When the eight months that marked finishing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and being on the academic job market simultaneously finally ended with an accepted offer, all I could do was exhale. Well, exhale and lay on the couch blearily watching television, sick as a dog.
Once I recovered, I was in touch with the committee who hired me, letting them know when I planned to arrive in town (a month and a half before my contract started) and that I would get started program-planning once I got settled in.
I immediately received an email in return from one particular committee member, castigating me for working ahead of my contract and announcing (with plenty of cc:s), that clearly I wasn’t up on the most recent Marxist theory. (Thank goodness Marxist theory wasn’t my area of expertise.)
The rest of the committee, to their credit, swooped in to blunt the damage of that email and make me feel welcome.
The problem is, he had a point
One of the problems of academia is that it has no boundaries. The vaunted flexibility that means we don’t have to be in an office between 9 and 5 every day also means there’s no container for our work.
Despite media and political claims to the contrary, academics work far more than 40 hours a week. In fact, you could argue that academics work all the damn time. They work evenings. They work weekends. They work holidays. There’s always more work to be done, more tasks that need to be squeezed in between classes and research and advising and all of the other commitments that constitute academic work at every level.
And yet despite working around the clock, on vacations, on holidays, (American) academics are typically paid for the nine months of the year that map onto the fall and spring semesters’ teaching. (Yes, some schools pay the 9 months’ salary out in 12 months, but that’s not the same as a 12 month salary.)
And that’s only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a tenure-track or post-doc position – adjuncts get paid by the course. The logic of the academic wage is made most explicit right there.
Forget overtime. There’s an immense amount of unpaid labor built in to the academic system under the rubric of vocation. You’re supposed to love it so much that you do it even though you aren’t getting paid. One might even argue that you’re structurally forced to do it, because it’s all that unpaid labor that gets you tenure or a promotion or a slim chance at a job that 400 other people are also applying for.
The unpaid labor is what is structurally rewarded. The less-valued labor is paid for.
This is some messed-up shit.
Straight to burnout
The most successful academics I know said no. They said no to committee work that didn’t serve them and wasn’t in line with what their colleagues were doing. They said no to being too flexible with teaching schedules. They said no to working all their waking hours.
And yet, the job market being what it is, graduate students are urged to take on more, do more, publish more, teach more, serve more, all in the name of trying to beat out peers to win that job that has, let’s face it, something like 400:1 odds.
Better departments protect assistant professors so they can achieve tenure, but the downsizing of the faculty means that assistant professors, more and more, are being burdened with too much work to do the work that gets them tenure.
This is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable personally, and its unsustainable institutionally.
I hear story after story of people who are burnt out, who have no enthusiasm or energy left for the work that they love or at least like, because they’ve had no time to recharge.
This does not make for happiness, and it’s unlikely to get better.
There are other options
There are options other than working crazy hours for not enough pay.
Set reasonable time boundaries, and triage your work. You know as well as I do that some work actually matters, and some doesn’t. Spend the bulk of your best time on the work that matters. Do the rest as well as you can given the time remaining.
Benchmark yourself against your colleagues. If you’re doing more than they are, either in teaching or in service, let some things go.
Know that there are non-academic options that really are 9-5, which leaves an unbelievable amount of time free for things that aren’t work. And they pay all year round, too.
Value your own time, work, and expertise. They’re worth a lot.
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
This is a very salutary reminder. I recently started my first post-academic job. It’s a contract position, and while in some ways I’d prefer a salaried job (with benefits!), I am finding that being paid by the hour is *very* useful for forcing the mind-tweak necessary to make a total break from the academic mindset. I remind myself daily that I must not work more hours than the organization I’ve contracted with can afford to pay me for, and there is no time worked that I will not bill for. I cannot allow the long mental list of things that need doing for this job to become the stuff I use to procrastinate from my own research: no staying up late tweaking the organization’s website for hours at a time, for example, and work-related email is to be handled in blocks of billable time I set aside for that task. I’m finding the whole experience strangely liberating.