Why I ended my career as university professor

My Rivendell

I spent most of my life trying to understand how the world works. I thought I would be a professor for the rest of my life. I was wrong. I did not leave the university because I stopped loving it. I left because I loved it too much to accept what was being done to it.

I knew when I was twelve that I wanted to become a scientist. The other boys dreamed of becoming football players, firefighters, or police officers. I wanted to understand how the world worked.

Science was my Rivendell, a kind of magical, almost spiritual place: a world where facts, reason, and the search for truth overruled social games  and appearances. It was real and larger than myself. It was my lifeblood.

At thirteen, I memorized the periodic table. The fascination continued through high school and university. I studied for my PhD degree in Lund in Sweden because my supervisor there was expert on my favorite subject. I immersed myself in the global culture of science: conferences, famous professors, profound questions, posters covered in data, arguments about unsolved problems, unexpected discoveries, and the feeling of being part of a higher mission.

I did a postdoc at Yale, funded by EMBO. Later, I was interviewed in Oxford by a renowned professor of crystallography. Sitting at the table, I saw in her old eyes the same scientific excitement that had animated me since childhood. Her questions were philosophical: Why does life use one molecular mirror image rather than the other—or both?

Apparently, I gave satisfactory answers. Soon after, two stimulating years at Yale sharpened my scientific instincts and methods. Later, I worked at Stanford University and then built my own research group at the Technical University of Denmark, all while starting a family.

Now, with 150 scientific papers and thousands of students behind me, only a strange calm remains. I still love ideas. I love evidence and facts. I love explaining things with animated hands and a twinkle in the eyes. But somewhere along the way, excitement turned into frustration and frustration into helplessness until eventually I had to stop. I was in my late forties.


When things started going wrong

I remember the faculty meeting where it supposedly started: A consultant had been hired to explain to us researchers what research was. Words such as “output,” “vision,” “strategy,” “impact,” and “performance” suddenly entered our academic vocabulary. We sensed that something profound was happening, but we had no idea where it would lead.

Then the consequences arrived like a double-edged sword. On one side came annual budget cuts. On the other came strategy meetings, reforms, procedures, employee evaluations, institutional reviews, and action plans.

The underlying idea was that research needs to be managed—not as independent intellectual activity, but as an industrial operation subject to bureaucratic and ideological control, from “research to invoice” as a Danish minister put it.

We began spending more time on form than substance. Spontaneous conversations about strange, interesting ideas were replaced by “innovation seminars”. We learned how to sell our research, formulate visions, and conduct SWOT analyses.

Consultants in pale-blue shirts earning more than we did and sitting closer to the university management gave us courses in personality types and nonverbal communication. The system was showing us our place.

We began competing for money, staff, recognition, and ultimately survival, even within our own departments. Sometimes the competition was with the people in the office next door. Then came the layoffs. The annual budget cuts separated sheep from goats, pushing out those who could not (or would not) adapt to the new system. Inevitably, the working environment deteriorated. There were fewer smiles in the corridors and employee well-being surveys were dismal.

In 2025, the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy concluded that university governance had become increasingly complex, and that political steering, frequent reforms, detailed regulation, and an unintended focus on competition diverted resources away from academic core activities (1). I felt all of this personally.


When Numbers Become Religion

Performance metrics suddenly appeared everywhere: on our screens, our websites, and in our annual reports. How much money had we brought in? How many papers had we published? How many citations had we received? What was the impact factor of our journals? What was our h-index? When our department was due for evaluation, heaven and earth were moved in the weeks before the expert panel arrived. Then, for weeks afterward, we digested the verdict and wrote entirely new action plans.

Numbers look objective. They appeal to researchers as well as to bureaucrats. However, researchers understand the limitations and uncertainties behind numbers (2). When numbers are used uncritically, almost religiously, to manage people, they can become dangerous.

Every year brought new committees, reports, forms, strategies, meetings about strategies, and metrics to measure the effect of those strategies. And every year, there were fewer resources for the things we were actually there to do. Eventually, many people became exhausted, not by the research and teaching they loved, but by everything that had come to surround it.


The Struggle to Be Allowed to Do Science

During these years, billions of Danish kroner were moved from universities into competitive funding schemes. Researchers now spend months writing project descriptions, budgets, work packages, and Gantt charts to demonstrate that they know what they will discover three to five years from now.

Tell us what you will discover. Tell us when you will discover it. Tell us what it will cost, what its value will be, and how many papers it will produce. And make sure the font, margins, and formatting are exactly right. Then press “submit” and forget about the application for six months.

In 2025, the European Research Council's Advanced Grant competition received 3,329 applications. Just 319 (9.6 percent) were funded (3). For every successful applicant, nine other researchers spent weeks or months preparing an application that failed. And still more researchers spent their time reviewing all those applications.

Universities and departments responded by hiring PR consultants, fundraisers, facilitators, strategists, and project managers. Increasingly large amounts of human resources were devoted to administering, promoting, measuring, reporting, and chasing the money that universities had once received directly. Resources that could otherwise have gone into research and teaching.

I gradually discovered that the projects most likely to succeed were those simple enough to fit neatly into a Gantt chart and confident enough to conceal the genuine uncertainty and randomness of research. There was little room for academic caveats or crazy ideas. The more predictable and machine-like the project, the better its chances seemed to be.

By conventional measures, I was doing well. In fact, according to the algorithms, my final years were my most successful. But my best projects were never funded. The projects I nevertheless managed to complete without external funding received substantially more citations than my funded research. I found that rather revealing.


Consequences

I gave academia everything I had. I believed that if I worked harder, adapted better, and learned to play the new game, it would eventually all make sense. It didn't, so I resigned. Even now, the words feel strange. I miss science enormously. I miss teaching even more. But I have never regretted leaving.

The place I had loved, the magical world in which curiosity and truth mattered more than status and power, had been transformed into the very thing I tried to escape from. Now, the university world is a primitive game for money, prestige, and influence, just like the rest of the world.

Science is essential to a free society. It allows us to distinguish evidence from ideology, test claims, challenge authority, and uncover mistakes. It generates knowledge, technology, and prosperity. But discoveries do not follow business plans. They often emerge from accidents, failed experiments, strange observations, and questions that only become visible after the work has begun.

If we organize science primarily as a competition governed by crude metrics and layers of bureaucracy, we risk destroying its very lifeblood: independent curiosity, enthusiasm, creativity, collaboration, patience, and a good deal of randomness.

University research was my youth dream. I do not mourn the loss of a career or prestige. What I mourn is the transformation of something I loved. And I fear that we are destroying something extraordinarily important, not because we have stopped claiming that we value science, but because we have forgotten what science is and needs to flourish.

Sources

(1) Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy, DFiRbrief 58: Simplified governance of Danish universities, 2025. https://dfir.dk/english/dfirbriefs/2025/november/dfirbrief-58-simplified-governance-of-danish-universities/

(2) San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Declaration_on_Research_Assessment

(3) European Research Council, ERC 2025 Advanced Grants results. https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2025-advanced-grants-results