In it for the Money

Something I'd never realised about my job was that I've been missing out on the chance to turn into a cash-machine.

In the grand scheme of things, academic pay isn't bad... once you get established.  The problem is that getting established isn't easy: I was 30 before I'd ever earned enough to pay income tax, and it's got harder since then to get a foot on the career ladder.  Taking into account the level of student debt that new entrants'll've accrued, which are far higher than people of my cohort would have had, and the way that they're expected to have a portfolio of publications even before getting a job, I'm glad I'm not looking for a first job now.  Still, the point stands that, once you've got a foot on the ladder, the average academic salary is comfortably more than the average salary.  All the same: a bit more income on the side would never be a bad thing, would it?

Considerablay richer than yeow.

Daniel Sokol, writing on the JME blog, thinks that it should be possible to monetise medical ethics, and offers advice on how to do so.  Well, he might be offering advice.  He might simply be looking to tell the world that he's doing nicely, and tacking an advert for his book on at the end.  It's hard to know.  Anyway: he's got some suggestions.

I'm not going to rehearse what they are point by point, because that'd be tedious.  The gist is that there're thousands of pounds to be made if you happen to make the right moves.  But one wonders quite what planet he's on with the figures he quotes, and about the character that'd be required to make the moves that he recommends.



Take, for example, his supposed fee for teaching.  Now, I and a lot of people I know get invited by external organisations to give the odd seminar or lecture now and again, maybe for something that'll earn doctors CPD points; I presume that's the kind of thing he has in mind.  These things are done for a number of reasons.  Sometimes it's because we're genuinely interested in the topic on which we've been invited to opine.  Sometimes it's because we think that the people asking are admirable.  Sometimes, frankly, it's so that we can drop in the odd plug for our postgraduate programmes.  Often, it's a combination of all those things.

What it's not is for the pay.  That'd be stupid, because they generally don't pay more than expenses, and maybe lunch.  I've been invited to do one of these things in the new year; I'm going to do it, even though it's going to eat up my day and won't make me a bean.  This is because I think it's worth it.  I don't think that that's because I'm especially virtuous.  I think it's pretty much the default setting for academics in my line of work.

I may be a fool.  But even if I am, I think that there's something a bit morally off-colour about how you can squeeze £1500 out of the NHS for a couple of hours of what is, by necessity, almost certainly going to be pretty basic boilerplate stuff.  (Sokol's point that Keele used to have a decent income from research ethics committee training - this is true: I was there at the time, though never involved in KTRECs - hides the fact that there were always several people doing quite intensive work, in a lot of detail, and they weren't personally making any money from it anyway.)

Working the other way, the people who're most likely to benefit from taking on this kind of job are those who're just looking to get established: those who know their onions, and are trying to find a first full-time job.  They, of course, are the ones who're least well-known, and so least able to charge mega-bucks.  What Sokol is recommending is a situation in which those who have their feet under the table are displacing those who could do with the cash, and are charging more at the same time.

(Now, of course, there are things that established academics do, and only get the chance to do, that don't pay at all well.  These would be things like external examining, which attracts pay at something at or below minimum-wage levels.  Call this "ceremonial pay".  But it's part of the game - so it goes - and it's sure as hell not the kind of extra work that Sokol is recommending.)

Much the same can be said for committee membership.  I've just done a stint of a couple of years on the BMA's ethics committee, the pay for which amounted to a sandwich lunch and biscuits four times a year.  Granted, they were good biscuits, but even good biscuits aren't legal tender.  And the same applies to media stuff.  When we do it, it's not for the money.  (Again, that'd be stupid.  There is none.  I do more media than most people I know thanks to an active departmental press-officer and a hyperactive ego, and I think I got an appearance fee twice.  In both cases, it was in the tens of pounds.  In most cases, you get expenses if you're lucky.)

Now, I don't doubt that it's possible - if one knows the right people - to generate a healthy sideline in doing plenaries for what Sokol calls "large medical conferences".  Hell, I've even done a couple of those things myself - genuinely, two since I started teaching - though the pay, I should emphasise, was considerably less than it would appear I could have got.  But these're likely to be sales conferences, even if they're dressed up as academic ones: echt academic conferences are invariably run on a shoestring.  (I may be naive, but the idea that a keynote at an academic conference will be paid the five-figure sum Sokol mentions doesn't strike me as plausible.  The idea that most, or any, would get more than expenses is stretching things.)

And the important thing to note here is that the conferences that pay big money aren't looking for people to give a paper in which a knotty problem in bioethics is dissected at length.  They're after someone to tell people what they already know; to make them feel good about themselves; at the outside, to witter trivially about the four principles and professional regulation for a bit.  They're not looking for an speaker whose there in an academic capacity; it's not really bioethics.  Someone doing this kind of job is using his bioethicist credentials to do something much more meretricious, by sicking up into the gullets of delegates the pre-digested and easily-swallowed parts of actual ethicists' work.

Come to think of it, that might be why I've not been invited back to do more.  I'm available.  Hit me up.

Look: here's the thing.  When it comes to the crunch, what I'm struggling to understand is how a research and teaching-active academic would have the time to do all those corporate events, training, and so on - quite aside from the inclination.  Everyone I know works evenings and weekends by default just to keep up with the day-job.  Essentially, Sokol's saying that you're quids in by abandoning the field in which you're supposed to have some expertise, and using the time to tell corporations exactly what they want to hear.  And I'm sure that if you know the people who can get you the introductions, that may be true.  But you have to know them.

And that's the other thing: it would seem that Sokol does know some useful people.  Bully for him.  But most of us don't, and the market for corporate gigs in ethics is small anyway; and so the chance that any reader is going to be able to get in on the market is, I'd wager, not significant - even if they wanted to.  And if that's the case, then Sokol's advice looks even more like preening.

Fair's fair, though: it's not all luxury for him.

What I was never taught in my career in bioethics was how to negotiate fees,  In my legal work, a clerk deals with this for me. For medical ethics work, I do not have that luxury and have to negotiate myself.

Oh,woe!  The hardship!

Oh, fuck off.

In the meantime, on the fleeting chance that there's someone from the NHS or a similar body who's looking for someone to do a spot for them, there's no shortage of academics who're brimming with insight, and who'd happily help out if they can.  Some are old hands; some are freshly-minded.  It might be nice to chuck the newbies a bit of cash, because they probably need it.  But, whatever the stage of their career, almost nobody is going to spend a lot of time working out the best way to squeeze pennies from you.