Individualized faculty performance: When unbridled meritocracy breeds selfishness

As a faculty member who has been teaching for almost two decades, I recall the many times I have felt so lucky to have the mentorship and support of senior colleagues.

Senior colleagues have thoughtfully provided feedback on my paper, with line-by-line edits, the paper entirely marked by notes in pencil. Senior colleagues have observed me teach, make mistakes, built up my spirit, and shown me strategies of teaching large and small lectures. Senior colleagues have taken me aside and given me advice on various aspects of academic life. To all these senior colleagues, I owe much of my academic survival.

That I survived in the academy and did so somewhat well is a product of the countless hours and unpaid labour these colleagues put in. They did all this with a smiling face, with compassion, and with care in their hearts.

The increasing privatization of the University in recent years and the ascendance of the privatized logic however is breeding a different kind of self-serving academic.

For this self-serving academic, university life is all about beating the performance metric so they can earn the next bonus or the next accolade. Success is narrowly defined as self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. Often at the cost of others.

For senior faculty in this individualized system, junior colleagues are seen as competitors, to be harshly evaluated, to be compared with, and to be put down.

Faculty members no longer want to share their lecture notes and PowerPoint slides with junior colleagues. After all, it is the job of the junior colleague to come up with her or his own lecture notes and PowerPoint slides. The irony is particularly rich when one recognizes how the careers of these individual faculty members ride on the generosity and kindness of other senior colleagues who have unconditionally shared syllabi, notes, slides, assignments, grant proposals, authorship, datasets etc.

Leave aside sitting through classes and giving feedback, faculty are incentivized perversely to think of junior colleagues as competitors. Rather than come from a framework of solidarity and love, for these faculty in an individualized performance-driven system, the performance is one of harsh evaluation. The performed subjectivity of senior scholars or want-to-be senior scholars in this sort of a privatized system is one of holding up criteria when evaluating junior colleagues without ever turning the harsh light of the criteria on their own scholarly record. As long as you can trick the system to look good on certain metrics, you have succeeded.

Unfortunately then, what goes on in the name of meritocracy in such instances is mediocrity, garbed in individualized and selfish notions of performance metrics.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Search This Blog