careers

A jeremiad from Henry Bourne: "Writing on the wall" [1].

Competition drives scientific discovery, but too much competition for scarce resources can block progress, and has done so. Thus, the growing flood of grant applications surpasses growth in NIH dollars, reduces the proportion of grants that are funded, and renders peer review increasingly arbitrary because a project ranked in the 20th percentile is often no less meritorious than one ranked in the 10th percentile (Berg, 2013).

Another problem is that we now have a ‘holding tank' of postdoctoral scholars that is overflowing with bright young scientists who are indentured to greying lab chiefs and are thus unable to break new ground as independent researchers (Bourne, 2012). The worst consequence, but harder to quantify, is that scientists avoid risky, creative projects in favour of ‘sure things’ more likely to be funded by conservative reviewers (Nicholson and Ioannidis, 2012).

Probably most people who have thought about these problems recognize the fundamental catch-22 represented by centralized funding of science. It would be more efficient of time, training, and human capital of all kinds to simply pick a limited number of "winners" early in their careers, provide adequate funding to a relatively small number of institutes, and turn excess talent away at the door. But large institutes often breed groupthink and complacency. There is no accurate indicator of "talent" that would allow selection of those who will achieve great scientific findings from the vast pool of undergraduates. And forcing people to compete every so often does provide a mechanism for cutting out deadwood. That is to say, the likeliest alternative to the current system has lots of obvious problems.

Yet as Bourne and many others say, granting agencies have become the main drivers of groupthink and complacency, we have set up a system where talented creative people are actively turned away from science careers, and no "deadwood" is ever actually cut out of the system because networks of greyhairs protect each other zealously.

I want to draw attention to the comment section of the essay, which has a series of thoughtful exchanges. This passage from Bourne deserves to be front-paged:

A more vexing and crucial problem is that even the faculty who agree with me remain silent and virtually inert. They worry constantly about difficulties getting grants funded, and (correctly) feel pressured to spend most of their time writing grant applications, scrambling to support students and postdocs, and wrangling with prestigious journals. These pressures combine with habituation (in earlier years) to a friendlier funding climate to impose a devastating inertia.

My instinct is that we need to democratize the process of science. A wider group of researchers should have power, not just a stake in the results.

References

I was pointed yesterday to a paper by Pablo Jensen and colleagues on the relationship between outreach activity and academic productivity [1]:

Scientists who engage with society perform better academically

Most scientific institutions acknowledge the importance of opening the so-called 'ivory tower' of academic research through popularization, industrial collaboration or teaching. However, little is known about the actual openness of scientific institutions and how their proclaimed priorities translate into concrete measures. This paper gives an idea of some actual practices by studying three key points: the proportion of researchers who are active in wider dissemination, the academic productivity of these scientists, and the institutional recognition of their wider dissemination activities in terms of their careers. We analyze extensive data about the academic production, career recognition and teaching or public/industrial outreach of several thousand of scientists, from many disciplines, from France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. We find that, contrary to what is often suggested, scientists active in wider dissemination are also more active academically. However, their dissemination activities have almost no impact (positive or negative) on their careers.

I think this is a little old now (from 2008) and it would be useful to track down subsequent treatments. Also, the CNRS is probably not the best model for scientists in other systems. An important confounding variable is the amount of teaching that scientists do, which may increase outreach in some ways (by requiring regular practice communicating with students) but takes time away from some opportunities for public engagement.

References

I have to drive some more traffic to this post on Forbes' website ("The least stressful jobs of 2013"), because it has me laughing out loud. Number one on the list is "University Professor". The comments section already has the author of the post backtracking away from what she wrote, which is ludicrous:

University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.

Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on Careercast.com’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013.

I'm so glad I don't deal with all the stress of being paid over the summer, and I'm now looking forward to the stress-free prospect of having my colleagues replaced by adjuncts over the next few years. Those non-mandatory conferences are so awesome I'm glad to pay my own way. Thanks, Forbes!

More seriously, it is possible to be a university professor without a lot of stress. I feel great about my work for exactly the reasons the Forbes post suggests -- for me it is important to operate independently, being in control of my own work. But many other professors don't respond to that opportunity by reducing their internal stress level, and pre-tenure is highly stressful for everyone.

And beyond research, all the other demands of the job are increasing greatly as administration grows and teaching staff shrinks. Definitely not a job that is decreasing in stress over the next year.

Mark Dawson's story, "Why I chose not to get a PhD", has been online for a few months and is well worth reading for prospective anthropology students.

Was all my education and training a waste? Hardly. I was a trained anthropologist, with extensive technical expertise, had years of experience watching how people interact with technology, and had a couple of years’ experience in a consulting environment from my previous graduate degree. Those were all qualifications people were looking for. Once I cracked the code of what I wanted to do, and where it was valued, I was fielding multiple offers precisely due to all the effort I initially thought I had wasted by not getting the PhD.

It takes luck and hard work to make anthropological training into a career. More work than luck. "Watching how people interact" sounds easy enough, but doing it systematically, being able to abstract information from the observations, finding ways to add value by writing about that information for a specific audience -- these are hard things, even for academic work. And there's a lot of unreadable academic work out there, which may once have made a line on someone's CV, but added no value for anyone else. Hard work helps more than a degree, even if you're limiting yourself to an academic career.