Academia: Hard to Enter, Harder to Defend, Still Worth It!

There has been no shortage of articles lately warning people to think twice before pursuing an academic career. Most make entirely reasonable points. Academic jobs are difficult to secure, casual employment has become entrenched, permanent positions attract enormous fields of applicants, research funding is scarce, and Australian universities have developed the sort of reputation that now makes “governance failure” sound like a sector-wide branding exercise. Anyone considering a PhD in the belief that it provides a reliable path to a pleasant office, a light teaching load and uninterrupted afternoons spent reading has been admirably selective about which university news to follow. Even so, whenever I read these warnings and the news, I find myself reaching the same conclusion: I would become an academic again without hesitation.

That does not mean I would recommend a PhD to everyone. In fact, I would probably discourage more people from doing it than I would recommend doing it. Being good at university is not, by itself, a reason to remain there indefinitely, and enjoying the experience of studying does not necessarily mean you’re going to enjoy academic work. A doctorate is long, frequently lonely and generally less glamorous than it appears from the outside. There are only so many times you can explain at a party that yes, you are still studying, and no, you’re not exactly sure when you’ll be finished, and despite being in your thirties you still don’t have a permanent job, and finally, no, not that kind of doctor. Most importantly, and to the dismay of your parents, the qualification does not come with a job attached. The question is not simply whether you want a PhD. It is whether you want the life that you hope will follow it.

I began my doctorate while teaching high school full-time. Even if I wanted the post-grad research lifestyle, I couldn’t afford it. While PhDs are mostly free in Australia through government grants, the reality was that, for me and for many, I needed a real job to pay bills and take care of my family. The PhD itself was never the dream, although I did covet the title. What I really wanted was to teach people who wanted to be taught.  I wanted to teach at university, and the doctorate was what I needed to get there. It was the price of admission rather than the destination, and I would make the same decision today. One of the best descriptions I ever heard was that a PhD gets you into the club, after which the real work starts. At first, I assumed the real work meant publishing papers, winning grants and being promoted. Those things matter, of course, but the phrase has come to mean something different to me. The real work is learning how to become a successful academic rather than simply being someone who has completed a doctorate and does the work.

We occasionally load the PhD with more meaning than it can reasonably carry. It is evidence that someone has completed a substantial piece of original research and demonstrated the capacity to conduct scholarly inquiry. It may also demonstrate independence, curiosity and intellectual courage. Sometimes it demonstrates extraordinary persistence, a highly committed supervisory team and a refusal by all involved to admit defeat. Having supervised doctoral students with very different strengths, I am less convinced than I once was that a PhD proves exceptional intelligence. It proves that someone has undertaken research successfully. While it is a considerable achievement to be congratulated, it is not the same thing as proving that the person can teach, lead, collaborate, exercise sound judgement or contribute meaningfully to the life of a university.

Universities do not employ PhDs. They employ academics, and those are not necessarily the same thing. A teaching degree does not automatically produce a good teacher, just as a medical degree does not immediately produce the doctor you would choose to operate on your child. Qualifications permit entry into professions; professional ability develops afterwards. Academia is no exception. Knowing how to conduct a study is not the same as knowing which questions are worth asking. Publishing an article is not the same as contributing something useful. Holding strong opinions in a faculty meeting is certainly not the same as possessing professional judgement, although the distinction is not always obvious to everyone present.

The difficulty is getting the chance to develop into an academic in the first place. If there is one issue that should genuinely make prospective academics think twice, it is the casualisation of the university teaching workforce. Talented early-career researchers can spend years moving between sessional teaching, short-term contracts and research positions funded only until the next grant expires. They may teach large numbers of students while having no desk, no certainty about the following semester and little to no paid time to develop the research profile required to compete for permanent employment. Universities train far more doctoral graduates than they can employ (I’ll save that for another post), while continuing to rely on many of those graduates to deliver their courses. That is not an individual failure of resilience or ambition. It is a structural problem, and anyone beginning a doctorate with an academic career in mind deserves an honest explanation of it.

Once someone secures a continuing academic position, however, the conversation changes. Academics complain about workloads, publication targets, grant expectations, administrative demands, compliance processes, dashboards, rankings, impact statements and the mysterious institutional capacity to turn a fairly simple task into a framework, a working party and a three-year implementation plan. I have participated in enough of these conversations to know that many complaints are justified; I am guilty of participating in the complaint roundtable.  Universities often expect academics to teach more students, publish in better journals, attract external funding, supervise research candidates, demonstrate community impact and contribute to institutional service, all within workload models that appear to have been designed using a different number of hours in the week.

Yet none of these is an argument against becoming an academic. They are arguments about how universities organise academic work. Every profession contains expectations that are frustrating, unrealistic or poorly designed. The existence of bureaucracy does not make the work itself meaningless, although bureaucracy can occasionally mount a determined campaign to test that proposition. There is an important difference between saying that entering academia has become precarious and saying that being an academic is no longer worthwhile. The first is plainly true for many people. The second does not reflect my experience.

Part of the frustration comes from the way universities talk about academic success. Research is treated as the most prestigious form of contribution, and teaching is sometimes presented as the activity that fills the time of people who are not publishing enough. I have never understood that view. Universities are educational institutions. Teaching is not an unfortunate interruption to the serious work of being an academic; for many of us, it is the serious work. The opportunity to shape future teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, engineers and other professionals is not a consolation prize awarded to unsuccessful researchers. It is one of the principal reasons universities exist.

That does not diminish research. Research is one of the great privileges of academic work, and universities should protect the time required to do it properly. However, universities do not pay every academic to pursue whatever happens to interest them indefinitely. They, like all businesses, employ people to create value. Some academics create exceptional value through internationally significant research. Others do it through teaching, leadership, doctoral supervision, industry collaboration or public engagement. Most contribute through a combination of these things, with the balance shifting over the course of a career. The idea that every academic should receive the same allocation of research time regardless of what they produce has always seemed difficult to defend. Time is not recognition of academic identity; it is an institutional investment.

I suspect this is also why some discussions about academic workload become confused. Academics are often extremely busy, but busyness and hard work are not identical. It is possible to spend an entire week attending meetings, replying to emails, reviewing documents and updating systems without creating anything that will matter a month later. Academia offers almost limitless opportunities for this kind of activity. Hard work, by contrast, produces something: a course, a paper, a successful student, a research project, a partnership, an idea that changes practice or a decision that improves an institution. None of this means that every administrative task is avoidable. It does mean that a full calendar is not necessarily evidence of a productive professional life.

Despite all of that, academia still offers something rare. Early in my career, I would often find myself sitting in a café in the middle of the Australian afternoon, speaking to my parents in the United States. My father, amused that I was apparently drinking coffee rather than sitting behind a desk, would invariably ask, “Shouldn’t you be at work?” It was partly a joke and partly the response of a lifelong civil servant who understood work as something measured by where you were and when you arrived. I would tell him, “They pay me to think shit up, and I can think shit up anywhere.” My answer was only half a joke. Some of my best work has begun in cafés, airports, hotel rooms and on long runs, usually when I was supposed to be thinking about something else. The office has never been the point. The extraordinary privilege of academic work is that thinking itself is part of the job. 

Thinking as part of the job itself does not mean aimless contemplation while somebody else marks the assignments. Thinking must lead somewhere. Ideas must become research, courses, arguments, decisions, or changes in practice. Still, there are remarkably few professions in which curiosity is considered a legitimate use of working time. On any given day, I might teach a class, supervise a doctoral student, review a paper, redesign a course, advise a colleague or spend several hours trying to understand a problem that has been bothering me for months. The variety is extraordinary, and the boundary between one part of the role and another is often where the most interesting work occurs.

A recent article encouraging prospective academics to “think twice” prompted me to reflect on all of this. I agreed with much of it, particularly the concerns about insecure employment and the narrowing path into continuing academic work. Prospective doctoral students should understand those realities clearly. Universities should also be challenged to address them rather than treating casualisation as an unfortunate but permanent feature of the landscape. But I am less persuaded when the genuine difficulty of entering academia becomes evidence that the profession itself is no longer worth pursuing.

I would not tell someone to undertake a PhD because they enjoy studying, want to be called doctor or cannot think of anything else to do. I would ask what they hope to do afterwards, whether they understand how uncertain the pathway may be and whether they are genuinely interested in teaching, research and the slow development of expertise. I would tell them that universities can be maddening institutions, that academic work is frequently misunderstood and that the freedom it offers must be earned repeatedly through what you produce and contribute. Then, for the right person, I would still recommend it.

The system surrounding academic work has become harder to defend. The work itself remains the best job I have ever had, and still the only one I ever really wanted.