Inbreeding in Flemish academia?

A newly released study of Flemish PhD graduates has found that fully 20% of Flemish PhD graduates go on to get a professorship in a Flemish university. This compares to perhaps 2% of American PhD graduates, so great news for the Flemish system, right?

I would argue the (unpopular) position that this is too high a rate of PhD to professorship transition. This is not to say that good PhD students shouldn't be given good jobs - just that most should find their niche outside academia. In my experience in the Flemish system, I would say perhaps half of PhD students really shine during their PhD (the system does not formally differentiate, but there are "good PhDs" and "average PhDs"). Many of these stars have talents that are not especially well aligned with remaining in academia - perhaps they are more interested in industry, law, journalism or the myriad of other jobs that a PhD is great training for. So the 20% figure is, to me, far to high. A 5-10% figure would be a good success rate based on my experience.

The other pertinent question is whether this system, with such a high success rate, produces the best outcome for Flemish science. Currently, 97% of all professors obtained their PhD in Belgium, and 75% even obtained their PhD at the same university! These are astronomical figures, especially for a tiny country with close neighbours that are also producing amazing PhD students. These numbers are not based on ancient history either, they are from the 2010 professorship appointments. 

My point is not that Flemish universities are producing sub-par PhD students that should be replaced by foreigners. Far from it - we are producing some outstanding PhDs that should be snapped up for prime positions around the world! My point is instead that an institution that is based almost entirely on internal hiring is going to have severe intellectual inbreeding. One great unique thinker is worth a fortune - clone them a 100-fold and have them work together and you get diminishing returns. It also shuts out the brain circulation that you get when externally recruiting. I'd love to see a hundred Flemish PhDs go out into the world and spread their exciting ideas, and (simultaneously) a hundred foreign PhDs come in and bring their exciting ideas with them. It can happen for people who post-doc abroad instead, and truly creative people can be generated in any system, but the numbers are an indication of openness.

Another staggering statistic from this report: 40-50% of professors (appointed 2001-2013) obtained their professorship within 1-3 years of finishing their PhD! This is mind-blowing. A PhD is the entry point to the academic pathway, and in most countries there is a good 5-10 years of further training before you get a professorship. Also keep in mind that in most countries there is a tenure-track process, so you then have 5-7 years to prove your ability as a Professor before you get tenure. In Flanders for all intents and purposes there is immediate tenure. So we are taking new graduates, who would still be considered junior post-docs in the American system, and instantly granting them tenure before we know if they are good at the job, and before they know if they even enjoy it!

So that's the system Flemish universities are operating under. Lots of professorships, given out at a very early career stage. And who does it favour? The internal hire (especially those who did an FWO PhD at the same universities) over the external hire, and men (19%) over women (16%). Top candidates are plucked out at the undergraduate stage and ushered through the system. Almost the definition of a boy's club, wouldn't you say?

This is not to say that the whole university sector in Flanders operates under these conditions. There are segments that are as merit-based and international as the very best American university. There are also segments where external hire is impractical (most notably, clinical appointments). But this is a clear sign that Flemish universities have a long way to go.

A PhD in science is the gateway to a great career

From inside academia we often bemoan the horrible bottleneck that young scientists need to squeeze through in order to land a professorship. The number of post-doc places is far lower than the number of PhDs, and the number of professorships opening up is smaller again, leading to only 2% of PhDs ending up as a Professor. Does this make it a bad career decision to get a PhD in science? No!

The thing that we usually forget to mention, is that while 2% of science PhDs end up with a Professorship, 98% of science PhDs end up having a successful career. A PhD in science is such fantastic training that graduates are highly sought out for diverse jobs that go way beyond active research - including policy, communication, regulation, administration and business development. Only 2% of science PhDs stay unemployed*, far below the population average.

So yes, there is certainly a bottleneck in the academic career pathway. But I also want my PhD students to look at the bright side - as a PhD student you get to spend years doing fun science, contributing to knowledge of the world, and then at the end you are going to be highly sought out on the job market. Some of you will end up in academia, some in research and others in a diverse set of interesting jobs that you cannot predict today. But you will all be a success. 

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* A recent newspaper article claims that the figure is 39%, but basically they misunderstood the data they were using, and counted as unemployed PhD graduates who filled out the form months before they graduated

How one lab challenged a grant rejection and won €5 million

A British scientist successfully appealed against an unfavourable grant review — but the road to victory can be paved with challenges.

Faced with a rejected grant application, scientists experience a range of emotions — shock, sadness, anger — before usually accepting the verdict and moving on. But when the European Commission rejected a €5-million (US$5.7-million) grant application from computational scientist Peter Coveney, he hired a lawyer and challenged the decision.

Read the full article

Personally, I wonder where the extra money came from to fund the appealed grant? Presumably they didn't cut someone else, so my guess is that the money probably comes from next-years budget, further reducing success rates.

Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons

Not necessarily restricted to women in science, but well worth a read. It is not a choice between career and family - being a successful career woman actually provides a wonderful role-model to your children. So don't feel guilty about hiring a baby-sitter or even (shock! horror!) asking the father to do some parenting.

School outreach

Many thanks to Annemarie, Dean and Evelyne for inspiring the next generation of scientists!

Women in science

This is one of the best articles I have read on the topic. Not enough women in top-level positions? The solution is simple - just hire more women. No more blathering on about childcare and maternity leave, just hire women. 

As the mother of two amazing women, I would say that family issues are the least of the problem ... It has been shown that women without children generally do not advance any faster or further than women with families. In their ground-breaking 2002 paper, 'Do Babies Matter', researchers Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden showed that women with children who remain in full-time academia are no worse off than women without children. Both groups lag well behind men — especially men with children, who lead everyone else.

...

When I give a colloquium at a university whose physics department lacks female faculty members, I often ask: “Have you thought about hiring women?” The answer is usually earnest: “Oh yes, we definitely want to do that, but we want to hire the best.” Do my hosts realize how insulting it is to imply those two goals are mutually exclusive? ... As I (and many others) have pointed out several times, the failure to hire women and minorities in science is a guarantee that the best are not being hired.

There’s an awful cost to getting a PhD that no one talks about

It’s common knowledge that getting a PhD is hard. It’s meant to be. Some even say that if you’re not up all night working or skipping meals, you’re doing it wrong. But while PhD students are not so naive as to enter the program expecting an easy ride, there is a cost to the endeavor that no one talks about: a psychological one.

Worth a read.

Five worst things about being a scientist

Five best things about being a scientist

Academic careers: closed calls exclude women

Old continental European universities such as the University of Leuven have a major problem with diversity at the professor rank. In Leuven, for example, the professor ranks are overwhelmingly old, straight, white Flemish males, with their PhD from the University of Leuven (and often even the same department!). It is the very epitome of an old boys club, and there is absolutely no desire to change it. In my first months as a professor at Leuven I had multiple professors tell me to my face that, as a foreigner, I had no right to be here, since the positions were needed for Flemish graduates. And such overt insularity is not even the biggest problem - in a way I appreciated the honesty - it is the behind-the-scenes stuff which excludes or drives out anyone who does not look like they belong in the boys club. The problem doesn't stop at recruitment either - if you are a foreigner or a woman who slips through the cracks, there are plenty of ways of stopping you. Disproportionate amounts of clinical duties, low internal grant success, delayed promotions, the list goes on.

It should be fairly obvious that excluding 99.8% of the population is a poor start to any selection criteria seeking excellence, but the defenders of the old guard claim the opposite - that the very reason why we can't recruit more women is that the system is meritocratic, and if the best candidate is a man we need to take a man. It is an attractive argument, but it begs the question as to why the "best candidate" is almost always a man. I would argue that it is the closed recruitment process so often used in Leuven that ensures that top women do not apply, giving us a net decrease in excellence.

In this article, Dr Mathias Nielsen looked at the numbers in Denmark, broken down into "open" and closed recruitment calls. In "open" calls, 23% of successful candidates were women, while in closed calls created for a single candidate, only 12% of successful candidates were women. In other words, there is a substantial pathway for political appointments, and it is being used to favour men. This is a smoking gun for equality campaigners - proof that the appointment system is being exploited to stack the deck in favour of men. The one good thing that can be said for Aarhus University is that they provided information for the study, rather than trying to hide it.

I've been in committees at the University of Leuven discussing this question, and I've never seen anything more serious than the cliched "we need to do something about childcare" proposal (particuarly offensive in a system with one of the best childcare support networks in the world, as I can personally attest to). Since I'm use to arguing to a brick-wall on this topic, I might as well throw my proposals into the internet void. So here they are, my proposals for the University to increase quality and diversity:

1. Reduce the number of new professorships markedly. Having swarms of new professors just divides funding into such small units that everyone sinks. Plus we'll need the cash for a few of my other proposals below.
2. Create tenured senior scientist positions. Professors are not the only critical people to research, yet they are the only ones to get tenure. What I see happening a lot is that a senior professor has a fantastic senior scientist (who might not even want to be a professor) and they know that the only way they can keep them is to get them a professorship. The position is duly created, applied for and gained, and now the senior professor has a junior professor who in practice stays a senior scientist. These positions are important so let's formally create them, but be honest about it. Having this process will free up professorship positions for actual independent researchers.
3. Link every professorship to an attractive startup package. Better to have one professor who manages to take-off (and brings in money for the university) than three who crash and burn (and then sit on a 30 year work contract). The lack of a start-up package is the number one barrier to external recruits, as it means you essentially waste the first year unless you have a local sugar-daddy mentor, which only political recruits have.
4. Change the absurd language laws for science professors. The students learning science need to learn professional-level English, so why not teach them in English from day one? It certainly doesn't help them if they can write scientific papers in Flemish but not English, and you drive away most of the international talent if you formally require Dutch language skills you don't actually need for the job. Right now, the written English skills of our science graduates are not up to an international standard, simply because the students have not been forced to practice.
5. Back-end load the teaching duties. Over and over again I see universities load up junior professors with so much teaching that they can't succeed in research - and once the window of opportunity is closed it never opens up again. No teaching duties for the first five years, and progressively increasing teaching duties after that. Don't let the oldest free-load.
6. All positions need to be open calls. And don't even pretend that this is the case right now. A call that is only made in Dutch on the university website and only has a single applicant is not an open call. An open call has international advertising in English. It comes with a start-up package and does not have ultra-narrow terms of reference.
7. Audit the advertising of positions. If particular advertisers are only sending men your way, then drop them and use other ones that are better at reaching the full candidate pool.
8. At a minimum, interview four candidates of international quality. At least two of those candidates need to be women, and at least two should be foreign. If you can't find four candidates of international quality, then either your position is rubbish or your call wasn't open. At the end of the interviews if the Flemish man was the top candidate, then by all means hire him - the big problem seems to be that women aren't even interviewed in the first place. Give good women a chance to get a toe in and don't worry, they'll look after themselves. No woman or foreigner is expecting a hand-out, they just want the chance to compete on an open-playing field.
9. Audit clinical duties. If a professorship position comes with 50% clinical duties and 50% research duties, then the clinic should only be able to put you on for 50% of time. Pretty obvious, right? Yet over and over I see clinical professors being given clinical duties that are more than full-time, giving no time to grow a research position. And since young clinical professorships are the one place where women often suceed in high numbers, the clinical duties workload sabotages women's careers. A lot of the suggestions here cannot be applied to clinical positions (i.e., international recruitment is far more difficult when part of the job is patient care), so extra scrutiny needs to fall on clinical research positions to ensure they are being used appropriately.
10. International panels for grants and hiring. It completely gets around local politics, taking away the biggest tool in the old boy's club's arsenal.  Academics work for practically nothing, so it is a complete no-brainer, and standard in places such as Norway and Finland.
11. Audit the university. Let's pull back the curtain and take a look. There are dozens of different processes for hiring professors, which ones are hiring successful women and international recruits, and which don't. Shift funding to the tools that are successful, and stop those that are not. Compare the different department - which have recruited successful women, and what processes did they use? Force the under-performing departments to change their hiring policies.
12. Make all positions tenure-track, and actually get rid of people who don't make the cut. It is the one chance to get rid of sub-par professors and re-open the position up, let's actually use it.
13. Hold heads of department responsible. All new professors need to be able to show their productive independence (grants as promoter, publications as last author) within five years. If they haven't, then either the wrong person was hired or they were not supported enough - both are the responsibility of the head of department. If a head of department's toes were roasted every time a new professor ends up as a glorified post-doc, then the practice would shut down fairly quickly.
14. Listen to proposals that make you uncomfortable. The same old policies will give the same old results, so at least listen to some uncomfortable truths.