A very friendly blogger

This post is to congratulate Professor K VijayRaghavan (Director, NCBS) on being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (pointer from the recent blog posts of Professors Abi and Rahul).

A lot has been written about his scientific accomplishments and his role in building up NCBS.  He is also active on the blogging network.

As Rahul points out,

``he is one of those scientists always willing to speak his mind, without causing controversy, and participate civilly in online discussion: he has commented occasionally (including very recently) on this and other blogs and himself blogs at Indiabioscience."

I have benefited a lot from many of his comments on this blog and have also enjoyed his amusing take on various issues [recently, in response to my (somewhat angry) post about communication troubles between senior and younger professors at N1, he suggested that they could go out together for a beer session where each can speak their mind without offending the other!]

My initial interaction with him was very funny.  He visited this blog following a link from Abi's blog and left the following comment:

Hi New Prof in New India,
I really enjoyed this post. Its wonderful for those joining new places in particular but also for those looking for faculty positions anywhere to hear about your experiences. You write politely and well and I am sure no one will take offense if you identify the places you are writing about. N1 can only become better and even more responsive! I would love to recommend N1 to others and perhaps apply myself if only I knew where it is :-)). In any case congrats and thanks to Nanopolitan for pointing me here. Keep writing.
Best wishes
Vijay
K. VijayRaghavan, Bangalore


I am not a biologist.  Being new to the scientific community in India and somewhat misled by his comment and his simple blogger profile, I assumed that he is a postdoc entering the job market and wrote the following response:

Hi Vijay,
It is a good idea to apply widely to many institutes and not write off any new ones before visiting them.
The current generation of job-seekers in India is very lucky because of the wide variety of academic jobs available and we should take full advantage of that.


However, after reading a few more comments by him on other posts, it became very obvious that my assumption was false! So, I googled him and went ``Oops! A big oops!"

Since then, I am very careful about who I am writing to and also about offering unsolicited advice :)

I conclude this post with a very thoughtful comment by him on a post I wrote long ago about struggling between academic and administrative duties [bold emphasis added]:

``Research is a full-time job. Teaching is another full-time job. Administration need never be more than 20%-time job. Counseling students ditto. So, with time-management and prioritization the question is, how many jobs do we want to do: .2, .4, 1, 1.2, 1.4, 2, 2.2, 2.4 etc. The choice we make is substantially ours and also depends on the context.

Lets say you decide that you are passionate about research, committed to excellence in teaching and, at the same time, would like to help with committee work and student counseling. In other words you want to be a 2.4 job person. If each job takes 6 hours of work a day, we are talking about a 14 hour day and an amazing ability to partition one’s hard-drive. Not easy for the best of us. There are at least two ‘trivial’ solutions to the 14 h day problem. The first is to do all jobs badly in a 6 h day. The second is to drop research. The first trivial solution inevitably leads to the second as neglecting research is a downward spiral that makes your research eventually irrelevant. Its amazing though, that something that should take about 2.4 hours a day can lead to a crisis in one’s research and teaching. Why is this? In my view, still taking shape, the .4 job day that is taken up by counseling and committee work, particularly when done well, is an opiate that makes us feel useful. The rest of the 2 job day will be very well used even if we only used a third of that time thinking hard and working a bit (i.e. 4 hours a day). Thinking hard, consistently, is demanding on most of us ordinary folk. Rather than find ways to remedy this handicap, we do more of the opiate. Hence the downward spiral. Thus, most people don’t say no to committee work. We justify our involvement with a variety of real and virtual arguments, but we inevitably get drawn into it more than we need to, We next say that this is the cause of the demise of our research or teaching. While, it may be the other way around.
The new institutes, such as yours, have an opportunity to shake us oldies from this complacent luxury of buffaloes wallowing in our ponds and declaring that ours is the best way and but for admin work and bureaucracy we would in a better pond. The reason I say this is that there is a nontrivial, though unstable, solution to the 14 hour efficient work day. That is by keeping an institutional and individual focus on research and teaching as our primary goals with all other activities helping these. If we can manage this focus, the .4 job investment will make the 2 job goal attainable in less time. If we forget this mantra the .4 job becomes all encompassing."

Generation gap?

Like many other new institutes, the faculty at N1 almost entirely consists of young members within five to ten years of their PhD.  The associate professors (few) and full professors (fewer) can be counted on fingertips.  Our senior colleagues have substantially contributed to the growth of N1 and by their accomplishments and experience, have been able to give direction to the institute.  What I also admire about them is that they left good positions in established institutes and roughed it out in a new set up and at the same time, managed to keep their research programmes going.  Their commitment and leadership is deeply appreciated.

Sometimes, however, there is a bit of a gap in communication between the younger faculty (YF) and senior faculty (SF) members.  I would like to share an example of how something said by YF can be misinterpreted by SF and vice versa.

A lot of heated conversations are centered around the balance between teaching and research.  On joining, the message that most of us get is that while there should be no compromises in teaching undergraduate courses in our flagship programme, eventually our performance will be judged on the basis of our publications and research grants.  Those of us who did their PhD/postdocs in North American universities have had prior teaching experience and have also seen our supervisors/postdoc guides balancing and actively performing both duties.  On the other hand, many of my colleagues have joined after doing postdocs in research institutes in India and Europe.  Thus, they may not have had any teaching experience prior to joining here and have come out of a system where undergraduate education was not given much priority.

Faced with the challenges of teaching their first course and trying to carve out an independent identity in the research world simultaneously, some YFs are occasionally heard saying that their teaching duties take time away from their research work.  I would not doubt  the commitment of a colleague who says this towards teaching well.  I would only think that my colleague is dealing with time management issues, an important part of the learning curve of any faculty member and is frankly sharing his/her struggles with others.

Unfortunately, however, if our SFs hear this, more often than not, they will angrily retort and say that they had much heavier teaching loads when they started out and that YF has it much easier and therefore should not complain.  SF might even make a general statement on the lines of ``People should not make teaching an excuse for their lack of productivity."  Perhaps, SF is making a general statement, but YF will be stunned because s/he has been very productive.  Needless to say, this conversation may not end very well.

SF's reaction is based on the assumption that YF was making teaching load an excuse for weakness, where as all YF was doing was harmlessly interacting with colleagues and sharing his/her struggles.  On the other hand, even though SF made an off-hand general remark, it is next to impossible for YF to not take it personally!  Perhaps, it might have been better if SF too had shared some stories of their early career days or given some advice. While it is considered impolite to offer unsolicited advice, surely unsolicited advice is better than unsolicited criticism?

Teaching was only one example.  Similar conversations can also happen around other issues like research facilities, lab/office space, personal facilities like transport, housing etc.

On a personal note, I often don't mind when a senior says things like ``I had it much harder," provided the senior gives a concrete example and describes how s/he handled it.  I get this a lot from my father and it usually has the desired effect.
When I was describing the above situation to him the other day, his reply was:

`` In army, a junior will not dare to open his mouth when a senior is talking.  You academic people have it much easier."

I will leave it to the readers to agree or disagree with my father :)