Love’s Labour: Work-Life Balance in Academia

Friday, 20 October 2017 7-minute read

There was a minor tiff on Twitter recently which was instigated by a controversial response to a survey by Times Higher Education on the work-life balance of academics. Igor Aharonovich, a material physicist at the University of Sydney, responded to this with the pernicious suggestion that for real academics, their work is their sole priority:

It is hard to give him the benefit of the doubt here. He is, at best, expressing an enviable love for his work, something in which he takes immense pride and from which he derives great satisfaction. But no matter how charitable I try to be, I find his attitude rather toxic, rubbishing the very question of a work-life balance as ‘silly’, valorising this idea of a ‘real academic’ as someone whose life is primarily defined by their work, as if all other priorities are less worthy, and using the ‘love’ of one’s work as a justification for overwork.

What irritates me the most about this line is its resonance with an age-old adage: choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. That’s utter drivel. Being able to ‘choose’ a career one loves is a rare privilege that is highly dependent on one’s circumstances. It’s easy to idealise choosing one’s dream job when one doesn’t have to make pragmatic compromises to make ends meet. A friend of mine said to me the other day, ‘I work in a bank not because I love banking, but because it pays the bills.’

Moreover, and once again at the risk of nailing my Marxist colours to the mast, I find this romanticised overlap between love and work belies the much deeper alienation of labour within capitalism. By characterising one’s job as something other than work, it places a burden on the worker to do more than is expected of them or what they are remunerated for in the name of initiative or passion. It paradoxically invests value in what they do while simultaneously lessening the need for compensation. This is something Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, summed up quite succinctly:

This ideology serves the increased exploitation and alienation of labour. This is why it finds its clearest expression in the professional world as an embodiment of a benign corporate culture. It was ironic that in response to Gorman, Kin Chan, a geneticist at the University of Ottawa who like Aharonovich insists that work didn’t feel like work because he was fascinated by it, responded by quoting Steve Jobs:

But these grandstanding homilies by businessmen barely acknowledges that the conditions of work are far from this idealistic. Academic labour is no different: it is an industry that relies upon people going over and above their official job description in things like research, mentorship, peer reviewing, advisory and supportive roles, pastoral care, et cetera.

Besides, this misunderstands the emotional toll that labour can take, even if one chooses a job one loves. As a doctoral candidate, I am acutely aware of the privilege of my circumstance: I have been given three years to read and write about Nadine Gordimer, an author whom I name as one of my favourites, whose prose I hold in high regard and whose politics I find inspiring. But just because I am doing something I love doesn’t mean I always love what I do. There are a few good days where I feel buoyed by new ideas, but on the whole the process of writing is slow and painful. My lasting memories of my one year’s worth of work so far is predominantly that of excruciating back pain and eye strain from sitting at a desk all day. I know I often need a break from all this. I have imploded on many occasions.

When people say this is what ‘real academics’ are like, I cannot help feeling inadequate and ashamed for being frustrated with and exhausted by what I ostensibly should ‘love’.

When people say this is what ‘real academics’ are like, I cannot help feeling inadequate and ashamed for being frustrated with and exhausted by what I ostensibly should ‘love’. That sentiment makes a number of judgemental assumptions. To make matters worse, there is a much wider disregard within society and public policy for the worth and value of academic labour, as exemplified by Andrew Adonis’ ill-informed mockery of academics as not working enough or having an easy life for not teaching over the summer. There are innumerable demands on our time and labour, and the anxiety that we are never doing enough, coupled with the pressure on us to do even more, is something that plagues everyone in academia, particularly postgraduate students and early-career researchers who are most vulnerable because of the precariousness of their careers. Reading through the responses to Aharonovich gives a clear indication of this. Twitter user J.B.S. Hotbrain hit the nail on the head:

Other academics were equally prompt in pointing out how unhealthy Aharonovich’s attitude was, emphasising that people matter as much as careers and that academics often have other priorities like family or childcare. S. Louise Pay made the following insightful and illuminating observation:

This career treadmill that academia is rapidly becoming is dangerous and harmful. It has already caused me great distress, and I have lost a lot of friends because I was too absorbed in work and had no energy for people and things outside. And chances are I’ll end up making the same mistakes all over again because of all the pressures that early-career academics and postgraduate students face. Still, some of the most inspiring academics I have worked with are those who have found some miraculous balance between their research, teaching, supervisions as well as doing the school run. Personally, I know I would have burnt out a long time ago if I didn’t find other ways to balance my time. I play korfball for my university in my spare time, and I dabble in photography now and then. Admittedly, though, that’s not enough and I still end up spending most of my time being burn out and exhausted, and thereby failing to work, compounding the guilt and frustration.

Still, what I find remains the wittiest and most illuminating insight into work-life balance within academia, and certainly the note on which I would like to end, is this absolute gem of a tweet:

Acknowledgements: My thanks to the various people with whom I had conversations on this subject over Twitter for all their illuminating insights, including those whom I’ve named above and also Ellie Mackin Roberts at the University of Leicester and the Institute of Classical Studies in London.