On Being Motivated by Esteem
The mood at higher education institutions and universities is changing. In many places, professors have to agree targets that commit them to supervising a certain number of theses and publishing a certain number of articles. These targets are not negotiated with deans, who are elected by academics, but with managers appointed by the president of the university. If a professor does not achieve the targets, her salary may be reduced or her budget for material resources or assistant posts cut.
The goal of these measures, at least according to the idea of control that informs them, is to turn academics into high achievers again. It is only by attaching financial and material incentives to the achievement of performance goals, the idea goes, that it is possible to save the professors from falling into a cosy slumber and transforming into sleeping beauties. Only by adopting the tried-and-tested motivational methods of the private sector is it possible to get professors to put in more work than the regular teaching load of eight or nine hours per week.
Of course, there may be some professors who drop their pens the very moment they are appointed and use the security of the position of a civil servant mainly to enjoy their lives outside of the university. Any student could tell you a few stories about professors who stroll leisurely on to campus once a week, and take siestas in order to be fit for their long mountain hikes. And then there are the stories of professors who use the university principally as a platform for well-remunerated roles as consultants and expert assessors, and can only be contacted by students if they pretend to be calling on behalf of a large company or media corporation.
But in fact our question should be: why are these characters the rare exceptions within academic life, despite the evident rationality, from the perspective of the individual, of using the security of an academic position either to simply enjoy one’s private life or to gain secondary income? How can we explain the fact that the majority of scholars, once appointed for life, are far more likely to turn their fifty-hour week into a sixty-hour week than to return to working hours that conform to generally accepted standards?
The reason for their – at first sight irrational – zealous work ethic lies in the hidden structure that informs academic careers. Every academic discipline has criteria for measuring the quality of its members, and it is surprising how easily academics can reach agreement on who is worth their salt and who can be written off.
Interestingly, this does not require them to count citations or successful grant applications. Even in disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, or biology that are characterized by fierce theoretical disagreements, there is a strikingly broad agreement on who counts as a luminary. To be sure, few would consider appointing a representative of a different school of thought to a professorship at their own institute. And when decisions are taken on the allocation of resources for research, some will be hesitant about awarding them to those of a different theoretical persuasion. But get a group of academics, even from different schools of thought, to have a chat over a beer in the evening and agreement on whose articles are worth citing and whose may just as well not be read will be reached with remarkable speed. This informal ranking plays an important, subterranean role in everyday interactions between academics. In conference discussions and in the short conversations during coffee breaks, these informal rankings are always at play in the background, and are constantly re-adjusted in response to new information.
What distinguishes an academic career from a career in business, politics, or law is its independence from the organization. A high-flying academic in a particular discipline will not necessarily call the shots in her department. Those who take the important decisions in institutes and departments will not necessarily be the same who rank particularly well in their discipline. There are even some cynics who claim that there is a negative correlation between success in university administration and success in academia.
Perhaps participation in university administration and management can be understood not only as a responsibility that all academics have to bear but also as a way of providing compensation for a poor showing in the unofficial academic career rankings. If so, the tacit disciplinary rankings would not only secure the ongoing translation of academic potential into actual work, it would also in part explain the motivation for participation in university administration. The main reason for the eagerness with which many universities and higher education institutions have introduced reforms is a desire to replace this hidden career structure with allegedly objective methods of evaluation. But it is doubtful whether this unofficial ranking can be captured in the data manically collected by university bureaucracies. Why introduce laborious and costly procedures when academic gossip is perfectly sufficient to keep academic staff on their toes?
