What do we do in the Long Vacation?

A few years ago the canny person who designs the Cambridge University Pocket Diary (an essential tool for life in this place) decided to rename the summer. No longer did the months of June, July, August and September go under the banner heading “Long Vacation”. Henceforth they would be called the “Research Term”.

The reason for this is obvious: to dispel the idea that the summer is one long holiday for academics – a nice excuse for lazy afternoon on the river, picnics, garden parties or extended trips to the South of France. Not that it has been wholly successful. I still meet people who say “Ooh, I do envy you the long holidays you get in your job”. Even students, amazingly, sign off their summer emails with a cheery  “Hope you’re having a good break!”

So what do we do in the Long Vac (as it used to be called)?

Well, like the new title says, “Research”. I don’t believe that there ever was a time when this was an optional extra for university teachers, something you did if you felt like it, but pottered about in the garden/on the river/golf course, if not. But it certainly isn’t an optional extra for any of us now. For better or worse (and in my view emphatically for worse, but that’s another story) a very large part of our funding comes via the Research Assessment Exercise – a cumbersome system which “peer reviews” our “outputs” (that’s mostly what we used to call books and articles) and gives more money to the best  research departments.

So why the long stretch from June through September? For the simple reason that if you actually want to think anything through in my kind of work (it may be different, or more difficult, in science, I’m  not sure) you need hefty stretches of time to do it in. There are all sorts of things you can do in the odd half hour between lectures (checking footnotes, for example). But  you can’t get industrial quantities of reading done. And you certainly can’t have good new ideas.

But there’s another catch. If we really did have the Long Vac for research, and all we had to put up with was a few bits of sarcasm about our long “holidays”, then all would be well. Increasingly though, it’s not like that.

For a start, it’s a bit of a myth that we get June through September anyway. Everyone knows that Cambridge has eight-week terms (“…aah so you actually only work for 24 weeks a year then”). True enough in a technical sense. But those terms are eight week bursts of undergraduate lecturing. All kinds of other teaching happens outside that, not to mention exams, interviewing prospective students and so on. This year my Faculty was still in full swing, with mopping up exams, graduate teaching and admin up the middle of July. And at the other end of the vac, a lot of our students now come up for “pre-terminal” courses. This year about half the first year classicists will arrive in Cambridge on 23 September and they reasonably expect to have their teachers on the job.

But even if you narrow the Long Vac down to mid July to mid September, it still isn’t quite what it seems. My colleague Ruth Scurr wrote a nice piece in the THES a few weeks ago pointing what it was like for academics with young kids. (She generously suggested that both men and women suffered pretty equally here. That’s not what I observe. I know there are honourable exceptions – but it seems to me that it’s more often my young female colleagues who have their Research Period curtailed by child-care, pleasurable as that may be.)

The rest of us don’t get off scot free, however. There’s no such thing any more as what we used to call “the depths” of the Long Vac. Most of us are scurrying around the summer long doing all manner of – admittedly useful and important -- things: from fixing up individual funding packages for new graduate students to teaching on summer schools. One of my colleagues has spent a large part of his summer working on the Faculty’s submission for the Research Assessment Exercise (which seems rather to undermine its aim of promoting research).

So when do you get to do your research? Well there is regular sabbatical leave, on which Cambridge I’m happy to say is a lot more generous than most universities. But more and more, people are applying for extra leave from “external” funding bodies – to take terms or even years off their regular university duties. Now I  myself have been a very grateful beneficiary of these schemes. And I reckon that at my post mortem they’ll find “Leverhulme Trust” engraved on my heart. But I can’t think it’s a good way of running a university system (or good for the students, for that matter)  to erode research time so dramatically that the only way of clawing it back is to buy yourself out of the job entirely for a while.

Comments

[Tony Francis]

It would appear that the key words in Foska's link to the Guardian are "Oxford and Cambridge stand to gain increased funds [at the expense of other institutions]..." In other words, so-called "metrics" makes the granting of funds for research totally political, instead of quasi-political as with peer review. Whenever government funds are involved in research, the political implications are large. Someone in government has responded to some perceived political need, putting funds in that area. The institution which is keen enough to understand this political need then gets the money. Maybe the research is legitimate; maybe not.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_funding
Two examples can be seen in the US: The Human Genome Project and the Superconducting Supercollider. Both projects were funded about the same time. The Human Genome Project was considered a success, not only because it produced the desired result, but also because hundreds of universities were involved. Hence, almost everyone got a piece of the government "pie". The superconducting supercollider was a disaster, since the initial funding of $4.4 billion grew to $12 billion, and it was located in only one Congressional District.
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Supercollider
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome_project
I am still trying to determine if my life is missing something because the "Higgs boson" was never proven to exist. One thing that makes me happy: those roving-know-it-all editors on Wiki have tagged these fine scientific articles in an indiscriminate manner similar to the way they tagged my wiki articles.

[SW Foska]

In taking time to refresh his/her teaching with insights from new research, JS is very diligent. There should be rewards in the system for this time-consuming activity, but in the UK at least, research for teaching purposes is not evaluated.
Having said that, the RAE needs some defending from the cheaper knocks. Sure, stocktaking is boring but it needs to be done and without it no claims about innovation and consolidation are really meaningful. It's got better over the years, moving from a purely quantitative output approach to more refined measures including tasks like peer review and general 'esteem'.
What's really scary are the plans to replace it with evaluation of research according to the money it attracts. See:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/RAE/story/0,,1796532,00.html
The bureaucrats call this 'metrics' as if it were somehow a precise form of determining value in research. But at the end of the day its about as sensible as awarding the Pulitzer prize to the journalist with the biggest expenses, or the Nobel Prize for literature to the writer with the most printer cartridges.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion about this subject, despite the lead taken by the British Academy in criticizing it:
http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/rae-2006/response.pdf

[mj]

And then there's another challenge: having the time to think about and analyze stuff with few or no outlets.

[JS]

All very true. A couple of additions:
(i) you omit teaching preparation as part of the work in the summer. Because there is new material in my subject (law) every year, but in areas I only teach, not research, I typically set aside all/most of September to that task.

(ii) Much research involves travelling (as your own experience in the US attests). But this is actually hard work: leave on Sunday afternoon, work for 12 hours or so a day, come back Friday evening/Saturday morning.

(iii) Don't forget admissions' decisions. After A-Level (sorry, A2) results we all end up dealing with the situations of those who didn't quite get the grades we wanted and have to make decisions on them, trawling through notes from December and trying to do it all as quickly but fairly as possible.

Personally, my most productive time is usually the first three weeks of June: my students are all sitting their exams, but the scripts have not been distributed for marking (and when they are marked, all are done quickly to enable double-marking). As such, I can get stretches of at least three days at a time in which to do research!

Mary, Concerning the question "does marble burn?" The answer is "yes, it does burn, or degrade in extreme heat, such as would occur in a forest fire." Most marble is formed from limestone which, over the course of time, is compressed with either dolomites or calcites. These are minerals composed of calcium carbonates or calcium-magnesium carbonates. These, for the most part, should be flammable:
http://www.minerals-n-more.com/Dolomite_Info.html
http://www.minerals-n-more.com/Calcite_Info.html
Various minerals or metals can give marble its characteristic colored streaks, such as red, green, yellow, black, etc.
A more insidious problem occurs with the degradation of marble when exposed to acid rain. The marble buildings in Washington, DC are degrading from this problem:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/index.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/contents.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/1.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/2.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/3.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/4.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/acidrain/5.html
I recall reading in the 1960s that marble surfaces were degrading in Greece from automobile emissions. This is apparently occurring in Egypt, as well. This is another consideration in the preservation of ancient marble treasures. Should they be displayed outside environmentally controlled cases?

[Tony Francis]

Perhaps the longest and most productive vacation occurred after 1665 when Cambridge closed down because of plague. The recently graduated Isaac Newton spent the next two years working on calculus, optics and gravity. He regarded these years, undistracted as his most productive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_newton
His theory of the interaction of two bodies proved to be highly predictive in explaining planetary motion:
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/newtongrav.html

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/newtonkepler.html

When Einstein is thrown into the mix, the situation becomes a little more complicated, because of gravity waves and "warping of space".
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/einstein.html

The theory of perturbations can be used to discover the masses of binary stars (Most star systems are binary star systems. Jupiter would have been a second star if it were 10 times as big.) Recently, new planets have been discovered because of the subtle "wobble" seen in distant stars, based on perturbation theory:
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/perturbations.html

Notice that all these equations involve only two interacting bodies. If a third body is added, the mathematics becomes to difficult, and it becomes the "n-body problem" which has no solution.

[Tony Francis]

Mary, despite getting what appears to be lots of free time, it always seemed that university teachers were busy doing something. In the US, the "publish or perish" doctrine has been around for some time. Tenure has been linked to producing research, or "publishing". Most universities and colleges (of which there are a lot in the US) are not hidden in their linking of tenure and research. Frequently, tenure has taken on the appearance of a primitive "herd bonding" with the other faculty:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/11/lombardi

http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/?p=764

Other cases involve purely political issues:
http://theworldnow.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/mit-professor-against-embryonic-stem-cell-research-denied-tenure/

There have been claims throughout the years that the Big Bang Theory has taken on the aura of a religion or cult. Problems with the theory are often glossed over. It has led to the invention of many mathematical gimmicks such as "knots", "strings", "dark matter", "dark gravity", etc. to explain irregularities. We frequently talked about this when I was in chemistry grad school. "But for" Hubble's red-shift, the whole thing would fall apart. It ignores the power of electronic forces and relies on gravity. Most compounds in outer space exist in a plasma state.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bang.html
Despite this site's amusing reference to a "flat earth", Aquinas mentioned that the earth was round in 1260, at the beginning of Summa Theolgia.

[Pedro Proença]

Hi Mary,

The most common word these days is productivity. The key word is more not better.

I like to work (work for a trade company) and also to read books -lots of them, by the way - what means that I have to squeeze reading between work and family.

Unfortunatelly what I find is that for most people, work is not part of their life but all the way around. Pressure and demands are too high and so the chances for thinking and organizing one's own life are very scarce.

So its every man (or "everyman", borrowing from Roth) life. Its modern life. Not necessarily, in some ways, better life.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

I can testify from my 21 years in American colleges and universities that anyone who brought to teaching what one was supposed to bring to it--freshness as distinct from the left-overs entombed in yellowed notes--the summers and year-long sabbaticals were indispensable for sustained reading and research. I know that some institutions do not run summer schools for this reason.
From my experience in the Bodleian Library in Oxford I can say that one saw more dons at work there once Research became obligatory than one had done before. Like you I consider imposed publication a mixed blessing.