Because a refusal often offends (and you look ridiculous)

Institutions of various sorts: if your advisory panels consist of people who can give their time for free, the advice they give you will be limited.

They might even be corrupted, in as much as they will be more likely to serve interests of people with sufficient money and/ or axes to grind for them to give their time.

So stop letting yourselves be unduly influenced and fundraise to do this more effectively.

Similarly, academics who are running public engagement projects or conferences may well wish to include viewpoints from outside to help them share their ideas more broadly and be challenged by a range of perspectives. But they will have to be prepared to pay for some of them.

Because you may run on an informal economy where the prestige of speaking or writing in a particular space is reward enough, but my landlady doesn’t.

Like almost everyone I know, I do a huge amount of work for free and also often ask people if they want to join me in it too. Such work can be worth doing when you want to grow something niche, or when you are actively challenging power in ways there just isn’t money for or a patron might be constraining. Or you might just want to do something for fun. Or you might be caring for something there isn’t funds to protect. There are a host of reasons you might not want or be able to be paid for something. But, so we can put our energies into stuff like that, professional organisations which do have access to funding need to organise their budgets to pay. I am looking at you, universities and learned societies (and a fair few charities) who are simply taking the piss.

The Wellcome Trust engagement and arts grants have an excellent policy when it comes to asking people to do peer review for them. If doing this review is your job, appreciate you are already paid. If not, they can offer £50 for your time. I never took it when I was a full-time academic, I do now. You won’t make a living out of it, but it won’t disrupt you from making a living either. It doesn’t exploit people. And leaves Wellcome’s grants scheme less open to being exploited itself. As research councils increasingly open up peer review to larger stakeholders, this is important concern for them too. They need to budget for that external time.

My favourite example of clueless academy recently was from an eminent professor I used to respect: “oh, you’re not an academic any more, that’s sad, but you still have very interesting ideas you know, I bet you could still publish in journals! Think of that! Then people like me might read you!” Lol. If I want to write and not get paid there are multiple spaces I can take my ideas, all of which are read by many more people than I’d get from a social science journal and, moreover, foster debate with readership so I get something out of the interactions and learn from readers.

Much of science and engineering runs on an informal economy of sharing expertise and time. It often works well, but limits you to either those inside this economy, or those rich enough to show they care. If science is serious about opening up to larger groups, they need to budget for it, else they’re turn themselves into a limited, incestous exercise of capital breeding capital.

And put some of the budget towards childcare too eh? Cos if you’re wondering why you struggle to get women speakers, that might be a reason. And if you don’t have money left over to take the speakers out for a posh dinner afterwards? Well, I’m sure you’ll all cope.

And yeah, that bit of public engagement advice comes for free.