Postdocs in Doctoral Supervision
I am involved with a Centre for Doctoral Training, and as part of that have been thinking about the way that effective PGR training can be constructed. Last academic year, I focused closely on the way that supervision can be successful in a cosupervised setting.
One of the points raised when I ran this session for academic staff was how postdocs factored into the development of doctoral students. Could a postdoc usefully be considered as an informal cosupervisor?
It’s a great question, especially in Chemistry where research is typically carried out in a group of researchers. This group culture responds to the expertise and personalities of its senior members in strong but complex ways; postdocs are extremely influential in this setting.
Ultimately, I found little literature on the influence postdocs have on doctoral students in Chemistry. I did find more literature on the postdoc experience, though.
What is a Postdoc?
The exact form of role occupied by postdocs is quite variable. In Chemistry, the typical academic research career involves perhaps 2-3 postdoctoral positions in different labs. These roles are normally about 2 years long, and this time limit is often strict because the funding for the posts is external. The funding is sometimes associated with the group (e.g. when a PI has funding for a postdoc as part of a larger grant), but can be associated with the postdoc themselves. Funding for the postdoc can sometimes encourage a more independent role for the researcher, and there is often a poor distinction between researchers ‘flying solo’ while collaborating and senior postdocs answerable to a more senior academic.
The postdoc identity is accordingly vague. A 2011 survey by Dyer and McWhinnie reported that 43% of Chemistry postdocs felt more like staff than students, but 17% indicated the reverse. This difference was gendered: women (men) reported feeling more like staff than student in 38% (48%) of responses, and more like student than staff in 23% (15%) of responses. Only 34% of the surveyed Chemistry postdocs felt well-regarded by their department.
The report proposes a three-factor model to describe the postdoc experience:
A passion for science;
Feelings towards the general research culture; and
Job (in)security.
Akerlind interviewed STEM postdocs in 2007, and describes the three ways that researchers thought about their positions:
As a stepping-stone to a ‘real’ position;
As being their career; and
As a chance to do research (with less emphasis on career).
A Stepping-Stone
This is the conception of the postdoc which I think is dominant in Chemistry, and the paper notes that it was the dominant view in the study. Akerlind quotes an engineering PDRA to exemplify this position:
I guess I see it as a kind of [pause] almost but not quite as a real job! [Laughter] It is like a postgrad sort of thing. I see it as being an apprenticeship to an academic career, more than anything else. But it is also a real job; you get paid. So, I see it mainly as preparation for a research career. I guess, ideally, a postdoc is a time in which I get to spend all my time on research, and try to get some papers out and make contacts, learn more of the ropes, but also contribute to the university. (Male PDR in Engineering)
A Career in its Own Right
This conception of the role framed postdoctoral research as being a sustainable career. This was apparently an option for researchers in curtain fields and countries; it is certainly very rare in my experience of UK Chemistry:
I guess in medical research, you do a PhD and then you do a postdoc position, and usually do a series of them … I know people of 55–60 who are still in postdoc research positions … So, I am now on a two‐year appointment and applying obviously for other five‐year ones. But many of us, especially the 40–50‐year‐old age group, are permanently postdocs as far as I am concerned. (Male PDR in Medicine)
A Research Opportunity
These participants described the position as a chance to do the research they wanted before leaving academia:
It means a chance to focus on some of my own research. And it means a job, because I’m not likely to have a career after it … I don’t see what comes next. Theoretically, they [PDR positions] are for you to lead into academia or an academic appointment somewhere, but I don’t see how at this point. (Female PDR in Social Sciences)
Akerlind notes that such views contrast with the prestigious nature of the postdoc grants the participants held. I have seen this framed as ‘defensive pessimism’ on Postdoc Twitter: frustrated hopes are harmful things, and deliberately-low expectations can help people survive disappointments.
Career Strategies
Interviewees described a high publication rate as a necessary but insufficient condition for progression into a ‘real’ academic post. Also important were (i) luck, and (ii) networking.
The way that teaching related to the development of postdocs fascinated me.
Far and away the most common career aspiration of the PDRs interviewed was to continue a research career or to move into an academic teaching and research position. However, the latter position was consistently seen as representing a move away from research, given that such positions, within Australia at least, notionally involve only 30% research. It is interesting to note that these positions were routinely described by PDRs as ‘teaching positions’ rather than as research positions or teaching and research positions. Related to this, a number of postdocs referred to the potential value of teaching experience for academic positions, though most still saw publications as the primary criterion.
I have written before on the way that teaching labour is erased from the RSC’s conception of academia; this might be seen as another instance of such erasure. The postdoc pursuit of research output might be one social mechanism through which teaching is deprioritised in academic cultures.
Supervisor views on the postdoc role show an awareness of the costs which can arise when pursuing research output:
It actually is that really impressive corridor when you set up your bona fides and you show your stuff … They need a stick [as well as a carrot] to say, it doesn’t come easy, you are allowed to be in the lab at 7.30 in the morning, and you are allowed to struggle there at 7.30 at night. It is quite acceptable … postdocs trade‐off a lot. They are trading off money and position and contract and all sorts of things to show what they are capable of doing. (Female supervisor in Medicine)
This kind of language shows two very important things: the vulnerability of postdocs and the deliberate exploitation of this vulnerability by PIs. An apocryphal letter - however credible its provenance - embodies this explicitly. Postdocs are expected to work very hard to prove their worth.
Fochler et al. treat the idea of postdoctoral ‘worth’ more deeply in the field of Life Science. Fochler’s whole paper was extraordinarily good, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how postdocs feel (or, if you are a postdoc yourself, to validate some of the feelings you might be having).
Hyper-Competition
The paper’s core argument is that postdoctoral success has been operationalised into an extremely narrow metric: the publication of good papers. Such a well-defined metric distorts the strategies of researchers, which can be seen as an instance of Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure. Specifically, postdocs are competing on the basis of quality publications to access sustainable careers. The level of competition for such posts precludes focus on non-publication labour.
There is some discussion of how established scientists see this development in early career research:
an anxiety surrounding what these quantitative metrics mean for younger generations of scientists is palpable. [Scientists] warn that the current conditions will be “discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession”[...] and worry about the impacts of the crisis on the work of those already engaged in life science careers. These senior scientists represent a generation that was socialized under different framework conditions; however, these scholars have also contributed to the development that they now criticize, and they partially continue to perpetuate it.
Again, the uncomfortable complicity of PIs is described. The focus on how such strategies are affecting the overall field is interesting, and the socialisation of both postdocs and doctoral students is identified as an important part of the way that the field renews and sustains itself:
Considering these young researchers’ perspectives is important for the following reasons. First, they are particularly strongly affected by both hyper-competition and shifts in the ways in which scientific work is evaluated, as both dynamics are intrinsically linked to career structures and the processes of institutional staff selection. Second, considering the perspectives of young life science researchers also opens a window into current academic socialization in this field [...] Through this socialization, novices learn not only which questions to ask and how to produce knowledge but also how to recognize good research and how to live and work together as scientists.
One participant describes how the pressure of competition increases from doctoral to postdoctoral positions:
The (…) higher you are in this hierarchy, the more competition you can feel. […] Because a lot of postdocs have to fight for the best publications to get a group leader position in the future. […] We fight for money […], and of course we fight […] for being first, you know, because only if you are first to publish then it’s cited a lot. […]. And this is somehow a measure of success in science—the number of citations.
One postdoc emphasised how the narrow impact agenda precludes engagement with other valuable tasks:
So, impact. In the scientific world, that’s the only thing that counts, unfortunately. […]. But then other people do top work in supervising people, making sure that the lab runs smoothly, but maybe they get to do less research. Now they aren’t first or last author, but they are just as important. […] So, impact factors count when you apply for a professorship. […] But the person does not. But if you work with so many people [as a professor], you would also expect leadership qualities.
Overall, postdocs viewed their prospects as being tied to transferable indicators of research productivity (e.g. publishing well-cited work) as the market for their skills was both globalised and hypercompetitive: a Nature paper means something very powerful in this context.
Such behaviours can cost postdoctoral researchers dearly:
postdocs aim to make biographical decisions that maximize their individual productivity and competitive performance. These decisions do not only impact their professional practice, but also strongly affect their private lives. They discuss “logging out of life” for the postdoctoral period to “show that one really belongs in science,” “camping in the lab,” and postponing family plans. The readiness to sacrifice other biographical plans is viewed as an indicator of a person’s worth in a discourse that assumes that only those with total dedication can become successful researchers. Other biographical aims are postponed until later phases, assuming that these phases involve less competition; however, quite a large number of respondents expressed doubts about whether such phases were possible in contemporary academia, even if they succeeded in becoming group leaders.
In an interesting twisting of the way that Dyer and McWhinnie framed a passion for science, Fochler et al frame an interest in the research as being a strategy to compete more effectively (rather than the intrinsic joy in the research being valuable):
fascination was not discussed so much as a value in itself but as a resource that was necessary for coping with the long working hours required to prevail in the competition.
Such mercenary strategies extend to the relationships between members of the research group, too:
So, yeah, I mean, I think certainly […] whenever you ask anybody for help, there is always a question of, well, you know, maybe it’s not the first question that comes to mind, but eventually it’s a question of, well, am I gonna be on the paper, am I not gonna be on the paper.
In general, it seems that postdocs accepted hypercompetition as ‘the way things are’, which contrasts somewhat with the way that PIs viewed its effects on the field as one possible structure rather than something inevitable. A rather bracing assessment of English science was provided by an international postdoc, though:
I was visiting a department in England and was nearly shocked to see how science there basically just aims at getting something written down and out the door. So it’s not about understanding what one is actually doing.
Muller wrote a 2014 paper on the issue closest to my own concern: how postdocs influence the way that doctoral students are supervised.
Broadly the paper holds that postdocs view doctoral students as a resource:
postdocs reframe the students they supervise as potential resources for co-authored publications. What might look like a mutually beneficial solution at a first glance, in practice implies the subordination of the values of education to the logic of production
Muller links this explicitly to the reproductive aspects of the field
the one-sided focus on research productivity in current academic reward systems is marginalizing the reproductive aspects of academic labor such as education-oriented activities (i.e. teaching, supervising and mentoring students). Since these tasks are cornerstones of any functioning higher education and research system, it is rather troublesome to find that young scientists perceive investing in these tasks as hindering rather than propelling their careers.
Pointing to the growing demands on established academics, Muller articulates how the tacit expectations on postdocs have been ratcheted up:
As numbers of full faculty members decrease, senior scientists are often close to overwhelmed themselves by the number of tasks associated with their positions. Leaving postdocs to cope with an overstraining situation by themselves becomes part of the processes of enculturation into the academic profession. The message is rather clear. Postdocs need to figure out ways to advance their careers quickly while still supervising their seniors’ PhD students. Anyone who cannot deal productively with this situation is not equipped for an academic career. This puts normative pressure on postdocs to find ways to prove that they have what it takes to make a successful career.
However, only the research productivity of the postdoc is valued in the job market, so the informal supervision of doctoral students becomes aligned not with the development of the doctoral student, but rather with the opportunities to increase the postdoc’s research output:
even the most ambitious postdocs can only work so many hours a day. In many cases supervision work will still gnaw off significant chunks of their productive capacities. Postdocs then focus on a strategy that promises to retrieve some of their invested time in the longer run: They reframe their supervision activities as potential sources of co-authorships on publications resulting from the students’ work.
Muller makes an unashamedly ideological case for this being problematic:
Scientists engaged in supervision work increasingly depend more on their students’ successful production for their careers than on their proper education – at least in the short term. Production, it seems, is no longer the lucky byproduct of education: rather, as the focus rests on production, education is becoming the byproduct.
This has a profound consequence on the socialisation of doctoral students, and thereby on the academic field:
The mentality that, in the end, production in terms of publication is almost all that counts as an academic scientist is currently handed down to large parts of the PhD student population. This suggests that the role of the academic scientist is presently being rewritten and key features of academic citizenship are being redefined. [...] A shift in students’ academic upbringing may hence consolidate these value transformations beyond the current moment, normalizing the subordination of education to production
Reflections for OxICFM
Within the context of the OxICFM CDT, this sense of narrow academic reproduction is a really significant challenge when the centre is aiming to challenge the predominant assumption that a doctorate is a route to an academic career. We have developed a taught course which exposes doctoral students to some of the varied inorganic research in UK Chemical Manufacturing, and it is not clear to me how this exposure will influence the socialisation into research groups with strategically-minded postdocs.
It could be that the interaction is very positive. Making doctoral students and postdocs aware of the stimulating, satisfying scientific roles in industry could be an appealing way out of a gloomy academic culture for many researchers. Similarly, access to a more diverse range of research productivity metrics (e.g. through KEF-aligned industrial collaboration) might permit some researchers to broaden the narrow definitions of research productivity which can be so constrictive.
If we treat postdocs as cosupervisors, then it seems likely that they are overwhelmingly forced to adopt a model of the doctorate aligned with academic employment: they will make pedagogic decisions which emphasise scientific capital such as high-quality publications. such a position is coherent - its coherence stems from a hard-nosed recognition of how the academic job market looks - but it will interact in complex ways with the motives of the formal supervisor(s). It seems possible that postdocs and formal supervisors might take different approaches, pulling a doctoral student in different directions.