Careerism, academia, and leadership

Mediocrity and the race to leadership

Globally, the crisis of academic leadership is a phenomenon felt across University campuses, especially as campuses struggle to find the anchors on which they can overlay their vision and mission.

One of the problems across these University campuses is the rise of the mediocre careerist that is all too hungry for power.

Leadership, rather than emerging as a response to a calling, has become a product of strategizing, planning, and mapping. Leadership, rather than being a function of integrity and ethics, has been turned into a well practiced ritual of sycophancy.

As a result, what you get in many leadership positions on University campuses today are mediocre academics who are unsuccessful in their academic pursuits, have poor CVs, but have figured out very well how to network, understand the organizational culture, and speak to the right person at the right time.

For these careerists, the way to power is their cultural capital in the academic organization.

They have learned the skill sets to identify the sites of power, and the language needed to speak to these sites of power. Having rehearsed all too well the games of performing efficiency, they are all too eager to implement the standards of efficiency.

Having figured out the "game of sucking up" then, for these aspiring mediocre underlings, the career path to leadership is one of getting to know the right person at the right time, about appearing to be efficient, and about carrying on the show of competence, often hiding the very incompetence that lies an inch below the surface. A close look at the vita and the charade typically starts falling off.

So leadership in academia in this sense is no longer about leadership, it is about learning to play a game of mediocrity, decorated with all the bells and whistles of a good show. It is also about the performance of the power suits, pearl necklaces, and paraphernalia of power.

So what are the threats to academe posed by the rising aspirations of careerists who have poor understanding of the academic process and who are poor academics to begin with?

When academic institutions are run not by leaders, but by mediocre careerists, these institutions quickly devolve into metrics, indicators, and scales. Mediocre academics, needing to find jobs to justify their existence, are set with the task of coming up with ever new metrics and ways of measuring their performance. Universities as institutions dedicate resources to new lines of administrative underlings who have very little real work to do, and thus must create ever-new metrics.

Universities thus are bombarded with new benchmarks and metrics, new initiatives, and new assessment scales, with very little time for academics to do actually what they are meant to do, to teach and to participate in the ever-inviting process of discovery.

The neoliberalization of academia across the globe has meant that more and more academics are held hostage to the career aspirations of these mediocre academics who otherwise would not make it through the academic ranks.

One way to counter this race to the bottom across Universities globally is to drastically cut down on the number of lines dedicated to leadership.

Another way is to push for global standards in leadership. To even be considered to be a potential leader, an academic would have to first demonstrate that they are competent as an academic.

Setting up processes to select quality academics for leadership roles would be a good start.

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 ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

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...

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