The sheer amount of work seems to be increasing exponentially, and not just in terms of scale but the number of vectors it’s all happening on too. It is impossible to be a top-line manager and administrator and mentor and researcher and writer and outreach officer and IT expert and online instructor and pedagogical innovator and recruiter and teacher and marker and external examiner and press pundit and grant bidder and editor and look after your own wellbeing. No-one can do that. Yet that’s what is often asked.
What we’re really doing overall is running down our social capital, toiling away in a failing system that calls to mind nothing more than the late Soviet economy (far more similar to ours than we’d like to admit). When the money coming in continuously declines, organisations sweat their assets, and as they do so increasingly wear away their own foundations. What that involves is constantly whacking our own creativity, and capacity for ideas, against the brick wall of funders’ and employers’ indifference. That’s a losing game. Small wonder a lot of lecturers come to feel – or be made to feel – like losers.
Beyond the line of hours worked, soaring ever upwards, and our own inability to actually come up with anything new, we have to add a third point – in most ways the most important of all: It’s a lack of money. When the ship’s afloat and running before the wind, change and movement can feel exhilarating. When it’s run aground, and it’s not so much stationary as lurching from side to side, that rush turns to nausea. Money is a great problem-solver and solvent. As the cash drains out of the system, all the nasty and gritty realities become nastier, gritter, more unpleasant.
Curious whether this rings true to UK academics.
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