Universities are in trouble, and it’s not just money we’re talking about. They are living through something of a crisis of confidence, even of trust and faith. More and more, I find myself, and my colleagues, unsure of what we’re supposed to be doing any more, and certainly unclear on why we’re doing it. 

There’s no doubt that many academics are feeling very pressured, highly anxious, and deeply insecure about their profession and its prospects. For some, suffering perhaps worse than others, a feeling of desperation, of being cornered, is setting in. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it? 

Why does everyone feel so miserable? 

The first element is workloads. Now we’re not working down a mine in the nineteenth century; we have flexibility, and still some control. We have to remember that most members of the public will regard worried articles about how we’re doing as self-regarding at best, and complaining with just about the smallest violin in the world at worst. 

But there is still a case to answer here. The sheer amount of work  seems to be increasing exponentially, and not just in terms of scale but the number of vectors it’s all happening on too. It is impossible to be a top-line manager and administrator and mentor and researcher and writer and outreach officer and IT expert and online instructor and pedagogical innovator and recruiter and teacher and marker and external examiner and press pundit and grant bidder and editor and look after your own wellbeing. No-one can do that. Yet that’s what is often asked. 

What we’re really doing overall is running down our social capital, toiling away in a failing system that calls to mind nothing more than the late Soviet economy (far more similar to ours than we’d like to admit). When the money coming in continuously declines, organisations sweat their assets, and as they do so increasingly wear away their own foundations. What that involves is constantly whacking our own creativity, and capacity for ideas, against the brick wall of funders’ and employers’ indifference. That’s a losing game. Small wonder a lot of lecturers come to feel – or be made to feel – like losers. 

Beyond the line of hours worked, soaring ever upwards, and our own inability to actually come up with anything new, we have to add a third point – in most ways the most important of all: It’s a lack of money. When the ship’s afloat and running before the wind, change and movement can feel exhilarating. When it’s run aground, and it’s not so much stationary as lurching from side to side, that rush turns to nausea. Money is a great problem-solver and solvent. As the cash drains out of the system, all the nasty and gritty realities become nastier, gritter, more unpleasant. 

Fourth, and perhaps worse for academics than others, is not being listened to. Most university staff are used to having Voice. They know things. They feel important. Okay, perhaps they felt like that rather too much in some of the pompous post-war years, when they ruled in a very small roost, but after massification they’re just getting drowned in a sea of powerful voices – claxons of Noise, as opposed to Voice. 

The growth of managerial and administrative grades responsible more and more for controlling academics rather than supporting them is one of the most important trends in the modern university. That structure emits a constant white noise and static of demands that don’t seem connected to lecturers’ training or aims. And that suppression of academic Voice is critical to a proletarianization or retreat of value and worth far more important than the squeeze on relative salaries (and therefore status) that we’ve concurrently been experiencing. 

Academics in a huge range of subjects understand very well the importance of responsive leadership and truly resilient systems, involving staff in change through consultation and discussion. Just about every modern management text recommends all of that. But being asked to do more with less in a dumb and crude way is not a progressive, modern or indeed successful way of proceeding. It just makes everyone – including me – feel isolated, disliked, frustrated and alone.   

Watching everything done badly 

Everyone loves to watch things done well. Cary Grant on the big screen. Back in the day, David Beckham curling in a free kick from distance or Usain Bolt breaking another record. It’s a joy. But watching things done really badly – a Donald Trump tribute to an opponent, an attempt at populist connection from Rishi Sunak, a DC Movies turkey – is painful and disassociating. Most of us have seen just that, covering our ears from the discordant clanging cymbals of amateurism and our eyes from sights akin to meticulous microelectronics attempted with a blindfold and boxing gloves on. It’s not helping.

That’s not just a question of expertise denied. The modern university has also become a site of moral harm or injury, perhaps mildly so, but a hard place to work and keep one’s sense of purpose and morality intact. Universities have moved progressively out of line with their staff’s view of the world, and that gap is another element in the increasing difficulty of keeping a grip on reality. Watching your knowledge go disregarded in the so-called knowledge economy is one thing: watching your beliefs denigrated in practice is quite another. 

One cannot sit in a long conference about employers’ care for their employees, the importance of equality or the need for true belonging and then turn to the faceless widget factory of contemporary Higher Education without wondering when the reality of the actual modern university is going to be addressed, or at least mentioned. It’s not so much the elephant in the room as a Damien Hirst-style shark in a tank.  

Isn’t there more to work than this? 

Taken together, these elements can make the profession of being a teacher and learner in Higher Education feel like an intolerable burden. Working harder and harder. Making the money go round as fees and funding dry up. Wasting talent on a faster and faster whirligig of a make do and mend. Watching on as a witness to some incredible blunders that wouldn’t even make it into a David Lodge-style campus novel. Feeling the moral injury of condemning bad behaviour while ignoring or condoning it while in the office. From this perspective, it’s not a surprise that academic mental health is suffering. It’s actually a wonder that people have held together for so long: testament to the discipline, stamina and long-practiced satisficing of many lecturers. 

I’m personally pretty resilient. In childhood I had to watch my father struggle with his own deeply fractured mental health. I know the signs of mental ill-health. I’m acutely aware of my own emotions. I think I have a good sense of how to move forward, when to change and when to stop. I’m an experienced and flexible observer and manager of my own feelings. Even so, I’ve got into a kind of furrowed rut like in a really deep and ancient hollow way: a strange, damp, grey passage in which we’re all just shuffling forward, ticking off task after task, job after job. We’re just shifting a big pile of paper from one side of the desk to the other, often these days online. You can trace it in the gossamer thread of document revises, or in your internet history. It’s not the History I’m supposed to be creating. 

It’s very hard to quantify what’s really going on in this profession, and in the words of my editor when I was a journalist many years ago, I can only say what I see. But I think we can detect that the challenges inherent in working inside Higher Education are mounting and mounting, with little relief on the horizon. Most people going into universities had at the start an ethical sense of their future, a vocation, something that wasn’t just mechanical but which was somehow simply right. The university must be just such a moral place, or it is nothing. As of now, it’s doing a pretty good job of looking like nothing: drab, pointless, miserable. That’s doing harm to all of us. 

Conclusion

It’s crucial that university leaders – and this includes Professors ‘in the field’ as it were – speak out about this. Early Career colleagues look to senior academics as an example, a prediction of how things might go, and for at least some sort of leadership. Being honest is probably the best type of leadership, and that’s what Professors like me, as well as departmental chairs, Vice Chancellors, Chancellors, sector leads and politicians should all be doing. We ourselves should be part of the embodied change we seek: turning off our computers and phones, taking all our annual leave, refusing to answer emails out of hours and only scheduling meetings within work hours everyone – including colleagues with caring responsibilities – can make. 

I could roll out a sad old list of ‘things that can help’. Absorb yourself in a really engrossing hobby. Go out with your friends. Switch off. Try to sleep better and longer. But that doesn’t help much in the toils of the big forces in play, which is why so many people became so enraged at the point they were sent a link to a wellness app, or when got all those emails about watching yoga videos during the pandemic. Actually, sometimes things aren’t in your own hands. In the endless mess of structure versus agency, it’s the structure. 

Remember, first, foremost and above all: it’s not you. It’s them. Don’t feel bad. You’ve not failed. You’ve been failed.

If you’re miserable in your labours, it’s important to come to the same realisation Toby Jones’ wronged sub-postmaster came to and then put to work in Mr Bates Versus The Post Office: this has been done to you. You’re not alone, and you don’t need to be alone. And you have allies among both your peers and the powerful willing to speak out. Those are perhaps the most important revelations of all.

Glen O’Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a series of books, most recently The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (2017). He is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘In All Our Footsteps: Mapping, Tracking and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post War Britain’, and is currently finishing a book on the domestic policies of the Blair Labour government of 1997-2007. 

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