Academic parents - welcome to the Senior Common Room of Requirement

[BoffinMum]

Welcome to the Senior Common Room of Requirement. You find yourself in a discreet space with a view over rolling lawns from large period windows, and a roaring log fire, with the College dog asleep in front of it. A number of comfortable Chesterfields and wing-backed armchairs are thoughtfully positioned around antique occasional tables. A selection of reading matter is on the medieval chest near the entrance, including New Statesman, Economist, New Scientist, Nature, Prospect, THES, every conceivable daily paper, Spare Rib and the Socialist Worker. Peters, the College butler (sponsored by a successful alumnus with a top domestic employment agency, so at no cost to the public purse) is on hand to fulfil all necessary demands. This is the place for MNetters of academic leanings, and post docs and student parents are welcome to knock on the door should they require academic or pastoral advice. Sit back, quaff your sherry, Fair Trade coffee or even a smoothie made from fruit grown in the College grounds, and enjoy.

[teahouse]

I don't have a DH so have had to do a FT lecturing job (including evening teaching) with 2 kids and all the domestic stuff for over 5 years. Eldest now at Uni and youngest just on GCSE's so soon I may have some time to publish properly.

Get very fed up being told I'm not producing enough work. Academia still seems quite patriarchal anyway, and I'm not sure LP's are truely welcome (and not having enough publications puts me in the firing line for the upcoming redudancies at my place).

Time for some rum and coke - sorry but passing on the sherry (not my style ;o)

[antimony]

I think academia still largely runs on the assumption we all have wives to pick up the slack/domestic/index for us. Ok, I do have a female partner, but she is not doing my indexing!

[drivingmisscrazy]

antimony I have a female partner too, and she did once do an index (for cash) for me, not for love...

[BoffinMum]

I was in another SCR in Cambridge yesterday, as a guest. It did make me laugh. It was as though some people had sat down with a list of things that normally find in SCRs, as well as a corporate hotel furniture catalogue, and picked out all the 1980s repro furniture they could find. But get this, there were no fewer than FIVE kinds of sherry on offer! Fab.

[kidsnotgongs]

Hi there, mind if I join you? Are there any choccys left? Have enjoyed your talk very much. Have been a tenured academic in the past, now a research fellow. Thought I'd pass on something I heard at a staff meeting the other day. We have been undergoing a "restucturing" and consequently cutting our admin staff. Was interested to learn that there are still academics in our institution with their own personal secretaries. Apparently these academics are struggling because they will have no one to go out and buy thier wives/kids birthday cards. Made me feel so sad - poor dears!

[BoffinMum]

kids!

Right people, gather round. I have a job related issue and I need as much advice as you can all probably give me. Here is the story.

Currently I am a normal lecturer in a top 25 university, where I have been for 3.5 years. I want to apply for a SL post in the elite university where I used to work, and I have just decided sod it, I am going to give it a go, that's what the fellas do even if they haven't fulfilled all the requirements. I feel like kicking ass and just getting this job, so there.

Potential problems.

1. Research record. Have probably 10-12 publications on there now, majority grade 3-4 stuff, but in my most recent job I have been flogged to my knees with teaching so only have 1, possibly 2 items (study leave coming right up though, so expect to be REF ready however).
   

1. Track record in this dept. It trained me. I won funding for a project there at one point, which I did very successfully. It has a few rather self-obsessed people in there, and a couple of mad alpha females who have gone to the trouble of putting me down in the past (but many more who haven't). It has a reputation for being dysfunctional within the university, but then that is also a characteristic of the subject area.
   

1. Referees. Current research mentor spends a massive amount of time managing my expectations downwards in a vaguely depressive way. (Not even sure why I have to have a mentor actually).
   

Advice required: how best to gift wrap myself so I look like a credible candidate. Have already got in contact with one of the panel, who I knew quite well before and who has a reasonable amount of respect for me, what else could I be doing?

Any advice gratefully received.

[CaptainBarnacles]

Definitely go for it.

Be very clear in your CV about what your REF items will be, and why they are 3/4 star. Really spell out your plan of action - where are the articles going to be submitted, how much work needs to be done etc.

Generally, make your CV not just about what you have done/will do, but put in lots of detail about how brilliantly you have done it. Quotes from referees reports, invitations to speak at mega-prestigious events, that sort of thing. I saw a CV recently that was from a candidate punching well above their weight - it began with a couple of pages of bullet points about how fab they were. Very effective.

Also really go on about future projects, grant apps. etc. in your CV (I am sure I am teaching you to suck eggs here).

Think about presenting yourself as somebody who will be going for a chair in five years time - what would you want to achieve in order to do that?

Your track record sounds like a strength rather than a problem. If the mad alpha females try to put you down, surely you will just go up in the department's eyes? In any case, if our place if anything to go by, the dept. has fuck all say in appointments. One, maybe two people on the panel, but it's all about what the Dean wants really.

In my view most appointments are about fit. So make sure your CV and covering letter are all about how brilliantly you fit with the dept and will add value, potential collaborations etc.

Referees - hmmm. Perhaps kick research mentor to the curb? Have you got any international connections who could write for you, or is that not relevant in your field.

Good luck!

[BoffinMum]

Thanks for the advice, Cpn Barnacles. It sounds very helpful.

I just did a huge ERC bid so I bigged myself up in that a fair bit, and could borrow things from there.

I don't really know why the articles are 3/4 star, only that they were assessed as part of a practice RAE in a previous HEI and I was told I would have been entered if I had stayed, and they only entered 3/4 star items. And the two I have had published more recently were a book chapter and a (solid) journal article in a respectable second tier journal, and certainly to my mind better quality than the first batch of 4 RAE articles anyway (journal ranking is not supposed to be the be all and end all in the REF, as I understand it, and if it was, god help my discipline as the top journals really are rather self-serving).

In my current dept they recently appointed two people and binned absolutely everyone who wasn't REF ready (one year into the cycle!!), so didn't shortlist some better candidates (IMO) and ended up hiring a couple of people who while reasonable, were not going to be particularly glittering - for example one indeed had publications, but just joint authored things spun out from a PhD and nothing more in the pipeline. Can I assume this is not the case everywhere? And that there are more criteria applied to appointments elsewhere?

[chutneypig]

My experience has pretty much been as you describe, if the papers aren't in the bag then they're not interested ...... Which is very depressing. I think all you can do is be crystal clear in the covering letter about the really key things, how you see your REF return panning out, income streams and fit with the department. And then hope someone with clout has foresight!

[BoffinMum]

Would it constitute discrimination if they were applying selection criteria such as producing 4 papers in the 3 years since the RAE even if that had the effect of discriminating against everyone who had taken maternity leave since 2007?

[BoffinMum]

Let me rephrase that. I know they do discriminate, it's a notorious industry for that, but how best to shift things in a favourable direction taking that into account?

[CaptainBarnacles]

Here (RG) they would certainly appoint people who weren't REF ready - books are big in my field, so they often come out towards the end of the cycle. But they would expect a very clear sense of what you would expect to submit.

ERC bid sounds v. good.

[BoffinMum]

Phew
I think HEIs that are panicking about REF three years into the cycle are probably the ones who aren't going to get any dosh in the next round anyway ;.)

[qwertymcwerty]

Hi BoffinMum. I was on a selection panel in 2009, appointing at lecturer level, and I'm afraid REF-readyness was a criterion given to us for shortlisting, as well as being a question explicitly asked by the member of the panel who represented senior management.

This, in itself, is obviously idiotic bollocks and makes me want to throw myself in the river. However: we didn't have any candidate who had (or admitted to having) taken maternity leave in the REF period. Under those circumstances, my assumption is that we would have had to consider those as special cases, and a) consider that such candidates might not need to have 4 outputs for the REF in any case (please God - that's the situation I'm in), and b) take seriously their account of future research to be completed in the REF period.

Sorry if I'm speaking Institutionspeak. It's been a long day of Doing Admin, and I have become a drone.

One more thing - is there any chance you could use this application to try to wangle an SL out of your current institution? Ahem, not that I advocate such behaviour. But, y'know, it's still an idea...

[CaptainBarnacles]

To be fair to the institutions (if we must), there is a certain cynical logic to their thinking. We have been seriously burnt appointing people who were not REF-ready in the past. (None of whom were parents, by the by.) But it's still the right thing to do!

On the REF-maternity leave issue, we were told that there are definitely provisions for people to submit less than four outputs. Our institution, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that it will ignore this and only submit people with four (even if they could submit three outputs of an overall higher quality). Sometimes it's hard to believe they are not doing it deliberately....

[CaptainBarnacles]

PS Totally agree on using your application as leverage for a SL.

[lionheart]

Have marked my place (in the befuddled corner).

[BoffinMum]

CapnB, they are actually being discriminatory in that case, as I understand the law.

[qwertymcwerty]

I think our place has opted to only submit people with four outputs - that's certainly how I'm being instructed at the moment.

Sigh. Time for more port, I think (it's just after 9am, but I've been up since 5 with a fractious toddler, so surely the sun must be nearly over the yard arm by now?). Where's that butler gone?

[SnapFrakkleAndPop]

PG (non UK) with some teaching responsibilities, may I ask a question? Actually I hve two but one is a question about writing at PG level so I should probably keep that over in the students bit.

I'm 32 weeks gone and have 10 classes all with presentations which I'm supposed to assess over the next 5 weeks. I have planned everything so I'll be able to assess at least all of the second years (smaller classes so although the presentations are longer I can fit them all in) and most of the first years however I still have people turning up to my class in week 4 of term. I'm told I have to accept them (fair enough) but AIBU to hold them to the same standards as everyone else who has been there since the beginning regarding the prep work which they have to hand in before they can have a presentation date? Even if this means that they may not end up being assessed by me and by whoever is covering my ML instead?

Also how do I not shout at them?! I'm normally v even tempered person but the blatant lack of respect and the sheer not-being-bothered is really riling me.

[BoffinMum]

Snap, have a sherry.

Just scanned your post briefly but as a rule you can't get in trouble by following the university's assessment regulations to the letter at all times. Usually this means following a set of marking criteria that should stand alone regardless of who is doing the marking, with the caveat that something might need a bit of internal verification or second marking to be on the safe side. If you haven't got a set of marking criteria for presentations because nobody has bothered to write one, I am happy to send you ours.

Do not shout at students, it only gets you in trouble. Just ignore it, it's not your responsibility, because they are adults. If they want to be arseholes and waste their money, that's their problem. If anyone shouts at you, though, you can invoke the university's disciplinary code and by following that to the letter, get your own back that way.

[BoffinMum]

PS I always have one or two students whose attendance is rubbish but who end up beign brilliant and getting firsts. It the law of academe.

[SnapFrakkleAndPop]

Well there's marking criteria that one of my colleagues has and marking criteria that another of my colleagues has, neither of which are particularly clear and certainly nothing which constitutes 'if they have done X then they get 1, if they have done X and Y then they get 2, if they have done XYZ then they get 3 etc'.

[BoffinMum]

How on earth is everybody supposed to know who should get what mark?

You could always merge the two documents, add a few exemplars of different levels, and then dish them out for use as appropriate.

[BoffinMum]

If engagement is supposed to be one of the criteria this needs to have been made clear at the beginning of the course otherwise students could quite rightly complain that the requirement wasn't stated.