On being an academic, part 1 – Introduction

I have been in academia since 1989, or even longer if you count some stints as a student employed as a tutor. Over those years my own roles have changed as I have adjusted my discipline focus and climbed the academic ladder, but there have also been significant changes in the sector. I have been thinking about the nature of academic life a great deal in the last few weeks but two events occurred today which have prompted me to put keyboard to blog to get some of my thinking out in the open.

The first was a seminar that actually discussed some of the pressures that are now present in the university realm (and have been for some time, but they seem to be coming to a head), and the implications they have for academic endeavour. It was an interesting seminar — and some of its themes will appear in the series of blog posts I have in mind — but the telling part of the story was the fact that I couldn’t give the seminar my full attention because I was frantically trying to read through my PhD student’s ethics application (needed in order to conduct her research project), while wondering whether or not my pile of marking was taking care of itself and if I would have time to also read one of several papers I need to review.

The second event occurred late in the afternoon. A friend/colleague called by my office, somewhat loath to interrupt me, with a quick computer question (we do have IT support, but I know a few Mac quirks and am often able to provide a faster response). Having taken care of this, our conversation turned to our mutual research interest. Before long we were in deep discussion, grappling animatedly with the question of what it is, conceptually, about fundamental statistical ideas that make them hard for students to fully comprehend.

And then my friend apologised for getting us “side-tracked” and taking up more time than she’d intended. I thought about this for a moment — with the marking and reviews casting an even larger shadow than they had been in the morning — and then realised that the conversation we had had was precisely the sort of conversation I thought I was supposed to be having as part of being an academic.

Now these stories seem to be about time pressure — and this is partly true — but the issues are far deeper than that. Some of my concerns with time pressure right at this moment are, in some measure, entirely my own, due to the fact that I’m in a new job and preparing new things in an environment that is new to me, and also due to my own pathological tendency to get sidetracked at times. Nothwithstanding these, however, there are bigger concerns underlying the problems in the stories above, that have, at their core, the inherent and changing challenges of what it means to be an academic in 2012.

So, brace yourself for a set of navel-gazing blog posts over the coming however-long-it-takes, as I try to paint a picture of (my views on) academia.