What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those with power/funding.
A union might increase productivity by both
a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment.
b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work.
c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*
>Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time).
is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work.
Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on tutoring and schooling is extremely high.
> biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work.
I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended sabbaticals of one kind or another which lead to their best work.
It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any famous researcher who accredits their success to an 80 hour work week.
We're also in an era where groundbreaking research is seldom done by lone unicorn researchers expanding on a stroke of genius.
The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases hundreds or thousands of technicians.
The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds of physicists responsible for verifying the theory).
Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.
> Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.
On the flip side, is this partially responsible for the declining productivity of science? We're effectively tying brilliant new talent to the whims of elders. ultimately as anyone who runs a large organization will tell you - you aren't going to get ground breaking work from a large org.
I don't really know if there's a way it could diffused - the reality on the ground is that cutting edge science requires cutting edge resources, and since advances are made on the margins major breakthroughs require knowledge across so many areas that one person can't possible be a specialist in everything involved. Both of those aspects mean most major research requires a significant concentration of resources to even be feasible.
> What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time).
I once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.
A union might increase productivity by both
a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment.
b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work.
c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*