British academics quitting UK over Brexit

Some British scholars are following in their European peers’ footsteps in a bid to improve their research opportunities overseas

九月 28, 2021
Participants In Home Made Rafts rowing as a metaphor for British academics quitting UK over Brexit
Source: Alamy

Brexit is driving British academics out of the country, according to scholars who have cited future opportunities for funding and research networks as key push factors.

An increase in the number of European Union academics flocking from the UK is a well-documented trend, with the latest available data suggesting that almost double the number of such scholars left the UK for a job in a university abroad in 2019 than before the Brexit referendum.

But British scholars who have relocated to positions in the EU have told Times Higher Education that Brexit was also a factor in their move, despite not being directly affected by immigration policies in the UK and despite the additional burden of having to deal with such bureaucracy abroad.


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Simon Watson, professor of wind energy systems at Delft University of Technology, said that Brexit was the “final straw” in his decision to leave his post at Loughborough University. While the Dutch institution’s larger wind energy research team was a “big draw” for Professor Watson, he said that Brexit “gave me a push.

“I could see that it may well reduce opportunities in the future – both opportunities to move abroad if I wanted to develop my career as I have done now, but also, if I stayed in the UK, there was no guarantee that European funding would still be available and it would probably reduce our ability to recruit European students,” said Professor Watson, who joined Delft in June 2017.

“I’m seeing it from the other side now. Universities here will work with UK universities, but there’s more of a reluctance now. The attraction of having a UK university involved in European projects is not what it was.”

A THE analysis recently found that agreed grants from Horizon 2020 to many UK research-intensive universities had dropped by more than 20 per cent by the last year of the programme, while a broader analysis by the campaign group Scientists for EU suggested that the UK may have lost out on £1.5 billion in funding since 2015 when comparing the figures with German institutions.

Miles Taylor, who will be starting a new role as professor of British history and society at the Humboldt University of Berlin in October after 17 years in the history department at the University of York, said he knew of several other British academics, both junior and senior, who had moved to Europe in the past few years.

“There’s a post-Brexit reaction,” he said, adding that while the UK has committed to pay to participate in the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, “it’s not clear what the longer-term future of UK involvement in Horizon is going to be”.

“There’s also the attraction of moving to Europe because so many master’s and undergraduate programmes are being conducted in English. Also, a lot of the big European players have adjusted their research cultures to be more like the British” system, he said, citing Germany concentrating research funding on a select number of universities and France reorganising the structure of its institutions.

“That actually works to the advantage of British scholars who want to move because they’re entering a research environment that looks more like their own,” Professor Taylor said.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com

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Reader's comments (9)

It's a common story now. We've gone from being the most dynamic academic settings in the UK to the one everyone is desperate to leave, even through European opportunities are quite limited. Good people are leaving regularly and do not appear to be being replaced (CV19 has masked some of these developments).
I left the UK in the early 10s, when the ConDem coalition started slashing university budgets and every time I turned on the television I saw Nigel Farage. I never predicted anything as head-bangingly stupid as Brexit would happen, but my partner and I both work in HE and we saw which way the wind was blowing.
... another Brexit-created headache for UK-based researchers that hasn't been mentioned so much is the fact that the UK is now outside the GDPR zone. This means that all research data containing potentially identifiable personal information transferred to collaborators in the UK has to be anonymised. This is a real problem for our researchers working with survey or questionnaire data who have UK partners, and in the long run this will result in a reluctance to involve UK institutions. But sure, blah, blah, sovereignty, blah, blah, control...
A very interesting report. Just a small addition: In the report, it says that "Germany [is] concentrating research funding on a select number of universities". This is not quite the case: There is the "Excellence Strategy" in Germany since a few years, strengthening research at select universities (which has been hotly debated and therefore expanded, including more universities across the country). However, research funding is still available to all universities and academics bidding for it.
I wrote about this in this publication back in 2016 (10 November to be exact). I ended with the following statement: "Skilled people go where there are other skilled people and the resources to do their jobs well. So the Brexodus will also include skilled locals, who know they too are better off working in an environment that provides them with opportunities rather than constraints." ... So it is not a new story or in any way surprising ... https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/brexodus-worlds-highly-skilled-have-options-other-uk
Time for a pin to be pulled, perhaps some, not all by any means, have simply followed the sexual opportunities? Several older Academics, male and female, I know have expressed their wish to continue shagging younger European 'partners' who are less straight-laced and more willing to have adventurous liaisons with older people than British students and young British academics, so have started looking to move to EU lands where such adult-adult relationships are not considered as so unacceptable as in Britain, especially as there are now fewer opportunities to interact and fuck with European students in UK Universities.
A new one on me! I have never heard of anything like that before and cannot imagine that it is a big factor!
You should hear their comments about not being allowed abroad for 'conferences', with all the exchange of genetic information opportunities that went with them, due to the pandemic.
There is huge discipline effect here. Dont know anyone who has left for EU institutions, not one. Show the stats, how many EU academics moved back to EU instituions? Show the stats by discipline. Show that there is indeed a causal relationship of Brexit on EU staff leaving to EU instituions.