The Times, They Have A-Changed

Academia is no longer as fun or rewarding as it once was - at least for me. 

Now, I am very well aware that my view of academia might be more, as the kids say, a me-thing than an it-thing. I suppose you could argue that after a certain number of decades, everyone has nostalgia for the way things were and is convinced the system is going to the dogs. I’m fully open to the possibility that some of my feelings are just sentimentality for what was, and a certain kind of arrogance that amounts to thinking that what existed when you were young is better than what exists now. 

To take an example from a different domain, I suspect all of us know people who assert that there’s no more good music, and who claim that the last good decade for music was — surprise! — the decade when they were in their teens and early twenties. This idea strikes me as completely implausible, even at some basic biological level - like why would humans suddenly lose their ability to make good art? Instead, what I suspect is going on is that, as you get older, it takes effort to keep up with new musical trends and not to retreat to the comfort of the songs you used to love and that you associate with happy (or perhaps sometimes even sad) memories. I have to work to fight this tendency, but fortunately, I get a lot of help from John, who pretty much only listens to new music. For example, we’ll put on a Spotify playlist of new indie tunes or tune into the NPR New Music Friday Podcast and he’ll know about 75% of the musicians. It’s very impressive. 

Turning back to academia, I’m sure that when I first started and I was excited and enchanted and not yet cynical, many of the faculty who were the age I am now thought everything was going to hell in a handbasket and were relieved they’d be getting out soon.

At the same time, when I talk to my younger colleagues, it becomes very clear that they’re struggling too. Even more striking is how few of our PhD students seem to want to go into academia. Interestingly, the drawback they mention most often is all the stress associated with grant-writing. Clearly they see our struggles and the lesson they learn is nope, that's not for me. But that's a topic for at least one post of its own, or maybe a series of posts. 

Returning to those of us who have been in academia for few decades, I think one of the big issues for a lot of us is that we’re dealing with major demands from the top - from administrators and our other university bosses - as well as major demands from our students, both undergraduate and grad. I’ll talk about the pressures from administration first and save the second set for a later post.

Academia used to allow you to be pretty autonomous, especially in the US. You taught your class in whatever way you thought was best, you assigned grades, you researched the topics that interested you, you even (to some extent) picked your teaching days and times. Even more importantly, self-governance was the norm: Academia was a model of the idea that workers should govern themselves, and that the best approach to management is for workers to take turns being the boss for some fixed period of time, after which they return to the rank-and-file. 

That model is eroding. Administration jobs are now so demanding that faculty have little time for teaching and research, and as a result, they tend to continue going up the administrative ladder rather than returning to their regular roles. These professional administrators lose touch with the regular struggles of faculty and start seeing themselves as conduits for mandates that come from above, which in today’s political climate can mean the university regents, or even state and federal politicians. Over the last couple of decades, these (unfunded) mandates from above have dramatically increased. Even in a system like the UC that has always been known as a model of what strong shared governance looks like, the role of organizations like the faculty senate has eroded. All this has led to a serious decline in morale among faculty. 

I don’t entirely blame the administrators. Most of the time they really are between a rock and a hard place. Let’s take the example of the idiotic required trainings so many of us are now required to take. These are “courses” prepared by professional outside firms that use video, audio, and quizzes to try to impart some knowledge to us, usually based on a mandate from the state legislature. For example, we have mandatory training on sexual harassment, cyber security, and workplace violence prevention. I just re-did the one on cyber-training, which I'd completed a bit less than a year ago. I remembered almost all the content from last year, including the weird examples and the naive way they advise using Google to find the correct URL for a company, with no acknowledgement of the way AI and advertising have contaminated search results. All this wouldn’t be so bad if we’d had any input at all into the design of the trainings or if there was any attempt to assess whether they changed behavior or performance in any meaningful way. In the end, we all understand that these trainings are classic CYA (Cover Your Ass) tools: The goal is just to stay out of the legislature’s crosshairs by placing yet another demand on faculty time, with no consent, negotiation, or discussion. 

I think these changes for the worse have made academia less enjoyable and more frustrating.  I wonder whether the key thing is change - that because senior faculty know what it was like before, they find this new approach almost intolerable. Maybe if you came into it not having known a different model you just deal with it. And let’s face it: We academics like to complain. Indeed, here’s me totally indulging that tendency, even though I know that compared to 90% of jobs out there, it’s a pretty nice way to make a living.