There And Back Again
As I am writing this, it is almost literally the eve of my departure from the United States: it is early June, the packers are scheduled to arrive in just two short weeks, and my tickets to Denmark are booked and confirmed for July 1. I’ve been going to Europe at least once or twice a year since moving to the U.S. (save for the COVID annus horribilis of 2020), but this time it’s different: this time, it’s for good.
Well, not really “for good”, as I am sure I will be returning many times to the U.S. over the next few years. But what’s different is that unlike the other times, this time I am relocating back to Europe after 15 years of living in the United States and being a member of the U.S. academic system as a faculty member. I hope you will forgive me if I indulge in a little bit of reflection to mark this occasion.
I moved to the U.S. together with my wife Helene back in October 2008 to accept a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. I still remember arriving at the Indianapolis airport late at night (especially late given the 6-hour time difference), picking up a rental car, and then driving the hour and a half to Lafayette. When we arrived at midnight, after a brief detour to Walmart (of course!), the house that we had bought in absentia was all lit up, a warm and welcoming glow from every window.
My time at Purdue was great, and lasted from 2008 to 2014. That’s when I was awarded tenure and moved to the University of Maryland. In fact, I actually got tenure twice that year: from Purdue and later in the spring from UMD.
Tenure was actually one of my own personal reasons for going to the United States in the first place. I had been fascinated by the idea of the tenure track and the concept of a “six year temporary position”, and I had challenged myself that I could do it. So just getting to that point was a big bucket list item for me.
Why did I move from Purdue? There are several reasons, both personal and professional ones. In terms of professional reasons, UMD has a much stronger HCI research ecosystem than Purdue, especially with the HCIL (which I had known about since being a wee graduate student), and is also located close to several funding agencies and a healthy computing industry. And in terms of personal reasons, the D.C. area is geographically better situated and has better airline connections to Europe. And it is close to the water. In fact, we ended up buying a historic townhouse in Annapolis that’s literally two blocks from the Chesapeake Bay.
Incidentally, as I grow more senior, I am coming to find that personal reasons are increasingly outweighing professional reasons when job hunting. During my first job search, I was willing to accept almost any faculty position that would have me, regardless of geographic location. Now, after having finished my third search, I find that the primary reasons for moving are personal: to be closer to family. That’s not to say that there aren’t some compelling professional reasons as well: my new CS department at Aarhus University is one of the strongest in Europe, and I have been given the opportunity to launch a brand new center in my own research area.
Another bucket list item for my academic journey was becoming a full professor. That happened in 2019, and perhaps that was the beginning of the end for my family’s U.S. adventure. Whether that’s true or not, by getting not just tenure and promotion to associate professor, but also subsequent promotion to full professor, perhaps I have proven to myself that I can succeed in the U.S. academic system? I’d like to think so.
So, it’s been fifteen years, and now I am returning to Europe. A natural question might be what I think of the U.S. academic system, both in terms of the good and the bad. However, before I do so, let me start with a caveat: so far, my faculty experience only comes from the U.S. In other words, you will have to wait a little until I can perform a real comparison between what it’s like to be faculty in Europe vs. the U.S. Nevertheless, here is a quick rundown, first of the positives about life as an academic in the U.S. (note that these are specific to my U.S. academic experience, not necessarily everyone’s):
Plentiful resources: As stated above, I have no way of comparing this to Europe or anywhere else, but research funding is relatively easy to come by in the U.S. Not only are there many federal funding agencies, but there are also many potential corporate sponsors. And while it can be challenging to receive federal funding, there are several young investigator opportunities that level the playing field for early career researchers. Finally, U.S. universities (at least the ones I have worked at) tend to provide significant pre-award and post-award support, and because funding is such a big deal for tenure, everyone is committed to mentoring junior faculty in the art and science of writing research proposals.
Excellent students: When I started in 2008, the U.S. was the one of the best places in the world to get a Ph.D. for students in my greater research field (computer science), and while this is slowly changing, it is still mostly true. Practically speaking, this means that U.S. research universities can get away with admitting top students from all over the world and largely ignore recruiting from their own states and surrounding areas. As a case in point, I remember one year that Purdue ECE received close to 3,000 Ph.D. and masters applications. Naturally, the very best students apply to many universities, get many admission offers, and tend to pick the highest ranked one. Nevertheless, the sheer numbers mean that U.S. universities have lived under an embarrassment of riches for a long time. What happens as the balance of power in CS research equalizes across the world (and as U.S. immigration policies continue their downward spiral) is anyone’s guess, but many U.S. universities may be in for a rude awakening. Salary: U.S. faculty members, at least in computer science, are very well compensated. This is not at all true for the rest of the world, but in the United States it is a fair acknowledgment of the fact that computer scientists can often get an exorbitant salary if they join industry. As a result, U.S. universities do their best to compete with high industry salaries. For those of us who worked at universities in rural areas (such as West Lafayette, IN), a faculty member’s salary is often enough to put them in the upper middle class: not rich, per se, but definitely well off.
Spousal hiring: Many European universities take a rather callous view of two-body problems, leaving most of these problems to the candidates themselves. U.S. universities, on the other hand, recognize that to attract the best faculty members, they need to take care of the faculty member’s whole family, not just the actual candidate. For this reason, U.S. universities often have specific spousal hiring programs that provide department and central university subsidies to hire a trailing spouse elsewhere on campus. (I will hasten to say that my new university, Aarhus University, seems very sensitive to two-body problems.)
Tenure: Tenure is pretty sweet and the idea of academic freedom is a good one. While some argue that the concept is somewhat outmoded, especially in areas such as computer science where scientists are in high demand, it is still a bastion in a U.S. society that otherwise puts very little value in stability of employment.
Of course, there are several negatives to the U.S. academic system as well:
Students as “customers”: One of the things I worried about before joining Purdue was that because students pay so much money in tuition to go to university, they would behave as if they were “customers” and I was a mere “clerk” providing them a paid service. Initially, I found this fear unfounded, but in the last few years I have increasingly started to sense this sense of customer entitlement in my students. Maybe it is my imagination, but several student emails over the last year have taken an imperious tone, telling (not asking) me to regrade their work and to do it “ASAP”, etc. I don’t like it and I worry that rising tuition and decreased state funding for universities will make it worse.
Poor student working conditions: Perhaps because of the embarrassment of riches outlined above, many U.S. universities tend to treat their Ph.D. students as expendable. As a result, Ph.D. student working conditions are often pretty abysmal. Their position is often uncertain and at the whim of their faculty member (see below about my point on student hiring), they typically get pushed into a tiny cubicle as a working space (if they get a personal workspace at all), and they are often paid a low half-time “stipend” rather than a proper salary. It is no accident that graduate student unions are popping up all over the U.S., even in the most prestigious universities who presumably should know how to appreciate their student workforce.
Summers: Ahh, summers. Perhaps my most hated aspect of the U.S. academic system. You see, tenure-track and tenured faculty in the U.S. tend to be hired on a 9-month basis, which means that the remaining 3 months are unpaid. Most research-active faculty tend to use research funding to pay their own salary from their own grants during the summer. In fact, during all my 15 years as a faculty member in the U.S., I always managed to cover my own salary. However, this does not mean that it is not stressful and tedious to do: it is. Arcane sponsor requirements (such as the fact that the NSF only allows for maximum two out of the three available months of summer to be covered by NSF funds) means that most summers end up being a patchwork of funding from different sources that you scramble to put in place before the semester ends. I know that most universities allow you to spread the 9 months of salary across the full year, but here is an idea: why not pay faculty for all of their labor, even during the summers? It’s not as if I don’t work hard to further my own expertise and the university’s reputation during the summer.
And then there are a couple of neutral points that are both positive and negative in equal measures:
Ph.D. academic procedures: I am sure this is most likely a fact of life regardless of where you go, but as a European, I had considerable difficulties understanding the Ph.D. journey from coursework, proposal, and defense. For someone who went through U.S. graduate school, this is probably as natural as breathing, but it took my first Ph.D. student to go through the whole process for me to understand it properly. Having said that, there are many nice features of the U.S. system that I like. In general, proposing your dissertation to your committee before you go and complete it is a good idea, because this gives your committee some input on the direction of your research before it is too late. I also like that most U.S. Ph.D. defenses are semi-formal events where outcomes such as minor and even major revisions are possible. In Sweden, the Ph.D. defense is a very formal affair, involves both family and friends, and is often followed by a huge dinner or party. In other words, anything other than a pass is virtually impossible.
Student hiring: The power balance for student hiring in the U.S. is almost entirely in the faculty member’s favor. For both UMD and Purdue (not necessarily elsewhere), there is a lot of flexibility in hiring (and firing) students, even for short semester-long projects. Furthermore, if a student is not performing well or is changing their research direction, a UMD or Purdue faculty member can easily withdraw funding. In fact, some U.S. departments admit more Ph.D. students than there is available funding, yielding a situation where excellent but unfunded students are “roaming the hallways” looking for a faculty sponsor to hire them. While this is convenient for faculty members, this is neither fair nor equitable for the students. The one time I can see this is beneficial to both is situations where both the faculty member and the student want to work together, but the faculty member only has funding for a limited time. In many places, like in Denmark, the faculty member needs to have funding for the entire duration of the Ph.D. in order to hire a student, making the above scenario impossible. In the U.S., on the other hand, I can hire the student on temporary funding and look for new funding opportunities to fill in the gaps as the time approaches.
The tenure track: As I stated above, I was weirdly attracted to the U.S. tenure track system because it is such a unique and specialized challenge: you agree to a six-year probationary period with a university on the condition that they give you sufficient resources, and in return you commit to achieving a research and teaching trajectory that the university deems sufficient for a permanent faculty member. There is a lot to say about the tenure track and most of it is out of scope for this short treatment. Suffice it to say that the pressure of the tenure track can lead to a lot of stress, worry, and poor work-life balance. The vagaries of external funding, peer review, and personal, gender, or racial bias can also lead to vastly unfair outcomes. However, on a very personal level, it is clear to me that the tenure track pushed me to work (much) harder than I would otherwise have done if left to my own devices, and it instilled a work discipline that I still (mostly) hold on to today.
Sink or swim: My final point about the U.S. academic system is that it is very much based on a “sink or swim” situation. While not quite the “survival of the fittest’’ dystopia I was envisioning before starting, where several assistant professors compete for a single tenured position (this is true for only a handful of top universities in crowded disciplines), new assistant professors are still pushed into several roles for which they have little or no preparation when they join a university. Do you have teaching experience? Good, cause now you’re the instructor of record for a few hundred undergraduates and have to direct a small army of TAs. Oh, so you know how to write a research paper? Good, cause here’s some Ph.D. students who are starting in the position you just vacated, and you need to lead them to successful Ph.D.s of their own. Can you balance your checkbook? Excellent, cause now you’re responsible for seeking and then managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in pursuit of new research advances. If this all sounds daunting, it is because it is, and for some of us, we relish the challenge. For others, it can be pretty overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming even if you wanted it.
As already stated, that I am leaving the U.S. “for good” is certainly an exaggeration. For one thing, I still have four Ph.D. students at University of Maryland that I will continue advising and, hopefully, see to graduation. While their day to day and week to week advising will have to be conducted remotely on Zoom, I do plan on being back for their defenses and/or commencements. And besides, solely meeting on Zoom is literally the reality we have been living for the last few years anyway (thanks, COVID).
But for now, my future lies in Denmark, and I am excited about it. Many academics that I know have a certain degree of restlessness and sense of adventure, and I’m no different: I can’t deny that I feel a thrill in anticipation of this new chapter of my life.
Will I ever come back to the United States? That’s a hard question to answer. For one thing, I am now a dual Swedish/U.S. citizen, which makes moving back across the Atlantic if not trivial, then at least a lot easier than it used to be. And, as stated above, the U.S. is still home to some of the world’s best universities. Who knows? After all, the road goes ever on and on.