From the outside, academia seems like a rarefied space that supports the life of the mind. The reality on the inside is more complex. This disconnect isn’t new or unique to academia, but academia has its own structures (or structurelessness), rhythms (or polyrhythms), and challenges at various points in a career.
We’ve lived inside academia for many years, and so here we’ll share some general thoughts on how to survive and maybe thrive. (Full disclosure: as academic editors, we orbit around academia, you might say we have “alternative academic (alt-ac)” employment. In addition, one of us (Alex) adjunct faculty, which further colours our perspective.)
The first part is to take stock of the system as a whole. There are good and bad aspects to academia, like any human system. It is entirely possible to thrive, but even those who find thriving don’t find it without struggle. That much seems universal.
Academic Dynamics
The ways academics interact with each other can be profoundly weird. When we take a bunch of people with very specific interests, an intense work ethic, solid ability to delay gratification, and a certain amount of attraction for solitary work, an intense atmosphere develops. The dynamics of this atmosphere come in extremes.
At the positive end, academics can be incredibly generous, supportive, and friendly. There can be profound meetings of minds in academia. There can be life-changing mentorships, friendships, and periods of intense bonding. The facts, skills, theories, and insights academics can get from each other can change the world. Many academics also cherish planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and interests in their students, and take those responsibilities seriously.
At the negative end, academics can be surprisingly petty, vindictive, absent-minded, and competitive. Some academics revel in the way their knowledge gives them power over people and makes their positions almost unassailable. Over years and decades, these tendencies can develop into profoundly damaging and dysfunctional patterns of relating to fellow academics and students. Academics are always busy, but for some this can transform into aloofness and inhumanity. Many academics are not particularly good teachers, and some of them use methods that are actively harmful to good learning and to the mental health of their students. Experts often forget the struggle they went through to earn their expertise, and this can lead to wildly inappropriate pedagogy.
Meeting new academics can be an exercise in discerning which type they are, and how to navigate that. Like in any encounter, academics often size each other up relatively slowly, in a process that can take months or even years. The biggest factor in developing a network is persistence. Intense bursts of activity are helpful, but it’s really the repetition that welds academics together.
Academic Structural Injustice
Some of the negative dynamics above come from the structure of academia itself. Despite being a modern institution, the roots of (western European) academia go back to medieval universities, which strongly emphasized hierarchy and apprenticeship as a way of training new academics. This structure has persisted to the present day. New PhDs are trained in such a structure.
There are costs and benefits of this model. On the positive side, developing expertise often requires intense, prolonged, high-stakes mentoring and guidance in the standards of a discipline. On the negative side, the apprenticeship model gives the apprentice next to no power in determining their fate. The apprenticeship model has few recourses when the trainer does not—or cannot—handle their responsibilities. Whether aspiring academics a good or bad apprenticeship depends on the predilections of their master—in the case of grad school, the supervisor and committee. There are almost no structural checks on the power that supervisors and committees have in their role as trainers in this way. Rights exist on paper, but are often unenforceable.
So we end up with a system of fiefdoms within which the tenured professor has near-absolute authority. This has been pointed out in many places and tracks our experience and the experience of many of our clients. Of course, there is a self-selection effect here. Nevertheless, there are great humanitarian gains to be made with a little more structural transformation of the training model.
How to get structural transformation is a difficult, context-sensitive question. We think that there’s no substitute for graduate students and early-career academics getting organized and demanding more rights by whatever means they can. In our experience, trade unionism is the only plausible counter for the structural problems built into academia.
We shouldn’t be totally negative. Positive dynamics and outcomes often happen, but this is usually despite institutional pressures. In our experience, collegial and generous communities of academics exist as distributed networks and subcultures within the cultures of larger disciplines and departments. It takes work to tap into these networks, but that work can pay off immensely.
Neoliberalization
Another factor that makes structural injustice in academia worse is the large-scale social trend towards neoliberalization of universities. This is the process where universities come under increasing pressure to substitute the humanistic model of education with the vocational model of education. At the same time, neoliberalization aims to runs universities as businesses.
The humanistic model is structured around giving students a broad understandings of the world and with equipping them with critical thinking skills that they can take forward with them into whatever specific jobs they do. Humanistic education tries to develop the skills that would make students good citizens in a liberal democracy.
The vocational model treats education as essentially job training. It is much more focused on measurable outcomes, return on investment, industry connections, networking, and job placement. Any student who’s been asked “what are you going to do with that degree?” and has recoiled from the question understands the attitude behind the vocational model of education. The vocational ideal prioritizes credentials over understanding.
Ideally, education should train job skills and couple those with humanistic critical thinking. There is no deep conflict here. But it sometimes seems that university administrators only understand the vocational model. This is the product of a long history of treating universities like businesses. The only problem is: universities aren’t businesses. At least not to academics.
Academics of all stripes instinctively know this. If market logic dictates everything, then student entitlement increases massively. Tuition pays for most academics’ (and administrators’) salaries. These are clear trends. Grades in elite American universities are almost meaningless now because they are so inflated because students spending a small fortune to be there, and they will complain hard about mediocre grades. This is a dysfunctional dynamic from the perspective of actually teaching people things.
So, neoliberalization feeds the negative, competitive, anti-social dynamics that already exist in academia. The continued neoliberalization of universities will emboldened the negative academic dynamics. Prospective academics should be aware of this and how it plays out at their institutions.
How to Thrive?
There is more to say here. (We will get around to it eventually.) But for now, it’s important to emphasize that surviving and thriving within this system is possible. There are costs, to be sure, but if one is committed, it’s possible to navigate effectively.
You will need some skills: long-term planning, personal development through inevitable stress and adversity, strong networks of support and collegiality, strong personal boundaries, the capacity for short-term sprints through overwhelm, and an unsentimental, critical approach to the dynamics that play out around you. You can develop these skills by finding mentors from all walks of life, but also fellow academics who understand the struggle
You will also, from time to time, have to fight collective fights to change systemic dynamics that seem completely baked-in. You’ll have to forge consensus with fellow academics and then hold it together through struggle. This is profoundly hard work. But the good news is that the system you’re fighting isn’t all-powerful or immovable. All institutional dynamics seem impossible to crack—until they crack. Their appearance of immovability is how they try to win the struggles. History shows us that the institutions don’t always win.