Pulling strings to get your research students a job is not good mentoring

"Ironically, it can be those who make the loudest noises about equality issues in the conventional sense who can be among the most myopic when it comes to patronage." It's called virtue signalling. It is a type of easy deflection to show others what good people they are to embrace diversity and equality the 'easy way'. It is similar to journal editors writing editorial columns in journals when they take over to tell the research community how much they embrace these values only to resume the same old research culture. You know what they say - talk is cheap. Over the years as an academic, I have grown to accept that academic accomplishments and recognition is a professional/social qualification and *not* a moral qualification.

Bruce is absolutely spot on with this observation, and I’ve seen many egregious examples of it. The worst was when someone who is now one of the country’s top researchers had his application for a simple lectureship scuppered below the water by a head of department who wanted his somewhat lacklustre but newly-doctored protégée to have her first post. The entire appointment process was corrupted and HR just sat on their hands, to the detriment of the department, whose research culture sagged and whose next REF rating was pretty grim. There’s a reason we need to do fair selection and this offers a cautionary tale as to what happens to standards when you disregard it.

Part of it is the devil you know versus the devil on paper or during an interview. Internal candidates are a known quantity versus a CV. Sometime a great CV turns into a disaster.

Bruce, this is another piece left us with more food for thoughts. On one hand you want to help your students to get up on the “almost impossible” academia ladder and on the other hand, do they really deserve it? I suppose many professors do that not just for the reason of moral but the actual students or junior colleagues are sincerely helpful or realistically speaking, useful for them. In-breeding is definitely a problem, in fact, I often think that academics who only have academia careers as you mentioned “ a PhD obtained full-time from a leading university, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship and then a series of short-term contracts or part-time positions at similar institutions” are also problematic. They missed the real world perspectives and can also be myopic to many areas. They also do not make the best mentors.