How to restore work-life balance in academia

There’s recently more and more discussion about what would happen if academics would stop structurally doing overwork, and instead work according to contract – which will in many cases mean 40 hours a week. It was the topic of a feature piece in Nature two weeks ago, and the topic has been discussed repeatedly by academics on social media and around the coffee corner. So what is the problem, and how can it be solved?

First things first. What does work-life balance mean and why should we have it? Clearly it doesn’t mean that one can never work outside office hours or work hard in a particular week, and then take it a little easier in another week. The issue is not to demand the right to work according to rigid hours. And I also don’t think anyone would protest if the unpaid overwork were very limited, say an hour or two per week. But in reality, we are talking here of unpaid overwork that easily amounts to 20-35% of one’s contractual hours (and one ends up working 48-55 hours a week structurally). The demand is to limit such massive structural overwork.

Why care about work-life balance?

There are so many answers to this question. One is that life is about more than work, even if you love your work: there are friends and lovers, children and relatives, household chores and hobbies, politics and community engagement, and the need to spend enough time on selfcare, doing exercise, or going out to enjoy nature. Several of these are also needed to stay mentally healthy. If you work structurally 50+ hours a week, some of this will come under pressure. The nice aspects of the job are no reason to effectively demand that academics should no longer have a rounded, balanced, healthy life. Everyone has a right to decent work, and that includes being able to enjoy these non-work related goods.

Second, even if a particular individual would prefer to work more, this should not become the norm. And that is the problem: structural overwork has become totally normalised in academia. It is endemic. That means that it is very difficult to refuse to go along with doing structural overwork, as the typical amount of work expected from an academic can’t be done in 40 hours. If in the current system one sticks to 40 hours, one is very likely to either let down one’s students, or the junior scholars whom one mentors and the service one provides to the field, or else to give up (most of) one’s research time.

Third, if the second point is true (as I think it is), then there will be a bias in academia against people who cannot do overwork, or who, when they do overwork, do so at a great personal cost – think of academics with exceptional care duties. Since carework is still gendered, it also leads to (an increased risk of) making academia less attractive to women, whereas more diversity among the producers of scholarly and scientific knowledge, and of those who teach it, is a good thing, for epistemic and pedagogical reasons.

What are the causes?

To know how to address work-life balance in academia, we must first know what the causes are. These can be different in different countries and different disciplines/institutions. In the Netherlands we discovered that in the last two decades the number of students had gone up massively, but the funding for universities had not gone up to the same degree. Long story cut short: our universities are all publicly funded, and receive from the government two streams of money that are given directly to the universities: one is “public funding for education” – and this is dependent on the number of students; the other, “public funding for research”, was frozen by a cabinet’s decision a decade or two ago. Given that the numbers of students grew very fast, there was increasingly insufficient money to pay for research time, and hence most (assistant/associate/full) professors effectively did more teaching and had virtually no real time to do research within contractual hours. In addition, the number of those teaching without research time and on fixed-term contracts started to rise massively. Hence in our case, a structural deficit of about 1 billion euro per year for all universities was part of the problem – something that we were able to change after 10+ years of writing analyses and polite lobby’ing, and an additional 4 years of street-level activism (about which I will write another post another day, since I am hoping lessons can be learnt for other countries where the universities are equally in financial troubles).

But there are other causes. One is the increasing use of competition as an allocation-mechanism in academia. Now, I do think there are some countries that could use more of this, e.g. where hires are still largely based on nepotism. But for other academic systems where this is not the case, increased competition has led to academics working very hard to acquire the basic things one needs to do one’s work as an academic – like research funds. Here’s a local example: in the Netherlands, PhD candidates are generally employees and pay no fees; instead, professors need to raise the money to hire them (there are also some very limited grant schemes where a candidate can submit a proposal themselves, backed up by a professor). In some disciplines, PhDs could be funded by industry; in other disciplines, almost all PhD and postdoc positions are funded by national or European Research Councils, who distribute research grants on a competitive basis to professors, who then hire the PhD-candidates and postdocs. So professors write grants (which easily takes a month or two, especially if one has little experience in doing this), spend a week or two preparing for the actual interview, support colleagues who write grants, participate in mock interviews, review grant proposals as an anonymous referee, serve on the grant awarding committees, and so forth. All of this takes an enormous amount of time. And the success rates of those applications are so low (between 10-25%) that many excellent proposals don’t get funded. All in all, it’s a very inefficient system – but that’s invisible to those who think the time of academics is not scarce and has no (opportunity-) cost. And that is, alas, what many of these policies and institutions seem to assume.

Another important source of competition is the great disbalance between the number of people with PhD degrees who would like an academic job, and the number of available vacancies. Academics on the job market will feel constantly chased to do more and publish more, so as to improve their chances at getting a job. This explains also in part why the journals are under such immense pressure. The number of submissions increases, and it is also increasingly difficult to find referees (I’ll offer a solution below).

Another cause is the increase in bureaucracy and systems of accountability, while at the same time a relative decline in support staff who do hands-on support, and the increase in staff who are engaged with control and bureaucratic systems, as well as marketing and management. If I tell my friends who work in the private sector that I do not have a secretary who organises my agenda, or who submits my reimbursement claims, or that I myself impute my students’ grades into an online university system, they stare at me in disbelief. I do a lot of ‘extra’ work that academia desires from me (raising reserach funds, supervising and mentoring many PhDs and Postdocs, serving on various sorts of national or university’s committees, societal outreach, and so on). Yet I receive very little practical hands-on support (except if I raise the funds to hire someone, which will most often then be a student). No TAs, no support staff to help with administration? Very little. Given my expertise, and the fact that I do a lot of work that could be done well (probably much better!) by a secretary, one wonders about how inefficient this is. But for the university, there is no perceived inefficiency, since I almost always do these kinds of administrative tasks on evenings and at weekends and simply work many more hours; it’s my own self-care and the time I have for family and friends and hobbies that suffers.

What are the solutions?

To some extent, solutions are context-specific and depend on what the causes are. In the Netherlands, increasing the overall budget for universities was a necessary part of the solution, although sadly the government choose for a strings-attached-model that (at least in the short run) further increased workloads, ironically. (I will explain this another time, it would be a degression for the topic of this post, which is already getting very long).

The first part of the solution is this: join a union. I mean, that this isn’t obvious is surprising to me, just like I’ve been many times surprised to discover how many of my colleagues are not a member of a union, or only became a member of the union when they got into some sort of conflict. Sure, the unions are not perfect. I also have various points of critique on our unions, but without them, things will only get worse. And not joining a union means freeriding on the contributions of colleagues who enable the unions to do their work.

Another solution is that universities as organisations need to be fully aware of the workload implications of every initiative or new policy they implement. The good news is that, at least where I work, it has now become acceptable to raise the issue of workload; when I first started raising this topic, about 10 years ago, I received quite a bit of backlash from colleagues who felt it was inappropriate to raise this issue, “as we are already such a privileged group in society”, or “if it’s too much, you should find another job”. This has changed dramatically over the last ten years, with more and more academics raising their voices on these matters. I guess too many of us have heard our children say “why do you always work?” or “I want to speak to your boss”.

Universities should also critically examine their existing policies and rules, and ask whether these can’t be simplified so as to demand less time from academics. For example, one might wonder whether teaching administration really requires so many forms. And why there are fewer hands-on support staff than in the past.

Would such institutional changes be enough to reduce workloads? I doubt it.

Another source of increased work pressure has been created by technological change – more precisely: that it has become extremely easy to send someone an email and ask them something. Email has become a true problem. I recently received the following autoreply to an email I sent: “Thanks for your communication. Unfortunately, the ease of email comes at a price. If I would answer all emails in the way that we would deem polite, this would take up a very substantial part of my time and come to the detriment of the more complex and fundamental activities that are crucial in the end. Hence please accept my apologies for brevity, non-response or delays. If you really want to capture my attention, write me a letter.” I understand this move (although I would not encourage writers to send a letter). Some of us have internalised the norm that we must respond to all emails. But it comes at a cost that has become prohibitive for some of us. So either we agree, academy-wide, to the rule that it is OK not to respond to certain emails, including all those from ‘outsiders’ who want something from us (that does NOT include journals asking us to review, where it is a no-brainer that one should respond with yes or no as soon as one can); or else those of us who can no longer bear with the email avalange must set up such an automatic reply. I think we’re going to see many more of such automatic responses in the future.

In addition, I think there is still a major issue with ourselves, on at least two levels. The first is that it would help if we would all agree that we should do our fair share of the slack & service work, and what that would entail. Slack & service work can be work that needs to be done locally, e.g. stepping in to cover teaching for a colleague who is ill, but also any other kind of (largely invisible) work, like refereeing papers that have been submitted to journals, writing tenure and promotion assessments, serving on PhD-examination committees, assessing grant proposals, and similar work. Here, I think the only way to reduce workloads is that we all commit to the rule of “reciprocity + 1”. This means, you do as much of this work as you demand from the system (= our colleagues!), plus you add a little bit extra to what you do in order to give the system some oxygen. Many of these types of peer-assessment are generally not done by (very) junior scholars, yet junior scholars also take part in this system. Many PhD candidates submit papers to journals, yet many of them do not yet have the expertise to review papers themselves. So in order to add oil to these machineries, I think we need to be willing to review [the number of referee reports we have received as well as one for the editor’s work + 1 for each paper we submitted in order to add oxygen/oil to the system]. If you submit a paper and receive 2 reports, you should be willing to contribute 4 referee reports to the system. I am pretty sure most of us can (roughly) reconstruct such an overview/balance sheet for ourselves and then keep track towards the future. If you’ve received more from the system than what you’ve given, you have a strong reason not to decline when asked to review; when you’ve given more than what you’ve asked according to the “reciprocity +1” rule, you can decline without feeling guilty. This should be a norm we impose on ourselves, since otherwise we add to the workload of others by not doing our fair share (and to the workload of the editors who have to work endlessly to find reviewers). If we would all accept this rule, and stick to it, it should also reduce the turn-over time for journal submissions, which is another bonus effect.
Clearly, this might have as an effect that some people will discover that they should review more and will have less time to write papers; but that would be fine, since first of all one might think that there are already too many papers published, and secondly, these extra-papers would otherwise be written by freeriding on the work of others – and hence on taking from their leisure and family time.

The other change that is needed is within ourselves, and will only apply to some of us. This is something that I have learnt the hard way, because my friends who do not work in academia kept telling me. We can just do less. That means, lowering our ambitions, also in terms of the number of papers we write, the number of PhD-candidates we supervise, how often we accept to serve on a committee, the number of events we organise, and so on. And also: not always feeling responsible for all the problems in our institution. Learning to say ‘no’ to concrete requests from others, as well as to resist internalised social norms (e.g. of whether one should feel responsible for a collective problem). Here too, there should be a norm of ‘doing one’s fair share’, but I don’t think it can be quantified. Also, my hunch is that there is a gender dimension to this: we don’t take ‘no’ as easily from a woman, and in my observation, women also have a harder time to say no without giving a full explanation of why they say no. But we don’t have to. If something is not part of our set of responsibilities, and we’ve done our fair share of picking up the slack/acting reciprocally, then we should not explain to others why we say no. It’s our life, our time, and hence entirely our decision to take on extra work or not, within the constraints of the demands of fairness.

So what would happen if academics would work 40 hours right now? It would dramatically change the culture in academia. Many of the things we do now, we wouldn’t have time left to do, such as outreach to society, but also most of our research (at least, that would be the case for the disciplines where it is impossible to delegate research to PhDs and Postdocs, as some lifesciences and medical sciences seem to do as their standard model). We would also have to say ‘no’ to many legitimate requests that fall now in the category of ‘I could do this and it would do much good for someone, but it really is beyond what’s morally required to take on me’. Moreover, a healthy and just academia also needs staff who organise around important topics such as improving social safety, anti-discrimination, the difficult position of first-generation students and staff, decolonizing the curriculum, and so forth. All of this too requires attention, dedication, and time that is no part of our 40-hours contract. (Some academics have ‘service’ as part of their contract, in which case they could see those types of work as falling under ‘service’; as far as I know, ‘service’ is not a category used in my country).

I am not sure that in the current circumstances working 40 hours would make all of us happy. We clearly need to make sure our institutions change, and any macro-circumstances that are currently hindering work-life balance. And we should also talk about spreading the work more fairly. Why don’t we agree to a rule such as “reciprocity+1” for the common goods in academia where it is easy to freeride? (Or another rule in case our discussion would show that there is a better alternative).

And some of us need to take a long walk to think about whether we should make changes to our own ambitions and commitments, for our own sake. Perhaps we’ll need quite a few walks; I know that this issue has kept me busy for several years, and many, many walks. Just ask yourself this question: assume you continue as you do until you retire, and on the day you retire, you die. Would you be satisifed? Or would you have regrets? If so, it’s time to reconsider your priorities.

Some have felt that the only feasible solution is to quit academia. Yet there is another less drastic solution, which is to move to a part-time contract. Staying in academia and moving part-time (if one has a legal right to do so) is a risky strategy, since the only thing one knows for sure is that one takes a pay cut and has a bit less teaching; whether one can effectively protect time-off and have fewer meetings, is a big question mark. The hope is that by making a deliberate choice to reduce one’s contractual hours, one might feel [psychologically] in a better position to decline requests that increase one’s workload. I’ve opted to do this (I reduced my contract to 80%), and will find out in September, when my sabbatical ends and I return to teaching & all the meetings, how that will work out. I know for sure I will need mega-self-discipline in saying no and in not feeling responsible for all the problems I see around me in academia. This will be a major challenge, but I will in part use the “reciprocity +1” rule to make things easier for myself. Not sure how this experiment of part-time work will work out, but I want at least to have tried it.