Juan
You have tossed in a hot potato there, though I think that there will
be far fewer list member picking it up compared to the debate on peer-
review and journal profiteering. Too many professors are guilty,
albeit unwillingly, of taking on unpaid and un-reimbursed students
who desperately need the fieldwork experience to get a funded PhD
place or paid research assistant post. I've no doubt that were more
funds available for paying volunteer workers then most professors
would try and get them - many 'silver-back' academics have a
paternal/maternal instinct towards ernest young students - but when
you have to spend so much time finding funds for a base camp, survey
equipment, shipment costs, salaries for local guides etc, etc, and
when willing self-funded volunteers are ten a penny and knocking on
your door....well, its easy to see why academics have not bothered
massing outside their parliament buildings (or even their university
senate) demanding changes.
The worrying thing is that this attitude of "there's always someone
who is willing to do it for little/nothing" is creeping above the
level of graduates looking for work experience to the level of
experienced post-docs looking for a full-time career. Tenured
positions have been getting rarer than hen's teeth for years but I've
noticed a disturbing trend towards part-time postdoc posts, some as
little as 40% part time. Given the already unfavourable ratio of
skill level/salary that academics have in comparison to most other
sector workers (including blue-collar trades with much better
political savvy and motivation than academics), reducing a career to
a succession of 1-2yr non-renewable 20 h/week contracts is just
taking the mickey. I myself have a PhD and postdoc experience but
have needed to offer my services to minimum wage or voluntary
positions simply to keep my resume scientific. The few professional
posts available are, as Andre notes, insanely competitive - or
insufficient to relocate for (e.g. a 20%(!) part-time teaching post
advertised at one UK university).
As Andre points out, academic ecology is one of the first to feel
the pinch when the government cuts funding to the research councils.
I guess ecology rarely makes money that shows up in the government's
treasury figures before the next election, and seldom results in
patents that can be licensed worldwide (unlike proteomics and
genetics). However, I think the conditioned response that academics
have towards discussions about pay and job security, i.e. "well, we
don't do it for the money" is largely to blame for the present
situation. No, I don't expect or need to become rich as a
professional ecologist but after 10 years of post-school training
(funded at subsistence level income, voluntary or paid for with a
second job as an career 'investment'), a funded career structure
where I know where I will be living for longer than 2 years at a time
would be nice.
Nic
______________________________________________________
Dr Nic Malone
www.nicmalone.com
______________________________________________________
On 23 May 2007, at 18:18, Andre Legris wrote:
> Juan
>
> You certainly hit a nerve with a problem which has frustrated me
> for many
> years the lack of respect given to the science of biology.
>
> I cant speak about this situation in the USA but I believe it is
> similar
> to what happens here in Canada. There are (as I see it) two main
> reasons
> for the situation you describe. First, there is the money side. Up
> until
> recently, money to fund biological and environmental research was
> viewed
> as a low priority expense. As someone who has spent the past two
> decades
> trying to pursue a career in biology, I was very aware of the fact
> that
> whenever the national or even provincial economy started to weaken,
> the
> biology jobs started to disappear. And quickly. Usually, they were the
> first sector of the civil service which was cut. (Sidenote: the best
> paying biology posiitions in Canada are generally in government rather
> than academia or the private sector).
>
> Even in todays world where environmental science is often on the
> front
> page of newspapers, well paying biology positions are hard to come by.
> There is little public desire for real biology research; government
> departments look after the legal aspects of protecting the
> environment
> and consultants fill in the holes not covered by government. That
> leaves
> biological research largely in the hands of academia, which is funded
> through grants and other forms of government hand-outs, funding
> which is
> cut back when the economy is not doing very well. This trickles
> down to
> the graduate student who needs a field assistant but is forced to
> look for
> volunteers just to get their research done within their very limited
> budgets.
>
> The second problem is the nature of the biology field itself its
> a very
> cool field to be working in. What other field can combine the
> allure of
> remote and wild places, the charisma of working with exotic
> organisms, and
> the galmor that comes from a job whose best recruiting tool is the
> National Geographic TV special?
>
> If you are at a dinner party and everyone compares professions,
> which do
> you think is going to generate the most interest from the others
> around
> the table: the lawyer who is a partner at a major firm, the heart
> surgeon,
> the businessman with his private jet or the guy off in the corner
> who just
> came back from doing polar bear surveys in the arctic?
>
> Sure, there is a lot of work in biology which doesnt fit the National
> Geographic mold but a lot of it does. The result is that biology oozes
> romance.
>
> A few years ago I applied for two jobs: one as a soil surveyor and the
> other as a wildlife biologist working with migratory birds. The soil
> survey job had a handful of people apply; the bird biologist job was
> inundated with hundreds of applicants. Soil is not sexy; birds are.
>
> So there is a real desire for people to work in the field of
> biology, even
> as a volunteer. I know of one tenured professor who works with Earth
> Watch, an organization which matches field researchers with ordinary
> people who want to volunteer to work on a research project.
>
> As the Earth Watch web site states, As a volunteer, you might
> choose to
> band penguins in South Africa or tag endangered sea turtles on Pacific
> beaches. You might measure snowpack density on the frontlines of
> climate
> change or map water supplies in drought-stricken northern Kenya.
>
> Who wouldnt read that and think to themselves, Heres a way I can
> star
> in my own private National Geogrpahic Special?
>
> Until society as a whole realizes that biology is a profession on
> the same
> level as the legal and medical professions, biology will get
> neither the
> financing nor the respect it truly deserves. There is nothing wrong
> with
> having enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers help with the never-
> ending
> task of answering the many questions about how our world actually
> works.
> But if we want to find concrete answers to the myriad of biological
> and
> environmental problems which are besetting our planet, we need more
> professional biologists and fewer dinner-party volunteers.
>
> Regards,
>
> Andre Legris
> (Environmental consultant and occasional bird biologist)
> Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
