Last week’s Academics Anonymous, in which a senior academic aired their concerns about unethical behaviour they had witnessed on the part of academics, provoked strong responses from the Higher Education Network community.
Several comments under the article and on Twitter took exception to what was seen as an unsubstantiated attack on members of the academic community at a time when the sector is already under strain.
Here are some of the points you made:
@TraceLarkhall This only gives more ammo to a govt taking aim at the sector based on anecdote/bias
@spinachiara1 And unethical PhD students are unethical academics in the making – too bad as teaching is where academia has a real impact.
@louisemoody Of various things to complain about, moonlighting academics are not one (most barely have enough time to do 1 job!)
We invited readers to respond via email if they wished, and two academics took the opportunity to express themselves at greater length. Here are extracts from what they had to say:
Ridiculously dedicated
The author claims to have witnessed university academics hiring unethically, exploiting staff, and abusing their positions for their own financial gain. This leads to the conclusion that the unethical behaviour in academia is “systemic”, and that “a culture of immoral behaviour is thriving at our universities”.
It may be that some of the specific claims about unethical practice in academia are true... but to imply that the actions witnessed by one person represent the wider academic community is not just lazy and wrong, but downright irresponsible.
In any career sector there are unpleasant people who do unpleasant things, and academia is definitely no exception to this. But my impression of academia is that it generally consists of people who are ridiculously dedicated, with a clear sense of responsibility and ethical grounding.
Most academics have no choice but to work very hard indeed. They have to find more grant funding than ever in a climate of dwindling resources. They are under increasing pressure to supervise large research groups, and large numbers of articles in high-profile journals. They often have to carry out multiple administrative roles within their departments, attend meetings, sit on panels and run training events. And of course, they must manage hefty teaching and marking loads.
Far from being an easy ride that favours the unscrupulous, academia is a high-pressure career, and people stick with it because they love research and teaching...
So rather than throw around unspecific claims that are unrepresentative and damaging of academia and universities, let’s tackle problems when we see them, and give each other the credit we deserve. This is especially prescient in the current political climate. At a time when “people have had enough of experts”, the experts should be giving each other as much support as they can.
Lewis Spurgin, researcher, school of biological sciences, University of East Anglia
Distorted picture
[This] is a hugely distorted picture of academics and the environment we work in. First off, let’s get this straight, if you are teaching law, or medicine, or architecture, or art, or English, or drama (I could go on), then you’re going to be a really bad teacher if you don’t engage in some form of professional practice, which, shock horror, you might occasionally be paid for. If academics do not sharpen their intellectual tools in an applied setting, then people training to be things like, oh, I don’t know, surgeons, might not necessarily acquire the latest cutting edge (no pun intended) skills you might want them to have as they’re slicing down on your aorta... If you are paid for it then this is something academics are contractually obliged to declare to their university employer...
And if we want to talk about people in universities who earn an awful lot of money for not doing a great deal more than the staff they employ we could look no further than university executive pay. Vice-chancellor pay increased on average at six times the rate of academic staff last year...
It is truly as if our anonymous academic is living in a reverse reality, where academics swan around working one day a week while they pick up at least one or even more full-time salaries. The reality for far more academics, as the Guardian itself has extensively covered, is one of zero-hours contracts, or a series of fractional contracts, otherwise known as the ‘casualisation’ of the sector, a process that leads to precarity and mental distress for many, rather than the enrichment our anonymous academic seems to think characterises the sector...
This kind of nonsense about freeloading public sector employees is continually thrown at public sector bureaucracies. All large (public and private) bureaucracies will suffer from a number of practices that might fall somewhere along the spectrum of freeloading, or even overt corruption. But if that is intrinsic to large bureaucracies, with high turnovers of staff, some of whom may for a variety of reasons engage in self-interested and socially antithetical behaviour, it is not necessarily rational to deduce that all bureaucracy is necessarily bad...
To suggest that because there may be some individual, or even systemic corruption, and that this suddenly invalidates the entire public mission of the university is illogical and also part of a pernicious and largely successful attempt to undermine public confidence in publicly funded (or in the case of universities, public-private funded) institutions. It does no good when one of our own joins in this mission to undermine the public university.
Dr Clive Gabay, senior lecturer in international politics, Queen Mary University of London
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