Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today 308
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, says he doubts any university would give him a job today. Higgs says universities wouldn't consider him productive enough — though the papers he published were important and of high quality, he didn't have the volume necessary for serious consideration in today's competitive employment environment. 'He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.' His comments highlight the absurdity of the current system for finding researchers in academia. How many researchers of Higgs' caliber have been turned down for similar reasons?"
Re:Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Informative)
That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing. I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.
No. There is a distinct difference between poor quality science and bad science.
There's also the public tendency to reduce everything to a simple answer, when it's rarely simple.
Honest Research (Score:5, Informative)
I am a tenured full professor at a mid-to-leading rank European
university. I work each day for several hours on ideas I consider interesting, publishing
if the results seem useful. I also take seriously my teaching duties (mostly low level courses that no one else wants).
However I refuse to play office politics or participate in advancing the careers of others (like writing articles for them). And while this excludes any possibility of promotion it is a fair trade-off for having the peace and tranquility required to research difficult ideas.
So problems that Higgs mentions exist also at lower levels. Either you play their game or else you get shunted out.
Idiocy (Score:5, Informative)
It's unbelievably idiotic and absurd... until you consider human nature.
The people above you are incompetent (cf. "Peter Principle") and will latch onto anything that they can use to judge you to avoid appearing as the incompetents that they are. Even when it makes no sense from an analytical point of view. We humans seem to be hardwired to avoid (being perceived to be, or actually) being wrong [ted.com]. (The book's also pretty good!)
Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Informative)
I very much think you will find it is these days.
RCUK have thankfully acred to reverse this. To compete in university rankings in the UK you submit at most 4 papers from the past 5 years. No others count.
I don't think you have that right. In Canada when we submit grant proposals to NSERC we can only include at most 4 papers from the past 5 years as well, but that is the copies for the referees to read. Your CV that you submit lists all of your publications in the last 6 years, and the referees certainly look at those. From discussions with my colleagues in the UK, it is the same over there. You submit a few best papers for the referee to read, but your CV better have listed all of the papers in the review period or you are sunk.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:4, Informative)
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the ranking of UK universities. The REF replaces the older Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which happened every four years. The last RAE was 4 years ago, and the current REF is just finishing. Established academics have to submit 4 research outputs since the last RAE / REF. These are usually papers, but can be other things (systems you've built and so on).
The REF is a really big deal in UK universities, because it directly impacts the availability of research grants. The CVs of individual researchers are taken into account, but the REF / RAE score of the department is the biggest factor. If you have 4 papers in top-tier publications (conferences or journals, depending on your field), then it's very easy to get hired in the run up to the REF, because a lot of second tier universities are looking to find people who will bump them up the rankings.
Conversely, if you don't have the 4 publications (or other impressive things), then it's very hard to get a tenured position, but if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher: part of the point of publicly funded research is that the results are communicated to the public, and if you're not doing this then you're not keeping up your end of the deal.