Why I gave up my professorship

A longer English version of my German FAZ article

I was pleased that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s largest newspapers, published my article on July 5, 2023, on why I decided to resign from my tenured professorship at King’s College London for a German audience. Here is a longer English version of my article.

Academia is in a precarious situation. The fierce competition for one of the few tenured professorships requires an impeccable CV, outstanding scientific publications, and, most notably, the willingness to endure ongoing planning uncertainties and modest compensation well into the mid-career phase, all while possessing extensive qualifications. For me, the fortune of a permanent academic career seemed to come to fruition with the appointment to a junior professorship in Political Economy at the renowned King's College in London. However, not even two years after receiving tenure and being promoted to Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), I have decided to resign from my position.

It appears that public resignation letters from professors are currently trending. Especially at universities of the Anglosphere, there are a number of prominent cases of leavers who complain about the undermining of academic freedom by left-wing activists and woke cancel culture. The ideologization of science has reached alarming levels at King’s College as well, which I will discuss in more detail. However, in my opinion, "wokeness" is more of a symptom rather than a cause of the erosion of scientific standards. The problem runs deeper, and is rooted in the systemic incentives of the English university, consisting of tuition fees, competition, and bureaucratization.

As profit-maximizing companies in a global education market, English universities rely heavily on tuition fees as their main source of income. Since the government massively increased the cap on tuition fees over a decade ago, tuition fees across the entire English university system have surged to the maximum. In my former department, British students have to pay £9,250 per year for undergraduate studies and £27,540 per year for postgraduate studies. For international students, which includes European students after Brexit, tuition fees reach up to £31,260 per year.

In order to justify such high fees in competition with other universities, students have been turned into customers. English universities, or rather their brand and marketing departments, invest in expensive marketing campaigns - including sponsoring various soccer clubs - to convince customers of the quality of their product. Tuition fees and competition were supposed to improve cost-efficiency and the quality of education, but they led to an explosion of personnel costs in the university bureaucracy. Since 1995, the cost of bureaucracy has more than quadrupled. There are now more administrative staff than academic staff at many universities.

Of course, a certain amount of bureaucracy is indispensable for the functioning of a university, ideally allowing academic staff to focus on research and teaching. However, at English universities, this has been turned on its head. In order to improve various rankings and performance criteria, administrative initiatives gradually replace academic autonomy with bureaucratic micromanagement. These initiatives are almost always misguided and create more and more unnecessary administrative tasks for the academic staff.

Here are a few examples to illustrate the point: New courses or changes to existing courses must be requested almost a year in advance using lengthy forms that have to be approved by various committees. Exams must be submitted months in advance, reviewed by a colleague, and finally approved by a committee of examiners. Grading coursework or exams has similar requirements, which mandates a second internal reviewer and an external one. However, my own reviewing activities were regularly for non-related subjects. In the first year, professors must complete a teaching certificate, consisting of attending lengthy classes and coursework. This does not teach one how to actually teach, but rather requires a time-consuming study on various pedagogical approaches.

Filling out forms in order to apply for further forms is also a popular practice in the English university. Applications for larger third-party funded projects must first go through an internal application process. Submissions of scientific publications for the "Research Excellence Framework" (REF), the national research ranking, undergo years of internal evaluations - along with workshops for the faculty that teach us how to properly read and evaluate publications. However, these are solely internal simulations that have no impact on the actual REF evaluation.

All of these examples highlight the essence of administrative management: even minor complaints, such as linguistic ambiguities in an exam of one colleague, require comprehensive interventions. Such interventions can be documented in checklists for student satisfaction or ranking performance and justify one's administrative position in the organization.

The English university has internally become a citizen service center, where academic staff must invest more and more time in administrative tasks on behalf of performance criteria, leading to a lack of time for actual student support, teaching or research. This includes administrative responsibilities for tasks traditionally assigned to administrative staff, such as the digital recording of grades, the processing of student sick notes for exams, the learning and processing of expense reimbursement software, etc. The university professor is turned into an office worker - including constant performance reviews and committee meetings with new "leadership" initiatives.

The central criterion for any business is consumer satisfaction or, in the case of the university administration, the student satisfaction rankings, which are measured in surveys such as the "National Student Survey" (NSS) or the "Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey" (PTES). Additionally, there is a ranking category with the appropriate economic term "value added". Value added measures the difference in grades before and after the university career, meaning that high value added exists when the average grade of the Bachelor's degree is significantly better than the average grade of the high school diploma.

While it may sound good on paper, the primacy of student satisfaction has led to a leveling of academic standards in practice, as student satisfaction is closely linked to the grades students receive. This is understandable from the customers' perspective, as one can only be satisfied with a costly product – often financed by massive debt - if it generates the corresponding "value added," namely that the educational institution certifies extraordinary skills for the job market.

These incentives, both from the university's and the students' perspective, have generally led to a reduction of course quality and a grade inflation of very good grades. Those who still fail (or plagiarize) can repeat the essay or exam until the result fits in practice. It is therefore not surprising that "The Times" reported in 2018 that none of the approximately 33,000 undergraduate students at eleven English universities have failed their final exams, and that the failure rate in 32 other universities was just 0.09 percent.

Student satisfaction is not only about receiving the desired grades, but also about the overall student experience and sense of well-being. A multitude of "well-being," "welfare," "event," "engagement," and "student lifecycle support officers" as well as "advisors and officers in advice, wellbeing & welfare" such as "Money & Housing Transitions Advisor" or "Income Maximisation Advisor" are available for the all-round care and entertainment of the student body, thanks to the funding provided by exorbitant tuition fees. The academic staff also have to support an ever-growing number of students as personal tutors who can turn to them at any time with academic or personal non-academic problems. In addition, there are administrative initiatives, such as sightseeing tours in the introduction week, in which academic staff go with students across London, or help them purchase furniture for their student accommodation at the local IKEA. The University of Nottingham requested their academics to provide personal support in student accommodation during the COVID-19 lockdown, which fortunately led to a public push-back by the scholars.

The administrative activism creates a kind of feel-good oasis to therapeutically protect educational consumers from all negative experiences and difficulties. However, the feel-good oasis often turns out to be a mirage. In a system where almost everyone is rated as excellent, students cannot afford to have bad exams and cannot experiment with more challenging courses. On average, English undergraduate graduates have a debt burden of £45,800, which understandably leads to stress, doubt, and anxiety about the future.

From a societal perspective, it would be desirable for higher education to contribute to the maturation process of young adults. Ideally, graduates should not only learn critical thinking skills in university, but also how to independently deal with stressful situations, challenges, and setbacks in preparation for their professional lives. In fact, higher education is the ideal place for this kind of development, and the English university system is doing a disservice by infantilizing the student body. The maturation process is not avoided, but simply postponed until later in life, when it may be more difficult to navigate under more challenging circumstances in the workforce.

The university's feel-good oasis is also in conflict with the scientific goals of the university. The purpose of the university is, in economic terms, to produce true statements about the world, but we can never be absolutely certain that we have the true means of production. As a consequence, the competition of ideas and their open exchange is essential for the enterprise of science. This means that students should learn scientific methods, but also to critically question one's own positions and to engage with new or controversial thoughts and theories.

This inevitably brings us to the "wokeness" mentioned earlier. Wokeness can be roughly defined as the dogmatic and unscientific belief that any inequality of outcomes in society can be attributed to discrimination, especially from white, heterosexual men. It is certainly no coincidence that phenomena such as "trigger warnings," "safe spaces," or "cancel culture" have their origin and widest dissemination in the university systems of the Anglosphere. After all, it is the Anglosphere where the transformation of the student body into customers is the most advanced. From the perspective of a profit-oriented business, controversies are a risk to its brand reputation. The primacy of customer satisfaction creates an incentive for the management to change the university according to the political desires of young tuition-paying customers, or to pivot to the demands of protestors that shout the loudest.

As part of a student campaign for the "decolonization of the curriculum", our department was required to engage in a tedious mutual review of our own curricula. However, the goal was not to ensure that the most important and up-to-date scientific contributions were included, but rather to include publications from chosen minorities in the curriculum. Prior to this, my entire department was already required to attend a "Gender Awareness Training" during the lecture-free summer, because a transgender student did not feel adequately represented by the content of one colleague's seminar.

Similar tutoring sessions for the academic staff exist for various minority groups, often in connection with other university-wide theme months, such as "Women's History Month," "Black History Month," "LGBT+ History Month," "Disability History Month," "Pride Month," "Trans Awareness Festival," "Climate & Sustainability Month," and finally the "Islamophobia Awareness Month" - the appropriate end-of-the-year event in this context. The courses teach us how to combat implicit biases and microaggressions, and how to become an "ally" - with particular attention to the so-called intersectionality. The course material includes topics such as "Black LGBTQ+ allyship," "How to be an ally to LGBTQ+ people with disabilities," "Black Trans Lives Matter," "White Fragility," or "disrupting hegemonic whiteness in the higher education classroom." Similar programs to support Europeans or white, working-class students, however, are nowhere to be found, as according to the woke interpretation of Marxist class theory, they do not belong to the exploited classes of the intersectionality pyramid.

There are of course colleagues who support the wokeness agenda for ideological reasons, or who hope to improve their career opportunities through virtue signaling. Supporting wokeness has been introduced as criteria for tenure and promotion at King's College. However, those who question these dogmas can expect serious professional consequences. Michael Rainsborough, Professor of Strategic Theory at King's College, experienced bureaucratic intimidation for organizing debates on controversial topics. He speaks in this context of a climate of fear that leads to an anti-university, which causes a spiral of silence and rewards real or feigned outrage over "wrong" ideas.

But the selective outrage is exposed by the internationalization of the English university system after all. English universities are primarily interested in wealthy customers, which has led to a massive increase and dependence on Chinese students – a trend that has been further intensified by Brexit. At some universities, over a quarter of income comes from China. In my master's class, the proportion of Chinese students had risen from about 30 percent to 90 percent in a five-year period. It should be noted that a large proportion of Chinese students have poor language and subject skills, which has made seminar teaching often impossible due to language barriers. Additionally, the number of plagiarism allegations skyrocketed, but this is silently tolerated.

As a consequence of the Sinicization of the English university, similar mechanisms of wokeness are at work here – in reverse. According to a study by researchers from the universities of Exeter, Oxford, and Portsmouth, 41 percent of the participating academics stated that they practice self-censorship regarding teaching materials about China in order not to offend Chinese students. Critical contributions about China, such as on the repression of the Uighurs, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, or Covid policies are hard to find at English universities. Instead, many universities enter into lucrative partnerships with Chinese educational institutions and companies like Huawei, although they are classified as high-risk for UK national security.

The woke hypocrisy became self-evident in the summer of 2021 when English media reported that King's College London apologized for the "damage" caused by sending a memorial notice with a picture to its staff upon the death of Prince Philip. Complaints were made; the "Anti-Racism Community of Practice" expressing outrage over the memorial notice, claiming that the husband of the Queen had made racist and sexist remarks. The university quickly backed down and distanced itself from its own notice. On the other hand, King's College had no qualms about maintaining a prestigious fellowship for Teresa Cheng. Cheng played a central role in the repression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, which led to her being sanctioned by the United States.

I was invited to a meeting with the heads of school and department because I expressed the wrong opinion on Twitter and a woke mob attacked me. My offense: I expressed the seemingly controversial viewpoint that scientific citations, invitations, and job offers should be based on scientific evidence and the principle of merit rather than on a quota system. I suggested that white men, who virtuously support such a quota system, should consider whether academia is the right place for them, as their departure would contribute to solving the self-proclaimed problem. However, instead of eating humble pie, I decided to resign from my professorship, as this job is no longer worth the trouble in England.

There is not much academic freedom left in the English university system. Instead, professors are expected to be poorly paid bureaucrats, counselors, and political activists simultaneously. But thanks to massive salary and pension cuts for academic staff in recent years, it is now financially more viable to directly start a career as an administrative clerk in government or as a teacher in a primary school. These are necessary professions for society, and at least there is no expectation that one must attract external funding to pay for one’s own position. And if political activism is important to you, then you could directly join the Green Party. At least in the case of the German Greens, there is a certain necessity for political ambivalence due to participation in government coalitions, whereas a similar mechanism to limit ideological dogmatism does not exist in English universities.

There are of course still cases of excellent research and teaching in England. And there are several practical strategies in order to successfully circumvent bureaucratic interventions. But these successes are likely to be sporadic and temporary in nature. This is because the systemic incentives of the English university do not allow for a fundamental change in direction.

For knowledge-seeking German students, the university experience in post-Brexit England, particularly at the post-graduate level, increasingly presents a dismal picture: The students pay high tuition fees to be taught by professors who often must live in shared accommodations. Due to the aforementioned issues, the quality of the classes is mediocre at best, and regular cancellations of classes have become the new standard, as academic staff engage now in prolonged strikes due to abysmal pay.

It is therefore important to note that German employers should not automatically assume that a first-class Master's degree from a prestigious English university is the best option when selecting their employees.