There is a problem with @34. Faculty at Now-Named Academy’s approach. If I may be so bold, it is rather like that of the Muslim world at the moment: Others are speaking for you! If you will not speak up to normalize extremist views, then you will be tarred with the extremist message.

It does not matter that you say “the academic world is not a monolith.” It does not matter that you “honestly thought that most people would disregard the silly parts…”

The students look to you (faculty) to provide leadership. When something like this comes out it looks official. Then no one is willing to publicly contradict it. What is the message here? That this is official policy.

If I were a student, I’d shut up, put my head down and try to work 100 hour weeks. I’d resent it and I’d resent you for not doing something about it. But short of giving up on the academic dream, that’s mostly my only option. Speaking up in an atmosphere of silence, from a position of little or no power? How is that realistic? You’re trying to attract smart people and they will figure out in a millisecond that the system does not care about the students.

I think the main reason I got an offer from the now-named university was because the professor called me in my office at 10 PM on a Friday night and I was there working. The professor was quite pleased by that. Of course he didn’t know that I had played hooky in the sunshine all afternoon and was making up time.

Other institutions, long past the grad school years, are not immune to the same type of people, with exactly the same mentality. While no longer in academe, but still in research, I have heard the same expectations from (some) supervisors. Never in writing of course, because that would be actionable. But made quite clear my career would suffer if I didn’t work nights and weekends. Not “implied” either. In so many words.

Whether for better or worse, with the current funding profile for science, I doubt it makes any difference either way, so I intend to keep not working on weekends, performing my job with excellence on weekdays, and taking my chances with living a well-rounded life, in which I enjoy both the research and the hobbies. So far, so good.

But, let’s be honest: If someone asks you what he should do to increase his odds of getting a permanent job, then “work 80–100 hours per week” is probably good advice. Yes, he might be a genius and can do in 40 what other good people can do in 80. As long as not too many geniuses are working 80 hours per week, then his chances are probably OK. But if he is not a genius, then he is competing mostly with similar people, some of whom are working 80–100 hours per week. True, for many people working more does not mean producing more and/or better work, but for some it does, and these are the people who get the jobs.

I don’t like this system either, but it’s not even clear how it could be changed, much less that it will be changed.

Compare this to non-academic jobs: If you can do the job, you can get the job. Of course only within the required working hours. One is getting hired to work for the company in the future, not as a reward for past accomplishments. It should be like this in academia as well, and past accomplishments should be used only as a proxy for future performance (in which case they should be suitably weighted but, as mentioned above, they aren’t), but they have become important in their own right. (The absurdity of this is shown by those people who, for whatever reason, get a good job early on, then get the next good job as a result of having the previous good job, etc etc until they get a permanent job, even though at most only during the first job were they above average in output. Most people will say “Hubble Fellow? Put him on the short list”, in other words demand less of him than from an otherwise similar candidate, but in fact one shjould demand more, since such a prestigious position offers a better environment.)

In fact, I would say that any one of those three things is more important—MUCH MORE IMPORTANT— than hours worked. And frankly, the first and third are primarily helpful in that they aid the second. In this money-strapped economy, bringing funding to your university is often a surer route to a tenured position than bringing prestige via publication. True, funding is ideally tied together with Publishing Important Science… but if you have to pick one, and you are not a theorist, the former is the safer bet.

Note, however, that many fellowships are not “jobs”, in several legal aspects.

If so, then the fundamental difficulty here is not cultural, but instead is a labour relations problem.

If people can’t work reasonable hours for reasonable pay, then the work suffers, and ultimately so does society.

Note, however, that many fellowships are not “jobs”, in several legal aspects.

Most of these people don’t have “jobs”. They are doctoral students, or postdocs, and have some paid job (which might be related to the work they are interested in and/or doing for their degree, but which also might not be), some fellowship or maybe no official funding at all (but perhaps a rich spouse). These people are in competition for permanent academic jobs.

Outrageous.

A job is a job, in and of itself. These people are being employed (usually out of the public purse) to perform service and produce specific work. That they may be doing so with a career path in mind is entirely irrelevant. If someone is paid to do a job then their employer is entitled is a standard working week and not a minute more, and the public is entitled to the higher quality work from that reasonable week.

I stress again: Working 80 hours weeks is a sign of incompetence. Its a sign of someone making up for shortcomings by appearing to be busy. If the public is paying for this as a matter of routine, then I personally think that funding to these kinds of workshops should be cut entirely. As it stands, we are subsidizing substandard people sitting at their desks for 80 hours doing precious feck all, then rewarding them with tenure afterwards. Money well spent?

The only way to fix this is for a hiring committee to take whatever metric it uses and divide it by the number of hours worked, assuming productivity per 40-hour-work-week (which perhaps they should care about if they are hiring someone for a permanent job who might work less in the future) and not total productivity is what is important. But this will not happen, for a variety of reasons.

Are there solutions? Yes, but I don’t see them happening with the current funding scheme.