This was what a colleague wrote today in some discussion of university life:
“I think the biggest problem is that the University effectively values academics time as zero.”
My response:
IMHO, this is indeed the core problem.
This is the Executive Summary of my paper arXiv:2103.04101v1 [math.HO] on 6 March 2021:
Executive Summary. This paper is written in lockdown and can serve as a testimony in support of the apparently self-evident, but largely ignored principle:
*The most important resource for a (pure) mathematician’s research is uninterrupted time for thinking.*
University administrators and research funding bodies systematically ignore it, and the bureaucratic burden imposed by them strangulates mathematics research. A short breathing space provided by lockdown made miracles.
And, in my paper, I provide evidence, and, I think, pretty convincing (at least to mathematicians), in support of this my claim. I did some of the best work of my life because, thanks to lockdowns and retirement, I took back control of my time.
This is what mathematicians have to fight for: taking back control of our time.