Professorial Health

Health, photo by GotCredit.com

Penn State professor of education-policy studies Katerina Bodovski has a truly remarkable article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Why I Collapsed on the Job. Bodovski writes about how her “inhumane” workload left her bedridden for weeks after her body refused to recover from an infection.

I know this paragraph will ring true for many of our readers:

But the benefits of such freedom and flexibility in academe come at the cost of disappearing boundaries between work and life. We are so free to work whenever we want that many of us end up working all the time, not having full weekends and rarely taking off more than just a few days, despite popular perceptions to the contrary. We bring our work home or anywhere we go — on flights or long drives, to vacations or family reunions. We are constantly checking email, responding to colleagues and students. What Richard Swenson wrote about in his 2004 book, Margin, has become reality: We live our lives without a margin.

We have become, as Bodovski names it, “silent workaholics.” And we all have to find a way to do better. Our health demands it.

-KitJ

P.S. Bonus fun-fact – Bodovski is an immigrant twice-over. She left Russia for Israel at 20, and later later pursued a Ph.D. in the United States.