Universities are increasingly run like businesses hungry for performance benchmarks, disconnected from the way scientists themselves would like their research evaluated
Due to the high-profile coverage in the science community, the recent suicide of Stefan Grimm, a professor of toxicology in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, UK, has reignited the debate around the nature of research work. Universities are now more in the money-making education business rather than merely the business of education. And vice-chancellors’ pay packets rival those of top private-sector CEOs. So how should these universities judge their researchers? In turn, what are the pressures that universities are subjected to, making them assess their staff in certain ways? Moreover, what can be done to prevent dedicated and successful scientists feel so pressured and downtrodden as to take their own lives? EuroScientist looks for some elements of response to these crucial questions of how scientists are considered by their own institutions.
Grimm’s story
“If anyone is interested how Professors are treated at Imperial College: Here is my story.”
So began a valedictory email from Grimm to colleagues. Sadly, it was written just before his death in an apparent suicide. The email goes on to lambast the culture at Imperial, which he described as “publish and perish”, a dark and ironic twist on the “publish or perish” phrase mooted by stressed academics trying to keep up in the publications rat race.
Grimm went on to complain that “Grant income is all that counts here, not scientific output.” And detailed how the college was taking informal proceedings to remove him from his post. He had been told by email that he was “struggling to fulfil the metrics” of a professorial post at the institution, “which include maintaining established funding in a programme of research with an attributable share of research spend of £200k [€270,000 per annum]”. Grimm had had at least four papers published and had £130,000 –€170,000—of funding in the year before his death.
The story and email thread went viral after it was published by David Colquhoun, emeritus professor of pharmacology at University College London, UK. According to a follow-up article it has been viewed by more than 160,000 people from over 200 countries, clearly hitting a sensitive spot in people who work in or near the modern research landscape. “I think it is very much driven the perverse incentives of the vice chancellors who want to go to the top of the ranking tables,” says Colquhoun, who broke the story on his award-winning blog.
It is very difficult to assess the rate of death related to pressure academics are being subjected to across Europe. Reasons for committing the irreversible also vary considerably, while such incidents remain isolated. For example, a French philosophy academic, Marie-Claude Lorne, from the University of Brest took her own life in 2008 after she failed to be appointed in a permanent position. More recently, in 2012, Jürgen Koebke, the former director of the Anatomy Institute at the University of Cologne, Germany, did the same following an investigation over irregularities in the storage of corpses donated to medicine, which failed to be buried in a timely manner. Another case emerged in the UK at the end of 2014. It was that of Nigel Veitch, a senior phytochemist at Kew Garden, a plant research and conservation centre, in London, UK. He had also been found dead. According to The UK Times, the scientist had been told he would have to reapply for his own job following a financial shortfall and subsequent restructuring at Kew.
However, because it has been widely reported, the recent UK tragedy of Stefan Grimm, has focused attention on academia’s current problems. These issues of pressure in academia are not unique to the UK as educational reforms gather pace, such as in France for example, which plans a new mega-university to counter the countries absence in the global top 20. Following reform in the previous years, the universities were faced with the necessity to become financially and operationally autonomous from the State. The move has left many universities struggling. And it has resulted in undue pressure on researchers.
Top of the table
Colquhoun thinks that university vice chancellors should stop paying attention to ranking systems. “There are many of them and they all give different answers,” he says. “Even if you use the same inputs you can get any answer you want. It’s stupid beyond belief.”
By way of example, he cites the recent Research Excellent Framework (REF) survey in the UK, which assessed research in the UK’s higher education institutions over the past five years. He concedes it had sensible aspects, such as limiting the number of papers research groups could submit to four to prevent ‘gaming’ the system by flooding it with publications.
Nonetheless, Colquhoun says that adjusting the weightings of the various input measures you can lead to any answer. “10% to impact, 10% to student numbers, 20% to publications, so the weights attached are quite arbitrary,” he says.
Universities run like businesses
The trouble is that universities are copying businesses in terms of setting targets for things like grant value and publications in certain high-ranking journals, according to Rob Briner, a professor of organisational psychology at the University of Bath, UK. “One of the bad things about this is that they are fantasy targets. They are completely unrealistic,” comments Briner.
The last 25 years have seen numerous targets and rankings emerge as competition between universities has gone global. And this competition, Briner says, has seen the very principles of university research fundamentally undermined. He believes that such institutions need to ask themselves what they are actually trying to achieve.