Workload, stress, and casualisation making higher education a misery

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Far from being a genteel world of ‘dreaming spires’, working in higher education these days is marred by high-intensity demands and workloads, long hours, precarious and casual contracts and, as a result, stress, anxiety, mental ill health and isolation. A recent event discussed what can be done. Nic Paton reports.   
“I am scared to access anything that might show I am struggling.” So said one university employee in response to a recent survey by the charity Education Support, in the process highlighting just how deeply entrenched, and worrying, stigma and ‘stiff upper lip’ around mental ill health remains within higher education.
The common ‘dreaming spires’ perception that working within higher education institutions (HEIs) is a rarefied, privileged, even cloistered life of gowns, high table and ‘tenure’, interspersed by the occasional languid seminar (perhaps sprawled on the grass in a sunny quadrangle), has long disappeared, if it ever truly existed.
In its place, a career in higher education, it is clear, is increasingly one of high-intensity demands and workloads, long hours, precarious contracts and casualised working, even to the extent of academics (often early-career PhD students) being forced to live in tents to make ends meet.
The Education Support study written by Dr Siobhan Wray, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Lincoln University and Professor Gail Kinman, visiting professor of occupational health psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, also highlighted widespread overwork and burnout; stress, depression and anxiety; unsupportive management; and a lack of access to support, even where such support is available. And all made worse by the scouring experience of Covid-19 over the past two years.

‘Nationally significant’ discussion

To try to work out how occupational health practitioners should be responding to this challenging picture, SOM (the Society of Occupational Medicine) in November brought together academics, practitioners, universities, health and safety experts and unions to discuss occupational health and wellbeing for university staff.

Nic Paton

Nic Paton is editor of Occupational Health & Wellbeing, within OHW+. One of the country’s foremost workplace health journalists, Nic has written for Occupational Health & Wellbeing since 2001, and has edited the magazine since 2018.