Oxford University’s other diversity crisis - The Economist (1843 Magazine)

Take a look at the Oxford University's other diversity crisis - how academics are underpaid and why it is impossible to become a professor without family money.

Original link: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/03/01/oxford-universitys-other-diversity-crisis

Web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230302051859/https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/03/01/oxford-universitys-other-diversity-crisis

One might expect that a university as rich as Oxford – which has an estimated total endowment of £6.4bn, if colleges are included – would be able to fund many well-paid academic positions, and would be especially keen to employ its high-achieving graduates. But Henry’s role only paid a stipend of around £14,500. (A stipend is a fixed amount of money that is provided for training to offset specific expenses. It is not legally considered compensation for work performed.) That amount is not unusual for a stipendiary lectureship at Oxford, even today. At the time of writing, an advertised job at a college was offering a stipend of between £13,700 and £15,500 a year.

This is a shockingly low salary for people who have spent nearly a decade becoming experts in their fields. (In contrast, a newly qualified solicitor, who will have trained for five or six years, can expect to earn on average just over £72,000 annually.) The university itself estimates that the living costs of a single undergraduate or postgraduate with no dependents are between £14,600 and £21,100 a year in 2023. These stipends also fall far below the median annual salary in Britain, which was £33,000 in 2022. “They treat us like we are very low pond life,” said one academic, who held fixed-term contracts with the university and various colleges for 15 years. “They market [courses] on the basis of our reputations…and yet they won’t even give us a business card saying we teach at the university.” (Oxford declined to respond to this allegation and a number of other specific ones in this piece.)

Question: Can ResearchHub and its incentive structures provide alternative and non-traditional career paths for academics so that they can continue their research outside of traditional institutions?

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Oxford University’s other diversity crisis - The Economist (1843 Magazine)