Embracing Academic Failure
How many of you understand what the term academic probation means?
Academic probation is that period of time after the new lecturer has been appointed at the university but before they are made permanent or, as it is described in some countries, before they are granted tenure.
It used to be common for the period of academic probation to be some number of months, perhaps 12 – 24. It is suggested that some, like Middlesex University, have a probation period that lasts only 8 months, while the vast majority are said to run for 12 months1.
Mine has run for Eight. Whole. Years.
During academic probation you are unable to seek promotion, you do not receive pay rises, you often have no access to research enabling or equipment funds and if you are lucky you might have extremely limited access to publication or conference funds.
This means that even though my laptop has died and I spent several hundred pounds on getting it repaired only to find that all I can do is get my data out of it and transition it to the wastebasket, I don’t qualify for an institute-funded replacement.
At a time when my continued employment seems tenuous, I cannot find or even risk borrowing the either £3,500 to replace my macbook pro or £1250 to purchase a motherboard, CPU, GPU and memory to build a useable desktop for AI model development.
Even better, on academic probation you can be fired on four weeks’ notice without cause. Many universities, including Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), have become well known for using short-term contracts over many years to avoid granting a permanent job, while also placing the individual on a new 6 or 12 month academic probation period with each 6 or 12 month short-term contract.
I know. I worked there for more than five years and even though my duration in the same school, research group and office exceeded the statutory four year limit after which an employer is required to make you permanent, I was never once not on academic probation and in spite of my bringing in a prestigious £200,000 external grant and publishing nearly 50 academic papers in journals including the BMJ and JAMIA, a litany of excuses were used to weasel out of the school’s statutory obligation to grant me permanency.
This was also true for many of the postdocs and junior academics I worked with. In my current role I have been on academic probation for three years, and it has already been made abundantly clear to me that permanency in my current school is simply not in my future.
Failure is an inescapable part of any undertaking2, and there are many different types of failure. Forgetting your friend’s birthday or to email out that report for this afternoon’s meeting are nothing more than the simple common failure that is inherent to humans – human nature, if you will.
If the engine seizes in my car because I drive it for many years without changing the oil and performing other necessary maintenance tasks, I experience what is often called a predicted or preventable failure.
A famous story among pilots is that of the Gimli Glider, Air Canada’s flight 143 that ran out of aviation fuel at 41,000 feet on July 23, 1983.
A series of issues led to an accident that began with a faulty fuel sensor, was complicated by a communication misunderstanding between pilots and ground staff that led to the working backup sensor also being disabled, and culminated in an incorrect conversion between the volume of fuel pumped into the tanks and the mass of that fuel as entered into the flight computer3 – a complex or systemic failure with many moving parts that led pilots to believe they had much more fuel in the Boeing 767 than they actually had.
However, with good luck, skill and a little unique knowledge the pilots managed to glide the plane on empty tanks to a former air force runway that had been converted into a motorsport race track.
Their tale of failure would also become a story of success against what were extremely poor odds when they landed the jet with little damage and no loss of life.
Academics fail all around us every single day, but very few talk about it. In academia it is made clear to us that our successes defines us, and that without success in a small number of pre-defined areas we are not an effective or worthwhile academic.
The (in)famous mantra publish or perish is a fine example. Except when it’s not. However, what many newly minted academics never see is that when evaluating the success, what is essentially the worth of an academic, the game is very definitely rigged by the few who have been fortunate enough to be really successful.
And it ensures those at the bottom are kept cold, hungry, and ever-striving for what are often completely unattainable goals. In reviewing my own and other similar academic’s academic success and failure over the last eight weeks, I have come to several realisations that I will try and explain here.
Yes, the game is rigged… but it’s how it is rigged that matters. Those professors who either floated to the top 10, 20 or more years ago or who were extremely lucky in the 5-10 years before 2020 honestly have little or no perspective any more on what is required to achieve their station today.
Too many times I have heard a professor say something like:
“All you need to do is bring in a little external grant money. Even £25,000 would be enough!”
They make it sound like it is a small matter that any budding academic could achieve in their lunch break while finishing off a pie and mushy peas. Worse still, they ignore the fact that there is often no set rule for many junior or probationary academics that dictates the amount of external funding required, or even its requirement at all.
This means that when the probationary academic comes up before their academic probation board (or tenure board in some universities), while someone who is ‘in favour’ with the panel may get through absent any external grant funding at all, I have seen others not ‘in favour’ get told the £25,000 or in one recent case £75,000 they brought in was insufficient to achieve permanent or tenured status.
And here, if you are paying attention, you see the real issue. The ‘rules’ are written in such a way that even within the same university, some probationary academics seem to breeze through seemingly having done very little at all, while others who worked sometimes 60-80 hours per week on a 37 hour a week salary find themselves looking for a new job at the end of the process.
The process that evaluates and grants permanency or tenure can range from generous to capricious, depending on the institution, the department within the institution, the particular make-up of the tenure panel on the day, or even simply how they feel about the individual academic before them.
Does this particular junior academic flag-wave for the right social justice or woke causes? Have they volunteered to be on the right panels or assessment boards? Have they come to the attention of the right (or wrong) professor at some time during their academic probation?
Any one of these things might be enough to push them forward to be made permanent even where they lack any external grant funding or sufficient high-calibre journal publications… or, if the answer to any one of them is ‘no’, that lack of external funding or small number of journal publications or even a larger number of publications in lower impact factor (IF) journals can be used to dismiss them seemingly for cause.
So, you may be asking, what are my failures? What will they use against me to again deny me a permanent seat at their table? I will try to outline everything I (and countless other junior academics) have done over the last three years that is simply insufficient.
I will also discuss why I believe academia has become a corrupt shell game where virtue signalling, flag-waving, and research and discussion of only the ‘accepted’, ‘consensus’ facts is tolerated – and any failure or dissent that should be embraced as part of the necessary process of ensuring scientific rigor leads to the individual being shunned, censored and ostracised.
Overall, I have made at least thirteen grant applications, with the last six occurring during 2023-24 while I have been with my current institute. In total, only three have been successful.
One, the prestigious £200,000 RAEng fellowship I received, is the only one that is considered ‘external’ but it doesn’t count towards academic probation in my current post because I won that award while at QMUL.
The other two were small-amount or seedcorn funds, £2,100 and £25,000 respectively, and even though the application process was equally rigorous and time-consuming, neither count toward academic probation because they are considered as ‘internal’ funds.
The other ten funding applications were all to external UKRI funders for amounts ranging from £95,000 to £1.18mil and represent my funding pool of failure.
And while we are supposed to receive some feedback that explains why our application was rejected so that we can improve either that particular application or any future applications, for almost all the rejection email simply advised that my application had been unsuccessful and that no further response would be provided.
For the last three, the rejection came only days after the application was submitted, meaning my overall application was never included in those that were sent out for peer review.
This last point is one that has become common.
For the last couple of funding applications the average academic spends sometimes a hundred or more hours writing, we have been told when being arbitrarily rejected in order to create a pool of only 20 or 30 applications for review that 250, 300 or an even larger number of applications were received for a funding call that would only provide two or three actual grants.
We have also seen different UKRI funders clawing back grants from some academics, and an overall reduction in the number of funding calls and the size of grants that are available.
Most funding calls have specific themes or requirements (such as research into a particular material or software solution, development of a particular medical device, or research where we are told the emphasis is on a very limited domain – such as multiple recent calls with an emphasis solely on diagnosis or care of brain tumours).
What I believe this means is that there is a reticence to give what are rapidly becoming very limited research funds to new or junior researchers, and this belief is borne out when we go back and look at which applications have received funds and see it is more often than not those from well-established researchers with a long track record of receiving funds from often the same funder or group of reviewers.
Junior academics are finding it difficult to sometimes impossible to get their research funded in a climate where they often need that funding in order to survive in their fight for a permanent or tenured position.
My failure to secure external funding will be a key reason I am being denied a permanent post.
I’ve already mentioned publish or perish but publications are a key factor in evaluating success of the academic. I have amassed a collection of around sixty academic publications (journal articles, conference papers and book chapters) in only around eight years.
Google Scholar reports my h-index as 20 – meaning I have at least 20 publications that have been cited 20 or more times. Indeed, I have one publication with 466 citations, one with 207, and a third with 126.
You may be forgiven for thinking this all sounds like the opposite of failure… until you come to consider the last couple of years. You see, I was one of the small group of academics who dared to point out that logic and the available data didn’t match the narrative on Covid-19 and the now infamous mRNA Covid shots.
While at the start, while I was only a co-author and when my research outputs were limited to pointing out the potential for failure inherent to the contact tracing apps (here) or the need for more testing to improve available data (here), this was okay.
However, when we became involved in analysis that showed official statistics were being misinterpreted (here) or worse, manipulated (here) our work was very quickly retracted, archived, cancelled and through often same-day rejection we were effectively silenced.
It didn’t matter whether the paper I submitted was reviewing issues of medical consent (here), the application of Gillick competence in court cases (here), local government and council’s regulation of personal aerial vehicles known as ‘drones’ (here), or even self-driving and artificial intelligence law (here), my papers were routinely given what is called a desk rejection (where the sub-editor rejects the paper without reading it or even sending it out for peer review).
Famously, I even had one journal, the BMJ, recently reject a paper in only 18 minutes from submission and over the last four years I have had more than fifteen manuscripts rejected even by the preprint servers arXiv and MedRxiv – who are supposed to be there to publish non-peer reviewed preprints of up-to-the-minute research findings.
What this means is that while prior to mid-2020 I had published nearly 50 papers at conferences and in academic journals, since then I have written nearly twenty articles but have been named on less than a half-dozen papers accepted for publication – with only one conference paper and one academic journal article bearing my name as lead author.
And as far as my academic division is concerned, that one article is not published in ‘the right type’ of academic journal. Even worse, my research and analysis on such matters as the evidence and conclusions in the Lucy Letby trial (for example, Researchgate preprint here) or my systematic review of issues in published opioid research in Australia (here and here) were not only also rejected by the mainstream preprint servers, each paper was rejected without review by three or more academic journals and they have also drawn insults, derision and a combination of physical and legal threats…
Yes, even while MedRxiv rejected my opioid systematic review for not being a systematic review (Ha!) I received legal threats from the managing editor of an addiction journal who did not like some of the results that same review found.
He couldn’t refute or rebut those results. All he could do was threaten me if I dared publish them. That is what junior academics have to contend with these days.
If your work dares to cross into contentious topics or your findings don’t align with the mainstream ‘belief’ (or narrative) on a topic, you get cancelled and you can’t even release your work on the proper preprint servers.
For all intents and purposes you are untouchable. You cease to exist.
So, while I developed an entirely new course in digital health and technology that incorporates the use of Bayesian-based AI for improved clinical decision-making and which has received very strong reviews in the top quartile from my students, while I have conducted research that has seen me author six comprehensive funding applications and nearly twenty papers during the last three years, and while my analysis of covid and Letby issues has been proven right time and time again…
Almost none of those papers are published, none of the external funding applications even went to peer review, and I am a pariah even within my own academic division.
While I don’t want you to leave thinking I am being all whingy and whiny… I am an academic failure in the broken UK university system.
See more here substack.com
Header image: The Irish Sun
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