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The 80-Hour Meme

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The 80-hour meme is this currently fashionable insistence that college profs work 80-hour weeks. People defend the meme by saying that it puts paid to the supposedly existing belief that academics don’t work.

The reason why the 80-hour meme bothers me so much is that it normalizes 80-hour work weeks (with no overtime, by the way.) Suddenly, it is as if everybody were supposed to work 80 hours a week and needed to prove that they were, indeed, doing it.

But, folks, that is patently cuckoo. If people work this insane amount of hours, they will get depressed and flip out. This is not normal. Let’s stop pretending like it is. Let’s instead change our approach to “No, I don’t work more than the 40 hours per week that I get paid for, and this is the only healthy way of living. And if you do work 80 hours without even getting paid overtime, you should stop.”

If the popularity of the meme keeps growing, I can easily imagine an administrator demanding to know why we are not on campus 80 hours a week.

28 responses to “The 80-Hour Meme”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Many professors also expect their graduate students to work that much.

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  2. Tanya Avatar
    Tanya

    As an empiricist, I’d ask for the data. Has anyone ever actually tracked their time and found they actually worked 80 hours a week. I have no doubt people spend 80 hours a week in front of a computer. But, how many of those hours are they actually working? When I have tracked my time, I find I work between 36 and 40 hours a week.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      Exactly. When I track the time I work, I stop the timer when I make phone calls, get up to make coffee, browse websites or answer blog comments like I’m doing right now. And that demonstrates the real amount of time one works.

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  3. Jonathan Mayhew Avatar
    Jonathan Mayhew

    I’d like to follow one of the 80-hour people around for a week. If you keep track of your time, you will find that it might be less than that.

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    1. Z Avatar
      Z

      We’re paid for 60 and it is in the documents. It’s how they figure out all the percentages of everything, how much what you do is worth, how much you should be assigned. Yes, you can work less, but if it shows . . . also, having them see you do the work, being present on campus, being seen early and late, does matter.

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      1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
        bloggerclarissa

        We are paid for 40 and fill out the paperwork for 40. Everything else used to be decided on the basis of actual results. What happened then and why this great situation changed, I can’t tell because I don’t have tenure and I’m afraid. 😦 😦 😦 Now you can be on campus or not, do the work or not, the criteria for evaluation will not depend on any of that.

        I can only add that this is not an institutional problem. It’s a problem of human relationships. Why people can’t keep their desire for relationships off-campus is a mystery.

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      2. Z Avatar
        Z

        Documenting the hours is part of the whole accountability movement. People who say “Oh, I am not good at administration” and “Oh, I hate service, it is so useless” have been complicit in letting it happen.

        On being in workplace, that’s cultural too. In some places the reason they want you there is because they feel they own you; in others, like this SLAC I worked for, it was this sickly, enforced sociability; here it’s just Mediterranean culture, a lot of work gets done and issues get resolved because of people rattling around, present in the same place.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          “People who say “Oh, I am not good at administration” and “Oh, I hate service, it is so useless” have been complicit in letting it happen.”

          – What if one honestly and truly sucks at administration? At this particular point in time, I really wish more people realized that they don’t have the talent to be administrators and just stopped trying already! Losers.

          OK, I feel better now.

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  4. David Gendron Avatar
    David Gendron

    Is this something that students should apply too?

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  5. charlesrowley Avatar
    charlesrowley

    Let us be brutally honest about this. Many academics shirk on the job, espoecially when they have attained tenure. They repeat class lectures year after year, stop publishing, and essentially retire on the job. Any notion of an average 80-hour working week is simply ludicrous. Many academics do no more than 15-20 hours a week for 30 weeks a year.

    The really successful scholars do not view their contributions as work. There is nothing else they would rather do. So the test of an academic institution is whether it can or will rid itself of the shirkers and reward the high-fliers.

    Talking about working hours always signals to me that the ‘scholar’ in querstionmis not a scholar. No great scholar ever refers to hours worked. Just hours of a happy life well-lived.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I think you are absolutely right. Yesterday, N. pointed out to me that I’m not counting all the time I spend reading as work, even though that’s what eventually leads to research and publications. But I can’t, in good conscience see reading as work, just like I can’t see eating, swimming or blogging as work. I would read even if I were unemployed or in different profession because I love it so much.

      “The really successful scholars do not view their contributions as work. There is nothing else they would rather do.”

      – Exactly.

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      1. Z Avatar
        Z

        Then I am sure you will be one of the ones who returns salary to help with the next budget cut. We’ve been asked for 5-10% voluntary contribution and that is in addition to the required ones and the passing on of overhead to us.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          If only the budget cuts were the greatest problem. In view of the real problems, these cuts seem very insignificant.

          We are in a bad situation right now and it sucks because this used to be a phenomenal department.

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      2. David Gendron Avatar
        David Gendron

        Here comes the crux of the matter: reading is not “work”! And I agree.

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      3. Jonathan Mayhew Avatar
        Jonathan Mayhew

        I disagree that reading is not work. If you are a literary critic (which you are) that is an integral part of your work. I also disagree that it is meaningful to count hours. I am spending one hour a day writing something, and that is a serious amount of work that will give excellent results. What is a painter painted two hours a day? Would you think her lazy? That just might be the proper rhythm for that painter.

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      4. David Gendron Avatar
        David Gendron

        Reading is an activity, not a “work”.

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      5. Jonathan Mayhew Avatar
        Jonathan Mayhew

        Well there is no such thing as “a work” is there? I mean there is a work of art but you can’t say “grading these papers is a work.” It isn’t grammatical. So if a person is hired to read reports and make summaries of them, obviously reading the reports is part of the job, and hence part of the work. It seems oddly perverse to say the, say, the music critic is only working while writing, but not while listening to the music she must review.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          I’m now discovering that I’m a lot more hard-working than I always thought, so this is good news. 🙂

          Of course, even with this new definition of work I don’t do anything close to 80 hours a week.

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    2. Z Avatar
      Z

      Don’t be silly.
      You have to think about money if you are not independently wealthy or highly paid. And you have to document hours if your state has mandated it.

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  6. Tanya Avatar
    Tanya

    I can only speak for myself, but reading in my field is part of my job, and thus “work.” When I say I work 36 to 40 hours a week, I include the hour or so of reading scholarly texts that I do every day.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      The thing is, I read novels and then analyze them. For the article I’m writing right now, I had to read about 10-15 novels to choose the one I’m working on now. But reading novels is fun in a way that scholarly texts often aren’t.

      So I don’t know, it gets complicated for literary critics, I believe. I simply don’t know when I read whether this work of literature will become useful for research.

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      1. Jonathan Mayhew Avatar
        Jonathan Mayhew

        Working on the scholarly base is also work. You don’t know whether you will work on one of those other novels, or teach it, in the future.

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  7. anon Avatar
    anon

    I have done an 80 hour work week a couple of times (that includes discounting time for breaks – with breaks it was probably closer to 95) but *only* because I absolutely had to in order to finish my dissertation by the deadline. I can vouch for the fact it was not fun, I was going completely batty by the end, and collapsed in exhaustion for two days after I turned everything. I would never ever advocate anyone should adopt such a ridiculous schedule since it is sure to result in a mental breakdown.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      Exactly! One is the most productive when feeling well-rested, happy and full of energy. Not exhausted, miserable or listless.

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    2. Z Avatar
      Z

      The 60, 80, and for administrators even 100 hour weeks include the mandatory meetings, weekend retreats, and so on. That is how it gets up so high. If you have to go back to campus every night after dinner to show a film one night, orient parents on study abroad another, run an honors ceremony the next, etc., or be at the recruiting fair on a Saturday … or if you take students to a student conference over a weekend to present their work … it really, really racks up a lot of hours fast. In some institutions you can avoid doing these things but in others you can’t.

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      1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
        bloggerclarissa

        “That is how it gets up so high. If you have to go back to campus every night after dinner to show a film one night, orient parents on study abroad another, run an honors ceremony the next, etc., or be at the recruiting fair on a Saturday … or if you take students to a student conference over a weekend to present their work …”

        – The sad part is that the people who do all these very important things then get passed by for tenure. People are pushed to do all this but then the tenure committee simply doesn’t even look at any of these things.

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  8. titfortat Avatar
    titfortat

    First off, define work? If you love what you do does it really matter how many hours you spend at it? If you don’t then obviously youre just a masochist or stupid. Not sure which one is worse.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      What happens is that in our jobs we are required to quantify how many hours we spend actually working since most work happens outside of the classroom and in a way nobody else can observe. I know that to non-academics these discussions sound insane. 🙂

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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