Answering the Craftsman's Call to Be Academic

Answering the Craftsman's Call to Be Academic

My grandfather was an avid amateur photographer who taught me the practicalities of photography, and more importantly craftsmanship. I never made it as a professional photographer. Instead, I eventually became an academic. In the process, I re-acquired the craftsman’s identity I first experienced through photography, but this time in academic craftsmanship. An identity formed through my educative transformation, and in my need and desire to make knowledge and scholarship of the highest quality and integrity I possibly can.

The problem was, having worked in higher education for years as an administrator, making my shift into being academic confronted me with a very different perspective of work life in universities. In our highly managerialised universities of today, the ability to be academic is diminished in many ways. Not least of all because the administrative burdens placed on academics takes necessary energy and time away from the craft work of making scholarship. This administrative burden is increased when academics take on pastoral service roles such as programme directorships.

I found myself in just such a situation where the university was taking much more from me than I could sustain, with little respect, thanks, or acknowledgement. I realised I was not contributing as an academic because I was too busy being a manager again. The managerial university wanted me to do administration. It tricked me into thinking that was the right way to spend my academic time.

I realised the managerialised university was never going to grant me permission to be academic because it does not value academic craftsmanship and therefore does not ensure there is space for it to prosper. Rather, it values hyper-performativity, quantity over quality of output, massified education that undervalues teaching, and audit and control rather than allowing autonomy to engage in legitimate academic work. I realised I must grant myself permission to be academic. So I did.

In reclaiming the time and space to service and honour my academic community by contributing to quality work with knowledge, service to academic institutional governance, service to my international academic research community, and to giving my students the best of my teaching ability rather than a burnt-out shell, I am now a better university and academic citizen. The result is an emotional re-balancing as I embrace the practicality of being academic. My wellbeing is re-balanced. I have returned to my core purpose and to the very reason why I and my craft belongs in a university – all because I granted myself permission to be academic.

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