Why I’m leaving UK academia

I am hearing this from so many of my friends who are academics, in the UK. I find it sad that the brilliant people are choosing to leave while the useless administration bureaucrats are flourishing. Good luck to you.

Good luck in Deutschland, the funding situation and overall quality of the students in my field, (science) is far better. Money appears out of no where and facilities are abundant and well maintained. However, trying to navigate the archaic purchasing systems and the depth of bureaucracy makes it almost impossible to spend said money or use said facilities. Find someone with an official stamp and never let them go!

best of luck to you! but couldn’t you have picked a nicer part of the german-speaking world? ruhrgebiet? really?

as a german academic working in britain (who once got frustrated with things back home!), I’d be interested to hear about your experiences in the new job. I look forward to reading your 12-months-evaluation post!

but personally, I’m beginning to think the perfect university has still to be invented….

I think there’s a danger of creating an illusion as to some past golden age of life in acadaemia. A longer term perspective may be helpful here. I started lecturing at Durham University Geography Department in 1972. I was told (no negotiation) by the then Head of Department what my annual teaching load would be: 120+ hours of lectures, 12 or so practical classes (each 3 hours twice a week, with 100+ books to be marked by the next week), 3 tutorial groups (meeting fortnightly, with essays to be marked by the next meeting), a one week residential fieldcourse in the ‘Easter vacation’. The lecture courses generated a heavy exam marking load, at the end of the first and third terms. As well as departmental administrative duties, I was expected to carry out research, publish and win research grants – I got my first SSRC (the predecessor of ESRC) grant in 1973. So, yes, there have been changes, and in recent years not for the better (though by no means confined to academia) but over the longer term not entirely for the worse.

I work in the NHS and like all public organisations it seems that the pursuit of targets and accountability, and in the case of the NHS in particular, the fear of litigation too, has bred an enormous army of administrators! The policy behind this is being implemented by the government but has sadly been deemed a ‘good’ idea because of forces originating from the public, propelled forward by the media! “Granny on trolley for 6 hours” – lets have a 4 hour target, “Grandad didn’t get a cup of tea for 10 hours” – let’s bring in more documentation.
Nobody, it seems, in our public bodies can be trusted anymore to provide good service unless they are constantly monitored and are regimented into using set guidelines and everything is documented.
By all means share best practice ideas but surely if top managers are held to account then hopefully good management practices will filter through organisations.
Suffocating the minnions running full tilt on the ground floor with more paperwork for the administrators to process ( as you rightly say this also generates more admin jobs, as those in the role either seek to justify their existence with more glorious ideas, or are themselves monitored) is killing morale depressingly effectively.

The public need to be made aware of how their money is spent on admin in public services, and appreciate what drives that policy!

Please can the government provide these figures and suggest how the spending can be reduced so that more money can be spent on educators, clinicians, care staff……
All the best in Germany, I would much rather be free to live and work in Europe as a citizen of the European Union than enjoy the dubious ‘benefits’ of free trade with America et al.

You describe how the number of ‘administrators’ has increased over the past years. As an academic I work closely with a team of administrators delivering student support and I must say I wish there were more ‘administrators’. TEF is turning my co-workers into ‘document writers and form fillers’ and leaves increasingly less time for supporting students & staff.
The problem are not the grade 4 & grade 5 administrators who are working their butts of to maintain some kind of student-facing role while being buried under a deluge of managerial excell sheets needing more ill-defined data.
The problem is the grade 9-and-beyond middle management who want to lay their management kuckoo’s egg into our academic institutions before they hop over to the next 4 year stint somewhere else. They leave behind a legacy of badly thought-through regulations, unresourced admissions policies, badly executed IT projects and a further plethora of costly mistakes.

Although I hear you, and in fact had to take a long period of sick leave after the REF due to work stress induced PTSD, I still love my job and wouldn’t dream of leaving. Why? Because we have agency and power. I bring in millions of pounds of research funding and write world leading articles and attract lots of PhD students because that is my JOB, and I am bloody good at it, and that is all these bureaucratic systems you complain about are measuring. If you do this you can tell the Dean, politely, to fuck off and just carry on doing what you love. Germany will be just as annoying to you unless you realise this, I am afraid. Honestly. Would you like to return to a system where promotion was reliant on the old boy’s network, professors disappeared for months on end screwing their prettiest PhD students and lower paid exploited research staff covered for them? I wouldn’t. I am very happy that the work of my colleagues is made accountable and transparent. We are public servants, not privileged elite patricians.

I am curious to hear how Germany has worked out for you. As a fellow academic, I am very sympathetic to your (now former) plight. I think part of the issue is that non-academics do not understand the nature of academic work. For one, academic work has been around long before anyone uttered the word capital. It has always had a different logic than almost any other profession. Most of what we do is carrying things — many of which don’t even exist as things in the eye of the public – forward. And, for the most part, our work requires a level of commitment, concentration and responsibility that is simply not achievable unless you are living in a state of leisure. Of course, this leisure is contingent on many factors. You could have it for nothing if you were a monk with an ironclad routine. You would need to make quite a bit of money if you had three kids and a big mortgage. You could have it if you have family wealth. That’s the other thing. Paying faculty less does not in some way level the privileges of the university. To the contrary, it makes the job attractive only to those who are already rich. I think this is part of the problem with Oxbridge today. Or, in the case of Germany, you can have it because you get a lot of public services, lower prices and a good work-life balance. Job security, too, is a big ticket in creating a sense of leisure: being unfettered by work as such and being free for serious play, which is what academic work is and has always been. I don’t think people quite realize how academics work best if their work does not feel like work. A teacher who does not (or for various reasons cannot) love teaching is a lousy teacher. And, that’s what the system is creating: turning academic work into genuine, alienating labor does not improve anything.
At any rate, I would love to hear how things are turning out in Germany. Is it as good as you thought it would be?