Although this may look like a new title for yet another masterpiece by Ethan and Joel Coen, it’s down-to-earth reality, as it seems, at least in the Bel Paese.
I need to thank my dear friend Davide1 who linked me to OECD data from 2005, according to which young researchers are among the least likely to enter a tenured research program in Italy.
In the Bel Paese, the average age for all tenured researchers is fiftyone. For full professors, it’s sixty2. Let’s have a look at other European Countries
Hooray for the Turks. But there’s more. Let’s focus on stats for spring chickens (my former post doc supervisor used this expression, I just love it)
Again, Hooray for the Turks, and gloomy days for the Italians. And, what a gap.
However, thanks to a phenomenon of modern societies called pension, these data are bound to change. As one can infer from the upper plot, in the next few years there will be a massive wave of retirement in the Italian Academic scenario. If you every fancied a career in Science in Italy, now it’s the time. Good luck!
1 Davide’s nickname is homo pre-technologicus, due to his limited use of WWWeb features
2 This blog discussed about Italian gerontocracy before.
I’m interested in this. And agree it looks bad for young Italian researchers. With respect to the French, I agree with the assessment that the average age for tenured professors is around 45. But that means for every one that is 60 in France there is another one at 30, which seems highly unlikely in my opinion. So I wonder how they classified people into “tenured professors”?
Such people as myself should not be counted – I am a tenured full-time scientist, and I just teach for fun (and for free). Young people get into the university system by becoming assistant (but tenured) professors. This is known as “maitre de conference” – rather like a lecturer in England, I think. These poor people are supposed to also keep up a research program but on a budget of some few thousand euros a year, so that means they also have to ask for grants on top of a heavy teaching load. To be cynical, full professors spend their time finding ways to dump their teaching load on their lab members or on their dependent maitres de conferences.
(This is why I didn’t even apply for jobs in the university system – this, and the fact that it is known for being ostensibly fair contests that are decided ahead of time, so candidates show up for interviews while the position is understood to go to someone else. It used to be someone local, but now it’s more indirect.)
My point is that “maitre de conference” appears to me to be little better than indenture – yes, it’s a guaranteed employment, but for a pittance with no way of continuing your research and an enormous bureaucracy to keep you down and not too ambitious, unless you are “shouldered” (literal translation of the French word for “sponsored” or "boosted") by a powerful patron.
Among the professors that must have been counted into these figures are also those who are in the parallel medical university system. These are doctors, who have gone on to be sponsored in a true research lab for a science thesis. Many of these “theses de science” for the doctors are completely bogus and accorded because it is the only way a doctor can advance from maitre de conference – teaching first- and second-year students – to full professor – once again, getting someone else to do most if not all of your teaching for you.
My main criticism of the university system is that there is no official feedback on the quality of the teaching, be it in the regular science curriculum or in medical training. Of course, there are unofficial and unapproved student-run websites to compare different lecturers and recommend some over others, but there is no way to keep the good and recycle the bad into another task the way there can be in the better American universities.
Of course, we can look forward to a lot of upheaval what with the university reform currently underway. I am all for allowing the universities more “autonomy” if they assume their responsibilities for transparent and progressive management at the same time. Currently, it seems like that the success of this initiative will be highly dependent on the personalities of each university president and their ability to resist special interest groups. We’ll see.
Massimo, as I understand from your earlier blog post, Italian professors retire with 75. That’s 10 years later than in Germany (some retire with 68 by special permission). But that doesn’t explain your second statistics.
Heather, what you write and what I learned from several French scientists I know is that the system in France is somewhat similar to the German system. Junior faculty is given little freedom – and research money – and candidates are interviewed even though a decision has already been made.
In 2002 Germany started to promote Junior Professorships. It is a step in the right direction.
@Martin: what was the problem with the “framework regulation” for these junior professorships, that it was challenged in court?
Do you have a parallel system where you can just do research without teaching requirements? It is, in my opinion, a real strength of the French structures, even if it is not optimally organized. Also, there are career technicians and engineers, rather than pre-medical school students just doing a tech job for a year, where their expertise is lost to the lab as positions rotate.
Heather, in Germany schools and universities are regulated by state law. The junior professorship was introduced as federal law and this law was challenged in court by the states Thüringen, Sachsen and Bayern.
For similar reasons we will no longer have a national law regulating our universities by year’s end (Hochschulrahmengesetz, more information in German here). Surprisingly, most students and faculty aren’t aware of these changes.
Researchers at the Max Planck Society or the Helmholtz Association not only have excellent research facilities but also almost no teaching requirements. And most technicians are career technicians.
Thanks, Martin, for the information. Massimo, in Italy?
I’m intrigued by this idea of excellence being insured or at least promoted by a parallel research-only path. A current, possibly dangerous idea that is ancillary to the university autonomy measures is to cut up the French CNRS (national science foundation, seemingly like the German Helmholtz Association?) such that it becomes only a management structure for personnel who are actually occupied by themes developed in these newly autonomous universities, side by side with university employees. The mixed laboratories exist already, but in the current system, the CNRS has its own peer-review bodies to judge the excellence of research, career promotions, and most importantly, budgeting for different scientific priorities in a wide range of subjects, independent of what the university as a local institution might want to promote.
The reason I think it’s a little dangerous is the following. Imagine that each university president wanted to increase the glory of her institution by setting up the same expensive platform for – whatever: whole-genome sequencing, for instance, or anything else in fashion. There would be no national coordination, and not enough users across the many identical sites to make them economically viable. That will go for research themes as well. Things like paleontology, linguistics or gender studies, currently supported by the CNRS, might possibly go right out the window.
Jennifer might be pleased to know that there has been another call to arms by the Sauvons La Recherche group. I can’t remember which blog post in which she was pleased to discover that occasionally, in their own interests, scientists can be motivated to demonstrate.
Helen and Martin,
nice to see that you have found this area for some exchange of thoughts.
Helen: another way to do your calculation, other than for every professor aged 60 there is one aged 30, is to think that for every professor aged 60, you have one aged 40 and one aged 35. You end up with the same average of 45. I believe they classified ‘all professors’ including all those who have tenure, which would include the maitres de conferences and Ricercatori in Italy.
Regarding your description of the French Academic scenario, had you replaced those few French words for their Italian counterparts, I would have been left with the impression that you were talking about Italy and its Academia, and with great exactitude. Also, the parenthetic expression in your first comment, about rigged selections, reminds me of something very familiar which I reported on before on this blog.
You mention the reform procedure in France, and Martin highlights the introduction of Junior Professorships in Germany. To the best of my knowledge, there is no realistic attempt to modernize the Italian Academic Career with the same boldness (which should answer Helen’s question in the 5th comment). Spain may be offering a more dynamic platform these days. See for example the initiatives promoted by ICREA and IMDEA for the Catalan and Madrid regions. Also, I heard a few days ago that the Spanish CNRS-equivalent has accepted to have its program reviewed by out-of country labs & institutes.
European countries that have not done it yet, may be on their way to modernizing the Academic ladder. Italy, as customary, is lagging and limping a few years behind. If only we had governments lasting for the entire term!
Martin: I need to think more what the 75 y.o. mandatory retirement line does not explain the second graph. There is a link which is not obvious.
I haven’t yet mentioned another aspect of the German university system, athough a few other European countries do the same. We have the habilitation, which is sort of an elaborate second PhD thesis. The successful habilitation gives you the title Privatdozent and you have then earned the right to apply for professorships. The recent changes in German law mentioned above also tried to get rid of the habilitation, but this was only partly successful. Resistance by tenured professors was and is very strong.
We are also in the middle of another change: switching the curriculum from diploma to bachelor and master degrees, the Bologna process.
Our habilitation is the same – a second Ph.D. defense, but it is more mild than the Ph.D. itself. That is, you are encouraged to seek it only if you are already a good candidate. I don’t criticize this much; the idea is to see if you are apt to direct younger researchers in their masters/Ph.D. research. First you demonstrate your own credentials, but you also need to demonstrate some didactic ability (usually by sponsoring masters/Ph.D. students unofficially, under the supervision of a more senior scientist who already has the habilitation. And volunteering to teach doesn’t hurt.)
You need this to advance from “maitre de conferences” to full professor, but since a MDC is tenured nonetheless, it’s not a huge catastrophe career-wise to be without a habilitation a diriger des recherches.
If the transition to the Bologna process seems painful now in Germany, the French example is that the furor died down quickly and everyone now seems okay with it after only a couple of years (I think it has been).
We (using the term meaning "Sweden") have something called ‘docentur’, which would be similar to ‘habilitation’. It occurs about 4yrs after PhD defense (you need a few papers and do a smaller defense) and is also linked to taking few classes in teaching. This since it (docentur) is one of the requirments (usually) for getting hired as ‘assistant professor’ where you are most likely teaching.
In order to get the precious ‘docentur’ you would benefit from having a position as a research associate/t-t-post doc where you can get those coveted publications.
The Bologna process is on its way through its first year soon and it will be interesting to see the implications for the PhDstudents and master students further down the line. At the moment, most of the PhD students have a MSc before being accepted as a PhDstudent and then you are funded for 4 years. I think after the Bologna it’d be one year of studies, getting MSc and then three more years in lab. I wonder what it will do to the publication rate for the new PhDs?
You probably have noticed the essay Retiring retirement by Peter Lawrence. He argues that the practice of mandatory retirement, common in most European countries but not the US or Australia, should be abandoned.
Martin,
The Economist has touched upon retirement in the last few years and what should be done about it. Here is one instance. Here is a second one.
I am adding a a link to the Bologna process as a glossary entry.
David Anderson in that essay is well-equipped to assert that Nicole Le Douarin, my former boss, can and has still made significant contributions to science although she has passed the cut-off age of 65. She negotiated a bit of a reprieve but indeed was forced more or less out.
The contribution of people should be judged in an open-minded and tolerant way, not just by counting papers or by undergraduate ratings on teaching, but by evaluating the entire contribution to the institution.
Yes, but how? How do you measure mentorship and example?
I really agree with this, though:
A portion of anyone’s salary is an investment in the future, to retain valued teachers and researchers, and therefore the justification for that portion will wane in older scientists until, sometimes, it may reach the point when the main beneficiaries of the opportunity to work may be the scientists themselves. The logical result of these arguments is to restructure salaries so that they can fall as well as rise.
Especially if the person can begin their pension plan.
The overhead costs of still providing an office to a “past retirement age” scientist are minimal, but when lab space is scarce, do you (as an institution) keep on the older lab or invest in a new one?
Tough stuff.
Have you seen Forced out and fighting fit at the News and Opinion forum? Various views on Peter Lawrence’s call to have the mandatory retirement age, er, retired.
I have finally managed to read the commentary by P. Lawrence. In fact, I read it twice and it’s giving me a lot to think. For reasons that have been discussed already, the idea may find huge resistance here in Italy. Is anyone willing to bet on which European Country will be the first to retire retirement?