The perverse incentives of academia

Have you written a book before? I'm trying and it is about as bad as I feared it would be. I love the topic, and that's keeping me going, but it is such a slog. Fortunately, it's due Dec. 1, so I at least know it will end.

Otherwise, it's been an interesting Fall semester, but not in the good sense. Lots o preps, back-to-back-to-back 3 days a week and two of them writing intensive keeps Mommy/Prof a busy lady. One of the most interesting challenging is keeping energy up. I definitely tend to the hangry side, so I have to bring snacks and run to my office real quick to shove something in my face.

The only one with a worse schedule is Spouse. He's literally got an 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. with nothing in-between one day, and an evening class two other days a week, so I don't see him a lot.

My latest big think on academic incentives, which I believe are f-ed up in a serious way.

Since the re-org of my unit, I am now in 4 departments with 4 different bosses that all their own meetings and some committee work for 3 of them, etc. And it's a lot of work that feels like complete BS - like "write a mission statement for your new department." I think it's telling that I wasn't the only lady faculty to repeatedly decline the blessing of working with the new dean in the new structure. All of the unit chairs are middle-aged white guys. And in my most core department, there are literally two women and 13 white guys. The last meeting we had devolved into a dominance contest between several of them and our only POC not only getting shut down, but having to listen to each one who wanted to deliver their sermonette on why they (our POC) were wrong. It was awful, and the new chair was one of the sermonette givers. I went to him afterwards and explained why this was not ok and about how having a brown face in your department is not just so your dept. photo looks good, but because we have the benefit of diverse perspectives and perhaps, just perhaps, we should listen to them. So I probably will get the mini-raise again next year.

This has been frustrating me a great deal. I will never be able to go up for full, for reasons. So the only incentives the university can offer me are reassigned time and raises. I've gotten the mini-raise for the last 4 years (below the increase in the cost of living because you have to have "merit" to get above it, and apparently I don't). I applied for a sabbatical - for a GOOD reason* - and got turned down. We have less reassigned time to give now, as so much of it is taken by our booming administrative class. We also have less raise money because they make more by virtue of their jobs. So I feel like I am doing a solid job at the stuff I was hired to do (teaching, research, service) and yet I am losing out. So why am I working so hard?

*One of my new departments is a very tech-intertwined field that literally did not exist when I was trained, so I applied for the sabbatical so I could do a grad certificate in that field. You know, so I could actually know what I am teaching in a deep way.