Hiring established scholars to junior Oxbridge roles imperils disciplines

In recent years, a quiet shift has taken place in academic appointments at our university, the University of Cambridge. Posts advertised in humanities disciplines at the level of assistant professor – traditionally understood as entry-level positions for those near the start of an academic career – are increasingly being filled not by experienced postdoctoral researchers but by senior academics who already have permanent posts elsewhere.

That such scholars – typically from the US or other Russell Group universities – should be drawn to Cambridge is hardly surprising. The prestige of the institution, combined with the guaranteed job security (and benefits in kind) afforded by a college fellowship, exerts a pull even for those who are in higher-paid and higher-ranking positions elsewhere. Hence, similar patterns, predictably, are evident at the University of Oxford.

Such appointments also make sense for hiring panels, who naturally seek to appoint the strongest possible candidate. Senior scholars often bring impressive records of publication and teaching – not to mention major grants, which may in turn support new PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. They enhance the reputation of a faculty and strengthen its performance in the Research Excellence Framework, all without the need to shell out for salaries commensurate with senior academic distinction.

However, this quiet, gradual dismantling of assistant professorships’ former function as entry points into the profession is highly problematic. First, when junior Oxbridge roles are advertised, early career researchers still apply in droves and are often shortlisted and interviewed – a process that demands weeks, if not months, of preparation. Given that it is now vanishingly rare for such candidates to be selected, this is extremely wasteful of their time.

Nor can those who fail to obtain a permanent Cambridge position necessarily apply for the position vacated elsewhere by the successful candidate. Across the UK, and particularly in humanities subjects such as music, modern languages and Classics, vacated posts are being frozen, repurposed or quietly eliminated, contributing to the accelerated contraction of these already threatened disciplines. This is not, we assume, the result of deliberate malice – but Cambridge and Oxford’s gain contributes to the structural weakening of the very disciplines on which their own intellectual life depends.

It also contributes to worsening morale among Oxbridge early career researchers: an effect particularly acute given that both institutions strive to hoover up as many graduate students as possible – especially lucrative master’s students, whose fees compensate for the loss the universities make on their day-to-day undergraduate teaching. Many of those students aspire to academic careers, and when they go on to PhD and postdoctoral positions, they, as a body, perform a non-trivial proportion of undergraduate teaching, often with extraordinary care and professionalism, at a much lower cost than permanently employed teaching staff. They do so for the love of their subject but also with an expectation that stable academic employment remains a viable long-term prospect. That expectation now feels increasingly illusory.

To add salt to the wound, many of the postdoctoral researchers being left behind in today’s academic job market are saddled with crippling Plan 2 undergraduate loans (issued to those who started courses between 2012 and 2022), a financial burden mostly unfelt by the scholars who sit on appointment panels – and those happy to take a pay cut to move to Cambridge or Oxford.

A predictable defence of this hiring trend is that appointments ought to be driven by excellence, irrespective of career stage. But hiring decisions are never purely abstract exercises. They are shaped by institutional priorities and strategic considerations, whether spoken or unspoken. Job adverts could, if institutions chose, specify that posts are intended for scholars within a certain number of years of their PhD, or with certain seniority restrictions. Such stipulations are common in almost all other academic systems – without falling foul of age discrimination legislation.

To recognise career stage as a relevant consideration would not be to abandon excellence but rather to acknowledge that excellence itself depends on the continued existence of viable career pathways. This is obvious in the medical profession: who can imagine a consultant swooping in to nab a junior doctor training post? Why isn’t it equally obvious in the humanities?

Of course, the hiring freezes, restructuring and even closures faced by humanities departments elsewhere, including in the Russell Group, will only further flood the market with overqualified applicants competing for junior Oxbridge appointments. But Cambridge and Oxford rightly pride themselves on their intellectual leadership. And leadership should come with an acute awareness of what exactly is being led.

Hiring committees can’t solve the structural or financial crises facing the humanities in the UK but they can recognise and redress their role in aggravating them. And they can recognise and redress the injustice of sacrificing their postdoctoral scholars’ dignity and hopes of stable employment on the altar of departmental reputation.

The authors are early and mid-career academics at the University of Cambridge.