The Academic Work Life is Not for Everyone
Will a white-collar trait from pandemic life persist?
The War on College escalated across many fronts over the past decade, but in an ironic twist a lot of white-collar workers suddenly want to live like academics.
One of the obvious effects of pandemic life was the degree to which work-from-home dynamics took off. For those workers who had the space for a home office, it made sense. In this area — and possibly only in this area — academics were way ahead of the curve. Many profs work from home on non-teaching days. It saves on commuting time and other workplace distractions. For those of us without in-person labs, working remotely is not a challenge. All we need is a computer, wifi, caffeine, and a cozy-but-not-too cozy workspace. It allows for the division of labor between researcher and teacher to be by the day rather than by the hour.
To be clear, professors do not work less than other professions.1 It is simply that we have more flexibility with when and where we do that work. [Have you been doing work this weekend?—ed. You’re damn right I’ve been doing work this weekend! Is that a typical occurrence?—ed. Yeah, it’s pretty goddamn typical, now go way!]
As the COVID-19 pandemic has eased and people have returned to work, the question is how many folks would continue to adhere to that pandemic lifestyle. The Wall Street Journal’s Anne Marie Chaker wrote about it for the WSJ’s weekend edition:
When the pandemic began, many professionals stuck at home opened their laptops on Saturday mornings. They just never stopped: Saturdays and Sundays are starting to resemble Monday through Friday, with hours of emailing and stretches of catch-up time. Some find the spillover of work into the weekend to be invasive, with kids’ soccer games to date nights to religious services to attend. But employees acknowledge that work-filled weekends are the trade-off for hybrid office time and flexible schedules that allow for midmorning gym workouts, afternoon school pickups, dog walks and grocery-store runs….
A new study of 134,260 employees across more than 900 organizations by the workforce-analytics software firm ActivTrak found that people now work an average of 6.6 hours on the weekend, up 5% from 2021. One of the biggest leaps in weekend work came from computer hardware industry workers, whose weekend workload increased 31% to 11.5 hours, according to the study.
Microsoft Corp.’s Work Trend Index published last March found that weekend work was 14% higher than it was in 2020. Microsoft measures average time spent on its Teams app and can see that a significant amount of work is happening during a second shift at night and now on weekends, too.
The key word in that excerpted section is “trade-off.” The understanding has to be that working on the weekend frees up more time during the week for, you know, not working. Because most academic work is relatively solitary, that’s a viable possibility. I do wonder whether that will hold for companies that keep trying to cajole workers back into the office.
More importantly, I fervently believe there is no one right way to organize one’s work life. For some people, working during the weekend is no big deal. For others, however, the separation of work from life doesn’t quite reach Severance-level extremes — but it comes close.
Anyway, back to the grindstone…
We definitely work less than some professions. One of my favorite memories of my brother was his reaction to a colleague of mine complaining about how much work he had to do. An investment banker at the time, he would occasionally call me from his office at 10 PM on a Friday night. My brother earned enough money to retire at age 50 and I hereby stipulate he put in the hours to earn that retirement.
I was an agricultural economist once, and the joke was told about the brother who had escaped the family farm into academia and the one who remained
Academic brother: This semester is really tough. They've got me teaching 12 hours
Farmer brother: Well, that's a long day, but at least it's easy work
I have been an audio teacher at a Community College since 2001. I am now the Dept Chair and I can tell you that since taking on this extra role, I work 75-90 hours each week. I teach several courses while also running a busy broadcasting department. I love my work. My amazing students range in ages from 18-70 with an incredibly diverse array of ethnicities and backgrounds continue to inspire me. The extra annual “stipend” to work as Chair doesn’t begin to cover the amount of time I work. My only complaint is the usual in academia: weak leadership and mismanagement of the college finances that causes far too many problems for us all.