Why don’t we acknowledge the long-term unemployed researcher, asks Michelle Newman
I recently read an article discussing how mental health in academia is taboo. While this is likely to be true, I feel that there is another area that encounters silence — the long-term unemployed academic.
The dilemma of the postdoc and early career researcher is nothing new, and has been written about again and again. From an economic standpoint, more PhD students mean greater productivity. The question in the past has been, “What do we do with all the postdocs?” It has been suggested (and in reality is quite obvious) that having a PhD isn’t tied to long-term employment because hiring is based on the amount of research funding available, and there is no need to offer permanent positions due the constant influx of ‘fresh’ graduates. So this means the question should be: “How do we help the researchers who are (still) unemployed?”
