While much has been written on the corporatization of universities, its effect on time begs further attention: Corporatization has sped up the clock.
A 2001 survey conducted by MIT compared university faculty and CEOs. Seventy-eight percent of faculty members reported that “no matter how hard they work, they can’t get everything done” compared with 48 percent of CEOs, and 62 percent of faculty reported that they “feel physically or emotionally drained at the end of the day” compared with 55 percent of CEOs.
What is it about the university that makes people feel unable to cope? It speaks volumes that Harry Lewis and Philip Hills, in Time Management for Academics, deem it necessary to state that “we have a right to health” and “we have a right to a private life, to a family life, to some waking time on personal projects (even to keep up with the mundane necessities of existence: getting ourselves housed, clothed, and fed, paying bills, attending to basic maintenance); and so a right to limit our total working time in such a way as to allow for these activities.” The fact that we need to give ourselves permission to eat, bathe, and pay bills reflects our loss of balance in the current university climate.
The time crunch is not just a personal issue. It is detrimental to intellectual work, interfering with our ability to think critically and creatively. Time-management books promise us relief, but they often make us feel inadequate. Our emphasis should be less on managing our time than on sustaining our focus in a culture that threatens it.
Academic work is by its nature never done. While flexibility of hours is one of the privileges of our profession, it can easily translate into working all the time or feeling that one should, particularly when the university, like many other corporations, presents the workplace as our true “family” and “community.” Furthermore, given the time and money required to get a Ph.D., and given its uncertain economic returns, most of us clearly pursue an academic career for idealistic rather than pragmatic reasons. And while believing in what one does is a key aspect of job satisfaction, idealism can also lead to overwork. The more committed we are to our vocation, the more likely it is that we will experience time stress and burnout.
No task diary will change the increasing workloads, the sped-up pace, and the instrumentalism that pervade the corporate university.
While the characters in David Lodge’s early campus novels had time on their hands — in Changing Places, Philip Swallow’s visiting position at Euphoria State University is spent experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll — today’s professor scans the bookshelf or the web for the quick time fix. Although there is plenty of advice out there, some of it, originating in the business sector, is manipulative if not Machiavellian.
Scribendi, an editing firm, recommends among its top 10 time-management techniques that you “use your grad students.” “Send the majority of undergrad complaints their way and have the grad students complete most of the marking,” the firm counsels. “If they’re going on to or are already in Ph.D. studies, it’s a good thing. You’re doing them a favor. If they’re not, well, it’s part of being a grad student. Just make sure to treat them nicely — maybe buy a pizza during midterm marking or occasionally meet them at the pub and buy a round.”
Such strategies are echoed by Anastasia Ailamaki and Johannes Gehrke’s “Time Management for New Faculty,” an article recommending that you “delegate as many tasks as possible to your administrative assistant: Try to avoid making copies, finding flight schedules, ordering items over the Internet, and printing papers.” Being driven, we drive others. These suggestions are blissfully ignorant of the fact that administrative assistants and graduate students don’t have unlimited time to devote to us, either, and that professors are dealing with the exact opposite of delegation. Many clerical tasks — ordering desk copies, preparing check requisitions, photocopying — have been added to their to-do lists. In the corporate university, it’s every academic for himself.
If you are struggling to regain work-life balance, most academic time-management literature will not leave you comforted. You may actually feel that you are not working hard enough. In his Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century, Gregory Colón Semenza, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, stipulates that “for the most part, an approximately 10-hour day is more than adequate for most academics, especially since we really can work for most of this time,” as opposed to the general work force, which wastes “a tremendous amount of time commuting to and from work, chit-chatting at the water cooler, and lunching for a full hour.”
Semenza’s own exemplary regimen “finds me at my desk no later than 7:30 a.m. and gets me ‘home’ no earlier than 6 p.m. or so. … Of course, I will frequently need to work extra hours — when I receive student papers, have to meet an article deadline, or take an hour during the day to visit the doctor.” Under the subhead of “Eight Days a Week,” he recommends that his readers “be smart about which work you save for the weekends": “If on a Thursday I realize that I’ll need to read two books and grade 10 papers by Monday, I’ll tackle the papers on Friday afternoon since I can more easily sneak in reading at various times and places over the weekend — in the living room while my wife reads her own book and my son naps, in the backseat on the way to Aunt Joanie’s barbecue, or in the beach chair while I catch some rays. I can update attendance books while watching the Yankees. I can copy edit a manuscript while sitting at the park.”
Phillip C. Wankat, in The Effective, Efficient Professor, recommends an academic work week of about 55 hours. He emphasizes that “family and personal life are important,” but when do we find time for them?
Much time-management advice is contradictory. On the one hand, we are told that we need to exercise, eat well, pursue hobbies, and socialize so we can work at optimal levels — but the postulated hours of work preclude actually doing so. A 55-hour week looks something like this: 9 a.m. to noon; 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.; 3:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., six days a week. We are confronted with a similarly relentless pace from the poet, critic, and academic Donald Hall, who argues that a research profile is possible even with a 4/4 teaching assignment when you “set … realistic daily and weekly goals.” He suggests protecting Saturdays for research and deferring marking and class preparation to “12 hours” on Sunday. Again, let’s break it down: This means working 8 a.m. to noon, 1 to 6 in the afternoon, and 7 to 10 at night — on Sunday!
Dean’s reports tend not to have sections for ‘offering support to colleague’ or ‘expressing enthusiasm for a project.’
We need to think critically about why time-management advice is so strikingly uniform: Keep a log to see where your time is “going,” schedule every day, establish short-term and long-term goals, organize your workspace, learn to say “no,” etc. While the dictum to plan, prioritize, and organize is not wrong, it tends only to exacerbate our anxiety over what might be called time poverty by always measuring it. Dividing our time pie into ever smaller and more precise segments is not a long-term solution.
Wankat recommends, when preparing for travel, to “pack enough work in your carry-on for at least two hours longer than the flight is supposed to last.” Ian Nelson, in Time Management for Teachers, urges them to fill every available time slot in their diary “as a powerful reminder of how little time you have. As long as you have some spaces in your diary it looks as though you have time in hand.”
Even the most well-intentioned time-management plans plug us into the wrong kind of time: scheduled time, which tends to exacerbate the feelings of fragmentation that result from juggling teaching, research, administration, student emails, and so on. The sense that there is never enough time produces panic, a feverish sense of being always behind.
The problems of time stress can’t be solved by better work habits, because time management does not take into full account the changes in the university. Rather, it focuses on the individual, often in a punitive manner. No task diary will change the increasing workloads, the sped-up pace, and the instrumentalism that pervade the corporate university. The fact that requests for information from some deans and directors to faculty now stipulate as a deadline “end of business Friday” or “COB” (close of business) makes clear that we increasingly are caught between two temporalities: corporate time and the time conducive for scholarly endeavors. In a 2003 paper, “Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work,” Oili-Helena Ylijoki and Hans Mäntylä observe that “true research takes — and must be allowed to take — all the time it needs,” an extraordinarily radical claim in the current climate.
The temporality of the corporate university also erodes the democratic potential of the university, which, as the pedagogy theorist Henry A. Giroux reminds us, is to encourage people “to think, to engage knowledge critically, to make judgments, to assume responsibility for what it means to know something, and to understand the consequences of such knowledge for the world at large.”
The time poverty engendered by corporatization has eroded collegiality, too. Corporatization has imposed an instrumental view not only of time but of one another. We are enjoined to spend our time in ways that can be measured and registered in accounting systems. But dean’s reports tend not to have sections with headings such as “helping a colleague figure out why a lecture didn’t go well” or “offering support to an overwhelmed junior colleague” or “expressing enthusiasm for a colleague’s new research project.” In a climate of accounting, such activities will fall by the wayside.
Something has to give. As Jane Tompkins has observed, “Nobody has time. … You can’t put a good conversation on your vita” and, as a result, “there is no intellectual life left in universities, or precious little, because people are too busy getting ahead professionally … to stop and talk to each other.” Many of the texts on time management actually advise against spending time “just” talking with colleagues. Yet talking with one another is essential.
The corporate university thrives on competition. Academics are encouraged to take an entrepreneurial approach to their work, to be ready to “leverage their assets,” and to be upwardly mobile rather than “tied” to a specific campus.
In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes that “the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, work force, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.”
An analogous transformation is certainly visible in our universities. Giroux remarks that “as higher education is corporatized ... campuses ... look more like malls.” They also feel like malls. Many if not most of us now run into our departments only to grab our mail or attend a meeting, and then we leave as quickly as we can. Academic rituals that were conceived of as community building are on the decline. Doctoral dissertations are examined via teleconference, a method that is welcomed as cost-effective and efficient. In this age of connectivity, actual connection is optional. As Sherry Turkle puts it in Alone Together: “Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed — and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”
The Slow movement urges us to immerse ourselves in local cultures, but our home departments are on the verge of becoming ghost towns. The hallways are empty because we work elsewhere, and we work elsewhere because the hallways are empty. Those of us in contractual positions are particularly vulnerable to isolation. Even departmental business no longer brings us together. Discussion has shifted to email or web forums, and when a meeting is called, people are, to use Turkle’s phrase, “there but not there": “In the world of paper mail, it was unacceptable for a colleague to read his or her correspondence during a meeting. In the new etiquette, turning away from those in front of you to answer a mobile phone or respond to a text has become close to the norm.” Turkle’s analysis rings true particularly at this time, when the atmosphere in the academic workplace is one of demoralization, overwork, and competition. The display of detachment is both symptomatic of the culture of busyness and a defensive response to it.
The individualism of the corporate university fosters self-blame and rewards competition. It pits us against one another. We must push back and insist on the importance of community as a challenge to the instrumentalism of corporatization. And we must recommit to the strong social support so vital to the intellectual and educational mission of the university.
Maggie Berg is a professor of English at Queen’s University, in Ontario. Barbara K. Seeber is a professor of English at Brock University, in Ontario. The University of Toronto Press just published their book, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy.
