"Hypercompetitive and Resource Limited"

Anna O’Connell asked a thought-provoking question on Twitter this week. She asked whether the “hypercompetitive and resource-limited nature of academia … is a huge part of what is making culture change so difficult.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

For context, O’Connell has worked mostly in the research university sector, at the graduate level. That’s a very different setting than a community college. Here, I’d focus somewhat less on competitiveness and much more on resource limitation. But the basic issue is recognizable. I’ll address it from a community college angle, because that’s my beat.

Competition is enervating when the rules are unclear, arbitrary or obscure. In graduate school, I remember the vaguely icky feeling of competing for the good graces of senior faculty. My discipline didn’t bring much external funding -- you don’t often see labs devoted to political theory, although it’s great fun to imagine what one might look like -- so the competition was based largely on personal affinities. When you have a vaguely Scandinavian approach to life -- “low power distance,” or a sort of temperamental egalitarianism -- kissing up doesn’t come naturally. (Luckily, neither does kicking down.) I remember being struck by the irony that people who studied democracy for a living defaulted to a courtier model in their own practice, but nobody said that self-awareness is evenly distributed.

Here, the situation is somewhat different. We don’t have a publish-or-perish system for tenure, and there’s no expectation, formal or informal, that any given cohort of faculty has to fight it out with each other to stay employed. The tenure system here isn’t competitive; if Smith gets it, Jones can, too. But the faculty promotion system is intensely competitive. Moving up the ranks after tenure requires winning the votes of senior faculty on the promotion committee. There are written criteria, but they function more like minima. In a given year, there might be 30 candidates for 12 promotions; of those 30, probably 25 or so met the minima. As with any ranking determined by committee vote, there’s an element of unknowability about what will tip the balance for any given candidate. I sit in the meetings ex officio, without a vote, so I see the discussions but don’t affect the outcomes. Even in the absence of nefarious conspiracies -- I haven’t seen any evidence of any -- it’s still true that any given application in any given year is a bit of a crapshoot. That leads to stress among the candidates.

In some ways, it’s parallel to what search committees do after final interviews. You’re faced with three highly qualified candidates for one position. You don’t have the resources to hire all three, so you wind up turning down two people who met all of the criteria. I’ve actually had rejected candidates ask me afterward what they could have done differently; in some cases, the honest answer is “nothing.” Sometimes good people have the misfortune of being in strong pools.

The resource-limitation piece is ubiquitous; it’s the bane of community colleges nationally. (Among other things, resource limitations are why promotions are few.) When someone leaves, with a few exceptions, it’s far from a given that they’ll be replaced. That leads to the folks left behind picking up the slack, which can cause stress. Worse, there’s often enough money to replace some, but not all, of the folks who leave, which means that the college has to pick winners and losers. While that’s better than not hiring at all, it generates anxiety and some level of blaming when people or departments find themselves on the losing end.

A culture formed over decades of growth can struggle to handle shrinkage. When austerity becomes the new normal, and every year is just a little bit tighter than the year before, it’s easy for people to become defensive. They want to keep what they have, big picture be damned. Ironically, that very defensiveness can doom ideas or interventions that could potentially slow or reverse the decline. If you start to equate change with decline, then even positive or helpful ideas will tend to draw vitriolic attack, thereby ensuring that decline continues. The most risk-averse sometimes don’t realize that stasis is a mortal risk.

In this sector, austerity isn’t confined to one college or another. If it were, and people got sick of it, they could just go somewhere else. But for many faculty and staff who have worked their way up, there really isn’t an external market of comparable jobs. They haven’t published enough to compete for R-1 positions, and other teaching-oriented places aren’t hiring much. And even if they are, they aren’t hiring at the full-professor level. Even if folks could leave, they’d probably have to take significant pay cuts. Lacking a credible threat of exit, those who aren’t happy with the direction of things are sort of stuck. That also tends to entrench a culture.

It’s a hard dilemma to fix. Were there a hot job market for academics, folks who are unhappy could go elsewhere and either discover greener pastures or not. More hiring would bring new perspectives, reinvigorating the culture naturally. But when the vise tightens just a little bit more every single year, over time, it’s understandable that people shift to playing defense. But it’s hard to score points on defense.

For a brief moment, I was part of a place that was growing quickly. In the late '90s, during the first internet boom, DeVry was growing fast. I saw what it was like to work in a place in which the future was assumed to be brighter than the past. It brought issues of its own -- notably, a sort of institutional amnesia -- but for a while, there was an intoxicating sense of possibility. The 2001 recession put an end to that, but having seen the opposite case, I can attest that sustained austerity is a stressor of its own.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks, Anna O’Connell, for asking the question that reminded me of that. Sometimes the right question makes all the difference.