The University Council and the General Board recognized the ‘overwork culture’ in Cambridge Holly Hardman for Varsity
The Cambridge Students’ Union (SU) is lobbying for reading weeks on topics to tackle the impact on students’ mental health, following the university watchdog’s call for “wider structural reforms” to university workloads.
A motion suggested by undergraduate SU president Sarah Anderson sought to fix university procedures that affect student well-being. This included campaigning for the introduction of a reading week and setting clear boundaries for supervision planning.
The meeting took place after the 29th report of the supervisory committee, which urged “concrete actions and structural reforms” rather than “simply speaking warm words” in the university’s education overhaul.
Previously, the university council and general council recognized the “culture of overwork” in Cambridge in July 2024, and the 2022 SU referendum, where 64% of voters voted “Yes” to the question: “Do you support the introduction of a full first-year week during the Christmas season and a one-week midterm break/reading week during the Christmas and Lent season?”
Katie Clarke, SU Undergraduate Access, Participation and Education Officer said: “The reading referendum is still on the table. It is not going away, but at the moment we can only campaign for reading week because we have been given a mandate for it.”
“We ask you to extend our support because the workload crisis is urgent, but some of these suggestions can be implemented much faster than reading week,” she continued.
Earlier this year, the SU held a workload forum found that 59% of students were rarely able to complete their work satisfactorily due to the amount of work. 55% believed that the amount of work required to be completed during their course was the main cause of an unmanageable workload.
Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education Bhaskar Vira told forum participants that “boundaries need to be imposed” to improve the well-being of students.
This follows the recent publication of an article by ex-Cambridge academic David Butterfield, who planned the current state of the university. He claimed that the “mental health crisis has ushered in developments that are disrupting university life” and that changes in accessibility have “infantilized” Cambridge.
Butterfield opposed the idea of a reading week, adding: “Many students are now exempt from writing essays and are allowed to submit bullet points.”
Butterfield has had problems with Cambridge students before. After a 2020 Spectator articleButterfield was accused of “downplaying the existence of racism in the classics field and the under-representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups within British classics”.
The Audit Committee also called on the University to increase the provision of supervisions to ensure they are easily accessible to students, stating that “the University’s reputation in education is based on the strength of its small group supervision system, ( it) must be protected and defended as much as possible”.
The board claimed that the university had fallen victim to the “silo thinking” that supervision was a matter for the university, and called on the university to better facilitate the organization of supervision.
The Justice for College Supervisors campaign did threatened a surveillance boycott last Christmas. The planned boycott was suspended following a negotiated increase in supervision rates for the 2023-2024 academic year.
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