Where did all the sociologists go? Querying ‘the lecturer experience’ by Daniel Nehring
11 July 2011 11 Comments
The new government’s announcements of forthcoming changes to the workings of British higher education have inspired much debate. The major newspapers have largely focused on ‘the student experience’, while neglecting the role of universities as centres of research in the humanities and social sciences. Academic bodies have voiced concerns about the changing nature of universities and the respective implications for their disciplines. Among all the clamour, the situation of early-career academics has unfortunately not received much interest at all.
The privatisation and full-on commercialisation of higher education currently underway seem likely to exacerbate trends towards a stratification of ‘the lecturer experience’ that have been unfolding for a number of years already. A select few PhD graduates, who have received their academic socialisation in elite universities, will be able to develop academic careers in those same institutions. For them, the integration of research and teaching will continue to be a meaningful concept. Another few will be able to move into permanent lectureships at the new second and third-tier teaching universities. They will spend their careers as teaching drones, reproducing second-hand sociological knowledge from textbooks for a mass audience of student-consumers. The ‘rest’ will either form an academic proletariat of part-time, short-term teachers and research assistants or drop out of academia altogether.
Such developments seem likely because many sociologists, in their roles as university functionaries, have long since subscribed to the ethos of the neoliberal marketplace that is so evident in the government’s policy proposals. This is most evident in one particularly emblematic development: the rise of the research grant as the key indicator of academic prowess and entry ticket for a meaningful academic career. Virtually all advertisements of lectureships at UK universities over the past years required candidates to show that they have made thousands or tens of thousands in grant funds. Those advertisements were written by sociologists and endorsed by the hiring sociology departments, and they may thus be read as a significant indicator of their professional ethos. The logic underlying the primacy of the grant is unclear, given that many sociological research projects work just fine without such funding and that many senior professors have built their careers and often considerable contributions to sociology without such requirements. Perhaps the rise of the grant as the alpha and omega of institutionalised sociology is simply due to a tendency towards passive acquiescence to the demands for financial profits imposed by the relatively new and now well established class of non-academic university managers.
In any case, most junior academics and recent PhD graduates are destined to fail in their quest for the grant: There just are not enough to go round, and most accessible funding schemes (e.g. ESRC postdocs, the British Academy small grants, etc.) have recently been cut. With no grant to show, the doors to a stable academic career are likely to remain shut. What is left is a patchwork of part-time and short-term teaching commitments, jumping from one position to the next, while hoping that the next grant application will finally be successful or that the first monograph will be a huge success.
The campaign which UCU has been running for a number of years against the casualisation of academic labour is a testament to this trend. Institutionalised sociology has had little to say about it in the past, and it remains to be seen whether it will have anything to say about its exacerbation in the impending era of ‘cuts’. In any case, recent PhD graduates intent on an academic career will face a terrible job market, but few trends that are genuinely new. The commodification of academic labour has been in the making for a long time, with the acknowledgement and acquiescence of many sociology departments and academic managers around the country. The new government’s policy proposals only represent an intellectually honest and more comprehensive articulation of this trend.
So where did all the sociologists go? I concluded my PhD in 2007/2008 in a large department that prides itself on being among the very best in the country and had, at the time, about a hundred doctoral students. Of all the PhD graduates in my commencement year and the adjacent years, only a bare handful managed to find lectureships and establish themselves through research and publications. This applies to both my department and acquaintances from other sociology departments around the country. The overwhelming majority have since drifted out of academia or barely subsist on the patchwork of unstable jobs outlined above. This lack of achievement cannot easily be explained by a shortage of scholarly talent – I have in mind prize winners, recipients of a variety of very competitive scholarships, and graduates who passed their vivas at leading universities with no corrections. The explanation rather is to be found among universities and sociology departments who recruit too many talented individuals to pursue doctorates without subsequently offering them opportunities to make meaningful contributions to the discipline.
The ‘cuts’ are going to make this pattern worse, but they are unlikely to change it. What remains are questions: How much scholarly potential has, speculatively, been lost by driving talented graduates to the margins of academia, or beyond? How can this loss of potential be compensated for? What will happen to institutionalised sociology if it lets itself be driven more and more by the survival-of-the-fittest logic of the neoliberal marketplace? Finally, why has this development not sparked more concern, and why is it hardly talked about? Does anybody out there really care? While the cuts will only make a bad situation worse for early-career sociologists, surely they could also motivate established, institutionalised sociologists to concerted action.
Dr Daniel Nehring, Middlesex University
This reads as pomposity and anecdote writ large. Again, the same old anti-neoliberal and elitist rhetoric that adds nothing new to the debate is trotted out as if for the first time. There is a limited world view from which extrapolations are made to answer a question, the very veracity of which has not been established by the author; and a question for which raw anecdote offers limited insights by way of understanding. Perhaps the author, who asserts sociologists are complicit in the current situation and should have something to say about it, could usefully and explicitly use his own autobiographical experiences to help us to understand why he holds a Lectureship in CRIMINOLOGY at Middlesex University, and does not teach in, nor represent sociology there in any way, shape or form.
I would be grateful if further comments could focus on the arguments I have put forward, instead of limiting themselves to personal attacks. Just briefly: How can the author of the preceding post know that I have a ‘imited world view’ from which my arguments follow? If what I wrote is nothing new, where is the big debate on junior sociologists’ career chances? I invite her or him to do some checks for background information about the situation of early-career sociologists – there is ample evidence to sustain my points. The fact that I have chosen to use anecdotal/personal experience does not per se rule out the broader arguments I am trying to make; this was a stylistic choice that does not necessarily entail problems of evidence. The argument that I not represent sociology is, by the way, disqualified by my (easily publicly accessible) academic profile.
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i think that this is an interesting and valid debate, but the question can be changed slightly, so focus on the reasons for an overproduction of PhDs in sociology and other subjects. I think there are pressures on departments (and the staff in them) to recruit a much larger number of PhD students than are required by the job market. This blog post (and all the comments) asks this question, but in the US context http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/08/18/harris
A very clear-sighted and refreshingly honest account of the worsening situaton for early career sociologists. Contrary to the first respondent’s bizarrely hostile and petulant suggestion, there is nothing remotely ‘pompous’ in it, and actually the sort of knee-jerk more-scholarly-than-thou response which demands of any argument rooted in experience (and the increasingly rare ability to perceive the bleeding obvious) that it evidence every assertion, list supporting sources, and establish every point forensically against all possible scepticism, is itself the height of pomposity and pendantry. It’s not an article submitted for REF purposes to a ‘high ranking’ journal’. Nor does it have to ‘add something new to the debate’ – this isn’t supposed to be a contribution to knowledge! It’s a political dialogue – which means that restating the basic reality of the situation happens to trump novelty and cleverness here – apparently not something everyone grasps. The situation described is an overwhelming reality: you either see it or you don’t, and if you don’t then that’s probably because you don’t want to. And Dr Nehring is quite right to say that the worsening situation is not entirely down to government, and that the recruitment practices of sociology departments not only passively reproduce but actively legitimise and intensify a logic wherein the new academic is judged above all by their ability to bring economic capital into the university – the sociologist as entrepreneur.
One thing I’d like to add: I would not be so quick to dismiss the role of those at what you call the ‘second and third tier’ universities as that of ‘teaching drones’. The assumption that research is the only really meaningful and worthwhile aspect of academic work and that teaching is a mere necessity, of little or no value in itself, is a totally indefensible attitude which is itself both a product and a mechanism of the hierarchical and elitist system you describe. The idea that the only meaningful and engaged teaching is teaching on one’s own research and that the alternative is some kind of rote learning from – whisper it – ‘textbooks’ (those ever handy objects of academic contempt), is utterly ridiculous. I despair at the ubiquity of this way of thinking, with its casual contempt for pedagogy and its unquestioning respect for hierarchy.
I agree with Richie Nimmo’s observations, and I should perhaps clarify my comments in the original posting. What I wrote was not directed against the often great work of academic staff at teaching universities. Great teaching – including teaching from textbooks (I am just writing one myself) – can enrich students in very many ways and make a real difference to them. Teaching is not just a mere necessity, it’s something which is crucial to academia and can be life-changing to students.
What I am critical of, however, is the conversion of teaching universities into teaching factories in which profit margings and performance indicators matter more than students. Especially at many of the non-research universities, there is a huge gap between a student-centric management rhetoric and an institutional reality that actually prevents staff from engaging with students in a meaningful and personalised way – by increasing student-staff ratios for profit’s sake, by burdening academic staff with onerous administrative and assessment procedures, by forcing staff to replace genuine assessment with efforts to meet arbitrarily set pass rates for their courses, and by placing university’s public representation in the National Student Survey above genuine dialogue with students. It’s management practices at teaching universities that deserve greater scrutiny, not the work of academic staff in such institutions.
Absolutely. Although those sorts of practices are by no means confined to teaching universities, and we can expect to see more of them throughout the sector as the student-as-consumer is made more central, so that what matters is not so much the quality of education as perceived student/consumer ‘satisfaction’ as measured by the NSS.
Dr. Nehring’s comments are quite correct. While we may all value teaching, the fact is neither the government nor managers in higher education institutions do. I spent years grinding out ‘modules’ wholly unrelated to my expertise aimed purely at getting bums on seats. I happen to enjoy teaching but the number of contact hours and constant preparation to teach courses with a very short shelf-life meant that even self-funded research was damn near impossible.
The fact is that the ‘second and third tier teaching istitutions’ as well as ‘the rest’ are now the new YTS. They exist, in part, to soak up youth unemployment (consistantly 3 times higher than the general rate) and ensure that graduate salaries are kept low. Whereas YTS was transparently exploitative, now people go to university, pay for it themselves and are conned into beliving they’ve made a step-up in the world. In fact, a degree from such an institution only buys you what 5 O levels would have got you when I left school. Put differently, we have taken the US road, where only ‘Ivy League’ university degrees are still regarded as worth anything and the rest are the entry level qualification to menial work. To say so isn’t elitism. I felt that I did my best to give students some sort of insight – something sociology is in a great position to do but in the end, it took its toll and I had to get out of that sector.
On the subject of the complicity of sociologists, I would add that sociology has always been linked to a social democratic, politically reformist political project. Now that project is dead we are left with nothing but naked class struggle. Sociology has shied away from the big issues for too long, mistakenly believing that it could inform social policy and being ignored for its pains. The obsessive parrotting of Foucault, or whoever else was fashionable after Stalinism’s collapse, only made it worse, as sociology seemed to become irrelevant. Sociology can only be resurgent if it reasserts its radical potential as a critique of capitalist society.
Finally, the cowardly, rude and childish comments by ‘Nemesis’ say more about him/her than anything else.
Dr. Ian Spencer
The original article is broadly accurate and mirrors the personal experience of myself and former PhD, even current colleagues. There is a point at which the weight of ‘anecdote and personal experience’ is so great and repeated so often that it can be taken as a representation of reality with some validity. Skeptical readers may wish to consult UCU statistics on numbers of temporary academic staff at leading universities. No idea what that first comment was about, but on a related theme, I work at a business school but still consider myself a sociologist. In partial answer to the question of ‘where have all the sociologists gone’? – many sociologists of work and employment have gone to business schools because the sociology of work seems to have declined within most sociology departments (cue lots of comments on how the sociology of work is still strong in the sociology department at the university of x).
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