#4 After Academia: what we tell ourselves about academic work
In Higher Education, "work" has multiple, overlapping often contradictory connotations. But the system relies on institutional exploitation of many academics' sense of vocation.
By linking our identity to what we do professionally or the job title we hold we put ourselves in boxes and these boxes end up being our prison as we endlessly strive to live up to these identities. - Loa Tzu (Toaism)
I’m writing my first portion of this weeks’ blog in the British Library—just another of the seemingly limitless venues I’m lucky to have within walking distance of my flat. In the reading rooms here, I can once again sample that aura of dedication to deep thinking and weighty research. But depending on the kind of work I’m doing, that atmosphere can sometimes be almost too quiet, as though the air is pregnant with expectation. Profound work must be done here; doom-scrolling will not be tolerated.
Right now, I’m perched on a high stool in the foyer café, waiting for my friend, former colleague, and long-time collaborator on The Cinematologists Podcast, Neil Fox. It hasn’t been that long since he was in London for the launch of his book Music Films earlier in the summer. This is just a flying visit. He’s in town for a gig, I’m heading up to Leeds for the weekend for my mum’s birthday. But I’m looking forward to the brief check in.
I know he’s been reading this series, but so far, he hasn’t given me too many clues as to his reaction. I probably value his opinion the most, both on the content of these pieces and the overall concept. We have been working together on The Cinematologists podcast for nearly a decade. Next March will be the tenth anniversary of the show, which is quite a milestone considering we didn’t really have any inkling as to what we were doing when we started. But considering my life changes, this season of the show feels more significant than ever.
It’s telling that I used the word “work” to describe The Cinematologists. Podcasting has been something in a grey area as a definition of work. It aligns with my university career but has never been formally supported or included within my “official hours,” as it were.
Neil and I started the podcast back in Falmouth in 2015, to some degree jumping on the podcasting explosion. We thought we could produce something that wasn’t already out there—a show that was intellectually rigorous yet accessible, with interviews and live shows, but framed around the pleasure of talking about the films we shared an affinity for.
The “work” of producing the show fit around our regular teaching and research; we held screenings and live recordings at the university, and students helped with production. We created an eclectic mix of episodes, auto-didactically learning the skills of audio recording and editing, grew an audience base using social media when it didn’t feel so much of a chore to use and hellscape to be in. Without wishing to blow too much smoke the podcast has become quite well-known and respected.
In many ways, this work has been my creative/intellectual outlet. But there is an awful lot of time and labor involved. There is not just the planning, research, recording, and editing, but a good chunk of time is dedicated to marketing and sharing.
The podcast for me is a specific kind of work. It’s creative and collaborative and will always had a more complex set of motivations that could never be reduced merely to economic ones (even if it did make money) or a sense of social capital. For me there’s still a unique pleasure in recording the conversations and shaping them into an episode. I want it to be the best digital artefact it can be, along with being an authentic expression of mine/our love of cinema.
Maybe that sounds a little corny, but I feel no cynicism or any sense that I need to apologise for my dedication to the work of doing it.
After a few years, the podcast instigated, particularly for me, a change in focus for my academic research towards the field of Podcast Studies. This wasn’t even a thing until around 2018/2019, when it emerged in a few books and articles, including a publication edited by myself, Neil, and another colleague, Richard Berry—Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media.
In a sense, this book, an episode of the podcast entitled Knowing Sounds: Podcasting as Academic Practice, and opportunities we were offered to talk about podcasting in an academic context, were developments that allowed me to frame The Cinematologists more specifically within the boundaries of academic “work.”
Universities are constantly looking for ways in which the “projects’ of staff can co-opted as measurable outputs. Criteria such as determining how scholarly practice feeds into teaching, academic publication, the winning of funding bids, and recognition in the Research Exercise Framework (REF) that ways in which such non-teaching projects are utilised for their scholarly value.
Obviously pure academic research is the main way this occurs. Most of my scholarly work outside of teaching had been in this traditional vein, until I started podcasting. But “practitioners”, “artists”, or “creatives” also look for ways in which such work can be articulated as research. This is more complex for various reasons - a subject for a later date.
In many ways, both Neil and I looked to follow this agenda, writing journal articles and impact case studies that imbue the practice “work” of the podcast as both academically rigorous and valid as research. But always trying to keep at the forefront of out minds that we were doing this for it’s on sake. That the value was in the practice of the work, and any outcomes where a byproduct.
But where am I going with all this, you might ask?
Well, I remember once, towards the end of the autumn semester in 2022, when I was complaining about workload to my partner. In my mind, I had too much to do and was working evenings and weekends to keep on top of things. My girlfriend said, “What about the podcast?” “What about it?” I asked. “You could drop that and just focus on the work that you’re paid to do.” I remember being kind of affronted. I can’t drop that, I thought. That’s the work I most enjoy and the work that I attach the most value to. “But you’re not actually getting paid to do it as part of your job. It’s just your hobby.”
That damning assertion. The Cinematologists was NOT a hobby. This provoked a spirited but defensive explanation of how academic work cannot be easily defined within either the framework of specified contracted hours or through blunt managerial tools like KPIs (which my girlfriend has to adhere to in her job in the commercial sector). Academia is different from corporate notions of work, I explained, probably in a high and mighty tone. Plus, it was part of the research development of my career, with outputs coming directly from work on the podcast.
But a nerve had been twanged; there was a kernel of truth to what she was saying. I didn’t actually need to work on The Cinematologists, and maybe the way to deal with the workload was to lessen the elements of academic work that were not directly tied to day-to-day management and delivery of a major film degree. That was my job after all.
I had started to write here a detailed breakdown of what constitutes academic work in my example, but quite frankly, this would be a book-length list. But it can invariably be boiled down to teaching, research, and administration/management. Again, there is a big difference between the Russell Group Universities, which are research-focused, and the Post-92 universities, which, by default, are teaching-focused but attempt to compete with the traditional institutions as much as possible.
I’ve always been sanguine about the breakdown of work in my career. In the institutions I have worked, there is a lot of talk about research, but teaching is of primary importance. Since the Blair years, with the introduction of fees and the expansion of student numbers (which is now starting to reverse), recruitment and retention trump more or less everything else.
The nebulous phrase “student experience” was perhaps the dominating maxim of my HE life. It’s full of contradictions and is particularly loaded when you consider that students are essentially paying customers these days. Which promotes the implication that academics service providers.
Teaching is obviously the core element of work in universities, and is or should be the defining aspect of the student experience. Over the years the average hours of teaching that academics do has exponentially increased. And in subtle and explicit ways there has been an erosion in understanding as the amount of labour that is required to produce the modules the define a degree.
But university managers don’t seem to give credence to the amount of preparation - things like reading and research, creating the materials for lectures and seminars, having all the resources online etc, and plain old thinking - that is required to deliver really high quality education.
As I’ve moved up the institutional ladder, the administrative load has always increased, as has the stress that comes with managerial responsibility. But the expectations regarding the production of “world-class” research have been a constant, and the pressure to keep students happy so that they give the university favourable rating the in National Student Survey (NSS) was exponentially ramped up.
Within all this, there has been a systematic reduction in administrative provision. HR, finance, and other support areas go through just as many restructures as academic departments. Or posts are not filled when people leave—all in the name of grand efficiency. But the upshot is administrative work then simply takes longer or gets pushed onto academics, usually Course Leaders, the lower middle-management trash can of a role. There is an endless cycle of report-writing and course evaluations, and strategic plan documents, and curriculum planning reports and student attendance monitoring etc etc.
And I haven’t started to mention all the free labor and “hope labor” that it is almost frowned upon to turn down. The paradox is that such unpaid work is what academics actually want to do out of a sense of commitment to the sector: PhD supervision, editing journals, reviewing articles, chairing committees of one sort or another are rarely accounted for in work allocation models.
There are supposed to be ways of defining all the roles one can do in hours, but the reality is that ones working hours are a nominal figure. The whole university system arguably functions on academics being vocationally minded.
My word, this is going on longer than expected. Neil is about to arrive. To be continued…
I’m on the train now from Kings Cross, hoping the internet holds. The problem with cloud-based writing when you’re in transit—a passing tunnel might wipe out some perfectly turned rhetorical flourish.
Neil arrived, and we had the most relaxed, joyful, and honest conversation. It’s interesting how we have both, in different ways, gone through so many personal and professional ups and downs. He’s known about my unhappiness in Higher Education for a while. As always, it’s fascinating to discuss The Cinematologists, but this new season of the podcast, which is nearly a decade old, seems to have greater importance. I can’t wait to start working on it.
There’s that word again. I need to come back to my thought process. But reading the above, I feel like I need another ten pages to provide adequate context. Note to self: get to the reflexive part much quicker.
The point I’m trying to make is about how an academic career changed my life because it was embedded with an amalgam of elements that coalesced to produce a unique type of work and working life.
It emerged from the purity of intellectual pursuit—the practice of researching for the sake of knowledge itself. An academic position offers the promise that this will be a staple of your day-to-day experience. Indeed, the encouragement to pursue your ideas, no matter how esoteric.
Then comes the teaching, which I enjoyed because of the sharing and play of ideas (at its best), in which you receive immediate feedback on the vitality and value of what you are doing. Indeed, I actually love the process of preparing for lectures and seminars in film. Learning how to structure the performative element of teaching was something that experience taught me. Some academics see teaching as a necessary evil; they do it under sufferance. But there is still no greater buzz than coming out of a session knowing you have gotten something across or that students have reflected on something.
In many ways, over the last ten years, it has been The Cinematologists that has given me this. For myself and many academics I’ve spoken to, they have had to reframe their role in the university in a psychological way. Redefining it as a 9-5. Recognizing and accepting that large parts of the job are taken up with tasks that just need to be done.
As a course leader, management and administration naturally take over from teaching to varying degrees. But to be frank, the bureaucracy is mind-blowing. Academia is creaking under the weight of bullshit jobs. Soulless administrative surveillance that leads to nothing is truly Kafkaesque. The narrative among colleagues of mine for years has been about methods of tick-boxing, getting “bullshit jobs” done so you can say it's done, but with the least amount of hours and headspace committed.
And the email. The fucking email.
I have lived in fear of email for a long time. I had to concoct ways of dealing with it. Time boxing was one, but, to be honest, I felt I had to keep on top of emails in the mornings and evenings. Universities did get better at insisting that emails were not sent on the weekend. But the more you leave it, the more it piles up. On Sunday afternoons, I started to feel the dread of what would be sitting there waiting for me. So Sunday evenings, I would open the inbox and write as many responses as I could to go out on Monday morning so I could focus on other things during the day.
One fatal flaw I realized is that the quicker one answers emails, the more work you create. It’s not just the quantity; it’s the tone. How to write emails is something I put into the curriculum for students, but many academics could take some lessons in that context.
This digital miasma has gotten to the point where firefighting email is the central occupation.
As I’m writing this, I’m aware of a sense of entitlement. Many people do “shit jobs,” and perhaps there is an argument to be made that there is less and less choice for many. Academia, compared to many sectors, can still be viewed as a privilege.
“You have summers off” is the passive-aggressive refrain I’ve heard on multiple occasions. There are academics who disappear in early June and reappear on campus in September. But most are doing academic or practical research, writing books and journal articles, or, God forbid, thinking and resting.
Maybe I’m being completely Pollyanna-ish here, but university management seemingly no longer acknowledges the very idea of thinking as time well spent.
It’s Sunday morning, and I ventured on a nostalgic outing to one of the cafés in Chapel Allerton just outside of Leeds to try and finish this piece. SevenArts café is a light and airy space that never plays the music too loud and has the advantage of being open until 10 p.m. After a day at the university, I would come home, grab something to eat, then head out to SevenArts for a glass of red wine, which I would singularly nurse through another three hours of writing. In the last year of study, I felt that I had no social life whatsoever, so coming here to work gave me a feeling of “being in the world” while continuing to flesh out the deep thoughts and reflections on others’ even deeper thoughts, which would eventually coagulate into a doctoral thesis.
I’ve been thinking about that mythical idea: if you’re doing what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This is a nice thought, but there are a lot of caveats. To be quite honest, I became an academic accidentally.
On the one hand, we have this sense of hustle culture, of hyper-productivity, or a drive from our social milieu to think through our lives in terms of ourselves as economic units, with everything we do open to potential economic exploitation. This is an imperative underscored by the neoliberal order and buttressed by a network spectacle of self-production.
It’s interesting just how much academics have inculcated this. The narrative of overwork is articulated as a badge of honour. “I was up until midnight filling student attendance spreadsheets”. It’s not healthy. Neither for the individual or the culture of work.
Just going back to the book Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe, which I mentioned in my previous entry, in the chapter on academia, she mentions how one of the ways in which “internet culture” has influenced what constitutes academic work is the sense that scholars have become beholden not only to the requirements of teaching, research, administration, and management, but also to the hidden-in-plain-sight extras (external examining, PhD supervision), and now have to think about the political economy of online subjectivity.
When I think about building an audience and the desire to get the podcast heard, Neil and I were never driven by a sense that we were going to make money. In fact, we took pride in the idea that there would be no ads and no attempt at what we disdainfully might call populism or commercialisation. We liked to think that The Cinematologists was where “those in the know” went for their cinematic commentary. But why should an audience matter at all if the podcast had no outright economic aims and no impact on our careers? Surely, just doing it for its own sake would be enough.
This “plunge” I’ve taken is an attempt to redefine an concept and practice of work for me. I don’t think I could have done it within the institution of Higher Education. In recent years, I’ve found myself having so little time and headspace for those elements that ultimately give the pleasure and the value.
Paradoxically, it’s going to require me to lean much more specifically into working towards a marketised, branded self. At least now I’m doing that for myself and not for a system that seems to change the goalposts.
I am asking myself whether this is realistic. Whether there is a different context of “work” that gives me what the ideal of a university career could. Or are these thoughts just solipsistic preoccupations deriving from archic scholarly notion of knowledge production for it’s own sake? Certainly, the ideological critiques of the arts and humanities are based on that neoliberal argument that now defines the raison d'être of universities, particularly on the right. The questioning of the value of certain degrees is a horse that the Daily Mail loves to flog.
There is a distinct possibility the main problem for me is that I wasn’t cut out for management. I actually may have gotten promoted to a position that I was not suited for. And perhaps there has to a realistic sense of what university work actually is. But those parameters have to defined more clearly by institutions themselves. There is an epidemic of burnout.
Because I’m cynical I think that’s unlikely. Perhaps solidarity among groups of academics could change the culture of work. But I’m afraid that individual academics will have to continue to manage as best they can their own sense of working life.