Doing academic work outside universities

One of the members of the Geek Equity research team, Heather Mendick, is freelance. Here she explains why she has decided to exit university employment and how being an independent academic shapes her work on this project. 

Becoming a freelance academic

I went freelance in September 2015 and six months later I wrote a blog about my experience that got republished by the Times Higher Education. For a few years after that I’d get occasional emails from people considering a shift to academic freelancing and looking for advice. Those emails have dried up probably because there’s more guidance out there now, including from people like Helen Kara who’ve been freelance for much longer than me. But there still seems to be an aura of mystery around doing academic work outside of the institutions of academia and a puzzlement from people who work inside universities about why anyone would want to do so. I think this betrays a romantic attachment to an ideal of academic life that is far from the reality of labouring in universities and that is difficult to escape while you’re part of it.

I tend to describe myself as a research consultant because people find it a less confusing label but I prefer freelance or independent academic to stress the continuity of my identity as someone who asks questions, investigates and seeks new ways of knowing. These are things which I have in many ways found it easier to do since I left academic institutions.

Like everything, my becoming freelance was a choice exercised within constraints. If the UK university sector were less toxic and if I hadn’t experienced workplace bullying which got worse after I reported it, then I likely would still be working at a university. It took something dramatic to push me to resign without another job and it took my pessimism about the direction of the sector to stop applying for posts after my first four applications were unsuccessful. I was also lucky to have been offered two small evaluations that I could do independently and to be at a point where I had a track record of research on education and equity. Similarly, my shift was enabled by my having savings and nobody financially dependent on me, and perhaps from my willingness to live cheaply and middle-class financial security.

I’ve been able to make a living independently mostly through evaluations and supporting other people’s research and bidding. I am determined to remain independent. When the research work dried up I chose to do private mathematics tutoring for eight months rather than apply for a ‘proper job’. I’ve managed to develop some regular clients with whom I share values and ideas, and I’m loving being part of this project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Being freelance on the Geek Equity project

As a freelancer, I’ve been bought into a couple of large projects specifically to write academic articles. But the Geek Equity research project is my first ‘traditional’ academic research funding since I stopped working at a university (not least because nearly every UK research funder rules out freelancers before we even apply). Academic work is slow. This project is four years long and for the first year we didn’t even have to think about producing outputs other than occasional blog posts. This has taken some adaptation as I’m now normally working towards shorter-term goals, for example, doing some interviews and producing an evaluation report based on these a few weeks later. I’d given up getting transcriptions of interviews instead making notes from audiorecordings, as there wasn’t the budget to pay transcribers nor the time available for in-depth data analysis. In contrast, in this project, inspired by Ann Phoenix, we experimented with slow readings of interview transcripts, examining each word and configuration of words in detail, to the extent of spending 15 minutes on just one sentence. 

Unlike my Geek Equity colleagues, I do not have access to a university infrastructure, meaning no library, tech support, conference funding, archiving and so on. I also have to generate my own credibility rather than rely on my position and the institution where I work to do this for me. My links with academic communities are weakened by years of neglect, so I rarely get invited to give talks and don’t have the same opportunities to share such research through academic networks that I did when I was part of a university. Being employed carries with it expectations that you will play a part in maintaining the academic world, by organising seminars, coordinating collectives of scholars, reviewing bids and papers, and so on. There’s no money attached to any of these activities. They are indirectly funded through the university salaries of those who do them. Once I no longer had a university salary, I dropped out of most of them. 

However, I think there are things that I bring to the research through being freelance. I appreciate the pleasures of developing research over years and without a predetermined agenda. However, I also bring what I’ve learned from ‘quick and dirty’ research to this study. I’m also more able than my colleagues to make time for the research because it’s not competing for attention with teaching and administrative work. My sources are more eclectic than they were because they are largely not drawn from or shaped by the interests of academic communities. I spend loads more time watching video essays on YouTube than reading journal articles, and reading novels than monographs. These help me make different connections. As Contrapoints identifies in her video about why she left academia, university research often leads people to narrowly focus on a specific problem defined by the field of study rather than reflecting broader interests. For this and many other reasons, academic work should not be limited to what happens in universities.