Email
We live in an era when scientific solutions will be required to extricate our planet from a host of mounting troubles. From pandemics and superbugs to climate change and dwindling fossil fuels, it's no exaggeration to state that only clever solutions from the world's best and brightest thinkers will keep hard times at bay.
It is therefore imperative that the processes of the scientific profession – both the discovery of new knowledge and the education of the next generation of researchers – remain healthy and sustainable. In parallel, we also need non-scientists on side so they don't fall prey to denialists and pseudoscience peddlers; this requires careful science education of young people overall. In these times of austerity, keeping science on good form can be a tricky balancing act, and it is one that must be juggled locally as well as globally.
Tomorrow, academic colleagues at King's College London, under the auspices of University and College Union strike action, will express their anger at a baffling decision by the university management to sack, with very little warning and under dubious selection criteria, a crippling number of academics from the Schools of Biomedical Science and Medicine and the Institute of Psychiatry. I say crippling, because it seems clear that not only will a large number of excellent researchers be shown the door, but delivering effective teaching in its aftermath will be highly problematic.
The Guardian covered this story when it broke, and Dorothy Bishop, while acknowledging that redundancies in academia are nothing new, has more recently written an excellent piece in the Times Higher about exactly why this particular "senseless purge" is not a necessary evil, but actually illogical, seemingly driven by the prioritisation of buildings over staff, and misguided by arbitrary metrics instead of actual analyses of worth.
I cannot better Bishop's astute analysis of the situation, but I was compelled to write this piece by an email from a former colleague, a successful, world-class early-career researcher who has nevertheless been targeted for redundancy. She has clear and demonstrable value to the university, but she – along with so many others – has simply not made the arbitrary cutoffs, which don't seem to have been set by anyone overly familiar with either research or teaching requirements. The original 120 letter recipients were given a chance to hastily defend their position (in a process one King's researcher called "humiliating"), but about half of these to date still remain on the hit list.
John Pizzey, who has been a neuroscientist at KCL for the past 25 years, also received a letter. He told me that knock-on effects of other staff having to take up the slack left by sacked colleagues will be devastating for teaching at King's, and predicts that courses will suffer from fewer course choices, larger class sizes, demoralised staff and poor course organisation.
Another targeted member of staff, who asked not to be named, is also on the list because he missed the retrospectively applied 100-hour threshold for teaching contact by only a few hours. He told me that management have already been forced to backtrack, approaching people on the list to ask if they could help out with teaching for another year when it became clear that the sackings would make delivery impossible. Indeed, the reaction of the student body at King's, which has been passionate, shows they are unusually agitated by what they see as a betrayal.
I was also driven to speak out here because of a pattern I've seen developing recently: that our greatest scientific asset of all – the people who work in the profession and have dedicated their lives to understanding how the world works – are often overlooked.
Take the coalition government's approach to science funding. Yes, it has recently redressed years of neglect by committing a significant sum of money towards "capital" expenditures. Yet while of course science needs infrastructure investment, who will be occupying all the new buildings and operating the fancy equipment when the core science budget has suffered from under-investment since the cash freeze of 2010? If the research councils can only fund an ever-diminishing number of grants, then the promising young scientists who fail to win grants will be forced out of the profession. As morale deflates, talented overseas workers will not choose the UK to bestow their efforts, and homegrown talent will leach abroad to more promising pastures.
And then there is the perennial problem of the dysfunctional career structure. The system lets down the vast majority of young trainees who are allowed to commence an academic career, as it can only accommodate a small fraction (in the UK, about 4% of all science PhDs). These disposable trainees are worked to the bone and then spat out when the system can no longer afford to pay market prices for their growing expertise. There is no shortage of fresh, eager youth to replace them and the cycle continues – unless, of course, perennial underinvestment and flagging morale finally drive even these idealists into more sensible career choices. A few years ago there was call from the highest quarters to fix this problem, but it all went quiet soon afterwards.
When will human capital receive the respect and support it deserves? You don't have to be a scientist to be angry at the treatment of one small group of cogs in a vast machine that harvests knowledge for the good of all humankind. There's a petition in support of King's staff under threat of redundancy: take a look at the arguments and consider signing. In our interconnected and global scientific enterprise, even small transgressions matter. And our planet needs all the help it can get.
Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist at University College London. Although she is chair of Science is Vital, she writes here in a personal capacity
;