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Oxford’s other “diversity crisis”: it helps to be rich to become an academic

Brian Leiter

A story at The Economist (behind their paywall alas); an excerpt:

Notably, Oxford does not publish data on the socio-economic backgrounds of its permanent academics. But I found, in nearly 30 interviews with fixed-term, permanent and former academics, that those who were not from affluent families found it difficult to withstand the precarity imposed by the academic gig-economy. These pressures seemed to be particularly acute for women and people from ethnic-minority backgrounds.

Casualisation, as this proliferation of insecure contracts has become known, works as a filter favouring the “gentleman academic” – someone who is rich enough to navigate the instability, poor pay and opaque hiring processes for permanent roles. “This is what it used to be in the 18th and 19th century where if you had money then you could have a sort of leisure job,” one academic who grew up in the care system told me. Although she continues to teach at Oxford, she is prioritising a secondary career in order to make ends meet. 

When Henry [a first-generation Oxford undergradutae and then DPhil] began his teaching at Oxford, he hoped it would help him secure a permanent job. According to his recollection, no one employed by the university had ever outlined how unlikely this outcome was. He remembers being told on just one occasion – six years into his academic career – that permanent roles were scarce.

Over the next seven years, Henry hopped from one fixed-term contract to the next. (British law dictates that successive fixed-term contracts can last a maximum of four years in total before a person is, in most cases, presumed by law to be a permanent employee. But because each of the colleges at Oxford is considered a separate employer, academics can be caught in limbo for years.) As soon as he finished one contract, he would start searching for his next, a time-consuming process. Some of his contracts lasted only the academic year, which meant the summers – when most academics are meant to do their research – went unpaid, as did the months-long periods between contracts.

Henry was comparatively lucky: other academics he knew held ad-hoc teaching positions, which were paid by the hour. Even so, he shuttled from one house-share to the next, often unsure how he would pay the rent. His friends stopped inviting him out, because they knew he could not afford to join them. Another academic in a similar situation told me that she never put the heating on and shopped as frugally as possible; even so, she still only had about £7 a day to live on, once rent had been taken care of.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

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23 responses to “Oxford’s other “diversity crisis”: it helps to be rich to become an academic”

  1. Elizabeth

    I was in Henry's position a few years ago before finding a permanent job. I find it striking that he wasn't aware of the shortage of jobs until 6 years into his career (I'm assuming they're including hte DPhil as part of his career, because otherwise I'd be shocked it took him 6 years on the market to notice there were not many jobs).

    Without wanting to blame the victim (because, again, I did many of these short term college teaching contracts too), these jobs are not intended to be full time positions. The colleges have only one or two philosophy fellows each, who cannot teach the entirety of the philosophy papers at Oxford. So they hire someone to come and cover the teaching their full time fellows can't. The people hired are usually expected to be DPhil students getting teaching experience and some extra money, or post docs doing the same. Sometimes these jobs are the person's only income, and sometimes they combine multiple contracts to make a living wage. But each individual job is usually only for a few weighted hours a week. The colleges also can't necessary hire people permanently or even long-term into these roles because their teaching needs change year-by-year depending on what papers their students want to take, and whether their fellows are on sabbatical or not.

    Again, not trying to downplay the awfulness of precarity or disparage Henry, just adding some context to the above.

    Reply
  2. Phil

    "British law dictates that successive fixed-term contracts can last a maximum of four years in total before a person is, in most cases, presumed by law to be a permanent employee."

    Advice to anyone thinking of taking advantage of this: get the management on your side first. I once attempted what was in retrospect a rather optimistic version of this manoeuvre, arguing that since I had been employed continuously for the requisite period on a variety of different contracts (most of them paid by the hour), and since I had been carrying a lecturer's workload while thus employed, my employer owed me not only a permanent contract but a permanent job *as a lecturer*. I rapidly discovered that the collegiality and good will my permanently-employed colleagues had extended to me for the last few years was not shared by senior management or by Human Resources. A series of increasingly peremptory (and at least incipiently desperate) challenges to my employment tribunal claim ensued. Whether they would ultimately have settled and if so on what terms I don't know; fortunately I found a job somewhere else, which enabled me to drop the whole thing.

    I wouldn't want to put anyone off pursuing research, but I certainly wouldn't recommend hourly-paid teaching as a lifestyle; I did it for two or three years (in my early 40s), which was plenty. Early-career academics can get stuck in that position for a long time – all the more so if, like 'Henry', they're being kept dangling by a highly desirable institution.

    Reply
  3. David Wallace

    I struggle to see what any of this has to do with Oxford in particular.

    Oxford has lots of short-term teaching positions, partly for the reasons Elizabeth gives but mostly to cover transient gaps caused by college fellows going on sabbatical, research, or parental leave. (A teaching team of 30 people can absorb leave internally; a teaching team of 2 cannot.) Mostly, as Elizabeth says, they're done by grad students and post-docs; sometimes they're done as a last-resort method when someone fails to find a better position, or as a short-term fix for a 2-body problem. In a rather small number of cases people stay around Oxford for many years serially doing these positions as they repeatedly try and fail to get a regular academic job; the general view in the University is that it's bad for people to do this, but ultimately people make the decisions they make. The whole thing is not a million miles from the sort of issues that come up with adjuncts in the North American system.

    What's immediately clear to everyone in Oxford (though apparently not to the Economist's reporter) is that these jobs are not in the slightest degree either a route to, or a requirement for, a permanent Oxford position. Like any modern research university, Oxford's new permanent hires are mostly not its own students and aren't even living in the city; when it does hire its own (which, to be fair, is somewhat more common for Oxford than for US institutions) there's no particular reason to expect them to have one of these jobs when they apply, and in fact it's fairly unusual in my experience. (The more normal route for an Oxford grad student to get an Oxford job is via a prestigious post-doc elsewhere.)

    I don't find it implausible that the academic job market, and the frequent need to serially move between roles until you secure a permanent job, advantages people from more comfortable backgrounds. It's not impossible to imagine that being worse in the UK than the US: since UK PhDs are shorter and since UK permanent hires don't really have an equivalent of the tenure track, it's hard to be hired straight out of a PhD program. But Oxford specifically would not be distinguished from other UK universities on this basis.

    Reply
  4. Steven Hales

    So, life's easier if you have more money and that applies to academicians too. That's a powerful insight from The Economist.

    Reply
  5. UK ex-philosopher

    The article makes an important point, but it is easy to be distracted by the silliness in it (e.g. the usual British-press Oxford-bashing and the weirdness of Henry having been oblivious to the endlessly-advertised scarcity of academic jobs until 6 years into his career). The important point is that the precarious, itinerant and exploitative nature of academic jobs in the first few years – not unusually extending to the first decade – after the PhD is almost unbearable for someone without family money to fall back on. Lacking family money, one would need to be happy to continue to live a student lifestyle while working a fulltime job, foregoing having children, holidays, buying a house, or even being able to stay in the same city for more than a year or two at a time, and with no guarantee of ever making it off this treadmill. I've seen so many of my fellow philosophy PhDs go through this, and it's just awful. There are not many other professions which require this of people. It's surely an absolutely central reason why people from poorer backgrounds are unlikely to make it as academics. I am consistently puzzled why this is not THE central issue that exercises people in the profession. Everyone knows about it, but people don't talk about it enough.

    Reply
  6. Mark

    I was an adjunct philosophy prof for several years and I aspired to the “gentleman academic” in the sense of having income from other sources and leisurely pursuing an academic part time “career” but found that other factors (not pecuniary) made this unpleasant.

    Reply
  7. Samir Okasha

    My impression is that in science the situation is even worse, because the ratio of post-doc positions to permanent positions is much higher than in philosophy. So lots more people get trapped doing endless post-docs and never become permanent.

    Reply
  8. Kelby

    "I am consistently puzzled why this is not THE central issue that exercises people in the profession."

    To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's hard to get a tenured academic to understand something when their peace of mind depends on their not understanding it

    Reply
  9. David

    At my small liberal arts college — for what it's worth on the national liberal arts college list in the bottom half of the top 100 during my time here — I have found it increasingly striking how many of our new (still almost entirely tenure-track) hires have either a strong personal incentive to live where or near where we're located, and/or have a spouse/partner who earns substantially more money.

    Reply
  10. Lennart

    Although I'm sure there are some horrifying cases, it's mostly an exaggeration to say that academics have it financially difficult. In Europe (where I'm based), there are plenty of well-paid postdoctoral positions, and when you're in-between jobs you usually have unemployment benefits. Financially, academics are in a much better position than low-skilled workers. (In philosophy it's currently very hard to get even a fixed term job, but that's a supply and demand issue particular to philosophy.)

    What matters is not the actual pay but the counterfactual pay that someone with a PhD can earn outside of academia. People from low-income background tend to choose the career paths that are financially most lucrative. People with rich parents are frequently fine with earning less than their parents. Of course the comfort with having family money plays an important role, but not the role of making possible a career that would otherwise be impossible.

    Reply
  11. Ian Rumfitt

    It would be interesting if someone were to make a systematic comparison between the backgrounds of academics appointed to permanent UK jobs today with those elected 50 or 60 years ago, when it was normal for people to get the equivalent of tenure in their mid-twenties, often before they had completed a PhD. The weekend before last, Oxford held its memorial (much delayed because of Covid) for the famous classicist Jasper Griffin, the son of a postman. Jasper took up the post he was to hold for 41 years only three years after finishing his undergraduate degree, and those three years were passed comfortably, first as a visiting student at Harvard, then as a junior research fellow of his college. No need for him to rely on family support. The old system of appointing people primarily on the strength of their performance in Finals had its dangers, but, as the Economist article brings out, the current system also has downsides, in forcing aspiring academics to endure a lengthy period of insecurity, survival through which may have little to do with scholarly or pedagogical prowess. While the dead hand of the REF weighs down on British universities, there is no chance of returning to the old ways. It would be good, though, to get an accurate sense of how much social diversity has been lost.

    Reply
  12. Steven Hales

    What power do you imagine tenured faculty have? Seriously? I’m tenured. Do you suppose that I can just wave my hands and create new tenure-track lines? I have spent years upon years fighting a losing battle with administrators for more permanent philosophers or at least the replacement of the ones who retire. They hold the purse strings, not the faculty. The tenured faculty can collectively get exercised about this all day long, and talk about it endlessly, and *it just won’t matter*. We’re not sitting high and mighty saying ‘let them eat cake’ to the peasants at the gate. At schools like mine, we’re trying to hang on to our own jobs. Redirect your ire to those in charge, which is not your tenured colleagues.

    Reply
  13. Andrew

    The son of a postman, sure, but educated at Christ's Hospital, a colossally wealthy public – in the British sense – school, which admittedly does use a biggish chunk of its vast endowment on scholarships, of which Griffin was a beneficiary.

    Reply
  14. Anon

    I do want to push back that the teaching isn't close to a full time position. I held a position and I did as much (arguably more) college teaching as a full-time member of staff, and also admissions and pastoral care. Now add that you're teaching these subjects for the first time, and that is a considerable workload.

    I guess the question for the "it's just part-time crowd" is why are so few Stipendiary Lectureships held jointly at two or more colleges at a time? I mean, after all, they're just part-time…

    Reply
  15. Elizabeth

    Because there are not that many stipendiary lectureships, and lots of DPhils/post docs who want them.

    Reply
  16. Kelby

    Ah, it looks like you've inferred (quite naturally!) from my comment that I'm an embittered and "irate" adjunct. FWIW, none of that is the case, thank god; I'm just an interested observer with no horse in the race. I'm glad to hear that you've personally been pushing back against what I know full well is coming from the managerial class. As for what more can be done, I'm not a union organiser — it's their job to work out what more can be done — so I don't particularly have anything in mind. But thanks for the reply.

    Reply
  17. UK ex-philosopher

    "I do want to push back that the teaching isn't close to a full time position. I held a position and I did as much (arguably more) college teaching as a full-time member of staff, and also admissions and pastoral care. Now add that you're teaching these subjects for the first time, and that is a considerable workload."

    Agreed. Even the teaching work you do as a grad student is way more than permanent academic staff seem to realise. When I taught as a grad student, I was paid hourly, solely for the hours I taught. There was tonnes of admin work that was just ignored, in terms of pay: emailing students, setting up rooms to teach in, and, most of all, writing references for former students and commenting on their application materials for postgrad programmes (I dealt with about 15 of these and none of the time this took was paid). Maybe permanent academic staff do realise this, but just ignore it.

    In reply to Steven Hales: I don't know whether you're on board with there being a problem or not. Your initial snarky response to the article was to imply that its only insight was that life's easier if you have money, as though there is no special problem in academia. If that's really what you think, then you're entirely deserving of ire! And surely a faculty that organised itself a bit and engaged in forms of protest could help produce better working conditions for temporary teaching staff: use your imagination!

    Reply
  18. Steven Hales

    You are quite right about my lack of imagination, and perhaps you can help. At my university, all faculty are paid on the same union scale. And I mean ALL, including the greenest adjunct teaching one course. They would be paid the same as someone tenure track at the same rank and step. Plus there are no research or service expectations of temporary faculty, and by contract at most 25% of the teaching across the university can be done by non-tenure track faculty. I’m not sure what else we can realistically do for them.

    I think there are a great many problems facing our profession. First among these is the increasing public denigration of the humanities and the decreasing absolute number of jobs for philosophers. I’d put the threats to tenure in general second. I’m afraid the problems at the world’s most elite universities don’t rank very highly on that list for me.

    Reply
  19. Cora Diamond

    Ian Rumfitt writes about the old system of appointing people on the strength of their performance in Finals. A couple of comments. By ‘people’ we should understand ‘men’. This system did not work at all well for women, who did much better under the system in which Ryle sent people off to jobs all over the UK and also in America and the Commonwealth. Peter Winch did a nice imitation of Ryle’s approach— telling you where to apply. Also, it should be remembered that, in the old system, even those with jobs had to live very frugally. My first job was 800 pounds a year. It went further than you might think, but it would extend to a bath no more than once a week. We lived, many of us, with shilling in the slot heat and hot water. No one less than a professor had a car. Lucky Jim gives you a not totally exaggerated picture of what it was like.

    Reply
  20. class act

    The class issue in the Academy is still a very awkward issue. I sat around a table the other day as some colleagues complained how conference halls are still often filled with bald white men, clearly people of privilege. Someone else followed up with the remark that none of us are the children of teenage mothers (what that was supposed to illustrate, I cannot remember). Initially, I thought of saying nothing … but I felt it would be a bit misleading if I did not speak up now, as I will see these people for years to come. My mother had two children by the age of 18. My older brother distinctly remembers her 25th birthday – of course he would, he was almost 8 years old. Because I am a white male, there is a widespread assumption that it must have been easy all the way for me. My mother certainly stopped helping me with school work around the 3rd grade.

    Reply
  21. UK ex-philosopher

    "I think there are a great many problems facing our profession. First among these is the increasing public denigration of the humanities and the decreasing absolute number of jobs for philosophers. I’d put the threats to tenure in general second. I’m afraid the problems at the world’s most elite universities don’t rank very highly on that list for me."

    If I understand you correctly, you don't rank the problem we're talking about very high among the problems facing the profession because it concerns elite universities. That's pretty absurd, since it suggests that elite universities can continue to get by using exploitative labour practices as far as you're concerned… just because they're elite? Maybe you meant something else, but I can't see what.

    Putting that aside, you ask what might be done. I don't know the situation in the US as well as in the UK, but here some ideas. First, tenured faculty could organise themselves and protest labour conditions for untenured faculty by withdrawing their labour. Second, they could try to establish bigger funds to help adjunct faculty with research expenses. (You mentioned that adjunct teaching staff are not expected to do any research. Another way to put this is to say that they are not paid for the research that they absolutely are expected to do if they are ever to grind their way into a tenure-track position.) At the risk of sounding embittered and triggering a defensive reaction, perhaps tenured faculty could help produce such funds by asking for a little less when they travel to conferences (the amount of money my university spent on 5-star hotels for US-based professors was substantial).

    Third, and I think most importantly, they could take on far fewer graduate students. I disagree with you that the biggest problem facing the profession is the decreasing number of absolute jobs for philosophers. It may be that the world doesn't actually need more philosophers as much as it needs other things which can be bought for the salary of a professional philosopher. In my view, departments should insist on taking far fewer graduate students, so that there are good jobs ready for, say, 85% of them when they get their PhDs. This might solve the adjunct labour problem by removing the steady stream of underemployed philosophers ready to take terrible jobs.

    To reiterate, I'm aware that I'm likely coming across as embittered and spiteful, and I'm sorry if that's the impression given. I'm genuinely trying to come up with practical suggestions to ameliorate a difficult situation, while also trying to impress on you that there is a serious problem here, since if I've read your comments correctly you don't really think that there is.

    Reply
  22. JRF

    Although I am happy that the Economist is raising such issues (which I agree with some commenters above are far from Oxford-specific), I find the conclusion that academia in Oxford is only or mostly reserved for those with family money to be at odds with my own experience. Now, I don't have any data on this (and I don't see any cited in the article either?), but I am fortunate enough to be a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) and neither I nor my collegue JRFs are especially privileged compared to the graduate student body. Indeed, most of us have gone through a year of stipendiary lectureships or teaching by the hour, but this was not funded by family money but rather by our own frugality. In my experience, the real bottleneck in academia is getting a prestigious postdoc or a permanent job, but this is the case whether or not one has rich parents. Of course, it is true that temporary and poorly-paid positions can impact people's decision to, say, start a family, so it may very well be the case that those who strongly wish to start a family often choose a different career path. That is bad, but family money doesn't seem to come into it – unless the data show that young academics at Oxford who do have children are especially likely to have a wealthy family?

    Reply
  23. Nick

    Lennart said:

    " People from low-income background tend to choose the career paths that are financially most lucrative. People with rich parents are frequently fine with earning less than their parents."

    One often hears this, but I wonder if there is data to back it up, especially in the case of academics and philosophers. My experience growing up in a family with no money, with friends with money and friends without, suggests the exact opposite: when you grow up without money, you don't get used to European vacations, ski trips, private school, new cars, eating out, summer camps, fancy hotels, $3000 bicycles instead of garage sale finds, and on and on and on, and you don't see yourself as somehow suffering without those. Your family (nuclear and extended), your neighbours, and most of your closest friends are in similar situations, and for the most part (as long as you can pay the rent and have enough to eat), life is fine. My friends from impecunious or lower middle class backgrounds never thought about trying to make loads of money, since they realised there are more important things in life and hadn't become accustomed to the lifestyle inflation that well-off people enjoy/suffer. On the other hand, my friends who were well off, from a relatively early age cared about making money and tended to pick majors that fostered that (e.g. commerce instead of philosophy). I don't know whether they cared about making as much as their parents but they certainly cared about money and having plenty of it in a way that, as far as I can remember, the kids who grew up in modest backgrounds didn't. We wouldn't have dreamed about going to uni for commerce because, well, morons did that as far as we were concerned. English and philosophy and history and sociology and so on were so much more interesting.

    There are no doubt cultural and national variations on all this, but even still it seems wrong to me as a generalisation that people who grew up without money gravitate to lucrative careers than those who grew up rich. Maybe the truly rich are different, but upper middle class (including very upper middle) are strongly attracted to lucrative careers, more than any other demographic in my experience.

    As a parent of young kids now, with a pretty high family income, I see my own values being now shaped by being affluent and I worry about my kids.

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