Execrable Elitism

It’s that time again when LinkedIn and university webpages are filled with notices that celebrate the election of one (or more) of their professors to Fellowship of the Royal Society. Such election represents that individual being admitted to the creme de la creme of science in the UK. As the Royal Society says on it’s webpage ‘the Society recognises excellence and elects Fellows and Foreign Members from all over the world. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science. There are currently approximately 1,800 Fellows and Foreign Members, including around 85 Nobel Laureates. Each year up to 73 Fellows and up to 24 Foreign Members are elected from a group of around 800 candidates who are proposed by the existing Fellowship.’

I’ve not yet stumbled across any examples of a celebratory post from a university that is celebrating a scientist who is female or a person of colour. You can be sure that 70% of the new intake of FRS are people who look like me. Middle-aged, white men. The Royal Society would probably argue that 70% is good. A couple of years ago their own diversity report showed that 88% of FRS are male, and pretty much all were white. 

I find the whole thing deeply uncomfortable and the celebrations from the universities disturb me, as on another of their webpages you will no doubt find them celebrating an Athena SWAN award for work in relation to gender equality and a Race Equality Charter commitment to go with it. Yes, we should celebrate the achievements of very talented people. Yes, to become a Fellow of the Royal Society you need to be a talented scientist with a track record of outstanding work. However, the whole thing is a disgusting celebration of unnecessary elitism, which reinforces the dominant position of white men over women and people of colour. The Royal Society does great work as a charity and funder of science, but why do we need this parade of the “elite”?

This paper by Bukodi and colleagues backs up my gut reaction. Even though society has made great strides in opening up access to education, there remains a trend for Fellows of the Royal Society to be privately educated and to have parents who are themselves socially advantaged professionals from a STEM background. As the study says ‘Recruitment from working‐class families has declined and for most recent birth cohorts almost ceased’, so efforts to enhance the diversity of the FRS pool is merely confirming the elitism. And, as we would expect in this world of elitism, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Imperial College London are dominant in supplying new Fellows to the Royal Society. You don’t need a PhD in education to know which pools those universities recruit from.

It’s all an old boys club. It makes me mad.

I’ve known a few FRSs over the years. A lot of them were deeply unpleasant characters, who treated their research groups badly, and reinforced unhealthy patters of working. Their achievements were built on the back of postdocs sacrificing their home lives by working 18 hours a day to please their master and hopefully secure another three year contract of employment. Which leads me to my final point. Like Nobel Prizes, election to Fellowship of the Royal Society bestows honour and glory on the group leader. Those group leaders cannot produce their papers, get their grants and make a name for themselves without their postdocs, PhD students, technicians and the rest of their team. Many top scientists are good at sharing the credit and celebrating the people who actually produce the data and, often, write the papers, but at the end of the day we see single individuals rewarded and celebrated for the achievements of the many.

I am not privy to what happens after a member of university staff becomes a Fellow, but I’d be happy to place a wager that it leads to an increase in salary, certainly an increase in status and an exemption from the more onerous tasks of academia (such as teaching pesky undergraduates). These things do not fall to the research team and the collaborators who worked to elevate the elite researcher to the sacred halls of Carlton House Terrace.

Time to drop this ridiculous and archaic process?

Check out some more posts from the home page. How about So You Want To Be An Academic?