Current academic cultures: enabling or disabling for good science?

Abstract

Now more than ever we need good science to help address the increasingly complex critical challenges society is facing. Yet now more than ever, academics are facing increasing pressures and demands, fuelled by a hyper-competitive culture, to 'perform' - to bring in funding, to publish papers, to have impact. There is no stopping point. The human costs of this are becoming evident in increasing rates of burnout and stress among academics, higher than the general population, not to mention the good science that isn't getting done. We'll take the challenge of getting research funding as an exemplar case of the pressures of academic culture, and ask to what extent it enables or disables good research. We'll also contextualise this question more broadly into other aspects of academic culture and ask further what we can do individually and collectively to start to change this, to move towards a more supportive collegial collaborative academia, and to where people can actually do research on the challenges they are excited about. Solving the grand challenges of today depends on this.