According to this article a third of academics in the UK want to quit. And I thought it was just me… Of course, dissatisfaction is hardly unique to staff in higher education—who doesn’t want more money and less work? But this survey did confirm my impression that the situation has got markedly worse over the past few years.

The article reminded me that I’ve been meaning to comment on an interesting view of biologists by Maciej Ceglowski (a non-biologist) for some time—but hey, I’ve been suffering from workload-related stress.

Maciej comments on the “web of trust” in academia:

We don’t normally think about cultural norms in science, because it is supposed to be a dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. And after all, many famous scientists were also famous misanthropes. But just because the regular social rules don’t apply to scientists doesn’t mean they don’t have their own set of norms, equally strong. Some of them are strong enough to be taboos. You always cite other people’s work. You publish results in scientific journals, and adopt an impersonal written style. You attend conferences and referee others’ work.

These cultural norms are indeed important, and much of academia rests on this kind of “reputation economy”: the more eminent you become, the more you are expected to perform altruistic duties. These include refereeing papers, writing references for more junior colleagues, editing journals, sitting on grant-awarding panels and so on. The problem is that you are expected to do world-class research, manage a research group, deal with piles of administration, teach and do all of the altruistic duties. These extra tasks are generally unpaid and unacknowledged. Most academics I know are in it for love and not money—just as well given the fact that pay scales have barely kept up with inflation – but some kind of remuneration for all the extra stuff would at least acknowledge that we are professionals doing a professional job. But funding is getting harder and harder to find, and teaching takes up more time as the government tries to get more students into higher education (without providing any more money). I really don’t know how long the system can continue as it is before it collapses.