How 'love what you do' went wrong in an ‘academic sweatshop’ in Siberia
We’re told that we should 'do what we love' when it comes to our jobs. But what if loving what you do leads – slowly, imperceptibly – to abuse?
In social sciences, a lot of work is dedicated to why people become committed to organisations. The classics, like Erving Goffman or Lewis Coser, claim that organisations can separate an individual - partly or totally, socially and sometimes physically - from her everyday environment and provide her with a new life-world and identity. Other researchers, mostly from management studies, say that institutions build commitment through organisational philosophy, goals and principles.
These theories worked well until the second half of the twentieth century when a lot of workplaces experienced dramatic change: precarisation, proliferation of part-time jobs and short-term contracts. The rise of lean firms, short contracts and “creative jobs” went hand in hand with the “new spirit of capitalism” – an ideology which made these transformations meaningful and desirable, prioritising flexibility and self-realisation over social security and stability.
This is how we found ourselves in the world of “do what you love, love what you do and you will never have to work a day in your life”. A world inhabited by life trainers and coaches who help us to “be more effective”; by employees who work while on holiday and try to increase their “energy” with yoga, special diets, fasting, spiritual practices, sport and healthy lifestyles; and by visionaries like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk whose projects often fail, yet they still tend to win at the end of the day, proving to all their detratctors that what once seemed impossible or crazy can, one day, come true. The 1960s are over and this is their heritage: love is everywhere, love is at the core of everything. But what is love?
When we talk about the “love what you do” principle, we usually mean very different things. The very notion of love makes us imply a lot by it. Love means interest, and passion, and fascination. It distinguishes a “job you love” from an average one. Love means an ongoing desire to move forward and thus can provide our modern creative and precarious factories with an inexhaustible source of fuel: you do not stop whatever happens, you overcome obstacles, you try over and over again – until death do you apart.
When we think about “loving what you do”, we usually forget about the “bad sides” of love. What if we are committed to something not only because love is great, but because love is awful?
Yet when we think about “loving what you do”, we usually forget about the “bad sides” of love. What if we are committed to something not only because love is great, but because love is awful – that it also includes anxiety, doubting, pain, suffering, dependence, agony and hate? What if love and abuse go hand-in-hand in the private and public spheres – including our workplaces? What if gaslighting - which manifests itself in the introduction of numerous innovations, alterations and broken promises that make you constantly doubt your competence, judgement and sanity - became a necessary part of our professional relationships? What if modern organisations make us committed – make us stay, involved, invested – by abusing us?
I am asking myself these questions as I recover from a two-year-long abusive relationship with my job in a brand new research and teaching department set up in Siberia in 2017. Although this text is based on my own experience as a faculty member, hours of discussions with my colleagues and students lead me to believe that it represents not just my personal view, but a collective experience of people trapped by an abusive institution.
Prologue: to Siberia with love
Our story starts in Moscow in 2012, the same year Vladimir Putin was reelected for his third presidential term.
On the day of his official inauguration as president, Putin signed a number of regulations which went on to have a profound impact on Russia’s public healthcare, social and education sectors - the so-called “May Decrees”. In general, these decrees were aimed at improving Russian living standards by 2020: higher public sector wages, a more effective healthcare service, a higher birth rate, and so on. In order to increase salaries of state employees (first of all, school teachers, university staff, healthcare workers), staff numbers were reduced by firing, the workload of those who stayed was increased, and the volume of financial support from the state became dependent on meeting certain performance targets.
As part of fulfilling the decrees, Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science initiated the so-called “5-100” programme. Its main goal was to get at least five Russian universities into the top 100 best universities in the world, and it planned to do so by giving them more money and aligning them more closely with international standards of research and education. This goal was ambitious: in 2012, the highest placed Russian university in the World University Rankings was Moscow State University, at 276.
In 2015, the state university in Tyumen, a city in western Siberia, joined the programme with the idea of a “greenfield” research institution, i.e. a new research environment without any baggage or prior constraints. They planned to set up a new department - the School of Advanced Studies (SAS) - that would be radically different from everything that existed before. As a promotional video later proclaimed, this department would break with the principles inherent in existing university infrastructures and transform the whole university from within by spreading innovative practices and vision.
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Quickly, news of this new multidisciplinary department in Siberia began to spread among Russia’s academic community. Everything looked almost perfect. Very generous salaries, especially for Russian academia. The proposed teaching load seemed lower than many other universities. Researchers from the best universities in the world were to move to Tyumen to teach and conduct ambitious research projects within multidisciplinary teams. And a former scholar with a PhD from UC Berkley-turned-professor of Skolkovo School of Management, Andrey Shcherbenok, was appointed as director.
Future faculty members were invited to participate in creating something new, ambitious and which seemed to fulfil an academic’s wildest fantasies. And all of this in the middle of Siberia, surrounded by luxury resorts and hot springs.
But inside the new Google-like building in the centre of Tyumen - complete with public spaces, glass work rooms and colourful walls - the dream of the School of Advanced Studies never came true.
Chaotic management
The first cohort of professors, I among them, arrived in Tyumen in August 2017, two weeks before the beginning of the academic year. Most of the newcomers were young researchers in their 30s or 40s, who had just received or were about to receive their PhDs, and were mostly from European or American universities. Everybody had received job offers the previous spring. Nobody saw their employment contracts in full before moving to Tyumen. “Some of you periodically ask me if everything is all right in terms of your contracts, etc,” the director, Andrey Shcherbenok, said via email in spring 2017. “Yes, it is all going as planned, but it is a long process since the SAS designs these contracts from scratch for the first time.”
Since the idea was that we are all partners in building a new institution together, we believed the promises. Because partners trust each other, right?
Our job offers stated that almost all of us would be employed for three years with the possibility of renewal. Salaries were fixed, with the possibility of increase after the first year. We were told that our main goal was to produce research results, so publications and conference presentations (“key performance indicators”) would not play a significant role when evaluating our work.
Yet when academic staff received their contracts, they were considerably more detailed and sometimes contradictory to our initial job offers: somebody had a 12-month contract instead of three years; only 20% of our salary was fixed; publications seemed to be necessary, and so on. We were told that our job offers were the main agreement between faculty members and SAS, and that the contracts were to fulfill some rigid university regulations. When contacted for this article, Andrey Shcherbenok stated that: “All SAS faculty are given an opportunity to study their contracts (in Russian and English) prior to signing them. They can refuse to sign if they do not like them.”
We accepted job offers in spring, we received contracts only after our arrival in August, and we signed them. Since the idea was that we are all partners in building a new institution together, we believed the promises. Because partners trust each other, right?
“We design everything from scratch” was the main mantra of the first, and then second year of life at SAS. Faculty members were immediately overwhelmed with an enormous amount of time-consuming tasks: teaching, making and remaking of educational programmes, scheduled and occasional meetings on evenings and weekends for discussing previous and new research projects, school strategy, hiring of new people for the multidisciplinary teams, principles of multidisciplinary research, etc. The idea of “256 hours maximum per year for teaching and the rest of time for research” immediately transformed into “256 hours per year of teaching, plus administrative work, plus membership in commissions, plus designing new electives, master programs and majors, plus redesigning of what we’ve already designed. Plus, plus, plus”.
The life of the school’s administrative staff – the young women who dealt with all the administrative work – was even worse. Once the professor whose English classes they attended told us that the only thing they were able to talk about (if they had time to come) was their work. And that they wept from exhaustion while talking about it.
Many students were constantly depressed and burned out, but it was never considered a problem by school administration. They believed that stress was the main ingredient of the organisational culture of an ambitious and fast-growing institution.
Instead, when students complained, they were told: “We are preparing you for real life”. And when faculty members tried to support students in their complaints, they were told: “This is what neoliberalism is, they should be prepared.” And it was true in the sense that life and SAS are incompatible with each other. If you are in SAS, there is no life; if there is life, there will be no SAS. So the only possible life in SAS is SAS, and SAS is real, and SAS is the whole world for you.
Social media posts by students about SAS (from left to right): "Studying at SAS be like"; "Fear, Stupidity, SAdnesS"; "At last I can get out of this meatgrinder called SAS".
Overwork and organisational disorder, of course, can be considered temporary “side effects” of building a new institution. Not, though, in SAS. From the very beginning, the director reserved the right to influence any dimension of life in SAS, and those small and big interventions – unlooked-for meetings, alterations to the teaching or research process, new demands, etc. – made the SAS universe very fragmented.
Contradictory demands were baked into school design. One set of demands came from the university, which has its own educational and legal standards and has to report on the “efficient use” of 5-100 programme investments. Others stemmed from the ambitions of producing revolutionary knowledge, research and educational practices. Without thoughtful management, this combination creates disorder by itself. Paradoxically, it was faculty members who constantly tried (and are still trying) to introduce more order with planning and scheduling, while top management sabotaged it. (When contacted, SAS responded that “SAS sets a lot tasks to its faculty. Most cope with them just fine, but some do not. This said, the teaching load for SAS faculty is on the level of US research universities and three times lower than in regular Russian universities.”)
I claim that in SAS, organisational chaos constitutes a particular type of management, inherent both in objective conditions and top-management intentions. Its main goal is to reproduce a constant state of emergency and prevent an institution from stabilising. It manifests itself in an enormous amount of micro-interventions through implementation of small, unpredictable and constant changes, as well as violation of obligations and promises; through overload and multiplication of tasks; through inculcation of fear and emotional exhaustion.
This kind of chaotic management creates an unstable and unpredictable work environment, forcing those who work in it – whether staff or students – to become both flexible (“ready to change”) and submissive. This is a necessary ingredient of many contemporary institutions which have a similar sense of time and distribution of power.
The crisis never ends
In the school’s erratic emotional landscape, fear and overexcitement were the most visible peaks. Which speaks for itself, because fear is a feeling of the end and excitement – of the beginning. What else can crisis be if not a constant collapse of the beginning and the end, of initiation and cancellation?
Jokes about firing staff or expelling students were, and still are a strong part of SAS organisational culture. Both students and professors were often reminded that they are there because they were “chosen”: that they are lucky to have been picked up, and they were picked up because they are special, but maybe not, maybe they are unworthy and got into SAS by mistake, so they have to constantly prove the choice was the right one.
In response, Andrey Shcherbenok stated that SAS “does not allow students to ‘pass’ classes in which they did not do substantial work and requires them to do most of their academic work in English. These practices are unusual for Russian universities, which results in many students having to leave SAS (usually they transfer to other institutes of the University of Tyumen). We believe that these requirements are a strong side of SAS, so expelling students who are not prepared to meet them is not a joke, it is a reality.”
Back in 2017, several months after the first cohort of professors arrived, faculty members and administrators attended an outdoor event. While we rode together on a track through a snowy forest, the director said (with a calm voice and no visible intention to insult any of us): “I would fire all of you except [the colleague who was sat next to him] if I could. But who will teach then?” On several other occasions, he complained that he would like the firing procedure to be easier for him, because we were too protected by Russian law. At Shcherbenok’s welcome to students at the beginning of the second year, he told them that they were like a nightmare to him - only when he opened his eyes they were still there. “Before this module started I wanted to expel 80% of you,” he said, “but now I see that things are not that bad and only 50% should be expelled.”
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