The Refuge
A career guide for the academic who has run out of ideas
The catering arrives before the consultation document does. This is the first thing to understand about a restructure, that the sandwiches are ordered with more care than the disestablishment list, and that in a room nobody in this meeting has ever entered it has already been settled which colleagues will be carrying a box of books to their cars by the end of the quarter. The slides are up before anyone sits down. There are four of them. One is a photograph of students laughing on a lawn beneath a sky that has never appeared over this campus. One is a graph with no numbers on the vertical axis. One says Enabling Our Future. The fourth thanks everyone for their engagement, which has not yet occurred, and will not.
There is a young academic in that room who has quietly worked out that they are never going to write anything anybody wants to read. The thesis was pulled from the fire by a generous supervisor. The two articles came out in venues nobody cites. The grant applications have been declined so consistently that the rejections now arrive with a familiar warmth, like letters from an aunt. That person should be told, kindly and without delay, that the sector has built a home for them, that it has furnished the home beautifully, and that it pays roughly three times what they are earning now.
The genius of university management as a profession is that it is the only career in the building with no entry requirements. Weigh the alternatives honestly. To teach, one must stand in front of a hundred and eighty people who have paid to be there and hold them for fifty minutes twice a week for twelve weeks, then mark their work, then be scored by them on an anonymous survey the institution will produce at the next review like a receipt. To do research one must submit to strangers who reject you, and to funders who reject you faster, and then to a national exercise that converts a life into a letter. To work with communities one must sit in their houses and eat their food and be told, correctly, that you are late.
Or one can apply to be an Associate Dean.
Nobody will ask what you have published. Nobody will ask what you have built. There is no research portfolio for the person who signs the change proposal, no panel of international experts convening every six years to grade the quality of a restructure, no measure anywhere of whether the strategy launched with a hashtag and a keynote produced a single outcome beyond a new font. You will spend three years instructing academics to demonstrate impact and in all that time no living person will ask you to demonstrate yours. This is not an oversight in the design. This is the design.
The credentialing works by inversion, which is the loveliest part of it. Everywhere else in the university, a thin record disqualifies you from judging the record of others. In management, a thin record is precisely what has kept your calendar free. The colleague running three doctoral students, a community research programme and a journal cannot possibly take on the portfolio. You can. You have nothing at all but time, and in an institution that has stopped measuring anything else, time is the only currency that compounds. Within eighteen months you will chair the committee that evaluates the research performance of people whose footnotes you would struggle to follow. Nobody will remark on this. Everybody will notice it.
The vocabulary can be learned on the drive in. There are no cuts, there is rightsizing. There are no sackings, there are change proposals. Nothing is removed, things are consolidated. Nothing is destroyed, it is reimagined. You are not closing the languages programme, you are creating a more agile and student centred offering that better reflects contemporary demand, and when someone asks which students were surveyed to establish this demand you say that you welcome that feedback and that it will be taken on board, and then it is taken on board, and it is never seen again, because the board is where feedback goes to be taken. Master three further phrases and you will never need another. Difficult decisions, which means decisions taken by you about other people. Capability uplift, which means the removal of capability. And robust process, which means that the outcome was decided in March.
Growth is your theology and it must be held with conviction, because growth as a mantra justifies the cut in every direction at once. When enrolments fall you must cut in order to survive. When enrolments rise you must cut in order to invest in growth. When they hold steady you must cut in order to position for the growth that is coming. The same enrolment data has justified three successive contradictory restructures, delivered by the same office, on the same slide template, and on no occasion did anyone return to the previous change proposal to ask whether it had achieved what it promised. This is because the previous change proposal was authored by someone who has since been promoted, and to open that file now would be to open them, and there is an agreement running the length of the sector on precisely this point.
Then protect your mates, which is the whole of the law. The organisational chart you inherit is populated by people who did what you are doing, every one of them a witness, every one of them therefore in need of a position. So the positions are created. Director of Strategic Engagement. Deputy Head of Academic Portfolio Transformation. Manager, Student Journey. Head of Culture. Each is advertised internally with a face already in mind, each pays more than a senior lecturer who has taught statistics for fifteen years, and each reports to someone who reports to you, so that when savings are next required the savings can be found downstairs among the administrators who knew where everything was kept, whose removal transfers six unpaid hours a week onto every academic for the remainder of their working lives. Six hours across four hundred staff appears in no budget line anywhere, which is what makes it the safest cut in the building. Announce the wellbeing initiative in the same week. A resilience workshop, a fruit bowl in the tearoom, an email about being kind to one another during a period of change.
And there is always the one. Somebody reads the consultation document properly, notices that the modelling assumes a decline the sector's own published figures do not show, says so in an open meeting, and turns out to have standing, a public profile, and colleagues in other countries who will notice if anything happens to them. This person is the only genuine hazard to your career, and you must never argue with them, because you would lose, and every person in that room understands that you would lose. So you do not argue. You restructure. You would never target an individual, you simply reconceptualise the shape of the discipline in a manner that leaves their position outside it, the way a road is widened and a house is found to be in the way of the road. The process is scrupulously fair. There is an independent review. The independent reviewer is a recently departed Pro Vice Chancellor who will be seeking similar work again in the spring, and who will find that while communication could have been improved, the process was sound.
There are decent people in these jobs, some who took them out of duty and hated every morning of it, who fought inside the room for things they were forbidden from saying outside it. The design does not depend on villains. The design selects, reliably, across an entire sector, for the incurious, hands them the knowledge institutions of a country, and asks them to find efficiencies in them. That selection was not an accident of hiring. Once it was decided that the university is a firm, the people who rise are the people who are good at rising, and being good at rising is a complete skill set requiring no other skill.
So take the job. Take the salary, which is public. Take the office, the standing desk, the two days at a vineyard where twelve of you will generate a values statement containing the words courageous, connected and future focused. Take the applause at graduation, where you will sit on stage in the gown of a discipline you left before you understood it, watching students cross the platform to collect a degree in a subject you closed.
Only do not stand too near the window. The building is emptying, and from that height it shows.