The authors of a recent article featured in Times Higher Education, “Is ‘academic citizenship’ under strain?”, argue persuasively that changes in policy and the funding environment are pushing academics to focus more and more on the primary tasks of teaching and research, at the expense of a large class of less widely known activities that are nonetheless essential to the academic enterprise. The points they make will resonate with any academic who has tried to find the time to make significant real-world contributions in today’s metric-focused environment.