Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University

By Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern

Higher Expectations is a practical guide to navigating academia for people who want to improve their own day-to-day work lives and create better conditions for everyone. Universities are broken: they’re built on systems that are discriminatory, hierarchical, and individualistic. This hurts the people that work and learn in them and limits the potential for universities to contribute to a better world. But we can raise our expectations. Hawkins and Kern envision a university transformed by collaboration, care, equity, justice, and multiple knowledges. Drawing on real-world, international examples where people and institutions are already doing things in new ways, Higher Expectations offers concrete advice on how to make these transformations real. It covers many areas of academic life including course design, conferencing, administration, research teams, managing workloads and more. Designed for faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scholars, Higher Expectations delivers hope and practical actions you can take to start making change now. It is a must-have for everyone working in academia today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781771136600

Roberta Hawkins

Roberta Hawkins is an associate professor of Geography at the University of Guelph and the director of the Social Practice and Transformational Change PhD program. In these roles, Roberta teaches courses on human-environment relations, research methods, and feminist theories. Her research expertise includes ethical consumption, digital media, and environmental politics. She explores how everyday practices can lead to wider societal and environmental change. Roberta’s research is published in academic journals including Gender, Place and Culture and Geoforum. Roberta loves swimming, reading novels, and good coffee. She lives in Guelph, Ontario with her partner and two children.

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Cover image for Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern.

"Can a book that pulls no punches on the reality of working conditions in higher education be hopeful, even optimistic? Yes. In Higher Expectations, Hawkins and Kern deliver both a realistic assessment and a plethora of practical suggestions for change, ones that students, faculty, and staff at every stage of their careers can enact, individually or in community with others. By sharing examples from a broad range of institutions and disciplines, they demonstrate that transformation is not only possible but already underway. This generous book is a rallying cry for a better academia for all."

Jennifer Polk, From PhD to Life

"Higher Expectations offers both a manifesto of visionary change and a practical guide towards that change. Most universities are structured to valorize and embed individual pursuit, privilege, and competition for ever-scarce resources. This is not a natural or inevitable model—it is a distinctly constructed model, and thus, as Hawkins and Kern reveal, open to deconstruction and, importantly, reconstruction. Higher Expectations offers pathways to shift the often unexamined embedded hierarchical assumptions of individualized success and struggle. As Hawkins and Kern demonstrate, it is possible to not only imagine but to actually create ‘higher expectations’ based on support, teamwork, and community. It is a remarkable book."

Joni Seager, distinguished professor in Arts and Sciences, Bentley University and dean emerita, York University

"Academia, as wonderful an intellectual enterprise as it can be, is also at times extremely competitive, highly hierarchical, unwelcoming, and inhospitable. Hawkins and Kern’s Higher Expectations is a much-welcomed breath of fresh air, a respite from the hypercompetitive, gruelling academic environment. In this wonderful book, Hawkins and Kern offer a framework for how to rethink, rework, and rebuild academia using ethical core values and principles that guide our pragmatic choices in what are turbulent times for the higher education sector. Higher Expectations should be required reading for all academics."

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, professor, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Mexico

"How can we visibilize and better structure our labour, create and sustain non-hierarchical solidarity in our writing, teaching, service, and adjacent activism? Hawkins and Kern offer much needed wisdom across these topics and more in Higher Expectations. I would have 100+ post-it notes in this book by now if I had had it in grad school."

Jack Gieseking, author of A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008

Higher Expectations

Higher Expectations

How to Survive Academia, Make It Better for Others, and Transform the University

Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern

Between the Lines

Toronto

Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make It Better for Others, and Transform the University

© 2024 Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern

First published in 2024 by Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario · M5V 3A8 · Canada

1-800-718-7201 · www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for copying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 69 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, ON M5E 1K3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders.

Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Higher expectations : how to survive academia, make it better for others, and transform the university / Roberta Hawkins & Leslie Kern.

Names: Hawkins, Roberta, author. | Kern, Leslie, 1975- author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240292405 | Canadiana (ebook) 2024029243X | ISBN 9781771136594 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771136600 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: College environment. | LCSH: Educational change. | LCSH: Education, Higher—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC LC210 .H39 2024 | DDC 378—dc23

Cover and text design by DEEVE

Printed in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Logos for institutional funders: The Governemnt of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, and The Ontario Arts Council.

Dedicated to our mothers:

Sheila, my first feminist mentor

—Roberta

Dale, my most valued support

—Leslie

Contents

Acknowledgements

Raising Our Expectations

Part 1

Collaborate

Do Solitary Tasks Together

Strengthen Research Collaborations and Labs

Foster Teaching Communities

Build Classroom Community

Text Box: Class Participation and Participation Grades

Take the Competition Out of Conferences

Text Box: Chairing a Conference Session

Build Solidarity in a Union

Part 2

Move beyond Metrics

Know the Time You Work

Name Invisibilized Work

Table: Ways to Make Shadow Work More Visible

Challenge Student Evaluations of Teaching

Try Ungrading

Survive Evaluation Processes

Redefine Impact

Text Box: Acknowledging Multiple Forms of Scholarship and Impact

Address Career Disruptions

Text Box: Crafting Impact Statements

Part 3

Dismantle Hierarchies

Support Precariously Employed Workers

Create Less-Hierarchical Labs and Research Teams

Text Box: Authorship Order

Undermine Disciplinary Hierarchies

Expand Roles for Non-Academic Knowledge Holders

Give Respect to Service Work

How to Use a Leadership Role for Good

Dismantle Hierarchies that Encourage and Hide Abuse

Text Box: Decoupling Alcohol and Academia

Part 4

Centre the Margins

Transform Graduate Training

Re-Envision Faculty Recruitment and Hiring

Text Box: Better Interview Practices

Disruptive Pedagogy

Rethink Course Design

Text Box: Demystify the Hidden Curriculum

Push for Radical Policies

Transform Citation Practices

Text Box: Reviewing and Editorial Work

Use Your Privilege to Disrupt the Centre

Part 5

Stay Whole

Reshape Your Relationship with Work

Take Back Control of Your Time Part 1

Text Box: Saying No

Take Back Control of Your Time Part 2

Text Box: Taking Control of Email

Supporting Others to Stay Whole

Leaving Academia

Collective Re-Humanizing

A Higher Expectations Manifesto

About the Authors

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge our status as uninvited guests on the ancestral and unceded lands of Indigenous peoples, specifically, the Mi’kmaq, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee. We’re thankful for the opportunities we’ve had to live, learn, work, raise our children, and build relationships in these territories.

Leslie and Roberta would like to thank our editor at Between the Lines, Amanda Crocker, for her support, patience, and keen insights as this book slowly came to life. All of the members of the BTL team, including Devin Clancy, Jasmine Abdelhadi, Sara Swerdlyk, and Tyler Chartrand have brought their amazing skills to this project and we’re grateful for their involvement. Our copy editor, Jess Klaassen-Wright, provided essential support for improving the clarity of this manuscript (any errors remaining are ours alone!). And finally, we’re indebted to research assistant Amy Kipp, whose gathering of key sources and eventual work in compiling endnotes was absolutely indispensable.

We also want to issue a special shared thank you to our long-time collaborators Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi. Although our ten years of work together ended a few years ago, it’s hard to put into words the impact this time had on us as scholars and humans. Much of what we know about working together, understanding each other as whole people, writing collectively, and challenging institutional power came from the time we spent together online and in wonderful places like Victoria, Omaha, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Chapel Hill. We’ll never forget the time we got a hole-in-one or that when we say take care, we really mean: don’t let the bastards grind you down.

---

Roberta would like to thank Leslie for her quiet confidence and continued assertion that writing this book was possible and yes, actually, a good idea. Your ability to turn long-winded paragraphs into short and snappy writing is unparalleled. I’ve learned so much from you during this process but the best part has been getting to spend more time together.

I am grateful to have met so many people in my career who have shown me how to do academia differently. In graduate school Diana Ojeda and Maya Manzi taught me that not only could we bow out of the pressure to compete with one another but that we could study it. While revising my first article, Joni Seager taught me how to deal with harsh and insulting reviewer comments and how to do peer review differently. While working as a sessional lecturer, Ebru Ustundag modeled solidarity, community building, and support. Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, upon finding out that my dissertation research coincidentally mirrored their own work, invited me into their circles, when they easily could have iced me out. Alice Hovorka showed me how to revel in the freedom of flexible work while protecting my time and working for changes within the system. Alison Mountz’s openness to co-organizing a workshop with a stranger helped to set me on a career path filled with feminist collaborations and friendships. The members of my research team and students in the Social Practice program continue to inspire me to dismantle unhelpful systems, get creative, and stay hopeful.

I owe a special thank you to Jackie Cockburn, Noella Gray, Kate Parizeau, and Jennifer Silver. I am so grateful to have frolleagues with whom I can form a writing group, swap tenure files, share advice, joke around, and rage against institutional injustices. The last decade of work would have been much more lonely and a lot less fun without each of you.

Finally, thank you to my family. To my Dad, Brian, and sister, Deborah, for always reminding me that academia is just a job, and a kind of weird one at that. And to Ishan, Kalin, and Norah, for filling my life with love. xo

---

Leslie is forever grateful to Roberta for making her feel at home on a snowy campus visit to Worcester in 2008, where we reminisced about growing up in Mississauga and discovered we went to the same high school. Thanks for giving me a tip about the toughest interview question and for making me feel better when I didn’t get the job by assuring me I would have been miserable there! We couldn’t have predicted that we’d be writing a book together over a decade later, but I believe the seeds were planted that day.

Over the long years I’ve spent in higher education, many people have cracked open my thinking about how we do this work and what it means. From professors in my undergraduate years who took our classes out of patriarchal campus spaces and into cozy living rooms, to colleagues who showed me that it was possible to imagine life outside of academia, I’ve learned how to craft a career and a life that felt sustainable and sometimes even joyous.

I’d like to acknowledge as well the clients in my coaching practice who have trusted me with their stories, struggles, and triumphs. Many of the issues we’ve worked through together have informed my thinking on the themes in this book.

I’m also thankful for the ongoing support of my friends and family, especially my partner, Peter, and my daughter, Maddy, who always seem to have complete confidence in my ability to succeed with whatever projects I take on, long before I feel that way myself.

Raising Our Expectations

The news about academia is grim. We open up our social media and there it is: another article about the dreadful state of the university and its students and faculty. Just the headlines are exhausting to read: An epidemic of mental illness among graduate students. The humanities are under siege. The age of tenure is finished. Precarious labour is the new norm. Audit culture has taken over. Women of colour are being denied tenure. Student evaluations show systemic bias. And so on.

Meanwhile, down the hall your colleague is hunched over her keyboard, peering through her glasses at an online form in which she’s expected to enter a full accounting of how every hour of her workday is used. This sterile form with its hundreds of fields will be translated into a quantified record of her career to date and used in her upcoming performance review. None of the fields allow her to record the hours spent comforting students in the wake of a sexual assault scandal.

Across campus a graduate student sits fuming over the latest casually ableist remark from their professor, the one with no women or people of colour on his syllabus. Whipping out their phone, they open the group chat, venting to their friends and feeling powerless to confront this established senior academic.

In your office you try to sort through the emails streaming in. Sighing, you try your best to triage the requests to review papers, guest lecture, mentor new students, provide feedback on a draft, speak at a community event, and join a university diversity committee. You can’t help but feel drained, wondering how to say no to some of these and what you’ll sacrifice from your teaching, research, and home life to do the others.

Whether ripped from the headlines or ripped from our memories, these stories abound in the blogs, group chats, hallways, and conference chatter of academia. They saturate our daily lives and flavour our relationships with advisors, colleagues, students, and administrators. They keep us awake at night, tossing and turning and wondering, what can I do differently next time? Or, will this ever change?

Sometimes it all feels hopeless and overwhelming. Then you see a tweet describing how someone’s advisor supported them through a mental health crisis. Or a blog post about running a feminist environmental science lab. Or a presentation with practical suggestions for creating an anti-racist syllabus. You’re reminded that other people are working through these challenges and there are lots of good ideas to draw from. You can raise your expectations.

We absolutely live for these posts and stories. They sustain us. In fact, we love the whole academic advice genre and its books, articles, podcasts, and social media posts. We’ve been consuming, testing, and sometimes giving out this advice throughout our careers as feminist social scientists. In our work together and with others, we’ve also contributed to scholarship on the challenges of studying and working in the contemporary university.¹ We share more about our academic journeys in the About the Authors (see p. 230) section.

In pouring over this literature, we notice a gap between the kinds of publications that describe and analyze power and inequality in the university and those that offer practical advice on writing, job hunting, teaching, and work–life balance. The former may include little in the way of actual strategies for making day-to-day change, while the latter often ignore the contexts and structures that shape our ability to survive in the system.

This book bridges that gap by recognizing power structures and offering practical suggestions for navigating academia for people who want to improve their own day-to-day work lives and create better conditions for everyone. We emphasize concrete strategies that take aim at a range of problems. These involve both individual and collective actions. Some are designed to help you stay afloat and others are about bringing people together to work for wider transformation. Many can be implemented today and others are longer-term endeavours, but they all include things that you can take specific steps toward right now.

Whether the tips are about organizing your calendar or organizing a union, they’re all directed at surviving in the academy and ultimately transforming it. We present opportunities for everyday change that are grounded in and guided by core principles of justice, equity, solidarity, care, co-operation, interdependence, and relationality. These values underpin a set of higher expectations that we believe we need for a radically different university, one that we think is worth fighting for.

This book is for anyone within or about to enter an academic environment not designed for them to thrive. It’s for anyone feeling stuck within a system that’s leading them toward burnout. At the same time, it’s for people who care about making a difference and improving the university, and who have a sliver of hope left in the possibilities, even in this broken system.

We write for folks like us who want to better their day-to-day lives and those of their co-workers and students, while also laying the groundwork for fairer conditions in the future. Specifically, we think this book is essential for both permanent and contingent faculty at universities and colleges. There are also many sections and suggestions relevant to university librarians, academic administrators and leaders, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students.

We wish we had this kind of book earlier in our own careers, but we believe that scholars at any career stage can benefit from its guidance. In fact, those of you with more job security and higher levels of responsibility within academic institutions will find a range of ways to use your position to make a difference for others, especially those in more precarious conditions. Graduate students and those new to the academic workforce will find tips to avoid burnout and overwork while creating classrooms, research programs, and service agendas that reflect your desire for more collaborative, equitable, just, and care-filled universities.

Universities Are Broken

It’s hard to overstate the challenges faced by contemporary academic institutions. The proverbial wolf is at the door with threats of bankruptcy, austerity, government censorship, far-right attacks, violence on campus, hollowed out labour rights, soaring tuition costs, crackdowns on protest, and more. In addition to these existential threats, those of us working or studying in academic institutions face daily reminders of competitive and hostile work environments, burnout, and desperation as we meander the hallways of our departments.

You may have even read much of the by-now robust literature examining, diagnosing, and critiquing what’s come to be called the neoliberal university. Terms like audit culture, impact factor, budget prioritization, publication metrics, and corporatization are all too familiar. In other words, you’ve likely experienced how the logics of neoliberalism have touched down on college and university campuses around the world.

An emphasis on individual success, quantification of research and teaching outcomes, corporate management models, efficiency, branding, downsizing, and privatization has altered the academic landscape in ways that are, for many, incompatible with the goals of higher education and knowledge production. At the very least these practices have led to extreme overwork for many of us, often as we struggle to balance other responsibilities like childcare, community work, activism, domestic responsibilities, or (gasp!) hobbies, friendships, and relaxation.

Some critics point out, however, that this isn’t a bug in the system. Rather, it’s a feature that’s been there all along.² Specifically, academia’s hierarchical organization is one that has always reproduced itself through exclusion, touted the self-serving myth of meritocracy, and worked to reproduce the elite ruling class. The particular corporate lingo-laced neoliberal flavour of these times is but the latest manifestation of an inherent underlying logic.

For many of us, the current emphasis on neoliberalism can be frustrating because other modes of exclusion and dominance have much longer histories and are often more salient to our lived experiences. The exclusion of women, people of colour, queer, working class, and disabled people, for instance, is not a neoliberal invention. Recent turns toward extreme right-wing politics and ideologies have entrenched these exclusions even further and made it more dangerous to speak about them.³

In the places where we work and live, universities are part of the ongoing settler colonial project.⁴ They’re relentlessly Eurocentric in their epistemologies and practices of evaluation. Many were built with enslaved people’s labour. They’re massive landholders sitting on stolen land, actively participating in processes of urban renewal, real estate speculation, and gentrification. They hoard vast endowments that rival the wealth of the richest corporations.⁵ We could go on, but suffice it to say that neoliberal isn’t the only way to characterize the problematic power relations that structure the broken university.

Whatever label we use, there are several central problem areas that this book addresses. These include a culture of competition and isolation, audit-centred and metric-based decision making, hierarchies and abuses of power, exclusion and discrimination, and exploitation and dehumanization. Despite the size and scale of these problems, we’re not as ready as some to declare the death of the university. The premise of our book is that we don’t have to accept the university and its resulting harms as it is. We can raise our expectations to demand something better.

We’re struck by the possibilities offered up by staying with the trouble, to borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway.⁶ We’re buoyed by the fact that universities, with all of their flaws, include more people of colour, Indigenous people, disabled people, women, neurodivergent people, queer, trans, and non-binary people than ever before. We’re not ready to abandon all of those who deposit some of their hope for the future in the ongoing project of the university.

Working to Transform

Oscillating between days where we want to burn it all down and days where we want to stay with the trouble is a constant tension for us. We also wonder, where should we focus our efforts and energy? Small everyday changes to help us survive in a system that’s stacked against many of us, or larger-scale efforts to change the system itself?

We find it helpful to return to an oldie but a goodie, the feminist notion that the personal is political (and vice versa). One’s personal experience of academia is shaped by powerful, entrenched structures. But changes made at a personal level are connected to the bigger political picture. Changing the things under our individual control and fighting for systemic change isn’t an either/or proposition; it’s both/and. And although we offer many everyday baby-step suggestions for change, almost everything we propose works better together, so we always centre opportunities for collective action.

We suspect that most everyone who’s chosen to pick up this book is already involved in some form of collective struggle: organizing for divestment from fossil fuels, fighting for unionization or active within their union, involved in decolonization initiatives, working on campus accessibility, etc. These efforts don’t preclude us from instituting changes in the way we mentor our students, how we interact at conferences, who and how we cite, and how we create systems of mutual support.

If this is all sounding like a lot of work, well, it is. This feels like it’s at odds with one of our goals: helping you to reclaim your life outside of your job or studies. We also know that it’s already the case that the work of bettering the university is disproportionately done by racialized folks, women, and other marginalized people. And, despite our efforts, the university isn’t likely to repay our care and loyalty in kind.

Some of the strategies included will take more work, at least at first. We don’t intend for every reader to try every tip, though, and certainly not all at once! The idea is to decide which ones will make the most positive difference in your work life and for the institutional priorities you care about.

Furthermore, we know that we’re all located differently with respect to our positions, power, security, and identities in the academic world. This means actions carry different levels of risk. We understand that not every strategy will feel possible, especially for those with more precarious roles or historically excluded identities. Even for those with more stability and privilege, the reality of cumulative overwork and burnout might prevent you from being able to enact all of the changes you’d like to see.

Maybe because we’re geographers, we like thinking about this in terms of space: how much is there, who can access it, can we expand it, what can we do within it? The conditions