A Comment About Not Working Hard

Yesterday I came across an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education about academics at small colleges who do not publish. The argument is that they still work hard, and should be valued for their hard work. The larger point is that public opinion about academics being lazy are untrue. I found the whole argument very wrongheaded from top to bottom, and posted the following reply:

I try my best to work very little. It helps me to do my work. I waste lots of time mustering up the momentum to do something worthwhile, but I find that I waste far less time now, as an academic, than I did working a 9 to 5 job — where I wasted lots of time to avoid doing anything at all, or at least as little as possible. (Looking busy, that’s the key!)

At the end of the day, I think academics ARE lazy. But not because we are academics, but because most Americans are typically not hard working. We work hardest at avoiding hard work. We invented Facebook and most of its time-wasting ancestors. We detest and look down on manual laborers. We don’t respect artisans either. In fact, we often learn how to do this, how to avoid hard work, in school. I know I did. 

We can only measure ourselves by the fruits of our art. A truly great teacher can SHOW their art in a display of some kind — the classroom, videos, workshops, talks, whathaveyou — just as great writers can showcase their writing in publications. Sadly, most academic publications are NOT the place to go to find great writing, just as most classrooms are not the place to find exceptional teaching. (But, if all writing and teaching were exceptional, it wouldn’t be, well, exceptional.)

A separate issue is that the public cannot understand the value of the virtuoso who plays small shows, never to wide acclaim, for small, unimportant niches of persons — and changes their lives. The writer who writes to his small circles of friends and saves one of them from suicide; the teacher who teaches in a dead-end high school and inspires one student every 5 years from the toxic cynicism of his peers…

But most of us don’t do those things either. And, again, we obviously DO waste lots of time. But who doesn’t? And what’s so wrong about wasting some time? I love to waste time. I mean, if I didn’t love to waste time I might not spent so much time here — like I an NOW — wasting my time reading and responding to another sad, sulking, and/or apocalyptic essay that smells of protesting too much, staying up til 3 in the morning trying to sound clever for no reason whatsoever.

Shameful, isn’t it? I know it is. Thanks for joining me.”