In the Dark

It is 1st December 2023, which means that it’s six years to the day since I started work at Maynooth University. (Obviously, I’m not there now, but you get the point.) So much has happened in that period it seems very much longer since I first arrived. Still, it does mean that I’ve now spent 10% of my life living in Ireland. I’m very happy that I made the move all those years ago.

I won’t deny that the past six years have had their frustrations. The major one is something I haven’t mentioned this on the blog before, but when I joined the University I was promised – in writing – that the Department of Theoretical Physics would be allocated part-time computer support. Despite many reminders, that has never happened. That’s a breach of contract. A less patient employee would have sued his employer already. It’s absurd that the Department is still having to run its own computer cluster without any professional technical support. I’m writing this now to make it clear that I haven’t forgotten. I hope that this issue is remedied by the time I return to Maynooth. Six years is long enough.

On top of that, the teaching and administrative workload, especially for the three years I was Head of Department, mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic with very little support from the University, was very heavy and has made it difficult to be very active in research. Fortunately, now I’m on sabbatical so am able to do a bit of catching up with projects. Obviously the big event this year was the launch of the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. Performance verification is still under way and the Euclid survey proper won’t start until the new year, but things so far look very promising.

I took over as Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee in July. That has been a lot of work, actually, with very frequent telecons. You might argue that this is a distraction from actual research, and there’s some truth in that. But the most important thing is that the Euclid mission is a success, and I think that making the Euclid Consortium as inclusive and supportive a working environment as possible is one way of contributing to that.

The thing I’m probably most proud of over the past six years is, with the huge help of staff at Maynooth University Library, getting the Open Journal of Astrophysics off the ground and attracting some excellent papers. This year has seen significant growth, with submissions and publications increasing by about a factor three since last year. We’re still smaller than many of the mainstream astrophysics journals, but we’re still growing.

So, after a few years of hard and at times dispiriting slog, things are now going pretty well from a personal point of view. I do still worry about the future, though. My biggest fear for the Irish Higher Education system is that it follows the “business model” of soulless teaching factories with courses delivered by demoralized staff on casual teaching contracts. Things are definitely going that way in Maynooth and this trend must be resisted, as must the never-ending diversion of resources away from teaching and research into useless layers of management. Every time I see a job advertisement for a new management post, I think how much less it would cost to fund the technical support I was promised six years ago. What drives the University’s policies is not lack of resources but ridiculously warped priorities.