The Staff Culture Survey at Cambridge University is not just restricted to bullying and harassment, prevalent though these are in academic life. It also asked questions about career progression. And this revealed another shocker of a statistic.
I think there are sufficient opportunities for career progression at the University … 32 %
Only 32% see opportunities for themselves to progress. This shows how disheartening a place the university is for young researchers.
Cambridge University has failed to take advantage of existing opportunities to advance prospects of its early career or fixed-term researchers. When UKRI launched its Future Leaders Fellowship scheme, the university did not allow prospective candidates to use it, even ones already on its so-called (fixed term) ‘early career lectureships’. (Cambridge only allowed those already in possession of offers of open-ended jobs to apply, so this effectively reduced the number of possible new jobs in other UK universities. Cambridge’s policy also seemingly violates the Fixed Term Employee Regulations (2002) blogged here.)
The UKRI scheme offers generous funding for up to 7 years for untenured staff, but requires a commitment from the host university to provide a permanent position upon completion of the fellowship. The scheme has a focus on diversity, and other Russell Group universities used it to broaden the backgrounds and ages of their staff. Over 500 new jobs have been created at UK universities with the scheme, but none at Cambridge.
Compared to University College London, this policy has deprived Cambridge of ~ £36 million of funding over the last 7 years. And it has restricted opportunities for its early-career researchers.
Cambridge University’s record on academic vacancies is amongst the worst in the Russell Group. The university does urgently need to create new academic positions to maintain its international standing in teaching and research. However, over the last decade, Cambridge has found it much easier to create fresh senior managerial and administrative positions than academic jobs.
Many UK Universities offer their own funded Fellowships that lead to permanent positions. For example, the University of Edinburgh supports early career researchers by recruiting a cohort of Chancellor’s Fellows. In 2024, up to 38 such Fellowships were available. The Fellows are supported with a 5 years of predominantly research time, and then the job transitions to open-ended Lectureship positions. The University of Edinburgh’s scheme is exceptional in its scale and generosity, but similar smaller schemes are also common in other UK Universities.
Cambridge University has much more financial resources available than most other UK universities, yet it runs no such schemes to support early-career academics. (There are Junior Research Fellowships at the Colleges, but these do not usually become open-ended positions).
The 21 Group thanks Dr Eileen Nugent for the detailed comparison with University College, London
21 Comments
Peter · 16 March 2025 at 19:29
It certainly looks that permitting those with open-ended contracts to apply for Future Leader Fellowships, but preventing those with Fixed Term contracts, is illegal.
The Fixed Term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002 prohibit this.
Still, when has something being illegal ever stopped Cambridge University before …
It would be good to see if Cambridge UCU would sponsor a test case at an Employment Tribunal.
Anonymous · 17 March 2025 at 15:35
Peter – Perhaps the UCU should also be asked how many individual Employment Tribunal cases they supported from their members across the UK, say in the last 5 years (compared to how many requests were submitted to them).
Camxit · 16 March 2025 at 21:11
Cambridge is famous the world over for being an utter disaster for academic career development.
It was always this way to a degree but in recent years it has become a comical farce. Top level scholars no longer get promoted to professor until they are five years away from retirement, assuming they have not been totally crushed under supervisions and administration by the time they reach that point, which they invariably have.
Meanwhile, there is a vast list of abused lecturers and postdocs who, like butterflies, magically transform into endowed professors at equivalent institutions the moment they get wise enough to get the fiddles out of Cambridge and to a university that recognises performance and talent.
It was always bad but now it is just a sick joke.
Just get out while you still can.
Anonymous · 17 March 2025 at 10:15
as soon as you get a job at cambridge you are dead on arrival. if you get hired as an endowed professor great but otherwise the salary you are offered when you join is the same as you will earn 10 years later. the only way to get on is to get out.
JMS · 17 March 2025 at 10:55
I recently retired after 30 years working for Cambridge University. I retired on a salary of ~ £65k.
My postdoc got a job at one of the London Colleges. He is starting as a Lecturer on a salary greater than the Professorial salary I retired on.
Cambridge University takes advantage of academics, many of whom feel it is grubby to be talking about money. Our VC clearly doesn’t feel grubby taking an enormous salary for doing little to fix all the problems.
Exploited · 17 March 2025 at 11:02
The university is not famous for its generosity.
Many early-career researchers are hoodwinked into doing jobs for little or sometimes no pay, with the dangling promise of a possible future permanent job.
“Do this Masters course lecturing or organise this conference. It will really help your profile, boost your cv and also help to set you apart in future job applications. You do know there may be a Lectureship in the department coming up next year”
Anon · 17 March 2025 at 14:45
Has anyone looked into the total cost and individual salaries of HR personnel? Of those who deal with the employment and opportunities of others, and provide “helpful” advice on recruitment, development, retention, promotion and contract termination processes? When they’re not too busy setting up HR investigations?
21percent.org · 17 March 2025 at 14:56
There are ~ 230 HR staff. Take an average salary of 60k (so this includes NI & pension contributions by employer). It’s a guess at the average, certainly at the top, salaries exceed those of many professors, but also many HR staff will be paid less.
60 k * 230 = 13,800 k or roughly £ 14m per annum
Human Capital · 17 March 2025 at 19:53
“Cambridge University takes advantage of academics, many of whom feel it is grubby to be talking about money”
Then talk about poverty, homelessness, indignity and humiliation because that is what our current system produces and it is getting worse and worse.
We are seriously at risk of having to set up a shelter scheme for retired staff who were too old to get a mortgage and whose pension is insufficient to cover cost of rent and living.
I myself am 10 years out from retirement, pay 1500 pounds a month in rent, and can expect 900 pounds a month from the USS pension scheme, so this is not speculative.
We really could be seeing Cambridge professors begging on the streets alongside the homeless.
Approaching the razor edge... · 17 March 2025 at 20:33
Sadly true.
Accepting a job at Cambridge is like the Somerset Maugham novel, “The Lotus Eater”….
…Similar to the main character in that story, you get to experience 25 “perfect” years of wine, dinners, conversation, affairs with students and staff, and decadent intellectual speculation.
….But once it is done and over with, you either have to have independent wealth – or somehpw find the resolve to accept that the end has come and simply terminate your life in a single flash of determination….
Eileen Nugent · 17 March 2025 at 20:08
I had a mental breakdown trying to get out of Cambridge after it trapped me in one of these short fixed-term “early career” positions and then used the subsequent state of career vulnerability induced to degrade the working conditions from employment as an employee at grade 9 university lecturer to employment as a worker using a temporary worker agreement. I then acquired legal obligations to raise health and safety concerns relating to the management of work-related stress so I had to do that whilst also trying to recover and get out of Cambridge which led to a series of mental breakdowns because Cambridge was not set to process that particular type of health and safety concern. I then had to leave, recover some health, raise concerns with an external regulator, have a more limited mental breakdown, recover some health, raise concerns with a different external regulator, have a more limited mental breakdown …. and so on over many cycles for the last 9 months… just to get out of the health and safety situation generated and to comply with the legal obligations generated in the situation.
Very little of the system [internal or external] has been built to safely handle concerns relating to serious cases of work-related stress, it then takes significant mental effort and mental drive to drive the concerns right up through the whole system, the amount of stress generated is extremely high, the health impact is extremely severe, these type of situations are extremely dangerous and any employment situation that could generate a serious case or work-related stress like this one in future should be avoided because it is highly likely to generate a preventable death.
No one has the power to do anything in these individual situations because there are currently no safe processes to remedy this type of individual health and safety situation so the only options are to withdraw from the situation quickly and without raising any concerns [safest option] or to drive the concerns up through the whole system and then withdraw from the situation [extreme health risk doing this on an individual case]. If the organisation does not care, none of the rest of the system is going to remedy that lack of care, the organisation will not be compelled to care in these individual situations.
To have rights, organisations have to care about the rights in question, if they don’t care about the rights in question then those rights don’t exist. It’s the same with legal obligations and regulation. There might be an attempt at regulation, the might be an strong messaging to indicate that a certain form of regulation exists but when you go looking for the regulation to apply it to any real situation you might discover it doesn’t yet exist, hasn’t been built, it’s work possibly in progress and possibly not. This is the case with the regulation of work-related stress, it doesn’t yet exist.
It’s not just the employment costs that need to be considered in these difficult employment situations, the health costs can start to dwarf the employment costs in some of them.These difficult employment situations can cost you everything if you don’t place enough weight to your health in them, it is sometimes necessary to abandon employment, role, career and everything else and to only remain sensitive to your health state just to get out of one of these difficult employment situations with your health in tact. New employment can be found, careers can be rebuilt or changed and everything else is possible so long as you can maintain your health throughout any difficult situation as you work your way out of that difficult situation but if you become permanently disabled in one of these situations this is something that you will pay the cost of for the rest of your life.
Userfriendly · 17 March 2025 at 20:23
We would be better off with deliveroo or uber. At least they pay the hours you work – even if the pay is low
Cambridge pays its academics on lies, betrayal and false promises.
21percent.org · 17 March 2025 at 21:36
Agreed.
Many of the jobs that fixed-term or early-career researchers are asked to do — like teaching in the MPhils — pay less than minimum wage once preparation time is taken into account
For example, if unestablished staff give a lecture, then the University pays £87.85 per lecture.
Let us say it takes one 8 hour working day to create a new one hour lecture from scratch. This works out at £9.76/hr, whilst the 2024 national living wage is £11.44/hr. These ungenerous sums do not suggest that the Cambridge University is the least interested in supporting early-career academics
Eileen Nugent · 18 March 2025 at 01:06
Never seen such an insane employer as Cambridge, not even close. When you look at that future leaders fellowship decision it’s clear that Cambridge is insane because the organisation gained nothing from that decision, it had losses along every dimension that it cares arising out of that decision – working conditions, staff morale, raw research power, raw teaching power, finance. Insane. No one negatively impacted by that decision could question it, no one would listen because it was assumed that any individual in that position had s potential conflict of interest, they never checked if the interest of the individual aligned with that of the organisation, aligned with that of the public, never actually tested if there was a conflict of interest, just assumed there was one and there goes £36 million.
21percent.org · 18 March 2025 at 07:23
The decision not to participate fully in the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship scheme is clinically insane.
No reasons that make any sense have ever been officially provided.
Suspect the reason is one of loss of control. As long as appointments to lectureships are controlled by Heads of Dept & senior academics, then the process can be manipulated internally. (Very bad things happen on university appointment committees).
The problem with the FLF scheme for some in Cambridge is that the choice is made by a panel external to the University. They can’t control this panel & therefore “fix” the appointment.
Eileen Nugent · 18 March 2025 at 11:19
I wouldn’t apply for a FLF without negotiating the submission of an application with a department first, these applications enable the establishment of a permanent working relationship, if there is no working relationship that is not something that can be forced into existence by one side. Most will apply that logic and there is no suggestion that an application can be made for a FLF without the consent of a University. I do however think it is important to bear in mind that some individuals find it harder to establish working relationships that others and yet they still manage to make major contributions to building academic communities through their academic work which speaks for itself and forms working relationships of its own.
Eileen Nugent · 17 March 2025 at 21:13
Some times it is necessary to walk away from a role at a prestigious organisation, a career, all employment and >£500k of financial losses just to preserve your health, to not develop a permanent disability, to not suffer severe mental ill health for the rest of your life. Having seen the consequences of severe mental ill health this was an easy choice for me to make. When HSE resorts to blocking the emails of those raising concerns in this type of situation and the judge who coordinates employment tribunals will not respond on health and safety concerns relating to how other cases of work-related stress were handled in the ET then it is clear that this is the choice that you are making. Then it is time to walk away.
If a complaint is directly coupled to your health state i.e. excessive work-related stress where the complaint is your health state, then the complaints process is also directly coupled to your health state. If you cannot raise concerns about any serious mishandling of the complaints process through anything other than a complaints process that has similar problems to the previous one but with a higher health impact then there is no solution to remedy the situation. If there is no person who is capable of recognising that situation and willing to intervene to get another person out that situation then there is no solution to remedy the situation and its time to walk away with all these other losses to preserve your health.
Eileen Nugent · 17 March 2025 at 22:34
In any of these prestigious organisations and/or prestigious roles where the rewards are potentially very high but the risks are also potentially very high – it is important to remain sensitive to your health state whilst in them to put some limits on potential losses should the risks start to materialise. Life is sometimes extremely harsh and sometimes there is nothing else that can be done in a situation but to work continuously to minimise losses in it and once limits have been placed on the losses to work continuously to get back to the position you were in before the situation arose and to then move forward from that position. Beware getting sucked into a vortex of escalating concerns in one of these serious work-related stress or education-related stress situations, without an extremely detailed knowledge of mental health there is no survival guarantee and even with that there is still no guarantee of survival.
Eileen Nugent · 18 March 2025 at 02:20
I have no regrets about this time spent in Cambridge. My passion was for understanding mental health and the knowledge derived in Cambridge from that passion before I encountered these extremely difficult working conditions during the pandemic is what then continuously stabilised my mental health during that extremely difficult employment situation and gave me the continuous drive to keep trying to and to eventually get out of that extremely difficult situation and to then drive concerns up through the whole system to fulfil any legal obligations to others that I felt I had in that situation. None of the system can claim that it doesn’t have constructive knowledge of the problems encountered.
Whilst I have no regrets about this time spent in Cambridge had I known about these particular risks – some Cambridge specific – in advance I would not have worked in Cambridge, had I not had that particular passion but some other equally as strong passion in another area I don’t think I would have survived that particular employment situation and the whole experience made me realise that these difficult employment situations that drag out for years-decades are a complete waste of a working life.
Eileen Nugent · 18 March 2025 at 02:26
Some people blow half a million on a cocaine addition, a sex addition or a gambling addiction – I seem to have blown half a million on a passion for mental health.
Eileen Nugent · 18 March 2025 at 02:37
All the above are addictions – academic passion, addiction – can have the same net impact on your life.