Professionalization Versus Community
Academia as a workplace that time is catching up to
Like essentially everybody else in higher education, Union is facing some significant challenges at the moment, which has inspired a lot of discussion and reflection. Because I am Of A Certain Age and move in those circles, a lot of this has had a kind of retrospective character, about how things used to be better in the past.
One particular lament that comes up a lot is that we’ve lost a “sense of community.” This means a bunch of different things, among others that we have fewer purely social gatherings than we used to, but much of it revolves around the way that we have instituted formal procedures around a lot of things that used to be done on an ad hoc basis. And the ad hoc method just feels… friendlier. You call up a person, describe your problem, and they fix it for you, without you having to worry about whether you picked the right item category from the drop-down menu on some weirdly baroque web form.
I have a lot of sympathy for this, because it really was a pleasant way to operate. When I first started, our departmental administrative assistant had been around for ages and knew everyone, which was an amazing resource for Getting Things Done. For a long time, my go-to solution to ITS problems was to flag down a friend who worked there (and played basketball in our lunchtime game) and say “I have this issue, who is the right person to fix it?” and then contact that person directly. It was great. Now it feels like everything is work orders and help tickets and impersonal formal procedures.
Closely related to this is the fact that we’ve had a ton of turnover in the staff over the last quarter-century. People who were in key roles for multiple decades have retired and been replaced with new faces, and in some cases those new faces have turned over multiple times. We need formal systems and procedures because the people who will be fixing this week’s problem are different people than the ones who fixed last month’s problem, let alone the ones who figured out that weird thing with the wi-fi five years ago. Part of what created that sense of community was a high degree of continuity— the same people in the same jobs year after year— and that’s been lost.
The churn of personnel in some of these departments that were previously incredibly stable has led to a lot of “What’s wrong over there?” speculation about managers and administrators, but I think that’s a bit of a mistake. Which is not to say that I approve of the leadership of every office on campus— I absolutely have a list of people I would like to see turfed out and replaced— just that I think general attitudes toward work and careers have changed in ways that academics haven’t fully caught up to.
Academia is, on the faculty side especially, a bit of a land that time forgot. Most tenure-track faculty spend the vast majority of their careers in one place— they get hired, pass their tenure review, and then work for twenty or thirty years before retiring. A handful of star researchers will jump to other institutions, and some others will switch over to the administrative track, where it’s accepted that you have to change schools to climb the ladder, but most professors put down roots and stay right where they are.
This was a more common career model for lots of businesses several decades ago, but it’s really not how things work outside of academia any more, and some of the change we’ve seen is just time remembering where it left us. Younger people take for granted that they’ll change jobs several times, and that moving up quickly requires changing jobs. They’re less likely to spend a decade in a bottom-of-the-org-chart job waiting for a chance to move up to the next level, and more likely to jump to a next-level-up job with a different employer. In this world, staffing churn isn’t necessarily a sign of bad management; it can even be a sign of a good operation, in that the people they hire into low-level jobs are being well prepared to move up by moving on.
This turnover cuts against the sense of community, though, both through the constant changing of people and also through a shift in attitude. Somebody who’s planning to be in a place for thirty or forty years is more likely to see their job as a part of a larger mission, which leads to a bit more bespoke service, as it were. A person in a support office who’s been there for ten years and plans to be there for another twenty is more likely to go beyond the formal procedures to fix problems in ways that make and sustain long-term relationships. That sort of thing can’t be relied on in a system with more job turnover, which is why you get more clearly and narrowly defined roles, and more formal procedures for doing things. Everything becomes more professional, more corporate, and less communal1.
And that definitely feels worse in a lot of respects. But, on the other hand, while the less formal system had better vibes in many cases, it was not without its problems.
I found the previous system relatively congenial because I’m a reasonably outgoing person, and made a lot of connections with people outside of formal work contexts, which then paid off in terms of work stuff. When a problem came up, I was calling someone I played hoops with, or chatted with at lunch, or whatever, and as a result they were more likely to take my call and act on it. Somebody less social than me wouldn’t have those advantages, and would accordingly have a harder time getting what they needed from those same people.
The kinds of things I was generally looking for were pretty benign— jumping a few spots in the tech support queue—but this kind of thing can absolutely turn much darker. In the distant past, we’ve had people in important positions who were real wheeler-dealers, and would dole out favors to their friends while slow-walking requests from their enemies. This is very much Not Good, and to the extent that more formal procedures restrain it, they’re a good thing.
The other major negative issue is that the sense of mission that comes from continuity can easily tip toward exploitation. People who feel connected to a community will sometimes step up to do extra work without compensation, in ways that can cover over deeper systematic deficiencies. This unquestionably makes life more pleasant for the people whose work they support, but a system that relies on this kind of above-and-beyond effort is fundamentally not sustainable. A more formally professionalized system where the roles and expectations are more clearly defined is less pleasant to work with than one where you were the beneficiary of someone else’s sense of mission, but it’s way better for the person in the low-level job, and that’s a trade we ought to be willing to accept.
That’s not to say that all moves toward systematization are good, of course. Poorly managed transitions to ill-thought-out processes can be actively corrosive in ways that far outweigh the benefits. At the same time, though, I think it’s important to take a step back from the vibes I personally experience, and consider the larger context. In which case the changes over the last twenty-odd years don’t fit quite as neatly into a narrative of decline.
This is one I’ve been kicking around for a while, and as a result it may have been smoothed out enough to not provoke much reaction. On the other hand, it’s almost certainly not specific enough about any particular people or problems to get me yelled at. If you like this sort of thing, here’s a button to get more:
And if you spot something specific enough to yell about, the comments will be open:
To be clear, while things have gotten more corporate, as a small liberal arts college Union is still way better than a lot of places. When students ask about the transition to grad school, I have always told them that when I moved from Williams to the University of Maryland the biggest shift was the realization that when you had a problem at a small school, you were never more than about two calls from getting it fixed— the first person might not get it done, but they’d know who could. At a big state university, the first three people you talked to just wanted you to go away. That remains true today, even with the newly added procedures.
It's fascinating to read this. I find that as time passes, I'm more and more likely to be the person who has that continuity and can answer questions quickly for students and colleagues, and knows where to reach out to find answers when I don't know them. And yet, the growth of administration is placing answers further away from the academic units and more and more into the hands of people who are rotating faster and faster through different roles.
There is a workplace that has some of the same characteristics that I can think of: civil service. Elon Musk did a lot to screw this up, and I don't know what the longer-term consequences will be, but pre-Musk, our federal government was filled with devoted people who were really good at their jobs and were happy to do them for a lifetime (with perhaps some upward mobility).
I've known this for a long time, but I have recently been pleasantly reminded of it by reading "Who is Government," by Michael Lewis, et al. Highly recommended.