bleaching stress

For some reason I thought I had posted previously on the relationship of stress and the academy. I can't find said post, and I can't link to my brain - yet - so I guess I'll add to it now. A while back, a friend sent me a link to a Toronto Star article (now archived) by Heather Menzies, Carleton prof extraordinaire, called "DUMBED DOWN ON CAMPUS, BIT BY BIT" with a subquestion: "ARE PCS MAKING PROFESSORS MORE ABSENT-MINDED?" about a study out of the UK that suggested that the multi-tasking required by new technologies reduces PC workers IQ by 10 points ("more than twice the decrease in the mental abilities of someone who smokes a joint.") and concluded that "the task at hand suffers." Menzies agrees and argues that university professors ("the very people we count on to preserve society's vast stores of knowledge") are getting hit hard; and as author of the still-pretty-new No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life,* she would know.

"No time," profs say. I can't have/do [fill in appropriate fun, relaxing, social thing here] today.

She also notes the dramatic increase in instances of chronic fatigue syndrome or other stress related phenomena, as well as instances where the feeling of being completely and utterly overwhelmed has taken hold.

This led not only to to her book, but also a survey of 100 profs that she conducted with Janice Newton at six Canadian universities. The answer speaks to the restructuring of campuses in the late 1990s and it is, as Menzies says, "unsettling":

...professors are less able to stay focused, read comprehensively and follow through on informal and professional commitments.

They are more and more distracted...less able to act on their own agenda and priorities.

On a typical day, academics will process email not only from students and colleagues on campus but from research partners in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business, government and other universities across the country and around the world.

They will download the latest university forms for reporting marks and travel expenses from the university website, fill them in and submit them, doing in a self-serve mode what support staff used to handle for them.

They might participate in a professional listserv discussion, make a contribution to an online government consultation, then do an online search for data to include in a conference paper they're working on, join a conference call where project partners are discussing the latest data or collaborative knowledge product, then post some website notes on the course they're teaching online or the one they have just returned from teaching down the hall.

In addition:

The increased expectations, from students, from colleagues...are enormous. So are the increased demands to raise research funds, to file reports in a climate of increased quantifiable accountability, and to keep up with ever-changing technology and administration policies.

Menzies finds the cause in funding cutbacks to post-secondary education and the online "revolution" of university admin/teaching methods (aka the entrepreneurial makeover) and suggests that academics (in her study, those WITH tenure) are digging themselves into a pit of exhaustion, and that that will have dire consequences for the future of the very space in which they work.

Hm. Would LOVE to see a similar study of graduate students, because the folks surveyed here sound strikingly similar to my colleagues. And they're dead broke on top of it.

Now the irony to this is that the article notes "a recent interest in teaching excellence awards and endowing university teaching chairs" on top of the prof push to their PCs. So either they want to illustrate how important the face-to-face interaction is in light of recent changes, or they want to award those who push their bodies to the limits and do everything, plus.

My question to all this is what happens when the same grind happens before the academics even become tenured? What happens to the replacement workforce?

*No Time was published in the summer of 2005 by Douglas & McIntyre, and a copy of it is sitting in the alcove alongside a growing stack of others I hope to read...when I have time.

Menzies isn't the only one thinking of these issues these days. Here's a short and incomplete bib of what's been buzzin:

• Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Beacon Press, 2001.

• Culture Machine 2, 'The University Culture Machine' issue, 2000 http://www.culturemachine.net

• Derrida, Jacques. Who's Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002.

• Giroux, Henry, and Kostas Myrsiades, eds, Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millenium. New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

• Kumar, Amitava. World Bank Literature. (Part One is a "Dossier on the Academy.")

• Mediactive, Issue 1, The 'Knowledge/Culture' edition, 2003.

• Nelson, Cary, & Stephen Watt. Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education.

• Ohmann, Richard. The Politics of Knowledge: The Commericialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture. Wesleyan UP, 2003.

• Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. [see also the Oxford Literary Review edition on the Readings' book (OLR, 17, 1995).]

• Robins, Kevin and Frank Webster eds, The Virtual University? Knowledge, Management and Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

• Waters, Linsey. Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.

• Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation (Expanded Edition) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

• Wortham, Simon. Rethinking the University. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

To add insult to injury, Inside Higher Ed published a study called "Stress and the Female Faculty Member" noting that yes, it's true. And it's not because women are just oh so much more emotional...

But wait! There's more!! Inside Higher Ed has actually followed a number of related stories as well:

"Does Political Science have a gender problem?"

Why yes, yes it does. There's an "alarming stall" in the progress of women up through the faculty ranks.

"Gender Gap in Publishing"

Yup, research presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association says so.

Hmm...could all this be related somehow to what Menzies was saying? Methinks so. And I think that the increased normalization of the 'culture of overwork' - that's being passed down to grad students at an alarming rate has a lot to do with it. As well as a throwback to some long-dead idea that thinkers should shirk the banal everyday in order to present some sort of illusion of being a card-carrying producer of the glorious ivory tower. It also sounds like some bizarro call for conformity to an old old (perhaps never been) network that some - the weak? - just can't live up to.

All this to say that this weekend I cleaned out the kitchen cupboards and bleached everything - even the silverwear - and played Mercenaries [oh.my.so.good!] out of a desperate need to take a short break before the hell of deadlines rears its ugly head tomorrow morning and launches me into another series of long stints in front of this PC. Because I can't foresee having time to do it again before the Xmas "break."