An interesting day yesterday, watching the strike get underway on media and social media. I spent most of the day out of the city, volunteering with the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust doing streamflow monitoring on sites that I set up as part of the science input to their Working with Water project (part of the Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership) in the Upper Don catchment.

As I was trudging along the path from the road to our level gauge on a small stream above Langsett Reservoir, flicking raindrops off my hood, I was trying to decide whether it felt different to be doing this for free rather than for work. The short answer – no. The obvious follow-up – why not?

Clearly, I was wearing the exact same clothes, using the exact same kit, following the exact same routine as I would if I was doing this as work under my consultancy contract. One constantly-amazing aspect of my job as a physical geography academic is the opportunities it gives me to spend time in the field, both for research and teaching. Moreover, the relative flexibility and autonomy to create those opportunities both within and outside of the timetable. These are among the very best bits of a job that, overall, I love to bits, and they are very good for mental health.

But is there a problem here? In common with other professions, most academics I know see their work as a vocation and an identity. We would, I suspect, be doing, reading and thinking much the same things regardless of whether we are being paid or not. There are, of course certain aspects of academic life which are identifiably ‘the job’ – the admin, the meetings, the teaching, the tutorials, and so on – but in many areas the boundaries between these and our autonomous intellectual lives are blurred to the extent that when I’m reading a paper on the geochemistry of tholeiitic basalts from the Reykjanes peninsula in bed at eleven at night it is impossible to clearly define whether it is certifiable teaching prep or just, well, certifiable. Either way, to me, it counts as fun.

Hence, the social media threads in which academics outdo each other with claims to work 100 hours a week. I’m not having a go here – many of us do work much longer than our contracted hours, both in the office and then when we get home. And on trains, in cars, on planes, in airports, hotel rooms, on ferries, in cafes and on park benches, up mountains, on beaches. Between your brain, your phone and a laptop, work can follow you anywhere. The crucial considerations here are expectations, and control. Immersing yourself in a subject is one of the most pleasurable pursuits I know, until you realise you can’t come up for air. Or worse, that someone expects you to stay under until you come up with something worth their while.

Worse still, that as well as finding your own way back to the surface, you are responsible for the safety and success of, literally, hundreds of completely inexperienced divers most of whom have not read any of the manuals and some of whom have very little idea of where they are or how they got there.

I’ll stop the analogy before I mangle it completely, but this is the crux of what is emerging as a mental health crisis in the university sector. What was – and is still espoused as – ‘academic freedom’ to explore, discourse on and propagate a discipline from a unique point of experience and expertise is being replaced by a poorly defined, vaguely punitive delegation of responsibility to ‘perform’; not just to exist as an academic, not just to be the best that you can be, but to pursue someone else’s conception of ‘excellence’.

What has any of this to do with what we’re striking for? For me, this is at the heart of the issues over workload intensification, job insecurity and inequality at both local and national levels. It is not just about the detail of AWPs – whether we get 2.5 or 3 minutes extra per student per assessment, or whatever – although that is a crucial manifestation of another issue I want to pick up on later this week. The point is that in the marketisation of both research and teaching in Higher Education, universities at large have neglected the well-being of the very assets they rely on to deliver both – their staff.

If you’ve been watching ‘His Dark Materials’ on the BBC recently, you’ll be familiar with the concept of ‘scholastic sanctuary’. In Lyra’s world, it has a very real legal and constitutional definition, but in the real world it underpins the concept of the academy too, as a refuge and as a crucible for open, broad and deep thinking; as an institution which exists, charitably, to promote and preserve learning as an act and as an objective. Academic staff, and others committed to the university sector in specialist technical and professional roles, are being told that scholastic sanctuary is dead, an out-of-date concept for a bygone age, unfit for the challenges of the 21st century.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, that cuts deep into the ideal of academic freedom, into the love of a subject, and of teaching it, simply because of what it is. I believe that is the deep trauma that underpins much of the mental health crisis in academia. And I believe that if university management are willing to destroy academic freedom, to remove scholastic sanctuary, then it is the very least of their responsibility to replace it with something as valuable and as nourishing; to understand the scale of the trauma and to protect, and support, and inspire their people through the change.

This is something universities have manifestly failed to do. Whose fault that is, is difficult to define and probably a reflection of much larger political forces as well as failings of policy, practice and empathy within the sector. As I said yesterday, the strike is about detail – important, but limited symptoms of something much more complex. Whether it is a battle in an existential war, or a painful step on a necessary journey, is not yet clear.