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[From Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change, The MIT Press, 2002. Note: Footnotes have been omitted.]
In public and in private, Bob Silbey and John Hansman, co-chairs of the task force, repeatedly stated the conclusion of the task force that the scarcest resource at MIT is not money, not even space, but time. "We used to be an exciting place," one member of the task force lamented, "Now we're just busy." The same thought was often expressed in Reengineering circles, whether in speech or on stickies. Everyone at MIT talks about the time crunch. When a group of faculty members pressed President Vest to put money back in the budget to reopen the Faculty Club, he wondered out loud, "If we find the money, will anyone have the time to use it?"
Thomas Hughes has often said that we express our values, both good and bad, in our technology and architecture. The same is true of our calendars, the scaffolding of our days. Each person at MIT, from top to bottom, is engaged in a constant temporal cost-benefit analysis in which complicated and ultimately incommensurate values are weighed and sorted to reach a precarious personal compromise. Faculty members weigh civic duties against exercise, family time against work time, committee service against research work, local community against extended community. For students, the analysis weighs time investment in a technical class against investment in a humanities class, or both against some form of student-centered recreation. The "felicific calculus" has invaded everyday life far beyond decisions we think of as market-based ones.
Like people elsewhere who lead similar lives, MIT people depend on clever ways to appropriate time – snatching moments to chat in the hallways or rest rooms, reading email while they chat on the phone, reading hard-copy mail in committee meetings, always multitasking and shoehorning. They use an array of technological fixes, ranging from the Palm Pilot to the Web-based "student stress minimizer" that links a student's registration with class syllabi in an attempt to smooth out the workload over the semester. The students are the real masters of time management. They combine and juggle requirements, figure out how to sequence work on assignments, and sign up for a large number of classes and then drop them at the last possible moment if the combined workload becomes too heavy.
In most cases, students do all this time management in a candid and straightforward way. Unfortunately, in other cases, time scarcity at MIT – like any other shortage – causes dissension and resentment. For example, the student stress minimizer depends on the cooperation of faculty members, who have to be willing to shift homework assignments, paper deadlines, or quiz dates forward or backward by a few days to smooth the student workload. Some faculty members would be willing to do this, but by no means all. As the report of the Student Advisory Group of the task force explained, while students often feel that faculty members should spend more time in personal interactions with students, faculty members often feel that students spend too much time on their own time-wasting activities (each faculty member has his or her favorite culprits: parties, computer games, athletics, . . .).
Furthermore, faculty members blame one another for taking up a disproportionate amount of the student's time budget. Nearly all curricular discussions boil down to competition for the student's time. Because faculty members are not able to agree on priorities, they all throw their requirements onto the heap, and the result is the curricular logjam. Scientists are sure the major requirements of the engineering departments are the main source of curricular overload. Engineers are sure the heavy General Institute Requirements (including the new biology requirement) are the problem. Humanists blame both science and engineering for heaping so many problem sets on the students that they doze through discussions and dash off papers at the last minute. The MIT curriculum is an educational commons that has been severely overgrazed, the result being exhaustion not of land but of students.
This situation worries everyone, because it leads to a sort of Gresham's Law that bad time drives out good. MIT's lifeblood of creative work, for faculty members and students alike, depends on having two different types of high-quality time: time for intellectual grazing, when random and apparently disconnected ideas are brought together in new ways, and time for prolonged and intensive work on ideas and projects. Time that is cut up by multiple demands, or cut across by multi-tasking and incomplete attention, is generally less productive. Weed time seems to keep spreading, driving out the better varieties.
On the task force, we understood that we were describing the problem, not really solving it. Our report contends that increased time commitment to community is essential for MIT's educational leadership, but provides no convincing mechanism for providing that time. We did ask the Institute to "recognize" student and faculty participation in community activities in the form of notations on student transcripts, or to have community participation considered a part of a faculty member's teaching record in tenure, promotion, and performance reviews. These are weak recommendations compared to the dominant reward structure, which is based on teaching as judged by the department and on research performance as judged by the extended scholarly community. After the task force's report, as before, community time remains marginal pro bono work, undertaken by a limited pool of dedicated faculty "good citizens" attracted by a hard-to-define set of rewards, including the hope of "making a difference." That is why the task force report ends with a call for a deep "cultural shift." If you feel it is well-nigh hopeless to change socioeconomic structures, you can always call for cultural revolution.
Two years to write a report! Governance, whether of MIT or of our society more generally, depends on investing time in decision making. Here it is difficult to achieve significant gains in productivity. Gathering relevant information and reflecting on it are activities that cannot be greatly compressed. Accordingly, institutions and individuals often do an informal cost-benefit analysis and figure that the consequences of making a less-informed decision will cost less than spending much more time to arrive at a well-informed one. This is the paradox of "the rationale of growing irrationality," by which quality of decisions declines because the processes of argumentation, negotiation, reflection, discussion, compromise, adjustment, and response are so woefully inefficient.
But there is no other way to compose a common world. In a reflexive world, time is as reflexive as anything else. How we invest in time shapes and reinforces our future investment. When time and space are in short supply, community life suffers and shortages of time and space become even greater. There is an old saying that it takes money to make money. Similarly, it takes power to produce power, and it takes civic time to make civic time.
Provost Bob Brown once commented that "community has a cost: it's time." The only way to have community time taken seriously is to pay the cost. But how does an institution do this, especially when the people there are so tied up in networks of achievement that extend beyond the institution and over which it has no control? At least in theory, the space crunch can be relieved by spending huge amounts of money. There is no obvious financial solution to the time crunch, however.
Time scarcity is psychologically much more complex than space scarcity. Space is perceived as material and external. It is someone else's problem: if it is not provided, you can get angry and frustrated, but you do not typically blame yourself. Time is different. Time is you. When you are short of time, you scrutinize your priorities, then run through a private cost-benefit analysis, then make some accommodation between your own desires and your obligations. Time management is so stressful because this internal process involves such an array of subconscious desires and guilts.
The most serious obstacle to reducing the time crunch at MIT is the conviction of so many people there that it is inevitable because its sources are internal, not external. We have constructed a silicon cage of internalized discipline. In the task force's many discussions about the time shortage, over and over again faculty members (and students too) said that they drove themselves relentlessly, and then even if they were somehow given more time they would continue to drive themselves. In our truly honest moments, some of us admitted that our lack of attention to "community" was due less to a lack of time than to other priorities. We really like to teach, learn, and do research. Without a "cultural shift," the internalized drive toward individual priorities was not likely to change, and no one could see where that shift might come from. Even if MIT were to figure out how to pay the cost of buying time for "community," would the offer be accepted?
MIT staff have the same tendency to internalize the problem of time scarcity. At one all-day Reengineering retreat, the facilitators concluded by asking people what one change in the reengineering process would be most helpful. As usual, stickies were passed around for people to write on and post on the walls. Most of them ended up bearing a single word: TIME. Earlier in the day, we had engaged in a discussion about time scarcity, which had led the participants to list possible remedies: stress-reduction techniques, cell phones, massages, and, of course, more lists. I commented that we had identified a collective problem, which might conceivably have collective solutions. So far all the suggestions were individualistic in nature: should we not try to think of common remedies? There was silence, some nodding of heads, and then the discussion reverted to individual responses for "coping with stress."
Most people at MIT do not think of these feelings and experiences as political issues. Staff, faculty members, and students continue to internalize and individualize the problem of time scarcity. In fact they often resist efforts to address it by a sort of defiant addiction argument: "That's the way we are at MIT. We love what we do and whatever you do, you can't stop us from working hard." When Paul Gray was installed as MIT president in 1980, in his inaugural address he famously called upon the MIT community to take steps to reduce its deleterious "pace and pressure." When he retired ten years later, he just as famously remarked: "I didn't lay a glove on it." These two incidents are regularly recounted in discussions of the time crunch to demonstrate its intractability. This is MIT. We will always be stressed. Just try to stop us.
I respond, quoting Karl Marx: "Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself." It takes a combination of institutional parochialism and macho posturing to deny a connection between the time crunch at MIT and larger trends of time compression everywhere apparent in the economy. We have always prided ourselves on long hours and hard work, but these are no longer unique. Everywhere today you hear the same laments about lack of time for enjoying life, family, and community.
One major economic driver of the time crunch is the much larger trend toward defining work as an accumulation of roles rather than as a series of tasks. Tasks can be completed; open-ended role playing is never done. This redefinition of work is evident in the new world of Reengineering, where workers are encouraged to see themselves as free agents, moving from one team to the next. It is evident in engineering education, where entrepreneurship rather than job holding is the new ideal. And it is evident in the continuous expansion of the faculty role at MIT, as each professor tries to manage the integrated lifeworld effects resulting from multiple demands on time: research, teaching, private life, and now the MIT community. Occasionally the task force talked about trying to get a grip on this sprawl by writing a faculty job description, but we would have been swimming against the current in a world where employment in information-based work is defined less and less by "jobs" and more and more by ability to adapt, expand, shift, retool.
The protean and open-ended nature of the faculty role is, for better or for worse, a portent of the way things are going generally in the world economy. Such roles offer flexibility and variety; however, as open-ended hybrids, they place ceaseless demands on individuals who are unable to distinguish the internal world from the external one and who, with mixed self-praise and self-blame, regard themselves as the source of their own busyness. MIT faculty members offer love of their work as a reason for putting up with the degradation of the common world. They are, in the words of the economist Nancy Folbre, prisoners of love.
Where have we heard this before? The other job that people do because they love it, they say, sort of, is motherhood – a priceless source of joy that, when you cost it out, carries a huge price tag for women in lost wages and opportunities. It has taken the women's movement decades to develop the conceptual tools to begin to address the "prisoner of love" argument. Self-exploitation is still exploitation, just as in Reengineering self-Taylorizing is still Taylorizing. In developing a new Politics in Latour's sense of the term (i.e., the progressive composition of a common world), what has been learned in the women's movement is crucial to success.
The appeal to faculty members to devote more time to "community" when no tangible reward is offered sounds eerily familiar to women. A faculty survey done by the MIT Planning Office in 1997, which became an important part of the "information gathering" of the task force, shows that female faculty members at MIT are more likely than their male colleagues to be asked to set aside time for the MIT community, and more likely to agree to do so. They also feel significantly more stressed in their professional lives. It is not clear from these results if women feel this way because of greater attention to family life or because of greater susceptibility to guilty feelings. It does not matter. If MIT or any other institution relies primarily on "good citizenship" to motivate people to set aside "community time," women will respond, and suffer, disproportionately.
The dilemma is that "building community," to use that favorite phrase of the task force, makes demands on the lifeworld. Each human link one tries to make, each connection, each message, each effort to reach out and touch someone, happens both in space and in time. The framework of the lifeworld will continue to degrade until it is recognized that the provision of common time and space is part of Politics. The state of lifeworld consciousness today is similar to that of feminist consciousness in the 1950s and the early 1960s, when there was diffuse angst, anger that had nowhere to go, and vague awareness of a "problem that has no name." In confronting the crisis of the lifeworld, we are just beginning to understand, again, that the personal is the political.
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