Why Students Work?

Given a busy student life at Presley University, we need to encourage them to become less productive. Make time to not work. Make time to think. Make time simply to be. As time is all we have. One day, we’ll reach the last page of the calendar, the clock will stop, and our time will cease. While it is a privilege to pursue interesting work, we also need to make time to live. 

But why do students work so much? 

• Habit:

When we’re just starting out, we learn to say “yes” to everything. Remember, tenure is good, but portable tenure is better. So you just get on that treadmill and never get off. 

• Economics:

We work just to make the ends meet. 

• Busy-ness:

The more you do and the longer you’re in the profession, the more opportunities and obligations accrue. Some of this work is interesting, but it’s still work. 

• Work that is fun is often not perceived as real work:

Do What You Love mantra may be the most elegant anti-worker ideology around. This philosophy’s ability to refashion academic labor as a form of leisure contributes to the unrelenting sense of busy-ness. We work because we love it. Or because we think we should love it. 

• Technology:

It is both help and hindrance. Email, accessing databases from your laptop, and Skyping with collaborators in distant cities all help us be more productive. We respond by doing more work, and foregoing leisure. Social media informs us not just about friends and family, but about new articles and ideas, upcoming conferences, planned essay collection and can be an unrelenting time-suck. You can be selective about technology (attending to emails and social media only during certain hours), but can you turn it off? If you do, you may miss an important conversation.

• The volume and nature of academic work erases the boundary between work and not-work:

Because we have too much to do and because much of what we do is genuinely interesting, work always spills into the rest of our lives. There is the problem of imposing limits on ourselves. This limitlessness is a big problem.

We have written about Presley University students because we are talking about academicians. We are aware that many jobs encroach on what was once private time, that fewer and fewer people have a boundary between office and home, and that many of us feel the pressures of our thin-boundaried lives. We expect people in other careers could write a similar diagnosis of their busy lives. If they could find the time.

Time is all we have. We need time to think: thought requires time. Ideas need some idle, non productive space in which to thrive. This kind of sustained thinking is an important part of being human, but it’s also vital for good academic work.