Some realities of academic life (a little bit lighthearted in parts but only a little 🤣)

[Gardenlover121]

As I come close to my retirement, I’ve reflected on some aspects of academic life. For info, I’m a Prof in a business subject, worked in 8 universities, been in a number of promoted roles too. I’m sure you can add to this list. Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Conferences
Taxpayer funded jollies, mostly in attractive tourist destinations, where many pompous middle aged professors perve on younger academics. If you are attractive, they really aren’t interested in your paper. You may be flattered if they offer to critique your work, co-write a journal paper, or otherwise help you publish. That bit generally won’t happen.

Journal papers
The academic press have really done a number on academic writers. We spend months or sometimes years working away on our papers for free as it often has to be fitted in during weekends and evenings. Sometimes we even review other academics papers or edit journals, again all for no money. We go through a sometimes brutal review process in which some reviewers are obviously on a power trip and see themselves as adversaries to gatekeep new ideas out so their own little area of interest is protected. When you finally get published, sometimes you have to pay a publishing fee too. Approximately 4 people, on average, will think your paper is useful enough to cite.

Books
See mostly above. In many areas, books, unless research based, don’t even count for the ref. You also need to come up with a load of online resources for a textbook. As in most publishing, a few people will make a lot of money and most of us make enough for a week’s holiday somewhere not too exotic. Royalty levels for me were 50p a book with a retail price of over £60.

Student support and wellbeing roles as part of your workload
Doesn’t count at all towards promotion. There is a reason most of these roles are avoided by males. Similarly most roles such as PL, being members or even chair of committees such as ethical approval, plagiarism, etc. Expected that you do something to show you are willing but pick the least onerous roles that you can.

Internal promoted roles or secondments such as research director, head of learning, or impact lead etc.
These roles are often not open competition as upper management have already approached the person they want but they go through a sham process so as to appear fair.

Promotions
For every academic level, the proportion of women roughly halves. Principle or senior lecturer percentage is half of lecturer percentage, and Prof is halved again. There is no real alleviation for a “missing” publication year because you have taken maternity leave. I’ve been on some promotion panels where men have questioned what the woman did in their year “off”. You can imagine my response!

i like this!

i ll add one

research funding
after a tortuous application stage, coaxing co-applicants in writing their section, and finally writing it for them, comes several months of anticipation before reading the scores (a mix of every possible score, but typically a 1, a 3, a 5 and a 6) and idiotic feedback written by someone who probably does not work in the area. if you are (un?)lucky, being funded means a bucket full of HR and finance work, with contract work on top, and the joy of now "leading the research" aka doing it evening and WE since your buyout is "modest" - hell yeah, 1hour per week is hardly going to work out, is it? If the work is all done by the end of the three years, you are most likely short of a postdoc (they left 4 month before the end to another short term contract), so it s you writing the papers...

Yes, brilliant post and very true. I didn’t include funding is not such a big deal in business but kind of the same deal with knowledge transfer partnerships. Similar application forms (shorter tho) but more or less the same deal in terms of like 3 or more actual hours worked for every funded / workload hour so again free work.

Conferences

Taxpayer funded jollies, mostly in attractive tourist destinations, where many pompous middle aged professors perve on younger academics.

Oh, if only!

The Humanities version:

Self-funded weekend work, generally accommodation in student halls, anywhere that bid for this year's scholarly association conference, where entitled female ECRs berate female middle-aged professors for daring to stay in their jobs, instead of getting out of the way.

Absolutely agree with this. I hate conferences. Not remotely enjoyable and have never opened up any new opportunities. Is this just a Humanities thing?

Oh no, I really love conferences! I always find that I have interesting conversations and indeed, new opportunities. It's how I have really good networks and get asked to do things. Anyone who doesn't go to at least the main conference for their discipline each year, isn't really interested in extending their reach, IMO.

But they are not tax-payer funded jollies to nice places in the UK humanities.

I’m just utterly shite in promoting myself. I know that’s a problem in academia. Conferences are my idea of hell.

But it's not "promoting yourself" - it's chatting to interesting people about things of mutual interest, and getting excited about new and interesting research!

Really agree with your comments regarding administrative roles OP. Nowadays, when trying to ascertain whether taking up a certain admin role will be good for my career or will be mostly a lot of drudgery for very little reward, the question I ask myself is, "are male colleagues fighting each other for this role or is this something that they "save" for the helpful female colleague?".

Humanities academics - sorry you seem to be getting a bad deal on conferences. For business, I usually had a wide range to choose from and have been to Yale, California, Italy, Spain, France, London, Gleneagles, Malaysia to name a few. But same old shit so I gave them up about a decade ago. Not worth what I agree with at the @theferry idea as a special kind of hell.

@aridapricot you can bet your salary that most males are not fighting for any kind of non promotion counting admin role whatsoever. Most might grudgingly take on a minimum effort role, do it just enough to keep management off their backs, and that’s it.

@theferry you can do lots of promotion online. I’ll do a post tomorrow about that.

And then of course your ‘reach’, along with your profile, networks and promotion prospects, is screwed if you are a single parent with no childcare and a legal struggle to leave the jurisdiction with DC.

I do recall reading a rather brilliant paper by a woman about the way in which academia was designed for the unencumbered (male) scholar. The modern day version is that you need a supportive husband, equal partnership and/or other support network if you have children. I remember going to an event to mark international women’s day some years ago when I was first a single parent. Six of the seven women speakers referenced their supportive husbands. One women spoke only and solely about her research and why she had been drawn to it.

I am not disputing that conferences and new institutions are great for profile and networking; but there are the systematic inequalities built into the expectation that everyone is able to do this, and in the reality that doing this is important for promotion.

What about teaching:

Teaching
Spend weeks developing innovative, inclusive, decolonized, diversified, dialogical, dialectic, research-led, agenda-setting teaching and assessment approaches and materials that will challenge students to work independently to achieve their potential and will equip students with key employability skills for an agile graduate jobs market.

Attendance goes into free-fall from day one with approximately eight students left in lectures by Christmas. Half of the supposed digital natives can't make head nor tits of how to access the online resources. Of the other half, a quarter can access the materials but don't bother. The remaining twenty five percent do the reading but either totally misunderstand it or are too shy to actually talk about it. To avoid silences, emails and self-harm, you descend into spoon-feeding. Just tiny teaspoons of information at first to nudge the students along, but by the end of term you're basically ladling knowledge into their faces.

We limp towards the end of term and end on a high note with After Eights to pass around in the final lecture. Then student evaluations roll in at a response rate of 14% which earns you a bollocking from the head of department. They're mostly okay apart from one student taking issue with the green jumper you wore in week three; another student accusing your Christmas After Eight gesture of imperialism because of the colonial powers of Christianity and the inherent colonial extractivism of chocolate production; and another student offering you advice on how to more sensitively refer to men in dresses based on a comment completely unrelated to your teaching that you made on Twitter back in April 2018.

This is pretty much the same in social sciences. The point about entitled female ECRs is absolutely on the nose.

I haven't been to a conference since 2019 and doubt I'll ever bother again to be honest.

That's all so true re teaching @KStockHERO !

This is painfully true.

I like my job & don't identify with most of these comments, esp. not the negative ones.

@MedSchoolRat you may well be one of the lucky few working in a lovely supportive and collegial environment... not seen at my institution since pre covid. We re getting battered with VS threats and it s all-round low mood.

How do you keep positive - especially with the admin, management and teaching side of things?

@MedSchoolRat I like my job too! I am staying on way past retirement because I know if I retired, I'd just keep doing what IU'm doing, so they may as well pay me for it (getting back all the 60 hours weeks I've worked over the last 40 years)

And I'd rather go to a conference than go on a beach holiday.

But it doesn't mean I don't recognise the bits of truth in @Gardenlover121 's post!

I like my job too. I'm paid very handsomely for an interesting job with huge flexibility, inherent autonomy, and very minimal accountability.
Sometimes the students are even okay(-ish) 😂

But I won't be staying in academia a microsecond past my 50th birthday at the very, very, very latest. I shall drop everything in the digital and physical bin on my way out and never think of it again.
For now, its a very good way to earn a living. But, like PP said, I can still recognise the truths about the negative parts.

How do you keep positive - especially with the admin, management and teaching side of things?

My job in academia has little of those 3 things. OP didn't list those 3 things. To the extent my job includes any of the aspects OP did mention, I enjoy those aspects /or/ I don't have them (eg no promotions).

Or I can blame menopause for the boundless positivity. That's fine, too.