Should Faculty work over the summer?
Here’s the cop-out answer: It depends.
The past several years have been stressful for academics—How’s that for an uncontroversial statement?
However, the type of stress has differed based on career stage, job stability, family situations, health issues, and any number of other factors.
For example, early in the pandemic, I experienced a type of stress that was specifically related to not working. In early 2020, I had two toddlers at home with me. I watched colleagues diving deep into the Criterion collection’s art house films, and others forming Zoom reading groups around new academic books. Meanwhile, I was running what I referred to the Fusco-Watson School for Humanities and Snacks. And I worried a lot about falling behind on my writing.
I followed this with a year in an intense administrative role. For me, this was too much of the wrong kind of work. Headed into summer 2021, I needed recovery. Now that I’ve rebuilt energetic stores, as I into summer 2022 and have work hopes.
Pandemic parenting and administrating are extreme example, but faculty might wish to have a summer of returning to work for any number of reasons: coming out of a period of illness, coming out of a time of intense caregiving, or coming off a cycle in a heavy administrative role.
On the other hand, during roughly the same period I was throwing goldfish crackers at feral children, I know other faculty who worked themselves to bits on articles and books. They wrote out of stress about their progress on the tenure-track or in the face of a bleak job market. There are junior faculty in my department who wrote field-defining essays and major theoretical provocations in top journals while carrying enormous stress about politics and the pandemic.
From this handful of samples among many possible permutations of stress faculty experience (pandemic or no), I hope it’s clear that there’s no one prescription for what academics need to do during the summer.
One way of framing this is to think about the metaphor drawn from summer travel: Have you been going, going, going such that you need to stop and refuel? Or, have you felt stalled or stuck in a traffic jam such that you’re looking forward to getting moving again?
For those who have been frantically grinding, significant rest may be needed. Working too hard for too long risks sickness, burnout, losing of a sense of self-worth outside the to-do list. Good rest might mean doing nothing, but it is nonetheless intentional. If you’ve ever lost an hour on Twitter, you know that’s qualitatively different than good rest. Good rest could be napping or reading, but it might also be something that fills a part of your life that’s been ignored during the busyness of the past year: social life, physical environment, exercise, or hobbies. Pouring energy into these pursuits may be as restorative as a good lounge on the couch. Though lounge if you wish to—there’s great tv out there!
On the other hand, sometimes work feels good. I think this is often underestimated, especially the way this resonates for parents and other care takers, who are often busy, but not with their most stimulating work. My children are delightful and strange and interesting, but time spent with them is not the same as deeply focusing on an intellectual problem.
Although positing work as a solution to stress may seem counterintuitive, there’s a significant qualitative difference in the work I propose. When we are busy too long without working meaningfully, we can burn out and lose our sense of purpose. As someone who is both an introvert and a humanist, time spent alone with my books and films and laptop is restoring in a way that time with any emotionally needy humans, even beloved ones, simply cannot be.
However, because it’s summer, I’d challenge you to make the turn to intellectual work look a bit special. To misquote the horror film The Witch, “wouldst thou work deliciously?” That might mean reading outside, visiting a grad school friend for a writing retreat, or diving deep into a reading project with a special coffee and an exciting stack of books near at hand.
Some questions for you, dear ones:
What is the summer you need: one of high-quality rest? One of delicious work engagement?
What do you want to have done by the end of the summer? As crucially: What do you want not to have done?
What can you put on your calendar right now to ensure you have the summer you need? Naps, movies, hikes? Trips to a library or archive? A writing retreat?
