Universities need to plan for a dark future if

academics prefer their own Plan B

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RESUMEN (ENGLISH)
[...]is there really anything unique about the problems faced by academics? "Outsiders" suggest to me, with varying
degrees of grace, that the precariousness of casual academics is shared by an increasing proportion of
contemporary white-collar workers, and that laments about stress, overwork and time poverty are par for the course
in all sorts of jobs. According to Sarah Sharma, author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics ,
contemporary labour is underpinned by three "normal[ised] and mutually reinforcing conceptions of time". According
to a recent survey, up to half of all Australian teachers leave the classroom within five years. In the absence of such
an effort, we will also need a "brain drain survival guide for university managers". Because there is a grave risk that
rather than merely fighting for survival in the academy, more and more people will choose to thrive outside it. l Ruth
Barcan is an associate professor in the department of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney.

TEXTO COMPLETO
Conditions that undermine the notion of scholarly vocation - relentless work, ubiquitous bureaucracy - can cause
academics acute distress and spur them to quit, says Ruth Barcan
When I bent over my home printer one day last year to check that it was switched on, its tiny digital screen told me
that it was in "deep sleep". And for a moment - honestly - I felt jealous.
Admittedly, my sleep had been particularly broken the night before. A bit of 3am dialogue with my daughter, who had
woken up and come into bed with me, had left us both wide awake. After lying there beset by little pinpricks of white
fear about how many things I had to do in the coming months, I had resorted to a meditation CD featuring the
soothing Scottish accent of a man named Bodhipaksa. It worked like a charm - for my daughter, at least.
The irony is that one of the things I was worried about was a deadline associated with a research project on
academic dissatisfaction. It is a small, qualitative study of academics who left, or are thinking of leaving, the
profession "early". In one or two cases, they felt that they could better use their talents elsewhere, but their reasons
were mostly that they had been unable to secure stable ongoing work, or that the pressures and distresses of
academic work had become unbearable.
The project, titled Weighing Up Futures: Experiences of Giving up an Academic Career, consists of 21 interviews
and 13 written surveys. Participants, mostly from the UK and Australia, were selected semi-randomly from among
the hundred or so people who contacted me in response to a single email sent to the mailing list of a higher
education association, and one related tweet.
There is a saddening and powerful familiarity to their tales. A recurring contradiction is that people who truly and
deeply loved academic work are much happier and healthier now that they are no longer doing it. Casual staff were
demoralised by the precariousness, while tenured staff were disturbed by the increasingly corporatist ethos of the
university and found the workload, as one participant puts it, "close to not-doable". Another sums it up like this: "I
genuinely have a life now that I would not have if I had taken the academic path. I have time for friends, for sport, for
life!"
These findings should surprise no one who has been following the state of higher education. As early as 1996, a
Guardian
survey of UK academics found that one in five had thought daily about leaving academia. Twenty years later, Times
Higher Education 's 2016 University Workplace Survey found that while 64 per cent of the 1,398 academics

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surveyed found their job "rewarding", 39 per cent of them wanted to quit. Reasons included spending too much time
working (68 per cent) and negative health impacts (51 per cent).
There appears to be something distinctive about academics' experience of work-related stress. Numerous surveys
of academics in the UK, Australia and Canada have found not only that stress has been on the rise for some
decades, but also that its reported level now exceeds that in the general population. (The work of Vic Catano,
professor of psychology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada, is one place to find summaries of these
studies.) The 1996
Guardian
survey also found that academics were considerably more demoralised than individuals surveyed from 20 other
occupational groups.
But is there really anything unique about the problems faced by academics? "Outsiders" suggest to me, with varying
degrees of grace, that the precariousness of casual academics is shared by an increasing proportion of
contemporary white-collar workers, and that laments about stress, overwork and time poverty are par for the course
in all sorts of jobs.
There is much truth in this. According to Sarah Sharma, author of
In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
, contemporary labour is underpinned by three "normal[ised] and mutually reinforcing conceptions of time". These
are that "(1) time management is the individual's responsibility; (2) one must work harder to stay in time; and (3)
being tired is a slow person's excuse for being unproductive". The point about individual responsibility is perhaps
especially true of universities, where academics' capacity to determine the work that they do and the way that it will
be managed exceeds that of most professions. Should academics be pitied less for their difficulties in meeting
deadlines when, unlike many other employees, they had some role in creating or accepting those deadlines?
Academics' relative autonomy is also manifested in their ability to complain about their working conditions and to
analyse them in public. This reflects the value placed by a wider society on academic labour, but, again, some might
well argue that complaints from academics about time poverty are less morally urgent than complaints from other,
less empowered workers about precariousness and economic poverty.
But regardless of such moral accounting, academic professional discontent matters because the university is an
institution like no other. Its crucial role in producing and reproducing knowledge, educating and training people of all
ages and serving society more generally means that the well-being and creative potential of its core workers should
concern everyone.
Three characteristics of academic labour stand out as particularly distinctive: its boundlessness, its enmeshment
with personal identity and its putative commitment to the social good. All these typify what has traditionally been
called a vocation.
Almost all the study participants are happy to embrace this term and agree that leaving academia is different from
leaving other professions. They cite the intensity of the work, its specialisation, the years of training required to
secure even a foothold in the profession and the difficulty of "getting back in" after stepping out of it.
One of the conditions that makes demoralisation possible is, of course, the possession of high hopes and
expectations in the first place - so it is, perversely, a marker of a certain kind of professional privilege. But vocational
work is double-edged: it provides very real satisfactions and even long-term health benefits, but its sacrificial
dimensions open it up to exploitation by others.
The intertwining of professional life with personal identity and a commitment to the social good is also common in
teaching and nursing - and, sure enough, reports are common of widespread stress, demoralisation and values
conflict in these professions, too, caused by the increasing demands and bureaucratisation that have accompanied
the marketisation of the education and health sectors. According to a recent survey, up to half of all Australian
teachers leave the classroom within five years. And in a 2016 study of Australian nurses and midwives, 32 per cent
indicated that they had seriously considered quitting the profession. The study authors estimated a typical annual
business turnover rate to be about 4 per cent.

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I suspect, though, that sacrificial, grateful or vocational relationships to employment are slowly spreading beyond
these professions - among employers, if not employees. This is due, in part, to a growing sense, promoted by the
various happiness industries, that all aspects of our life, including work, should be creative and satisfying; this
promotes a sense (naive or cynical) among bosses that everyone aspires to a collegial, satisfying workplace in
which everyone gives a bit extra. But we should not underestimate, either, the extent to which the exercise of brute
corporate power in deregulated labour markets can enforce a more sacrificial attitude.
Earlier this year, for instance, an illustrative incident in a branch of one of the two multinational chains that dominate
the Australian supermarket landscape went viral. A trainee store manager sent an email to his 65 staff urging them
to come in on a Sunday for four hours to clear a backlog of stock. "Plentiful" pizza would be on offer, but no extra
pay. "I'm asking team members to give me 4hrs free labour," he wrote - in the same week that considerable political
turmoil erupted over a government attempt to reduce the enhanced rates the casual weekend workers receive.
While this incident appears to have been a one-off (the supermarket chain condemned it immediately), it may
nevertheless point to new ways in which paid work is understood as something that employees should be grateful
for and obedient to, and to which leisure and family responsibilities should play second fiddle. In other words, more
and more people are obliged to treat their work as a vocation even if they would never think of it in those terms, and
even if they receive none of the compensatory sense of meaning and fulfilment.
But if the corporate sector is picking up on the usefulness of the vocational ethos, the dynamic can also work in
reverse. At least some academics now expect little more from their universities than other workers expect from their
corporations. Many appear to feel that the care they display towards their students and colleagues is not returned to
them by their managers. In the THE survey, more than 56 per cent of academic respondents disagreed with the
statement: "My employer cares for the well-being of its staff."
In terms of academic work specifically, the biggest question I am left with is an empirical one: just who is leaving the
university early? The small scale of my project means that I was not trying to elicit statistical or generalisable data,
so it was only by accident that I stumbled on an indication that something might be seriously wrong on the gender
front.
Roughly 80 per cent of offers to participate in my project came from women. Some of the respondents took the
gender issue as a given, one noting matter of factly that although women were well represented in her discipline,
"we're pushed out of academia so readily". A UK participant said: "I think we're going backwards on [academic staff]
diversity." Can this be true? The question urgently requires further investigation, as does the possibility that other
demographic skews might also be in play when it comes to a propensity to quit the academy; quite a number of the
interviewees mentioned in passing that they were the first in their family to go to university, for instance.
But the ultimate question that my research raises cannot be answered by empirical research alone. It is a conceptual
and political one: what do we think universities are for - or should be for? How much credence you give the notion of
a crisis in academic retention depends, in part, on how much you want to fight for the necessary distinctiveness of
the university's institutional form. And that, in turn, depends on whether you see universities primarily as
communities of scholars, producers and repositories of knowledge, laboratories for solving big problems or as major
contributors, directly and indirectly, to national economies.
For example, while the public may not feel much sympathy for the time poverty of people who are more able than
most to work from home, they may care that a youthful researcher in cancer genetics - or law, or architecture, or
early childhood education - decides that "the career I fell in love with no longer exists", and drops out. Even
someone with little sympathy for the human story behind that statement might wonder whether such an outcome is a
reasonable return on national investment in human capital.
Of course, this is not only a picture of waste. Viewed positively, the exit of high-level expertise from the academy into
a variety of other socially valuable sectors where it might not ordinarily have gone, such as school education, is a
good thing. And even those who do not end up in such careers - an educationalist I interviewed had left to sell
gelato; the cancer geneticist was seriously considering insurance - often find energising and productive ways of
using their intellect outside the academy.

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Still, most skilled and economically significant professions in which almost 40 per cent of workers want to leave
would be viewed as being in crisis. Even if there are plenty of young would-be academics in the queue to replace
them, universities' relinquishment of specialists from virtually all fields of knowledge, often at the peak of their
capacities, has to be seen as a threat to sustainable, long-term knowledge production.
The main THE feature a fortnight after the workplace survey was a " Workload survival guide for academics". How
about a serious attempt to manage the problem at its source - in the name of "business continuity", or for the sake of
the knowledge economy if the care of people and the expansion of knowledge is not motivation enough? In the
absence of such an effort, we will also need a "brain drain survival guide for university managers". Because there is
a grave risk that rather than merely fighting for survival in the academy, more and more people will choose to thrive
outside it. l
Ruth Barcan is an associate professor in the department of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney.

DETALLES

Materia: Research; Polls &surveys; Higher education; Workloads; Studies; Knowledge;

Professions; Time; Brain; Politics; Stress; Occupations; Teachers

Título: Universities need to plan for a dark future if academics prefer their own Plan B

Título de publicación: Times Higher Education; London

Número: 2314

Año de publicación: 2017

Fecha de publicación: Jul 13, 2017

Sección: News

Editorial: THE World Universities Insights Limited

Lugar de publicación: London

País de publicación: United Kingdom, London

Materia de publicación: Education--Higher Education

ISSN: 00493929

Tipo de fuente: Revista especializada

Idioma de la publicación: English

Tipo de documento: Journal Article

ID del documento de 1941297748

ProQuest:

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Copyright: Copyright TES Global Limited Jul 13, 2017

Última actualización: 2019-08-15

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