AGORA Newsletter of the Aberdeen University and College Union

Vol.20, No.1, November 2014

Editorial

As this edition of AGORA goes to press, autumn has descended upon us once more, the light is shrinking from day to day, the long, dank, dark winter is about to descend, UCU is calling upon members to embark upon an assessment boycott and the whole unimaginable awfulness of the USS pensions cuts (‘Predicted Consequences of USS Pensions Reform’, p.15) has become apparent. It seems as if all is doom and gloom (‘Iceberg Ahoy!’, pp.16f.).

Well, it would be pointless to lie. There is no escaping the long, cold winter, unless it is by means of (early) retirement somewhere on the sunny Costa del Brit, an option which in any case looks increasingly improbable for most of us as the cruel axe looms menacingly over university employees’ pensions.

So instead, this editorial would like to move swiftly along and draw readers’ attention to some of the matters which colleagues have chosen to highlight in this edition of AGORA. In ‘Biking Is Best, So Why Isn't Everyone at It?’ (p.2) Adam Price seeks to answer this question, while simultaneously trying to kid us (with the help of a spirited photomontage) that he cycles up mountains on his bicyle.

‘Reimagining the University’ was the title of a recent conference upon which Aberdeen’s Fiona Stewart, AUCU Honorary Secretary, and UCU Scotland’s Murdo Mathison provide informative and complementary commentary (pp.3f.).

What is an academic? What does it mean to be an academic? Why do—or even: why should—academics work such long hours? Is there any alternative? These are some of the questions which Patience Schell addresses in her reflective, thought-provoking and entertaining article ’Work Less, Do More, Live Better’ (pp.8f.). This commendable study, originally published in the Times Higher, is reproduced here in full as it deserves as wide an audience as possible. AGORA is persuaded that all colleagues, whether academic or academic-related, will enjoy the encounter with Patience Schell’s ideas and arguments and that many readers will recognise themselves in the picture of the university employee which Patience Schell paints.

As if that were not enough in the way of praise, Steven Lawrie commends UCU and Aberdeen UCU on their continued commitment to the Holocaust Memorial Day (p,12) and welcomes UCU’s latest oral-history-inspired documentary Journeys to Safety: Memories of the Kindertransport.

If anyone ever wondered what biological scientists do in the summer break, Adam Price dismounts his bicycle and is back again to tell us in ‘Raising the Political Profile of Climate Change—A Personal Perspective from Working in Bangladesh’ (pp.13f.), where he draws an interesting parallel in respect of the human indifference to suffering and discusses some possible remedies.

More cuts coming our way?

Adam Price cycles up a mountain (allegedly).

Autumn fashion tips are provided.

Patience Schell asks some fundamental questions.

In this edition of AGORA:

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From A to B in Aberdeen, I reckon biking is best. If the journey is short, it's the quickest way. It's door to door, you can miss the jams and you don't waste time finding a parking space. Don't believe me that it's quicker? In May coming home from the Scotland vs England Cricket game it took me 20 minutes to go from Mannofield to Kittybrewster. You could not do it quicker in a car, bus or taxi. And I follow all the traffic rules (unlike some cyclists). In December when we go for the work Christmas lunch and everyone leaves Old Aberdeen to go to town, I am always the first to arrive. Every time—for 15 years! The bike is best for any city.

negative relationship between cycling rates and the proportion of the population who encounter problems in their urban travel. To quote: ‘A large majority of respondents in Finland, Sweden and Denmark never encounter problems that limit their access to activities, goods or services.’ In Malta, Cyprus and Greece (where cycle use is tiny) between 63% and 74% of the people encounter travel problems. And half of Europe's citizens think city transport problems will get worse in the future. The amazing thing about this last bit of data is that the most pessimistic country in the EU is the UK where 61% think transport in cities will get worse.

So cycling is a good way to get around a city; it’s quick, it costs less, it helps you get fit, it does not pollute the air, it does not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions—and people in the UK don't do it. WHY? Transforming cycling from Aberdeen style to Amsterdam style would help give us a city that’s quieter, safer and less stressful for those who live, work and play here.

Why is cycle use so low in Aberdeen? Is it the weather? Surely it can't be worse than Finland. Is it the effort? Surely not, seeing the number of people jogging in the evenings. Is it road safety? Any beginner is going to be seriously put off by a close shave with a car or a lorry. Anxiety about road safety is my guess.

But what do you think? And how can we get cycle use higher in Aberdeen? If you have an opinion, email a.price@abdn.ac.uk.

*Source: ‘Attitudes of Europeans towards Urban Mobility’, December 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_406_en.pdf

Adam Price

Biking Is Best, So Why Isn't Everyone at It?

Above: Adam Price getting ready for the morning commute.

Actually, British people don't seem to like bikes. According to EU commissioned research on city transport*, about 50% of people in the UK use a car every day, bang on the EU average. But when it comes to cycling, people in the UK are nothing like average. Tying with Spain with only 4% of people who say they cycle every day, it's a third of the EU average of 12%, way below the Netherlands with 43%, or Denmark (30%), Finland (28%) or Germany (19%) and even below France with 5%. Of the 28 countries of the EU, only Cyprus and Malta are below the UK.

It’s odd. Seven out of ten Europeans believe that air pollution, road congestion, travelling costs, accidents and noise pollution are important urban problems. The report suggests there is a Above: Giving the bike a view of Loch Muick.

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The Future of Scottish Higher Education

‘Reimagining the University’ was a one-day conference jointly organised by UCU, Unison and EIS, attended by members from all three unions and addressed by speakers from the Scottish Government, the National Union of Students and the Scottish Funding Council.

The day was based around three questions:

1. What are universities for?

2. Who do universities belong to?

3. How should universities be governed?

In trying to find answers to the first question, delegates expressed a range of views on what universities are NOT for:

• Commercialisation: higher education institutions are now run like businesses, with students as consumers and customers;

• Grade-driven conveyor belts churning out ‘employable’ graduates with generic skills rather than well-rounded individuals with a sense of social responsibility;

• Permeation of neoliberalism.

The general consensus among delegates was that university education should be a means of enriching society and promoting a culture of social justice, social responsibility and ethical values.

The chair of the Scottish Funding Council, Alice Brown, spoke eloquently about the role of the ‘public intellectual,’ which appears to be vanishing in favour of the more narrowly defined ‘academic’. She stressed the importance of widening access to HE, which often results in higher performance overall because those students who would not otherwise attend university are more highly motivated towards academic achievement. Regarding the question of to whom universities belong, she talked about the University of Edinburgh as a source of civic pride while she was growing up in the city, despite having no direct connection whatsoever to the institution, and she argued that this kind of connection between universities and local communities should not be allowed to disappear.

The Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Mike Russell, addressed the conference on the subject of

university governance. He confirmed his c o m m i t m e n t t o i m p l e m e n t i n g t h e recommendations from the von Prondzynski Review of Higher Education Governance in Scotland. These include elected university Chairs, staff and student involvement in appraisals for university Principals, making public the reasons behind remuneration decisions and improved gender balance in university governing bodies.

Scottish Labour’s education spokesperson, Kezia Dugdale, reiterated Labour’s commitment to gender equality and to free university tuition, subject to Labour’s fairness test, and to improving childcare provision for college students to improve access to further education. However, some disappointment was voiced from the floor that higher education was less of a priority than further education in Labour’s policies.

In terms of Scottish higher education specifically, Ms Dugdale expressed concern about high drop-out rates amongst Scottish students and highlighted that students leaving the sector are not followed up in any way (incidentally, our own Principal drew attention to Aberdeen’s alarmingly high rate of withdrawal at his recent open session at Foresterhill). Other points raised were that pay ratios for university staff could be explored and that better governance of universities is needed to ensure better outcomes for students. (OVER)

Above: Kezia Dugdale MSP, Labour’s education spokesperson.

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In terms of future action, it is up to us as trade unionists to use every available opportunity to challenge and question the way our universities are run. Here at Aberdeen, a new strategic plan for the next five years is currently being formulated and we must take advantage of the consultation process to make our voices heard.

The conference concluded with a vision for the future in which the following should be priorit ised: Re-establishing the role of universities in contributing to social justice, equality and to enriching society. Students should benefit from an ethically-grounded education beyond grade-driven pursuits, and universities should be a source of pride for local communities.

Fiona Stewart

Above: Mike Russell MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Education.

Reimagining the University

On 9 October UCU Scotland joined with our sister campus trade unions EIS and UNISON to organise a conference focusing on the future of higher education in Scotland after the referendum. The conference, titled ‘Reimagining the University’, asked three fundamental questions of importance not just to UCU Scotland members and staff in our universities, but also to the sector generally and the wider community. More than 130 delegates came together to ask: what are our universities in Scotland for; who do they belong to; and how should they be governed?

The importance and topicality of that debate was shown by the prominence of the keynote speakers who were drawn to come and speak and engage with UCU members on the day. The Cabinet Secretary for Education Mike Russell gave the keynote speech; with significant other contributions from Kezia Dugdale MSP, Labour’s education spokesperson, and the chair of the Scottish Funding Council, Professor Alice Brown.

There was good press coverage from the main addresses to the conference with Chris Havergal from the Times Higher Education writing an article on Mike Russell calling for more powers for the Scottish Parliament to allow post-study work visas for international students and committing the Scottish Government to legislate on outstanding elements of the von Prondzynski Review including elected chairs of governing bodies. The conference also heard Kezia Dugdale indicate the direction of travel on student funding in her party and that she was hopeful they would rule out the introduction of tuition fees in Scotland.

T h e s e a r e i m p o r t a n t a n d s i g n i f i c a n t announcements and support the broad policy positions of UCU Scotland and the other unions on student funding and higher education governance. But the conference was not just about politicians giving pre-written speeches from the top table. There were important discussions amongst delegates on the three issues the conference examined during the breakout sessions with contributions from a number of contributors who had been invited to help inform the discussion. These included Professor Mike Neary from the University of Lincoln who outlined the university’s ‘student as producer’ programme and the steps being taken locally to pursue a co-operative model of higher education provision. Other speakers

(OVER)

Aberdeen UCUC18 Taylor Building http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ucu/Email: aberdeen-ucu@abdn.ac.uk

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included Liam Kane form the University of Glasgow, Green Party activist and Rector at Edinburgh University Peter McColl, Robin McAlpine from the Common Weal campaign and student leaders from NUS including current NUS Scotland President Gordon Maloney.

The answers to the three questions posed at the start of the conference–what are universities for; who do they belong to and how should they be governed–are too big to be satisfactorily answered in a single day at a conference in Edinburgh. However, we did make significant progress. We do know now that there will be Scottish Government legislation to tackle some of the governance issues that the von Prondzynski Review highlighted. And we also know that when UCU engages with Scotland’s politicians, of all parties, we can influence them to the benefit of the sector we work in. We need to continue to do that as individual members, in our branches and as a national union. At a Scottish level we will be working to draw out some of the main themes from the conference, holding the politicians to account, and to argue for universities and institutions that are publicly funded without student tuition fees; that are well governed and accountable to staff and the communities they exist in; and which do not use zero-hours or casualised contracts for staff.

Murdo Mathison (Policy and Communications Officer, UCU

Scotland)

Recordings of the conference can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/channels/829818

Above: David Anderson, President, UCU Scotland.

The Long-Hours Culture and Why It Is a Bad Thing

The long hours culture in Universities

• There is a culture of long hours throughout academic life (in the UK and worldwide) where a 50-60 hour working week is normal, 70 hours is not exceptional, weekends are frequently lost to work and holidays are not taken.

• The academic’s job is one of the very few (also including the self-employed) in which there is essentially no workload adjustment for temporary illness.

• The reason for the two points above in Universities is that the everyday and immediate workload requirements, of the academic grades at least, are sufficient to fill a working week and those aspects of the job that are the main criteria for judging success (writing papers and grant applications) or obtaining personal work satisfaction (success in intellectual enquiry) must be done in what in many other professions is considered leisure time.

• For that reason there is, in general, a relationship between willingness to work long hours and career achievement.

• While on the face of it, working long hours may be considered a personal choice for an academic (if I work hard I will be promoted and become a professor), in reality those that are not prepared to do that are considered underachievers and poor at their job, so the peer pressure to conform to the norm is enormous.

• Allied to this, the strong competitive nature of grant capture (which has much to justify itself) ensures that academic success is almost only achievable through long working hours because the competitors are doing that. This is the destructive nature of over-aggressive competition for a resource that is too small.

• There is generally inadequate, or frequently zero, workload adjustment made when someone takes on a new responsibility.

(OVER)

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• Universities in the UK, including the University of Abe rdeen , suppo r t t he expec ta t i on o f achievement that is only possible through excessive working.

Why the long hours culture is bad for workplace efficiency and creativity

• People under workload stress are generally less pleasant and create a less pleasant working environment which is a sad state of affairs given that many will spend one third of their waking life in work.

• Workload stress causes illness, almost certainly predominately unrecorded since most occasions when academics take time off due to ill health it is not noted because they work at home (at the University of Aberdeen anyway).

• Mistakes are commonly made, especially those involved with scan-reading information such as emails which should have been more carefully read.

• One alarming consequence of this workload demand is a lack of willingness of academics to engage in activities related to workplace cohesion such as exchanging pleasantries, attending the tea room or socialising. Indeed, disturbingly prevalent is the behaviour in which colleagues turn up in the morning, work behind a shut door all day and leave in the evening without being seen.

• Related to this, there is a lack of willingness to behave in a collegial manner if doing so requires a significant time commitment.

• Prioritising novelty and creativity, like that required for engaging teaching or step changes in research, is difficult when workload pressures are high. Out-of-the-box thinking for research and innovative updating of teaching material has a low priority when the in tray is so full.

Why the long hours culture is bad for the equality agenda

• One of the main reasons why women are disproportionately underrepresented in the higher posts in universities is they are less prepared to dedicate excessive working hours to achieve their career ambitions. Often this is related to child and/

/or carer responsibilities which mean they cannot commit those kinds of hours even if they wanted to. This fact is the elephant in the room of the equality debate and something everyone in a management role at a university should be striving hard to rectify.

Why the long hours culture is bad for social cohesion and social responsibility

• Citizens have responsibilities and rights to engage with other people and organisations besides their employers. Primary amongst those are the spouse and children, followed by wider family, then neighbours, the local community and then the wider community. These bonds and responsibilities are the backbone of social cohesion in every society. Excessive workloads erode the ability to engage in these activities.

• It is my opinion that decreasing fertility (due to postponement of children in family planning), marriage breakdown, the prevalence of single families, childhood misbehaviour (drug addiction, crime, pregnancy, antisocial behaviour), the shameful neglect of the elderly and lack of neighbourhood cohesion which are becoming established features of modern British life, are all in some large measure linked to the UK workload culture.

Why the long hours culture is bad for the environment

• Increasingly people want to make choices which reduce their personal impact on the environment. Often, there is a conflict between an environmental choice and time. Most obvious is the choice of the train over flying, but using public transport or walking/cycling over the car is also a time-related choice. It also takes time to research the environmental impact of purchases both in work and personal life. Excessive workloads reduce the ability to make environmentally responsible choices.

Why the long hours culture is bad for the image of the profession

• The working conditions affect the attractiveness of academia as a career and encourage valuable employees to leave. The concentration of the workload on a relatively small workforce of permanent employees is in part responsible for the shameful treatment of contract research staff

(OVER)

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almost as a disposable commodity.

• It is increasing important in a situation where public and student spending have to be justified, that the employees of universities can present themselves and their profession in a manner that promotes respect within the society that funds them. But how can we present a façade of respectfulness when we do not respect ourselves, but rather subject ourselves via peer pressure to excessive workloads? If we demand respect from the public we must first respect ourselves.

So what?

• For the reasons given above, any institution that supports excessive workloads is acting in a socially and environmentally irresponsible manner. A University should surely be a beacon of social responsibility, a model of best practice and be proactive in addressing this issue and not reactive.

• I crave more time, rather than more money and I know I am not alone. For that reason I urge trade unions including UCU to raise the priority of workload relative to pay in negotiations with the employers.

Adam Price

Working Less and Achieving MoreTalk by Professor Patience Schell at Foresterhill!At the Foresterhill campus on 16 October Aberdeen UCU held a well-attended joint meeting with the women’s network The Esselmont Group, which was supported by the Athena SWAN charter, to discuss working patterns.

Professor Patience Schell gave an excellent introduction to the topic which was followed by discussion. Patience expanded on her recent piece in THE of 7 August 2014 presenting evidence to support the notion that working less can ultimately achieve more. Working less in this context should be seen as working in a way that allows the mind some ‘time off’ to pause for reflection and the birth of new ideas. She reminded us that ‘working all hours’ is a relatively new concept, facilitated by the very technological developments—electric light, domestic appliances, the internet—that were originally expected to create more free time. Working long hours is by no means unique to academic environments, but discussions about better working patters at our university have only just begun. It was pleasing to see reference being made to healthy working lives in the draft strategic plan of the University of Aberdeen. What can be done? Patience presented evidence illustrating the beneficial effect of walking and other forms of exercise to break up the working day and refresh the mind.

In the discussion which followed we identified points to be explored further, such as the following:1. Should we start walking groups and identify walking routes around campus?2. How accepted are different working patterns across the university?3. How can we stop feeling guilty when not working?4. How can we best bring the evidence base for ‘working less to achieve more’ to our employer?

UCU will work with the other organisers of the meeting on these points. If you want to contribute or are interested in joining the AUCU focus group on workload, please contact Susan Melvin at ucu@abdn.ac.uk.

Miep Helfrich

The discusions engendered by Patience Schellʼs talk at Foresterhill, as well as the interest aroused by her article in the THE have persuaded AGORA that this thought-provoking piece merits as wide a

dissemination as possible. For that reason, ʻWork Less, Do More, Live betterʼ is reprinted in full on the following pages.

Casework Support

Aberdeen UCU supports its members in a number of different ways, including casework support. Over the past year AUCU has supported over 70 individual members on matters such as bullying, disciplinary hearings, avoidance of redundancy, redundancy meetings, stress due to workload as well as other work-related problems.

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Work Less, Do More, Live Better

Some years ago, I heard that a colleague characterised me as ‘someone who didn’t work weekends’. This description was not meant as a compliment. It’s true that I make a concerted effort to keep something approximating normal working hours of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. But I haven’t always worked like this. As a postgrad, I anxiously counted my hours and consulted with fellow students, worried that I wasn’t spending enough time at my desk. Eventually, I allowed myself one full day off weekly. When I became a lecturer, I stayed in the office until seven or eight in the evening, in part imitating the working patterns of my new colleagues, and continued to work weekends. Yet when I reduced my hours at the desk some years ago, my productivity did not decline. Instead, my mindfulness to follow regular hours means that my productivity is the same as or even greater than it was before, when I worked 50, 60 or whatever hours it was per week.

After this change, I began to wonder about my own working patterns and to think more generally about work and specifically about academic work. We certainly don’t join this profession or hope to become academics for fame or fortune. We join because we’re insatiably curious about something and we love to learn–there’s something that we need to know about and we won’t stop until we’ve solved the puzzle. With that sort of desire pushing us, it’s no wonder many of us work long hours.

Often, it doesn’t even feel like work, but rather an extension of us. Because we love what we do, in many ways we are among the luckiest workers in the world. And yet employers are well aware of our drive, our desire to please and our tendency to follow instructions (we don’t become

The following article first was published in the Times Higher Education magazine on 7 August 2014. AGORA extends its grateful thanks to the Times Higher Education magazine and to Professor Patience Schell for their kind permission to reproduce the article.

academics without being good at following instructions). Employers keep piling tasks on and on and on. For those who have just finished their PhD, expectations of what level of accomplishment is required to become a lecturer go up and up. So the love that drove us to work nights and weekends can turn into desperation, as that time becomes the only chance to do the part of the job that motivates us.

We are part of a class of people, as sociologist Jeremy Seabrook argues, who compete with each other for recognition for the labour that we undertake. We drag ourselves into work when we’re unwell and say with ill-concealed pride that we can’t possibly fit any more meetings in for ages because of all the important talks we have to give and all the vital meetings we have to chair. As we say this, we riffle through diary pages or sweep fingers along a smartphone and sigh in mock despair.

Yet in the first half of the 20th century, the buzz was about how we were going to spend all that newfound free time won through labour-saving domestic appliances and reduced working hours. Instead, paid work has expanded to fill the time, despite, or because of, technological changes, even as productivity has risen. Data indicate that by the first decade of this century, the average worker in the US was as productive in 11 hours per week as one working 40 hours in 1950. Generations ago it was assumed that greater productivity would lead to shorter hours, but many of us have forgotten that link and lost that expectation.

In our current circumstances, with a challenging economy, students’ increasing demands on academics and the work insecurity many of us face, it may seem outlandish to discuss leisure and breaks. But working a ‘normal’ work week, closer to 35 to 40 hours, is not crazy or out of touch, nor is it the signal that an academic lacks commitment. It’s not even damaging to productivity. In fact, rest, leisure and alternative activities beyond the spaces of work are vital to productivity, well-being and creativity.

Let’s also not kid ourselves that humans have always worked long hours and that daily toil is part of the burden of being human. The medieval workday, it has been estimated, was not more than

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eight hours and the concept of productivity hadn’t yet been invented. These people did not actually consume sufficient calories to work at the rate we might expect. A full day of agricultural toil requires more than 3,000 calories, unaffordable to medieval agricultural labourers. Moreover, for these labourers, holy days and celebrations counted for about a third of the year and, when wages rose, people tended to work less, not more. Without a consumer culture, these workers had little incentive to earn more than a survival wage. If we compare today’s conditions with those of the Industrial Revolution, we’re looking at a blip: the mid-19th century could well be the apex of long hours for all of human history.

Now, the debate about working hours has lost some of its urgency in the UK because, as sociologist Kenneth Roberts argues, lifestyle is seen as a private issue, not a public one. Meanwhile, long hours are fetishised and new technologies allow for constant contact with the office. Tragedies have resulted. Last summer in London, a 21-year-old student banking intern, Moritz Erhardt, was found dead in his shower after working an alleged 72 hours without sleep. In the wake of his death, other interns talked about their experiences, including working 20-hour days and returning home only to shower, with a taxi waiting outside still on the meter. Some interns claimed that they worked like that through choice, but what choice do they have? The culture tells them that long hours equal commitment and success.

The long-hours culture has also found a home in universities. In 2012, the Trades Union Congress released a study that concluded that lecturers and teachers were putting in more unpaid overtime than other occupations, including the financial sector’s managerial staff. That has been the trend for the past 40 years, with many academics regularly working 50 hours a week or more. The value of this unpaid overtime in 2007 was estimated at £877 million. One of the risks from the long-hours culture is burnout, rates of which are on the rise in higher education, according to Noel le Robertson, cl in ical psychologist at the University of Leicester. Younger staff are more at risk, and high numbers of students is one strong predictor of burnout.

Some businesses and governments are starting to address this problem. German companies including Volkswagen, Puma and BMW have

already restricted out-of-hours email use, as has the German Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Ursula von der Leyen, who was minister when the change was enacted, said: ‘It’s in the interests of employers that workers can reliably switch off from their jobs; otherwise, in the long run, they burn out.’

So how can we find a way out? There are alternative models of work as well as activities for our free time that will make us more productive overall. Let’s start with some historical figures. Edmund Morgan’s 2002 biography of the scientist and US independence leader Benjamin Franklin advises us that when thinking about Franklin, ‘The first thing to do is to overcome the image of a man perpetually at his desk [!] Because Franklin wrote so well and so much it is natural to think of him pen in hand. But the man we will find in his writings likes to be in the open air, walking the city streets, walking the countryside, walking the deck of a ship. Indoors, he likes to be with people, sipping tea with young women, raising a glass with other men, playing chess, telling jokes, singing songs.’ In fact, Franklin’s 24-hour model day, called his ‘scheme of employment’, shows that he worked about an eight-hour day.

Let’s take another figure: fuelled by strong coffee, Ludwig van Beethoven worked from first light until mid-afternoon, breaking up this working time with walks. Afterwards, he walked again, taking pencil and paper to note down ideas. Later, he retired to his local to read the papers; he enjoyed time with friends or went to the theatre. Virginia Woolf also counted on time away from her desk for inspiration: To the Lighthouse came to her while she was walking around Tavistock Square. The painter of big skies, big flowers and stark bones, Georgia O’Keeffe, began her workday walking for half an hour in the New Mexico desert, while keeping an alert eye out for rattlesnakes. Charles Darwin, too, took inspiration and mental relaxation from his daily turns on the ‘Sandwalk’, a gravel path behind his home planted with hazel, dogwood and birch trees.

The common feature in these workday schedules is walking, bipedalism, that form of locomotion that distinguishes us from the other primates. Walking and thinking seem to go together so naturally that perhaps it’s walking that made us thinkers. Aristotle famously taught while walking along the colonnade connecting the temple of Apollo and the shrine of the Muses. That link between philosophy

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and walking has stuck and was memorably parodied in Monty Python’s sketch about the Philosophers’ Football Match. Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000), concurs that walking is good for thinking: she concludes ‘a desk is no place to think on a large scale’.

Franklin and Solnit, Woolf and Darwin were, and are, wise to walk. An active lifestyle is helpful in treating depression and reduces the risk of suffering from it. Physical activity, according to a 2004 report by the Chief Medical Officer, makes people feel better, improves sleep and reduces anxiety and stress. Even 10 to 15 minutes of walking can bring about a substantial improvement in mood. Biking, jogging, dancing and swimming are also magic mood-improvers. Better still, a quick boogie around the office will actually help your cognitive performance. Peter Lovatt, aka Dr Dance, head of the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, has demonstrated that dancing speeds up mental processing and improves creative thinking. Thus, physical activity need not come at the expense of work; physical activity actually improves our work, making us livelier, happier, better thinkers, and increases our ability to cope with workplace stress. Yet a recent study of Canadian assistant professors found that, even among those who had been physically active previously, only 30.7 per cent of those polled met the minimum levels of recommended physical activity, compared with about 50 per cent of the larger cohort of young Canadian professionals.

Let’s not forget the other vital element to productivity (and longevity): adequate sleep. According to research carried out at the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, there is an approximate 15 per cent rise in mortality among those sleeping for five hours or less per night. The US National Sleep Foundation has estimated that exhaustion costs the US economy $100 billion (£58 billion) in reduced productivity, absences and poor health. One way around this problem is to take naps. Albert Einstein, Bill Clinton and Winston Churchill all joined the nap-taking fraternity. Some companies actively encourage their workers to nap: Nike offers employees spaces for napping or meditation, while Google offers napping ‘pods’. (If you’re going to try this at home or work, the research suggests that naps of no more than 30 minutes in the early afternoon are optimal.)

You may worry that with the myriad demands of your work, if you try to constrain your workweek, including research, to 40 hours or less, you’ll never get anything done. There’s a book for you. In How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (2007), psychologist Paul J. Silvia offers evidence-based advice about how to be productive as an academic writer without giving up on leisure time.

His suggestions are simple: write and do your research daily in small blocks of time (schedule it in and don’t cheat on that schedule); keep track of what you do in that time; stay attentive to your writing goals and, ideally, get yourself a group that will help you keep to these goals. You might protest, what good are small blocks of time? But small, regular amounts of work build up to significant productivity. A few pages often make a big difference. If you were learning how to tap dance or play the French horn, you wouldn’t set aside one full day a week for practice or cram it into your Saturday afternoons; instead you’d practise for short periods, daily. Why should research and writing be any different?

I’m not making an argument about ‘work-life balance’; I hate that phrase, which juxtaposes the two and puts work before ‘life’. Rather I’m arguing that we of all people, people who believe in the value of research, should consider the evidence about good working habits, think critically about how we work and approach our own work from a base of solid research on productivity. But work is about more than productivity. It is in our best interest to not only be productive but satisfied with our work, because work is vital to our identity and self-definition. We need work not just to put bread on the table but to feel of use, to serve, to contribute, to make and to connect. But the long-hours culture and the cult of busyness saps meaning away, as we tick through never-ending ‘to do’ lists, becoming chronically tired and working less efficiently with each overtime hour.

The authors of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013), Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, demonstrate that the chronically busy work less efficiently owing to a profound shortage of cognitive capacity, resulting in poor decision-making. Their research indicates that this shortage of cognitive capacity, caused by extreme lack of time (it can also be caused by extreme lack of money), measurably reduces an individual’s fluid

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intelligence, hampering performance. Without what they call the mental ‘slack’ of time away from work and away from thinking about work, we will make poor decisions. We’re dumber when we don’t take a break, and it shows. Even on factory production lines, there has long been evidence that reducing working hours improves productivity. In 1930, during the Great Depression, the Kellogg company reduced working time to a six-hour day. Despite working two hours less per day, however, workers were 3 to 4 per cent more productive overall. One observer saw workers increasing the number of shredded wheat cases packed from 83 to 96 per hour.

The utility of time away from work has also been demonstrated in research published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (‘Reversing burnout’, winter 2005). ‘Mark’, a volunteer environmental activist who spent hundreds of hours organising, lobbying and campaigning while also working a full-time job, was understandably close to burnout. He managed to find ways to avoid it, including delegating, taking breaks to read or jog and doing easier tasks when his energy was lower. He also remembered the wise words of his older colleague who told him: ‘When I was younger, I was convinced that I needed to drive myself every single moment. Now I feel that I can go to the sauna, and I’ll still hate imperialism in an hour and a half. And that’s helped me to stay an activist.’

This same study uses the American Red Cross new management approach to highlight the necessity of breaks, even among disaster response workers. Before, Red Cross workers put in as many hours as necessary until the job was finished. Now the Red Cross recognises that workers need breaks in order to be able to respond effectively to the humanitarian crises they face. The new approach follows advice given by the American Psychological Association, whose mental health workers had supported Red Cross disaster response teams. So even the Red Cross, in emergencies, recognises that without breaks, leisure and time off, we don’t work as well as we could, we are less intelligent, we make poor decisions and we are at risk of hurting ourselves and shortening our lives.

So what can we do? In many ways we academics are the lucky ones, often with greater autonomy than most workers, as well as extensive training in

critical thinking and assessing evidence. I’m arguing that we can be better workers, and more productive, if we think carefully about how we work, create time when we’re not working and model good working patterns for our colleagues and our students. Thus, my encouragement is to walk away. Get up and leave the office, roll around on the floor with your or someone else’s kids, do sudoku, plant radishes and climb mountains. Leave work to go to be with and to care for family and friends. The leisure spaces that we create allow our bodies and minds to rest and are vital to good work; these fallow moments are as much an investment in our working lives as pleasures in themselves. This article is the opposite of a call to arms, it’s a call to leisure, a call to lay down your keyboard and take up your knitting needles, your surfboard, your pleasure reading and, especially, your walking shoes.

Some of you may not want to do this, because you thrive on the busyness, the rush from feeling at the centre of the hurricane. Well, if being busy is your identity, if you love to find that your diary pages are brimming with appointments, I’m genuinely delighted that you’re happy with your lot. But I would ask that you don’t participate in the hegemony of busyness and that you don’t perpetuate the sense that those who try to keep more regular hours and do walk away from their desks are less dedicated. In other words, don’t sum your colleagues up as ‘not working weekends’.

Patience Schell

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Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2015

Preparations are already underway for the 2015 Holocaust memorial event in which Aberdeen UCU will once again, for the third consecutive year since the inception of this event at the University, be actively involved—AUCU’s own Sue Bateman having hitherto been instrumental in helping to organise the event.

The work of the local Aberdeen branch of UCU parallels the commitment by UCU both to Holocaust Memorial Day and to UCU’s anti-fascist campaign (see: http://www.ucu.org.uk/antifascist).

UCU has in the meantime produced two short documentaries on the topic of National Socialist persecution and the Holocaust: UCU Holocaust Memorial Day and Journeys to Safety: Memories of the Kindertransport. They are available to view at the following address: http://www.ucu.org.uk/hmd2014

The second of the two films focuses on the phenomenon of the Kindertransport, a programme (now fairly well documented*) which enabled some 10,000 mostly Jewish children to escape to Britain from National Socialist Europe (Nicholas Winton (1909-), one of the protagonists in this campaign, was honoured in late October 2014 as a result of his work to save children in Czechoslovakia).

The UCU Kindertransport film employs interviews with former Kindertransport children, much aged in the meantime and speaking something approaching a received pronunciation English (although the traces of German are still apparent). Thei r tes t imony records not on ly the i r recollections of anti-Semitism, but contains interesting insights into their childhood responses to the foreign British environment such as the curious phenomenon of the British open fireplace, the baffling British bedsheets and the parental warning that ‘everyone in England is mad’ (the interviewee means Britain—Britain is ‘England’ in German). But none of the interviewees mentions the unpalatable British food, which so unsettled numerous exiles in the UK and remained a recurring topic in the recollections of refugees from National Socialism, but perhaps these three interviewees have in the meantime become so British as to avoid being impolite about the food.

These two films provide an interesting insight into some aspects of persecution and exile, and are work upon which UCU is to be commended.

Steven Lawrie

* Besides regular publications by various academics in the Yearbook of the London Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile, Anthony Grenville has completed an informative study on Jewish exiles in the UK (Grenviille, Anthony, Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933-1970: Their Image in ‘AJR Information’ (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010)). A longs ide numerous German- language publications, the following are available in English: Fast, Vera, Children's Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport (London: Tauris, 2010); Leverton, Bertha (ed.), I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports (Hove: Book Guild, 1990); and Milton, Edith, Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing up English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). The Kindertransport Association has its own web page (http://www.kindertransport.org/), while the recent Refugee Voices project has documented the testimonies of many former refugees (http://www.refugeevoices.co.uk/).

Above: Kindertransport memorial, Berlin (2010).

Raising the Political Profile of Climate Change—A Personal Perspective from Working in Bangladesh

I have just come back from visiting Bangladesh on a project aiming to help the country continue producing enough rice without using water faster than it is being replaced. It was my fourth visit to the country and while I cannot say it is a good tourist destination I am always blown away by the fantastic way I am received by the people—friendly, courteous and appreciative of me being there. But I feel a great sadness when I come back because I am aware of the huge vulnerability that these 160 million have in the face of climate change and especially the inevitable sea level rise that is associated with it if we do not limit it. A 2012 report by the World Bank (‘Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience’) identifies Bangladesh as a hotspot for climate change impacts. Most of the country is within 10 meters of sea level. The report predicts that a 4oC increase in global temperature will raise sea level by about one meter by 2090 (and flood many of the world’s cities). This will remove something like one fifth of the land area of Bangladesh by the end of the century. Over a longer period of time predictions suggest climate change may cause the country to become virtually unable to grow crops because of increased temperature, sea level rise, heavier summer rain and increased storm surge.

Do we have a right to do this to another country and the millions of men, women and children who live there? Obviously no, but we are doing it none the less.

While I was travelling to Bangladesh I was reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak which has recently been made into a successful movie of the same name released this year. It describes life in a street in Germany during the early parts of the Second World War and reflects on the reaction of German people to the evidence of genocide being inflicted on Jewish people. It may be audacious to suggest this, but as I read it I thought there are parallels between the Holocaust and climate change. Both lead to death on a huge scale, and really both threaten the existence of entire races of people. Both have a population who know something about it but choose not to do anything. The difference lies in the motivation for the death and genocide in the first place and excuses for inaction. The Holocaust was intentionally motivated by racism and political convenience, while climate change at least started out being unintentional. In both cases it

Above: Hot and sweaty, working in a rice field in Bangladesh. Above right: Measuring soil hardness with Mahmud Sumon from Bangladesh Agricultural University.

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seems that, despite horrifying evidence, there is no strong public reaction. As eloquently portrayed in The Book Thief, it was essentially impossible to make any objection to what was happening in Nazi Germany. It is not so for climate change. The reason people are not reacting to climate change must be very different. Perhaps it is that they do not want to accept it even when they are bombarded with evidence and expert opinion. They do not want to accept it because it is ‘not convenient’ (to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore).

There is an urgency if we are to keep temperature rises well below 4oC and save the people of Bangladesh. But it is not too late. Each of us needs to understand that almost every choice we make affects other people, for good or ill, because

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Top: An open day for our experiment, with researchers, undergraduates and farmers in attendance.Above: Some of the team in front of our BBSRC-funded experiment in Mymensingh, Bangladesh.

we all share one planet. Probably everyone knows this; now we have to act like we know it. And we need to make our political classes at every level (local, national, global) know that we want more to be done to reduce climate change, and to empower individuals like us to do more about it ourselves.

Adam Price

(Professor Adam Price holds a Chair in Biological Sciences and conducts research in the field of genetic variation in rice at the breeding, physiological and molecular level.)

The 9U bus between Old Aberdeen and Foresterhill is back with the help of lobbying from AUCU. The AUCU committee would like to urge you to try it out if you travel between campuses. The earlier withdrawal of the service when it was trialled in 2012-13 was primarily motivated by the lack of use. While it was successfully argued that the University should consider the bus a structural cost as a result of having two campuses, justification for its continuation in three years' time will be stronger if it is widely used. And, of course, it is better for the environment and the pressure on parking if its use means many fewer car journeys are taken between campuses.

The details of schedule are here: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffnet/news/6663/

AUCU Environment Rep

Inter-campus Bus Service

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Predicted Consequences of Proposed Pensions Reform

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Source of table: UCU.

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Aberdeen UCU colleagues will already be all too aware of the impending threat to the pensions of many university employees throughout the UK.

At an Aberdeen UCU General Meeting in September David Watts, AUCU Pensions Officer, gave a detailed and informed analysis of the current situation and of the likely consequences of the changes USS is keen to make and David spoke again at an emergency General Meeting on 6 November. David has also communicated in detail with all AUCU colleagues by email on the topic. Most of us must, therefore, by now be aware of the nature of the crisis.

However, lest anyone still has any doubt about the dire financial consequences of the proposed changes, UCU’s table (see p.15) provides a useful estimate of the likely financial losses to various cateories of university employee.

The essence of the problem is that Universities UK want to end the final salary element of the scheme for all members of the Universities Superannuation Scheme and move members to a career average (career revalued benefits or CRB) scheme. A number of universities have already expressed disquiet about this. As AGORA goes to press, the situation remains very much in flux. It is clear, however, that the outcome of USS’s proposed changes would be horrific cuts to our pensions totalling thousands

Iceberg Ahoy! upon thousands of pounds, and cuts which would visit themselves with varying degrees of ferocity upon us all.

We may not be facing a breach of contract in legal terms here (as USS/UUK would doubtless counter), but some of us may at the very least struggle to fight off the sense of having been misled. How many of us, after all, would have paid into the scheme all these years had we known that further down the line the goalposts were to be abruptly moved and our pensions slashed? Who, save those who understood the implications of the small print, would have thought that the hard copy USS ‘Manual Benefit Calculation’, sent out year after year, was just intended as a bit of a laugh with no relationship whatosever to future reality? It is p robab l y no co inc idence , g i ven recen t developments, that the snazzy online ‘benefit modeller’ now (since when?) includes a very clear and unaccustomedly prominent disclaimer in bold upper case characters. How curious that USS has only now worked out how to create text in bold and upper case characters.

If the USS ‘benefit modeller’ is just a bit of a laugh and has no relation to reality, it would be useful if in future USS stated this clearly. Suggested wording: ‘Have a go at the online benefits tool. It probably has nothing to do with reality, and USS may well cut your pension in future whenever it feels like it’.

However, anyone who remembers the series of failed pensions schemes in the UK over the last two decades may not have been taken completely unawares by the USS crisis.

The perhaps most notorious of these failed pensions schemes, resulting from Robert Maxwell’s plundering of his employees' pension funds, not only occasioned Maxwell to flee the wrath of robbed pensioners by means of his watery suicide in 1991, and the University of Aberdeen prudently to rename its ‘Robert Maxwell Conference Centre’. The plundering by Maxwell also served as a useful warning against placing overly much trust in any pension fund, and some of us—our current and justified fury notwithstanding—will doubtless always have had such concerns at the back of our minds.

The USS crisis raises a number of questions which go beyond the understandable instinctive first reactions on a personal level such as ‘How much of my predicted pension am I going to lose?’, or even ‘How can I get my money out of the USS scheme?’

(OVER)

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One possible consequence of the crisis is likely to be a widespread loss of trust in USS. The yearly attrition of real-terms salary may be straightforwardly unpleasant, but it pales into insignificance in comparison with the impending pensions disaster, and it is clear that many AUCU colleagues have been profoundly shaken by the unexpected uncertainty over their retirement provision. One possible scenario for the future of the USS pension scheme involves a voluntary 1% additional contribution, but one wonders how many members still have enough faith in USS to entrust the scheme with additional monies. The image of a bargepole comes to mind.

A further broader question concerns the sustainability of the USS scheme. One wonders how long it will take for the whole scheme to unravel if universities begin to offer alternative pension schemes—in the way that St Andrews has already mooted.

Perhaps we should be heading for the lifeboats now and rescuing whatever we can before the good ship USS vanishes beneath the waves. But as we proceed in an orderly (or undignified) fashion towards the lifeboats, we may find that the latter have already departed and are being rowed furiously away by older senior staff intent on reaching the safe haven of the final salary scheme before the probable 2016 deadline.

The threat to our USS pensions also provides a useful incentive to study the captain and crew of the good ship USS.* Its chief investment officer, Roger Gray, it transpires, received last year a bonus of three hundred thousand of our pounds, taking his salary up to £900,000.00. Gray’s startling bonus even made it into Private Eye, which wrote: ‘In the three years that the fund’s deficit has risen more than five-fold, Gray has trousered £2.3m.’** Lucky old Gray.

Gray’s crew of around 80 investment staff are rumoured to be on well over £100,000.00 p.a. per head. USS has, too, been criticised for paying out the (inevitable, it seems) bonuses (in this instance ca. £40,000.00 per skull) which certain categories of employee in the UK feel morally obliged to shovel into their pockets. It is a curious thought that alone the bonuses paid (by us) to these employees exceed the full annual salary of many USS members.

If USS is beginning to sound like a British bank, then perhaps the time has come to subject the pay and bonus culture/ bonanza*** of USS to some rigorous scrutiny and to a salutary dose of glasnost. After all, USS belongs to us—to the members and to the universities who pay into it—and not to trustees, or indeed to the investors who work on our behalf.

The response to the crisis—the UCU marking boycott—similarly raises questions, for some of which there is no straightforward answer. What possible madness, for example (and this point enlarges upon a recent ly encountered sentiment), would drive a poorly paid newer member of staff, perhaps on a zero-hours contract, to embark upon all the complications and uncertainties of a marking boycott in order to save the pension of another member of staff who has never been a UCU colleague, has paid not a single penny in subs, has never lost pay due to going on strike, but has gleefully sat back all these years and pocketed the pay rises fought for by striking UCU colleagues? The writer of these lines can think of no answer to this question.

(OVER)

Trouble ahead for anyone relying on a USS pension and not expecting a £300,000.00 bonus this year.

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Autumn Fashion Tips for Victims of the Real-terms Pay Cuts

As autumn closes in, the dedicated followers of fashion amongst university employees will be keen to discover what is currently trending on the UK HE fashion scene.

AGORA can reveal that this charming piece of apparel (pictured below) is currently de rigueur amongst the fashion conscious, not only as a statement of good taste, but also as a reminder of just how bad things have become since 2009.

Fashion, however, being the fickle and ephemeral thing that it is, this piece of clothing could well be out of date by autumn 2015, by which time the percentage figure might require some adjusment.

This item is available in the following sizes:

Extra large/ large/ medium/ small/ very small/ very small indeed/ annual pay rise size.

Things that Go ‘Bump’ in the Night

Above: Miep Helfrich, AUCU Vice Chair (Foresterhill) and Professor in Bone Cell Biology has—like the rest of us-—not a safe pension, but a large and frightening USS pumpkin on her hands.

AGORA continues to welcome offers of articles from AUCU members for forthcoming editions.

The views expressed in AGORA by individual contributors may not necessarily reflect the views of

AUCU Committee.

Unless otherwise stated, all material, text and image, is copyright (c) the respective author of each

article/ AGORA, Aberdeen, 2014.

A further question which arises in connection with USS’s proposed pensions cuts concerns the fate of the UK as a destination for academics, particularly when one simultaneously recalls the annual real-terms pay cuts in the last 5 years which have reduced salaries to approximately 87% of their previous level.

One muses upon the consequences for recruitment and for teaching and research at pre-1992 universities in the UK. But will any of us really care about the consequences for teaching and research in the UK as we spend our retirements stacking supermarket shelves to make up for the vanished thousands? No. Probably not.

Steven Lawrie

* See for example:

http://www.payandbenefitsmagazine.co.uk/pab/article/uss-bonuses-of-£40k-1239221

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5a55f350-350a-11e4-aa47-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3IJHAxqlh

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/6034809/USS-pays-bonuses-despite-fund-fall.html

**‘Gray-vy Train’, in: Private Eye, no. 1375, 19 September - 2 October 2014, p. 36.

***Readers are invited to decide which expression fits best.