March 25: Academic life in the fast lane (Vostal)
by lukevanryn
As we continue our exploration of the conditions of contemporary academic work, speed remains a pressing issue. The acceleration of academic labour – through devices such as meetings, audits, grant applications and engagement activities – is consistent thread in both everyday discussions and literature in the field. In this article, Filip Vostal highlights the ambivalence of contemporary ‘academic time’. He draws on interviews with British academics from a number of fields to support his argument for “unhasty time”:
a theoretical and politico-normative model that would be both an antipode to oppressive acceleration and yet attendant to acceleration’s energizing properties too (3).
We meet in the Pierre Gorman Room, 1888 Building, at 5pm this Tuesday.
[PDF] Vostal, F. (2014). Academic life in the fast lane: The experience of time and speed in British academia. Time and Society. doi: 10.1177/0961463X13517537
As the constraints of both ‘scheduled time’ and ‘timeless time’ kept me from attending the group for this reading, I thought I’d post a few comments here.
I found Vostal’s description and analysis of academic time and the pressures impacting on it in turns both fascinating and frustrating. His breakdown of the temporal structures of academic life was useful and subtly informed his supporting argument: that academic time is not experienced in a unified, cohesive fashion, but is by nature often contradictory and paradoxical. Academics might be pressured to attend meetings, meet a project or article deadline or devote certain hours of their life to teaching. But at the same time, they have a remarkable degree of freedom to work when and how they choose. Likewise, the ‘labour’ of academia might be measured in ‘outputs’ – publications, citations/impact, grants and so forth – but the actual process of this labour is intangible, requiring a great deal not only of writing and research but less ‘measurable’ practices – like thinking, discussing ideas, drawing inspiration from multiple and sometimes unlikely sources.
Yet Vostal’s claims to support his argument come across at times as self-serving and sometimes simply absurd. Towards the end of the article Vostel points out that academics often suffer “‘epression and a prolonged inability to work’. His argument, that ‘accelerative moments might actually help to nudge and get a researcher out of “scientific inertia” and various forms of unmoving intellectual blockages’, completely overlooks that these issues are mental and psychological, not merely temporal. Vostal overlooks the fact that depression and anxiety, in their clinical form, need psychological treatment to be overcome; simply loading on more time pressures often exacerbates, not addresses, these issues. As a Guardian article recently pointed out (link: http://bit.ly/1bUxrgB) mental health issues are all too accepted in academic life, and are seldom addressed in a direct, sensitive fashion by institutions. Vostal’s resorting to sophistic arguments like this do nothing to support his broader analysis. Likewise, Vostal quotes a respondent who says ‘there are not many professional jobs you can do in your dressing gown’ to suggest that this somehow makes up for academics being constantly tethered to their computer and having no life outside work. This seems more than a little ignorant and self-serving, and reeks of taking a quote out of context; similar tactics can be found in his discussion of the statistical research on academics life (pp. 5-7).
Ultimately I found Vostal’s piece a decent opening for discussions on time pressures in academia. His argument that research on this topic at times uncritically view it in a negative sense is a valuable contribution to this debate, if inconsiderately phrased at times. But it’s ironic that Vogul is talking about a form of labour that is itself composed of different, conflicting pressures and experiences, yet he uses such confining, systematic measures and claims to support his argument. I almost wished that he would break free of the reliance on empirical studies and statistics and talk more experientially, in a more grounded fashion, about what it *means* to be an academic, the less tangible elements of what is really involved. His argument is instead concerned with a debate that raises interesting issues but ultimately becomes trapped – perhaps like many academics themselves – in a set of quantifiable, objective measures that only capture one aspect of the reality of what academic life entails.
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