I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “productivity” and worrying about it. It is part of the culture in America, though I realize not only here. A growing trend among those lucky enough to be employed is working longer hours than the traditional forty-hour week. Younger workers in certain sectors are expected to work such long hours and some do not take vacations, even paid ones, fearing they might be seen as lazy, not valuable or considered replaceable. Our smartphones, tablets, etc., result in being available 24/7 and we feel the pressure to always be on call, like doctors used to be. The distinction between professional and private life is being eroded, including in my world of academia.

In my profession of teaching, publishing research and engaging in various kinds of service, we are urged to be productive, complimented on our output, and if we are lucky, rewarded for it. Barnard College, where I moved seventeen years ago, feels like a welcome exception. Our Provost at the end of this spring semester, knowing how much extra effort we had put into our students with remote teaching, urged all of us to make time to take care of ourselves this summer.

The pandemic, with the physical and psychic confinement we felt, has made a lot of people rethink their lives and how we live. Recently, I read an article about how younger employees are thinking about what kind of life they want, choosing not just better pay and flexibility, but quality of life with boundaries, which means having a personal life beyond work and measuring it by more than “productivity.”

Maybe my boundaries are too permeable, too undefined, though I view this as a positive, feeling that everything is connected in my life and provides me with a gratifying wholeness. It’s not like there’s pleasure and then there’s work. Work gives me pleasure (well, except for grading papers). I love teaching, but I also love being involved in a research project where I’m discovering new things, figuring stuff out and expanding my mind. Writing is part of that, though it’s the most difficult part, often anxious-making, especially when it comes to deadlines. Moreover, many of my friends are both personal and professional. In fact, one of the great sources of my happiness is that through work I have made close, life-long friendships. Still, I don’t have any hobbies and can’t remember the last time I took a real vacation.

The death of my husband in December 2019, and then the long challenge of Covid-19, physical isolation paradoxically paired with a demand for more work, has made me more contemplative. Why do I work so hard after all these years? Is it simply a personal choice or have I also absorbed the valuing of productivity that’s increasingly characterized our capitalistic culture?

As far back as the 6th grade I’ve been absorbed by doing research, reading books and writing papers. It is natural to me and the way my mind works. Sometimes those activities provided an escape from less pleasant things. If you are really busy and focused, you don’t have to think about your troubles or what makes you anxious. Work is simultaneously both focused attention and distraction.

In my field, that kind of focus is what makes for success since academics are expected to do their research and writing, all while teaching. 

At some point, possibly in the early 1980s, academia became increasingly obsessed with productivity. I remember it well from my time teaching at the University of Illinois, a research university. As institutions became more corporatized, notions of measurable value and productivity came to dominate, affecting not just budgets, but the overall work environment. The more “productivity” was valued, the less teaching was appreciated, as well as the work/life balance that went with it. 

Every year in my department we each filled out our faculty report, a productivity status beginning with “Research.” This included books and articles published, work submitted and forthcoming, work submitted but not yet accepted and work in progress. You could tell what “counted,” and what didn’t. Then came “Teaching” and finally “Service.” A scale of value, which I loathed. 

Once when I was on a university Senate committee that tried addressing such campus culture, we met with the Provost. I still remember him boasting that the more rigorous our requirements for promotion, meaning the more books and articles we produced, the better off we would be. This was his explanation for why the criteria for tenure and promotion had been rising. I asked him, sarcastically, “So you think ideally the criteria should increase indefinitely?” “Yes,” he replied with not a word about the quality of the work; it was all just a matter of the numbers (he was a mathematician after all).

How happy I was when I moved to take my position at Barnard College in 2004 when the Provost and President informed me that I was expected to also have a personal life, that balance was necessary.  I thought I’d gone to heaven. Maybe that’s the difference between a liberal arts college and a research university. When we fill out those personnel forms at the end of the year, “Teaching” came first, then “Research,” which was broadly defined, and various kinds of “Service” to the college. In other words, all these things counted.

And yet, for seventeen years I have continued working as I did before, always concerned with being “productive.” Always taking on more assignments (including reviews of younger faculty) while fretting about deadlines on articles and essays, always the pressure to write another book. Admittedly, I’ve put this pressure on myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m running a race where the goal keeps getting pushed further and further. It’s not competitive; it’s a race with myself!

Academia is no “ivory tower.”

I think of Ben Franklin’s advice to himself to be “industrious” — the mantra of the corporate world, of capitalism. I’m a doer. I like to be busy.

I remember the poet Andrew Marvell, with his famous lines in “To His Coy Mistress:” “But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near “— advising us to seize the day, to enjoy its pleasures.

  Those words mean more the older I get.

    Marvell also wrote “The Garden,” a poem about retiring to a place of peace, after we’ve run our race, competing for “the palm, the oak, or bayes” — wreaths recognizing achievement. His speaker lies in the garden as “Ripe apples drop about my head; / The luscious clusters of the vine / Upon my mouth do crush their wine.” Only the bees buzzing around the flowers are “industrious.”

    Well, that kind of life is too passive for me, even if it might seem nice for a couple of hours. I’d be bored.

Can’t there be some nice middle ground?

I teach at a wonderful liberal arts women’s college in New York City that is dedicated to teaching anti-racism and the ongoing project of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). I specialize in an area that will be under pressure, in which I will likely have a role as we undertake the English major review and reform: Seventeenth-century English literature, the period of John Milton.

People more often think of Milton as the author of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of “the Fall of man,” than as the defender of liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. Milton’s political writings influenced the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, now criticized (as Milton has been) for the implicit exclusion in its idea that “all men are created equal,” because who counted as all men? Obviously, not women or enslaved black people. The Declaration of Independence - America’s founding document, which was radical at the time - voiced an ideal that has never been realized.

And, in a curriculum review, the questions will come up (they already have in some institutions) whether and why we should continue to teach early modern writers, but also Enlightenment writers and thinkers, the creators of “liberalism.” Personally, I have always taught these writers and their texts critically. But is that enough? What do we do about teaching literature, especially earlier formative texts that have been made to bear responsibility for some of our current problems?

So much has changed since I came to Barnard College almost seventeen years ago. We now have a far more diverse student population, thanks to the college’s efforts, which include need-blind admissions. These are some of my best students, many truly exceptional, intellectually as well as personally. In our entering class for 2021, more than half identify as people of color.

I think back to many years ago when I was an undergraduate who never saw anyone among the faculty like me. No one was Jewish, there were practically no women and certainly no Jewish women. There just wasn’t anyone I could imagine myself being. That’s why I understand students today who want a diverse faculty and a curriculum that includes their voices, even as I think education should be expansive, not simply reinforcing an already-formed identity.

Now as a senior professor, teaching and writing about seventeenth-century English literature and culture, I’m wondering what will happen to my courses when we do reform our curriculum. But is it “my literature” or “my culture” to reform?

That is complicated. With my weird name, difficult to place or pronounce, I was not someone who obviously belonged as an English major, studying the so-called White European canonical tradition. As a Jew and a woman, a first-generation student with an immigrant father, English literature was an alien field; I was an outsider. Yet some of English and American literature spoke to me, deeply and personally, as well as intellectually. A wonderful Professor at Indiana University, the late Owen Thomas (an Americanist, who taught Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, but also linguistics and Chomsky’s transformational grammar), urged me to go to graduate school, helped me get in to UCLA, the school from which he had earned his Ph.D. But in the middle of my second year, the senior Americanist (a powerful white man with the pedigree of an old Anglo-Saxon name) kept me from specializing in nineteenth-century American literature (a field I had planned on), by failing me on the qualifying exam, though years later I found out he thought I’d plagiarized my essay believing it was too good to be written by me. That professor made it clear there was no place for me. It never occurred to me at the time that he would think this young woman he didn’t know, with a foreign name, could not possibly be an expert in his field. I now know the history of how Jews (and women) were excluded from Ph.D. programs at elite universities. I was devastated at the time, thought I would surely never go on, but the faculty—and then the field—embraced me. That was the beginning of my career in the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England.

It wasn’t “my” literature or culture, except in so far as it had become part of the culture of America. It was Christian literature—actually, Protestant Anglo-Saxon literature. Yet, over the years I made it “mine.” As I gained professional successes and tenure, as well as confidence in my voice, I found a freedom to think and write about it differently, to make Milton mine in a way that allowed me to understand and critique the limitations of his vision, his prejudices (the greatest Hebraic writer,v but not tolerant of Jews, or Catholics), even while celebrating his virtues and expanding his notions of liberty and tolerance.

My long experience and struggles for acceptance make me sympathize deeply, indeed identify, with those students and faculty seeking changes and release from curricula that might seem to have contributed, even indirectly, to the social injustices that we are trying to reform. I chafed under feeling that, as a Jewish woman, it could never be fully my culture. Jewish literature and culture was not what I wanted to study. It was not all of me. I wanted a larger world. I still cling to a belief that each of us can feel both “universal” and “particular” identities. If that is not possible, we are then as human beings… lost.

There is much to be said for a long perspective, for wide and broad reading, for reading things that are not narrowly “ours,” for inclusions and additions, rather than exclusions. I don’t think I could say it better than Cornel West and Jeremy Tate did in their brilliant, impassioned opinion piece in The Washington Post (April 19, 2021) on the announcement that Howard University would be abolishing its Classics department: “The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices.”