Background

As a newly tenured professor, I have been spending more time with fellow tenured professor colleagues. I’ve listened to ‘elder’ professors (those who started in the late 1900s) complain (and sometimes outright protest at faculty meetings) the increasing metrification of our work as well as increasing audit of our mentoring. As a more junior professor (who started in the 2020s), this is metrified audit culture is the reality I inhabit and the only reality I have only ever known. So, to better understand their perspective, I decided to do some reading on how academia has changed over the years, which led me to a number of interesting work, including:

Based on these readings, I had some fun writing this essay to reflect on what I’ve learned as well as offer a semi-autobiographical accounting from a biological scientist perspective observing and experiencing academia as a distinct ecological habitat with university professors and PhD students as inhabiting species.

University Professors in the Neoliberal Academic Ecosystem

University professors, a reclusive species well-regarded for their curious nature, occupy an ever-changing ecological niche in the modern academic ecosystem. Historically sustained by stable long-term appointments, shared norms of collegial governance, and a slow reproductive cycle of ideas, today, this habitat has been radically altered, much like the rest of Anglo-Saxon society, by the encroachment of a new operationalizing force: neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, as a governing philosophy, extends the market logic of competition, efficiency, and quantifiable returns into diverse aspects of life, reorganizing them into systems to be optimized, ranked, and disciplined through performance indicators. In the broader environment, neoliberalism has been associated with a shift in collective priorities: away from robust worker protections and universal access to housing and healthcare, and toward economic growth through globalization, deregulation, and privatization under the assumption that the resulting financial corporate gains will one day trickle down.

Likewise, in the academic ecosystem, neoliberalism has gradually shifted traditional academic values away from a focus on what is good for the public towards what is good for economic markets. From the pursuit of truth toward the pursuit of profit.

The value of academic activities, once guided by professional judgment, becomes increasingly metrified and subject to continuous audit and comparison by a proliferating population of university administrators, who can serve either as symbiotes or parasites depending on which university professor you study.

Such audit culture, for example, mandates annual online mentoring training in lieu of providing university professors with the time and resources to mentor, thereby converting care into compliance and mentoring into a set of attestations submitted into an administrative abyss with no real accountability. Service, once a communal obligation, is rendered visible only when documented. Trust, once a crucial limiting resource, declines as surveillance expands. Because if it can’t be quantified, it must not be valuable.

University professors thus experience a shift in selective pressures. Survival of careers, labs, and research programs increasingly depend on metrics devoid of context, such as the amount of grant funding, the number of outputs published, and the volume of citations (also known as an H-index). Academic labor and the scientific research endeavor is reduced to a counting exercise, knowledge to a commodity, and the undergraduate student to a customer.

Under such selective pressures, some university professors choose to migrate into an alternative habitat, such as the biotech or government sector. Others, to survive, metamorphosizes into the perfect neoliberal subject: a brand that must be marketed and sold on LinkedIn.

They learn to forage strategically, targeting journals with high impact factors and funding agencies with predictable preferences. Risky intellectual migrations across disciplinary boundaries or curiosity-driven blue-skies research activities become rarer, as they threaten short-term fitness. Cooperation gives way to competition for scarce opportunities and limited resources. Burnout becomes endemic, a sign of chronic environmental stress but often misconstrued as individual weakness even by fellow university professors, who, through their own survival adaptations, become indoctrinated into the neoliberal worldview where it becomes difficult to imagine academic life outside the logic of productivity and return on investment, or to conceive of scholarly endeavors and even interactions with other living organisms except in terms of how they might ultimately benefit the university financially.

But resistance to this permeation of neoliberal ideology has come from an unexpected inhabitant of the academic ecosystem: PhD students. More abundant than university professors but less abundant than undergraduate students, PhD students are a keystone species whose labor sustains the stability of the academic ecosystem. Long taxonomically classified ambiguously as both trainees and laborers, PhD students have begun to reorganize their social structure, forming labor unions, thus demonstrative an alternative survival strategy to the individual adaptation used by university professors in the form of collective action.

Through such collective action, PhD students have renegotiated access to essential resources, including competitive wages, dental care, and safer working conditions, thereby replacing competition with solidarity, rejecting metrified productivity as the sole basis of value, and reasserting that precarity is not a necessary rite of passage any more than burnout is a personal flaw rather than an environmental condition that is subject to change.

Likewise, elder university professors with the wisdom afforded by longer views of the changing academic ecosystem, have created new resources in the form of HHMI Investigator awards and NIH MIRA grants, long-term financial research funding that invests in the person rather than the project with reduced administrative oversight, thereby restoring trust as a governing principle, enabling university professors to pursue uncertain and foundational work without perpetual audit. Because fortune might favor the brave but bravery is easier for the fortunate.

While some within the academic ecosystem may present neoliberalism as an unstoppable force, others remain hopeful. Because one of the strengths of academia has always been the ability to idealize, to dream, and to conceive of a that which has never existed before, be it in the form of a scientific discovery, or a controversial and dissenting idea.