Jan Hladký, March 2, 2022
Česká verze [zde].
Charles University, the oldest and most prestigious Czech university, evaluates applicants for academic positions on “takes into account their educational and creative activities as well as other aspects of their expertise such as for example ability to popularise their subject, mobility, management skills” (see [here]). The requirements and expectations placed on academics as to their educational, creative, popularisation, and managerial skills are perfectly legitimate. They are required to be able to teach well, produce original work, present findings in their field to the general public in an understandable form, and participate in the management of the academic environment. However, academics are not truck drivers, and the requirements placed on them with regard to their mobility, the last of the aspects listed above, are much harder to justify. To give another example of this practice, the Czech Science Foundation required grant applicants in the category of junior projects (in years 2015 through 2020; see, for example, [here]) to have done a postdoctoral internship abroad of at least six months prior to the application. Other such ad-hoc criteria might include, for example, having a doctoral degree from one of the top fifty universities according to Shanghai University Ranking or having given at least one invited lecture at an altitude above two thousand meters. These criteria have never appeared among the Czech Science Foundation's application conditions.
I have been interested in the topic of long-term academic mobility since my return from the United Kingdom to Czechia in 2014. The specific characteristics of the part of the Czech academic environment that I was able to observe were striking: inbreeding and career clientelism, fragmentation and a lack of interest in efficient collaboration, deliberately muddy interpretation of matters of academic ethics, and rigidity in the choice of research topics – all of these often perpetuated through professional silence. In many of these aspects, it would be advisable to adopt standards from selected foreign academic systems. Long-term academic mobility could undoubtedly contribute to such efforts.
On the other hand, long-term academic mobility also has certain drawbacks. First, it often puts a significant strain on one's personal life. This aspect has been pointed out by the Centre for Gender and Science in connection with the abovementioned Czech Science Foundation's junior projects. The excess of postdoctoral positions compared to the number of permanent positions and the fact that it is possible to chain them (especially in Western Europe) leads to the establishment of an unhealthy employee structure and the precarisation of the careers of aspiring junior academics. In many cases, academic mobility also contributes to brain drain and reinforces historic inequalities in the division of power. I am interested primarily in its drawbacks related to climate sustainability. It needs to be pointed out that long-term internships abroad can often be done with a minimal carbon footprint. Specifically, in many fields, academically valuable internships can be done at first-rate institutions in Berlin or Vienna, which are easily reached by train. Even in its most extreme form (and including occasional private visits to one's home country, often with one's family), long-term mobility produces only a fraction of the carbon footprint that we sometimes manage to produce by doing short-term internships abroad and participating in conferences. Nevertheless, the normative and mindlessly quantified imperative of long-term mobility is being accepted as a part of what is generally perceived to constitute academic qualities and, as a result, creates an environment that places an unjustifiable strain (especially with the abovementioned short-term internships) on the climate. While most of my critical comments concern issues specific to Czechia and some other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, this mobility fetishism is affecting academic evaluation in the West as well.
We, therefore, need to differentiate between mobility and internationalization. First and foremost, we have to articulate which foreign standards we want to introduce into the Czech environment. Mobility can potentially serve as a means of doing so; it is not a quality per se. Take, for example, the following model scenario. A doctoral supervisor X arranges for their student Y to do an internship under their close foreign collaborator Z. After a year or two, Y returns to their “home” department. Y has not learned much new because they continued working on their projects with X and Z. And for the few new things Y has learned, there is no demand. For decades, X, the head of the department, and many of their former students now employed at the department have had a clear idea of how the department should be run and refuse to make any changes. Y can now tick the mobility box in their CV although the actual academic benefits they have drawn from it are almost nil. (On the other hand, there are undoubtedly scenarios, in which doing an internship abroad does improve one's academic skills.)
It is perhaps even more regrettable when good ideas brought back from internships abroad and even simple common sense run into rigidity in matters outside the scope of research and teaching, i.e., in the management of academic institutions. For obvious reasons, it is impossible to directly document just how large the number of issues that are being actively or passively covered up actually is; however, we can estimate how prevalent they are based on the proverbial tip of the iceberg, i.e., some of the astounding cases that have been exposed recently: [the plagiarism of former vice-rector Kovář], the manipulation of scientific data by the groups ran by [multi-director Zbořil] and [almost-rector Adam], or the extensive [tampering with selection procedures at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics] of Charles University. Even though the responsibility for each of these issues lies with specific individuals or small groups, it was the permissive nature of the local academic ecosystem that provided the breeding ground for their proliferation. We should not need to do a postdoctoral internship at Princeton to be able to identify, name, and eliminate such basic flaws in the way our academic institutions operate.
If an academic environment is to become truly enriched, high demands have to be placed on the qualities of hired academics, and at the same time, institutions need to be willing to make use of these qualities - including those acquired during internships abroad - and apply them in their operation. Furthermore, to actually implement international standards, the Czech academic environment needs to engage in an open critical discussion and listen to opinions from abroad. In recent years, we have been making progress in these respects, but we still have a long way to go. One specific major improvement would be to increase the number of international members in advisory and executive bodies operating at academic institutions of all levels, especially wherever there is a risk of tribalism and rigid resistance to change. To give a top-level example, in this case from my home institution, the Czech Academy of Sciences, such bodies would be, for example, the [Science Council] or the [Commission for the Scientific Integrity]. And it is just as important to implement strict external oversight for competitive hiring at departments with a high degree of inbreeding, sometimes euphemised as “tradition” or “specific Czech conditions” (based on which in some other situations perfectly legitimate arguments can be made). The coronavirus pandemic taught us that international committees can often meet virtually (to the benefit of its members, the taxpayers' wallets, and the planet). The reluctance to open up and internationalise committees is the result of simple math - more influence for foreign members means less influence for the local old guard. In the case of some key decision-making processes, such as dean or rector elections, external elements are precluded from participating in the decision-making process by law. However, requiring young academics to meet artificial criteria of international mobility is not an adequate substitute.
I would like to thank Tereza Stöckelová and Kamil Vlček for their comments.