This is a basic question that is worth asking in many situations and contexts. Here are some examples.
John is a postdoc who works seventy hours a week. He is always in the lab. He never takes holidays. He says he will once he gets a paper in a luxury journal. But, then we won't take a break until he gets a faculty job...
The students of Professor X regularly experience verbal abuse from him. He usually apologises for getting "carried away".
A government is corrupt, incompetent and tortures its political opponents and critics.
Suresh is on his fourth postdoc. Each has been in a different country.
Susan is a young faculty member, married and with two young children. She is usually at work or "on the road". At home she is mostly working.
A university borrows huge amounts of money from a bank in order to build very fancy buildings that they hope/claim will attract international students.
Scientists keep telling funding agencies that their research field is going to produce commercial benefits in just a few years.
Humans burn lots of fossil fuels....
Every year a university increases the administrative load on faculty by "just a few hours per week".
What will eventually happen? Something will break. A colleague once said to me "if you treat people like a machine and your drive them hard enough they will break. Just like a machine."
Eventually, we butt up against reality. It does not matter what we wish is true. The reality is that humans are finite. We have only finite physical, emotional, and mental resources. We all only have finite time, money, and abilities. Individuals, families, communities, institutions, and nations have only finite financial, social, and political capital.
Every situation is different. Every person is different. Our resources, whether financial or emotional, may differ significantly from one another. But we are all finite.
So, a good question to ask in any endeavor is "Is this sustainable?"
What do you think? Are there situations where you think this question should be asked?
In the good old days , there was teaching . admin and research. Then in 1997 with the advent of the web and globalization it became teaching , leadership and research . It is difficult to understand what is leadership ?. Great emphasis is given to leadership. This is creating hubris and vanity on a large scale in universities. Teaching one feels has been sacrificed due to emphasis on leadership.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. I feel it may have been a little off topic. But it is an important issue. You prompted me to write a post I had been planning for a while.
Deletehttps://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2021/03/management-is-not-leadership.html
Thanks.
John will have to pay to publish in Nature and Baby Nature luxury journals. Hope he has funds for this expensive paywall. Good luck to you John.
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