We recently highlighted Richard Stewart’s YouTube video that explored how a Results-Only Work Environment might translate to the world of education. Now we have a related tidbit, this time from a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how the next generation of professors view their jobs.

The study is small but telling. Harvard researchers interviewed 12 professors born between 1964 and 1980 (so called “Generation X”) and talked to them about work-life balance issues. (You can find the full study on the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education website.)

As the COHE story notes, researchers found that Gen X professors “value efficiency over ‘face time’ and believe that quality is more important than quantity in academic work.”

Agreed.

But what really caught our eye was how the professors’ work experiences mirrored the demand/control issues we discuss in WHY WORK SUCKS AND HOW TO FIX IT. Check out these statements about what they like and what they don’t like about teaching at the college level:

“I like the freedom – that is probably the best thing, to come and go when I want. I would say the best things are freedom and flexibility.”

“[What I like best is] the balance. It’s a classic teacher-scholar model, and for me it was important in the job I took that every aspect of it be something where your efforts would be rewarded.”

“I think [what’s hard is] just the constant demands, right?…the sheer workload, and the number of hats that you wear. I’m like most academics – I’m not a multi-tasker – I’m a focuser. I’m really, really good at focusing, but there are millions of different sorts of things to keep track of.”

“[The job permeates] every pore. And that’s why we pick it – because we love it enough to go through the ridiculous hoops you have to go through to get it done. But it’s still just exhausting.”

Despite the misconception that people in academia lead cozy, tweedy lives, those last two quotes demonstrate that they can be as harried as the rest of us.

What surprised us even more is that the older generation of academics has traditionally responded to those demands by piling on the hours when that isn’t how college works.

As we note in our book, college is based on a results model, not a time model. Students are expected to spend time studying, but they don’t have to log in hours with their professors. They are given expectations and then given the space they need to work on their own. Why shouldn’t their professors live and work in the same way?

FREEDOM and CONTROL are the only antidotes to demands, and fortunately (as evidenced by the first two quotes) the Gen X professors seem to be making the most of what the college life has to offer.

As always, it’s our hope that people stop talking about these issues in terms of the squishy and elusive “balance” and start talking about the best way to deliver the service at hand (in this case education). There’s no reason why both college professor and college student can’t live by the same code. Tell me what you expect of me, then let me meet that expectation in a way that allows me to meet the demands of my life.