When possible several of our friends and their families gather at our local park on Friday nights for dinner. This affords the opportunity to let the kids run wild after a week at school and a chance to talk to our fellow parents over a Solo® cup of wine. Last week as I was watching my youngest and his friend examine the cause-and-effect relationship that sticks and people have I was chatting with a fellow parent. We were talking about our plans (or lack-there-of) for the Labor Day weekend. My friend indicated that rather than go on a trip they were going to take the whole of this week off and instead have a “Workcation”. There was just too much to do and the normal work week was too full of meetings to allow certain essential tasks to get done. So, this friend was opting to use precious vacation time instead to hide-out at a local establishment and finish several papers that were close to submission but needed that final time and attention.

Now, my friend is a successful researcher at a major university here in California. This person is funded, publishes and is respected by their peers – the dream of most early Ph.D. students. But the reality is that the drumbeat of publications, committee meetings, and other faculty obligations only gets louder and more distracting as one climbs the ladder. And so the only escape from the din of the day-to-day is to actually stay home for a week to do their job. What value are we placing on people’s time? What are all these committee’s functions? Have University’s become so unwieldy that everyone must spend so much time trying to steer them in the “right-direction”? Aren’t the exorbitant indirect contributions of research grants supposed to support the administration of the University so that the Researchers can, now what’s the phrase I am looking for……oh, yeah – do research?