What real academics do in their unreal world

The life of a #realworldacademic

Famously few politicians are scientists. Few have been serious academics of any kind. They have tragically little idea of how academia works.

Case in point. Glyn Davies is a UK politician, the Conservative MP for Montgomeryshire, Wales. He is not a scientist. On Saturday, he treated the UK’s academics to this gem of a Tweet:

“Personally, never thought of academics as ‘experts’. No experience of the real world.” 29/10/16 @glyndavies

Unsurprisingly, this unleashed a torrent of hostility on Twitter. Academic hostility, obviously. Correctly punctuated. Not all in CAPS. Liberal use of grammar.

But it is a depressing insight into the extraordinary ignorance of politicians into how academia works. Perhaps once, long ago, tenured academics could roam the corridors of their institution, balancing cups of tea on their tummies, idly chatting, intellectualising. If that day ever existed, it’s long gone now.

Competition in academia is intense, some would say cut-throat. So bad, in fact, that many believe research is being damaged, throughout the sciences and humanities, by the actions of researchers desperate to survive.

Survival requries mastering a set of skills that would be vital to an extraordinary range of “real-world” jobs. Leaders of research teams – principal investigators – are a combination of manager, entrepreneur, chief financial officer, and scientist.

Let me count the ways:

Manager. Easy one this. We run a team of people doing research. We are personally responsible for their recruitment, their training, their future career prospects. We line manage them. In universities, Human Resources plays no part in recruiting researchers – they fill in some paperwork and issue a contract. After a couple of reminders. And so long as the wind is blowing from the south-east. On a Tuesday. When Jupiter is in ascendancy.

Entrepreneur. Science costs money. To build and maintain a team of people needs investment, investment in the form of funding for specific research projects. We pitch projects for very limited pots of money, competing with scientists from across the country or across the world. Only the potentially ground-breaking, world-beating projects are invested in; many outstanding projects miss out. And that’s the key word: invested. The difference between start-ups pitching to venture capitalists and scientists pitching to research funders is wafer-thin. Indeed some of these targets are the same entities (Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk).

Chief Financial Officer. So we’ve got the money. Now we, and we alone, are in charge of managing the money. We track the accounts, make and approve expenditure, find suppliers for crucial, bespoke equipment, approve salaries. Indeed, an accurate analogy for a research team is a small, private business: annual turnovers for research teams in biology can easily top £500,000 a year.

Scientist. Somewhere in all this, we also do research.

In the process of dedicating years or decades of time to acquiring deep knowledge of some aspect of human endeavour, we pick up a little know-how. What you might call, y’know, expertise. And we don’t passively absorb information. We use that expertise to push knowledge forward.

What academics was Glyn Davies (MP) talking about? It turns out there was a previous Tweet; he said:

“Nothing more irritating than academics rubbishing the efforts of those operating at the sharp end, without facing up to the hard decisions.”

Cryptic. Did he mean chemists, biologists, physicists? Did he mean psychologists, sociologists, historians, geologists? Did he mean economists, political theorists? [Given the current political climate in the UK, best guess: something to do with Brexit (#Fuxit)]. Does it matter?

Academics of all stripes are facing up to the hard decisions at the sharp end, a far sharper end than Glyn Davies will ever prick his finger on. At the sharp end of climate change (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); of nuclear arms, treaties*, and waste disposal; of conserving our natural world; of drug approval, and rejection; of detecting, controlling, and stopping outbreaks of horribly lethal infections (Ebola ring any bells, Glyn?).

But academics, what do they know? Well, like the rest of the world, they know an idiot politician when they see one.

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* Latest research suggests nuclear disarmament is not best achieved with a tea-spoon and an angry badger, but with an inebriated rabbit and a 5 inch drop-steel wrench. Drop-steel, mind you: none of your fancy alloys here.