Workload: it's not heavier, but it is more burdensome

I am happy to work 60+ hours a week, because much of what I do is curiosity-driven research. I spend a lot of time thinking about things (some of it turns out to be useful) and learning new things. Is this all working time or private time? I just don't care. The boundary is fuzzy and I think best kept that way. But things go wrong when my Head of Department comes in as a manager, does a review of my work and says "Thou shall produce N papers in time T", "bring in X pounds grant income within N years of your appointment", and "be a member of 23 useless committees" and so on. That is the way to run a production line, manufacturing soap powder. British academic life is becoming unbearable due to over-management. Driven by budgets and QA procedures, our managers are incapable of realising the damage they are doing to quality research and teaching.

I have no doubt that hours have not increased simply due to a ceiling effect - there are only so many hours in a week. My hours haven't changed in the 16 years I have been working in academia in the UK, built the administrative load has increased each year. Rather than spending time in the lab, my day is now filled with filling out forms, repackaging information that should already be available to our University's managers, and attending meeting in which only 50% of the scheduled time is fruitful. The increase in administrative burden is based on a form of vindictive management that was discredited in the private sector ages ago. It has been years since the University management inspired me and now I go to work with a sense of foreboding and dread. I love research and teaching and I find it frustrating that I am allowed to spend so little time performing those core activities.

I too have that sense of foreboding and frustration. It does indeed seem that many activities are 'makework' schemes that don't even turn out the quality of information they are supposed to. Sometimes, decisions appear to be made in order to support earlier decisions simply because it's very difficult in a modern organisation to admit mistakes - so everything is "going forward" and "don't dwell on the past" - and it becomes impossible to learn by mistakes and we seem doomed to be engaged in 'patching'. However, I have to defend management a minute (!!) - I don't think "vindictive" is quite the right word (except in a minority of cases). Having met many university managers (not from my own establishemnt, obviously - it's not as easy as that) - thet don't strike me as a vindictive bunch at all. Rather, they are trying to accomplish an impossible (or at least improbable) job with the tools they have to hand - it's just that many of these tool are innapropriate in their native form. What I would observe, though, is that many middle-tier managers are under-informed about what's really going on in the engine room. It's just too easy to say that this is the fault of the individual managers - rather, it's the structure within which they must operate. So, information-gathering is always at one remove, via reports fed up from committees and lower tiers. Those lower tiers are under immense pressure to be seen to be delivering the goods - or else they'll never get on. So the quality of the information that permeates upward is filtered by successive layers until what arrives bears little relation to the real situation. So we all, academics and managers alike, seem to be trapped in this weird, Kafkaesque nightmare, and it's unsurprising that we blame 'the others' but that's not getting us anywhere. It does seem we need the perspective of someone who comes from outside of the problem - Sir John Harvey Jones used to do this well, and what about Gerry Robinson? - there's a TV programme in it, if any university is brave enough

If we do a bit of math, 55 hours are close to working 7 days a week and nearly 8 hours a day. One has only 24 hours a day. Leaving aside time for eating, sleeping and commuting between work and home, I wonder where else one can find time to work even one wants to work longer hours. The conclusion is the workload is heavy, no point to argue whether it is heavier. We all complain about more admin and more time has been taken to do admin, but where is the solution?

I find it very unsettling that respondents discussing a key aspect of academic life are afraid to provide their names. Oppressive management is indicative of a general attempt to control academia: to the point of the stupidity of the Liverpool Hope 9-5 regime. I find that thinking imaginatively, an intrinsic part of academic activity, occurs at all times, except when constrained to plod through administrative trivia. This is not really burdensome work, as suggested in the article, but rather it is deadening. It is high time that teaching teams are provided with appropriate administrative assistance, administration that accepts that their purpose is to support teachers and not impose upon them. Working in Denmark, I see a marked difference with the regimes I left behind in the UK. LH Copenhagen Business School

Prof Harvey - I know it's unsettling, but the sad fact is that anonymity is a must - there are simply too many would would shoot the messenger simply because it's the cheapest option. Stand up and be counted is all very well; stand up and be picked off isn't

I don't buy the reported 'average' working hours per week estimatation (and which weeks of the year, how many weeks per year?). True, the pressure is immense and the information load and performance expectation has increased massively in the past 20 years. There's no opportunity for breaks, intellectual discussion, or collegiality, and the 'senior common room' has long gone - but in terms of hours I don't see most people doing much more than 40 hours per week. Having worked in catering, residential social work and delivery be thankful for academia (and it's more secure and better paid).

Paul: I agree in general, but this is quite a complicated issue.

I haven't got hold of the report yet, but certainly welcome the move to actually evaluating workloads - I think it's in everyone's interest to clear away the speculation, accusations of whingeing/skiving and so on. One thing I'd like to know of is any attempt to evaluate wasted time. I know many accountability systems are clunky to use and fail to achieve their objectives. Many systems that ostensibly should help organisations be more efficient actually have the opposite effect. My guess is that much admin carried out by academics simply takes twice as long as it ought (from personal experience I think I'm underestimating, but that's anecdotal)

I agree that we are generally in a privileged position and are well paid but there are only so many competing demands one can take. So much of what I do now is evaluation of core activities rather than the core activities of teaching and research themselves - annual evaluation, institutional audit, subject review, module reports, module archiving, research audit etc. Basically it's bonkers overkill and incompetent management. I also find academics remarkably meek at doing anything about it. I tried to suggest that one way to make managers understand was simply to refuse to carry out the latest pointless directive. I wasn't taken seriously.

Perhaps we should, the next time a new system (requiring a great deal of input from us) is added, meekly ask "instead of what?"

I'm at QMUL, and have archived my diaries since 1980. Over this time my notional contact hours have remained remarkably constant at about 200 per year. But the size of classes has doubled or tripled, and the paperwork associated with any teaching or assessment activity has increased by roughly the same amount, possibly more. Self-evidently, these teaching workloads have increased over 30 years, yet research outputs have also gone up, so what has given way? One thing is obvious: annual leave. I don't know any colleague who takes the full 5 weeks of contractual entitlement, its more like 10 days if you're lucky. The other is surprising: we all eat lunch at our desks like any stressed-out City trader. I slipped into this habit without realising it, but now I simply can't cope with my workload and have an hour for lunch each day, at least during term-time. The SCR is dying, and with it will go much of the day-to-day social pleasure and stimulus that came with academic life. But then isn't this the same in any other workplace? We're not as different as we like to think. I like to do something towards my research each day, if only to bolster my morale. I call this "my own work". When you can start it is a good measure of your other workloads: 2 pm is a good day, 3.30 pm is average and 5 pm means the system is screwing you. How about that as objectivity, Professor Tight?

The national academic contract, in the colleges and universities which are covered by it, was developed in the early 1990s through binding arbitration with ACAS to provide a professional working relationship between the employer and the employee in respect of annual workloads. In particular this has provision for a 37 hr week norm (pro rata to contract); a maximum number of teaching hours pro rata within the teaching year; maximum teaching time within a week and the working day; a teaching year definition to ensure provision for self managed research & scholarly activity; workload to be agreed between an individual and line manager with rights of appeal, and monitoring arrangements. There are statutory regulations for the maximum number of working hours people may do without a signed personal agreement to work above the limit of 48 hrs per week average (see Working Time Regulations on various Government web sites). This academic contract is NOT open-ended. Also employer and employee have contractual obligations in respect of health, safety and welfare under various regulations and the implied terms of the contract. The long hours culture is not something to be admired as it is dangerous for all concerned, could lead to serious stress-related illness and even self-harm, and could affect the health, safety and well-being of colleagues. Universities and Colleges of Higher Education have absolute responsibilities to ensure that the workload of any individual they employ may be achieved within the terms of the contract and statutory regulation. UCU has recently published guidelines described as follows: “Our Guide is not arguing that all workload models are good. What it does do is suggest some beneficial uses of workload models - especially to tackle overloading. In order to enforce contractual limits on workloads, whether expressed in terms of total weekly hours, teaching hours or both, there must be some system of accounting and recording work plans. Without this it is impossible for individuals or groups of staff to check whether they are being asked to work beyond their contract or not.” (Excuse any typos or grammar errors - not having paragraph facilities does not help those with 'visual impairment'!)

I think what is most troublesome is the amount of administrative work which academics appear to have to do, simply in order to keep administrators in work, much of which work seems to involve ... generating administrative work for academics. This doesn't make too much sense even in the sort of Soviet-tractor-factory work model which we appear to be aspiring to. As to how to deal with the problem: two monosyllables, "why?" and "no".

Another form of admin burden comes from the *reduction* in lower-rank admin staff. For example I have found I need to do a lot of straightforward and tedious tasks like arranging travel, managing budgets, doing data entry on exam marks, etc; when I started 20 years ago, there were secretaries who did these things for one. I find it terribly wasteful that a researcher/scholar is putting time into these tasks.

Some of the stuff we waste our time on is probably going on in most jobs: reduction of secretarial provision, executives dealing in effect with their own correspondence by email, and so on. However, I'd like to know whether there are comparable sectors in which there is the same contractual distinction between those who do have defined working hours, and those who do not (even when in effect the same pay scale applies, as it does between academic/non-academic posts). My suspicion is that we could stop the administrative overload over night: either put academics on fixed hours, or switch non-academics to contracts with no fixed hours. When I last floated this, it didn't go down too well, which suggests that it might work.

Working 55 hours a week on my current salary is equivalent to being paid about 12pounds an hour. This is slightly less than currently advertised secretarial positions in the city.

Sandra wrote: "Universities and Colleges of Higher Education have absolute responsibilities to ensure that the workload of any individual they employ may be achieved within the terms of the contract and statutory regulation." The myth of the overworked academic. Quite a few of my colleagues work no more than 10 to 15 hours a week---once teaching is done, they are done. What's more, they resent any attempts to get more out of them? What's to be done?

I'll give my name as soon as I get out of teh UK system.

We all know the truth -- the vast majority of us are required to work, on average, 20 hours on top of the 35 hours stated in our contracts. But no one seems to know or/and care, other than us. What are the Unions doing? what are we doing? why is this stupid government still asking us for more and more? This situation is ruining the quality of our teaching, ruining our research and ruining our personal lives. we should start industrial action every May until this situation is resolved. Only by stopping students from graduating and calling the press in, we will achieve an improvement in the real quality of universities.

I'm interested in Dr. Truth's assertions - although anecdotal (as everything here) if true, it would help to explain why so many of us have been stitched up. Oddly, what would help us is some realistic (as against faux-acocuntability mechanisms) and objective method of assessing workloads. i've many colleagues who are tearing their hair out about now, with 20 hours contact time, about 35 % of which comprises new modules with little available material, new subject area, lecturers used as generic teaching devices - just plug'n'play. Admin systems don't work, and a steady stream of new initiatives. Clearly, we should all go and work at Dr. Truth's place - what a doddle!

I just gave my first tutorial of the semester, at a Russell Group university. Along with everyone else in my department, I received a 10-page handout on this tutorial, explaining exactly what we were to do. The edited highlights follow: "4. Explain how tutorial performance links to job references, e.g. "cannot follow written instructions", "pays little attention to detail", "not proficient at word processing and/or spread sheet analysis". Staff may use tutorial performance when they write a reference for their tutees, therefore explain to tutees that you will maintain a file of information about them for use in reference writing. Explain that you want to be able to say that they completed the tutorial exercises in this module with enthusiasm. 9. After the tutorial, log on to the Key Skills database and record attendance, absence or absence with just cause and enter the deadline date. TSO requires this information as a check of how many students really exist. To encourage staff to keep their tutees' records up-to-date on the Key Skills database, TSO will monitor the records and ask those staff who are not keeping their records up-to-date to provide electronic and paper copies of their tutees' work. All tutees' work should be kept for subject audit and on a random basis any member of staff could be asked to provide copies of their tutees' work for audit." Next week I will mark the resulting work by clicking buttons on the database, corresponding to criteria like these: "1.1 Updated LUSID Key Skills database and submitted copy of the updated audit 1.2 Submitted list of characteristics of a good/bad essay 1.3 List has reasonable number of points 1.4 List produced in tabular form, as in example in manual 1.5 Cell borders are modified, as in example in manual " The academics who designed these 10-page handouts and the database worked quite hard. The result is easy to use, objective, shallow, and burdensome out of proportion to the time involved.

To anonymous2: This has to stop. You have to find a way to bring this unmitigated nonsense to a shuddering halt. Take it to your HoD. Or Dean. Explain that this is just unadulterated bollocks and that it will be sent to the national press unless they stop.

David - would that it was so simple - and yet, why isn't it? - a deceptively simple question, yet hard to answer. Where did we cross that line between concentrating on knowledge and discovery, via improving the process through analysis, to monitoring and auditing taking over and actually becoming the point? I've never yet met anyone who could tell me. Yet here we are, spending more time on the form rather than the substance, on the appearance of teaching, rather than teaching itself. In the old saying, "justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done" - we've travelled to the state where, as long as it can be seen to be done, the actuality underneath can go hang. In the late 20th and the early 21st centuries, we seem to have become unhinged. Money has become some free-floating "thing" in its on right - not representing goods or services. "profit" has become something you take rather than something you generate. Education has become some kind of passport-to-taking, rather than a tool for individual betterment. Did all those people who died trying to bring about civilisation really have this in mind? where's the commonsense? How have we come to empower the commonsense-bereft? It seems that Douglas Adams really did have something to tell us - remember that first spaceship, populated by the telephone cleaners, sent ahead to provide the infrastructure for the engineers that never followed? well, they arrived here, safe and sound.

David Trotter "either put academics on fixed hours, or switch non-academics to contracts with no fixed hours. When I last floated this, it didn't go down too well, which suggests that it might work." Nor would the following. Make academic staff work 9 to 5, five days a week and let administrative staff take four weeks off at Christmas and Easter and then disappear from June until September to do "research" or some private consultancy work which benefits themselves and not the University.

Stevelmarch - I've a feeling we might be talking about different establishments; 9-5 would do for us round here. No weekend stuff, answering urgent student e-mails in evenings, preparing for the next day, all that stuff? But I'd worry that, in the principle of "a stitch in time saves nine" that this 9-to-5 attitude would leave a lot undone. I've no way of knowing if your view of what academics get up to is actually justified, and whether that is at the root of the problem facing the whole enterprise. I do know it's not what's going on within spitting distance round here - but it seems as though there is indeed an assumption that it is. So we're being squeezed to the point of leaving (I don't mean virtually - people keep departing) and there's no sign of a letup

Well, anonymous Stevelmarch, I don't know a single academic who works the hours or weeks which you imply. And "research", or possibly research without the gratuitously snide inverted commas, is what funds a fair number of jobs in universities, not least non-academic jobs.

As an administrator in HE, it is always nice to check out the Times Higher after work to top up my daily dose of vitriol. I think that the misunderstandings work both ways. I would love to work in an institution where non-academics have fixed hours. As a member of academic-related staff, I have nominal hours. Unlike (most) academic staff, this means I have to be in work 9-5 without fail, but my contract recognises that I may need to work longer hours if that is what the job requires. Like academic staff, I get no overtime or time in lieu. I always work beyond five, normally start well before nine, and have worked every weekend bar one since Christmas (normally both days, but with some exceptions for special occasions). It is commonly stated tnat administrators create administration. At my HEI, all policy decisions are taken by committees composed almost exclusivey of academic staff (at a departmental and school level admin staff are not allowed to be voting members of any committee; the University level committees have two admin members of staff). I deal with those decisions, and receive the anger from the academic staff whom they affect. I am contractually obliged (in a written statement) to deal with academic staff and students politely regardless of the situation, and regardless of how I fell about that situation. Perhaps my institution is unusual, but the comments I receive from academic staff regarding my role and their perception of it suggests otherwise.

"I'm not unusual": - I can back you up that much of the admin actually originates with the committees, largely consisting of academics, and that administrators didn't simply 'think up' some new torturous rigmarole to go through. Often the origination can be traced back to a new political agenda item (widening participation, health and safety, imapct, ethics, etc.,) which is somehow mysteriously added to the existing workload but with additional resources. But after that, some sort of committee silliness seems to creep in - examining things in fine detail seems to produce some kind of infinite regression, so the detail becomes finer and finer and the paperwork becomes bulkier. Then some recommendations issue forth, and academics and administrators have, whilst still juggling the balls they're keeping up in the air, to invent and implement the new system - which is unsurprisingly clumsy and ill-designed. Meanwhile the committee proclaim "light touch", "quick and easy", and of course, "training will be provided". However, there's a dark undercurrent: a relatively small number in the university are empire building. They are the wasps that paralyse their vitim to lay their eggs - that is, in the early stages, they start out parasitic. In the long run, if they are to survive and prosper, they must gradually turn into symbiotes, firmly lodged in the host but without destroying it. However, each new initiative brings a new wave of parasites (who eventually aim to be symbiotes) The net result is that those at the bottom (academics nad admin alike) have to deal with onslaught after onslaught of 'improvements' - but we never actually get to a stable 'post-improvement' state. Now, I think it's fair to say that there's been a bit of 'divide-and-rule' going on here, so academics and administrators are at each other's throats. This is simply 'shooting the messenger'. Actually, admin and academic should see themselves as on the same side - and the question is, who is on the other?

I must agree with ''I'm not unusual' and 'Don Quixote' that a large proportion of the blame for the present dire situation must attach to senior academics rather than administrators. An expression that I have been hearing a lot of recently is 'going over to the dark side'. It refers roughly speaking, to academics, often those not particularly distinguished in research themselves, who get advancement by going into the ever-multiplying management roles and end up telling those who are good at research and/or teaching how they should do everything. They then boost their own importance by appointing new layers of under-managers who are instructed to send you those lovely 'change management' graphs that show (on unlabelled axes) how you can expect to sink into a slough of despond before rising happily to a state of nirvana once you realise how good everything has been. What they never consider is whether the changes were good in the first place. Often the changes are ideological, motivated by mindless buzzwords, or some idea dreamt up by the HR manager. Frequently they are uncosted and usually the effects not assessed. Perhaps the real problem arises from semi-failed academics who have done a few leadership courses (run by failed PhDs for £800 per day). One theme seems to run through all such changes and that is to reduce the power of the underlings who actually do the research and teaching on which the whole enterprise rests. I don’t think that Google got rich through this sort of heavy-handed top-down attitude to management. Let’s not shoot the messengers (though I fear it may be necessary to fire some of them).