RW4 Rejection, tenure and so-called excellence

In this short related-work podcast, I share the stories of two people we’ll call Alex and Blake who are facing the challenge of meeting tenure criteria. From this I reflect on the personal, professional and societal impacts entailed in this push for so-called excellence.  I then discuss two different papers that point in different ways to the need for institutional and cultural level response and present ideas for practical actions – for how we can address academic rejection and what it means to focus on soundness and capacity instead of excellence. As Moore et al state, excellence is not excellent and in fact is at odds with qualities of good research. [Note: anonymised stories have been told with the permissions of ‘Alex’ and ‘Blake’]Related Work: Allen et al, Journal papers, grants, jobs … as rejections pile up, it’s not enough to tell academics to ‘suck it up, The Conversation, February 3 2021. https://theconversation.com/journal-papers-grants-jobs-as-rejections-pile-up-its-not-enough-to-tell-academics-to-suck-it-up-153886 Allen, Kelly-Ann; Donoghue, Gregory M; Pahlevansharif, Saeed; Jimerson, Shane R.; and Hattie, John A.C., Addressing academic rejection: Recommendations for reform, Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 17(5), 2020. Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol17/iss5/19 Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M. et al. “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Commun 3, 16105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/03/donna-strickland-nobel-physics-prize-wikipedia-denied Geraldine Fitzpatrick, 2017, ‘ The craziness of research funding. It costs us all’. , TEDx TUWien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66_DRDYJz4g&list=PLq-OfvAJu5UZtNcBLLwsgmDRPbkARew6G&index=6 TRANSCRIPT: CAL Related Work 4(00:26):Reflections for this week are triggered by two interactions I had recently that highlighted for me the significant human impact of our so-called drive for excellence in academia and especially so for people who don't have traditional career paths or tend to do more cross-disciplinary work. Both of the people that I'm talking about are postdoc people in tenure track positions or tenured positions at two different universities in very different countries, not the UK or the US and I'm going to call them Alex and Blake.(01:05):So for Alex's story, Alex moved countries a couple of years ago to take up their first full-time faculty position at a university in a, in a, we can call it an Eastern European country. And this was after a long number of years on precarious short term projects with European funding. And a lot of that funding was about conducting more near to market research and involving industry partners.(01:32):So it wasn't always conducive to very deep, theoretical, journal papers, if you like. And so they were really excited to finally get a position that was full time in a faculty position and with the longer term output and where they could really shape their own research identity. We had...

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