In my father’s generation, (see David Lodge, Changing Places, 1975), British academia had this system where if you did really well on your degree exams, you could get tenure, with the expectation that you’d give some lectures, and one day, once you’d thought of anything interesting, you’d write it up as a PhD.
There were senior academics in Cambridge, well respected in their fields, who’d never got round to writing a PhD.
Tenure was defined as ‘we give you a well paid job for life, from which you can only be dismissed for “gross moral turpitude”’. Nobody knew what gross moral turpitude actually was, but it probably included murder.
In those days, the complaint was always that “British scientists would invent things, and then American businessmen would turn then into commercial successes”.
I don’t know how much truth there was in that complaint, but that was the commonly heard complaint.
Of course, people being people, many British Academics decided that their job was to stay at home drinking themselves to death, and never got in touch with their university ever again.
And of course, a lot of more passionate academics decided that their job was to be a full time advocate of communist revolution. Generally this was thought to be ‘the sort of thing that academics did’.
At any rate, the answer was deemed to be to go over the the American system of ‘Publish or Perish’.
No no-one can get anything done, and our youngest and brightest people spend their lives teaching, filling out grant applications, and moving house,
And God help you if you say something controversial.
In my father’s generation, (see David Lodge, Changing Places, 1975), British academia had this system where if you did really well on your degree exams, you could get tenure, with the expectation that you’d give some lectures, and one day, once you’d thought of anything interesting, you’d write it up as a PhD.
There were senior academics in Cambridge, well respected in their fields, who’d never got round to writing a PhD.
Tenure was defined as ‘we give you a well paid job for life, from which you can only be dismissed for “gross moral turpitude”’. Nobody knew what gross moral turpitude actually was, but it probably included murder.
In those days, the complaint was always that “British scientists would invent things, and then American businessmen would turn then into commercial successes”.
I don’t know how much truth there was in that complaint, but that was the commonly heard complaint.
Of course, people being people, many British Academics decided that their job was to stay at home drinking themselves to death, and never got in touch with their university ever again.
And of course, a lot of more passionate academics decided that their job was to be a full time advocate of communist revolution. Generally this was thought to be ‘the sort of thing that academics did’.
At any rate, the answer was deemed to be to go over the the American system of ‘Publish or Perish’.
No no-one can get anything done, and our youngest and brightest people spend their lives teaching, filling out grant applications, and moving house,
And God help you if you say something controversial.
My sources inform me. I ran.