8 February 2018Times Higher Education 5LEADER
Some of the stories will
shock. Others, while less
dramatic, describe thetoll of a working life that
for too many feels likebeing asked to juggle
several balls more thanis physically possible
Hell hath no fury like an
academic told to be grate-
ful for their long summer
holidays.
When Lord Adonis
suggested as much as part
of his barrage of attacks
on the supposedly over-
paid, underworked
academic classes, he said
that he expected a “flood
of angst” in response.
He duly got it.
The flood becomes a deluge in our cover
story, which draws on our very first survey of
university staff attitudes to work-life balance.
More than 2,000 people working in higher
education took part, with responses from
52 countries (the majority from the UK, the
US and Australia).
The results paint a picture of a career that,
for all its upsides – and there are many – can
be deeply damaging to individuals’ health and
happiness.
Some of the stories will shock: take, for
example, the woman who terminated a preg-
nancy because she was on a short-term
contract and did not feel able to start a family
in such circumstances.
Others, while less dramatic, describe the
toll of a working life that for too many feels
like being asked to juggle several balls more
than is physically possible.
The risk of a survey such as this is that
responses tend to cluster at the extremes:
those at the end of their tether may be more
likely to take the time to say so.
But even if they are to one end of the spec-
trum, their experiences highlight how
unmanageable many are finding university
careers as they are currently structured.
Nevertheless, it can also be useful to hear
from those who are doing very well but who
recognise that, structurally, all is not well in
the state of higher education.
Such a view was articulated by the math-
ematician Eugenia Cheng in a recent episode
of the BBC Radio 4 programmeThe Life
Scientific.
Cheng, who is now scientist in residence
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
described the relief she felt a few years ago
when she secured a full-time lectureship at the
University of Sheffield.
“Doing postdocs is fun, but it’s very stress-
ful because it takes basically an entire year to
go through an academic hiring process. You
start your one-year postdoc and you immedi-
ately have to start applying for your next job.
So getting that permanent job is such a relief,”
she explained.
Returning to the UK after stints in the USand France for the permanent post at Sheffield
was, however, “a culture shock”.
“Things have been changing – the higher
education system has been gradually brutal-
ised,” Cheng said. “I really wanted to come
back and contribute to the education system
that had given me so much. Some people just
want to do research, but for me education has
always been really important so I wanted to
contribute not just to educating students [at
Sheffield] but to the education system, and
to guiding the way that a university should be- I was really excited about that.”
Reality soon bit. “I loved teaching, but you
get stuck into the academic year and you find
that you don’t have any time to do research at
all...There was so much administration and
bureaucracy, and at the start of each academic
year you had a realisation that you weren’t
going to take a breath until it was all over in
August after the summer resit exams, when
you’d have two or three weeks to frantically
get some research done.
“You barely have enough time to remember
what on earth it was you were doing a year
ago, and then it all starts again. One summer
it was just starting up again in September, and
I thought, ‘Gosh, this is how it’s going to be
until I retire.’”
This is not how it should be. Someone
with Cheng’s obvious passion for her subject,
for teaching as well as for research, and clear
talent for communicating something as poten-
tially impenetrable as pure mathematics,
should not be quitting, and leaving teaching
behind altogether, in order to find the time
to do research.
Hers is not a tale of personal woe, but it is
a tale of a system that is in important ways
broken. And as the accounts in our cover story
reveal, it is breaking too many who work in it.
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Academia’s demands are taking too great a toll on individuals’ health
and happiness, as our first work-life balance survey shows
Campus crush
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