Our last post was a guest post about Weaponized Incompetence in Academia.  The author, Susan Cholette, wrote:

“Do you find yourself pulling together the materials for the multi-section introductory course tutoring site because your fellow instructor complains about how that newfangled LMS system confounds them? Or do you always bring the cupcakes for orientation sessions because others bemoan how they are hopeless in the kitchen?

Dealing with weaponized incompetence in academia is especially challenging because it tends to pop its lazy head up in that third part of the job that Administration purports is just as important as research and teaching but categorically is not.”

I added the comment to this post that weaponized incompetence is ALWAYS gendered (and otherwise intersectional) and included a link to the post A Good Little Girl, that I find myself quoting in nearly every talk I give. That anonymous author (xykademiz, a tenured professor in a STEM field at a midwestern R1) writes:

The good little girl is in danger of a) doing much more service then necessary, b) doing much more or more laborious teaching than the colleagues who are not good little girls, c) generally being misinformed about what all that teaching and service really do for her career, because everyone expects her to act as a good little girl and, at the same time, thinks less of her for doing so…

It is entirely possible to be very successful and to be completely selfish. These people are the ones who are happy to let the likes of me — the good little girls, who feel insecure about their belonging in the enterprise of science and thus want to do their share, to please, to not feel like they take more than they deserve and they deserve so little — do well more than necessary, as it benefits them. Women do more teaching and service than average in their academic STEM departments (this is true across my college) because everyone gently perpetuates this myth that more teaching and service will benefit the women in the long run. Maybe, but it’s a weak, higher-order effect.

Scratch that. It’s mostly a lie. Any recognition or warmth or fuzziness that your willingness to please and serve and make deadlines and generally play by the rules will produce for you, the good little girl, among your colleagues, takes too much of your time (the time that’s subtracted from research, family, hobbies, watching grass grow) yet is much, much  smaller than the recognition than any of your self-centered colleagues gets for bringing in another grant or publishing another Glamour Mag while doing minimal service and teaching.

If you feel teaching and service are important, that the institution wouldn’t function without them, and if you really truly enjoy these activities, then go ahead and do them. But please don’t do them because you think they will benefit your career, other than in a very small and indirect way. People who are whispering these lies in your ear want you to be the one doing the dirty work, so they’d be free to pursue the really high-payoff activities. They are not evil incarnate; they do it because they can. They simply recognize that you are a good little girl, and we all know the good little girls will do anything to be liked and useful and helpful. There is no benefit to you if you do as expected; there is a likability penalty if you don’t.

A reader of the Weaponized Incompetence post commented on FB, “Honestly reading this, I’m like “How can I get better at shirking?”

It’s funny because it’s true.

How to shirk for fun and profit?

As xykademix writes above, learning to shirk effectively is one of the keys to a successful academic career, certainly for anyone occupying a marginalized position that renders you vulnerable to exploitation.

A friend of mine, the Dean of a major college at an R1 institution, says that the key to her success is a single phrase, “I’ll think about that and get back to you.”  I encourage everyone to make liberal use of this phrase. Never agree to any request immediately.  Give yourself time to think. And time to run it by your No Committee.

What’s a No Committee?  A panel of friends and colleagues who help you say no to excessive requests, who help you manage your tendencies to codependency.

This advice applies to grad students as  well. Just because your advisor asks you to organize their vanity symposium does not mean you should, no matter how much they insist it will “look good on your CV.”  You know what looks good on CVs?  Peer reviewed journal publications.

Cue the old-timers who c0me in like clockwork (boomer white women mostly) to say: “academia runs on service! It’s a core part of the job and everyone should pitch in.”   See them in full force on this painful comment thread.

Examples:

“This is a part of being a member of your department, part of your job, not something “extra” – frankly I’m astonished at the question.“

“It’s part of the job and something I did both before tenure and after. I chose which committees to participate in and considered it part of my responsibilities. After tenure I felt even more committed to being part of the campus community. It was an honor and one that even as a retiree I still cherish.”

And this classic:

“I’m at the other end of my career. Hate to say it but these are part of your work responsibilities. I’ve spent untold hours doing things like this for the good of my department. It’s about being a good citizen. You can’t nickel and dime everything.”

Notice the elitist shaming: “you can’t nickel and dime everything.”

To this I say, no.

Unpaid labor should be part of NO jobs, ever.

That’s why they’re called jobs. Because you are exchanging labor for wage.

My reply on the FB comment thread above:

“I categorically reject this outdated gaslighting. This is precisely the recipe for overwork, and uncompensated labor that is the foundation of academic exploitation that has led to the entire academic-industrial-complex relying on the UNPAID labor of faculty to function while allowing administrators and sports facilities etc etc to eat up the lions share.of the budget. If The Professor Is In has one mission, it is to put a stop to this narrative of “unpaid labor is part of the job” and to get academics to recognize academic work as labor, labor which should be calculated in terms of hourly compensation. If you do not work for free for Walmart then for the love of god do not work for free for a university which wants nothing more than to extract labor from PhDs who are deluded by a mythology of “do what you love” which as @miya tokumitsu wrote in 2015, is the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism to render workers infinitely susceptible to exploitation. I want anyone reading this to know that I’ve been battling this kind of thinking since 2011, and still do, and am running through this thread today to post this response on every tenured gaslighter here. Tenured people: it’s 2024. The world is on fire. Do better.”

Academia is a job. You are exchanging labor for wage.

But certainly in the present moment, in 2024, in the face of all-out assault on the conditions of this labor? Of threats to our individual and collective well-being and safety?  Of vicious cuts/closures of entire programs, departments and institutions?  Of attacks to tenure, intellectual freedom, the humanities, and the very concept of knowledge and expertise? Of rampant depression and anxiety among academics at every level?

Are you suggesting that the few faculty who remain should shoulder an infinitely ballooning burden of labor, with every lost colleague, every lost dollar of budget?

That’s a race to the bottom.

I repeat my end-stage capitalism mantra:

do not personalize a structural failure.

You cannot, with your feeble efforts, correct a macro-level disinvestment and a national-level assault.

“Well then you’re just part of the problem….” say the boomers and their apologists. “but then how can we make it betterrrrrrrr.”

Please.

That ship has sailed.

Boomer academics* had the last real chance to defend academia and its formerly rather pleasant and more or less sustainable balance of paid labor and service contributions (which I actually recall from my early career days in the 90s). They elected not to.

Like other boomers in other fields, they just pathologically hoarded the fruits of a growth economy and turned a blind eye to the gathering forces of destruction, sailing off into their outrageously well funded retirements in their paid-off houses while those coming behind struggle to pay rent.

Academic boomers don’t exactly have “more fun” but they’ve certainly got the finger wagging down. “In my day everyone pitched in,” they bleat.

In your day people also had hope.

So, readers:  shirk away.  Do what you must, and what you want to, and not one iota more.  And then go out and try to save this burning planet, and yourself.

*I’m 1964–the last boomer or the first Gen X, depending on which counting method you use.