First World War research, academia, and the life beyond
The title for this occasional series might need some work.
I spent a few days in Patterdale last summer with my estimable partner in crime, Lisa. We climbed Helvellyn on one of the hottest days of the year. (In case you’re wondering, this isn’t advisable.) We ascended through Grisedale and then up the vertiginous, winding Dollywaggon Pike.
At the top we came across this cross-mounted poppy, looking towards Ullswater. Remembrance reaches to some unlikely and not-that-easy-to-reach places.
Academics are people too. I’ve been turning over this phrase in my head for a while, in response to the increasing workload I see colleagues shouldering, and the almost exclusive focus which is demanded to achieve an academic career.
Ironically, feeling that I should be doing work instead has got in the way of me starting this blog more times than I can easily count. So, t
onight I’m just going to press ‘post’ before I see something shiny and wander off. Or look too long at the stack of books imploring me to read them.
Intellectual work of any form is subject to Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. How many days do you have to mark that pile of exam scripts? That’s how long it will take. When is that conference proposal due? It’ll be sent off late on that day. When is that article due? You know that if you’re around the deadline you will be far from the last to submit. I never fail to be struck by the irony of the elasticity of the majority of academic deadlines in comparison with the hard and fast deadlines the students we teach have to adhere to. Yes, of course, we’ve earned the privilege, and everyone else is in the same over-extended boat. But still.
It’s difficult to work back to when I first started thinking about the need to balance the personal and the professional effectively. Maybe it was in 2008, as I was finishing my PhD having just returned from a three-month interruption to deal with some family stuff. Maybe it was in 2009 as I was teaching a full load for the first time. Maybe it was in 2011, when I ended up needing to finish four articles in the same semester as I was doing three quarters of my teaching. It certainly crystallised as I was trying to finish my monograph in 2012 while jobhunting, and was still there after I finished as I was moving house and institution in 2013.
From my position in 2014, still (too) busy but without a major project on my plate for the first time since I started the PhD, I’m absolutely convinced of the need to keep active outside of academia, both mentally and physically. I wasn’t good at it when doing the above. I wish I’d continued to do some exercise, to get out and about, to reassert the importance of my mental health and physical health as, in the end, vital to my professional health. The uneven demands of work in the university aren’t conducive to maintaining regular activities outside of it. But that makes it even more important to do so. In the humanities we need to remember the importance of being human.
This isn’t just about me, though. I mentioned initially that this is a burden I see others shouldering. I hosted an #ecrchat in 2012 that looked at work-life balance, and found similar stories.
A variety of articles that I’ve linked in previous, unpublished versions of this piece are no longer current, but give a sense of how important an issue this is. Just to give a flavour, here’s one from the THES which perpetuates problematic stereotypes. The striking thing about these entries is the lack of time in the day to do anything apart from academic work. The limited time Ruth Farwell is able to devote to her beekeeping seems symptomatic of a wider problem, as are the rare dates Alice White is able to manage with her partner. Surely it isn’t right that we should be subjecting ourselves to this sort of unsustainable schedule?
There are, of course, wider issues about the shrinking budgets for Higher Education and the spread of casualisation in the academy that underlie this – from that point of view today, UCU’s Anti-Casualisation day of action, is apposite for this post.
I’ve also been impressed by others on twitter thinking and writing about health and wellbeing. Katie Lowe (@fatgirlphd) is great on being healthy, positive and getting things done; the thing that most recently inspired me to come back to this idea was some of Lucia L.’s tweets (@empathywarrior) about mental health and academia.
This would be a great service.
So, the point of this blog is to remind me, and to remind us, even to remind our students, that academics are people too. It’s OK to have external interests – no, it’s GOOD to have external interests. This blog will be about research and pedagogy. There might even be a bit of shameless self-promotion. But it’ll also be home to music and book reviews, recipes, comments about sport. Anything that comes to mind to write about. I want to demonstrate clearly that it’s possible for two sides of life to coexist in academia, and it’s good to write about all aspects of that life. It’s necessary, even, to write about the good things as well as the moments with which we struggle, to remind ourselves that it’s not one long unremitting tide of papers to write, essays to mark, conferences to attend, exams to mark, jobs to apply for and classes to teach.
Maybe it’s time for a new hobby. Or time to catch up with those friends you keep thinking you don’t have time to catch up with as you spend another night sitting fretting about that article and not achieving much. Spending time on yourself to relax is good – it can make you work effectively as much as take time you don’t have, and recharge those batteries in order to let you think clearly about work. Because we do need to be able to think clearly – more than anything, as academics, we need to be able to think clearly. And making space to think clearly comes, in part, from taking up a bit more space with leisure.
Academics Are People Too 