Since I took up a job in Germany, almost 11 years ago, US-based scholars have often asked me what is involved in making the switch to European academia.
I’m careful in my answers. Just as different colleges in the same American city might feature wildly varying working conditions and expectations, thus making any blanket statements about “US academe” inane, so it is that European countries have different forms of qualification, working conditions and funding levels.
That said, I have made some general observations over the years, and have compared notes with colleagues in other European countries. Having studied and worked in Canada and the US, and writing these words at the end of a visiting professorship in France, I feel I can offer at least a watercolour sketch of the European academic landscape.
My comments will be most relevant for US humanities scholars, where I also think the differences are the largest.
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Grants:?Let’s start with the most important area, which determines much else. European university administrators adore large-scale, multi-year, multimillion-euro grants. Admin love grants everywhere, but the pressure is much higher on humanities scholars to get them in Europe, where the overhead often makes up university budgets. (One institution twice offered me a junior professorship in which a minimum grant amount was written into my contract as a condition for tenure.)
Job candidates write grant amounts on their CVs, and selection committees will sometimes tally up the numbers. For a more junior applicant, they will expect to see at least some attempts to apply for grants, even if none have been awarded.
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Collaboration:?American academia loves the lone genius. Europe loves networks.
This happens at every level. Multidisciplinary work is the key to getting certain very large grants, and so is warmly encouraged. Universities carefully record the international cooperations (whether loose, or formalised in projects) of their staff. They might also develop dedicated relationships with partner universities around the world. There is a deeper point here which can be a tough adjustment for North American go-getters: European academia finds it easier to celebrate collective success than individual achievement.
This is also why conference proceedings, a low-prestige form in North America, are more respected in Europe: they are the visible proof of a group of people working together (and probably of the grant that’s funding them).
Career stages:?This varies by country, but careers often look quite different when viewed at the same time?from?graduation. Doctoral students often also work as assistants for their adviser, and might do a certain amount of teaching and administration and legally be considered employees. Where a (very fortunate) North American academic might step into a tenure-track position or a postdoc upon finishing their doctorate, a successful European one might move into another assistantship.
If these positions are funded by grants, the scholar’s main projects might also be determined by the subject their adviser got funds to pursue, and some of their publications may also be published with the adviser. I’ve even seen cases where scholars in their thirties and forties were waiting for a professorship in order to pursue their own independent research topics.
Enter at the professorial level, and you might find that job is wildly different from the North American model as well. European professors in the humanities are much more like lab heads than solo thinkers. They might be expected to run a team (doctoral students, student assistants, postdocs, lecturers, a secretary), manage resources independently (including buying office furniture, library books and computer equipment), organise course assignments and find teaching staff for those courses, and apply for money both to bolster the strength of their area and to fund younger scholars.
Success in grants does not necessarily ensure time to write. Some countries have large fellowships that can give senior researchers time off, but often the grants buy time only for junior scholars. Even a multimillion-euro grant from the EU is not necessarily a guarantee of a course reduction – that may have to be negotiated. Moreover, grants come with extra administrative duties, perhaps extra staff (who then also have to be managed), and more reporting.
Prestige:?All of the above leads to a different prestige structure. A high-flying US academic will publish lots of single-authored, peer-reviewed books and articles, ideally all in one narrow area. They will win fellowships that give them time off teaching. Eventually they will move to a richer, more prestigious university, where they will have a lower course load, less admin (or very well-paid admin), and publish even more. They will be invited to give talks at other campuses on the basis of their star power.
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The high-flying European academic will be brilliant at winning grants, allowing them to amass as large a team as possible. They will host events, put out large-scale team research projects (editions and reference works are good for this), and loose forth a stream of essay collections demonstrating their connections.
They will be sought out by others for their patronage, or for a potential collaboration. When they move universities, their negotiations focus as much on number of staff and other resources for their team as they do on salary and teaching load. Most universities being public, the last two elements might be uniform at state level anyway.
The takeaway from all this is that a European academic is a node in a network, not a solo actor. The academic who leaves the US for Europe will be happier and more successful the sooner they accept and embrace this.
Irina Dumitrescu is professor of English medieval studies at the University of Bonn.
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<网曝门>‘Teaching overseas is a great adventure, but a risky one’It’s the perennial academic political fantasy: “I can’t live in this country under [insert Republican president]. I’m moving abroad.”
Proclamations like this ran rampant when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and again under George W. Bush’s semiliterate government. Temporarily in abeyance during the Joe Biden interregnum, they have become ever so fashionable after the second coming of Donald Trump.
The (political) grass really is greener overseas. By American standards, the UK Conservatives are more or less Democrats. The Australian Liberals really are liberal. Ireland and New Zealand are bucolic progressive paradises on all sides of politics. And continental Europe is, as they say, très européen.
Never mind that most of these countries are at least 20 per cent poorer than the United States, with academic salaries to match. And that few pay superstar salaries for the kinds of senior professors who are most likely to be in a position to move. Or that if you somehow negotiate a superstar salary, you might be double-taxed on your income in excess of $126,500 (courtesy of the global reach of the Internal Revenue Service). It’s all about the politics and the self-respect that comes from sticking it to the Orange Man.
But what about tenure? That’s the trick. Academic tenure is a uniquely American institution – one that has, admittedly, spilled over into Canada, but not spread much further than that. The?US tenure track can be perilous, but once earned, tenure virtually assures a job for life. In most other countries there is no heart-stopping moment before opening a tenure decision email, but neither is there the total job security that comes with tenure.
Many American academics were shocked in 2021 when the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced, with no consultation and no compromise, that its Yale-NUS College partnership with Yale University would end in 2025. Tenured professors didn’t lose their jobs, but they were forced to transfer into the mainstream faculty at NUS, with a concomitant loss of independence, self-governance and academic freedom. Many commentators attributed the arbitrary exercise of administrative power to the non-Western practices of an illiberal country.
They were wrong. If anything, NUS was exceptionally generous by the standards of Western academia outside North America. For example, even as Yale-NUS was in the headlines in 2021, the University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth was busy ?– with the loss of 16 academic positions. And lest anyone jump to the conclusion that the move was politically motivated, UWA’s cross-town rival Murdoch University in chemistry, physics, mathematics, statistics and economics about the same time, offering to keep academics in these disciplines only on teaching-focused contracts.
More recently, Australia’s University of Wollongong recently announced plans to eliminate 91 academic positions (many of them chair professors and associate professors) in a restructuring driven by financial shortfalls. The university may not be well known internationally, but it is a major public university with 33,000 students. More notoriously, the (public) Australian Catholic University in 2023 – just three years after recruiting a stellar group of faculty from leading international universities into “permanent” research-only positions.
The precarity of “permanent” (read: “continuing”) employment isn’t limited to Australia. In the UK, Cardiff University just announced the elimination of ancient history, modern languages, music, nursing, and religion, while the University of Hull is . In Scotland, Dundee University has announced it will cut hundreds of academic jobs as it seeks ?35 million in savings.
These are not isolated incidents. Similar stories could be told for Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan, and many other countries. Outside North America, university professors are not privileged professionals ensconced in ivory towers. They are simply employees. And when their employers adopt new strategies (or mismanage their finances), professors are subject to redundancy just like other workers.
American professors might think more than twice about giving up a tenured position in the US for a “permanent” position in a country where “permanent” employment means nothing more than a position with no fixed end date.
Academics who are close to retirement, with mortgages paid and children all grown, might be in a position to put personal politics before job security. Most other tenured American professors would be well advised to stay put.
For those few who work in high-flying fields where skills are scarce and jobs are plentiful, giving up tenure might be worth the gamble.
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For everyone else, teaching overseas is a great adventure, but a risky one. Nothing beats a cozy chair in the ivory tower of American academia, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
Salvatore Babones is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, having previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of
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<网曝门>‘It’s easier for small degrees and niche subjects to survive in the UK’Hey there, my American colleagues. Let’s imagine that you’ve recently been offered an academic position in the UK and that, for reasons of your own, you’re currently considering accepting it. Brilliant as you are, you’ve already brushed up on British academic jargon, and have auto-replaced “college”, “grading” and “dorms” with “uni”, “marking” and “halls” in all conversation. Nice job! – oh, forgive me: well done!
Bear in mind, however, that our two academic cultures are divided by a force far more rigid than their supposedly common language: geography. I don’t mean the vast ocean between us, but the cliffs and rocks that enclose and isolate this small cluster of islands. In the 15 years since I moved here, I’ve come to suspect that the assumptions and characteristics underpinning all of British university culture stem from one geographical detail, utterly baffling to anyone who grew up with a US road atlas in the glove compartment. In the UK, everything is reachable in one day – even by public transport.
The ripple effects of proximity touch every facet of British university culture, starting with the subjects on offer. In the US, most students, even those with the biggest dreams, ultimately choose a university within 50 miles of home, or at most, a day’s drive. Given the vastness of the country, almost every rural or small-town American university must therefore offer almost every subject; the main goal is coverage and breadth of offering. Urban universities do much the same, to be competitive. As a result, it’s often rare for members of the same department to find that their interests truly conjoin. When I worked in the US, my office had a one-book overlap with that of my closest colleague (we’re still friends).?
But here in the UK, coverage can be measured on a national scale. It’s less risky to leave home for, say, Bath Spa University and its , when you can still get back to Inverness for grandma’s birthday weekend. Equally, it’s perfectly acceptable for Bath Spa not to offer , when Plymouth University does, only three hours away. Across the country, it’s easier for small degrees and niche subjects to survive, where they might be impossible to justify in the US.
In short, individual universities can specialise. One happy result is a fertile soil for intellectual community – pockets of depth across the country. Universities can develop research centres by hiring clusters of scholars with overlapping interests; they can bring in visiting scholars and guarantee them a knowledgeable audience of staff and PhD students; they can choose to fund weekly or monthly seminars and the odd weekend retreat.
Likewise, shared scholarly networks can also flourish and across the country. It’s reasonable, feasible, and usually affordable to travel for conferences and workshops, attend a scholarly seminar in London, or a book launch at the National Library of Scotland. Collaboration is easy – and please note, it’s more easily funded.
More prosaically, the assumption that colleagues will understand each other’s work underpins much of British academic bureaucracy, the amount of which will shock you, as it once shocked me. Brace yourselves for a level of oversight and pedagogic collaboration that American universities lack: the team teaching, the moderation and second marking to make sure our grades and feedback are consistent, the exam scrutiny committees, the external examiners, the full double marking of undergraduate dissertations and master’s student essays.
These practices may all stem from various prime ministers’ lust for accountability, but they survive only because we all think closely enough to each other to carry out their orders. Every year at this time, the last week of teaching is met with relief, followed immediately by dawning dread at the amount of paperwork I still owe my colleagues.
Even so, I’ve come to see the value of many of these exercises, and even of their unintended consequences: I know my colleagues well; I learn from seeing?how they teach; I am relieved that so much bureaucracy at least helps me get to know and support my short-term and contingent colleagues.?
The worst consequence of our island mentality is, predictably, the risk of narrowmindedness. Plenty of scholars will still think your entire discipline is nugatory unless it provided a set text in their high school exams, last century. Many of them knew each other back then, too, and continue to believe that their group chat comprises the whole field and all future hires. Certain names, schools of thought, universities and methodologies might loom larger than strictly necessary.
More perniciously, because universities prize scholarly depth and clusters of strength, they can be reluctant to hire in new areas, however much these are needed. The new appointee will have no close collaborators! No current weekly seminar addresses their field! The library will have no books for them!?
As you’ve no doubt noticed, university principals in the UK are already firing more than they’re hiring, to widespread dismay. Somehow, I suspect such problems are in fact surmountable. Perhaps you, my newly arriving compatriot colleagues, are part of the solution. Thank goodness you’re here.
Emily Michelson is professor of history at the University of St Andrews.
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<网曝门>‘At MIT it wasn’t unusual to remain at work until 10pm, even 11pm’As a young physics student in India I used to wonder whether my ambition to work at one of America’s top universities would be realised.
By the time my dream move to arguably the most hallowed institution of them all – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – happened, however, my life was very different given I had responsibility for a family of two young children. My outlook on academic life had also changed, having previously spent just over four years as a postdoctoral researcher in Finland before moving to America.
Having become accustomed to a lab culture where everyone worked from 8am to 4pm and the office was deserted by 5pm, I entered a world where it wasn’t unusual to remain at work until 10pm, even 11pm.
As a working mother in a demanding profession, this situation was often challenging. On several occasions I felt I had to stay until late otherwise I felt I would lose my competitive edge as a scientist, but working such late hours was often difficult.
The cost of living in Boston was also prohibitive for a researcher. This meant we had to live seven miles out in Waltham, enduring the heavy Boston-Cambridge rush hour traffic every morning and evening. This is the reality faced by most early-career researchers working in Boston or other expensive cities in the US.
If I had moved directly from India to Boston as a single woman, I might have felt differently about this situation. I’d have certainly welcomed the higher salary on offer in the?US and the evident benefits of working in a prestigious institution known for scientific and engineering excellence.
Yet it was hard not to compare things?with Finland, where I was a postdoctoral researcher prior to moving to MIT. In Nordic countries healthcare for your family is paid by the taxpayer. In America even a basic health check-up for a child can be expensive if you don’t have the right health insurance. We didn’t have family support in the area either, so childcare was very expensive, especially during the summer holidays.
As European universities expressly seek to recruit US-based research talent amid the instability caused by the new White House administration, I’d certainly recommend such a move if the conditions are right.
Of course, America still has some amazing universities and opportunities for academic advancement. It will remain a sought-after destination for international researchers – particularly from India and South-east Asia who, while able to converse comfortably in English at MIT, usually cannot speak French, German or, in my case, Finnish, fluently enough to teach undergraduates.
But European universities are changing. At my own institution in Tampere, which I joined in 2023, having returned to Finland in 2010 to work at other universities, nearly 50 per cent of the students, staff and faculty members are of international origin. This makes it much easier for foreign staff to settle in new surroundings and focus on advancing the quality of education and research on campus, making Tampere University one of the fastest-growing young universities in the world. State-aided English and dual-language primary and secondary education also ease the transition for many international families.
The life of a researcher can still be a tough one – even at a supportive institution with significant research ambitions. Having experienced academic life on three different continents, however, I can say with certainty there are definitely elements of American academic life that researchers – particularly international ones with young children – will not miss.
Sayani Majumdar is associate professor of electrical engineering at Tampere University in Finland
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