When I quit my academic career and started working for a tech startup seven years ago, I initially focused on learning the technical skills that the job required. I had wrongly assumed that my biggest challenge would be my relative lack of technical knowledge. But as I soon realized, my biggest deficit was that I came from the bizarre and dysfunctional culture of academia.
Just so you know where I’m coming from, my academic career had been as a philosophy professor. After a dozen or so years as a faculty member, and a few years after receiving tenure, I quit and joined a tech startup as a software engineer.
Academia has a reputation for being petty, cutthroat, and full of jerks. Believe me, I know from years of experience that this reputation is well-deserved. Lots of people have asked me why it’s so bad in academia. In my opinion, this nasty culture is caused by a combination of the tenure system, a glut of supply in the academic job market, and an economic famine. This environment is capable of turning reasonably nice people into jerks.
For a long time, the poisonous culture of academia only affected faculty. But because of the pandemic, the factors that created this culture are now suddenly capable of destroying the university system as we know it.
Misconceptions about tenure
For those who haven’t lived in the tenure system, I’ll explain a few things about tenure and try to clear up some common misconceptions.
Tenure is pretty simple. Having tenure means that you can’t be fired without cause. In the private sector, you can find a pink slip on your desk at any moment, and your employer doesn’t need to have a reason for firing you. A tenured professor doesn’t have to worry about that. The purpose of this is to guarantee freedom of speech. Professors should be able to criticize the university or pursue research that’s unpopular, and engage in long-term projects that are risky. They should be able to teach controversial subjects. With tenure, they can do these things without fear of losing their jobs. This is a very good thing, and in my opinion, a university can’t function without it.
It’s a common misconception that tenure is a guarantee of job security. It is not. You can still be fired for cause, and you can be fired if there are financial circumstances that require layoffs. So right now, as the pandemic continues and university budgets are cut, we’ll see plenty of tenured faculty lose their jobs.
There are also loopholes that allow administrators to fire tenured faculty. At one university I worked for, an entire department can be dissolved, resulting in all the faculty — including tenured faculty — losing their jobs, even though it’s against the rules to fire an individual who is tenured in that department. I’ve seen new departments be created and staffed entirely with faculty the administration doesn’t like, with no pretense that they are real departments (e.g. no offices, classes, staff, or even a phone number). Such fake departments are created and then dissolved. All the faculty are fired in the process. That’s unusual, but sneaky little tricks like that do happen.
To be sure, tenure offers an unusual level of job security that most people can’t even dream of. But although tenure might effectively guarantee a job, it doesn’t guarantee a good job. There is absolutely no protection for your salary, teaching load, benefits, or budget. If you get on the wrong side of your colleagues or administrators, you can face salary cuts, dramatic increases to your work load, and so on. In my experience, this is very common. I’ve seen faculty get big salary cuts, or lose their entire research budget, even when that professor worked for years to obtain an external grant, simply because they crossed the wrong administrator. Some forms of retaliation can be downright petty; losing one’s office space is common for unpopular faculty.
All faculty can see their jobs degrade over time. This is not theoretical — it’s normal. For example, I was a relatively successful professor; I received tenure a year early in a department with a growing PhD program; I had a very good publication record, a low teaching and administrative load, excellent teaching evaluations, and so on. Yet, I never received a pay raise more than about half the rate of inflation. My benefits were cut multiple times, and my teaching load crept gradually upwards. By the time I quit, I was making less money in inflation-adjusted dollars than before I had tenure, and doing a lot more work for it. The trend was clearly going to continue indefinitely. Almost every faculty member I knew was in the same boat.
Powerlessness
When I’ve explained this to people who haven’t lived in this weird system, they always say, “If your job gets so bad, then just quit and get a new one.” In theory, this is possible. But in practice, it’s extraordinarily difficult. Universities are having their budgets cut all the time, and aren’t hiring enough faculty. And a university will usually try to hire a younger faculty member into an untenured position because it’s a lot cheaper, with less commitment. With departments everywhere being slashed, and more jobs being taken by adjunct (non-tenure track) faculty with criminally low salaries (often below the poverty line), it’s usually impossible to move once you have tenure.
This system creates a psychological trap. To get tenure requires spending years in graduate school, writing a dissertation, and earning a PhD. Then you have to succeed in an extremely competitive job market. Generally, it takes about six years after being hired at a university to be considered for tenure. It’s an “up or out” system, so failure to be awarded tenure means that you lose your job. So if you do succeed and are tenured, you’ve spent more than a decade after your first college degree in preparation for that moment. For most people, it’s crazy to even consider giving that up. They’re locked in.
Ironically, the tenure system is designed to empower faculty. In theory, faculty can leverage their job security to make decisions that are unpopular with the administration. Sometimes this happens. But it’s much more likely to do the opposite. With faculty unable to move to a different university, psychologically locked into their role, and vulnerable to reprisals, they have no bargaining power or leverage.
Real power in a job comes from having the ability to walk away, not from having some theoretical job security. As an employee in the private sector, if my manager does something to make my job unpleasant, or tries to do something petty just to irritate me, I have options. Sure, I’ll try to resolve the issue in a cooperative and positive way, but in the background, I’m holding a trump card: I can quit. Employers have a weaker bargaining position than employees whose skills are in demand. The cost to an employee of getting a new job is often lower than the cost to an employer of replacing someone who quits.
Since leaving academia, I’ve been on both sides of this power dynamic. As an employee, I can make reasonable requests for professional development opportunities, organizational changes, and so on. Although I might not always get what I want, I will always be taken seriously. As a manager, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that the people who report to me have good reasons for staying with the company. I have to, because I know that they could leave at any time and get another good job right away. Only a tiny number of academics have the bargaining power of even a low-level employee in the private sector whose skills are in demand.
The war of all against all
Another reason, which I think is just as important, for why the culture of academia is so bad is how resources are allocated. Universities are now in a state of famine. The budget cuts that are coming as a result of the pandemic are going to be far worse than is generally known, because universities are deliberately delaying announcements of the worst cuts for fear that it will decrease enrollment. And this is happening after years of slow and steady budget cuts that were bad enough already.
The budget famine creates an environment in which everyone is out for themselves. Here’s a very common example. In my department, the structure of faculty raises created a poisonous environment. The dean would allocate a certain percentage of the total salaries in the department for raises. Typically, this was 2% or less. The money was put into a pool and divided up each year among the faculty for salary adjustments. There were some guidelines about how that money was divided. For example, each faculty member would get some credit for each publication of theirs that was accepted that year. Teaching evaluations were counted, too; so were administrative assignments.
So when I would hear that a colleague has had a very productive year and published several articles or books, I was not happy about it at all. That’s less money for me. Similarly, it’s in my financial self-interest for my colleagues to do a poor job teaching because if their teaching evaluations are worse than mine, this is helpful to me. And because the total pool is less than the rate of inflation, the only way anyone can keep up with inflation is to take a disproportionate share of that money.
In a time of economic famine, this dynamic plays out constantly. Simply treading water requires taking resources away from others. It happens at the individual level, the department level, and all the way up through the university system.
Jerks
Take an ambitious person who has invested a decade or more of their professional life, then render that person powerless. Lock them into a job that gets worse each year, and gradually take away their livelihood. Then pit these people against each other for scarce resources, and the results are unsurprising. You get a bunch of jerks.
“Oh, quit whining!”
I’m sure a lot of people will find this post irritating. We’re in a world now where huge numbers of people have lost their jobs and are suffering. Complaining on behalf of tenured faculty may be seen as being in poor taste. I can hear people say, “Quit whining, you self-entitled jerk!”.
Fair enough. But let me explain why I think that now is the time to think about the dysfunctional dynamic of the university system in the United States.
These dynamics have been in play since the 1970s. Faculty who have been paying attention and aren’t in denial have seen the trend for a very long time. But it’s been possible to pretend the problem doesn’t exist because the changes has been very gradual. However, if the trend has been gradually downhill for the past few decades, it’s now gone straight off a cliff. The budget cuts and enrollment drops that are now happening as a result of the pandemic have compressed the next ten years of steady pain into a single convulsion.
Faculty jobs in universities are going to change to the point of being unrecognizable. Tenure is largely going to be a thing of the past, and in the rare instances where faculty still can receive tenure, it won’t be worth having. Universities are using the pandemic to accelerate their online learning. Those online course offerings will stay on the books forever. Online courses do not require the same number of faculty, and the faculty do not have to be located in any particular place. So there will be no need for traditional departments of faculty to support students. Because faculty can be recruited to teach online from anywhere on short notice, the new “departments” will be able to shrink and grow to match demand, resulting in the loss of any semblance of job security for faculty. My message to my former colleagues is this: “You are now the most highly educated members of the gig economy.”
If this picture no longer looks like a university, that’s because the changes that are underway will require a complete reimagining of higher education. The factors that created the poisonous culture of academia in the first place have been greatly amplified to the point of destroying the university system as we know it.
