How to be happy in academia

‘Start viewing time for joyful activity as indispensable and you start finding more of it’

I emerged from my PhD as an expert in my field. I had multiple peer-reviewed papers, including second-author status on a publication in Science. Excited by research, I became a bit of a magpie, eager to form new collaborations, apply my skills to new challenges and grow my knowledge. And I was rewarded for my unstinting efforts with a lectureship.

The initial relief at moving away from fixed-term research contracts, however, was short-lived. Now came a new battle for job security. The pressure was immense to constantly prove myself with papers and grant income, even as teaching loads were increasing.

Campus spotlight: How to create a happy campus

Moreover, by the time I gained my “confirmation of appointment” (tenure), I already had one child and was about to go on maternity leave with a second. And I had been back only six months when the pandemic lockdowns hit, forcing me into survival mode as I balanced childcare and working from home.

My career stalled. I was no longer in the box labelled “early-career researcher”, and associated opportunities were closing. Meanwhile, administrative duties had become overwhelming. I was trying my best to juggle multiple roles, yet I still needed to prove my worth as a researcher at appraisals.

So at the end of last summer, I did the unthinkable. I added more into my daily routine.

“I don’t have time” had become my default response to suggestions that I take on anything new, both at home and at work. But it was worse than that. With a demanding job and two young kids, I had no mental capacity for anything new.

The key to breaking that impasse was to find something away from the office that took my mind elsewhere – and to view that mental depressurising as a necessity. I asked myself what brought me joy. With my offspring now four and seven and generating healthy social calendars of their own, I also needed something that didn’t require the commitment of a fixed time slot.

The answer for others might be running or climbing or music or creative writing, but for me it was art. As a child, I had loved drawing, and I wanted to return to it. Fortunately, technological advances mean that online tutorials are easy to find and available on-demand. I found one on how to draw a cat’s eye and started there.

If you start viewing your time for joyful activity as indispensable, you start finding more of it. I started by snatching snippets of time from my day, but I now get up early in the morning or during the night to draw for a couple of hours. I absolutely love it, and I revel in the sense of achievement. Moreover, I can now bring that positivity into my day job as an academic.

For me, however, there was another necessary step. I no longer loved my job, but I was still passionate about aspects of it. I think this must be true for many academics. After all, we are not the same people we were when we started our doctoral work. If you’re feeling like an impostor or constantly needing to prove yourself, perhaps you’re overwhelmed in your current post. Consider whether you are working in the area where you perform at your best. Avoid comparing yourself to others, and ask yourself which aspects of the job give you the most satisfaction (yes, that box on your appraisal form is important).

I used to be good at finding a hook, generating a story and weaving a paper or scribing a grant proposal. But along the way, I began to associate those things with the relentless pressure to succeed, and I lost enthusiasm for the research. Now I have accepted that I do not need to be the best at everything. I can let go of some real or imagined pressures and still proudly remain an academic in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

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Like many other UK universities, UEA is undergoing upheaval resulting from financial challenges. As part of the cost-saving initiatives, I have opted to reduce my working hours to further reclaim a work-life balance that I lost as an early-career researcher.

With the support of line managers and colleagues, I have dropped research from my role. I no longer wish to be a world-leading researcher. But I am a passionate advocate for improving the way quantitative skills are taught in further and higher education. I have found my niche in the area where I am of most value to my employer and my students. I have work to do here and on-the-ground experience to impart.

So now, by day, I’m a geographer who gets great satisfaction from helping my students improve their confidence with maths. By night, I’m an artist. And I’m available not only for commissions but also for chats if my story resonates with you.

Our work really does need to give us joy – but I also know that finding that joy can involve a great deal of pain.

Amii Harwood is a lecturer in geography and geographical information systems at the University of East Anglia.

‘Remaining a student even while teaching has been a key source of happiness’

I’ve been a teacher and a student for a long time, and having that dual identity, that doubled practice, has been a key source of happiness for me.

In high school, I tutored children, and in the summers I worked as a swimming instructor. That was in the early 1970s. I began teaching undergraduates when I was pursuing my PhD in history at Princeton University. How thrilling that was! Overflowing with nervous energy, I’d scamper off to the previously off-limits faculty lounge, ready to talk turkey about teaching.

It was usually slim pickings. No doubt the more experienced teachers reserved their enthusiasm for the classroom. Were they surprised by mine? I was. I was surprised to discover just how much I enjoyed sitting in the professor’s seat. I’d already recognised how much I loved being a student but wasn’t sure that would translate to being, so to speak, on the other side of the equation.

For an equation of sorts it is. Good students make teachers better, and a great teacher can motivate learning in ways that surpass expectations, including expectations that students have of themselves. As a student, I was the nerdy kid who was eager to learn – and perhaps eager to please the teacher, especially in college (at Wesleyan University), when it became clear to me that strong teachers are pleased by being challenged.

I was always happy being a student. Even as an instructor, I found ways to stay in a student role – to sit in on lectures, audit seminars, ask questions of colleagues. At my first academic job at Scripps College, I created a humanities institute where professors and advanced undergrads in the humanities could learn from one another and from invited luminaries. It was, I see now, a way for me to remain on the student side of the equation.

Years later, I took a job running the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute. Noted researchers and artists came from around the world to Los Angeles to work on a problem chosen because my colleagues and I thought it was interesting and open-ended. Although I “led” our weekly seminars, I felt the same sense of intellectual adventure as I had enjoyed as an undergraduate at Wesleyan.

At the Getty, too, I got to be on both sides of the equation. I was even able to remain a student when I became a college president in 2000 at the California College of the Arts (then the California College of Arts and Crafts). Since I’m not an artist, I made no bones about the fact that I needed to learn from my colleagues and my students. And their generosity in accepting me as their student was almost as inspirational as their creativity in making their own work.

In 2007, I returned as president to Wesleyan, where I continue to teach and do my best to remain a student. Although coming back to an elite New England liberal arts institution from a California arts school reminded me about the persistence of traditional academic hierarchies, I found that the best way to remain open to learning is the same for a president as it is for a freshman. Acknowledging one’s ignorance is the key. And at Wesleyan, there are plenty of people to help me with that.

As a professor, I have had the good fortune of working with students whose seriousness and joy, playfulness and purpose have illuminated for me powerful works of philosophy, literature, history and film. In addition to wrestling with, say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, we have had the experience of thinking for ourselves in amiable company.

That experience, as I suggest in my new book, The Student: A Short History, teaches us something about agency and entanglement and, ultimately, about freedom. That was the happy experience I had as a student, working with gifted teachers at Wesleyan and Princeton in history, philosophy and political theory. I have found my happiness in academia trying to recreate the experience of wonder and experimentation that was characteristic of their classrooms.

The best teaching invites one to remain a student, someone who stays open to learning, discovery and even transformation. I have found much happiness in never graduating.

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. This piece is drawn from his book The Student: A Short History, published by Yale University Press in September 2023.

‘Moments when I wasn’t following the implicit rules of academia made me happiest’

When I began graduate school in 2003 with the aim of writing a dissertation in Old English, I heard that one of the professors liked to say, “When Anglo-Saxonists die, they don’t get replaced.”

The line stuck with me. It was harsh, true; but I knew at that point that academic jobs were increasingly hard to come by, and those in my small specialty rarer still. The recognition that there was little I could do to gain a faculty position in my field could have spelled doom, but it gave me a surprising kind of freedom.

My fellow grad students, cannier and more sophisticated than I was, always had their eye on the “market”. At get-togethers, they discussed which topics they should write on to make themselves more employable down the line, even what type of chapter structure would be easily legible to a hiring committee. Perhaps naively, I decided to follow my own curiosity as I wrote my dissertation. My topic was not particularly sexy, but gradually I found scholars with similar interests, an intellectual community and a career.

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I was wise in my twenties in a way I haven’t always been since then. New to academia, I had not yet learned that it is made up of rigid hierarchies that, though wholly imaginary and specific to local cultures, seem “obvious” to people in the know. Research universities are better than teaching colleges; and even if at heart you’re a teacher, you should try to work at the former. Moving jobs is preferable to staying put. The more grants and employees you wield, the more respectable you are as a scholar. A specialist is superior to a generalist, and if you can spend your career writing on just one topic, all the better. Scholarly writing is admirable, whether or not it is original or anyone reads it, while writing for a wider public is amateurish, a kind of fall. And that’s not even getting into the prominence of Oxbridge and the Ivy League and their various imitators.

In short, I hadn’t learned that the way to measure your success in academe is against what everyone else thinks is worthwhile.

Over time, I absorbed these dubious lessons. Their effect was, for the most part, to keep me from being happy with my career even when it was, by any reasonable reckoning, pretty great. I still worked on experimental questions that I found compelling rather than trendy topics that would have won me invitations to join conference panels and special journal issues. I wrote memoir and journalism and essays on topics irrelevant to my area of specialisation, back when that kind of writing was still seen as an unwelcome distraction from serious work. I had hobbies outside of work: dancing and knitting and cooking. But I felt apologetic about all of it. I wasn’t doing the professor thing right.

Looking back, however, those moments when I wasn’t following the implicit rules of academia made me happiest, and were also the most intellectually formative. Partly this is because the “truths everyone knows” are often wrong. It doesn’t make sense to pick a trendy topic for a dissertation or book because by the time it’s out, the field will have moved on. Large conferences are often terrible places to present new work; better to go to a small seminar, where you can meet people and get good feedback. Scholars who work at top-ranked schools are not always more satisfied with their jobs – they’re not even necessarily more productive.

More importantly, academia does not guarantee the kinds of rewards that might make intellectual and lifestyle compromises worth it. You can spend years doing research aimed at the job market only to find there is no job. Or you might land a job but find yourself locked into a line of research that isn’t what you wanted to do in the first place.

There’s another reason why I’m glad to have gone against received wisdom, beyond the pragmatic calculations. What drew me to scholarship was the promise of discovery. Every time I have made the less obvious career choice, I’ve gained a new perspective on my work. Moving to Europe from North America showed me the value of collaborative scholarship. Reading outside my field showed me connections I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Writing creatively has helped me think about audience and form. As uncomfortable as breaking unspoken rules can be, it’s also been the key to feeling that I can keep learning throughout my career. And that, to me, is the key to happiness.

Irina Dumitrescu is professor of English medieval studies at the University of Bonn.

‘Capitalise on your strengths rather than be obliged to work on your weaknesses’

In the early 1980s, I wrote an article in what was then The Times Higher Education Supplement saying that being an academic was the “best job in the world”. That is still probably true – ish.

Things are changing quickly and dramatically in the ivory tower, but there is still good reason to believe one can have a very good life there. My major point still largely holds: that academia offers so much liberty to choose what you work on, with whom, and what the resulting output should be. If you are passionate about a discipline and some specific areas of concern, you can explore these in great depth for long periods. It’s like being paid for a serious hobby. My wife calls it a private income.

There are other benefits, too. Academics worked from home long before Covid came along. Some become media stars. Some of my students have been knighted. A few are multimillionaires.

None of these professional trappings necessarily buy you happiness, of course. Job and life satisfaction have a large (50 per cent) genetic component. Stable extroverts (sanguine people) are most likely to achieve it, but it is difficult to become a stable extrovert unless you are born one.

Yet one of the things you can consciously do to boost contentment is to avoid sweating the small stuff. For instance, the more you emotionally invest in organisational affairs, as opposed to research, the more upset you are likely to get. Beware the petty, vicious rivalries of academic politics. Decathect, as the Freudians say: withdraw your attachment in anticipation of future loss.

Relatedly, don’t tell central admin anything – they will only inform you that what you are doing is against some undefined rule or other. But make friends with department support staff, especially IT, HR and security, who can otherwise make your life hell. Jealous colleagues can also be a problem, so never boast. Never disclose success.

While success is not a guarantor of happiness, it certainly gives you a big push in the right direction. But how best to pursue it? One suggestion is to join the invisible college. The publish-or-perish mantra will always apply, so you should cultivate your (very public) h-index. Set an output target and find a set of like-minded colleagues who can help you meet it by complementing your skills. I wrote 50 papers with a German academic before we met, and that was in the days before email and Zoom. Seek out people you like, trust and admire wherever they are and work with them. Form multiple groups. Support one another.

Also bear in mind Thomas Edison’s quote about genius being 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Working on things you both like doing and are good at is usually enjoyable, but there are still times when we need perseverance, dogged hard work and dutiful conscientiousness to make it through. You need passion, determination and resilience to succeed.

It also helps to be clear-sighted about what you are and are not good at, so you can capitalise on your strengths rather than be obliged to work on your weaknesses. And the best way to find out what you are good at is to have a go at things. Default on “yes”, not “no”.

When you have identified where your talents lie, seek appropriate trade-offs in your workload of teaching, admin, grant-getting and community blah-blah. The old concept was buying your way out of teaching. Wise administrators understand the wisdom of this.

Above all, try to seize the day (and night). This means living in the present, with an eye to your goals for the future. It means acting, not deferring or dithering. It means “being there” wherever you are and whatever you are doing. It means making, finding and using opportunities.

Some colleagues may disparage this approach as opportunism. They are just jealous. Refer to paragraph six.

Adrian Furnham is an adjunct professor at the Norwegian Business School, and has held lectureships at the University of Oxford and UCL. He has three master’s degrees and three doctorates. He has published more than 1,300 peer-reviewed papers and 98 books. He formed a consulting company more than 30 years ago, which he still runs.

‘Stop giving a shit about every little thing’

The editor has allowed me 800 words to give you the secret to academic happiness, but I can sum it up in eight: stop giving a shit about every little thing. To be honest, it doesn’t even need the “about every little thing”. But I should probably expand a bit, and not least because I get paid by the word.

In case my head of department is reading this and I sound overly nihilistic, I need to provide some clarification. I am not saying “don’t try”, and I am not saying you don’t have to work hard – whether we like it or not, academia isn’t a nine-to-five job. What I really mean is stop stressing about the things you cannot control – which, to be honest, is most things.

I also mean loosen your attachment to the standard metrics of academic success – “high impact” papers, measures of esteem, fellowships of exclusive organisations. Most of these things have little or no relevance outside the ivory tower – as a fun way to test this, explain to a non-academic friend how you paid £8,490 for the privilege of someone else posting your research data online.

A more grown-up way to put it is to have some perspective, but that way I don’t get to say “shit” in Times Higher Education.

An important point in the NGAS philosophy is that it applies predominantly to the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – those of self-esteem and self-actualisation. No amount of not giving a shit is going to help if you are underpaid, overworked and worrying where your next contract is coming from. If you are in this position, you have my utmost sympathy. But if you have survived that stage and are still feeling unfulfilled and miserable, then read on.

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Much of the current system equates academic happiness with academic success. But this can lead to the chasing of end points for the sake of accolade rather than enjoyment of the thing itself. The goal should be a well-written paper that, through the effort of yourself and your team, pieces together a story addressing a research question that is important to you. The goal should not be getting it past a specific editor, who has a particular target audience in mind. One of the healthier developments in recent years has been the uptake of the Declaration on Research Assessment (Dora) and the move to recognise papers for their own merit, not just for where they are published.

Likewise with funding – write the best grant proposal you possibly can, enjoy the process of thinking up new ideas, but accept that it might not be what the funders are looking for at that time and that you might need to repackage it and pursue it somewhere else.

And there are so many things that matter more than papers and grants. Strip away the stuff that is valued collectively by “the system” and focus on the stuff that matters to you. Be that teaching an enjoyable course with engaged students; widening participation in your field; answering a research question or finding the perfect bon mot for your writing. Academia sans merde gives you amazing opportunities to set your own path.

A corollary is to do things outside the academy that give you joy. If all you have in your life is your work, it is much easier for work to overwhelm you when things don’t go according to plan.

Not giving a shit doesn’t mean not caring about others. Another advantage of stepping away from externally defined success is that it is likely to reduce bad behaviour. The zero-sum model of perceived excellence, where only a select few principal investigators can win and everyone else loses, promotes toxicity. Focusing on actual excellence can be done with others, and everyone can win.

Hopefully, I have persuaded you of the case for caring less. But doing it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Letting go takes commitment. You need to work at it, especially in the face of the little siren voices that say you need more success to be happy.

A particular temptation is comparison. Never give in to this one. If there is one sure-fire way to be miserable in academia, it is to compare yourself with other academics and their externally broadcast achievements. Bear in mind that those broadcasts are about achievements framed in defined (and quite artificial) terms, not about happiness or fulfilment. If you focus on what matters to you, the consequences will be of far greater value.

John Tregoning is professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London and author of Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them.

‘What works for me is having a sense of agency and deriving satisfaction from completion’

Working in academia is about having a growth mindset – fundamentally, it is about change: encouraging learning in others, demanding growth of ourselves.

In this line of work, does it make any sense to talk about trying to achieve a single state, such as “happiness”? Is there a better term? Or a better way to consider what “happiness” means for academics?

Happiness is the oldest term of them all, but there is no shortage of attitudes that have tried to take its place – practising mindfulness, engaging in self-care, being resilient, finding awe, slowing down, doing less. I am rather allergic to fads, but to each your own way of articulating what brings you fulfilment. In the academic growth mindset, that itself can be overwhelming – yet another list of things one should do better. And wholly unappealing as another optimisation problem – how do I best make myself feel good?

If “feeling good” is even the goal. Or should a term like “happiness” serve as shorthand for an individually defined combination of factors that allows one to be professionally effective while maintaining equanimity and a strong sense of oneself as a whole person?

That’s a mouthful. Rather than seek definitions or subject ourselves to additional external pressures – I will practise mindfulness! I will meditate! I will relax! – let’s consider more generally what it takes to be whole in academia.

One must be honest with oneself about what brings satisfaction and what doesn’t. The ground question for me is, what makes you feel like you’re expanding instead of contracting? As I am an avid chamber musician, playing music is a big one for me. It is the one activity that requires such a different set of skills and perspectives and such focus that I’m taken away from everything else in my life.

At the same time, one has no time or bandwidth to hang on to anything but the most life-giving essentials. I used to play with music groups locally, but after having two children I had to admit that rehearsals weren’t giving me enough of a lift to justify budgeting the time for them.

So it’s a process, not a single solution. One should step back once in a while – is this still working for me, or is this combination of work and personal choices from last year increasingly stressful? Trying to keep up weekly chamber music sessions and my daily 5K run made me grumpy, and I’ve come to appreciate that the occasional jog and five minutes of violin practice before seeing my kids off to school are enough to make me much more amicable in the rest of my life.

Which brings me to perhaps the hardest thing: to declare that taking time out from tackling one’s never-ending to-do list is worthwhile. Doing so belongs in one’s daily schedule as much as anything else does. Other people are depending on me – but I am also depending on myself to come through for them, and to do that I need to pay attention to me, too.

And if it’s about me, then the choices are not necessarily intuitive and always personal. Those buzzwords are starting places, but whether seeking mindfulness makes you mellow or mad depends on you. Maybe I pull one all-nighter to finish a grant proposal because seeing it off will give me the freedom of mind to tackle – even enjoy – the next day’s work. Sounds hellish and unhealthy to many, but I know it suits me: doing what “makes more sense” – putting it off and getting a good night’s rest – can instead make me a grumpy ogre.

I have only slowly acknowledged that what works for me is having a sense of agency and deriving satisfaction from completion. Academic research is such a brutal exercise in delayed gratification that a crucial element is being able to put my mind or hands to something and just finish it.

Each moment balanced against another is a triumph. Working into the night to complete a manuscript, then saying “no” to meetings can allow me to leave work early and celebrate my daughter’s birthday with friends. I still can’t do everything. I’m still running around. But when I take the agency to make these choices, I am, dare I say, happy.

Jessica Seeliger is associate professor in pharmacological sciences at Stony Brook University, in Stony Brook, New York.