Academia’s shunning of the lone wolf: Why?

At every seminar on how to boost your chances of success for attracting external grants and getting promoted, you will hear an active discouragement of the lone wolf model. This is because universities have cottoned on to the fact that funders will hand out extraordinary amounts of money to teams with high profile names on them. Whack their big h-indices in there, and talk it up as having star power by association, and you’ll nab yourself a juicy carrot.

This is seen by funding bodies as money safely spent, but when you have reviewed enough high-prize grant proposals you begin to see something a bit funny. Often enough, the project proposal of high-profile teams, even their formatting, can be a bit sloppy. They know they can rest on the power of their h-index. The quiet little achiever who has busted a gut designing an amazing and innovative project, and clearly spent time taking pride in checking every word, is seen as an unsafe bet.

A woman drowning in care-giving of others does not have as much time to develop collaborative relations. She also may have radical ideas no one else from the conservative safety of those established teams feels comfortable to be associated with. But giving those ideas oxygen, gives her oxygen. The lone she-wolf is created by circumstance and is looking for a place in the world, all her own, where she is given the chance to go deep and big with something potentially very cool.

When denied that chance, and explicitly told there is no place in the system for her and her type, she will work by candlelight in a dark lonely cave; not from the well-lit studio the world made for her, so she can be her own Da Vinci and get lost for hours in her intellect and creativity. From the caverns she made room for herself for, she will work out how to fly. When her wings become lucrative (for her, a slow long-range game), universities will need to honestly tussle with themselves to help shrink the gap between their rhetoric of nurturing intellect and their reality of chasing fast cash; a wide crack that hurts women more.