The promotion primadonna
I got promoted. So, here is a text about about academic promotions in the UK and what is wrong with them.
The ladder
When you are on an academic career in the UK, your first sort-of permanent position is likely to be as a Lecturer. This would come after several temporary research contracts or short-term teaching contracts. This used to be an actual permanent position, pretty much, but those days are gone now. Nowadays it is often another temporary position masquerading as a permanent position. Not that academic positions in the UK are ever truly permanent or guaranteed. The goal is to not have an end date in the contract. That’s permanent for us. Personally, I can live with that.
The Lecturer position in the UK is kind of equivalent to the assistant professor in the US. It’s the starting level position for academic staff at universities. A Lecturer’s job is not just lecturing, that’s part of it, but Lecturer is just a title, not a job description. People who become Lecturers are typically in their thirties to early forties. I was 38 years old when I got a four year contract for a Lecturer-equivalent position, which was sort of like a Lecturer, only with additional duties. In my case, it came with the expectation that the contract would be converted into a permanent position at the end of the four year period, if criteria were fulfilled that nobody bothered to write down or explain to me. Teach. Get grants. Write papers. That was the informal job description, and that seems to be the brief for academic staff in general. A few months before my 42nd birthday I received an email from HR telling me that my post will now be ‘open ended’. That’s it. The most significant step in my career was — an email with a form letter from HR. (Nostalgic memories of the day I picked up my physics diploma — equivalent to a Master in Science today — from a secretary at the university, no celebration, no congratulation, nothing. Just a piece of paper.)
But Lecturer is only the lowest rung of the ladder. For UK academics, it is not directly expected, but sort of implied that academics aspire to climb the ladder. The next step is Senior Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor. Sometimes it is possible to skip steps. Note to my friends who have been waiting patiently for decades for the day they can call me professor: It’s going to be another while, maybe a decade, maybe more. Most likely it will never happen. At every step, the salary increases, of course. The pension will increase accordingly. These are important considerations — I have spent my twenties on no or minimum income and a large part of my thirties on an average income while moving from one country to the next, with little or zero benefits, a very typical career path. You have to think about security and pensions, at some point. Many of us reach their late thirties without any financial cushion, without disposable income, and without a safety net to fall back on. I’m not complaining, but that’s just how it is.
Apart from that, the promotion to a higher rung of the academic ladder means that I will get drawn more and more into the system. The higher I climb, the more likely it becomes that I am asked to do administrative duties. This may begin before actually getting the promotion, It’s just sometimes hard to notice. This seems fair, at first glance, I get paid more, I get more benefits, so, I get asked to do more of the work to keep the system going. But the kicker is that many of these duties come on top of the normal workload, which does not magically go away. The workload in academia only ever increases. But that is an entirely different topic.
The process
The process to get promoted will be different from place to place. All I know is how it works in my university. Here, I filled out an Ugly Word Document. Let’s calls it UWD, which is the sound I made when I saw it for the first time. I added a list of publications and perhaps additional material. But mostly I filled out the UWD. I provide ‘supporting evidence’ for my application, in that exact UWD, an eight page long form with lots of empty boxes. I submitted that, and waited four months. Then I found out what the decision was. That’s it.
The UWD has to be filled with the professional life, the part of it since the employee joined the university, or the part of it since the person last applied, whichever came last. The UWD has boxes for teaching, for research, the two obvious categories, but also for ‘service and leadership’, for ‘impact, outreach, knowledge & technology transfer’- categories that are more difficult to understand. I poured allm y beautiful work into these boxes. For each of the four categories, I explained what I have done, I reflected on my performance, and I explained why this is a major contribution of my application, if it is indeed one, all in separate boxes. I provided ‘evidence of esteem’ in another box. The redundancy in the document is overwhelming.
What happens after handing in the UWD is relatively simple: A group of senior academics will evaluate the applications, first on their own, then as a panel. The university will ask two referees, who I can name in my application, plus the department head, for an evaluation. That gets added to the application. The referees, by the way, need to be independent, but they also need to know me well. And of course I want to name referees that are likely to have a positive opinion of me. It is entirely possible that there is a fundamental contradiction here. Nobody would name a referee who is truly independent. No academic referee in the world is truly independent anyway. Finally, these ‘independent’ evaluations together with the supporting evidence will be discussed at a panel meeting where the decisions are made. I think. After that it still takes a couple of weeks before an email arrives to inform me about the decision. An email with two attachments: A brief letter from the university leadership. And a formal letter from HR to explain the new employment status. (If I ever become a Professor, I will later get a ceremony as part of graduation, with costumes and hats and pipers, but that’s for another day.)
The fallout
Promotions are not a pleasant process. It feels like a colonoscopy extended over several months. Let’s get it over with, was the most sensible reaction among colleagues.
For a number of reasons. The first is the process itself, the filling out, the discussions about font sizes, about page limits and formatting, all the struggles that are created when people try to solve a problem with a Word document. Academic careers rarely fit strictly into boxes, and finding the right box for the things I do is not trivial. In the end, the UWP bears no resemblance to my work. It looks stupid. Wait, that’s me? That’s disgusting. It feels like looking in a mirror that distorts my face and shows a bureaucratic monster.
Second, it is impossible to pretend that this process is primarily about merits. The criteria for promotion are so vague, so ill-defined, that anything seems possible. To be promoted to Reader at my institution, I was asked to make ‘outstanding’ contributions in research, ‘strong’ contributions in teaching, and ‘excellent’ contributions in one other of the aforementioned four categories. Alternatively, I could be ‘outstanding’ in one of the categories that are not research or teaching, ‘excellent’ in research, and ‘strong’ in teaching. The guidance contains long lists of possible bits of evidence I can provide to demonstrate how strong or excellent or outstanding I am, but what these adjectives really mean, remains unclear. I guess it’s like when you break your leg — you know it when you see it, like that. But there are no guarantees, there is no ticklist, nothing definite. The uncertainty is hard to take. It should not be like that.
In the end, the informal advice is the same as before: Write papers and get grants. Or, as in my case, one grant. That’s the most important bit of the application. And the papers are only important because they help getting grants. Nobody in the entire promotion process is going to read the papers. The people who make the decision wouldn’t be able to understand anyway. It’s all about the money, that’s the feeling, that is the bottomline. Of course the process does not readily admit that. To some degree it would be better to just come out and say it. Bring us a million pounds and you get promoted, or something like that.
The entire time I’m wondering: Why am I even doing this? I should not have to apply for a promotion. Why do I have to explain to my organisation how valuable I am to them? Shouldn’t they know? The answer is that they don’t. The people making the decisions about promotions may have never heard about me. In my eight years in this organisation, I have not discussed my work with anyone outside my own building. They don’t know me, at all. I’m just a broker to them, someone to funnel money into the system.
The process is not about the work anyway. Academic jobs are not well defined at all. They are a combination of ‘roles’, duties that accumulate over time. When I started as Lecturer, I inherited roles that were previously filled by much more senior people. But that doesn’t mean anything. A Lecturer may have more responsibilities than a Reader or even a Professor. The promotion does not change that trajectory. It’s just another brick in the wall.
The promotion is mostly not a reward for things I have done in the past. If it were, it would be obvious that I should not be a Lecturer anymore. After all, I’m filling roles that more senior people are doing. The promotion is also, and maybe moreso, a reward for things I plan to do, an affirmation for the person I say I want to become, for conviction and confidence and projection. I got promoted for showing off. That’s why I needed to apply, and why, I’m sure, the system has all kinds of undesirable inbuilt biases. Hard to avoid when you ask people to brag.
In the end, the promotion only adds to the confusion of identities at academic institutions. It is easy to feel good about it, to read it as an affirmation, a compliment, but the joy is hollow. For the daily work, it does not matter anyway. The academic degree does not say anything about the actual job. I will keep my duties, my office, my students. In the end, the job does not change.
