tenure track

Why India Needs a Different Way to Support Climate Research and Education

The answer can’t be tenure, which might just make things worse.

Climate science has been an accidental tourist at the debate dominating human discourse in the last two decades. Developing countries like India are being forced to strike a fine, but often impossible, balance between pushing aggressively for economic development and mitigating the unavoidable environmental damage that comes with such development (because of, among other reasons, reliance on dirty energy, unmanaged land use and natural resource exploitation).

Economic development however also facilitates higher investments in the human and computational resources required to advance weather and climate predictions as well as to setup educational and research institutions for research on climate, water, food, energy and health.

India has used a model whereby faculty members at academic institutions get a full year’s salary and the students are typically funded separately by government fellowships. The pressure to write proposals for grants should thus be minimal. However, the pressure to institute a US-like tenure system, with salaries corresponding only to teaching time (up to eight or nine months a year) and funding students through grants instead of government scholarships, has been on the rise. In fact, the scramble for grants has already precipitated greater stress among faculty members of all disciplines.

In this regard, the following alternative paradigm may be worth a shot: inviting the formation of multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional teams to identify and address climate change and related problems. So instead of having to negotiate time-consuming proposal calls, submissions and review panels, teams can present the problem they wish to solve and the methods they wish to use to do so to an expert panel empowered to rapidly assess and decide, together with inputs from other experts.

Such a setup could also render funding decisions more transparent as well as free India to focus its limited resources on becoming a weather- and climate-resilient nation.

Climate education also needs to face up to the urgent need for a climate-aware workforce and the fact that no institution can by itself provide the full suite of natural and social science aspects of climate awareness to all disciplines, including medicine and journalism. Institutions already have an opportunity to synergise courses through MOOCs and wired classrooms equipped to broadcast lectures.

Disciplinary boundaries within a given institution as well as cross-institutional PhD theses should be possible with a committee that facilitates research on climate solutions that India desperately needs. Competition drives innovation but competition doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game; India certainly can’t afford that to be the case between its research bodies.

This new paradigm can be justified by considering historical investments in education and the corresponding payoffs. India benefited the most among all countries by exploiting the outsourcing boom, due to its large skilled workforce, itself a product of many decades of investment in education. Employment tends to be the main criterion for judging success, so all science and engineering disciplines tend to drift towards the IT and financial sectors.

On the other hand, climate science tends to produce graduates that are neither easily attracted to other sectors and nor absorbed there. As India continues to produce more climate science PhDs, with each new IIT and IISER wishing to commence climate programmes, the government hasn’t been giving much thought to whether India really needs so many climate scientists.

As a result, we need to carefully deliberate on funding for climate education and climate research, together with the country’s needs in terms of its commitment to the Paris Agreement, such that we don’t end up overspending on one and underspending on the other. Indeed, India can’t afford to generate highly qualified but jobless climate scientists: employment prospects are limited around the world, not just in the subcontinent, especially to a few labs and universities and which typically focus on producing their own climate PhD-holders.

Despite the daily barrage of headlines about climate change and its impact, more climate scientists are not what the world really needs. This endless production line may in fact already be nearing the employment ceiling in the US and Europe.

I know from personal experience that the cycle of proposal-writing and producing PhDs has caused the number of proposals submitted in the US to balloon together with the failure rate (i.e. the ratio of proposals funded relative to the number submitted has dropped). Together with a drop in climate funding itself, thanks to the vagaries of the shifting political priorities, the situation is fairly dire. This is especially so for researchers whose entire salaries are drawn from proposals, as well as for faculty members who need to raise funds for a quarter or more of their own salaries as well as the funds to take on graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

As a result, most faculty members tend to spend up to 150% of their available time writing proposals! Ultimately, the labor cost incurred tends to be much higher than the funds being disbursed. Most of the community is thus spending time unproductively, and no business can survive if this modus operandus continues.

The unique thing about climate science is that it has already begun to negatively affect daily life as well as the country’s water, food, energy and health systems. Funding blue-sky research that may not be of immediate value to the country’s climate problems will have to be balanced with the practical needs of dealing with extant climate challenges. While drafting proposals offers that creative tension in a competitive environment, India will only do itself a disservice if it adopts a Western system blindly without considering all the pros and cons of its impact on the country’s own needs and ambitions.

Raghu Murtugudde is a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science and Earth system science at the University of Maryland. He is currently a visiting professor at IIT Bombay.

Mental Health in Academia: What About Faculty Members?

The hypercompetitive academic culture has ways of always keeping you on your toes.

The life of a professor is a constant balancing act where we try to juggle personal and professional responsibilities under the pervasive stress of managing expectations in an often hypercompetitive culture. There is always a fear that we may drop the ball, a sense that if that were to happen, we would be alone and the only one to blame. The system assumes that we should be old enough, experienced enough, and tough enough to withstand all the pressure that comes with the job. Being a faculty member in a university can be one of the most fulfilling career paths, but it has also become one of the most stressful jobs.

The storms of academia

As young scientists taking on a faculty position, we quickly transition from being a team member to a team leader; from never worrying about securing funding to being overwhelmed with grant deadlines; from managing a single project to planning and guiding the work and careers of several students and post-docs; from worrying about ourselves to being absorbed in worrying about everything except our wellness. The great majority of us have never developed a course or taught classes on our own, yet we are all expected to assume these responsibilities.

Many universities give good support when it comes to teaching, yet most offer very little training or help in project and team management, leadership, mentoring and conflict resolution, let alone mental health awareness and intervention. We are expected to learn everything on the job. In other words, we learn by making mistakes that we – and to some extent our students and staff – directly or indirectly end up paying for. Driven by our passion for science, we keep trying and do get better at it, but very rarely pause to assess: “At what cost?”

As the tenure clock starts ticking, stress and anxiety often begin to increase; the stakes become higher, and many begin to struggle with the ambiguity of the tenure criteria and the lack of feedback. The pressure mounts to publish papers in ‘high impact journals’, to secure prestigious grants, go on lecture tours, and fill in all the blanks in our CV. Frustration, disappointment, self-doubt or burnout are all too common throughout this journey.

Also read: What Is it About Working in STEM Labs That Increases Anxiety, Depression Risk?

Even after tenure, the pressure often does not go away. Instead, we simply transition from one type of stress to another: from being anxious about publishing and securing tenure to being worried about funding, deadlines, increased administrative duties, the pressure to secure more prestigious grants and awards, and concerns for our reputation. The hypercompetitive academic culture has ways of always keeping you on your toes. For senior faculty, the definition of success is a constantly moving target that is shaped and reshaped by the achievements of our peers and the expectations of our superiors. After achieving tenure, success becomes much harder to define, especially because the more senior we get, the less feedback we receive. What remains constant, however, is the lack of acknowledgement that faculty may be struggling, and the absence of formal or informal support from our institutions.

We constantly preach that failures provide unique learning opportunities and are the stepping stones for success. But when it comes to our own careers, many of us may feel that failure is never an option or something that we are willing to accept, admit or share. Academia is also not the place where we are likely to get second chances. Our peers may view our failure less as a potential learning experience and more as a sign that we are not fit for academia. In a culture of perfectionism and nearly constant peer pressure, the lines between disappointment and failure become very blurry.

Most of us quickly learn that we must project an image of always being in control and unshaken by all the storms of academia. We feel the need to ‘fake it’ until (hopefully) we make it. In reality we, like our students, frequently experience stress, fear and insecurity as well as anxiety, depression and burn out. As faculty, many believe that admitting we are stressed or going through a mental health crisis would be a mistake; that if we do, no one will see us the same way, and that it may compromise our relationship with our students, our colleagues and our superiors. In the absence of a collegial and supportive culture, and with many professors spending most of their time in their office only surrounded by computers, a faculty position can be emotionally, mentally and physically draining. It should not be this way, and no one should suffer alone.

Too high a price to pay

Often, we do not realise until it is too late that poor work-life balance and pretending that we are on top of everything comes at a great cost to our health, wellbeing and our families. Pressure, stress and anxiety frequently translate into sleep deprivation, exhaustion, irritability and isolation, all of which negatively affects our quality of life and our interactions with students and colleagues. Chronic stress is also a major risk factor for developing many psychiatric and cardiovascular disorders: I have come to learn this first hand after suffering two heart attacks during the past three years.

We have to equip new postdocs and faculty with the necessary resources and training to manage their new responsibilities, navigate the pre-tenure period and handle their mental health challenges. I am happy that my university – The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – has started to recognise and prioritise more professional training and support for faculty, but more work is still needed. As a community, we need to pause, reflect and work together to systematically assess why faculty, but also students and staff in our universities, experience so much stress and so many mental health problems. This, and normalising the conversation about mental health, are crucial steps to tackling the mental health crisis in our campuses.

While researching the topic, writing and reflecting on my experiences, I realised that there are many things that I could have done differently; I wish I’d had the courage to admit that I was not a superhuman, to seek help to handle my mental health and the daily struggles to achieve work-life balance. From how I managed my time, job expectations and my wellbeing to how I failed at times to fulfil my responsibilities towards my family, I learnt there is no such thing as suppressing your feelings or hiding your struggles. If you do not deal with them, they linger in your head, mess up your sleep pattern, impact your health, and affect the lives of people around you. I regret not taking the time and initiative to seek the assistance of experts and to follow structured training programs that could have helped me with my new responsibilities and to manage my mental health and support my students and colleagues.

Also read: In India, IITs’ Decision to Use Tenure to Improve Research Could Backfire

But it is never too late: this is exactly what I am doing now. I have come to terms with the fact that balancing my life with my work means saying “no” more, traveling less, prioritising my health and family, and giving up on trying to please everyone or do everything that can be done. To make more time for myself, my family, my research and my students and group members, I have decided to start by reducing the size of my team, by giving up certain grants and by further consolidating our research programs. I am now more comfortable opening up and discussing my own difficulties with team members and colleagues. I am also more sensitive to the struggles of those around me, and having them share their mental health challenges has been equally therapeutic. At the community level, I plan to organise a series of lectures and activities in 2020 to help normalise the conversation about mental health on campus. I would like to advocate for joint community-based initiatives that create an environment where people struggling with stress and mental health issues feel supported and are not afraid to be excluded.

I hope this article will help others in academia feel comfortable speaking out about their struggles and mental health challenges, and sharing their thoughts, feelings and experiences. As faculty, we cannot take care of our students if we do not learn how to take care of ourselves.

Hilal A. Lashuel is an associate professor and director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Chemical Biology of neurodegeneration in the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

This article was originally published by eLife and has been republished here on a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Debate: Let Junior Faculty Learn the Ropes at Universities

Granting positions of authority solely on the basis of seniority makes little sense in many cases: most come to occupy these positions without any productive intellectual output for many years.

The questions raised by Malhar Dandekar in his recent essay in The Wire are both relevant and topical. I was particularly struck by the quote from T.N.C. Vidya, which said it is “interesting how senior professors who did not have to go through the kind of competition that exists today keep coming up with these recommendations that affect young faculty and not themselves”. On this outlook from Dandekar – which I still take to be a mild critique – much more needs to be said, albeit sounding a bit like the proverbial devil’s advocate whose speech is perhaps a diatribe.

All evaluation of academics ought to begin from the very top. To lapse into the autobiographical, I have argued for this endlessly in my institution. When candidates come in for the interviews for assistant professor positions, those interviewing ask: “What have you published so far?”

In my own institution, an apocryphal story goes that our senior professor sitting on the selection committee, annoyed by this placing of moral and academic responsibility solely on young PhDs, turned around and said to the committee members, “Let us first ask, what we have done in the last five years?” This is how it ought to be.

Let us start with the vice chancellors, deans and heads of departments, and examine what they have produced by way of patents, publications and PhD students in the last five years. Can we get these statistics from the high-profile institutions in India?

It may be stepping on a minefield to say that once the professorship ‘happens’, research output stops, or what is produced is not worth the paper it is printed on. Why not place the moral and academic responsibility on the people who, at much higher salaries, administer these policies of evaluation?

Also read: Why Are Senior Professors in Charge of Universities, Anyway?

Shifting responsibilities

An evaluation of research output needs to also consider the other tasks assigned to junior faculty, from keeping the minutes of meetings to wardenship of hostels. Now, admitting that many junior faculty take on these responsibilities for either the dreadful Academic Performance Indicators (API, which should actually be, Agonistic Performance Indicators) points or to evade the responsibility to publish – one cannot assume that they can do all these ‘extra-curricular’ tasks and produce quality research.

At some point, perhaps, we can assign such tasks to any faculty, irrespective of cadre, who has been non-productive in terms of quality research. Those who are not productive in terms of research can then be in charge of various administrative tasks so that the ones who are writing and publishing can be given more space and time to do those.

Freeing up time for the new entrants to produce work is imperative, after an assessment of their project proposal and such, of course. But one cannot shackle them with excessive teaching and general dogsbodying loads and ask them to produce exceptional research.

The credibility of schemes like the sabbatical or study leave must be called into question when availed by the senior faculty. In particular, I recall one senior colleague seeking a year’s leave to ‘read’, implying that without this leave, he would not be reading, and does not read on a regular basis! The outputs at the end of their time off can be made public so that everybody knows exactly what emerged from a year’s period of rest and relaxation.

Credit: Reuters

Dandekar’s idea to give the charge of running the university or college to junior faculty seems admirable. Why not? It is not as if with seniority, wisdom and administrative skills come automatically. Granting positions of authority solely on the basis of seniority makes little sense in many cases: most come to occupy these positions without any productive intellectual output for many years, and as a consequence of their position, sit on the evaluations of junior colleagues who are then upbraided for not being productive.

Let the new entrants learn the ropes of running a department, organising exams, serving on the grievance and other key committees. In many ways, this will also help them understand the problems involved in running any academic unit, and thus, perhaps, tone down their constant gripe of mismanagement!

Why Are Senior Professors in Charge of Universities, Anyway?

As the MHRD mulls bringing in the tenure-track system in India, we must remember that it will only worsen the already significant power gradient between junior and senior faculty members.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) will soon call a meeting of the directors of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) to discuss the benefits and shortcomings of adopting a tenure-track system for faculty appointments, The Hindu reported on June 24.

Under the proposed system, when researchers join an institute as assistant professors, they will be considered ‘on the tenure-track’, meaning that within five years of joining they must apply for tenure: an indefinite extension of their appointment that can only be terminated under truly extraordinary circumstances. Tenure also comes with significant protections of academic freedoms, including the freedom to pursue unfashionable research directions and the freedom to take up controversial political positions. Given that researchers spend close to a decade in training (in graduate school and during postdoctoral fellowships) with little job security, tenured positions are the stuff of a young researcher’s dreams.

It isn’t clear why Jayant Udgaonkar, director of IISER Pune, believes “there will be a massive improvement in the quality of research done in the country” (as told to Hindustan Times) once we switch to the tenure-track system – as if this was the only thing holding research in India behind. However, the comments of other researchers quoted by The Hindu are quite clear: the tenure-track system will exacerbate the already significant power gradient between junior and senior faculty members.

Also read: How to Wreck a University

Its structure is blind to the difficulties of establishing oneself as a young faculty member, and the insecurity it engenders by encouraging young academics to reach for low-hanging fruit instead of embarking on long-term research programmes. More egregiously, the tenure-track system forces people out of academia. There is also a strong case to be made that these pressures disproportionately affect women academics and academics from lower classes and castes.

Significantly, as T.N.C. Vidya, from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, says, it is “interesting how senior professors who did not have to go through the kind of competition that exists today keep coming up with these recommendations that affect young faculty and not themselves.” This prompts a more subversive question: Why are senior professors in charge anyway?

The origin of the university

The quest for an answer takes us back many years. In the late 11th century, groups of foreign students organised into mutual aid societies called ‘nations’ (as they were grouped by nationality) cooperatively founded the University of Bologna – the oldest university in the world. They hired scholars to teach them the arts, theology, law and scrivenery. According to Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), this incipient university was controlled entirely by students, in sharp contrast to the “professorially controlled” universities that opened up a short while later in Paris. In fact, professors were not even considered members of the university!

At Bologna, a council of elected student representatives, two from each nation, had the power to enact university statutes regulating fees and salaries, housing, codes of conduct, aspects of the curriculum, etc. The more important decisions were decided by the equivalent of a referendum among all students of the university, at an assembly where attendance was compulsory and each student had a vote and the right to speak.

A committee of students wonderfully titled the ‘Denouncers of Professors’ was constituted to report professorial irregularities, such as failure to fulfil one’s teaching responsibilities adequately or to complete the syllabus on time. It was their understanding that professors were hired to provide services, and if these services were found to be inadequate by the students, they would be fined or, worse, their employment would be terminated.

This moment in history, from over 900 years ago, ought to be the centrepiece of our meditation on the tenure-track system because its mere existence forces us to broaden our conception of what a university could be. It is in the nature of democratic institutions to effect a perturbative reform of their statues across space and time.

These measures, though admirable at times, often take for granted certain mantras that contain the seeds of their own destruction. At other times, they take the form of cosmetic changes to a structure that rests upon a fundamentally inconsistent ideological foundation. A more critical reimagining of our universities and institutions of higher learning affords us the opportunity to analyse and smooth out these contradictions, and recognise unsound foundations and discard them for more robust and resilient alternatives.

With higher education, the example of the universitas in Bologna highlights how universities should be structured: in a way that serves the best interests of the students as decided by the students. This is a legitimate claim to authority over educational spaces. But how are student governance and the issue of tenure-track appointments related?

A proposal

It’s foolish to apply old formulas to new problems, and I’m not arguing that we should drop the notion of tenure itself. Academic freedom does require the institutionalisation of certain protections, including protecting scholars when they offer a measured counterpoint to public opinion.

While universities often speak highly of democratic institutions, the way they function is anything but democratic. It is often taken for granted that senior professors know what is best for an institution and should be entrusted with running it. Instead, why not put younger academics – assistant professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students – in charge? Let them sit on the committees that make decisions regarding university policy, such as attendance requirements and hostel curfew timings. Let them participate, collaboratively and in consultation with other stakeholders including senior professors, in the authoring of curricula. Let them participate in the evaluation of their peers, juniors and seniors, in good faith and as equals. And let them sit on internal complaints committees, to ensure that the issues of sexual harassment and abuse of power will not be taken lightly.

These young academics will naturally act in their self-interest and their priorities will not be congruent with those of senior professors who have, until now, held sway, but this is precisely the point. Assistant professors will understand most acutely the difficulties of setting up a new laboratory or starting a research group, and will evaluate their peers more fairly and compassionately. Postdoctoral fellows will seek out collaborators that are eager to tackle ambitious research programmes and are interested in working with graduate students. Undergraduates really just want good lecturers to show them the ropes and good advisers to guide them as they take their first steps in the world of academic research.

The much-recycled trope of the disgruntled graduate student, or the vindictive undergraduate, are caricatures drawn by senior faculty and propagated with the objective of undermining any assertions or claims to this authority.

Also read: How Neoliberalism Fragmented Our Universities and Staved off Student Unrest

These groups of young academics – assistant professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students – interact often and amicably, and share many of the same problems. A governing council comprising these communities, backed by an able administration that will steady their hand, could radically alter educational spaces, making them more dynamic, relevant and plugged into society at large. If the lack of experience is a problem, the council can constitute a committee of senior academics who can make recommendations. And since the council will periodically be infused with new blood, institutions will become less prone to ossification.

Won’t the focus of these institutions turn “too pedagogical” and won’t research quality suffer? Consider the expectations one has from, say, an IISER: at least half its job is pedagogy, and if the quality of pedagogy is improved by shifting the centre of power, what reason is there to hesitate? Good research comes from people who understand their disciplines thoroughly, and there’s no reason why this will not continue to be the case.

Our institutions are built to serve certain purposes, but we have to remember that their modes of functioning are not sacrosanct, that they should be challenged constantly. The voices of young (and older) academics speaking out against the tenure-track system in particular, and the authority of senior academics in general, are to be commended.

Mukund Thattai, a researcher at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, tweeted on June 27, “Retired scientists can be excellent mentors, but their role can only be marginal. Satish Dhawan became Director of IISc at 42. Bhabha founded TIFR at 36. And Vikram Sarabhai founded PRL at 28!” One hopes that we won’t stop there, that we will follow the trail of breadcrumbs that could lead to a fairer, more inclusive and more democratic educational space.

Malhar Dandekar is a scientist from Bangalore.