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Together we can make academia
an environment where we thrive
Today, we face a burnout crisis in universities. More than half of UK academics experience high or
very high levels of work related stress. Early career academics are at least 6 times more likely to
develop mental illness than people working outside academia.
Universities and governments typically address these problems by using psychological interventions
to make academics more resilient to stress. Prescribing CBT or meditation for stressed-out
researchers suggests that the reason we cannot cope lies with us as individuals, and fails to address
and treat the fundamental sources of the problem. The reason for the burnout epidemic in
universities is not that overly sensitive people self-select for an academic career, but that work in
academia is organised in ways that make us sick. Some of these factors are the obsession with
performance metrics in universities, the perpetual competition among academics, the expectation of
excellence in all areas, job insecurity and the rise of temporary and unstable contracts, the utilization
of free academic labour by publishing houses, the pressure to publish in high impact journals, and
the pressure to obtain external funding.
Psychology is often seen as the ultimate tool to understand and ‘fix’ mental health problems: to
improve individuals’ coping strategies to enhance their resilience and adaptiveness, so that they can
function better and become more productive in their work. However, helping individuals adapt to
the system that caused their suffering in the first place is clearly a limited and sometimes misguided
use of psychological knowledge.
A more responsible approach to psychology would provide both a systemic analysis of the causes of
individual suffering, support for individuals in responding to it, and the empowerment of individuals
as change-makers. Within a flawed system, individuals have agency that extends beyond their
ability merely to cope and function at work. We can take action aimed at changing the rules of the
system that makes academics collectively miserable. For this, we need a collective form of agency.
As academia is ultimately constituted of us academics, we must recognize our own responsibility in
perpetuating the competitive logic of the academic system. Instead of competing, we should
envision and try to create an academic system in which we want to work. We, a group of work and
organisational psychologists, have written a manifesto that describes how this might happen.
In this manifesto, we offer ten recommendations for a sustainable future for universities, in which
academics can both thrive and conduct meaningful work that delivers on academia’s social
responsibilities. We call on academics to do research that is truly independent from corporate
agendas, prioritize societal interests instead, and engage in continuous dialogue with other
stakeholders to identify and research the most relevant issues. We want to collectively stop aspiring
to be the mythical ideal academic who delivers excellence in every aspect of their job (and often
pays with their health for pursuing this fantasy). Instead, we need to co-construct healthier
objectives and standards, working in ways that are more collaborative, caring and relational, and
much less individualistic, competitive and self-exploitative in nature. We invite academics to break
the silence in universities and engage in dialogue with colleagues about discrimination, bullying, and
other misconducts in academia, actively supporting each other within and across universities. We
invite academics who are in managerial roles to remain aware of their primary responsibility for the
wellbeing of their employees. We must strive to prevent health problems among academics, and if
they occur, notice their early signals and respond to them carefully.
The current performance management system builds on the extensive use of quantitative metrics to
measure and compare the performance of academics, which promotes poor science, amplifies stress
and is detrimental for academics’ intrinsic motivation for doing research. The dominant performance
management system in most universities damages academics’ motivation and capacity to deliver
high quality research, failing both us and society more widely. We should set our own professional
objectives and processes through democratic dialogue with each other and manage our own
performance in sensible ways. These are just some of the recommendations outlined in our
manifesto.
The field of work psychology has been nearly entirely incorporated into mainstream management
research in the past several decades, absorbing neoliberal assumptions into its core principles. With
this manifesto, we are reclaiming our territory. We are reminding ourselves and fellow work
psychologists of our responsibility to use our expertise to serve the well-being of employees, both in
academia and in other sectors across society.
To ‘respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals’ is a key responsibility of
psychologists, as stated in the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association. We want to
live up to these responsibilities by continuing the work we started with this manifesto as part of a
movement for change. But we recognise that the problems we identify are common across many
academic disciplines, so we invite all academics who are sympathetic to our agenda to sign the
manifesto. By building collective agency, we can begin to change our academic system from the
bottom up, creating a future in which academics can do more socially relevant work in healthier
ways.
Please visit www.futureofwop.com for more details.