Björn Brembs

[*This is a post loosely based on an
[article](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/verbesserung-der-arbeitsbedingungen-an-unis-13354907.html)
appearing today in the German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319). Please do
let us know if you find a mistake.*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[**UPDATE**]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}*[, 09/01/2015: A commenter made
me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before. In our
analysis, we evaluated all non-scientific professional staff, e.g., also
technical support or library staff. As I'm actually quite fond of the
libraries and the technical support we have, I looked at the trends for
the 'pure' permanent administration staff and found and increase of 17%
from 2005 to 2012, while permanent scientist positions increased only by
0.04%. Taking only these two groups of employees, the ratio between
scientists and administrators shrinks to 0.57 in 2005 and 0.64 in 2012,
i.e., the average administrator has to support less than two permanently
employed scientists. In my opinion, this would have been the better data
to use, but my co-author is not quite as convinced. Either way, even
focusing on 'pure' admin staff conveys essentially the same message as
the full overall data, albeit perhaps less dramatically. This is
precisely why I am an open science advocate: making your data open
allows you to discover more and improve your
science!]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}  
*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[**UPDATE***, 16/03/2015: I was just made aware of very similar numbers
from the USA, published in this [article by Jon
Marcus](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html).*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Noam Chomsky, writing about the [Death of American
Universities](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/),
recently reminded us that reforming universities using a corporate
business model leads to several easy to understand consequences. The
increase of the precariat of faculty without benefits or tenure, a
growing layer of administration and bureaucracy, or the increase in
student debt. In part, this well-known corporate strategy serves to
increase labor servility. The student debt problem is particularly
obvious in countries with tuition fees, especially in the US where [a
convincing argument has been made](https://www.takepart.com/ivorytower)
that the tuition system is nearing its breaking point. The decrease in
tenured positions is also quite well documented (see e.g., an [old
post](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html)). So far, and
perhaps as may have been expected, Chomsky was dead on with his
assessment. But how about the administrations?

To my knowledge, nobody has so far checked if there really is any growth
in university administration and bureaucracy, apart from everybody
complaining about it (but see update above with link to similar numbers
from the US). So [Axel
Brennicke](https://sites.google.com/site/axelbrennicke/) and I decided
to have a look at the numbers. In Germany, employment statistics can be
obtained from the federal statistics registry,
[Destatis](https://destatis.de). We sampled data from 2005 (the year
before the [Excellence
Initiative](https://www.excellence-initiative.com/) and the [Higher
Education
Pact](https://www.research-in-germany.de/en/research-landscape/r-and-d-policy-framework/higher-education-pact.html))
and the latest year we were able to obtain, 2012.

The aim of the Excellence Initiative and the Higher Education pact was
to improve the funding situation for universities to increase scientific
competitiveness and to allow them to cope with the rising student
numbers. Student numbers increased from 2005-2012 by 25% to 2.5 million.
The number of full-time university employees in research and teaching
also increased, but only by 18% to just over 142,000, i.e., not keeping
up with student numbers. Looking at the type of contracts, we can
confirm the US trend of an increasing precariat also here in Germany: in
2005, 50% of all full-time employees were on short-term contracts. This
fraction increased by about one percentage point per year to now more
than 58%.

University leadership and politicians often argue that such short-term
employment benefits research as scientists constantly need to learn new
skills in different places and the short-term contracts keep the
work-force up-to-date and flexible. However, this argument also holds
for administrations: fluctuating student numbers, a constantly changing
funding landscape and the constant turnover of university employees
ought to mandate a flexible and slim administration as well.

However, the numbers speak a different language. Every full-time
university scientist is administrated by 1,28 employees in
administration. Of these 182,255 administrative and professional
employees, only 25% are on fixed-term contracts. The remaining 75% are
virtually tenured: it is almost impossible to make them redundant,
according to German laws and regulations for public employees.

Perhaps the two initiatives have improved on this situation? Maybe in
2005, the situation was even worse? Alas, the fraction of 'tenured'
administrative personnel and professional staff was only 70% in 2005. In
fact, for every permanent position that was created in research and
teaching between 2005-2012, 3.7 such positions were newly created in the
university administrations. This means that the average German scientist
now supervises 7 more students than in 2005, while the burden on
administrators and professional staff has only increased by 2.7
students.

These numbers show the real winners and losers of the increased cash
flow in this past decade: the students and scientists lose out, while
university administrations benefit the most from the billions. At this
point, to support the work of 60,438 permanently employed scientists in
German universities, it is apparently required to permanently employ
135,897 administrative and professional employees.

In fact, for every permanent position that was created in this time, ten
fixed-term positions were created, exacerbating the already abysmal job
prospects of German early-career scientists. This parallels the
development in many other research nations such as the US or the UK. The
situation is most dramatic for early-career scientists. The tip of this
huge iceberg are increasing number of science scandals, such as the
recent case of the young Haruko Obukata whose mentor committed suicide
after the manipulations of his student became known, or Felisa
Wolfe-Simon, who called her arsenic-less strain of bacteria "GFAJ1":
give Felisa a job.

As I [remarked](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html) long
ago, the trend to corporatize higher education parallels the rise in
retractions. This rise in retractions is so rapid, that by about 2045
every published article will be accompanied by the retraction of another
article, if the current trend continues. Back in 2010, Amy Bishop killed
three of her colleagues at University of Alabama in a shooting spree
after she was denied tenure because her publication rate was deemed
insufficient. Scientists on non-permanent positions today need to
publish many articles in journals ranking high in a hierarchy that is
[devoid of any empirical
justification](https://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/fullhttps://).
On top of that, they need to devise and find funding for especially
expensive experiments, as the higher the funding, the higher the
so-called 'overhead' that the universities receive. Last year, professor
Stefan Grimm committed suicide after his employer, Imperial College
London [told
him](https://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/)
he had 12 months to pull in 200,000 Pounds in research funding or be
fired.

Today's top scientists thus have been selected by their marketing
competence to sell their work to hi-ranking journals and by their
ability to come up with expensive experiments. If their research is
actually reliable and sound, it is pure coincidence. There exist no
incentives today for just doing reproducible science.

The trends are clear on all fronts: business as usual has become
untenable. There needs to be reform and it has to be international and
far-reaching. Tinkering a little here and there is not going to cut it.
On the up side, a lot can be established by universities themselves,
without outside assistance: administration funds can be siphoned into
research/teaching positions, and the billions now tied up in
subscriptions can be used to develop a digital infrastructure which
comprises a reputation system that rewards scientists for doing reliable
science, once all subscriptions have been canceled. This is technically
and financially feasible and within a sufficiently short time-frame. But
action has to be taken now and it has to be decisive. The downside? It
has to be [collective
action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action).

P.S.: We have made the raw data on which we have written our article
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319) for everyone
to check. Mistakes happen and we would not want to end up like
[Reinhardt and
Rogoff](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best-evidence-for-austerity-based-on-an-excel-spreadsheet-error/).

P.P.S.: Two related articles, one in
[English](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) and one in [German
(PDF)](https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Wolf_Professorendaemmerung.pdf).


<em>
 This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.
</em>
<strong>
 UPDATE
</strong>
*, 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

[*During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [September 30,
2010](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n669.html):*]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

I've been
[contemplating](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n597.html){target="_self"}
the current competitive state of science here
[before](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n594.html){target="_blank"
rel="external"}. The gist of it was that science may be suffering from
too much competition, leading to an increasing incidence of misconduct,
such as falsifying or omitting inconvenient data. In this week's *Nature
appeared* a
[news-report](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100929/full/467516a.html){target="_blank"}
which tells me that apparently the pressure cooker which is our
scientific community apparently has been set to a notch hotter recently.

The article is about the sentencing of a postdoc who has been sabotaging
the work of a graduate student in his own lab for several months. The
postdoc has admitted -- after being caught on secret camera -- to have
poured ethanol in the culture medium for the cell culture of the
graduate student as well as contaminating Western blots of the student.

In my previous posts I speculated that fraud and other, related
misconduct may be on the rise as more and more trained scientists are
faced with less and less positions for which they compete. I did not
expect this form of misconduct and neither did anybody else: sabotage is
not officially part of the canon of research misconduct and thus no
federal agency was able to prosecute the perpetrator.

As all of the cases which make it into the media, this is another
anecdote and the plural of anecdote is not data. Nobody knows if the
frequency of misconduct is rising or if the publicized cases simply come
with the growth of the business. Nevertheless, this form of direct
sabotage of researchers by researchers seems to be a novel quality of
competition-induced research misconduct.

What will we see next?

Hot on the heels of the stunning sabotage case comes a seemingly
unrelated [report in The
Scientist](https://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57728/){target="_blank"}
that US libraries are forced to cut scientific journal subscriptions by
the thousands due to budget cuts:

> <div>
>
> New Mexico State University (NMSU) library announced the cancellation
> of over 700 journal and database subscriptions, the result of a
> perfect storm of rising journal prices and a slashed materials budget.
> \[...\] A [2009 global
> survey](https://www.ebrary.com/corp/collateral/en/Survey/CIBER_survey_2009.pdf)
> of 835 libraries in 61 countries found that nearly one-third of
> academic libraries saw their budgets reduced by 10 percent or more
> that year. And journal subscriptions are taking the brunt of that
> loss: The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) cancelled
> [118 print and 115 online
> subscriptions](https://www.library.ucsf.edu/help/scholpub/cancel/2010)
> for 2010, as well as several databases (including [Faculty of 1000
> Medicine,](https://f1000medicine.com/) publisher of *The Scientist*).
> Last spring, the University of Washington announced cuts of [1,600
> print and electronic
> journals,](https://www.lib.washington.edu/dean/budget.html) databases,
> and microforms. The University of Virginia library sliced [1,169
> journals,](https://www2.lib.virginia.edu/press/budgetfaqs/2010JournalsnotRenewed.pdf)
> the University of Arizona downsized by [650 print and electronic
> titles,](https://www.library.arizona.edu/spendingReduction/) and
> Georgia State University cut 441 and is now considering the fate of
> [another 1,092.](https://homer.gsu.edu/journalcancellation/list.php)
> The list goes on and on.
>
> </div>

While on the surface these two reports seem unrelated, they in fact
demonstrate the coming scientific system: too many highly trained
scientists competing for a position in a system that is so cash-strapped
that even access to the literature is threatened. Access to the
literature is the most basic prerequisite for doing science. One of the
quotes in the article demonstrates that: "I need the EBSCO databases
like I need air or water!"

[Just as now access to drinking water is a human right, access to the
literature should be a scientific
right.](https://friendfeed.com/brembs/2d8613b7/just-as-now-access-to-drinking-water-is-human){target="_blank"}

German psychologist Bally in the 1940s and later ethologist Hasenstein
in the 1970s coined the term "eased-up field" (entspanntes Feld) for a
situation where all the basic needs are satisfied. They found that
exploratory or playful behavior decreased in virtually all subjects
tested, be it human or animal, whenever the animals were not in an
eased-up field. Currently, science almost on a world-wide scale is
heading towards a situation in which each scientist's livelihood is
threatened as well as one of the basic prerequisites for doing science,
access to the literature. Neither of these trends alone bodes well for
the quality of future science, but both trends together serve to
basically block the emergence of the creative genius required for major
scientific breakthroughs.


<em>
 During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.
</em>

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Booming university administrations

Science, red in tooth and claw