I keep wondering about the academic version of “quiet quitting” that is now such a topic of interest in higher education journalism and in academic social media.
There’s a certain amount of responsive activity from the usual suspects running workshops and management seminars for mid-ranking administrators and department chairs about how to handle the “great disengagement”, but for the most part, university and college leaders seem to simply be ignoring the whole issue except for the occasional improvident outburst of irritation or scolding.
I can’t decide if that’s because many leaders simply don’t know how the faculty and staff are feeling or if they think it will all blow over when we return to some kind of pre-pandemic normal.
Or, I suspect, many leaders simply don’t care because they actually don’t think there’s a meaningful difference between a disengaged and demoralized faculty and an engaged and energized one in terms that matter to the institutional bottom line. After all, at institutions with high levels of contingency, administrative leaders plainly haven’t cared much that most of the teaching was being done by poorly paid faculty who had little trust in the security of their positions and could offer no promise of continuity in advising or mentorship to students.
Not caring much about demoralization doesn’t seem restricted to those kinds of universities and colleges, however—right now, it seems as characteristic of the Ivy League as it does of a revenue-starved regional public university where 80% of the instruction is done by adjuncts. This is the flip side of the admitted difficulties we all have in all types of institutions with assessing faculty performance. We’re familiar with how existing efforts to do so are tied to dysfunctional accreditation processes and are riddled with bias effects and inequities, but the lack of a meaningful way for students and leaders to gauge when they’re getting teaching and institutional work that is unmistakably worse than the norms of ten or twenty years ago means that only a leader with a deep sense of institutional history and culture and a consistently maintained connection to the working life of faculty will have any inkling of what’s happening on the ground. Which is a very small, perhaps non-existent, subset of contemporary leaders.
Students have no hope really of grasping what they’re possibly missing out on, especially if that kind of demoralization is happening everywhere all at once. The sort-of end-of-pandemic feeling is such a relief for most of them that they can hardly be expected to complain that maybe everything isn’t quite as it was described in the brochures and website.
At a much larger scale, workplace morale matters most in the minds of employers and managers when it results in valued employees leaving and in recruitment difficulties because the word has gotten out. It ought to matter more even in the narrow worldview of the people in charge in the sense that it affects motivation and therefore the quality of what workers do, but that’s our historical moment in a nutshell: nobody really cares much about quality in that sense unless they’re involved in a profoundly bespoke line of work where they’re close to their customers and the customers have high expectations and a lot of knowledge about the product. Of course it should matter beyond that in a moral sense: a happier world is a better world. But when you’re sitting in the room where it matters, making the real decisions, these are the sentiments that are fit only for annual reports and fake-sentimental motivational speeches. Leaders and managers who want to genuinely look after the satisfaction and welfare of everyone in their organization as a value in and of itself are as rare as unicorns.
So in this respect, any academic leader who calculates that demoralized faculty and staff really don’t matter is arguably doing some pretty shrewd thinking, in part due to the unusual character of the labor market they’re in. Mid-ranking staff can off-board fairly easily but there’s generally more where they came from. Moreover, in only a precious few cases do you absolutely have to have a highly competent person from the get-go in a mid-ranking administrative post—there is usually room to work around a new hire who is fucking up, and even more room if that new hire is otherwise a compliant backer of the powers-that-be. Even when there isn’t that room a lot of universities and colleges will just learn to live with someone who is doing a lot of damage in a mission-critical, highly visible role. So almost nobody in a staff position has the leverage to say “if things don’t get better around here, I’m gone” and hope to be heard.
Past a certain critical point in their career, faculty are generally going to stay put, and if they don’t, there’s also always more where they came from save in a handful of (admittedly important for the bottom line) fields. So the same thing applies: the faculty person who says, “The status quo is unacceptable,” is generally going to get little more than an invitation to look for another position if that’s the way they feel.
The people who do leave generally have every reason not to say anything public about why they’re leaving, especially if they’re remaining in academia. (This is particularly true for staff who are hoping to move up within a particular area of administrative specialization.) Even if there is some kind of exit interview, that information remains privileged and there are always ways for senior leadership to disavow or explain away dissatisfactions voiced in such a process.
The professional values that most faculty live by also have a long time to wither away before the difference between how they were and how they are will become really palpable and visible. It’s the same thing with a lot of professions. I’ve been watching one of the regional health systems near Swarthmore get completely burned to the ground by its current for-profit owners and you can feel how demoralized the remaining staff and medical professionals are as a result, but most of them just can’t bring themselves to harden their hearts and reduce their professional energy to a level that matches the ill-will and incompetence of the ownership. The owners don’t care if the patients go elsewhere and they bleed employees because they’re mostly looking to sell off the physical assets of the system: it’s a pump-and-dump.
There may be pump-and-dump operators in academia—it is what the worst ed-tech sharks circling around have been calling for continuously since the 1990s—but mostly I think there are people content to preside over decline and diminishment, knowing that no one will really see it until it is so pronounced that nothing can be done about the situation anyway, often after those people have left the scene.
Well, not “no one”. The people who’ve been somewhere long enough to know the difference between disengagement and commitment can see it. Which is itself fuel for an accelerating feedback loop of demoralization—the more you know what was and should still be, the more you feel simultaneously powerless and anguished about where things seem to be going.