Few would deny that there is a general air of malaise in academia at the moment. I look around at colleagues and their attitudes seem to vary along a spectrum from combative anger, through pervasive anxiety, to sullen resignation.
Academics seem to be trapped in a spiral of worsening conditions, but many fear that if they seek a new position elsewhere, the situation there may be just the same as the one that induced them to move. Others, of course, are simply unable to move, stuck in a job with working conditions that are increasingly less tolerable.
Standards of management are generally very poor in the university and college world. Most academic staff are hired on the basis of their reputations as researchers or teachers, not for their skills in managing departments, faculties or entire institutions. Those who make the transition from intellectual activity to administration are precipitated into a system that enthusiastically applies principles and techniques that were tried out in business half a century ago and rapidly abandoned because they failed to improve the performance of companies.
Expansion, competitivity and the desire for hyper-visible progress induce university administrators to pile on the tasks with no attention either to a person's capacity or his or her priorities. The huge expansion in non-academic staff has created a large cadre of people who spend their time thinking up tasks for academics to perform. Many of the latter are being driven to distraction by the relentless increase in demands upon their time.
Academic units such as departments or institutes are cost centres. They must under all circumstances maintain a balance between financial inputs and outgoings. There is no elasticity in this system, which cannot tolerate anything regarded as a "loss-making enterprise", no matter how worthy it is. Priorities are thus determined by how much money they are worth, not by their intellectual value. However, monetary value is a poor measure of utility to society, because not all things of value have an equivalent cost.
Among the greatest casualties of this vicious spiral is "thinking time", and with it creativity. Both are essential to the pursuit of research, which, we know, is essential to the furtherance of teaching. Academic staff who are too tired or demotivated or pressured to take time to think about their mission and their work are losing the very thing that underpins the real value of universities.
Unions are fighting to halt the decline in the real value of salaries, the rise in precarious employment, the assault on pensions, and perhaps also the constant erosion of the status of the modern academic. However, there is more to be done in terms of university and college governance.
Managers need to recognise that the working week is finite and so is the number of tasks that can be completed during it. This means that management and the front-line staff need to agree on priorities. In this it must be accepted that, if one task is prioritised, another will not be accomplished. Lip service is paid to "work-life balance", but the system is currently rigged in such a way that for most academics it simply cannot be achieved.
Many colleagues I speak to have lost their creative impetus to the constant demands of administrative tasks and the low-level activities that crowd into our days (and evenings and weekends). We need to be able to schedule ourselves at least half a day a week when we will not be answering emails, dealing with urgent requests, teaching classes, attending meetings and such tasks. Instead we will be reading and thinking, also writing. If we must regard academic life as a buying-and-selling market, then the product we have to sell is the fruit of our creativity. If we lose that, our product rapidly deteriorates.
During the worst of the pandemic there was, no doubt rightly, a huge emphasis on student welfare. Many of us had the impression that the corresponding emphasis on staff welfare was little more than lip-service, as we struggled day and night to support the well-being of our students.
In effect, the pandemic saw the triumph of the marketisation of higher education, a process that had been steadily accelerating for decades before Covid-19 struck. Yet in its current form, the commercial market approach to academic life is bound to be self-defeating, as it hollows out the product that we sell to the consumers of our teaching and research.
Conditions are sadly not right for anyone to found a "slow university", a place where deep meditation can give rise to enhanced creativity, well-crafted publications, sustained concern for others, and courses in which one has time for free, wide-ranging discussion. Nevertheless, it remains an ideal, even if a distant one.
In the meantime it would be useful to repair the processes of governance in higher education. This would require more participation by staff in decision making, which in turn would require less of a separation between teaching and research staff, on the one hand, and management on the other.
One tendency that seriously needs to be reversed is the loss of trust in front-line staff. Everywhere, there seem to be procedures that control what we do and require us to justify the smallest of our actions. Not only is this demeaning, it creates a massive, unnecessary bureaucracy that eats up time that could be devoted to loftier activities and saps the will to create. If once it was unnecessary, it can treated so again.
It is striking that so many of those who run universities either cannot see the problem--and the solution--clearly enough or else remain indifferent to it. Cultural change is drastically needed in the academy. Some of it involves reversion to the saner ways of doing things that once prevailed, but, clearly, trying to recreate the past would not work in an age as dynamic as our own. Perhaps we should start by trying to ascertain why common sense seems to have fled from the halls of academia and what can be done to attract it back. Governance has to be improved, and one measure of whether happens is to know whether expectations of academic staff are realistic--indeed humane--enough.
