions in this blogpost than usual, because it seems to me these are all important if unanswerable questions. As we, in the UK, hope we are emerging from the worst of the pandemic, as vaccinations (now there\u2019s<\/u> some work no one needs doubt was excellent!) take hold and more and more of the adult population have some protection, there is much of which to take stock. Of the way our lives, teaching, meetings and so on have changed. I agree with all those who say we are working even harder now than ever. I may not have had the burden of recording lectures, for which I am duly grateful, but there have been far too many days of non-stop meetings, with barely time for mugs of coffee, lunch or the requisite comfort breaks.<\/p>\n

My levels of exercise have plummeted now I no longer cycle into town for meetings (or dinners!) let alone further to the railway station on the other side of Cambridge once or twice a week. I am sure I am not alone in living a life apparently glued to my computer chair. Yet I seem to have no more time because of that travelling time I\u2019m saving. On the contrary. Somehow, in this Covid life, intensity increases but well-being does not. What of this changed life should we carry over to the brave new world we may be lucky enough to face at the start of the new academic year. I sense everyone is hedging their bets about how much will be face-to-face. For instance, I do wonder if our colleagues much further from London will decide that getting on a train (let alone a plane) from the further flung parts of the UK to attend a two hour meeting just isn\u2019t worth the effort. For them zoom may continue to be a major part of their life. Alternatively they may feel trains continue to offer \u2013 as I have regularly found \u2013 a great space away from other people to sit and read a thesis or thick wadge of committee papers.<\/p>\n

Who knows how things will settle down in a year or two! And will that way of life be \u2018excellent\u2019, better than what we had before, or will it simply be another botched job as we move from crisis to crisis?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politicians toss around phrases like \u2018levelling up\u2019 and \u2018build back better\u2019, not to mention \u2018freedom of speech\u2019, with gay abandon. Such words sound so positive and authoritative, what could be the problem? As many people have pointed out, however, there … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,10,19],"tags":[994,612,175,1317,121],"class_list":["post-6198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers","category-research","category-science-funding","tag-bias","tag-erc","tag-grant-giving-panels","tag-matthew-effect","tag-ref"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}