Being an incentive, being an obstacle, being values

I came here to do teaching (40%) and research (40%), and because it’s expected, to help with administration (20%); but the teaching semester is over, and I’m too tired to read another paper.

But I’ve been sitting in committees, talking to and observing colleagues whom I greatly respect, and who have made me think more about how to do this other 20%, and why. So, a few thoughts about it.

I think most academics don’t particularly want to do this type of work, and we aren’t particularly qualified or trained for it. I used to wonder why we do it. But ok, there are a few reasons.

• Over the centuries, we have developed and internalised the principle that WE, academics, run the university.

• We are collegial: someone has to do it, we don’t want to make our colleagues take a disproportionate weight.

• Someone has to do it, and if the wrong person does it, they’ll make things worse.

• Do people do it for power? I remain sceptical, because the power is so little. I have come to see that leadership is sometimes more about service than about power. Again, someone has to make decisions and (the thinking goes) it’s faster than voting on everything.

• Some people want promotions and then it’s necessary to tick the box that is euphemistically labelled “contribution”.

Part of the 20% is writing value statements, and strategies, and planning. For example, we talk about research strategy: we want more research funding, proposals, hiring, ambitious research targets, metrics, top journals, reputation. We can’t direct individuals to write particular papers or proposals, so we try to make them want to: we incentivise.

I’ve always disliked that word, it sounds too much like Margaret Thatcher. Mea culpa, I have used it in committees myself, but I want to stop. Academics don’t need incentives to do the best research they can do. A bundle of research incentive is what an academic IS.

So if we want more and better research, I would prefer a different vocabulary: what are the obstacles, and what are the supports we could provide?

When I look in the mirror, and when I look around, I see people working hard towards research, sometimes achieving the things the university wants of us, sometimes not. When not, it’s not because of a lack of incentives or because of wrong incentives. It’s mostly because of time: that 40-40-20 usually becomes something like 50-40-50, and the most ambitious and forward-thinking research is the part that is most easily discarded under time pressure.

In our value statements, we usually say we value diversity, but our strategies and plans don’t quite live up that. Academics are themselves diverse. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all job description. The 40-40-20 model itself doesn’t fit everyone, and doesn’t fit every stage of the career. It is natural to focus more on different roles at different times, depending on opportunities and energy. Some of us are just not meant to be president, and not everyone has to lead large EU projects to contribute to research. Individuals sometimes manage to make other types of research contributions by forging productive partnerships, eg between people at different career stages, but it requires them to work against the system a bit, and subvert the expectations the University has written into its metrics.

(Let’s point out again that academics are diverse: I certainly don’t speak for everyone, nor for the University.)

It would be nice to discuss: How can we create space and roles and expectations or affordances for everyone to contribute to research in their own way? How can diverse colleagues contribute their abilities to the benefit of all, and receive appropriate recognition even when not hitting those metrics as written?

But really, my main point is that this type of recognition doesn’t matter, as valuable activities are already valued by the people doing them. Collegiality and gradual improvement and contributions in research and teaching - and sometimes, in administration - are their own reward. What we want is rather to make sure the university is not getting in the way.

And the university does get in the way. One academic told us: the day-to-day effect of these research targets is I wake up every day thinking about how far behind the target I am. That can only be demoralising.

The university wants PhD students to finish on time, which means within 4 years. But nowadays most students are expected to spend some months on taught courses (the “structured PhD”); some months in internships or placements, mandatory for some funding schemes; a week or two per year on preparing to meet and present to their research committee; some days on public outreach activities; and more. All of these are nice ideas. They add up to many months away from research.

The university suffers from a bias towards novelty. You can put a line on your cv for a new initiative with your name on it; but not for maintenance, not for asking whether a new initiative is sustainable, and not for fixing something that is broken, not for removing an unneeded process, not for saving everyone 5 minutes per day.

When they put these in, I took advantage of a feedback form to remind them that the previous generation of water fountains had been left to rot. Now this cup-washer has been out of service for far longer than it was in service.

So, we keep getting new processes and initiatives (and it seems I ended up talking about incentives after all), and each one takes another few minutes out of your research time.

My point is: we need to be much more ruthless about unnecessary demands on time.

Some of my colleagues are probably thinking, based on recent discussions in committees, that I’m kind of bolshie and difficult about university administration activities. Thank you, perhaps yes.

We’re organised into schools, which make up colleges, which make up the university. There are also cross-cutting research institutes. Sometimes when colleagues say “the university wants us to do X” - send generic marketing emails to our research co-authors in other institutions, to take one recent example - they mean the central university administration, distinguishing that distant body, “our bosses”, from the sensible, local, group of colleagues in the school. That is fair enough in a way. But in response I also want to say, there is no us and them. The university central administration is not the university. The deans and vice-presidents are not the university.

We ARE the university.

I should say again, that leadership in a university is (can be) a form of service. For better or worse, academics are keeping the job of running the place to ourselves. Someone has to make the decisions, take the responsibility, think about the issues most of us would rather not.

Now it sounds like I’m making an apologia for university administration, when my goal was to explain why I’m bolshie and difficult.

The university (ie, we) does not want us to lap up the strategy documents and produce research. Our public and social role does not want us to do that. We should not do that. We should be ready to question the ideas that come from the central university. At the same time, we should be collegial. When a colleague wants to pursue an initiative, it feels bad to get in their way. How to square this circle?

There is a good tv programme about this at the moment: Pluribus is about how, when you object to something everyone else is going along with, you look like an asshole. At least, that’s how I’m reading it this week. (It’s also about AI.)

But I think we have to object sometimes. When a new initiative is not going to work, someone has to say so. These initiatives are everywhere, because we are faced with problems that have no solutions. We want the university’s reputation to be bigger and better than it is. There are no easy actions to address this. But asking a committee is just like asking ChatGPT - if you ask for actions, it will confidently provide you some actions. Or just like the politician says: something has to be done, and this is something, therefore we must do this. (I remember well a good colleague showed me how I was making that mistake.)

The system grinds, pushing those actions down into lower-level committees. Lower-level committees respond with actions of their own. Every individual knows these actions will not help, but no committee can ever say that. If you’re on the committe and you say it - like the woman on Pluribus - you look like an asshole. Still, say it.

The university writes value statements. Sometimes we contribute to them, and sometimes perhaps we quote them.

But our real values are the values we assert in our work. Whatever is on the website has at best a distant relation to that.

When we see a student is about to be screwed over by a bad university policy, we may have an option to act to prevent that. Or when we see a new university policy that will militate against collegiality in our day-to-day work, we may have an option to speak against it. That is how our values become genuinely part of us, and that is how we earn the right to speak about values in the first place.