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Is academic nursing being sabotaged by its own killer elite?

The growth and development of academic nursing is being hampered, if not sabotaged, by our very own mandarins of mediocrity. These are the academic ‘leaders’ whose own slender scholarship and contribution to nursing is out of all proportion to the stifling and inhibiting influence that they wield. Our focus is on nursing academe in the UK and Australia (although our New Zealand colleagues may also have a view on these issues) and our thoughts are shaped by our extensive experiences, observations and conversations with colleagues. Over the past decade, we have expressed our dismay at the general decline in academic nursing, particularly in the UK (Watson & Thompson 2000, Thompson & Watson 2001, 2005, Thompson 2009, Shields et al. 2011), and bemoaned the decline in the academic status and standards of the nursing professoriate (Thompson & Watson 2006, Watson & Thompson 2008a, 2008b, 2010a, 2010b). These concerns are reflected in weak research performance as exemplified by the poor research citations of professors of nursing in the UK (Thompson & Watson 2010) and Australia (Hunt et al. 2011), and in the lack of success or impact of joint or clinical chairs in nursing (Darbyshire 2010), allied to a diversion into something called practice development (Thompson et al. 2008, Walker 2008). Tracing the rot historically is not difficult. Thanks to a combination of luck, timing and well-organized professional self-interest, many professors and heads of department were appointed when nursing had its sudden and wholesale move into the higher education sector. A move, it must be said, that was almost exclusively geographical, not academic. The same old ‘Sister Tutor’ elite were now enthroned in more powerful university positions with even more grandiose job titles and all too generous conditions, akin to a job for life irrespective of performance (Darbyshire 2011). The educational and ‘scholarly’ mindsets, however, stayed behind in the old ‘colleges of nursing’. Having set the bar to point zero by appointing (or more accurately, ‘transferring’) people to senior academic and professorial positions who would not even have secured an interview in almost any other university school or faculty, the die was cast and the legacy is painfully clear to this day. A useful exercise here is to look, not for professorial prattling about ‘excellence’ or ‘world class-ness’ (Darbyshire 2008), but for scholarship and outcomes. Consult the publicly available websites and university home pages of many of our nursing professoriate, especially those who may have secured a ‘joint/clinical chair’ or a head of school position at a time when health services and universities were so desperate to fill these positions that they would have appointed, as an Australian CEO described in a schools context, ‘anyone who was upright and who could fog a mirror’. (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationalaffairs/committing-to-the-toughest-teaching-gig-in-the-country/story-fn59niix-1226077317246.) Akin to missionary zealots visiting the colonies, the new ‘manageriate’ and their sycophantic disciples spread the word and dispensed their perceived wisdom while not overly encumbered by any obvious academic talent. Still, we continue to wonder why academic nursing receives a lukewarm reception from an audience invariably with more credibility, yet often too polite and embarrassed to express its real views. Watching (as we have) some nursing professors/heads of department from these two countries lecturing nurses in South East Asia on how to ‘do’ research and scholarship, while their own tenuous track records pale into insignificance by comparison, is truly cringeworthy. Rarely is such embarrassment shared by the elite themselves, however, as they share an unshakable confidence and ability to exert power that is inversely proportionate to any evident ability. This is possibly related to the ‘unskilled and unaware’ phenomenon identified by Kruger and Dunning (1999), yet despite this they insinuate themselves on to every advantageous platform with a sense of rectitude that makes a 1980s ‘nurse theorist’ look like an icon of humility. The fiefdoms of the elite are critique-free zones, virtually devoid of any spirit of inquiry, ethos of debate or culture of scholarship. So tyrannical are some of the ‘killer elite’ that the only notes of dissent heard will be the whisperings