Wits End

Work will follow you

Academics laboured in their pyjamas long before it was trendy, but they can't so easily fall in line with other 21st century work habits, writes Professor Chris Thurman.

These words come to you, dear reader, from the side of a sports field. My son is playing in a cricket match (don’t ask me for the score). I guess this is one of the perks of the 21st century – if you can work remotely, you can work remotely anywhere. But it is also, of course, one of the worst things about the digital age. Because if you can work any time, any place, then work goes with you everywhere.

This is how we live now: never entirely present where we are, with our minds or our virtual selves always partially somewhere else. Still, I have to catch myself before I fall into self-pity. Tapping away whimsically on a laptop, occasionally looking up to watch bright young things sprinting across green grass under a blue sky, hardly seems like the stuff of a tech-dominated dystopia.

And perhaps it isn’t about technology anyway. There has always been something paradoxical about the academic life: never fully at work, never fully at rest. Never fully at work because we scholars are so passionate about our fields (aren’t we?) that research and teaching are, if not always a pleasure exactly, then at least a labour of love. To be fair, email and spreadsheets are mostly just labour; there isn’t much love involved. And marking, well, that’s not so much about labour as it is about torture.

Okay, so passion and pleasure may not feature as strongly in our vocation as we imagined would be the case when we heeded the clarion call of academia. But it is nonetheless a vocation, a calling – and that’s why we’re never fully at rest. Weekends? Public holidays? That week around Christmas when the university is definitely, officially, unambiguously closed? These are the times when, rather inconveniently, ideas strike – when you suddenly find you want to spend hours on a computer or in a lab or on a research site, reading and testing and thinking and experimenting.

This is one of the reasons that it’s very annoying being married to an academic. It’s also why trying to get us to follow due process with things like leave is a fruitless exercise. I know colleagues who, much to the chagrin of HR, haven’t applied for a day’s leave over the course of a 40-year career. What’s the point of taking leave if one’s “work” and one’s “life” are basically the same thing?

A sabbatical is a different story. You don’t mess around with sabbatical leave. Sabbaticals are vitally important because they allow you to carry on working as you have done, but in your pyjamas. Or at another university. Or sometimes, at another university and in your pyjamas.

In fact, were it not for the mild inconvenience of the Great Online-Hybrid-Blended-Learning Perma-Pivot™ of 2020 (and 2021, and 2022) ... and were it not for, you know, the terrors of a global pandemic ... the COVID years would have suited most academics down to a tee. Academics were pioneering working 18 hours a day while wearing pyjamas long before it became trendy. When it comes to some other work trends, we don’t fall in line as easily. Open-plan offices don’t match the standard academic persona – we like to be able to lock our office doors and pretend we’re not there. For the same reason, you won’t find a staff common room at a university that boasts foosball or a mini basketball hoop. Hot desking? We’re not big fans of this, unless the desk in question is a table at a coffee shop halfway between home and campus, and we’re on our third cup of the morning.

In the past, academics took a certain amount of pride in not keeping up with fashionable habits and “best practice” in the business world. Now it isn’t so easy to be disdainful, especially because we are all being encouraged to embrace academic entrepreneurship. This was a terrifying prospect to those who thought it meant we would no longer have a reliable salary and would have to learn how to use start-up jargon like “bootstrapping” and “market penetration” and “sweat equity”.

Happily, however, it turns out that academic entrepreneurship is primarily about increasing the public-facing side of your work. It can mean making money, for yourself or for the university, but touting products and services is not the only aim. Entrepreneurship, broadly understood, goes beyond economic value and focuses on innovation for social good.

Nalaka Gooneratne, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the “inherent contradiction” in academic entrepreneurship – that universities “cannot have profit as their primary motive” – is in fact what makes it a useful term and concept: academic entrepreneurs pursue a unique goal, writes Gooneratne, because they “seek to incorporate aspects of commercial engagement into their research work with the ultimate goal of accelerating the actual implementation of their research in order to advance the health of the general population”. Those of us who aren’t medical scientists might want to replace “health” with “wellbeing” in that definition, but there’s a lot about this particular spin that appeals.

You could go so far as to say that anyone pursuing research at a university who does not seek to perpetuate the ivory towers mythos has been an academic entrepreneur without even knowing it. And let’s be candid: this is not bad work if you can get it. Sometimes you can do it in your pyjamas. Sometimes you can even do it while sitting beside a cricket field.

* Chris Thurman is Professor of English and Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre in the School of Literature, Language and Media