Research, teaching and nuclear disasters
This is probably going to be a very boring post, if anything because I do this so seldom, nowadays, that surely I’ve forgotten how to write blog posts (assuming I’ve ever done this competently, I hear you say…).
Anyhow: the other reason why this is probably going to bore the bejesus out of you is that I am very aware (and increasingly so) that, since starting my job as head of the department, things have changed. Before, when I talked to people about work, no doubt somebody will have felt like I was the most boring person on earth and “I mean… come on, man — nobody cares about value of information!”1. But I would also get a whole spectrum of responses, from very encouraging “Oh — this is really important then. You tell the Government what they should fund!” (not really, but: sure!), to hopeful “OK so we’re going to win the next Eurovision, then?”, occasionally all the way to technical people lighting up and going “wow: this is really cool!”.
Now, when friends (especially those who don’t work in academia) ask me about work, I usually sigh and prepare to see their will to live simply drying up, while they wonder why on earth they had to be polite and ask that question to the guy with the most boring work problems in the world. And I don’t blame them — except that, while I do realise that I sound boring while I talk about them, I don’t find them boring day-to-day. Sometimes “frustrating” or even “infuriating” are a good description. But basically never “boring”, for me — which perhaps tells you already all there is to know… And to complicate things even further, the link from 👆 this to 👇 that is not necessarily so direct — but if you’re patient for a little longer, I’ll also bring Chernobyl into this…
The thing is: maybe it’s just me, but until I started having serious managerial responsibility (as the HoD of a department that consistently returns no less than 60-65% of our income back to the centre; which, at this level, you can only do trough teaching…), I hadn’t really appreciated the perfect balance that is needed between research and teaching activity, in an academic department/institution. Sure: I know that, philosophically, research and teaching make academia — and you could argue that you can’t do one without the other, to do both well, or even to serve the very purpose of working in a University (if you like to be pompous, which, obviously, I do). But I think what this truly means is that you really cannot separate yourself from the rest of your institution — by which I mostly mean “department”, here.
You want people to do great research, because, arguably, that’s the core of academia and, by and large, the very reason why the vast majority of people decide they want to work in a University2. So, as management, you try and create positive incentives for people to be able to have good ideas, apply for grant money and eventually do their research, generate impact, visibility, etc. And, in our system, this means that if somebody is successful, then they will probably use that success to “buy themselves out of teaching” — this isn’t preposterous: if you have a big grant, you’ll need to focus on that and therefore you can do without teaching a 10-week module with 300 students. But, again, the thing is, for a University to be alive, somebody must do that! Because yes: teaching is the primary source of income for a University — there’s a lot to say about this: I personally think that academia is a (very) poor-man version of Enron. But, whatever: teaching is the primary source of income for a University.
The balance would be somehow restored if there were some freedom to trade-off a successful grant (which means people don’t contribute equally to teaching, because somebody buys themselves off it), with extra capacity, i.e., as HoD, I can “buy” somebody else’s time to cover the hole in my teaching allocation. Now: in reality, even this doesn’t really work 100%, I think — because if you’re really good and lucky, you get a grant in which you cover \(x\)% of your time. So somebody will pay for \(x\)% of your salary (well — not quite… overheads and all the rest, but: whatever…) so you can do what you want for \(y\) years (oh: and in the process, I, your HoD, have promised you and the funder that you won’t have to teach, so you can concentrate on research. In fact, said HoD was being stingy and only promised to reduce your teaching load by giving you two Teaching Assistants to help with marking, but the reviewers didn’t like that and so you managed to completely get out of teaching!…).
But typically \(y\) is what: 2, 3 years? And, more importantly, \(x\) is what? At UCL, the rough guideline is that if you’re the principal investigator on a grant, you budget for something like 20% of your time — sometimes people are really good and get 100%-funded fellowships, but this isn’t for everybody or for every research project… So what happens is that my spare monetary capacity (assuming that I could use it freely) would not necessarily be enough to create an attractive post. Perhaps my department is good and I have 5 colleagues on 20% buy-out for the same 3 years, which means I can go to the centre and say, “OK, can I use the money we’re saving (bar overheads) and hire a full time lecturer on a temporary contract for three years?”. Even if they say “yes” (it never works like that…), then I’d have a pretty crappy job to offer — time-limited, little security, with a strong remit to cover my back with the teaching I can’t have others doing.
So, as HoD, the conundrum is that when somebody you told to apply actually gets a grant, you’re very happy for them and the department. But then you immediately start worrying about who’s paying the price for their colleague’s success; because somebody will have to cover up the teaching activity (which, by the way, is not just delivering a lecture… there’s summer projects, tutees meetings, other admin, etc) — and that’s what’s basically punched me in the face: the very strong realisation of this absolute inter-dependence, which, I think, often we just simply don’t understand, as “normal” academics.
Now: nuclear disasters. Last night I was re-watching the brilliant Chernobyl. The main character Valery Legasov is a nuclear physicist tasked with the impossible job of mitigating the disaster3. In the last episode, Legasov testifies at the trial of the three people held responsible for the tragedy4; during the testimony, he explains how the nuclear reactor works in a way that I found dauntingly beautiful5.
He lays red and blue cards on some shelves: red cards are factors increasing reactivity, while blue cards are those responsible for balancing this increase out, thus ensuring stability of the system. So for every red card in the mix, you need a counter-balancing blue card (he goes on to demonstrate how the chain of tragic events meant that first there were too many unchecked blue cards and that then, to counter that, the operators mistakenly removed all of them, which meant a basically infinite loop of red cards, which produced a ginormous amount of reactivity, which made the reactor explode).
As I was watching, I couldn’t help but thinking about research and teaching6 — how they’re like a bunch of red and blue cards and how strong the “cross-subsidy” should be between the two — and especially across members of the same department.