Empathy in academia across career stages, leadership roles, generations & age groups

Anne-Wil's informal reflections on how we can communicate better across career stages, managerial roles, academic generations, and age groups. Aims to create more empathy and reduce friction between different groups of academics.

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 25 Nov 2026 16:27 (updated Mon 26 Oct 2026 11:50)

Anne-Wil in 1969 and in 2026

In October 2026, I organized a CYGNA meeting Building understanding across career stages & academics vs managers, which featuring 8 excellent panelists. In preparing for this meeting, I myself reflected not only on career stages and managerial roles, but also on different academic generations and age in general. So I thought I might as well post these reflections.

Given my current demographic, i.e. semi-retired and in my sixties, they are no doubt "skewed" towards a senior's perspective; I am trying to bring to light what might not be visible to academics more junior in position and/or age. However, I have also attempted to reflect on a junior's perspective, drawing on my own early career experiences, as well as those of my past and current mentees. So I hope all of you will find something of interest here.

For more on my own early career stage, see:

• My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals
• On failures in academia: My PhD journey

Career stages & managerial roles

For the two original topics of our October meeting - career stages and managerial roles - I discuss two of my "bugbears" below. These are issues I encountered increasingly frequently in the last 10-15 years of my career, i.e. when I had been a full professor for a while and had taken on significant leadership responsibities.

Privileges are typically earned; you may get them too

Academics at a junior career stage often feel academic life is unfair; everything seems to be so much easier for senior academics. That feeling might well be justified. Senior academics often do less teaching and/or have small post-graduate classes in their own area of research, whilst juniors are carrying a heavy load, teaching the big undergraduate classes. Seniors may also find it easier to get their papers published (though see: The burning question: are rejections the norm in academia?), and they may be offered lots of prestigious roles. Some even appear to win award after award. When you are struggling to get your first papers published, this may easily lead to some resentment.

But it may help you to understand that - in many cases - these "privileges" were earned through 15-20 years of "hard slog" when they were more junior themselves. Most senior academics have also been teaching the huge undergraduate classes, and might have had to engage in new course preparations every year; I certainly did. During those years, they - like junior academics nowadays - were doing "all the right things", but were not seeing much in terms of recognition or rewards.

So, when you meet a full professor who is clearly successful, you may well feel some level of envy towards their position; that’s only natural, we are all human. But to create more positive interactions with them, it might help to understand the 15-20 years of hard work most seniors went through to get to that position. My own academic life definitely started to get much "easier" after I became (Associate) Professor, successfully acquired a big research council grant (after many earlier rejections), and was able to dove-tail my teaching with my leadership responsibilities. But that was 15 years into my academic career and after plenty of setbacks.

Career progression in academia is rarely quick and even more so than in many other professions it may take years of hard slog as a junior academic before you see external recognition of your efforts. Obviously, I realize that there is an elephant in the room here. In our current rapidly changing academic environments, there is a huge open question for junior academics: is this “deal” still going to work in the future.

• Will you get these benefits too after 15-20 years of hard slog?
• Do you really want to wait for 15-20 years, especially with life in general being as uncertain as it is these days?
• Or even: is striving for a higher seniority level something you want to engage in at all?

These are questions that senior academics often didn’t have to deal with when they were junior, and life in general was a little more stable than it is today. So empathizing with these dilemmas might help creating more positive interactions with junior academics.

In sum

Juniors don’t know what seniors went through when they were juniors. Seniors don’t know what juniors are going through right now. This is how I saw conversations playing out on an almost daily basis.

• What the junior says: Academia is such a struggle these days.
• What the senior hears: You have had it easy in your time.

• What the senior says: I had a really tough time too early in my career.
• What the junior hears: You are ignoring my hardship.

So let's try to draw on our communalities, our passion and interests as academics, not on our perceived differences. Academia is a tough job, but we can help each other making it more enjoyable on a daily basis.

You are not the center of your manager's universe :-)

My own leadership roles have largey been in the area of Research Higher Degrees (PhD directorship) and Research (Associate Dean Research). So I haven't had line management responsibilities. However, I have supported Heads of Department and Deans as an informal coach. Moreover, my research mentorship discussions with junior colleagues often turned to their experiences with management. There are two things that stood out to me in the way these interactions played out.

First, I have heard many academics without leadership experience express the firm conviction that their Head of Department or Dean "hates" them and is actively plotting to make their lives difficult. Of course, this happens sometimes, bullying and personal vendettas do happen. Some managers are real power freaks or just downright nasty. But knowing the other side of the coin (and the managers involved) my prevailing thought usually wass: "your manager really doesn't have the time to concern themselves in such detail with you" or even "it is quite self-centered of you to think you are the center of their universe, positive or negative".

And yes, I have been there too as a junior academic, convinced they were "out to get me", giving me new teaching preps every year and blocking my progress. But over the years, I have learned that negligence and incompetence are often much more likely explanations for our managers' "negative" behaviour towards us than malice, a variant of Hanlon's razor. Managers are not superhuman and they have their own limitations. Their negative behaviour may even result from a simple communication breakdown or a serious lack of time or options available to them. I have a subsidiary rule though: three strikes of negligence or incompetence within a short period of time and no apparent desire to address these flaws may constitute malice. :-)

Another source of friction that I often encounter is that rank-and-file academics do not fully understand that management is a role. As a manager you often simply have to do certain things or take decisions that are not popular with everyone. This may lead to exasperated exclamations: "how can she [expectations are always higher for female managers, we need to be both competent and "nice"] do this to me, I thought we were friends / we are working on a paper together / we use the same nursery etc.". But in fact as a manager there is even more reason to act strictly professionally towards someone you have personal connections with; you do not want to be a manager who plays favourites.

So by all means be critical of your line manager. If systematic bullying is happening do report this through to the appropriate channels in your universities or beyond. But do realize that most managers in academia just try to do the best they can under very difficult circumstances. They carry a lot of responsibility. In most cases, they don't even get much, if any, financial compensation for working what are often very stressful 60-80 hour working weeks. They are also only human and occasional slip-ups or even outbursts may occur. Try not to see these as a pattern unless they really are.

Academic generations & age

Different academic generations grow up with different external circumstances, different institutonal conditions, but also different career logics. The past really is another country (see also: Tips for promotion applications [4/4]). So if you really feel you need to compare yourself to other academics - I wouldn't advice this - compare yourself to your contemporaries. And if you are younger in age as well as in academic generation, try and have some empathy for those in the later stages of their lives. It will help you relate better to older friends and relatives too.

Standards were different, but conditions were too…

First, I often hear academics who started publishing in the 2010s or even the 2020s speak disparagingly about the quality of research in the past. I get that. When I started publishing in the 1990s, I often wondered how on earth some pieces of research managed to get published in top journals in the 1970s and 1980s, let alone the 1960s.

But we need to realise that in looking back at published research, we only see the outputs not the processes and conditions that lead to them. Older research might appear primitive. This is especially true for empirical research; conceptual research often “ages” a little better. Indeed, looking at it with today’s eyes empirical research from the 20th century or even a decade ago is primitive.

So, it may appear unfair to younger generations that such “primitive” research could get you published in (top) journals. But you can’t really judge 20th century research with current day norms. In the past, access to resources was much harder than it is now (see also: How to keep up-to-date with the literature, but avoid information overload?). Moreover, many steps in the research process took 5-10 times as much time as they do now (see: Doing research in an analog time), and that was even before the introduction of GenAI. We can only evaluate research in its own historical context. Our current research might look very primitive in a decade too.

Second, there is a general belief that it is harder to get promoted these days than it might have been in the past. Again, there is some rationale for this belief. There are definitely many more criteria to satisfy these days. In the past publications, funding, decent teaching, and some leadership experience were usually sufficient. However, this is by no means universally true. In my own case, nearly a dozen good (ABS4*/ABS4/ABS3) publications and a job change were needed for promotion to Senior Lecturer.

Moreover, in my experience of being on many promotion panels for Associate and Full Professor, promotions tended to be even less merit-based in the past, and gender discrimination was rife. I have seen male academics promoted to full Professor with a publication record that barely exceeding mine as a Lecturer. Comments like "you have quite a good CV for a woman" were common-place. Getting promotion was often more about being at the right time at the right place and having the right face, even more so than it is now.

Finally, most countries didn't have the "tenure track" system that is more common now. They had a fixed (and usually very small) number of places above the (Senior)Lecturer / Assistant professor level, typically 2-3 Associate Professors and 1-2 Professors for a group of 20-30 academics. This meant that many academics would stay at the lowest rung of the academic hierarchy for their entire career.

Older age: Physical limitations and mental resilience

Academics who are younger in age are often frustrated with older academics regardless of the level of seniority they are at. Many older academics can seem so passive, so resigned. Oftentimes, they don't want to change anything, and are just waiting to be asked, or even to be forced, before they do something. When I was in my early-mid fifties myself, I remember complaining about our PT professors at Middlesex who were then in their sixties/early seventies. This is what I wrote to my line manager at the time:

I feel like a nagging wife, asking her husband to "take care of the supply of toilet paper" and then is expected to remind him when the last roll is used, explain what brand to buy in which supermarket, and supply the money as well as a route to the supermarket. We need people who take responsibility for the entire family shop but also suggest other things they can do to relieve the "wives of the organization” of the mental load.

But now I am in my sixties myself, I can understand their perspective much better. Their attitude was probably not caused by an unwillingness to get engaged, although there might have been some of that. It was also likely motivated by energy management. These days, there are only a few days a month where I feel I have real energy in the morning and am not physically and mentally exhausted by 6pm. Disrupted and lower quality sleep and constant low-level pain can make it hard to function productively. Suffering from shoulder arthritis and the after-effects of a broken wrist (see: Tripped over a tree root? Fell off your bike? Accident in the gym?) means it takes me nearly hour every day to get my body to work properly and at least half an hour to not look like a scarecrow.

But maybe even worse than the physical lack of energy is the declining mental resilience for older academics. I am not talking about mental decline or even emotional balance, which older people often have more of. What I am talking about is the “wear and tear” that comes with decades of work in the same profession, experiencing all its dark sides, trying out many things, and time and again seeing them frustrated by university politics. Older academics are likely to experience the phenomenon of “history repeating itself all over again” on an almost daily basis; everything you see reminds you of something you have experienced before, tried to change, and failed. In that context, some level of withdrawal might be a logical response. So try to be patient with them.

But the same level of understanding from older academics towards younger academics would be helpful too: try to understand how frustrating your attitude can be to younger academics. To keep complaining, listing all that was tried in the past and failed, could kill creative any new initiatives. Give younger academics a chance to make their own mistakes. They might even come up with a better solution than you could. Just step aside and let them charge ahead. Don’t keep telling them they are too young, and that things won’t work, because they never did for you in the past. It dampens their natural drive for change and positive energy (see also: advice for senior academics). So try to enjoy that positive energy vicariously.

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