A year of looking in on academia

Originally published on eve.gd on 13 December 2023.

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As many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, not least my health and wanting to be able to work from home. After a year, I have reflected on my experience of transferring to a very good employer outside of academia. If you did the same, your mileage might vary, because it all depends where you end up working and for whom. Crossref turns out to be a most excellent organisation to work for. YMMV. I should also say that I still remain a Professor at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, and that is not planned to change. Rather, I will be moving onto a research-only contract for the longer term.

• Safety. Covid landed me in hospital on the serious infectious diseases ward for a month last year. My immune system can’t handle it. My new role is entirely work from home and people are very understanding of my immunocompromise and vulnerable position. It has meant that I have missed out on some fun things; the Crossref away week in Spain for instance. But being able to work in a safe environment means the world to me. It would be very difficult to fulfill my in-person teaching obligations in academia without huge Covid risk.
• Pay. People don’t like to talk money in the UK; part of our supposed decorum. But it’s nice to be paid well. And my new role pays much better than academia. In fact, pay in UK academia, given the level of qualification – PhD – is very poor. When I first started in academia, this didn’t seem such a problem. The job was good; I loved teaching and research. I didn’t mind that the salary wasn’t the best, because the job was enjoyable. A decade and a half later, and admin is all-consuming in my academic role. I could spend all day every day just answering emails and carving out time for actual intellectual thought and practice has become difficult. As for “Christmas bonus” – unheard of in academia! “What’s that?”
• Care. Crossref has a policy of not counting sick days. They have been so good to me over the course of my kidney failure this year as I got everything sorted out and moved things around so that they don’t interfere with work too much. Birkbeck has also always been very good to me during periods of ill health, but I know that not everyone’s academic employers are so good.
• Stimulation. If my role in academia had been leading me further and further away from intellectual concerns, into the all-consuming administrative realm, my work at Crossref is the opposite. There is so little admin that it’s unbelievable. I spend my days working directly on challenging computational research problems and often a day has gone by and I haven’t noticed. Academia is not the only place where you can do worthwhile – and enjoyable – work.
• You can still do academic research. As noted above, I maintain my position at my university and still wish to keep up my research output in my discipline. So what do my days look like? Every other day I get up at 5am to do dialysis before work; I then have a full day of Crossref work; then at the end of the day I turn to academic writing. This is, for me, the perfect balance. The computational work tends to draw me into myself (don’t get me wrong: I love it, but it tends to absorb my thought process in a less conversational kind of way), the academic writing draws me out. So to finish the day on the extroverting activity means that I then bounce downstairs in a far more convivial mood.