On Choosing an Academic Career

… what it takes, what it offers, and what it demands

TL;DR Academic careers suit a particular kind of person. You need intellectual stamina and tolerance for ambiguity. You should possess the skills and readiness to be part of a complex institution with all that entails. Success will require flexibility and an entrepreneurial edge. If you value the purposes of universities, and are committed to furthering them, it can be a very good career. If not, there are certainly easier ones.

Should you opt for an academic career? Would you recommend a career in academia to an aspiring student? If so, why? And, if not, why not? @profserious considers the issue.

There is an entire genre of writing devoted to the expression of regret at the choice of an academic career. It comprises two sub-genres. The most prominent is ‘tenure regret’. Early-career academics who have failed to secure a tenured position in the US, generally in the arts and humanities, express their regret at the efforts they have devoted to the cause of academic achievement, only to be frustrated. Often the failure is attributed to opaque processes, disciplinary fashions, or personal animus. Further uncertainty and precarious work, the need to move, and the stresses on young families feature heavily. The principal theme is regret at the initial choice to pursue an academic career and worry at the difficulty of finding other employment, equipped only with a well-regarded monograph on Flaubert, and a comprehensive grasp of the critical tools necessary to dissect neocolonial ideologies.

The second sub-genre is ‘life regret’. In the final years of a career, perhaps with an offer of voluntary redundancy on the table, the author expresses disenchantment with the situation of academia: rising workloads, declining esteem, soulless corporatist management (yes, you @profserious), ungrateful students, and decreasing autonomy. In the background you can sense flagging research productivity in an area that has lost its lustre, perhaps even a receding hairline. Academia is not what it was, and their emotional investment appears to have come to little.

If your diet is simply this writing, then you might be justified in thinking that an academic career is a bad idea. I intend to act as something of a counter-balance. Academic careers can be engaging, rewarding and purposeful - that remains my experience - but, of course, they suit some people, and not others.

A first requirement is obvious enough: you should be good at your subject. Academia is one of the few professions in which your core intellectual capacity is fully exposed. An academic who cannot generate novel insight in their area of interest will eventually find that limitation difficult to conceal. Your early experience of research will have given you a sense of your relative capability in this regard. To be clear, this does not mean being a genius. Most successful academics are not geniuses; they are as scarce in academia as in other professions. But, academics are, or at least should be, able to sustain attention on difficult questions for very long periods of time. There are, in life, many more important personal attributes than an aptitude for some rather particular technical tasks associated with an, often narrow, field of study, but in academia it counts.

One must also be capable of working on large, uncertain, trackless problems. Academic research often involves pursuing objectives whose completion point is unclear and whose value cannot be guaranteed in advance. This can be psychologically difficult. Some people are far happier with shorter, more bounded tasks and with immediate feedback.

Closely connected to this is inquisitiveness. The best academics possess a kind of sustained curiosity that survives professionalisation. They continue to ask questions, follow odd intellectual trails, and become fascinated by things beyond their immediate utility. Without this, academic work can become performative rather than alive - the production of papers merely because papers are required.

Successful academics generally combine specialist depth with considerable adaptability. You need a field - something recognisably yours - but universities reward those who can move between areas, methods, audiences and institutional priorities. Entire disciplines rise and fall over the course of a career. Funding landscapes shift. Technologies change teaching. New forms of public engagement emerge. A scholar whose identity depends entirely upon a narrow specialism may eventually - I suspect, will inevitably - find themselves stranded. You need to sustain a portable intellectual identity: expert enough to matter, flexible enough to evolve.

You should note, of course, that universities are not always the best place to pursue a specific subject. In many areas, notably in science and technology, industry can set the pace. This may vary from time to time, and the cutting edge can shift, back and forth, as it has done for example in machine learning.

It is important to like all the parts of the job, not merely the romanticised core of ‘thinking’. Many aspiring academics imagine a life spent reading, writing, and occasionally delivering brilliant seminars to attentive audiences. In reality, academic life involves administration, committee work, pastoral care, grant applications, quality assurance processes, meetings, and … email. Quite a lot of … email. Teaching is not an interruption to the work; for most academics and in most institutions it is the work. If you do not like teaching, or even if you regard it as, in any way, something that you have to tolerate in order to devote yourself to the ‘life of the mind’, do not become an academic. Imparting knowledge and understanding is of the essence. Frankly, you will be devoting a good deal of your time to it, so you had better enjoy it and find it worthwhile.

A liking for students helps enormously. Universities are populated primarily by students, and many academics spend much of their professional lives engaging with people between the ages of 18 and 25. They need not always be the best interlocutors - indeed they frequently are not - but one should find some energy in their curiosity, uncertainty, ambition and occasional transformation. You can derive pleasure from watching students develop intellectually and personally over time.

Universities are organisations with budgets, hierarchies, politics, compliance obligations and strategic anxieties. The academics who thrive are often those who can find at least some satisfaction in the whole ecology of the profession rather than simply enduring large portions of it. An ability to tolerate and navigate complex organisations is equally important. Universities occupy an unusual institutional space: part bureaucracy, part intellectual community, part commercial enterprise, part public body. They contain competing incentives and contradictory values. Decisions are often opaque and progress can be frustratingly slow. The successful academic learns when to resist, when to compromise, when to ignore, and when to strategically participate. Outrage at institutional absurdities is emotionally exhausting, though perhaps understandable.

And universities need leaders as well as scholars. One of academia’s recurring mistakes is to imagine management as an external imposition. Universities are large, complicated institutions and they require competent leadership. Good heads of department, deans and even vice-chancellors matter enormously. The difficulty is not that universities are managed, but that they are sometimes managed badly. Academics who can combine intellectual credibility with organisational competence perform an important public service, even if their colleagues occasionally treat them as collaborators with the occupying forces.

Academics require a tolerance, even a liking for, ambiguity. Academic work is often poorly defined. There are few clear metrics of success, despite seemingly endless attempts to manufacture them. You may spend many years pursuing a line of research only to discover that it leads nowhere interesting. You may produce your best piece of work and watch it garner almost no attention. Conversely, a workshop paper dashed off with the principal aim of travelling to an attractive conference location may unexpectedly define your reputation and your career. If you require certainty, constant validation, or structured progression, academia can become deeply uncomfortable.

Similarly, universities are loosely managed with limited means of performance oversight. You may get a few pointers along the way. You may be fortunate in finding mentors, sponsors and the critical friendship of a tight knit research group or programme team. You may even find a skilled Head of Department but, regrettably, this is not as common as it should be. In short, you will likely need to navigate and ‘make’ your career yourself. This type of ambiguity suits, and indeed benefits, some but not others. Self-motivation is indispensable. Outside of teaching obligations and administrative deadlines, much academic work lacks much by way of external structure. Nobody truly knows whether you spent the afternoon advancing human understanding or browsing property websites. Academia rewards those capable of, and with a preference, for directing themselves over very long timescales without supervision.

There is a strong entrepreneurial dimension to academic life. This does not necessarily mean founding companies, although you can do exactly that (and I strongly recommend it). Rather, it means creating opportunities instead of waiting for them to arrive: building collaborations, identifying emerging areas, attracting funding, designing programmes, shaping public debates, or constructing institutions within institutions. Universities tend to reward initiative.

Nor are academics, particularly the enterprising variety, restricted to the walls of the university in the way they once were. Increasingly, academic careers spill into industry, public policy, consulting, media, schools outreach, and public engagement. Impact, which naturally entails engagement of this kind, is encouraged. Some academics found start-ups. Others advise governments or international organisations. Yet others become public intellectuals, broadcasters, or writers. The academic career can be surprisingly plural if approached imaginatively.

Purpose matters, and academic careers do not make sense if assessed in purely material terms (though, in fact, the financial proposition is not as bad as some suggest). There are easier ways for a smart person to earn money, often much easier. The rewards are more intangible: intellectual freedom, the chance to contribute to knowledge - and hence perhaps address global and societal challenges, the opportunity to shape minds, occasional moments of genuine discovery, and participation in the collective scholarly enterprise. If these things do not matter to you, the trade-offs made for the career may not seem worth it.

It is also worth remembering that universities differ enormously from one another. Some are intensely research-focused, others teaching-oriented, others civic or vocational in mission. Some are entrepreneurial and outward-looking; others remain highly traditional. National systems vary too. A career that would be unhappy in one institution may be deeply fulfilling in another. ‘Academia’ is not a single thing. It is important to understand that the league table position of an institution does not entirely determine its desirability as a place to work; you need to assess where you will be most successful, where you will find your purpose and your people.

Universities themselves are at something of an inflection point. Technological change, geopolitical competition, new models of knowledge production, demographic pressures, artificial intelligence, changing student expectations, and financial instability are reshaping the sector. This creates uncertainty, certainly, but also opportunity. Aspiring academics should not expect stasis. They are entering a system likely to evolve very substantially over the course of their careers and possibly very rapidly in the next immediate period.

Everything I have said so far, assumes roles are readily available. Given the financial constraints on universities in the UK, I know this not to be the case. You will need to be ‘competitive’ and you will have to likely tolerate an extended period of precarious work as a Research Fellow or temporary Visiting Lecturer. This is unfair, and I wish the system were different.

For all the complaints, some justified, some merely performative, academia remains one of the few careers organised around the proposition that thinking carefully about important questions is socially valuable. For the right sort of person, that remains a rather good way to spend a working life. And, quite frankly, if you do not like it, then you can always leave.