The academic productivity cost of moving

I moved city for the job I have now. I’ve done it before, and if there are any Universities in four years when my contract expires then I’ll probably do it again. Moving is very common in academic teaching careers, often much more frequently than every five years: one-year contracts are common, and permanent contracts are now extremely rare.

In this blog I want to describe some of the ways that moving has affected my academic productivity. I think it’s something which probably gets talked about more in the Postdoc churn than the Teaching Fellow churn, and I think there is value in setting out some of the specific ways that my scholarly output has had to take a back seat in 2024-25.

When I talk about productivity, I’m mostly talking about the kinds of things which gain you esteem among teaching peers and promotion in teaching careers. The archetypal output would be a scholarly publication like a J Chem Ed paper.

Health

Liverpool has a different germ pool to Oxford, and I had a persistent heavy cold for about six months when I moved. Being ill like this – and the grinding sadness of emptying your pockets of used tissues into the bin every time you go to the photocopier – damages productivity. It makes clarity of thought harder to access, and it also depletes the stamina needed to sustain the kind of on-the-side work which characterises most SoTL projects.

I also found that my responsiveness to students in the room was imperfect. It took longer to understand students’ questions, for example. My guess is that this affects how good my teaching is a little bit, but it affects how good my teaching feels quite a lot. “I should have grasped that quicker” is an easy thought to think later that evening. This is demoralising.

Being ill is not unique to people moving cities, of course, but six months of a cold is a big chunk of time. My five year contract is considered long, and six months is 10% of it. Someone on a one year contract would experience six months as half of their employment.

Living Conditions

Being hurled into the short-term rental market was not good. My rent-to-let (renting the house to sublet the rooms) landlord was a nice enough person, I guess, but mould and mice are apparently part of what it means to rent in modern Britain. Having housemates in your thirties is hazardous enough to sleep patterns, but the Monday-night karaoke at the nearby pub was punishing for my Tuesday lab demonstrating. I certainly was not reading papers every morning after a refreshing slumber.

Culture and Recognition

Moving somewhere that values teaching was emotionally jarring, which I didn’t expect. I have been surprised at how heavy the backwards comparison has felt – it is hard to see how I would have reached a substantially higher salary point if I had worked in Liverpool since 2018, and saddening to at last find the collegiality which was denied so comprehensively to teachers in Oxford. Feeling such negative feelings – even ones emerging from positive situations – takes time and significant creative effort. Perhaps there is a view of academic productivity where this brings valuable breadth to my perspective in the longer term, but it has taken up so much of my thoughts this year in ways which have cost me reading and writing time.

Working on my SFHEA application has perhaps forced me to confront some of these emotions more directly than I might have done otherwise. What story threads through my last five years? What do I emphasise and suppress when I present my trajectory? How do I make my leadership legible across two very different institutional contexts? How do I present the limited opportunities afforded to fixed-term staff as being leadership? Perhaps answering those questions in an application is the closest I will come to making this reflection productive, or maybe settling my mind on this history will allow me to move on and do productive things. Either way, it’s taken a year and I’m still not really finished.

There is also a very concrete way that my productivity is arrested by the act of moving. Liverpool promotion panels won’t care about my curriculum work at a former institution (which is fair!), and leveraging that to make Senior Lecturer when I moved wasn’t viable within the scope of the advertised role. The work starts again.

Curriculum

Any University has its own distinctive curriculum. The sequence of material differs, the emphasis of certain ideas is different, and the advanced topics are normally substantially inconsistent between different institutions. I had to learn a lot of magnetism for tutorial teaching in Liverpool, and I had to scale back my MO Theory ambitions with the second year. All of this seems legitimate to me – Universities should be different – but it is also true that there are switching costs to understanding the context you are teaching in: it takes time and effort to fit into the wider context of students’ learning.

I wonder if this is perhaps most acute in the middle of a course. Doing first year lab demonstrating was not difficult to contextualise at all (students are all new). Similarly, the magnetism work was relatively context-light because the advanced modules are sometimes a little bit distant from the context of the core curriculum (content is nearly all new). Yes, I had to learn about antiferromagnetism. But I didn’t need to compare it to magnetism they had done before (beyond simple spin-only analysis).

In contrast, teaching transition metal chemistry was excruciatingly difficult to pitch. Understanding how bonding had been covered in first year was important, as was grasping the scope of organometallic catalysis they would go on to see in third year. Teaching in the middle of a course is arguably a problem with more degrees of constraint than teaching at the start/end of a course, which is a thought I had never had before.

Systems

There is a new set of structures to navigate in a new University, and a new set of characters sitting behind desks in a new labyrinth of rooms. It is overwhelming meeting everyone, it is embarrassing to keep forgetting names, and it is lovely to find people who are determined to welcome you anyway.

The modern corporate University means that it can be hard to understand where decisions are taken and who to approach about any ad hoc problems which arise. Developing this understanding is probably an important part of productivity eventually, but the early work of locating someone’s office doesn’t really become productive until you need to find their office in a hurry about an issue which emerges in week 8 of teaching. It’s one example of the kind of work which makes fixed-term employment more inefficient for employers; this time will need to be spent by every new starter.

There are also very concrete things a new employee needs to chew through. How do you get lecture capture to work? How do people use Sharepoint here? What are the expectations of a Canvas page? And while a lot of mandatory training needs renewing for long-term employees, when you’re new you have to do it all in one terrible gulp.

But there are nice opportunities, too. Resigned to not writing anything this year, I volunteered to join the local organising committee for ViCEPHEC (“Hello, my name is Michael. Can I be your publicity officer?”). I have felt useful doing this, which satisfies some sense of personal productivity, and it’s a commitment with a very clear sunset: ViCEPHEC25 will be great, and then it will be over. I can move on cleanly, having got to know some fantastic people a little better.

Life Admin

There are a hundred tiny jobs when you move city. Your bank need to know your new address, the DVLA need to know where to send the ticket for when you accidentally entered the bus lane coming off an unfamiliar roundabout, you need to find a GP and register to vote, there are viewings and phone calls and emails and forms. Something important about the bittiness of this work is that it fractures what a day or a week of work looks like. The deep focus required for high-quality scholarship or lecture planning is harder to access when you need to get keys cut before Timpsons shuts. Of course the little pieces of admin never disappear, but there is a glut of them when you move.

Positives?

I think there are probably ways that moving can make you more productive in the long term. A new context is stimulating, and seeing self-consistent ways of teaching a Chemistry degree always presents interesting angles you haven’t appreciated before. Probably more importantly, you meet new people who model new ways of being an educator and you grow as a person when you push yourself into new situations in new communities. None of that can write you a paper while you’re six chatbot responses into a council tax query, but it’s the kind of thing which can help you feel personal satisfaction.

I don’t want to claim that someone coming in “cold” to a new Department has a better perspective, but sharing your observations with people who have become comfortable with their approaches can be productive for a community as well. There is value in having some fresh eyes around. Perhaps especially at moments of change, it can be helpful to have some experience of different ways of doing things.

And maybe there is a positive in the chance to just board a new train. To accept a new set of circumstances and to hurl yourself against a new challenge. To release an old set of circumstances and withdraw yourself from an old set of preoccupations. Is that productive? I don’t know whether it will result in more papers, but I think it probably does shield you from career threats like burnout to have moments where you deliberately focus on what’s important to you. There is every chance to think about your priorities without moving, but I don’t think there’s a way of moving without thinking about your priorities.

And a lot of my priorities are not really about being productive at all. I know that teaching organometallics well will not get me promoted, but I still want to do it. This needn’t be an either/or choice between satisfaction and recognition, but the faff of a year when you move can limit your ability to do everything.

Conclusion

It’s pretty mundane stuff, really, but I mostly just wanted to point out that moving has costs and that personal productivity – which in my experience is an important part of how satisfied I feel doing my job – will take a knock when you uproot your life.

For a five year contract, I judge that this is probably worth it for me. The productivity costs of switching will likely be recouped at some point over the longer term by working in a University which has a teaching career track. But the increasing number of one-year (or nine-month) contracts being offered at Universities after over-recruiting in clearing are much more problematic. There are ways of offering fixed-term work which are more- and less-exploitative.

Endnote

I’m not the only one reflecting at the end of a year in post! Readers of this blog may find Michael Seery’s recent post stimulating.