Following the Advance HE symposium on ‘Barriers and Enablers to a Thriving Research Culture’, Taryn Bell considers how we rethink academic failure.
Scrolling social media recently, I came across a post by a friend. This friend is one of those people who fits the mould of the ‘perfect researcher’ to a tee. She works hard, has 1,000 side projects on the go, and is utterly dedicated to her work. Yet, she didn’t feel like the perfect researcher; quite the opposite. She’d written about her soon-to-be-completed PhD, “I’ve spent most of the process feeling like an abject failure.”
This isn’t a unique story. Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of kind, talented people made to feel like they’re an academic failure.
Failure isn’t a bad thing in and of itself – it’s an unavoidable part of life. However, academia’s current approach to failure actively harms researchers and encourages the worst parts of research culture to thrive.
Rather than treating failure like a taboo, we need to foster an ethos of care in which failure is not fatal.
What makes academic failure unique?
While academia is not the only competitive industry, failure in academia does seem to be particularly common. UK research fellowships have an average success rate of 5-15% (i.e. a failure rate of 85-95%), while only 10-15% of doctoral researchers in Europe will eventually secure an academic career, despite 75% aspiring to one.
Whether it’s the rejection of a journal article, an unsuccessful application for a job, or a failed funding bid, academics are expected to bear the effects of repeated failure throughout their careers. This is made more difficult by academics’ close links between their personal identity and their work, which make it harder not to see failure as a personal failing.
It’s no surprise then, that the prevailing narratives around academic failure view it as harmful, individualised, and a necessary evil to be endured.
Who has ‘space to fail’?
When academics do talk about failure, it tends to be those in more senior positions – i.e. those who ultimately prevailed – who set the tone for these discussions. As a result, academic discussions of failure often revolve around ‘triumph over adversity’ narratives, or what Johanna Stadlbauer refers to as the ‘rise like a phoenix’ mentality: you just have to keep going, keep pushing, and eventually you’ll succeed.
These sanitised accounts of failure are simply bad advice for most people, as not everyone has the same space to fail. If you’re a senior researcher with a permanent position, then yes, failure may just be one of the norms of an academic career. But if you’re a precariously employed postdoc, or a PhD researcher trying to carve out a niche in your field, failure has far more serious consequences. For those in the most insecure, precarious positions, just one or two failed funding bids could mean the end of your academic career.
So, what do we do?
None of this means we should be doing away with failure. Not only is that unrealistic, but failure can help us improve what we do, foster creativity and help us to learn.
What we must do is foster research environments in which people have space to fail and to acknowledge their failures openly and honestly.
A simple place to start is the creation of shared emotional spaces. This can take a variety of forms: researcher-led forums, workshops and structured spaces, or simply a chance in team meetings to talk about what’s not gone so well recently.
A brilliant example, championed by the University of Graz, is Fiasco Fests, in which researchers come together to share professional failures. At the University of Leeds, we recently piloted a workshop to support researchers who have experienced the failure of a recent funding bid.
What we’ve learnt from these events is that our research communities need space in which to acknowledge the negatives, move away from toxic positivity and support one another without the immediate compulsion to fix things.
Funders and institutions can also play a role in redefining what, or who, is counted as ‘success’ in academia today. Academia has an extremely narrow view of ‘excellence’, to the detriment of us all. If only 10% of people who apply for funding are successful, are the remaining 90% really failures?
Initiatives like FailSpace and the narrative CV are beginning to help us rethink what success looks like. We need to push further, to reward ‘intelligent failure’ and learning as well as traditional successes.
Changing funding structures may go some way to achieving this. Funders should consider increasing the number of smaller-scale, proof-of-concept or experimental funding. This offers more attainable options for early career researchers, who will benefit from less risky opportunities to gain independent funding early on and develop their skills and knowledge further.
It also means considering who applies. Academic failure often places the blame on individuals, but models of distributed leadership, options for researchers to act as Co-Investigators, and funding which encourages this, encourage the kind of collegiality and collaboration upon which modern research cultures should be founded.
We also need to make funding processes more transparent, so that failure is better understood. Funding processes feel, to many, entirely arbitrary, and funders need to make the time to provide more, and better, feedback to applicants, so that failure truly is an opportunity for learning.
An ethos of care
Underlying all of this is an ethos of care. We can’t avoid failure. But we can create environments in which people can fail without feeling like it’s all their fault, that the responsibility is all on them, or that it reflects some kind of deeply personal failing.
Academia, at its best, can foster the best of human creativity and innovation. But at worst, it makes everyone feel like ‘abject failures’, regardless of whether they are or not.
References
- Bell, T. (2024). Navigating failure in academia. Research Culture Uncovered. 11 December 2024. Available at: https://research-culture.captivate.fm/episode/episode-97-navigating-failure-in-academia
- Centre for Cultural Value. (2025). FailSpace. [Online]. Centre for Cultural Value. Available at: https://www.culturalvalue.org.uk/our-work/failspace/
- Edwards, M. S. and Ashkenazy, N. M. (2018). Emotions and failure in academic life: Normalising the experience and building resilience. Journal of Management & Organization 24, 167–188.
- Gillie, D. (2024). Failure: we’re doing it wrong. 2 September 2024. LinkedIn. [Online] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/failure-were-doing-wrong-darcey-gillie-eye5e/?trackingId=wHhTO7hfR6qdeD4k%2B1ywvQ%3D%3D
- Pifer, M. J. and Baker, V. L. (2016). Professional, personal, and relational: exploring the salience of identity in academic careers. Identity 16(3), 190–205.
- Timmermans, J. A. and Kumar, V. (2023). Learning from senior academics’ perspectives of success and failure. Studies in Higher Education 49(8), 1317–1328.
- Turner, J. (2020). 0–39%: The beginning of an infrastructure of failure in academia. Emotion, Space and Society 35, 100647.
- University of Graz. (2025). Fiasco Fest. [Online]. University of Graz. Available at: https://research-careers-campus.uni-graz.at/en/events/fiasco-fest-3-1/
Taryn Bell
Taryn Bell is a researcher developer at the University of Leeds, focusing on career development and funding support for researchers at all career stages. She is also co-host of the Research Culture Uncovered Podcast, which is currently running a series on failure in academia.
