Take back control

This was what a coleague 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] 6 Mar 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 indeed provide evidence, 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.