Whoever has 
undertaken an academic career knows one very basic truth: it’s very difficult if not impossible to have a permanent position in the same University where you earned your Ph.D. Changing the working environment, especially for those who aim for a bright scientific career, is a very beneficial and powerful way to increase your skills, create new links with other scientists, advertise yourself in a new university and a new scientific community and complement your knowledge with different expertise. This is the main reason why it’s so common to change the working environment in academia.
However, a very well-known drawback of this mobility is that if you have a family then the continuous need to change the city and, most probably, the country is going to heavily affect your family too. I know of several people whose partners have decided to leave their (good) job just because it was impossible for them to find a decent replacement in the new city/country (and guess what, in all cases I know, I count 12, it has always been the woman to sacrifice her career). I have even heard a colleague saying “if you have a family problem then academia is not the place for you”. Then one wonders how comes there are so many nerds in astronomy…well, if many people think in the same way as my estemeed colleague, then there’s a sort of perverse “natural selection” in the academia that filters only those people that have no problem moving around the world, who are often also socially impaired individuals.
But there is, of course, a very serious problem here anyway, if we stay in the same university then it is certainly true that we do not absorb all the goods I mentioned above. So what is the solution to this? There is no clear solution, but I’ll make a provocative statement here: with modern technologies and an interconnected world, it has become less and less important to move around and work in different universities or research centers. Imagine the world in the ’70s or the ’80s. You have a new exciting scientific result and you want to show it to other colleagues. Or you want to make new links and create new collaborations. Or you want to share some data with another group on the other side of the planet. What do you do? Well, you need to wrap your new draft manuscript, fold a mail (without “e”), send it by post, wait a week or so before it arrives, receive an answer after two weeks and keep going. Surely you can use the phone, but you can’t see anything. Or do you want to share some data, well good luck with that! The Internet has made information sharing so easy and immediate that we tend to forget how different it was just a few decades ago. Also, today you prepare your brand new paper and in less than 24 hr it can be posted online on arXiv. Or you want to talk to your colleagues in Australia, the US, and the Netherlands, and well, with Skype you can have a video conference. Or with EVO you can share your slides and give a talk remotely. Or you can connect on the same machine from two points at the opposite extreme of the world and share the same data, or download them in less than 10 minutes on your hard drive. And the emails, how many emails do we send every day? What about social networks, we can talk and communicate new ideas, and opinions, and ask for suggestions from hundreds or thousands of colleagues at the same time in seconds. What a difference…
In short, is it really true that moving to three-four different universities before you find a permanent job is such a fundamental requirement? Or is this a leftover expectation that was born in an era when the world was a very different one? Has the new interconnected globe increased or decreased the need to physically move around the world?
September 13, 2013 at 2:24 pm
You had conferences in the 80s as well, so I completely miss the link betwee moving around and broadening your perspective since the dawn of effective transportation. And even then, the point ypu made are not based on research, but just on a hunch. Many people travel around and don’t pick up anything while others stay at home and broaden up.
So I really see no reason why your point should be even remotely provocative.
September 14, 2013 at 4:29 pm
I’m not sure I understood your criticism. Many people in the academia (by far the largest majority) believe that if you don’t move around then you better switch to a different career. This is the dominant idea and I think it’s based on assumptions which are no more valid in our epoch. I’d be happy to know more details of what you think !
September 15, 2013 at 7:12 pm
I think you may be misinterpreting my comment. What I meant to say is that I don’t buy the reasoning why you should work in many places to broaden up in the first place. So I would even agree with you had you ‘posted’ this in the eighties. I know scientists who have never worked abroad but have a very broad professional network as well as people who did work abroad and did not really end up being that broad. The fact that for some working in multiple countries is of added value does not necessarily mean that this, and only this, works for all.
So not only I agree with you, I strongly disagree with the original idea that you try to prove wrong based on the ‘modern time’ argument.
September 13, 2013 at 2:58 pm
I think it is important to move around 1-2 times, not more. Even if you have emails, Skype etc., as a young PhD you will have very few people to mail/skype. You need to move around for conferences, and also for new positions, to create your net of collaborators and to find what you really like to do and where is your interest. You can move one-two times, maybe change topic once, but I would not do it more than 2 times. The family is definitely going to pay the consequences.
By the way, your statement is not provocative. I heard this suggestion already a few times.
September 16, 2013 at 10:54 am
I don’t buy it. The most important things about moving around are the personal and direct experiences, like living in a new culture, interacting in person with new people and new languages, chatting at breaks and meals with new colleagues, learning new working styles, etc. None of these can be done via skype nor facebook. Of course this is not the only ingredient, it’s just one out of many. True genii will remain so even locking themselves in their offices, but everybody can gain something by opening the door and going out of their offices for a while.
September 16, 2013 at 1:35 pm
There is pretty much between locking yourself up in your office and being a constant nomad. You probably have to go to conferences early in your carreer to get in touch with people, plan work visits, have contact with colleagues (who, even if you don’t force them will probably be of very diverse origin anyway). Most science is done in collaborations and for collaborations you need (personal) interaction. I don’t per se disagree that moving around is good for you on a personal level (and I am very far from stating that people should be demotivated to do so), but I doubt that it automatically makes you a better scientist.
June 15, 2015 at 10:06 am
Well, sorry for this reaction, but I cannot pass ;-)) Have you never thought about the fact that – thanks to the internet – individuals can have a scientific career as an independent researcher without being a member of the scientific community? Because the internet makes information accessible and opens the way to publish.