Academic STEM is miserable. How much are DEI and COVID policies to blame?

by Daniel Nuccio

Graduate programs in the various STEM fields are often populated by young, ambitious individuals who will spend much of their twenties and part of their thirties learning the finer details of some niche topic and honing specialized skills in order to become true masters of their craft. With a commitment to objectivity and rationality, they work for little money, as they attempt to prove themselves by racking up a high tally of peer-reviewed journal articles. Then, after a period of eight or twelve or fifteen years, if they they have yet to burn themselves out or opt for a job in industry or with some government agency that promises more money, or at least more reasonable hours, they pursue their final reward for their years of dedication: a tenure track position at a university with lab to call their own. Yet, for many, if they attain that final reward, doing so will often mark the beginning of the end of their career as a researcher (or at least an in-lab researcher), as their new position not only comes with a lab to call their own, but with a tiny office and a desk and additional responsibilities as a teacher and an administrator.

Most researchers seeking academic positions know all this well before they start applying to tenure track positions as professors and have come to terms with it. Many actually have no qualms about being expected to teach. Some even enjoy it or take a liking to the idea that they are inspiring a new generation of scientists. Likewise, many accept the administrative component, which can entail serving on various departmental committees and editing professional journals among numerous other tasks. It is a necessary service to their departments and their fields, they tell themselves. But, what may not always hit these ambitious, young individuals until they have been in their long-sought professorship for a number of years, is just how little time they have left for engaging in hands-on research (or maintaining any semblance of work-life balance).

For many, whatever time they can find for research is no longer spent unlocking the mysteries of the universe or life on Earth or even the sex lives of crickets, but spent at a desk, securing funds by writing grants and managing lab personnel in the form of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as the occasional post-doc or volunteer. Some adjust well to the realities of their new positions. Others do not. Still others may have done quite well in such roles in another era prior to the wide-spread bureaucratization of academia when they may have had at least some time to actually be in their lab (or in the field for those who consider themselves outdoor-scientists) as opposed to in a conference room serving on a committee deciding whether allowing graduate students to bring food to thesis and dissertation defenses to share with their committees and guests constitutes a form of bribery that should be prohibited.  

A series of recent articles published by Nature sums much of this up quite well, reporting relevant numbers from a 2021 survey. Among mid-career researchers, 37% are dissatisfied with their positions, 24% are “dissatisfied with their opportunities for career advancement” , 34% are “unhappy with the amount of time they have for research” (partly due to administrative duties), and 41% believe they are stifled by organizational politics and bureaucracy. Considerable percentages of late- and early-career researchers share these complaints. Among scientists working specifically in academia, 58% claim their level of job satisfaction has worsened in the past year and 36% report working more than 50 hours per week, more often than not without additional compensation or even having these hours specified in their contracts. 

There is also discussion of how STEM professors are experiencing stagnating wages, funding difficulties, micromanagement of their teaching, and ever-increasing administrative duties which take them from their telescopes, their Petri dishes of microbes, or at least their collections of birds. 

Additionally, many professors are claiming to be victims of systemic bias on the part of their universities and upset by the failure of their institutions to take COVID mitigation seriously. 

Collectively, one of the most recent of these articles suggests this has all contributed to something of a “great resignation” or “mass exodus” of scientific researchers from academia. All things considered, this is not very surprising. 

However, it is worth considering the inverse of some of these latter claims. How much has the current climate on university campuses due to the embrace of policies to combat both systemic bias and COVID added to the growing malcontent of academics in STEM departments?

In recent years, many universities have embraced the ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in a quasi-religious fashion (and the same can be said about policies in essence promoting zero-COVID for as long as COVID has been around). 

The embrace of DEI policies has had a chilling effect on intellectual freedom and has engendered a climate of fear at universities at which such policies have been pursued, with many not wanting to come to the same fate as Bret Weinstein, Colin Wright, or Bo Winegard (to name just a few of STEM’s most notorious DEI thought criminals).  

Furthermore, many university faculty are strongly encouraged, if not outright required, to sit through worthless seminars about microagressions, the gender spectrum, and reimagining their fields. Others are encouraged to rework syllabi and Power Points, if not entire courses, to align with changing progressive norms. Some are required to discriminate against white males while serving on faculty search committees. Some are being told that in order to be eligible for promotion and tenure at their institutions, they will soon be expected to actively engage in the promotion of DEI, treating such coerced activism as being on par with their research, teaching, and administrative tasks. 

On the COVID front, universities have been pretty slow to give up their often performative or politically driven COVID mitigation efforts, the harshest of which undeniably hampered many basic aspects of scientific research by academics – although the extent to which researchers believe this to the result of university policy as opposed to a necessary consequence of COVID in the world remains unclear. In either case, when such regulations finally are dropped (or at least loosened), university reopening plans often mandate professors fill out stacks of paperwork describing how they will enforce remaining COVID mitigations in their labs (or in the field for the outside-scientists) even when they fail to see the scientific basis for such mitigations.

Hence, one wonders how much such policies add to the decline in job satisfaction and the mid-career malcontent driving researchers to some kind of great resignation or mass exodus from academia. Hence one asks how many bright young researchers committed to objectivity and rationality such as Debra Soh chose to self-exile from academia in order to retain their ability to speak openly and truthfully about topics like what science says about how many genders there are. (Spoiler alert, it’s more than one, but fewer than three).  

The bargain many young researchers who go on to become professors make is they will sacrifice the the best years of their lives, any hope of a work-life balance, and the possibility of a larger annual salary so they can pursue truth, make an impact in their respective fields, and aim to have at least a little time to sit at a microscope and feel like they’re still able to be a direct part of that impact. They did not make that deal to uphold orthodoxy, waste an occasional afternoon in a seminar being lectured about the latest research in a made up field like Critical Whiteness Studies, or sit on committee debating the proper demographic qualifications for their department’s new biostatisitics professor.