On Andy Roddick

Apologies for such a long gap; I used up all my writing beans on a) trying to protect myself from the global pestilence, and b) doing a Masters.

I rarely read about sport. Sport, which constitutes the only compelling reason for having a television in the house at all, fascinates and absorbs me, but it is something that people tend to write about in one of two ways: over-emphasising the physical, or over-emphasising the emotional. Recently, however, I read an article by Sean Manning in which he interviewed Andy Roddick and several people from of his professional and personal support network. Manning strikes a delicate balance between describing the sheer physical ability and endeavour required to pursue elite sport, and the emotional dangers of so much attention, such high expectations, and every disappointment taking place in public. The article ranges widely over his life and career, but what has stayed with me is how hard Andy Roddick he found it to enjoy his success. His trainer at the time, for example, describes Andy Roddick losing the 2009 Wimbledon final to Roger Federer. The match was an absolute epic, lasting well over four hours. Roddick lost, 14-16 in the fifth set. Afterwards, he sat in the shower for twenty minutes, distraught and unmoving, letting the water stream over him. Roddick himself describes that match only in terms of pain, speaking of his team as “hurt[ing] as much as I did in that moment”; there is no sense that, having recovered from the initial disappointment, he was able to reflect on the game, recognise that he played out of his skin and take comfort from the many, many good things he did in that extraordinary final, and indeed across the rest of the tournament to get to the final at all. At the very least, one would expect him to recognise that he played well: well enough to take the best player in the world at the time right to his limit; well enough, in fact, to win more games in the final than Federer did (Roddick won thirty-nine, Federer thirty-eight. Proof, if proof were needed, that what matters is not how many points you win, but which ones). Surely there can be no disgrace in losing to Roger Federer at the height of his powers? And yet Roddick remained unable to feel good about any aspect of his role in that jaw-dropping match for many years because he didn’t win. He set the tone immediately after the match when he was asked to describe his performance, saying simply “I lost”. Winning is all, and losing is worse than nothing; a kind of abjection in which every defeat is dragged around forever as a mark of not being good enough. The question I’m interested in here is implied throughout the article (and, I think, throughout Andy Roddick’s career in professional sport, and the sporting careers of so many others), and it’s this: what is the correct mental attitude for a competitive athlete to take towards competition itself?

Roddick and others describe him as hyper-competitive, the same naked compulsion to win (and win utterly, annihilating, crushing and demoralising his opponents) expressed in everything from Grand Slam finals to supposedly casual games of Scrabble. He recalls his last year on tour, tortured, dissatisfied and unhappy, not yet thirty years old. Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer were all steaming up in the outside lane, ready to overtake (and, as he saw it, humiliate) him, no matter how hard he worked. It’s worth remembering here that Nadal, Murray and Djokovic are all four or five years younger than Andy Roddick, but Federer is actually a few months older. Moreover, all those players I just named are European, while Roddick was the sole representative of his sports-obsessed nation. This, then, did not look or feel like a timely and appropriate changing of the guard; rather, it was framed by the press as the end of an era that had barely started. Roddick continued to win matches, but under so much pressure to take responsibility for the whole of American men’s tennis, winning lost its flavour. He says, of another, un-named player on the tour that year, “I see this guy floating around and he’s like #25 in the world. He’s the happiest guy I’ve ever seen. And I’m just like … I just want one more look at the basket. I’ll do anything.” In a recent article by Donald McRae, the swimmer Adam Peaty describes feeling godlike before races, a sensation that was ‘built on a consuming obsession to be the best. Even another world record, or gold medal, was never enough.’ McRae then outlines Peaty’s more or less total mental and emotional breakdown, after years of the strain of feeling, as Peaty puts it, ‘under siege’ by the quest for physical perfection. So, while relentless competitiveness can drive a person to work harder, to make greater sacrifices, to achieve more, it remains a deal with the devil. Nothing other than total, eternal, indisputable success will do. That means winning at all costs, while at the same time those wins mean less and less. There is no good or good enough, but only the best. Number twenty-five in the world won’t do. Number five in the world won’t do. Number one in the world won’t do, because you can’t stay there long enough. There is no long enough. Long enough means forever. Even winning itself won’t do, because every win must be followed with another win, a better win, a more prestigious tournament, a more fearsome opponent, a new combination of major championships. So, good enough can never be reached: the satisfaction and serenity that one might expect to accompany a win are drained away. Roddick himself says “there’s relief when you win, not out-and-out joy”. This kind of competitiveness, then, goes well beyond a healthy wish to work hard and be appreciated for doing so. Like a curse in a fairytale, it becomes something very much darker, and very much harder to escape or switch off: a mountain that can never be scaled – or, rather, a mountain that can be scaled, but from the peak of which the view is only clouds.

Manning describes Roddick and his team being asked, from the very early days, whether he was “the next Agassi” or “the next Sampras”, as though he couldn’t just be the first Andy Roddick and have that be enough. It’s worth reminding the reader here that Andy Roddick is both blond and white: a classically American white man. Much as the British media foams over the idea of a British person winning Wimbledon (‘our’ tournament), the way that the American media relentlessly pushed Roddick to surpass those that had gone before him, and Agassi and Sampras in particular is, I suggest, a subtle form of racism, assuming that a blond, white man will naturally overtake players who were embraced as American heroes very much in spite of their immigrant heritage. Even though I despise big serving, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Roddick play. As a player, he was never less than entertaining, physical and committed, and I always felt sad for him when he was compared to his heroes (or, rather, invited to make such a comparison himself), at such a young age, and in such a crass way. The 2009 match mentioned above was the win that took Roger Federer past Pete Sampras in terms of the number of majors won, and Sampras was courtside to see him do it, presumably hoping that whole time to see Andy Roddick prevail. Sampras’s presence also gave the whole thing the slightly uncomfortable feel of a tennis-based production of Macbeth: Sampras, weirdly anonymous in a suit and tie, fades in and out of focus, while endless journalists prepare to yell their single line (“are you the next Banquo?”) at the victor. This hyper-competitive world does not allow one to simply turn up and be whomever one is; clearly delineated from those who have gone before; eager, unashamed and comfortable with one’s flaws and quirks; and above all grateful for whatever one is able to achieve. It’s also a world in which one cannot say “look, it’s just a person hitting a ball at another person” and have such a statement taken at face value. I don’t reduce tennis to a person hitting a ball to devalue the achievements and sacrifice of professional athletes; rather, I am pointing out that treating sport as life and death, and in particular treating defeat as death, is clearly incredibly bad for the mental health of those that make a living from playing sport. Moreover, the way that female athletes in particular have been criticised for prioritising and protecting their mental health (the tennis player Naomi Osaka springs to mind, as does the gymnast Simone Biles) is not unrelated here. It’s almost as if even mentioning the idea that elite sport is undertaken by people, who have emotions, desires and frailties, is in bad taste. This is also related to our tendency to see sport as a substitute for military conflict, in which we are encouraged to support those from our own nation against everyone else, lumped together as foreign, Other and therefore somehow undeserving of victory. In such a black-and-white model, nuance (such as the idea that sport might not be the only thing in a person’s life) finds very little purchase. Being Good At Sport is seen as an athlete’s whole being. Roddick’s wife Brooke Decker describes the change in her husband when he left that world. She says, “it was like a light switched on in him. And he became the person who I knew and fell in love with. And after some time I realized, Oh, this is a man who was suffering and really grappling with the end of his career. And the end of that identity.”

This, I think, is key to how we think about sport: as a problematic source of identity, both for those that play it and those that watch it. I think this is particularly true for men, simply because women are not expected to watch sport (not out of choice, anyhow). It’s very rare that, on hearing that I watch a lot of sport, a person responds with anything other than incredulity. They immediately seek explanations. Does your husband watch sport? Not without me, no; in fact, before we met, I don’t think he had ever watched any sporting fixture of any kind all the way through. I once sat in a pub, knitting a sock, watching a Six Nations game and patiently explaining crossing to my husband (who would have been an excellent number 8 were he not bespectacled, fat and greatly averse to physical discomfort). Did you used to do competitive sport yourself, then? No, not really; certainly no more than anyone else does at school, and no more competently than anyone else. Do you follow a particular team or player? Again, the answer is no, and listing the sports that I enjoy watching (rugby, tennis, athletics, gymnastics, snooker) only makes it worse. Not football? they screech. Not even the World Cup? This feels to me like yelling at an atheist for not going to church (not even midnight mass?) – and not just any church, but our church, our local, personal church at which we worship just the religious figures with whom we identify most closely.

Think about how we choose a team or a player to support. One, there are circumstantial factors: our nation, region or city; the team our friends or family support, or took us to watch at an impressionable age; a person who seems to represent or speak for us who also does a sport that we like. These things have nothing to do with our chosen team or player as such – they either happen to match us in a grand game of Sporting Snap or they don’t. Two, there are emotional factors: our sense of how a game should be played; an interview we watched in which this person or that was funny/generous/insightful; a vague sense that, were the world to be rearranged, we might play a bit like/be best friends with that person; a nice voice; a nice haircut; and so on. Most of that is bullshit, though, because we have no idea what that person is really like. What we are seeing of them is partial, and heavily filtered. And yet, we will sit on our sofa and watch hour after hour of them Being Good At Sport, maybe well into the night because the sport is taking place in another time zone, yelling and clapping and slapping the furniture because somebody did something with a high degree of skill and enthusiasm, and we appreciate their endeavour. How, then, can it be fair to demand that this person account for themselves by attempting to answer banal questions like “are you the next Simone Biles?” or “are you the next Serena Williams?”? I’ve deliberately chosen two women of colour, each of whom is very unlikely to be surpassed any time soon, in order to illustrate how utterly inappropriate and stupid such questions are. Whatever answer is being invited is completely uninteresting: obviously the only possible answer is to be gracious and respectful towards the person one has just been invited to consider. What is really being gestured at, underneath the lazy journalism, is something like “are you going to fill the role in my life currently filled by someone else? I’m basically unable to cope with change” and “do you think you can be the best person ever ever EVER to do the thing you get paid money to do?”, as if we were all eight years old and trying to decide who was the fastest runner or the best at spelling, and then following that up with a discussion of whether any of us could possibly grow up to run the fastest, spell the best – run and/or spell so well, in fact, as to eclipse all runners and spellers, both past and future.

There is, I think a further confusion in such questions. Firstly, sport (an endeavour that prides itself on notions of fair competition) and sportspeople are not treated fairly by journalists. The article that prompted this post is unusual in that Manning treats Andy Roddick like a fully rounded person, with a personality that goes beyond tennis and thoughts and feelings of his own, rather than little more than a container for the sloshing, incoherent hopes and fears of those that have chosen to ‘follow’ that athlete, and who is expected to feel some sense of responsibility towards that faceless crowd. Roland Barthes notes in an essay on wrestling that ‘out of five wrestling matches, only about one is fair’ (Mythologies, pp.11-12), and suggests that this unfairness is what makes a match interesting, giving us a clear sense of who ‘should’ win and who should not, and thus allowing us to become more fully emotionally engaged because we have picked the ‘right’ person to support. I don’t think Barthes is entirely correct here (because we cannot be in possession of all the facts – we can’t know just from watching a wrestling match whether one of the combatants has taken performance-enhancing drugs, for example, and therefore might unwittingly choose to support the ‘wrong’ person), but even if he was, his idea that we need to identify (and have an opinion about) who ‘deserves’ success doesn’t apply to the unfairness I’m describing here. That unfairness is itself getting in the way of the sports spectator forming an accurate view of who does or does not ‘deserve’ to be in a team or to represent a nation; who does or does not ‘deserve’ to win; who does or does not ‘deserve’ to have their personal life discussed in public; and in Andy Roddick’s case, who does or does not ‘deserve’ to be tasked with resolving a crisis in a particular sport, saddled with a reductive nickname or photographed endlessly without a shirt. Secondly, the “are you the next x?” question conflates the emotional and physical (because the athlete should want to be ‘the best’, whatever that means) but also neglects the emotional in favour of the physical (because the athlete is being encouraged into deeply unhealthy mental habits, dismissing or flattening what they have already achieved by comparing them to someone ‘better’, whatever that means). Thirdly, the timing of such questions is deeply unfair. As noted above, many professional athletes are very young when they start being asked if they are the next big thing, but I’m also talking here about post-competition interviews, when the athlete hasn’t had time to register what has just happened to them, nevermind what it might mean or form a coherent sentence in which to express some of that. It isn’t fair to shove a microphone into the face of someone who is sweaty, exhausted and deeply disappointed, so that you can ask them existential questions about their relationship with whomever it was that most recently did the thing they have just attempted. Those questions can wait until the athlete has had a wash, a clean set of clothes, a drink, a decent meal and time to quietly reflect on what this defeat or success means for them, in the context of their career (not someone else’s).

bell hooks speaks about the cure for patriarchy lying in men, and specifically in learning to accept criticism with gratitude. Similarly, it seems to me that learning to accept a sporting defeat with grace and thoughtfulness (and perhaps even gratitude) would be a far more constructive attitude, allowing an athlete to process losses and then move on from them as a better, more stable player. I’ve made a related point with regards to my own profession and how much academics get paid in another post, and it’s this: be satisfied. Be satisfied with what you have already done, where you are, what you are doing now. Be present. That doesn’t have to mean complacency, laziness, settling, or even becoming one of those dreary people who can only talk about how good they used to be. It means finding contentment in how good one already is and taking reassurance and confidence from that as a way to improve, rather than using discontent and imposter syndrome to frighten oneself into chasing a hypothetical ‘better’. Roddick played twenty-four matches against Roger Federer, and won three of them. That seems extraordinary to me when we remember just how startlingly good Federer was in the five or six years leading up to the 2009 Wimbledon final mentioned above, and just how dominant he was – how rare it was for anyone to push Federer to his limits. However, it’s not as extraordinary as the fact that Andy Roddick, despite being one of the best players of his day, has only just come to terms with the idea that he is, and always was, good enough.

Strike rate; or, why I haven’t written to the Highways Authority

At the time of writing, we have just experienced Britain’s longest and most comprehensive strike in higher education. It isn’t making even a dent on the news and while that is obviously partly because of the killer virus sweeping the globe, the strike last autumn, which was almost as large and did not coincide with a pandemic, was also barely covered. During that earlier strike, I switched on the radio on a strike day hoping to hear (say) an articulate, smart and dedicated UCU rep being interviewed on the picket line, laying out calmly and clearly the various, entirely reasonable grievances of striking staff. Instead, I caught an outside broadcast from, if memory serves, St. Anne’s College Oxford.[1] The interviewer repeatedly exclaimed how vital both research and university education are to the economy (this is how we spot a Tory, my children: they have no metric other than money). Neither the strike nor any of the issues that prompted it were even hinted at.

A strike and a pandemic (whether they run concurrently or not) are both slightly strange for someone like me: a part-time academic only required to leave the house for teaching commitments once a week, with a chronic illness and a business to run from home in what is effectively pre-emptive self-isolation. This second period of industrial action has been particularly odd because I received an email from a non-striking[2] colleague[3] in HR to tell me that my teaching job, which I have done on a series of temporary contracts for the last seven years, has been made into a permanent role. I’ve been partially or wholly self-employed by my lovely little micro-business since 2005, and I’m very successful. Unlike roughly 60% of small businesses, mine did not fail in its first five years; I’ve managed to hit upon something that accommodates most of the physical and mental issues that my condition comes with; and the mortgage broker was entirely satisfied with both my accounting and the long-term viability of the business. Nevertheless, it’s hard to overstate the feeling of relief that comes with a guaranteed income, holiday pay and sick leave (things I have been without for over a decade). I sat alone in my office and whispered, “I can get the roof done.” Then I high-fived the dog[4], sent private messages to understanding friends and studiously maintained the digital picket line by not saying anything about it in public.

I’m one of the most junior academics in my Dept., which is as it should be: I’m part-time, which excuses me from all the most onerous senior admin roles; I became ill at exactly the point my first husband was supposed to start supporting me financially through my doctoral studies; and I certainly can’t afford to take four years off work to do a PhD now. I have thus spent the twelve years since my diagnosis slowly and painfully coming to terms with the fact that (a) I can’t be a fulltime academic, or indeed a fulltime anything; (b) my ability to get promoted through the ranks is necessarily limited and realistically lecturer (where I am now) is as high as I can go; and (c) I can’t afford for my (hitherto) hand-to-mouth, insecure university job to be my main source of earning power (and thus I can’t justify significant investment in it). That sounds frustrating, but I’m very content in my work. It’s so important to be satisfied with the job that you do, including what you get paid and how you feel about promotion. I resent the hell out of the horrible, predictable interview question “where do you see yourself in five years?” because it implies that the job you are doing right now (or indeed the job you are being interviewed for right now) won’t do and isn’t your main focus. I am happier and more productive when I am fully present in the job I already have.[5] I have a similar issue with the notion of social mobility: while I’m all for people trying to do well for themselves, as I said above I’m wary of anything that measures value in purely economic terms.

I manage the household finances with frugality and care. Helped by the fact that I don’t have to pay into a pension (because I probably won’t live long enough to collect it), we are comfortable. In other words, I am perfectly happy to be one of the most junior academics in my Dept. In addition to the reasons given above, this is partly because I am also one of the most highly paid academics in my department.

Here’s how I know. Firstly, I did not spend four years doing a PhD, for which I would likely have had to pay fees whilst earning little or nothing, and getting further into debt. Instead, I spent that time earning, supporting my first husband through his PhD, quietly paying off our student debt while he received a stipend (because STEM). Secondly, I keep careful track of all the hours I work, because that’s what self-employed people do. This means that working beyond my contracted hours is a conscious choice that costs me money. Obviously working beyond contracted hours costs most people money, but we behave as if this isn’t the case because we can’t quantify it easily or accurately. Those of us that pay ourselves a particular rate per hour, however, know exactly and immediately how much we could have earned in (say) the two hours we spent stuck in traffic. Sometimes I work beyond my contracted hours at very busy points in the academic year, but this balances out across the piece pretty well. I am paid to work 56 hours a month and my spreadsheet tells me that last year I averaged almost exactly that (although this is somewhat skewed by the fact that I was very ill in August, a month in which I did nine hours of university work, averaged four hours of sleep a night and lost a stone in ten days). In a typical week, I do around fourteen hours for the university and around sixteen hours for myself, averaging a total of thirty working hours per week. This is not normal in academia. Junior staff often work multiple fractional contracts, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about because I have only two jobs, each of which is (now) stable and (now) long-term. What I mean is that a thirty-hour week (i.e. around 0.8FTE in most normal jobs) is nowhere near the norm in higher education. Most academics work ‘fulltime’ and I’m using the scare quotes to indicate that I don’t mean a normal working week of 35-40 hours, but rather a regular weekly workload well over this, doing work that is complex, emotionally demanding and against tight and inflexible deadlines, often for the greater glory of an institution in which we no longer believe. As Clive James says in Cultural Amnesia, we are doomed ‘to becoming active participants in a productive society, whether we like that society or not’.[6]

Before I became ill, I routinely worked a 45-hour week in various academic support roles, with a significant commute at either end of every working day. I worked evenings. I worked weekends. My first husband Garden Naturalist studied and worked at the same university, as did most of our friends. I had no boundaries between work and rest (or Work and Not Work, as T. H. White’s ants might have it) and neither did most of the people I knew. I’ve got very much better at policing those boundaries, but people are still astonishingly bad at respecting them. I have written before about the time I went to work on Boxing Day and wasn’t the only person in the building (and neither of us was surprised). I’m no longer physically or mentally able to work like that and most working days now involve no more than four or five hours of work. A teaching day, with its two-hour commute each way and five hours of back-to-back lectures, meetings and office hours, knocks the stuffing out me. Regular readers may recall that I work far longer days when in China, but that’s because a) I have nothing else to do besides work; b) I ride the mighty steed of jet lag as far as it will carry me; and c) I take a full week off to sit in the garden when I get back.

Thirdly, when I say I’m one of the most highly paid academics in my Dept., I’m talking about an hourly rate after tax, not an annual or monthly salary. Here’s an exercise I invite you to undertake, particularly if you work in higher education: without looking at any of the relevant figures, write down what you would like to get paid as an hourly rate (this is something every self-employed person has to do, although of course we do look at the relevant figures). Now work out what you actually get paid as an hourly rate. Be honest about the hours you actually work in a typical week and how much tax you pay. Now compare the two figures.

In the interest of both context and full disclosure (see a relevant post on pay by Plashing Vole), in the current tax year I have paid myself £23.50 per hour as an editor and indexer. My university work pays me slightly less (it wouldn’t be worth doing otherwise). I put my prices up at the end of each tax year in April, in line with inflation and after looking sideways at the mortgage. The professors in my Dept. are on jolly decent money, but they are working far, far more hours that I am and are expected to do a whole load of boring shit that I’m too junior for. Professorial salaries at my institution start around £60k pa, which means most professors in my Dept. are paying 40% tax on a substantial part of their salary. If they are also working a fifty-hour week, then even the most senior professors are taking home around £25 per hour. This means that I’m earning only slightly less (again, in hourly terms) and my workload is far more manageable. It also means that everyone between me and the top-end professors is earning significantly less than I am in hourly terms. Indeed, there are many conceivable scenarios in which a promotion might leave one noticeably worse off, on many levels.

My business allows me to practice a workplace model in which I increase my hourly rate and decrease my hours. For example, if I am asked to produce an index in a week (rather than the three weeks it would usually take), and if I can be arsed to take that job on, I can charge a rush rate to reflect the fact that I will have to turn away other work, perhaps delay jobs already booked and work far more hours in a day than I would really like (and which will then require me to take time off when the job is done). Having planned a week in which I expected to spread my usual thirty hours over the whole seven days, I might then find myself working into the night on a complicated text for four days in a row to meet an inflexible deadline. We do this in academia all the time (marking exams, for example), but we don’t have enough control over our workload to balance this out once the deadline has passed. Having produced an index in no time at all on rush rates, if I’ve planned my work properly, I can take some time off to recover without it costing me any money when compared to a normal week. Based on this principle, my plan for the future of my business is, therefore, not to gradually increase my rates as I become more experienced, competent and highly trained and continue to work the same hours, but to gradually increase my rates and work less: to be content with what I earn and what I do. Rather than the reward for work being more money, in other words, the reward will be the same amount of money – an amount of money that I already know to be sufficient for comfortable subsistence – and less work, which I hope to do more competently by dint of there being less of it in front of me and more of it behind me. This is a deeply counter-intuitive model for a workaholic and I don’t pretend to be implementing it as well as I would like, but nevertheless that is the endgame and one that I wish more of my colleagues had the control and flexibilty to implement. Labor are meno, chaps (we can all work less).

Now imagine if higher education was run like that. Imagine if a promotion meant an increase in responsibility, an absolutely rigid workload model in which everyone worked strictly to contract, and an increase in pay as an hourly rate. I would favour a model in which a member of staff who found they were regularly unable to do their work in the stipulated hours was not penalised by just being expected to do the work anyway, for no extra money and in their own time (as happens now), but one in which their line manager was asked to treat the mismatch between paid hours and the length of time required to do the job as a matter of urgency. When these things are left to individuals, the most conscientious – the best citizens, if you will, who take on the horrible roles that nobody else wants, and who genuinely feel obligated to do them well – will work whatever hours are required.

The kinds of roles and tasks that I’m talking about can bloom out of nowhere like fungi, and they fall disproportionately onto women and/or more junior staff, for obvious reasons that we needn’t rehearse here. Pastoral care, for example, is not spread evenly across academic staff, even if students are allocated to staff in an equitable way: any member of staff perceived as too frightening, too senior, too unsympathetic or brusque, or simply too difficult to run to earth (e.g. someone with a teaching or admin role that means they are rarely in their office; someone whose research involves regular periods away from the university; someone whose office is difficult to find or access) is likely to get off more lightly here.[7] A student with serious pastoral care needs not only takes up a huge amount of time and energy, but may also need to be prioritised above other pressing matters (without warning and at any time of the day or night) if we are concerned that they may be a danger to themselves and others. This is as it should be in the sense that we should love our students; we should want to support them as best we can; and we should see it as a privilege to be able to help them, when we can help them. However, be under no illusion: this work takes its toll. It is often triggering and always exhausting. Moreover, when academics support students, this is often the exhausted counselling the exhausted. I suggest that figuring out how to balance one’s unpredictable, draining work – work that must be done properly, if we are to serve each other and our students well – cannot be left to the conscience of each individual academic. One of the most psychologically destructive aspects of overwork is that we do it to ourselves (or, rather, we feel that we are doing it to ourselves). Suicide, illness and self-harm among students make headlines (as they should), but we hear a lot less about the poor physical and mental health of the staff trying to support them and how this relates to the quality and quantity of the support we are able to provide.

I admit that in the model I am proposing there would be an uncomfortably Foucauldian level of scrutiny in terms of keeping track of one’s hours; we would all have to spend more time with our line managers, wrestling our jobs into submission (clearly HR can’t be trusted with this even though it is literally their whole job); and the senior staff would all pay less tax. However, I think these downsides would be more than outweighed by two things. Firstly, HR clearly wouldn’t be needed anymore and thus the whole department could be removed, saving heaps o’ cash and lowering the general cuntishness in the university by a noticeable margin. Secondly, imagine the lightness, joy and productivity of a healthy workload. Rest. Energy. Reading. Giving our best to our students and to each other. Cooking. Eating slowly. Sex, and again, I refer to Foucault here: ‘sex is […] incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative’.[8] Sleep. Imagine how many books you could read if you worked thirty-five hours a week, at a sensible pace, like a normal person. Imagine how many books you could write. Or, to apply the principle of ‘less but better’ more strictly, imagine how brilliant your books would be if you read and wrote the same number of books as you do now, but gave them the care, time and attention they deserve. Imagine the care, time and attention we could give our colleagues and our most vulnerable students. It would save relationships. It would save lives.

Everyone doing less work per person (so to speak) would mean that there would be a load of work left over, of course, but I suggest that much of that work has absolutely zero value and could simply be abandoned (as the coming months of ‘lockdown’, whatever that means, will no doubt remind us). However, for everything left over that does have value, I draw your attention to the fact that every academic has a precarity story, by which I mean a harrowing tale about a lengthy period in the wilderness, usually immediately after getting their PhD: working multiple jobs; teaching anything that moved; writing lectures, job applications and teaching material (almost all for lectures, jobs and seminars that they didn’t get to do); and watching their peers and colleagues fall away. Academia is merciless. It will rip your throat out the moment your arms get tired. I’ve written elsewhere about being a functioning workaholic, but almost everyone in academia is a functioning workaholic. Indeed, I’m not sure it’s possible to work in academia without being a functioning workaholic. Overwork and work addiction are completely normalised. That’s why so many talented, dedicated colleagues, undergrads and postgrads fall away, through ill health caused or exacerbated by punishing hours and stress, or through realising that they have other, more attractive options. That attrition may sound like survival of the fittest, but of course the selection pressures at work here aren’t the natural external forces of a hostile terrain or scarce food resources, winnowing out those least suited to the environment for the long-term health of the species. It isn’t the best and brightest that are left, but those of us who have already invested too much to walk away; those who can’t do anything else; those who can’t bear to do anything else; those who are institutionalised; those who got lucky; those whose bodies and brains and relationships hold up the best. Meanwhile, into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

Why not spread the work out across more people, then? There is clearly no shortage of workers or work, but a shortage of proper jobs (and, I suggest, leadership). The current model is that of a person who, upon ordering a reasonably-sized piece of cake that they are planning to savour is instead strapped into a chair and force-fed an entire cake. Every so often the person doing the force-feeding whips the cake away for no reason and yells into their face that they aren’t eating it right eat it better eat it faster eat it eat it eat it you bastard EAT IT. Nearby, half a dozen other people who are quietly starving to death (and who have expended considerable energy, time and money to even get through the door of this cruel and unusual cafe) write endless, hopelessly elegant recipes, with lengthy prefaces detailing how much they love cake and how well-suited they are to cooking and eating it, as well as generally telling other people how fucking amazing cake is. For these tasks, they are rewarded with crumbs. On no account is anyone to be given an appropriate amount of cake at any time.

Obelix as professor, from Asterix and Cleopatra (words by René Goscinny, pictures by Albert Uderzo). I quote this here because: a) Asterix is not used nearly enough as an explanatory device; b) Asterix and Cleopatra contains some of the best word-related jokes of all the Asterix books, thus illustrating the briliance of both the writing and the translation, as mentioned in an earlier post; and c) Albert Uderzo died, aged 92, while I was editing this post. I note that, since exhaustion is my topic here, several of the articles about his death quote Uderzo’s son-in-law as saying, “[h]e had been very tired for several weeks”.

As well as being one of the highest (hourly) earners, I think I might be the only person in my Dept. with a manageable workload. Again, let us be mindful of the fact that this has been achieved by a combination of bloody-mindedness and chance. It certainly wasn’t via a sensible, transparent and evidence-based process that takes into account the number of hours an academic needs to work in order to be both happy and productive (the kind of process that one might have thought, I don’t know, some department with responsibility for staff wellbeing and working conditions might have developed, if they weren’t too busy being cunts). Since we have already established that many staff (including professors) are apparently content to be paid £25ph, I see no reason why a workload model couldn’t be established (or at least tried, for fuck’s sake) that, alongside the collossal sums freed up by not bothering with an HR department ever again, released enough money to employ some of those talented, committed people currently languishing on multiple fractional contracts, chasing fees and expenses for months and not getting paid at all over the summer. And when I say ‘employ’, I mean properly: with a contract, for years at a time, on decent money that they receive promptly and spread evenly throughout the year, to deliver courses that they have had the time and support to develop well in advance.

As I said above, I’m wary of conflating value with money and my intention isn’t to suggest that senior lecturers, readers and new professors don’t have value, or are in some way stupid or wrong for working so many hours that they reduce their hourly rate below my own. Rather, my point is that annual salaries are meaningless numbers unless they are accompanied by information about the hours worked, the intensity or complexity of the work, the time spent training and preparing to do that work, the money and time spent commuting to a particular place, the emotional labour and stress the role might entail and finally the aesthetic labour of dressing yourself appropriately (another burden that weighs far more heavily on women, even in a sector where tweed and corduroy are considered what my mother used to call ‘smot’). None of those things appear in the job description, and most of them (unlike the annual salary, at least in theory) are not up for negotiation.

To borrow the language of coronavirus, then, the stress of working in higher education does not simply ‘move through the population’, removing the weak, the stupid, the obscure and the lazy. It chews everybody up. Once we have been spat out again, we are then expected to act as role models for our students, teaching without breaks, pushing through office hours on adrenalin and no lunch, and perpetuating workaholism in the next generation. We do everything in a rush, on flights and trains, late at night or early in the morning, and often at the very last minute. With my editing hat on, I have yet to be asked to proofread an application for a job, research money or additional funding that isn’t right up against the deadline. That might not sound like much, but think about who academics are. We are conscientious, bookish, earnest people. We got where we are by paying attention and doing as we were asked. Missing a deadline is something most academics had never done until they became senior staff and found that the good habits we tell students to practice (planning carefully, not allowing oneself to be surprised by a deadline, seeking help as appropriate) simply aren’t possible. That bothers us. We feel we have failed. We feel haunted. We feel guilty. We might even feel stupid.

There are also ramifications of our enormous workload and feelings of inadequacy for the rest of our lives, and indeed the community as a whole. Academics are organised, passionate people. We are thoughtful citizens and have many interests outside those we choose to teach and/or research. Imagine the contribution we could make to society if we had the time and energy to get involved in our communities. Consider also the burden of admin (non-work-related admin) that falls upon the partners and families of academics. I have written elsewhere about how important it is to a romantic relationship that both partners are able to do their share of admin to a reasonable level (again, simply not possible for those described above with the fifty-hour working weeks). I’ve literally no idea how any of my colleagues manage to spend time with their children, or indeed how they found the energy to produce a family at all.

Recall also from an earlier post (Zen and the Art of Relationship Maintenance) how boring-yet-important many of those life admin tasks are. Anne Helen Petersen speaks of  ‘errand paralysis’, arguing that when we expend too much mental energy on simply staying on top of our work, we have nothing left for tasks further down the food-chain, tasks that are then done badly or not at all. She’s right. I’ve had ‘write to Highways Authority about garden wall’ on my to-do list for nearly four months. It would probably take fifteen minutes or so to re-read the relevant paperwork, write the email and file the correspondence in a sensible place – certainly far, far less time than I have spent writing this post. It isn’t the case, then, that I don’t have time to do that boring-yet-important little job. Rather, I don’t have the energy with which to do that job – whatever finite amount of energy I have has been spent on things that are more important, more interesting and more rewarding.[9] And yet, the list of undone things still reproaches me. The full inbox. The endless to-do list. The unwashed plates and unhoovered floors. The half-decorated rooms; half-finished knitting projects; half-abandoned, buttonless dresses. Those last few items are not ‘work’, but they still reproach me, along with all the books unread, films unseen, plays unwitnessed. I don’t feel good about the fact that I haven’t written to the Highways Authority about our garden wall. I feel sloppy. I feel ashamed. I feel less of an adult. There is something deeply wrong with a working culture (and indeed a society) in which ‘busy’ is virtuous, and ‘disorganised’ is a symptom of moral deficiency, because, like the annual salary described above, those labels are meaningless out of context. Also, I’m not disorganised: I know exactly where the paperwork is, who I need to contact and what I’m going to say. I just haven’t got to it yet. There are too many other things in my life that are more important, and I only have so much energy to expend on them. There is no logical reason for me, a competent, responsible person, to feel bad about sensibly prioritising other things ahead of this boring-yet-important little job – and yet I do feel bad.

As I’ve written in another post (in which I argued that love is finite and that one only has so much love to expend on others, and therefore must necessarily make painful choices), one can’t simply pour oneself out endlessly. However, without a healthy workload and concomitantly healthy, proportionate attitude to what is actually possible, agreed upon and shared by all the people involved, neither can one learn not to mind that one can’t do everything. As the Confession has it, ‘we have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.’

_________________________________________________________________________________

[1] I put the radio on without thinking, which meant I got the seething self-congratulatory cess-pool of drivel that is the Today programme, rather than the adult perspective of the World Service, the joy and energy of Radio 6 or the light and space of Radio 3.

[2] You’re right: I needn’t have said it. Of course there were non-striking staff in HR. There shouldn’t have been, mark you. Human Resources ought to be more exercised than anyone about our clunky tools, wasted time, suicidal students and inadequate pensions, as well as the gender, race and class pay gaps, the perils of staff/student relationships, poor pastoral care and all the other stressors that those working and/or learning in higher education are beset with. HR ought to be leading the charge. HR ought to be jumping up and down with rage, all day every day. They aren’t, though, because they’re cunts.

[3] Again, you’re right: ‘colleague’ is the wrong word to describe the parasite that clings to the neck of higher education. As I explained above, HR staff have a duty of care to ensure we are able to carry out our jobs as best we can. They don’t, though, because they’re cunts.

[4] Be under no illusion that there was corresponding, supportive high-fiving going in HR. HR fucking hate me and the dick move of sneaking this piece of information out during industrial action is merely the latest skirmish in a war of attrition, currently approaching the end of its second decade. Of course they informed me of this at a time when I couldn’t celebrate it in public. Of course they did. They’re cunts. They are a constant reminder of that wonderful phrase from Baudelaire: ‘Ah, you want to know why it is that I hate you today!’

[5] I’ve been promoted beyond my competence before and for anyone with a shred of self-awareness it is a deeply uncomfortable experience, for both the person it happens to and those who have to work with them.

[6] Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time (New York, 2007), p.xxiii.

[7] Staff with a reputation for being inappropriate with students are also unlikely to be asked to do their share of pastoral care. The students might discuss this amongst themselves, or it may be quietly agreed among the other staff that Professor Handsy needs to be kept away from the kids. Yes, of course Professor Handsy should have been sacked the minute they first laid a sweaty hand on an undergraduate knee, but that’s not how HR in higher education works. That’s not how any of this works. I likened HR to a mousetrap in an earlier post and I stand by it: cruel, ugly and out-dated.

[8] Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality: Volume 1, The will to knowledge (Penguin, 1978), trans. Robert Hurley, p.6,

[9] I have spent time today outside sawing wood so that I can light the Aga later and cook a roast and I’ve spent time trying to express the ideas I’ve laid out here. I don’t get paid for either of those tasks and could easily have made the argument that I would have done better to spend the whole day pushing on with paid work, and it’s a powerful argument – exactly the kind of argument that, when taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that I will never be able to justify spending fifteen minutes writing to the Highways Authority about our wall.