Since the launch of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, education policy has put increasing emphasis on quality education (SDG 4). However, the precarious working conditions and demanding research culture in academia beg the question of what comes to count as ‘quality’. UK universities rank highly on international league tables but fare poorly in terms of student mental health, with students reporting anxiety, burnout, feelings of isolation, and lack of support; Suddenly, it seems difficult to say whether the UK’s higher education system is succeeding or failing to provide quality. This ambiguity won’t be resolved as long as we must compromise academic success and personal wellbeing in a kind of zero-sum game. What we need are more transformative and sustainable solutions to the wellbeing crisis in academia, recognising academic flourishing and personal flourishing as equally essential signifiers of ‘quality education’.
You won’t find self-help tips or a summary of Edinburgh student wellbeing services in this post. While it is laudable that most UK universities offer programmes for stress management, resilience building, and emotional wellbeing, such individual coping strategies distract from the root issue at hand. The academic workload hardly allows for engagement with support services and programmes. Looking after yourself presents yet another chore on the list; looking after yourself feels like a battle against the work culture in which we find ourselves. So, it’s time we came up with interventions addressing the underlying problem, not just its symptoms.
The growing ‘slow scholarship’ movement reminds us that time spent “just reading”, “just contemplating”, and “just observing” are essential for research. Meanwhile, “faster learning” is valued among students as the biggest benefit of AI, reflecting an ever-accelerating research culture. In her book Slow Scholarship: Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University, Catherine E. Karkov writes that “[slow scholarship] is a means first and foremost of reclaiming time”— Could the university systematically reclaim time for slow, deep, and informal learning?
The university struggles to reclaim time because it faces pressures too. One of these pressures is the growing accountability regime around quality education. To secure top rankings—and thereby attract fee-paying students, external funding, and reputable staff—, universities must meet various criteria. For instance, QS World University Rankings prioritise faculty citations, graduate employability, and an international profile. Meanwhile, student experience is reduced to student-teacher ratio, making up a mere 10% of the overall evaluation. Krakov observes that “if we are kept busy […] trying to achieve ‘better’ (and demonstrating how we are doing it), we will not have time to think, talk, meet, plot, upset the status quo and […] to create the universities in which we would really like to work.” Gradually, the neoliberalised university has given up agency in determining its own work culture. In the process, the neoliberalised university has shifted responsibility for maintaining wellbeing onto individuals who are “free” to engage in self-help programmes.
The neoliberal fix for deteriorating student mental health levels only goes so far. Concerning statistics must be viewed as a problem of philosophical nature. Rather than introducing more wellbeing programmes, we should ask: What is higher education for? What kind of quality do we wish to achieve? And, importantly, how do we ensure student voice in the process of articulating answers to both?
Open discourse about the issue, senior academics modelling healthy practices, and involving students in curriculum co-creation might be more transformative and more sustainable solutions to the wellbeing crisis in academia. However, before the task of having to change academic work culture adds even more pressure to our busy schedules, we first may wish to follow the example of the slow-moving (but not lazy) sloth character Flash from Disney’s Zootopia (2016):
Judy Hopps (main character requiring an urgent administrative service from Flash):
We are in a REALLY big hurry!
Flash:
I…. am…. on….
Judy Hopps:
[pleadingly] It?
Flash:
Break.
Flash from Disney’s Zootopia (2016), taken from Pixabay.com, https://pixabay.com/illustrations/flash-slothmore-fictional-character-7298115/
