On Sunday evenings, I often find myself already in work mode. It’s like something inside me has decided that’s when the working week begins, making the Monday hurdle a bit easier to clear. That hurdle seems highest after a few days or a week off, as was the case last Monday. I’d already caught up on my emails, but I still felt a pang of anxiety during our weekly editorial meeting after autumn break. The list of topics we urgently need to tackle (read: write about) in the near future seemed endless. Writing the articles usually isn’t the hard part; that part tends to go quite smoothly. It’s the research and interviews beforehand that often take up a lot of time.
Any volunteers?
Take the proposed merger between the university and the hospital, which quite a few people – if they even know about it – mistakenly refer to as a possible merger between MUMC+ and the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. We’ve been hearing very little about it, so it’s high time to look into this. Any volunteers? A few hands go up.
Then there’s the perpetual problem of high workloads at UM. For starters, we need an overview and analysis of all the working groups and initiatives set up over the past 25 years to combat this hydra, with little success so far. Who would like to take this one on?
Trigger warning
Or consider the challenges faced by the average lecturer: the official time allocated to teaching duties doesn’t reflect the actual hours spent (those cursed “norm hours”), not to mention other obstacles like students complaining about grades, accusations of failing to provide trigger warnings for lectures and tutorials, parents getting involved, and terrifying student evaluations. Who has time to look into this over the coming weeks?
Bureaucratic beasts
Last but not least, we need to take stock of the unnecessary procedures and bureaucracy adding to workloads at UM. It’s a long list, from what we heard in a recent University Council committee meeting. UM President Rianne Letschert was immediately interested, and so were we. We need to get input from academic staff across faculties to identify the bureaucratic beasts we’re dealing with here. If you know what we’re talking about, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re considering a series of articles on this, possibly running until summer 2025 if needed.
Right then, enough talking. Time to get to work.