For years, I keep telling people that I need to work a lot in order to stay on top of things. Gone are the days of the professor sitting in their office thinking, or only showing up to teach after spending hours in a smoky coffee shop reading and writing. No, the 21st century professor is more of a small business owner, dealing with immense administrative burdens like hiring and time sheets, reimbursements, purchasing, health and safety, scheduling exams, financial reporting, teaching assistant duty forms, and so on. The thing is, none of these responsibilities has much to do with a professor delivering the teaching and research missing of the university. But more on this later.
I had a very busy several months last semester. I taught two courses, one of them new with a lab, which I built from scratch, and grant proposals, research travels, all alongside graduate student mentoring and performing research. I decided to track my work hours for a month. And the outcome was shocking.
I kept a spreadsheet open on my computer and marked an ‘X’
in an hour slot if I performed work activities for more than 30 minutes. I did
travel for one week, which is not abnormal for me, I travel for work about 25%
of the time. I also had COVID for a week, which slowed me down a little, but basically worked, slept, worked, slept for a couple of days.
I worked a total of 253 hours in the month of October. Put another way, I worked more than 63 hours per week on average. That’s more than 50% more than what a regular work week should be. Fortunately, I’m not a very good sleeper.
I’m not arguing for more money (though I wouldn’t say no), professors earn a decent salary. But what is clear, more support is needed. I’d argue that I shouldn’t be doing about 30% of the tasks I spend my time on.
Why I work so much
I love what I do. Doing research is my jam. I also really enjoy teaching and put a lot into my courses. Because of these loves, I do work a lot on research and teaching. These are what I consider productive work, where I fulfill the core responsibilities of my job for the university. However, the administrative side of my job has increased substantially over the past 15 years, to the point where I work a 10-hour day and have done no productive work, instead doing busy work.
Why this increase in administrative work? Part of the answer is increasing oversight and regulation from the provincial government. The other part is what the late David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”. I don’t mean to denigrate perfectly well-meaning individuals who also work hard, but the massive growth in the bureaucratic staff in universities has resulted in more busy work for everyone. The bureaucracy of a university includes those that do not directly deliver a university’s mission but have power to institute procedures and policies that affect those that provide the mission. Bureaucratic units, according to Graeber, gain power and momentum by growing in size, creating more procedures, and making themselves necessary.
Beyond this, are the emails. Oh, the emails. I get 150-230 emails a day. As I write this post, I have 8,411 unread emails. And this is after I marked all emails as read that were received before last November. I get daily review requests, queries from prospective graduate students, and journals asking me to write manuscripts for them. My university also does most of its paperwork by emailing pdfs, which has a high error rate (e.g., students not getting paid, visa letters not being sent to visiting researchers, etc.), requiring more time to fix things. So, my solution is to basically ignore many emails. It would take at least half of every workday to simply reply to the emails sent to me.
What are the solutions?
Obviously, this workload is not sustainable. But what can be done? Well, I’m not willing to reduce my commitment to teaching and research. So, either I continue to work 60 hours a week, or I try to cut back on other demands. But I already say no daily.
Institutionally, the university can do much better. My job contract specifies 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% administration. But I work more like 40-40-50. One solution is that I track my administrative hours, and my department charges bureaucratic units for my time beyond the 20% (which should be 8 hours a week). This money could then be used to hire administrative support for professors.
Regardless of the mechanism, more support needs to be provided to professors. I recently travelled to Germany for a research meeting and not once did the professor deal with any logistics of my visit. Instead, it was an administrative person embedded in the research group that dealt with everything. It would be amazing if I did not need to fill out doodle polls every day to organize meetings, or handle routine paperwork. I could be so much more impactful at delivering the university’s mission. This is especially needed for those of us running large research groups and laboratories, which comes with a lot of administrative stuff.
Final thought
This post is not meant to be an exercise in complaining. Rather, its about the effective and efficient delivery of our teaching and research duties. Professors doing administration for administration’s sake is a waste of taxpayer money. More than this, I hear from junior faculty about how stressed they are and that there are too many administrative hurdles and too much paperwork. This is about protecting people and their mental health. People who got into this business to have impact through their research and teaching. And that promise of impact is being taken away from them.
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