The empty chair

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While I was finishing a paper at home, a colleague from the administrative staff posted a photo on the internal network: an empty corridor, with the caption, “The summer silence on campus… where is everyone?” The reactions were predictable:  😊   🏖️   😎 Light-hearted, no doubt. And yet beneath the jokes ran something more persistent: a quiet undercurrent of suspicion. “You must be at the pool every day, right?” Or, to my students: “You must be left to fend for yourself, your supervisor is never around.” It made me wonder: when did being present become the ultimate proof of working? If I really had spent all that time by the pool, I would probably have an Olympic medal by now – not a pile of unfinished articles, reviewer comments, and looming deadlines. In academia, two worlds quietly coexist. For support staff, the campus is the workplace. Work has fixed hours, fixed locations, and above all: visibility. If you are there, you are working. If you are not, apparently you ...
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The paper favourite

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When I applied for my current position, I was – at least on paper – not the ideal candidate. Understandably so: there are always people with a stronger CV or a more “sexy” specialisation. I was simply glad that I got the job.

That is, until I heard who the paper favourite had been. It turned out to be someone I knew. Same niche, same research focus. Only less experience, fewer publications – in fact, less on every front. She had once applied for a position in my department and had been rejected. I understand that a university might sometimes prefer someone with a supposedly more exciting research topic over someone with extensive experience in a less fashionable area. Fine. But we were doing exactly the same work. So it wasn't the field.

I did briefly wonder why, but didn’t dwell on it. I had the job, after all.

Until I applied elsewhere and didn’t make it past the first round – while my PhD student did. That surprised me. I had taught him the field. I had more experience, more publications, a longer track record. For the first time, I seriously wondered: could it be my age?

And then it happened a third time. I applied in a country where candidates are said to be assessed objectively on merit. Publications and CVs are sent to external reviewers, each of whom writes a report and produces a ranking. The top four or five are invited to give a presentation and attend an interview, after which the reviewers evaluate them again.

One of them compared me to a younger candidate and wrote that I performed better, but: “If we normalise this finding for seniority (i.e., length of research leadership experience), then X takes the lead.” I checked her CV. She was younger in years, but her research seniority was longer than mine – I had entered academia later. Seniority, it turned out, was not adjusted for experience, but implicitly for age.

In other words: it is not what you have achieved that counts, but how much they can still get out of you.

From that point on, it became difficult to see those earlier situations any other way. On paper, I was not the ideal candidate. And it turned out that this had less to do with my work than with my age.

Perhaps that is the most uncomfortable insight of all: that “objective” selection procedures are often remarkably good at reproducing existing assumptions – about who still has time ahead of them.

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