I was intrigued to read this story in the Times Higher Education about Dutch academics complaining about having to work “structural unpaid overtime” of 12-15 hours per week, which this report says is 36% above their regular paid hours.  One can infer that Dutch academics’ contracts actually stipulate they are to work a 35-hour week, which is quite a foreign concept in North America, where many “professional” jobs usually have no hours attached to them, our theory effectively being that if you are in one of these jobs you work “whatever it takes”.

It appears that the workload Dutch academics are complaining about – and which they claim is a result of recent cutbacks (plausible, given that Dutch higher ed has probably been squeezed harder than any other system in the OECD over the past decade) – is a workload actually roughly equivalent to the weekly 48-hour workload Canadian academics reported over a decade ago in the 2008 Changing Academic Profession Survey during term-time (yes, yes, faculty time-use surveys are methodologically fraught but they are all we have so let’s just roll with it).   And it’s not like Canadian workloads have gone down over the past twelve years, so really, what are the complaints about?

Part of the answer is pay: Dutch profs get paid roughly 20% less than Canadian ones, so remuneration on an hourly basis – to the extent that type of comparison makes sense – is certainly lower over there.  But part of it may be cultural.  If you think of being a professor as a job like any other, then yeah, you may want to count your hours.  But in North America (and I think the anglosphere generally), occupation defines identity more than in Europe, in academia triply so, and so it’s consequentially much harder to find an “off” switch.  It tends to engender a kind of Academic Stakhanovism, which can be extremely problematic to one’s mental and physical health.

The problem is that it’s really hard to see what anyone can actually do about it.

I mean, in one sense it’s a pretty straightforward collective action problem.  Everyone might be better off if they just chilled and worked less, so why not empower academic managers to actually, you know, manage people and set realistic and reasonable expectations for research output each year, accounting for things like teaching and service load?  (I know, this sounds crazy, but there are many places where this actually happens, even though it’s pretty rare in Canada).  Obviously, not everyone would appreciate the trade off between managed work loads and “being managed” because the latter is seen by some as being an insult to one’s professional status.  But at least it’s a solution, right?

Well, it might be if the only rewards and sanctions an academic cared about were those handed out by the institution.  But that’s not really the case: most also care about the respect of peers in one’s discipline, which usually relates to the quantity and/or quality of academic publishing.  Because rewards in a discipline are to some degree positional, no single institution can ever really push back on the culture of research overwork because it would put all its academics at a disadvantage within their disciplines compared to other researchers.

Don’t get me wrong: if academics at an institution think overwork is a problem, they should definitely take it up in collective bargaining (though don’t expect relief to come from the teaching side of the equation – that just drives up university costs by forcing it to hire more sessionals).  But my guess is there wouldn’t be many faculty unions/associations who would want to risk signalling sloth to the world by publicly acting to work less (note, for instance, that the book Slow Professor by Ontario academics Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber hasn’t exactly sparked a mass movement).  And institutions should certainly, to the best of their ability, try to equalize workloads among colleagues and take special care and allowances for those whose health may be frail or in danger.

It’s just that greater workloads aren’t exclusively a function of tighter budgets and scheming managers.  In North America at least, the culture of academia itself is deeply workaholic and rife with incentives at the disciplinary level to keep it that way.  Fair observers need to credit both and recognize that in the end, a lot of the workload issue comes down to individual academics’ decisions about the trade-offs involved in pursuing professional success in a field that attracts more than its share of alpha types.