Managers must recognise that the working week is finite

Few would deny that there is a general air of malaise in contemporary academia. I look around at colleagues and their attitudes seem to vary along a spectrum from combative anger through pervasive anxiety to sullen resignation.

Standards of management are generally very poor. 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 immersed in a management culture that enthusiastically applies hard-headed principles and techniques that were tried out in business half a century ago and rapidly abandoned as ineffective in improving performance.

Expansion, competitivity and the desire for hyper-visible progress induce administrators to pile on ever more tasks with no attention to a person’s capacity or rightful priorities. In addition, managers’ (and politicians’) trust in frontline staff has broken down to such an extent that everywhere we encounter procedures to control what we do, requiring us to justify the smallest of our actions. Not only is this demeaning and demoralising, it creates a massive, unnecessary bureaucracy: a large cadre of people who spend their time thinking up new tasks for academics to perform.

Another casualty of this vicious spiral in workload is “thinking time” – and, with it, creativity. Both are essential to the pursuit of meaningful research – which we know is essential to the furtherance of teaching. Universities whose academics are too tired, demotivated or pressured to think about their mission and their work are losing the very thing that underpins higher education’s value.

During the worst of the pandemic there was, no doubt rightly, a huge emphasis on student welfare. But many of us had the impression that the corresponding emphasis on staff welfare, on work-life balance, was little more than lip-service, as we struggled day and night to support the well-being of our students.

In effect, the pandemic led to the triumph of the marketisation of higher education, a process that had been steadily accelerating for decades before Covid-19 struck, with academic departments recast as “cost centres” that therefore cannot tolerate anything regarded as a “loss-making enterprise”, no matter how intellectually or socially worthy it is. This 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.

It is striking that so many of those who run universities either cannot see the problem clearly enough or else remain indifferent to it. But even if conditions are, sadly, not right for the development of a “slow university”, where deep meditation can give rise to enhanced creativity, well-crafted publications, sustained concern for others and courses with time for free, wide-ranging discussion, we need at least to walk in the direction of that distant ideal.

It would also be enormously helpful, for instance, to redemocratise decision-making in higher education, so that academics and managers could develop a less adversarial, more trusting relationship. Managers must recognise that the working week is finite – and so is the number of tasks that can be completed during that time. They must agree priorities with frontline staff and accept that some other tasks will not be accomplished. For instance, academics 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 or dealing with any of the other low-level activities that crowd into our days (and evenings and weekends).

And if mass bureaucratic surveillance of academics was once considered unnecessary, so it can be again.

Of course, trying to recreate the past would not work in an age as dynamic as ours. But unless expectations of academic staff become more realistic and humane, the future for staff and students, societies and economies alike looks bleak.

David Alexander is professor of emergency planning and management at UCL.