How social acceleration affects the work practices of academics: A study in Brazil

Introduction

The university environment has undergone radical changes, which have been modelled according to industrial and market logic in the past few decades. Consequently, this environment is currently subjected to a marketization process derived from neoliberal policies. The concept that universities serve a public good has been challenged through the vision ‘that the market can replace the democratic State as the primary producer of cultural logic and value’ (Lynch, 2006: 4). Public institutions linked to education, which originally were considered crucial to the collective well-being, are currently seen as part of the market (Davies and Bansel, 2007).

Substantial changes in the university environment that have significantly affected knowledge production and academics’ subjectivity are synthesized by Vostal (2015), who points towards both external and internal pressures. With regard to external pressures, he refers to a tendency to view universities as economically oriented institutions, whereas internal pressures correspond to the implementation of research quality audits that directly affect knowledge production and the culture of higher education. Changes in the academic environment include an emphasis on the accountability and maximization of academic output, which increases competition (Davies and Bansel, 2007; Thomas and Davies and Bansel, 2002). These practices, which characterize performance-based goals in the context of management, are linked to so-called managerialism (Chandler et al., 2002; Thomas and Davies, 2002), or new managerialism (Radice, 2013), which is derived from the New Public Management (NPM) approach. According to Radice (2013: 408), the NPM approach creates a situation in which ‘the values, structures and processes of private sector management are imposed upon the public sector; key elements include a shift from professional to executive power, a focus on “performance” as measured by quantitative targets, and the widespread use of financial incentives’.

Thus, ‘the image of a lonely scholar pursuing his (seldom her) intellectual interests alongside teaching duties in a long-term, often lifetime, dedication to one’s disciplinary field has become a part of academic folklore rather than the present reality’ (Ylijoki, 2015: 94). Academics believe that working time is focused on production rather than on thoughts (Noonan, 2016). Reflection activity and mental development are viewed by teaching professionals as ideal and utopian in light of the demands of everyday life in the university context (Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003). Public university academics have experienced increasing pressure regarding the relevance and marketability of their work as a result of the need to obtain external resources due to reductions in state financial support (Sabelis, 2007). For her, this situation illustrates the fact that scholars are currently subject to measures of efficiency in relation to professional tasks, such as the time allocated to teaching. Thus, the logic according to which time is viewed as a scarce resource, and speed as the expression of efficiency, reflects the current ‘speeding up and general acceleration of daily life and work’ (Adam, 2003: 96), and it seems to be completely applied to contemporary universities.

Accordingly, studies on academics address issues such as work overload resulting from excessive professional demands and exhaustion derived from time pressure (Hartman and Darab, 2012), as well as professors’ dissatisfaction with insufficient funding and lack of acknowledgement of their work (Winefield et al., 2003). For Ryan-Flood and Gill (2010: 42), the analysis of contemporary work in academia demands the input of several sources of knowledge that can jointly reflect the ‘relations between transformations in capitalism, new forms of governmentality and psychosocial experiences of working in the University’. In sum, academics experience a series of demands that are viewed to be incompatible with their professional expectations and to have negative effects on academic research (Noonan, 2016) and academics’ subjectivity (Ylijoki, 2003). Thus, ‘academic time’ (Guzmán-Valenzua and Di Napoli, 2015) can be viewed as the university version of the time shortage that permeates all spheres of contemporary societies.

With respect to time pressure issues in academia, few authors benefit from the concept of acceleration (Adam, 2003, 2006; Rosa, 2013), which explains the mechanisms underlying the temporal transformations in society and its institutions. Müller (2014), for instance, analysed temporal experiences in the work and careers of life sciences post-doctoral students and found significant transformations in the temporality of academic work carried out in Austria. Vostal (2014) carried out another empirical study using interviews conducted with senior academics in the United Kingdom from several fields to analyse social acceleration theory as a conceptual resource to help understand the structural changes that occurred in the academic environment. Studies conducted by Ylijoki referred to Finnish academics from different disciplines, and university contexts focused on future orientation among short-term academics (Ylijoki, 2010) as well as on the impact of temporal acceleration on the work–life relationship (Ylijoki, 2013).

Taken together, the literature regarding accountability and maximization of academic output and the view of efficiency based on speed suggest that acceleration is currently a relevant element in academic work. The present study aims to introduce the concept of social acceleration in relation to university professors based on empirical material that focuses the effects of social acceleration on workplaces in general (Rosa, 2014). These effects include (a) the production of ‘guilty subjects’ due to time scarcity, (b) burnout related to the feeling of ‘running uphill just to stay in place’, (c) work–life balance and retirement, (d) experience and expertise devaluation and (e) lack of identification with work and the workplace. Through this empirical material, we seek to illustrate the effects of social acceleration specifically on the work of academics.

Social acceleration theory

According to Rosa (2010: 41), acceleration dynamics are the essence of modern society such that ‘our understanding of modernity and of the process of modernization is utterly incomplete if we do not pay attention to the changes taking place in the temporal patterns and structures of society. The author advocates that one cannot speak of one acceleration process. He draws attention to several phenomena, such as sports, fashion, transportation and labour turnover, in which acceleration manifests itself. Despite the differences between these phenomena, he suggests a pattern of changes expressed through the social acceleration concept, which can be analysed according to the following three distinct categories: technological acceleration, social changes acceleration and life-pace acceleration (Rosa, 2010).

Technological acceleration concerns direct-objective processes, such as transport, communication and production, in which the general trend of increased average speed is undeniable. Rosa (2003) refers to advancements in transport and transmissions as well as the possibilities generated by biotechnology, such as transplants. He also highlights the tremendous effect of technological acceleration on social reality.

Social change acceleration is related to changes within society, that is, in society’s structuring institutions, such as the family and occupational systems. Rosa (2010) argues that the stability of institutions has been declining throughout late modernity. For instance, changes in fields such as family and work have accelerated; they occurred between generations during early modern society, but occurred in an intra-generational pattern in late modernity.

Life-pace acceleration concerns the ‘speed and compression of actions and experiences in everyday life’ (Rosa, 2010: 22), which can be measured through subjective and objective approaches. The first approach is related to the general feeling of time pressure, rushing and time scarcity, whereas the second approach is related to the trend to eat faster and sleep less (according to time-use studies) as well as to do and experience more in a given period by diminishing pauses and/or doing different things simultaneously. In this regard, Leccardi (2007) also posits that the amount of shares contained in a unit of time tends to increase. She notes that the perception of a lack of time can be seen as an obsession that characterizes the contemporary experience, and she emphasizes that the growing sense of lack of time outweighs the possible benefits of acceleration in terms of time savings.

According to Rosa (2017), the general feeling of time pressure, which he acknowledges as a feature of contemporary late-modern societies, results from the fact that the time required to fulfil our to-do list exceeds the time we have, which affects the time we can spend on each item on the list. As he notes, the problem is that the number of legitimate and justified demands composing the to-do list seems to constantly increase. In the case of university professors, this list includes several activities related to teaching, research and management. He observes that whereas the to-do list can be expanded by increasing the number of items on it, time cannot be expanded because social time-division standards (length of day or year) are not modifiable. Rosa (2017), based on Harvey (1990), states that time can only be condensed or compressed, a fact that explains the increasing time pressure. He adopts the term ‘temporal mismatch’ to address the incongruity between the time allocated to a given number of tasks and the time needed to perform them in an appropriate way (Rosa, 2017).

In the debate on the consequences of speed, Hassan (2014) points out the difficulties of considering velocity-related pathologies in a neoliberal context, in which speed is seen exclusively as beneficial. He perceives that rather than recognizing that individuals, society and institutions are vulnerable to the imperatives of speed, one must analyse the nature of the social pathologies related to social acceleration. In analysing the interrelationships among globalization, time and knowledge today, Hassan (2003: 6) expresses concern about what he considers human adaptation to environments. According to him, ‘we are getting used to dealing in “data” and “information” instead of “knowledge”. We thus become accustomed to thinking in an “abbreviated” fashion’. He argues that it is necessary to deeply analyse the relationship between the fast life and the pervasive feeling that there is not enough time for reflection. For him, (Anglo-American) universities have become pseudo-businesses based on the ideology of the market and the alleged benefits of communication technologies, ‘orienting them away from a “universal” concern for knowledge to one focused on the narrow needs of the economy’ (Hassan, 2003: 7).

Ylijoki (2014) performs a brilliant study on the relevance of the temporal approach to higher education. Ylijoki emphasizes the several levels in which social acceleration manifests itself in researches at universities. In a brilliant analysis of the relevance of the temporal approach to higher education she emphasizes several levels on which social acceleration manifests itself in different studies conducted on universities. On a broader level, she points to the higher education policies, which value the rapid transfer of knowledge to industry in order to accelerate innovation flows so as to promote economic growth and the competitiveness of countries. In relation to universities, she refers to the need to compete for resources, seeking the best rankings, often facing reforms and restructuring pocesses. At the level of work practices, academics are faced with strong pressures to produce more and better outcomes in short-term, such as fast supervision of students, and publishing more papers in high-ranked journals.

Methods

To illustrate the effects of social acceleration on the work of academics specifically, we draw on a qualitative study that represents the first stage of a broader research project entitled ‘Work, time and health – a study of the demands and expectations of public university teachers in Rio de Janeiro’. The procedure adopted in this article is to use qualitative data related to academics to illustrate abstract aspects of the concept of social acceleration. According to Graebner et al (2012), qualitative data have the richness and concreteness of the material as advantages, and can be used to reveal an abstract idea, in this case, the social acceleration. The empirical material is based on individual interviews conducted with 15 biomedical-field professors from two public universities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during 2015–2016. This area of knowledge is among the fastest growing fields, with a high level of competition and internationalization related to the hopes of economic return (Müller, 2014). The sample was drawn using the snowball technique (Abdul-Quader et al., 2006), in which a professor already known to one of the researchers contacted another professor, who then contacted another, and so on. Thus, the professors in the sample were accessed through social networks. The proportions of teaching and research performed by the professionals in the sample varied considerably. Throughout the text, the terms teachers, professors, academics and university teachers are used interchangeably. Although temporary hiring is a customary practice in Brazilian public universities, all interviewed professors were permanent staff members at their institutions. The interviews, which lasted between 20 and 40 minutes, were carried out by three researchers in a place previously agreed upon with the interviewees, often at the university. Participants signed a consent form expressing their agreement with the study methodology. The project was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil.

The interviews covered participants’ demands and expectations in their professional life, changes in their profession since the beginning of their career, and a description of their work in terms of tasks to be performed as well as their organization. The conversations also included work tasks carried out at home, their views on new communication technologies, the degree of their professional satisfaction and their satisfaction with the acknowledgement of their work, and their perspectives on their future. The interviews also included questions about what it is like to debut in this profession today, the relation between work and health, and the relation between research and publication. Professors were also asked about whether they would change anything if they had to choose their profession again and whether their profession aligned with what they imagined it would be. The interviews were recorded and fully transcribed.

The qualitative material (the professors’ discourses) was analysed with the aim of identifying the following detrimental effects of social acceleration on their work, as described by Rosa (2014): the production of ‘guilty subjects’ due to time scarcity, burnout related to the feeling of ‘running uphill just to stay in place’, work–life balance and retirement, devaluation of experience and expertise, and a lack of identification with work and the workplace. Certain ‘speeches’, or ideas expressed by the interviewees regarding each of these topics, were selected by identifying the main points in the discourses. Excerpts from the interviews are provided below. Fictitious names are used, and the duration of time that participants had worked at the university as professors is indicated (y = years).

Findings

According to the interviewed professors, the increasing demands in the academic environment are directly associated with the decreased quality of their work in relation to publications and classroom activities, which makes them question the quality of academic work in teaching and research. They experience these requirements, mainly regarding the purely quantitative aspects of article publishing, as a source of strong pressure:

Sometimes diminishing quality is necessary in order to achieve goals. With respect to the so-called salami articles (…) we subdivide the available data to publish more articles because number counts more. (…) The demand for students has increased in some way. We cannot give them too much support (…) so I believe it affects the quality of the guidance. (Nancy, 4 y)

Nowadays, publication means number, regardless of the quality and of the author. It is necessary to show numbers. We even question some published data; when it happens very fast, we end up not trusting them. This ‘number’ issue is so distressing that our dedication to the research is not really taken into account. (Emma, 9 y)

The idea that the number of tasks to be performed is almost impossible to achieve was recurrent in the analysed discourses. Regardless of how much is done, it is always insufficient given the quantity of the demands:

Nowadays, we are slaves to publication; it means that we have to increasingly meet endless goals. (Angelina, 9 y)

It is difficult to be measured … It seems that the work of a university professor involved with research is something that has no end. (Joanna, 5 y)

The excessiveness of the activities and tasks to be performed adds to participants’ perception that some of these tasks should not be part of their professional responsibilities. In attempting to balance their entire set of demands, professors often organize their time that is not dedicated to scheduled activities (classes and meetings) by prioritizing activities with the closest deadlines. Thus, the activities they deem to be the most important –their true priorities – are often left behind:

The time I could use to produce, which I understand is the role I should play here, is taken away from me. I don’t think I should perform administrative tasks (…). I’m sure I don’t make good choices, so much that I harm myself since sometimes I don’t have time to prioritize what I should be doing, such as an article (the correction or the writing of one), for example, which is left behind because there are other tasks I must perform in order to meet the deadlines. (Anna, 5 y)

Because it is not possible to accomplish everything on their to-do list, professors often take time from their personal life to complete their work tasks. All interviewees expressed the blurred boundaries between work and life away from work, as they worked to varying extents at home, in the evening or on weekends:

At first, I even saw myself in the situation of not knowing how to manage my work time. So, I got home from the university and kept on doing work-related things because there was always something. Then, I understood that no matter how much I devoted my time to it, it never seemed to be enough. (Nancy 4 y)

There is considerable variation among teachers in terms of performing professional activities at home. Female professors in particular allocate their time spent working at home based on their family life and domestic demands. In some cases, the time spent working at home was at the expense of sleep. One female professor said she works on weekends only in cases of emergency. She is now able to separate work from her personal life and dedicate more time to her children. In contrast, when she is at the university, she gets ‘disconnected from her family’ (Yasmin, 9 y).

The professors often complained about being subjected to work demands, and they used expressions such as ‘work sucks’ and ‘pressure generates anguish, turns professors into slaves’ (Angelina, 9 y, and Joanna, 5 y respectively). According to Rose (12 y), ‘even if you do what you like, if you meet 100% of work requirements, you will lack time for health’. Such speeches were often accompanied by reflections that noted actions and changes aimed at facing the ever-growing demands, such as being able to take vacations after a long period without doing so given the importance attributed to work. The following speech expresses a change movement, which is viewed as a way to define the limits between professors and their work:

I think it is also an apprenticeship. When I started working here at the university, I didn’t really know how to manage the limit between work time and my own time in order to allow me to do all other activities, that is to say, in order to exist. Nowadays, I think I’m more concerned with it. (…) I don’t think my professional life belongs to the university. I belong to the university, I’m part of the university staff, but I’m also myself, I do what I want to do. (Anna, 5 y)

Retirement is often seen as a way to ameliorate the feeling of endless debt caused by the feeling of running without moving forward:

I think [professors retired] because they always felt like they were in debt with something. I even joke [I still meet most of them], we used to feel like dogs running after a sausage, which is tied to a stick, in order to eat it; the dogs think they will be able to get it, but they never do. It happened because the demands gradually, but constantly, increased, so we never felt that the mission was accomplished; we felt it was X + Y and then X + Y + Z . . . . So, sometimes, people cannot stand the ever-increasing demand. (Amy, 33 y)

The interviewees expressed the strangeness of the non-valuation of experience before entering post-graduation programmes, which is a position they attribute to professors who are now starting their careers. They even questioned whether the fast rhythm of publication and supervision allows new researchers to develop innovative science or whether they will only reproduce what they have learned as students:

[At the time I graduated] there was no such imposition as we see nowadays: ‘Go get a master’s degree’, ‘Go get a doctorate’. On the contrary, at that time, professors told us: ‘Acquire experience first’, ‘Do not get the master’s degree yet; you are not mature enough’. (Amy, 33 y)

Nowadays, innovating is the challenge for early-career professionals [and it worries me], mainly in the biomedical field; it seems to me that by dominating some techniques, they will be able to reproduce. They should, they are expected to do it; however, they must be able to publish studies, as well as supervise students, in the first or second year. I am really worried about whether they will have time to creatively innovate and invest in a more autonomous research line. (Rose, 12 y)

When asked about whether they would choose different careers if they had the opportunity to do so, none of the teachers stated that they would make changes. However, many of them would change their research trajectory to adapt to the current demands of the university environment. Michael, for example, resents having sought greater innovation at the risk of encountering difficulty in publishing due to the type of subject he examined. In his opinion, this made him lose ground in the short term because his results were considered insufficient to constitute good articles. He said:

I do not want to try something that could go wrong, you see? I always wanted to swim against the tide; I always wanted to do something different. So, nowadays, I would play more for the fans and less for romantic thoughts, like ‘Science, let’s make discoveries!’ (Michael, 20 y)

In contrast, some researchers resent being restricted to their research while they pursue more concrete and short-term results in order to be known more immediately as productive researchers:

A professor, a researcher, also has deadlines, etc. At various times, I think, this has happened to me, too. I think one risks less when it comes to thinking about a research project; one dares less because daring implies that there is a greater risk of going wrong, and if you go wrong, you do not have a publication. If you do not have a publication, this, in the future, can complicate your life. So, in a way, that is a dissatisfaction I have. I think it is a dissatisfaction. I think I should dare more, to go even further, to have a higher reward potential, to have a result that is more relevant than my result. (Yasmin, 9 y)

Teachers perceive that their way of working in the classroom is also affected by the pressure to produce. Amy notes, with regard to the position of some colleagues, that ‘Teaching impairs me. If I’m going to stop this work to teach, I will not produce it’.

So I see the following: teachers delegate the function of giving classes to students who have already passed the discipline, to monitors, to graduate students … things that would never have been thought of years ago when his class was his responsibility. Not today. (…) There is even a certain displeasure regarding frequency control and notes. I have heard the following comment: ‘The market will regulate.’ (Amy, 33 y)

Discussion

The inflated to-do list seems to be at the very root of social acceleration’s detrimental effects on workplaces (Rosa, 2014). The production of guilty subjects caused by time constraints can be exemplified in Nancy’s speech on page 4, since achieving the goals (publishing a given quantity of articles per unit of time) seems to be incompatible with publishing good articles. Similarly, in her view, the increase in the number of students impairs the quality of supervision. Thus, there is an acknowledgement that good articles are not published and good student guidance is not provided, which leads to a sense of guilt about the quality of work done. Some of the tasks on the to-do list are related to bureaucratic tasks. For Guzmán-Valenzuela and Di Napoli (2015), in addition to affecting teachers’ energy and time, those bureaucratic tasks restrict subtler (but important) aspects of professional quality, such as empathy between teachers and students. The teachers’ view on the lower quality of their own work refers to Gill’s (2009) critique of the ‘audit culture’, whereby everything has to be ‘auditable’ and calculable in terms of quantity. According to Sabelis (2007), the failure of the application of this economic model to the work of academics is enormous, as several tasks that are necessary for carrying out activities (e.g. advising students, grading papers and course preparation) are not computed. In a study among university scholars in the Netherlands, she observes how efficiency-seeking practices result in a ‘degradation of quality time spent teaching and a reduction of time available for research’ (Sabelis, 2007: 266).

Problems in the work–life interface among scholars are often related to the perception of professional debt. Amy, for example, commented on colleagues who chose to retire because they were always owing something (page 8). However, debt also refers to those who remain at work. Several interviewees associated overwork with the habit of working at home at night and at weekends. Total commitment to academic work was observed by many of the interviewees, while others clearly distinguished between work and family life, as also observed by Ylijoki (2013). The invasion of the home space by work, which affects the time spent in personal and family life, corresponds to what Cannizzo and Olbaldiston (2016) classify as a porous equilibrium between life and work. Thus, the guilt associated with lack of time also manifests in relation to the family and to the teachers themselves, including the self-care. This can be observed in the discourse that work carried out at home occurs at the expense of sleep or that overwork leads to a lack of time for health.

The devaluation of experience, another effect of social acceleration, expresses itself in the direct sequence of the graduate–Master–PhD-researcher/teacher that is expected today. In teachers’ opinion, this clearly translates into haste and pressure on the researcher’s training at the detriment of greater experience. Teachers express the strangeness in relation to inexperienced newcomers who, in their view, are not sufficiently qualified to develop innovation research. This strangeness adds to the aforementioned issues (having too many work duties, time pressure and the hamster-wheel effect), leading them to doubt whether the current pace of the university is compatible with what they view as good science and education.

The feeling of ‘running uphill just to stay in place’, as exemplified in accounts that professors have to ‘increasingly meet endless goals’ (Angelina, page 7) or ‘we never felt that the mission was accomplished’ (Amy, page 8), is associated with the ‘hamster-wheel effect’. This expression, used by Rosa (2014), refers to ‘a monotonous, repetitive, unfulfilling activity, especially one in which no progress is achieved’ (WordSense EU Dictionary, 2018). Rosa (2014) argues that pathological reactions to stress are not a consequence of work overload or running fast, ¹ but rather the result of two factors. One is the lack of resonance with interlocutors at work (colleagues, clients or patients) and with the purposes of work, including a lack of recognition at work. The second factor is that running fast or working hard becomes a problem if these actions are not purposeful. Thus, burnout ‘becomes a likely (albeit involuntary) “exit option” if our efforts and achievements are never met with gratification, security, recognition and rest, but with the immediate sense of progressive devaluation’ (Rosa, 2014: 59). The image of the university professor as a dog chasing after a sausage it can never reach seems to transform professors’ efforts into something vain and unrecognized (Amy, page 8). Emma (page 6) describes the non-recognition of effort: ‘This “number” issue [of publications] is so distressing that our dedication to the research is not really taken into account.’ In this sense, the manifestations of pathological reactions can be seen as a lack of identification with how people work in academia today. This feeling refers to a failure in resonance relations.

to the tools and instruments we work with, to the goals and purposes of our work. Thus, it is not chance that many who suffer from burnout do report a lack of resonance in the form of a lack of gratification and recognition: their efforts went more or less unnoticed and, in any case, unacknowledged. (Rosa, 2014: 58)

Both the devaluation of experience and the non-recognition of efforts, which are viewed as characteristics of academic work today, contribute to the lack of identification with work and the workplace. This lack of identification was observed in academics’ accounts through two types of frustrations that manifest themselves in teachers’ professional trajectory in research. The first one refers to professionals who prioritized recognition as productive researchers. However, they conclude that their contribution to the field of knowledge leaves something to be desired with regard to originality. The second corresponds to teachers who, in their evaluation, sought to be bold about innovation but now ‘play for the fans’. That is, they submit to the ‘rules of the game’, which value production to the detriment of innovation. Although they are two very different views, that is to say, a pragmatic view and an idealistic one, frustration seems inevitable in both: the teacher feels frustrated either because she/he is recognized as productive but is not capable of innovating or because he/she seeks to innovate but does not produce enough to be recognized as productive. In sum, regarding research activities in current academia, teachers perceive that creativity is compromised by changes and by the stress that affects the day-to-day lives of this group of workers who persist in their profession, often being frustrated their ‘expectation of doing science’. In this respect, the concept of being a scientist remains latent, the urgency of submission to rules that seems to coerce everyone as a condition for remaining ‘in the game’ being superimposed.

In addition to the increasing number of tasks, there is still ‘competition’ between activities. Thus, the prioritization of academic production (seen as the publication of articles) to the detriment of functions directly linked to teaching is seen as another consequence of the maximization of production that prevails in universities. In the context of these issues, the notion that ‘the market will regulate’ reflects a non-commitment to educational activities, which are delegated to an abstract agent, in this case, the market.

The illustration of social acceleration effects on academic work shows everyday situations in which teachers are amazed at the way work is currently done. In their view, the essential features of their work (creativity, commitment to teaching and knowledge production) are continuously challenged. They attribute those challenges to the emphasis on the number of published articles in accordance with an institutional process that, in their view, directs their profession away from what they conceive it to be. Commenting on the lack of appropriation and identification with work as a consequence of social acceleration, Rosa (2014: 56) states that ‘in the end, people lose their intimate knowledge of their workplace and working conditions’.

Therefore, an important contribution of the lens of social acceleration in analysing the examined issue is that the very ethos of the profession is at stake in academics’ discourses. Their difficulties seem to be derived not from overwork but from a conflict of moral values. Universities are institutions that once focused on the public interest and the free exchange of ideas (Lynch, 2006). Their current emphasis on efficiency and productivity characteristics, derived from the entrepreneurial culture, tends to produce ‘commercially-oriented professionals’ (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 52), which conflicts with academics’ view of their role as scientists and teachers. This conflict, which seems to be the constitutive force of the discourses on what it is like to work as an academic today, deserves deepening in the field of higher education.

Final remarks ²

The professors observed all of the harmful effects of social acceleration described by Rosa (2014), from demands that are impossible to meet to the decision to retire. Vostal (2016) proposed different degrees of difficulty in relation to acceleration among academics – including juggled, wrestled or resented acceleration – all of which were observed in the qualitative material. None of the interviewees dealt with acceleration in a positive light. The interviewees associated several manifestations of physical and emotional pathologies with work acceleration features. These specific difficulties will be examined elsewhere.

The conflict between teachers’ views of their work and their professional expectations seems to generate a conflict of values such that they seem not to recognize academics as good teachers, dedicated supervisors or innovative researchers. In summary, they experience their work demands as time challenges that can threaten their identification with what they conceive as their profession.

The findings should be regarded in the context of the Brazilian university reform process that took place in the 1990s. The changes introduced encompassed a greater diversification of tasks and greater intensification of work, thus stimulating the emergence of new assignments, especially in relation to management activities (Bosi, 2009) and pressure to reach very high productivity goals (Borsoi, 2012; Borsoi and Pereira, 2013; Santos et al., 2016). Along the same line of thought as Davies and Petersen (2005), we could say that the accelerated university implies the transformation of universities and academics into entrepreneurs in search of production. This compromises the role of higher education in the production and transmission of knowledge.