Much yelping in the twittersphere this week over a story in The Independent re: Edinburgh University. To wit:
“Edinburgh University has come under fire for planning to introduce a new monitoring policy to check where employees are when they are out of the office.
Campus staff are now required to tell university management if they leave their “normal place of work” for half a day or more – a rule that until recently only applied to international staff in accordance with Home Office policy.
Under the new rules, all schools and departments at the university have been asked to put in place “sensible and proportionate arrangements” to monitor staff whether they are on leave, working from home, working on campus or away from the university…”
Now, this pretty clearly is a solution in search of a problem. Professors are professionals. They’re on-campus when they need to be (classes, meetings) and the rest of the time, frankly who cares? As long as they are producing in terms of research (admittedly, this assumes expectations about research production are clear and unambiguous, which is not always the case) and they are available by phone/email, there is no problem. Creative, productive people work wherever they feel most productive. Everybody gets that, even Edinburgh.
The University isn’t saying “you must be on campus all the time”; it’s saying “hey let us know when you’re not on campus”. And they’re probably not using it to track people hour by hour; more likely they just want to root out the odd Professor Piercemuller trying to work at an overly long distance. But the fact is a) the university is requiring people to take an irritating minute out of the day to write to tell them someone where they are and b) the policy will make everyone feel as if they might be being monitored. What problem could Edinburgh have that was serious enough to wish to irritate staff to that extent?
On the other hand, it is important to keep things in perspective. In literally any other line of work, letting the boss know where you are is not optional but expected. The fact that this is not the case in universities speaks to the fact that Professors have achieved a kind of magical status of acting like freelancers while still drawing a steady paycheck.
Now, I sometimes wonder if everyone in academia understands how unbelievably privileged this arrangement really is. For instance, when I see people on the internet conclude that what Edinburgh is doing “violates academic freedom” or that having to tell your employer where you are is tantamount to acting “under the shadow of the police”, my thoughts are basically “get a grip”.
Edinburgh’s decision affects professors’ privileges, not their rights. It doesn’t seem to be a very good decision – seems to me the downside to staff morale and institutional culture likely outweighs. But the quickest way for academics to get tarred as being out of touch elitists is to start ranting about how something that is 100% normal for 99% of the population is the forerunner of jackbooted fascism.
Check your privilege, as the kids say. There’s nothing wrong with opposing irritating and officious management decisions: just, you know, keep it in perspective.
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Or maybe there are other reasons. For risk management purposes how do you estimate the number of people in the building if there’s a fire or an active shooter on the premises.
Okay – I’m not sure that would fly very far when you’re talking about a university or college where people are legitimately coming and going all the time. We need to provide building occupant load estimates based on the number of scheduled events and classes for insurance purposes.
Bear in mind that the magic’s reversible: universities can treat professors like staff to be administered, then expect them to produce like free-lancers with no lives.
Secondly, while parallels with (say) Mussolini making the brains run on time might be hyperbolic, the real threat is existential, concerning not what we do, but who we are: are faculty members of the intellectual community, or mere help? Is a university an intellectual community, or just a public service?
Spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, believe it or not. Very clear to me that one must be wholly “on the clock” or not at all. Our institution is, at present, stuck between. As a legacy of our college past, there is a very generous vacation benefit, one more fitting an institution where colleagues executed almost all their duties through teaching during the fall, winter, and spring. Now with a more conventional mix of duties, including research, work is spread throughout the calendar year, and yet a large summer vacation remains on the books to be managed. Not practical for many people to use it all, cannot roll it over, must track the hypothetical liability of everyone taking it all at one time (not that this would ever happen, of course)…
I am accustomed, elsewhere, to taking some vacation and doing some research and prep in the summer, and managing this time, myself. I didn’t even count it, to be honest, and my previous institution just assumed that I used my allocation, whatever was that allocation. But now that I am at a place where the summer time is supposed to be tracked, I wonder how would be best for me to conceive of my time doing archive work and attending conferences. Is none of that time vacation? But the far more interesting element is how to conceive of the time of teaching colleagues during the year. Of course, it is off the clock. But if time outside of term is definitely on the clock, how does a teaching colleague imagine her or his time during term? Is Saturday grading at time-and-a-half? If one is teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is Wednesday a half-day if you prep in the morning and at night?
Managing one’s own time really is the only thing that makes sense for the academic environment, but making all this fit within the context of provincial labour laws, aligned with the arrangements for non-academic staff, gets more complex with each layer peeled off. I have often said that HR people with good ideas for managing the processes around university life can really write their own ticket.
Reminds me of a Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-15