Stockholm syndrome, maternity cover, and the value of academic staff.

Working in universities is a privilege and a joy at its best, but is overwhelming and destructive at worst. I can’t imagine working anywhere else and on most days I love it, but my husband thinks I have Stockholm syndrome and can’t see how much I’m being exploited.

Personally, I’ve worked out how to ‘play the game’, aligning the things I care about with the institutional metrics, strategy and buzzwords, and I’m doing well for myself, and hope to be promoted to Professor on our Education pathway next year. I see a lot of colleagues really struggling to align what they care about with the institutional priorities and getting very disillusioned – sometimes I think they are naïve for not being more strategic about it, sometimes I think I’m a sellout for playing the game. You have to understand the language of senior leadership to get anywhere – I’m lucky I have a hybrid role where 50% of my time is spend in a central role where I see much more of the ‘mechanics’ of higher level decision making and this definitely puts me at an advantage compared to colleagues who are 100% ‘on the ground’.

I do object to the way the university fails to look after the mental health of its staff. I’m a scientist so everything I do in the lab has to be risk assessed to through a ridiculous amount of paperwork. But where is the risk assessment for me having to work at the level required, even though the university knows I have a serious mental health condition. Where is the risk assessment for me, with my condition, doing pastoral work with students in crisis who turn up at my office unannounced and desperately need more support than the university can provide? I’ve never had an hour off work for a health and safety issue in the lab, but have had to take months off in the past for my mental health to recover from pressures imposed by my job. I am lucky to have good colleagues who are very understanding on an individual basis, but at an organisational level these are not safe working conditions for anyone, let alone someone who has had very serious mental health issues in the past.

I’m also very frustrated by the failure of universities to plan for staff absence, and the expectation that staff will just pick up the extra work. In my case, no maternity cover was put in place, and my module was moved so I could deliver it when I got back on leave so had a double work load when returning to work. In a large organisation of X thousand staff, with Y% women, it is entirely predictable that Z members of staff will be on maternity leave in any given year. Yet we have no funds set aside for maternity cover and support – I was pressured into making unreasonable decisions over how I would effectively cover my own maternity leave while nursing a premature baby. Universities need to be better at predicting staff absence – it comes as a complete surprise every year that someone is on maternity leave, long term sick leave etc, but this should be budgeted for and shouldn’t rely on the goodwill of staff to cover – it breaks us every time and is an institutional failing.

On a day to day basis I generally love my job and am good at it, and seen to be good at it. I am well aware this is a luxury compared to many others in the sector. I just wish institutions valued their staff as their primary asset more, and took their responsibilities as an employer more seriously. My husband who works in the corporate sector is so angry about the lack of structural support I get, and the unreasonable nature of the expectations we are all under. Universities seem to have learned the worst from the corporate world in terms of middle management, but are slow bureaucratic inefficient machines that would go out of business instantly in the corporate sector due to mismanagement. We need to revisit what universities are actually about, which is the relationships between staff and students and the intellectual ideas, and to resource that appropriately. I don’t envy senior leaders who have to make budgets balance in the face of underfunding, but university leaders also have a responsibility to champion their employees and lobby for better funding arrangements. Those of us on the ground can’t keep giving our hearts and souls to cover strategic gaps. We want to focus on the core activities of teaching and research, inspire the next generation and generate new knowledge while working in a psychologically safe environment. That shouldn’t be so hard to achieve, but seems further and further away each year.