Doing More With Less is Not Alchemy—It’s a Recipe for Burnout
The constant refrain of our neoliberal era is “do more with less” and “work smarter, not harder”. These two things are inherently contradictory. The unofficial policy of most American universities these days is to convert academic departments into lean, mean diploma machines. Instead of hiring enough faculty members to provide a quality education, poorly-paid adjuncts are exploited in ever greater numbers. This has lead to shrinking tenure density and thus a politically-weakened faculty. Not only do increasing inequalities reign between the fortunate few who are tenure-track and precarious lecturers, but inequality also puts all faculty at risk by depriving them of collective power against administrators.
Another way to “do more with less” is to increase class sizes whenever possible. It may start out with a few extra students here and there, or raising the class cap to the room capacity, but promises to return to lower class sizes never seem to manifest. With the advent of more online teaching, especially Zoom teaching during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, class sizes are all of a sudden completely arbitrary, no longer limited by physical chairs and desks. Of course, online education may be even more difficult and time-consuming for instructors.
With more people holding PhDs (or other top degrees) in society seeking academia’s historically attractive working conditions—but with fewer such positions available due to decreasing tenure density—job candidates must become highly competitive. This competition results in dramatically increased research expectations. While tenure-track professors of past decades could be ABD (all but dissertation) with no published research, today it’s commonplace for newly-minted PhDs to have multiple peer-reviewed publications. And even comprehensive-level schools like the California State University system—traditionally a mostly-teaching-oriented system—can expect greater research productive from faculty than in the past. Growing expectations also occurs for service too, since schools have also become highly competitive with each other, thus requiring lots of extra committee work to figure out how to best attract, retain, and graduate students.
But, how can more precarious faculty, with larger class sizes, greater research (and service!) expectations continue as before? Administrator demands to “just work smarter” deliberately ignore clear, structural limitations. Even were it possible to “work smarter”, such strategic development takes lots of time and labor itself, which is already a precious commodity. University administrators have become like all other bosses in private enterprise: pushing employees to the brink of exhaustion, knowing that there are more highly-qualified people available to replace anyone who burns-out. “Working smarter” and “doing more with less” is as realistic as turning lead into gold. Until admins are willing to address basic, underling realities, their demands should be correctly identified for the foolish alchemy they are. And we ought to refuse to perform miracles to satisfy their whims.