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Universities are in trouble. I know of three that are unable to hire for senior and middle positions. They've been advertising for months. Here (UK), Brexit is

• krastanov 4y ago
  What does "senior and middle positions" mean? Are you talking about something that has the potential to be a tenured position, non-tenured academic positions, or non-academic positions?
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    By senior I mean "senior or associate professors and lecturers" like myself, and by middle I mean postdoc full lecturers with at least 5-10 years. I don't know what to say about the word "tenured" because it's meaning seems very different in the UK than it is used in USA. In the US I get the idea people think "tenure" makes you impossible fire. Yet here I know of two full professors with over 20 years service, scores of publications and teaching awards in their pockets who were "let go" (forced quit). I know many more who are planning to quit, and there seems a dearth of replacements to step into their shoes.
    • pmyteh 4y ago
      Where are you based?
      • nonrandomstring 4y ago
        Institutions? I'm actually really lucky in that I teach internationally at multiple institutions, university and non-university. What's useful and interesting is it gives me a broad taste of politics (as well as a way to stay out of the melee). That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some private and state entities are thriving. What is killing the universities, in my opinion, is they're caught in a no-mans-land, as neither fully state entities, nor private concerns.
        • pmyteh 4y ago
          Ah, interesting. Yes, our current position is deeply unhelpful. State enough that VCs will jump to follow some arbitrary after-dinner speech by the Minister, but private enough that we're competing in a 'market' with each other and carry a bunch of financial risks directly. Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • arghnoname 4y ago
      I had the training and a reasonable chance at an acceptable offer if I went on the academic job market, but I bailed out and went into industry instead of trying my hand on it. To my mind, it doesn't make sense to try to break into and establish yourself in such a competitive field with all of the problems of academia. I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the field, which didn't encourage me to backfill it. Strangely enough, whatever difficulty there may be in the more senior ranks, entry sure seems like a grind.
      • TSiege 4y ago
        Interesting. Are you in STEM or some other field? As an outsider I'm curious if this is specific to some fields or the same across academia
        • nonrandomstring 4y ago
          CS/EE, so yeah, the blight affects all areas, even the ones you'd imagine were "safer".
        • arghnoname 4y ago
          I was CS
  • pmyteh 4y ago
    We don't have tenure as such in the UK (it was abolished by Thatcher). We do have jobs with permanent contracts; these used to be really quite secure (occasional department-closure redundancies notwithstanding) but the current batch of senior managers seem keen to make everyone afraid for their jobs. My own university (Liverpool) attempted more than 50 redundancies on the basis of dodgy performance metrics last year and generated six months worth of industrial action. There are also (increasing) numbers of teaching and research staff on casual and temporary contracts. Some of these are postdocs, others equivalent to US adjuncts or Visiting Assistant Professors. Our middle and senior management are increasingly a separate class. It used to be that management was done by established academics on a temporary basis: the department's full professors take their turn as head of department, for example, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors (deputy Presidents) would have recently been senior profs. Nowadays, heads of department tend to be externally recruited as such, there's an increasing group of senior management that have never been academics, and those that have been are essentially part of a separate management track that doesn't really interact with the career paths of the rest of us. The traditional governance measures have also broken down: it used to be that the faculty Senate was (probably over-)powerful; now management is corporate-style in the hands of Vice Chancellors-as-CEOs with their senior management colleagues and carefully selected 'independent' non-execs serving as oversight.
    • pyuser583 4y ago
      I’m really sorry to hear this. I was hoping the UK universities had avoided this.
• randomsearch 4y ago
  > As I've said in other comments, the main problem is that academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling as good people leave. As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
• JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  >unable to hire for senior and middle positions As usual with these claims, chances are it's due to the fact that these positions don't pay enough to be competitive.
  • pvaldes 4y ago
    And the surrealist list of artificial obstacles and requisites unrelated with the job, (but copy-pasted since middle ages by inertia in each job offer) will alienate your desired target
  • lozenge 4y ago
    Maybe, but UK universities don't have much headroom. They can't raise their student fees past the government set level; the government funding per student has decreased; only the oldest institutions have massive endowments; and they don't spend crazy amounts on sport, admin or pampering students. Some of them can try to squeeze their student base a bit more (increase accommodation prices, reduce subsidies in the food halls, etc) but the students don't have access to private loans so they can't afford much.
    • pmyteh 4y ago
      Honestly, I don't think this would be such a problem if the job wasn't getting so grim. It's HR 101 that salaries help with recruitment but are less important for retention and that a cash raise can't substitute for a poor working environment. Even with the 20% salary cuts of the last decade I don't think they'd have much trouble obtaining enough staff (outside London) if people felt respected.
    • jknoepfler 4y ago
      I mean... If the voters won't pay more taxes to fund their own educational institutions, then that's that yeah? The people are letting their centers of learning rot because they don't value them.
      • anonymousDan 4y ago
• cehrlich 4y ago
  I don't know about other parts of the UK, but I interviewed for some (senior) lecturer positions last year and the salary was a joke by London standards. I'm not comparing to lofty SWE salaries here, but just compared to what it takes to make a decent living in London.
  • bingohbangoh 4y ago
    More broadly, the general job market -- "there are so many available!" -- seems to be cities bit by higher than expected CoL increases. Academia seems to be the same. Nobody wants to earn $20/hr at Starbucks if I have to pay $2k/mo for rent.
  • orbifold 4y ago
    PostDoc salaries in BayArea Universities are 1/2 or less of what a junior engineer makes. You can literally consult the tables at https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/income-limits/state-and-federal-income-limits/docs/income-limits-2021.pdf https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/income-limits/state-an... that a NIH postdoc would pay you an extremely low - low income. Other countries like Germany or Switzerland at least pay somewhat decently (Germany 3x above media income). I got an offers to work on several really cool projects, but the pay is at poverty level basically.
    • the_only_law 4y ago
      See I could probably stomach a PhD, yes it’s going to be a shock in QoL, but it’s not too long, and can be a useful credential. But the post doc stuff feels like ritual hazing. Poverty wages for highly educated, highly skilled individuals for even more years. It seems like medical residencies, but you’re never going to see the type of money the physician will after paying dues.
• pvaldes 4y ago
  This didn't started with covid19. It started with Bologne.
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    I'm not sure which parts of the Bologna process drove these changes, can you clarify?
    • pvaldes 4y ago
      All that I can say is that more than half of my department quit soon after Bologna. The decade of the big scam was terrible for doing science also. The trust between politicians and scientists was destroyed deliberately by the first. Covid was just the last nail in the coffin.
• robwwilliams 4y ago
  Yes, “professional management” and serious compliance overhead are producing a byzantine system.
• pjc50 4y ago
  > the main problem is that academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling as good people leave. This hits the nail on the head. Everyone I know in academia is there despite their management. One had to leave the UK for the US in order to progress her career. The ongoing pensions fiasco has produced some extraordinary responses. Some universities are threatening to withdraw a whole month's pay for any strike action, not just for the period of the strike. Strike action is likely to hit exams: https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1531245496190128131 https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1531245496190128131 , with the result that universities are trying to outsource and automate marking (a lower quality product for which students will be charged the same amount). Inflation over the course of this year is likely to be 10%. Pay offers are in the region of 2%, with pension cuts of up to 40%. Staff are going on strike simply to maintain their pay levels. Marketisation has ruined the concept of the university. It's now seen as a place for manufacturing Education Units (to be sold to students) and Research Units. The staff on the Unit production line are therefore as metric-driven as Uber drivers. And there are attempts to casualise them similarly. Nobody senior or in government really cares about the content of the Units, only how they're ranked by the Unit Assessment System (RAE). The culture war is also squarely pointed at universities, which are in and of themselves a threat to the right-wing, apart from the top two or three which are required for elite reproduction.
  • erddfre3423 4y ago
  • rosegepi 4y ago
    This Nature piece is basically describing me. I was a tenured associate professor who left for several reasons, but one big one was a dramatic change in the university and department's culture, especially in their administrative and management values. It's somewhat validating to see this phenomenon get attention in an outlet like Nature, but likely too little too late. I did interview at a university in the UK before I left -- one well known to HN is my guess. My impression from discussions there is that the UK and EU has been insulated from many of the trends in the US, but at least in the UK, there has been a shift to adopting some US practices. There are rational reasons for this but my impression was that it was already creating some of the same problems as in the US. In general, my impression is that the US and UK academic sectors are starting to resemble one another much more than was the case historically. I've gone back and forth about whether or not leaving was the right decision. For a long time I didn't regret it at all, but now I often wonder if staying was the right choice despite all the problems. It's become distant enough in time I now have difficulty remembering everything though, so it's easy to remember certain feelings and thoughts more than others. The US university system is often held up as one of civilization's great achievements. However, to me the system is fundamentally broken. I often can't discern if that's just my sour grapes opinion, or if the US university system is somehow riding the coattails of previous decades. I'm partially saying this cathartically, but partly because I worry about the rest of the world seeing the current US academic system as something to emulate, as opposed to what it was 50 years ago. Everything you're saying is exactly right on the money in my opinion, though. Especially about marketisation. The problem with marketisation as applied to academics, I think, is that it mistakes short-term market metrics with long-term real value. My sense in discussing things with colleagues is that a lot of this is location-specific. That is, there are enormous pressures in academics right now, and a lot of someone's experience depends on having an environment that is supportive and constructive. If you end up someplace fundamentally dysfunctional or abusive, it's decimating to your ability to function. Conversely, if you end up someplace where there are at least some reasonable individuals at the helm, with checks and balances, and an environment of looking to help each other succeed, a lot of the problems can be mitigated. I think that could be said of almost any vocation, but in academics it's especially important because there's so few degrees of freedom.