Below are some of the (slightly edited) thoughts I shared during my inaugural lecture as Professor at the University of Edinburgh on May 8, 2024. These reflections pertain to my academic trajectory and to making my intellectual home in Edinburgh. I hope to publish the more academic part of the lecture in another forum.

Making my intellectual home in Edinburgh

I arrived at the University of Edinburgh almost 12 years ago, as a freshly appointed Chancellor’s Fellow. Before this, I held temporary posts in Canada, at the University of Toronto, and in Portugal, at the University of Coimbra; places where I learnt a great deal about becoming an academic, which eventually prepared me rather well for the job here at Edinburgh.

I still recall the enormous exhilaration and relief I felt when I received the call from then Dean Charlie Jeffery. For those of you in the room not working in an academic setting: there are very few sensations comparable to getting such life-changing news as the offer of a permanent position. It implies the end of agonizing precarity, which almost every early-career academic today has to endure for increasingly protracted periods of time.

My experience in that respect has not been exceptional. I come from a country with an illustrious past in terms of intellectual and cultural achievements, but with a present that is far from ideal, especially when it comes to fostering a vibrant and nurturing academic system. Upon completion of my doctorate at the University of Vienna, I was therefore confronted with a stark and admittedly painful choice that would reverberate throughout my entire life, leading up to this event today: either remain in Austria and hope against all odds that one of the incredibly scarce positions with tenure might perhaps become available, which would have required me to become a relentless and ruthless networker, something that is quite against my temperamental nature; or, alternatively, I could say farewell to my country of birth and try my luck elsewhere, which I eventually did.

It is indicative of the rather sorry state of Austrian academia – a situation that is probably not much better in many other continental European countries – that my trajectory resembles to a significant degree the one that the sociologist Max Weber captured in his essay “Science as a Vocation”, delivered originally as a public lecture in 1917. Apart from many enlightening thoughts on the inner workings of the German University system and on the ludicrous travesties of promotion processes, Weber delivers a pithy observation on what is unique about choosing an academic career: “Thus academic life is an utter gamble.” (Weber 2004, 3)

For such a gamble to pay off and eventually culminate in a permanent job, brute luck is of course fundamental. And every (honest) colleague will probably concur with me that merit alone, no matter how outstanding the candidate might be, only ever gets you so far. At some deeper level, any scholarly career is therefore subject to the vagaries of blind fate, as much as to structural obstacles, such as various forms of disadvantage and powerful networks.

Incidentally, this insight is one of the lessons that I find the hardest to impress upon my immensely talented doctoral students: that no matter how well prepared and how brilliant you may be – and many of our PhDs are both – you will still need a lot of grit and fortune to succeed. That is a truly hard message to stomach.

But if grit and fortune are undoubtedly present in all stories of scholarly achievement, so is privilege, or what Weber calls the “plutocratic premises” (Weber 2004, 2) undergirding academic careers. In this vein, I am certain that I could not have embarked on any kind of venture in academia without the unwavering support of my parents, who put their trust into my naïve, but dogged pursuit of scholarly passions.

Relatedly, you may know that in the Germanophone system, the PhD supervisor is usually called Doktorvater or Doktormutter – perhaps an antiquated way of speaking, but one that still captures something essential about the reciprocal care, expert commitment and occasional revolt that bind together supervisor and supervisee. Under the guidance of my own Doktorväter, Rainer Bauböck and Franz Martin Wimmer (against whom I never rebelled in earnest), I finally landed in Edinburgh. Later on in my career, many other senior colleagues in the profession – way too many to individually name on this occasion – took on the mantle of quasi-parental figures in directing me through the chaos and confusion of the initial career stages.

It is profoundly humbling to remind oneself of the enormous debts one accrues in such a crucial period of one’s professional life, and beyond. Becoming aware of the help I have been receiving along the way amounts not only to the most effective antidote to rare bouts of narcissistic grandiosity (“I did it all by myself!”), but also motivates the ongoing care and commitment I aspire to sustain vis-à-vis my own students and colleagues. It lies in the nature of academia’s intergenerational care chain that one can never fully reciprocate the support one obtains at an early career stage; all one can strive for is buttress this framework for social reproduction by matching the routinized care one has benefitted from and by extending it to the following generation of scholars.

[…]

It is here in Edinburgh that I have made my intellectual home. Allow me to pose a question about the very phrase that I began with – “intellectual home”. What does this mean, for me personally, but perhaps also for those of you working at this University? Although we won’t have time for a discussion afterwards, I would be curious whether you share these impressions or whether your take on Edinburgh differs from mine.

“Making an intellectual home” must mean something other, I believe, than simply “staying for a long time in the same place”. If the University of Edinburgh were merely my employer and nothing else, I would have much less material to rhapsodize about. As many of you here will surely remember, the industrial relations between employees and the University management have been rather frustrating over the past few years. The fact that we have been forced to go so regularly on strike is incredibly exhausting and demotivating for staff and students alike; and I genuinely hope we can, in the future, arrive at a truly stable settlement whereby academics feel once again enabled to do what we love the most about our jobs – engage in meaningful research and teach amazing students.

This sobering experience of almost-continuous conflicts in the workplace has for me always stood in sharp contrast with another, much more rewarding aspect of being a member of this University: the realization that Edinburgh is a place of learning that combines excellence with scale and ambition. Let’s quickly run through these interrelated facets.

I have been benefitting from the excellence of my colleagues on a daily basis, ever since arriving here, be it through generous feedback on draft publications or in informal discussions around incipient ideas for new projects. Even though we might perhaps be prone to forgetting it from time to time, in Edinburgh one is constantly surrounded by smart and helpful people. And just to avoid a misunderstanding: when speaking of excellence here, I mean, of course, our entire, finely balanced ecosystem of learning and teaching, encompassing both professional services and academic collaborators.

This aspect results directly, I believe, from the premium put – across the UK, to be sure – on excellence in recruiting, as opposed to the ingrained mechanisms of other academic contexts, such as quasi-feudal networks in many continental European countries, and pedigree fetishism in the US. Naturally, “plutocratic premises”, in Weber’s diction, keep on sustaining any complex organization, including the contemporary University; but in the British academic system, it seems to me, they are somewhat moderated and tempered by meritocratic ideals that continue to shape – imperfectly of course, but still – all our hiring and working practices.

The second ingredient of my intellectual home is equally important, if somewhat less obvious: the University’s scale. Working at a large University like Edinburgh is both a blessing and a curse, to be sure. Judging from my own experiences, it can sometimes literally take years to understand how this place works – or does not work, in some cases. That is one effect of Edinburgh’s sheer size, as much as of the increase in bureaucratic complexity that can be observed in any rapidly growing organization.

But it still remains rewarding to me when I encounter, again and again, after more than a decade of working here, colleagues who are researching topics that I have a passion for. Such breadth of expertise is simply not accessible in smaller universities. To me, the pursuit of excellent research relies on an intellectual environment that constantly challenges pre-conceived ideas and prompts me to question unfounded assumptions or conclusions. In that regard, Edinburgh, not least due to its significant scale, has proven a wonderful place for intellectual growth.

Finally, ambition. This is not a word we often invoke or hear in this University (outside the pages of marketing material with dubious intellectual credentials); and I can see why some might be sceptical of it. Too often ambition is perceived and promoted as an individualistic, male, even heroic character trait, with problematic implications for collegiality and solidarity. That type of ambition surely exists in Edinburgh as much as in any other University, but it is not the one I want to foreground here.

There is, then, another way of thinking about ambition, by locating it institutionally at the core of a thriving community of scholars, teachers and support staff. If every academic career turns out to be the contingent product of various factors, both within and beyond one’s control, then anyone fortunate enough to land a permanent job, and certainly anyone fortunate enough to become a Professor at the University of Edinburgh, owes the world something, to put it somewhat melodramatically.

And one manner of paying back the debts accumulated through the odd combination of luck, privilege and merit is to always remain ambitious in one’s work. That includes research, obviously, but also, and crucially, our pedagogical initiatives and our collaborative activities. In other words, one can be ambitious not only by decisively advancing one’s personal interests, but also by enabling oneself and others to discharge of the debts accumulated in the process of building an academic career. In the process of making an intellectual home in the contemporary University, together with my colleagues, I have therefore always felt an obligation to also render it hospitable and sustainable to others and their plans.

Despite all the undeniable and profound problems with current academia, I have always been attracted to Edward Said’s emphatic vision of the modern research University as the “last remaining utopia” in today’s messed-up world. A utopia under attack from many different sides, more so now than when Said made this provocative statement. Yet, the fact that we have over the past years demonstrated a sustained willingness to fight for its future is suggestive of how highly we value the ideal of this University and how unrelenting we are in shouldering the personal costs of its defence.

As a consequence, being the beneficiaries of Edinburgh’s excellence, scale and ambition also imposes a duty on all of us, I believe, not to take anything for granted. What I feel personally about Edinburgh as my intellectual home is a curious fusion of gratitude and vigilance; gratitude for granting me the chance to pursue a career in what I truly love doing; and vigilance regarding the fugitive nature of this scarce opportunity, both for my own sake and for the many colleagues and students I have the pleasure and honour of working with.