It wasn't a good season for the University of North Caroline football team: with nine defeats and only two wins they ended at the bottom of the table in the Coastal Division. Not at all a good result for a team that has won 9 conference titles and that in 2015 picked up the regional division title. As their performance had been becoming gradually worse since then year-over-year, it made sense for the head coach to be let go. Fortunately for Larry Fedora, he still had four years on his contract and so UNC paid him the $12 million he would have earned had he stayed.

$12 million? Yes: the highest paid job at an American college, as we all know, is typically not a world-renowned Nobel Laureate or the chancellor, it's either the basketball or football coach. Alabama coach Nick Saban topped it all with over $11 million annually. While that is excessive, many top sports coaches have multi-million dollar contracts, running as high as $7 or $8 million for the best coaches. To put that in perspective, you could easily pay 40 professors with that kind of money.

To an outsider these salaries seem nothing less than absurd. Not because great sports coaches shouldn't be well compensated—Pep Guardiola makes close to $20 million annually at Manchester City—but because universities are generally seen as institutes of higher education and research, not sports. As a history professor at the University of Edinburgh put it: the $12 million that Fedora got as a going away present is more than the entire history department at UNC costs annually. So 32 professors that contribute to the university's primary goal—research and education—combined make about half what the football coach got. (To be fair, Fedora made $4 million per year, so the history department normally makes more than the football coach.)

The question that surfaces each time in these situations is whether it's fair that the coach of a sports team is by far the highest paid staff member at a publically funded institution. Some argue that the history department does not bring in 50,500 spectators on a regular basis, the size of the Kenan Memorial Arena. It would obviously be fewer for basketball—the Dean Smith Center where UNC plays basketball hosts 21,750 spectators—but a basketball season is far longer. The profits from ticket sales and sponsorship deals are subsequently used to pay student tuitions and fund other sports programs that are not as profitable. So by the simple "rules of capitalism", it's only fair that a sports coach makes more than a professor.

People who make this argument, however, miss two crucial points. First of all, college sports generally do not make money, but are in fact a drain on a university's resources. Although college athletics is a $10 billion industry, there are only a few universities that actually turn a profit—UNC is not one of those. No matter how great a university sports team may be, they almost never generate the necessary revenue to actually fund themselves consistently. Even if teams perform well, the profits are not spectacular. College basketball may be a billion dollar industry, but that money goes to divisions first, not the succesful teams (Actually, it goes to the NCAA first, then the divisions, and then the teams). So when UNC won the NCAA Tournament in 2017, they had to share the $8 million in profits with fourteen other division members. Compare that to the $60 million Real Madrid made for winning the Champion's League.

A second point is that as fun as college sports are, universities are not in the business of entertainment. They are institutes of higher education. Their first goals should be high quality research and high quality teaching. It's hard to see how athletics make a contribution that justifies draining resources that could be allocated to either of these two goals. And while US universities are among the best in the world and have no trouble attracting billions in funding—Harvard has a $36 billion endowment!—they are also incredibly expensive to attend. Tuition at UNC will set you back well over $10,000 annually even if your a resident of North Carolina; if not, the costs will triple. This means that most students will have to go indo debt, deeply: after a four year undergraduate degree students owe on average more than $37,000 at a less than generous interest rate.

I'm not saying this to argue that universities should not invest in athletics. One major benefits is that they offer disadvantaged students the opportunity to attend college through athletics scholarships—and once awarded even an injured student is entitled to them. While many scholarships don't cover all the costs of a university degree, most will at least compensate their students to some degree. There are also some less tangible benefits, like building community, spirit, and support—attending the Bruins basketball and football games made me feel part of UCLA more than I sometimes felt a part of the University of Groningen. Universities with great athletics departments may also be better at attracting tuition paying students and motivating these students. But if athletics is to make a contribution to higher education, it should not come at the cost of higher education itself. 

It is probably the most well-known problem in Academia: Publish or Perish, the pressure to write as many articles as possible and getting them printed in top journals. It creates a system in which the quality of research is subordinate to the quality of journals, measured in impact factor, in which the research is published. Your quality and value as a scholar is determined not by what you do, but whether your articles add up to some arbitrary number that is supposed to represent quality. We all know it does not, but numbers like impact factor and h-index, which represents how often your work gets cited, provide a very simple picture and that is what committees want. But as bad as it sometimes seems, and can be, in Western universities, I had not realized how easy we have it compared to some Chinese universities, where if you want a career as an academic, you really cannot have a work-life balance. Work is life and life is work.

Let's start by looking at my own academic career. As a social scientist, I'm obviously not representative of the pressure in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), but it provides a good point for comparison. I got four years to write my dissertation, but with a 0.9fte contract. This obviously did not mean I did not work full-time: I never measured it but I estimate that my average work week exceeded 40hrs. In some extremely busy periods I could spend close to 60 hours on my research. But that seems pretty acceptable; it's no different than in non-academic fields, and I finished my PhD within the alloted time; in fact I submitted the final manuscript four months before the deadline.

But I did my PhD at the University of Groningen, and while it is a top 100 university, the pressure is obviously going to be less than at an elite university. Fortunately, I got a job at Oxford, one of the best academic institutes in the world, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. And indeed, I do spend a lot more time on research now than I used to. But I don't teach anymore, so my work week is actually no different than during my PhD. I barely work more than 40 hours a week, and I don't often have to do research in the weekend. I'm juggling more projects, and as a post-doc I'm more efficient and effective in the way I spend my time, but all in all, I can easily manage a work-life balance.

So how does that compare to a top Chinese instituet like Tsinghua. If you've never heard of it, that's no shame. It has a strong focus on the STEM fields, and let's be honest, most of us will think about Western universities like MIT, Stanford, or Princeton when we think about elite technological institutes. But in fact Tsinghua published more papers in the most cited papers in math and computing in the past few years than all these American institutes. Which is insane if you consider that only a decade ago the university did not rank among the top 50 in the world!

Of course, such a radical change requires a radical investment. Part of the foundation for its success is that Tsinghua has embraced the tenure track system, where you are basically on probation for the first six years, after which you either get a permanent position or let go. The basis for determining whether you get tenure is your publication record, which means to get a job you have to work very hard for six years straight. I've heard stories of how big the pressure can be for tenure at US institutes, but apparently at universities in China like Tsinghua it's not uncommon to work days, nights, weekends, and everything in between, in order to get into the top journals and guarantee tenure. 

An additional benefit is financial compensation. Chinese universities pay bonuses for published articles. This can apparently go up to $165,000 for a single article if it's published in a journal like Nature. While plenty of research has shown that financial stimuli don't necessary lead to quality work, it does provide an environment in which it is attractive for great scholars to stick around. In Western society you can always go into industry, where you can make a lot more money than in academia. But if the pay is good, that's one fewer reason to switch.

While clearly these incentives work well for the reputation of Chinese universities like Tsinghua, there are obvious downsides. The people willing to sacrifice six years of their life are not necessarily the best academics. It also creates an environment where it becomes harder to compete for Western universities, particularly those outside the anglosaxon system in the UK and US. My alma mater got its first Nobel Prize in more than sixty years when Ben Feringa was awarded the prestigious award. Part of the reason the university, and its counterparts in Europe and beyond, gets so few awards is that it cannot compete financially. I don't blame universities like Harvard or Oxford for their financial success, but getting a brand new lab and a salary that's triple what you get is a good incentive to move on: the money also represents opportunity after all.

The result may be comparable to what we see in modern day football (the non-American kind). At the start of a season you can  predict the sixteen clubs that will compete in the round of sixteen of the UEFA Champions Leauge, because they are nearly always the same. The leagues in countries like England, Spain and France have been ruined by the billions that oligarchs have brought with them. Talented players are acquired by clubs before they are out of puberty, and the murderous competition can ruin them. Their countries of origin don't benefit, they don't benefit, and the sport does not benefit.

We should take care that in order to remain competitive, we don't move to a system where young academics have publish papers before they can even start a PhD, and then have to spend all their time researching and writing. Quality research is not the result of stress and pressure; scholars should have some freedom to pursue their own interests at their own pace. Many groundbreaking discoveries were made accidentally. That's not to say there shouldn't be competition, in academia as in industry competition helps create excellence, but the focus should remain on doing good research. And if universities like Groningen cannot compete financially, maybe we should focus on making it an attractive environment to work in, in other respects: like getting rid of that bloody publish or perish drive for academic success.