Higher education needs more portfolio academics

Many years after the event, I was told that my advancement had once been successfully opposed on a promotions committee when someone from the science faculty reported that he had seen me described as a “travel writer” in a British Sunday newspaper.

It was a tiny incident in an incipient culture clash in university life between those who worked only on their formal academic duties and those who did other things. Had I been allowed to defend myself, I would have argued that I should be judged on my output and not on the proportion of my efforts that went into producing it, although I can see that “dilettante” and “moonlighting” might be words that could be applied by my opponent. In the latter stages of my career, I distinguished between “career” and “portfolio” academics and observed that things were going against those of us of the portfolio persuasion.

My very minor status as a “travel writer” had initially caused me no doubts at all. When I joined the new University of Warwick in the late 1960s, academic staff were up to all sorts of things. I was in the politics department, but the English department provided some of the more spectacular examples. One member co-starred in Kenny Everett’s raunchy television sketch show Nice Time. Another wrote poetry, but had also picked up a fee as a Page 3 girl while a lecturer; this was taken to demonstrate how unstuffy the university was. (Remember that in those days, an important criterion of success in a university was attracting undergraduate applications.)

Yet another used a paid sabbatical to write a novel. Lawyers actually practised law, and various colleagues owned antique businesses, bookshops and restaurants. And in some respects, the business school topped them all. While sitting as a faculty representative on a committee for quite a senior appointment, I asked a candidate about his publication plans, only to be told that emphasis on academic publications was antiquated and that you should judge a business academic by the size of their consultancy fees. Anything Goes seemed to be the theme tune, and all publicity was considered good publicity.

Behind that range of activities lay an enormous and impressive history of intellectual moonlighting going beyond the universities and into the church. The mathematician Charles Dodgson was and is much better known as the fantasy author Lewis Carroll. He always denied that when Queen Victoria remarked that she had enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and asked if she could see his next work, he sent her An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, but the rumour has persisted.

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The contribution of academia to children’s and fantasy writing since has been a large one, led by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, but there are also contributions to several other genres. The socialist intellectual G. D. H. Cole managed to teach and write about all three of philosophy, politics and economics – including tutoring the undergraduate Harold Wilson at the University of Oxford in the 1930s – but he also produced 29 detective novels. The latter were co-authored with his wife, Margaret, which might have helped convince the promotions committee that he hadn’t been too distracted if he’d ever been considered by one. And there is, of course, a genre of academic fiction led, in the UK, by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. The forefathers of the portfolio writer remain the legions of Anglican vicars who wrote about matters other than religion.

Looking back, we in academia lived in a world of delightful vagueness. I never knew of any stipulation about my job as to how many hours or days I was supposed to work, whatever work was. There was said to be a phrase in our contracts that referred to “such duties as shall be prescribed by the Senate”, but this might have been mythology; and anyway, I have no memory whatsoever of seeing or signing a contract. In any case, when it came to teaching, my record was impeccable: in the 46 years (1968-2014) during which I was doing some sort of university teaching, I turned up on every single occasion. No sick notes; gold clock standard for attendance.

I had always assumed that I/we had something called “tenure”, but when the Conservative government of the 1980s sought to abolish it, it turned out not to exist. Not, that is, in the American sense, clear of purpose and definition, with interpretation honed by more than a thousand legal cases a year. It only existed in an English sense, whereby certain things were assumed and therefore could be taken to be part of agreements under common law. I felt that my interests were sufficiently involved in this question that I wrote an academic article about it, which, I note, still generates some correspondence (“Academic tenure and conservative philosophy”, Higher Education Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1, 1990).

It would be reasonable, surely, to say that academic freedom left one free to do academic work of one’s choice, and anything else done for money should be done only in “spare” time. But in a world containing creative writing and chemistry, the varieties of academic activity make definitions difficult or perhaps impossible. My “travel writing” was a case in point. I was teaching a course on the politics of the environment, but as a highly non-urban person I felt that the aspects of urban decay and regeneration were something I had little “feel” for. So, initially, I wandered around London, exploring parts that neither I nor most visitors would ever normally go to and talking to people there. Only afterwards did I write up an account, and the now-defunct weekly New Society not only published it but commissioned an indefinite run of sequels that went on to other magazines and newspapers and to two book-length collections. But the original motivation was clearly academic, and the activity had benefits for teaching and research. Later on, when my main research interest became the politics of sport, the possibilities and ambiguities were endless.

Tenure wasn't the only traditional ambiguity of British academic life that eroded in the 1980s. At first, Margaret Thatcher’s government seemed to be going in a different direction from the one we now recognise in retrospect. During a pay dispute early in her time in office, in the context of high inflation, the prime minister opined that academics were clever people who ought to be able to earn money outside the university by using their skills. She even suggested a figure for extracurricular earnings: £20,000 a year, which would be worth about £75,000 at current prices.

But then her government became obsessed with “value for money” and, therefore, with quasi-market arrangements and assessments of performance. Thus the emergence of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which, in its initial form, gave credit only to “research” as defined by outputs in prestigious refereed journals. Naturally, almost everybody running universities shifted their aspirations from general considerations of reputation to very specific ones of league tables and began talking as if they were the chairmen and managers of football clubs.

For what it’s worth, my initial strategy was to churn out the requisite number of “scoring” academic articles in the first phase of the RAE period. Like most people of my level of experience, I did this semi-corruptly by negotiating with the editors of journals with whom I had contact; I don’t remember ever submitting an article “blind”. That left me free to pursue other interests for the remainder of the period.

My subsequent strategy was simply to leave – about 10 years earlier than originally intended. The broadest reason for doing this was that universities had become much more unhappy places. I was deeply sorry for young colleagues without permanent jobs, struggling to teach and publish, unable to buy property because of uncertainties. I could have told them that at their age I had played cricket and golf a couple of times each week, but they probably wouldn’t have believed me.

As far as I could tell, my permanent employer, the University of Warwick, had no rules restricting outside earnings. That might have been to help with attracting and publicising staff in the early days, but retention also demanded that academics in such subjects as business and manufacturing engineering be allowed to enjoy substantial outside earnings. It also helps to excuse your own moonlighting when top management – vice-chancellors and principals – do other things, too. 

In the US, those in the different subjects would be paid on different scales, and I have come across employees in the university state system who were prohibited from earning outside their contractual employment. In some cases, my friends in American academic life were paid salary for only nine or 10 months a year, allowing them to earn extra money (which usually turned out to be summer school employment). In other cases, I have heard of a permitted limit of 20 per cent of salary as outside earnings.

All of which raises the question of what should be the regulations and arrangements for academics working outside the university. I take it that there is little disagreement that part-time university employment is good for everybody and likely to increase. Indeed, new rules for the RAE’s latest successor, the Research Excellence Framework 2028, explicitly encourage universities to allow their staff to take adjunct status and work in other fields, with any employee with a “demonstrable and substantive link” to the university in question, however part-time, set to be eligible to submit outputs. But the other question that arises is how those on full-time salaries should be treated.

I would start with the idea that we do not want universities to suffer from sinecurism like the medieval church, but also with the observation that a liberal regime worked very well at the beginning of my career. Ralf Dahrendorf, who led the London School of Economics for most of the 1970s, used to argue that those in demand outside the university should and did show themselves to be also the most dutiful in terms of university events. I would add that the transferable skills between broadcasting or writing for a wide audience are far more convincing than those between “pure” academic research and teaching. I have vivid memories of listening as an undergraduate to philosophers who had massive and probably deserved reputations for their published work but reached extremes of dullness on the podium.

And I think far greater dangers of sinecurism have come out of research assessment as institutions try to attract or hold on to “star” performers, who are thus left to get on with their own (career-enhancing) work with very little real benefit to those around them. Far better the honest portfolio of the person who can do it all.

Lincoln Allison is emeritus reader of politics at the University of Warwick.