Speaker 1: There's something so important about an academic career that I've never talked about before and I see this played out everywhere. When I was in academia, there was someone who was so obsessed with this aspect of academia that every time they came into the tea room, we were just rolling our eyes, being like, okay, this guy is going to boast for the next like 20 minutes and we just got to sit and nod because he's a fancy professor and if we annoy him, we won't get our names on his papers. This is something that sort of really explains why academics sometimes make the decisions they make and it's a little bit unsavory and that is prestige, the prestige economy. Academia is really based on building up as much prestige as you can. I found this paper, Motivation of an Academic, a Prestige Economy and this is something that I think is so important and no one else ever touches on and the bits I want to touch on from this paper are down in the conclusion. Here it says, firstly, it draws attention back from the monetary to the social, cultural and explaining academic behaviours. I know of so many professors that really just want to be important, that really just sort of like want to be known and interestingly, the people that are able to build up the most prestige around themselves really do do the best in academia. The people that are boasting or in the papers the most or getting the most awards are often the most successful and it's really annoying because they're not doing any more like academic work than anyone else, they're just better at building up this, this prestige. Further, it allows for the possibility that some academic motivations are about intellectual positioning rather than financial gain. It then supports the idea of intellectual leadership where it's a form of leadership that's not necessarily related to control of financial resources or the management of staff but rather just about being in control. I know of so many academics that are in positions of power that really are bad at being in those positions. They have no people skills, they're unable to organise themselves let alone other people but they like to say, well I'm the head of this department or you know I'm the dean of this school. It is why academia is crumbling at the foundations is because these people are in these positions not because they like leadership, it's because they just like to boast. And the most dangerous part of this is that if you are unable to spend time building up prestige early on in your career, if you have a thing like a career gap for raising children, if you have some sickness, if you have anything that just stops you from being able to build up these positions of power early on, it really means that you kind of like don't have the ability to grow as quick as others and therefore you're seen as you know not as prestigious and therefore not as capable in academia. So it can be really challenging for people that find themselves a little bit on the back foot early on in their careers. There's a scary part of academia and I have seen this play out time and time again. That is I have seen these really impressive young early career academics who are just ticking all of the boxes. They're bringing in money, they've moved institutions loads of times, they've built up loads of networks, they've published in high profile journals and they cannot seem to get past the final hurdle of getting an academic position. I've seen it time and time again. These are the people that I look at and go, you know what, you should be in academia, you are amazing and I just, you know, I was really excited for them when they went for different jobs. But the problem is, and this is it, you can do everything right and still fail. And this obviously is not limited to just academia but I feel like here where you've built up prestige, where you become your work, you dedicate so much, there's so many outward facing signs that you become inseparable from your career success that it hurts even more when you've got a great H index, when you're doing all the right things, you're ticking all the right boxes and then the institutions just say, no, you can't get a job. So you can still do everything right and still end up not getting an academic career. There is so much luck involved and no one will just say, luck is involved, there is no heroes because it's a lucky break, I knew the right person, it was the right time. There are loads of universities in Australia, for example, that were launched in the 70s and they had this big influx of professors who these days wouldn't stand a chance getting the positions that they currently hold because it's so competitive. But they don't just say, oh, it was lucky timing, they say, well, I tried my hardest but they did do all of those things. But I think just by saying like, oh, the cream will rise to the top, it's the best that get it and I'm clearly the best, does such a disservice to the people that are struggling right now and it's completely out of touch with the current situation in academia. There is something that is common across nearly every institution I've worked at, nearly every academic I've spoken to and it really comes to light when you ask them what they want to do. There are so many academics that feel stuck, they have no idea where they would go if it wasn't in academia. And I found this from ages and ages ago, why do academics feel trapped and this is goodbye academia. And so, this is an article from goodbyeacademia.com and it says here, the I wish I could quit response from academics is puzzling to me. It's absolutely puzzling because quitting surely is just like the easiest thing in the world. You just say, I quit, you hand in your resume and you move on. But of course, it's so much deeper than that. Because we've been institutionalized to believe that our value is only linked to our work, it's really, really hard to leave. It's really hard to think that all of a sudden you would strip yourself of this identity that becomes you, you know, I am an academic, I am my papers, I am the amount of funding that I bring in because of this prestige economy. That all of a sudden when you try to sort of strip it away, it really does feel like starting from scratch. And this is what I want to touch on is that here it says, when you are an academic, you are surrounded by other academics day in, day out. Merely by virtue of having received a PhD or gotten a stable job, you're already much better off than the vast majority of people who attempt an academic career. I certainly felt that. In my postdoc, I was sat there, I was ready to leave and all of a sudden I'm thinking to myself, well, oh, I got this far, surely I've got to continue, surely I owe it to myself and to the people that have helped me. But it felt so wrong to even think like that because you're kind of indoctrinated into thinking that the next step for you is that academic career. So, it's almost offensive to suggest that you deserve even more when there are thousands of people who would do anything for your job. But I just want to let you know that there are so many things outside of academia that are rewarding, that are more fruitful, that give you a better work-life balance and it has been the best decision of my life to leave academia and I wish I had done it about three or four years earlier. And that's not to say that people can't succeed in academia, it's just such a small slither of PhD students that are successful that it makes a huge portion of us think that we're not worthy, that we failed in some way despite getting a PhD, which for most people is unachievable. So, anyway, it's just crazy to me, yeah. Feeling stuck is just commonplace. In academia, all of my supervisors would work until crazy o'clock. Like, I would receive emails at 2am, I would receive emails at 5am. It was so bad that one of my supervisors would literally fall asleep in our meetings. And I know of one story with this supervisor where there were two people sat opposite them at their desk having a very informal office meeting and the supervisor fell asleep, like 100% asleep. And the two researchers that sat there, like, do we wake him up? Like, do we just sit here and wait until he wakes up? Do we sneak out of the room? Like, what kind of crazy stuff is that? But this person is overworked to the point where he's just falling asleep in his office in a meeting. I've seen loads and loads of academics, in fact, it's a bit of a kind of trope now, but they fall asleep in your lectures and presentations. When you give a departmental seminar, they would be sat in the front and sometimes it would be almost offensive if they didn't fall asleep because they're that overworked. If someone was falling asleep, you've done yourself a good seminar. But overworking is so normal that I found this from this year, How to Restore Work-Life Balance in Academia. And essentially, this is the problem down here. Structural overwork has been totally normalized in academia. It's endemic. That means that it's very difficult to refuse to go along with doing structural overwork as the typical amount of work expected from an academic can't be done in 40 hours. That is crazy. I know of people who just like, for some reason, they get into academic positions and they're like, it will get better. Like, surely at some point it will get better. It never gets better. The higher up I've seen people go, the more they work until like 2am, 3am. There was this weird situation and this is what happens in academia. I went to a conference once and I was sharing a room with my supervisor. It's so weird that we do that. I don't know if it's still even allowed. But I was sharing my room with a supervisor and he got up at like 2 or 3 in the morning to the desk and he's typing away to international collaborators. And I couldn't believe what I was seeing. A man sat in his underwear typing away to an international collaborator at like 2 or 3 in the morning. I thought at first he was going out getting up for a wee because of old man bladder. But no, he was literally doing work. No wonder he was falling asleep in the meetings and in the seminars. And this is the problem, is that there is a bias in academia against people who cannot do overwork. Because when they do overwork, they do so at a great personal cost. These are academics with exceptional care duties and this means that academia is less attractive to women and other people that cannot just dedicate 100 hours a week to typing out emails, to applying for grant applications, for reviewing papers for free. This overwork is endemic and there's really not much we can do other than start to sort of like move the tide ever so slowly by saying, no, we're not going to be doing this. The problem is if you do that, you're already on the back foot. You're already sort of seen as someone who is not suitable for academia and it's really tough to change. And the last horrible thing about academia as it exists today is that people think that you have to suffer. They suffered apparently in their mind to get their role. So if you're suffering, that's just part of the process and you should suck it up. That is no longer appropriate for today's sort of academic journey. Surely it is much worse today. The suffering, the competitiveness, the kind of like insane amount of publications you need to get to get an academic career is so different from where it was when the crusty old professors decided to enter academia. I know people that have got into academia like one or two papers years and years ago, whereas now you need like 20 papers to even be considered for any sort of academic position. It's just academia on steroids. But of course, they like to fantasize about how crazy and sort of like hard they were. And don't get me wrong, I'm sure it was, you know, hard work for them, but it's nothing like it is today. And this idea that other older academics just go, well, it's just part of the process. I suffered so you suffer is just so misguided and completely unacceptable. If you like this video, go check out this one next where I talk about how academia is broken and there's systemic issues we cannot ignore. It's a great watch. So there we are, there are the realities of working in academia and what no one else will talk about because we all just think it's part of the system. Let me know in the comments what you would add because I'd love to know your story. Also, remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapleton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks, everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write a perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So why wouldn't you sign up? And also remember to go check out academiainsider.com. That's my project. I've got e-books. I've got resource packs. I've got blogs. I've got courses coming soon. And a forum is over there. And it's all there to make sure that academia works for you. All right then, I'll see you in the next video. Bye.