Why are academics so damn weak?
Tales of learned helplessness and a collective surrender of power
Yeeeaaaahhh, that got your attention.
I can feel your righteous indignation burning through my screen, but allow me to tease this out before your head explodes and your eyes start bleeding.
We all know that the university sector in Australia is a dumpster fire. Poor working conditions are the norm, restructures and downsizing left and right. You are rightly upset about this, as am I. But our collective response as academics has been so damn weak.
I saw your open letters to management. I saw your articles in the media and your complaints on social media. It’s cute, thinking that rational argument without collective resistance will halt the managerial bulldozer. How can such dedicated people be so passive. How can the most intelligent people in the country be so dumb?
I get it, you’re over-worked already and your shoulders ache from the weight of responsibility for research and teaching and admin. You are in retreat, shutting your office doors or working from home as much as possible. Or you are program administrators, holding your departments together by a thread.
Maybe you find it hard to trust the colleagues around you. I get that too. There’s plenty of class snobbery, misogyny and racial insensitivity floating around the campus ether, particularly in the upper echelons of the hierarchy.
You have invested many years to get where you are and you’re afraid of losing your job, scared of the uncertainty, terrified of having no money. There are real risks involved in standing up for yourself.
I’m here to tell you that there’s even greater risks that come with inaction and passivity. Workplace conditions will get worse. Your physical and mental health with deteriorate, and you will burn out. There is no risk-free option.
I’m not going to downplay the difficulties, but take it from someone who has moved on: If you lose your job or decide to quit, you’ll figure it out. Your fear keeps you compliant and your compliance cedes your power. Your fear makes you complicit in your own misery and it will combust you to a burned-out husk, like it did to me.
You’re better than this. I’m not kicking you when you’re down. I’m lighting a fire under you with some sympathetic tough love, to encourage you to start punching upwards for your own well-being and for the good of the higher education sector.
Learned helplessness
Your collective weakness is a product of learned helplessness.
You have fully bought into the competitive funding frameworks, the arbitrary metrics and the endless hustle productivity culture for the status of being an academic, all of which have isolated you. Then the organisational chaos hits and it dawns on you that your enthusiastic buy-in might not have been worth it.
The change process is announced, and X number of jobs need to be slashed. Then they pit you against each other through spill-n-fill downsizing, creating a frenzy of self-interested fear. The suits know what they’re doing when they explode their institutions into chaos and they’re succeeding at it too.
You are delusional in thinking that writing a thoughtfully argued article on the neoliberal university or a philosophical musing on the value of education is going to move the needle. If your article is not accompanied by organised resistance, your article means very little.
You’re fooling yourself if you think that a well-reasoned open letter pleading your case to management is going to shift their priorities. These are hardcore ideologues you’re dealing with, who are whole-heartedly committed to their agenda and uninterested in the rationality of your arguments.
You are an agent of your own disempowerment if you waste time in official consultation processes. The Suits set arbitrary deadlines for “consultation” on organisational restructures, knowing that academics will busy yourselves with the construction of thoughtfully argued submissions, begging and pleading for your positions and programs. Yet you follow management’s playbook of faux consultation like good little Oompa Loompas, failing to see that it’s a bait-n-switch, a total distraction. They want you consumed in self-interested busy-work, atomised and alone.
You are playing management’s game like lemmings following the Pied Piper over a cliff. Get organised, coordinate collectively and start changing the terms of the game. Re-learn how to exercise power and agency.
Get organised
Many academics do amazing work collaborating and co-creating with allies and marginalised groups in the community. This is important and courageous work. But it’s a shame that academics are willing to make social movement coalitions everywhere except in the workplace.
You don’t have to seek the overthrow of capitalism to recognise the logic of numbers in a workplace where power is highly asymmetrical. As individuals, you have no leverage. Management likes it when you act as individuals, because you have no power and they can dictate terms. They are dictating terms and let’s face it, you’re getting fucked.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) exists in the higher education sector for a reason. Yes, they have been sadly impotent in the face of restructure after restructure, but that’s because membership density and participation is too low to make an effective counterbalance against managerial power. Their leverage is directly proportional to your participation.
American labour organiser Jane McAlevey (2020) recommends that a union membership density of 90% of the workforce is the necessary “super-majority” required to execute effective industrial action and exert maximum pressure on management to win concessions. That’s the benchmark for effective resistance.
You don’t have to wait for the NTEU to establish your own rhizomic networks of care, trust and action. Formalise the angry conversations you’re already having with each other into regular check-ins for mutual care and strategising. Expand these discussions to include colleagues from other departments and from among professional staff. Use your social infrastructure in concert and collaboration with the union.
Management wants you atomised and feeling alone and powerless. Horizontal networking is the antidote, the infrastructure of resistance.
Impose costs
Management likes to position students as human shields for their bastardry, exploiting your ethics and devotion to teaching. Do not acquiesce to this. The students are not your family. If they don’t understand that your working conditions are their learning conditions, they are not worth your angst. Any harms experienced by students are a direct result of managerial policy and cuts, not the dedicated academics holding teaching programs together with sticky tape.
They exploit your belief that you are following a vocation, not working as employees. Wake up! You are not monks in a middle-ages monastery devoting your lives to God, you are wage labourers selling your labour for money, and the terms of that exchange are not weighted in your favour. Your leverage comes from organised collective action. “No” is a complete sentence to unreasonable demands, if you’re saying “no” as a collective.
Get organised and start imposing material costs on the terrorists in business suits that are destroying higher education. If they want to argue their restructures and change processes on the basis of cost, fight back in a language they can understand.
This includes a willingness to take strike action and other related measures during protected bargaining, like overtime bans, marking embargoes, and meeting boycotts. These measures are legal during workplace bargaining periods, as outlined under the Fair Work Act (2009).
Outside of protected bargaining, resistance measures that don’t fall foul of the Fair Work Act might include:
Collective refusal to undertake voluntary tasks. University Open Days as the prime example; unless they pay you full fare for your time on your weekend, don’t do it.
Work-to-rule campaigns in which academics strictly adhere to all university policies, procedures, and safety regulations, refusing to take shortcuts or expedite processes. You know the dodgy shortcuts and compromises you have to make in the aftermath of a downsizing when less people are around to do more work. Sometimes, university policies can be your friend.
Mass grievance filings or workplace audits. Occupational Health and Safety regulations can be your friend as well. When the workplace becomes unsafe, shut that thing down.
Build alliances with other stakeholders, including and student bodies and community organisations.
Target the high-paid consultancy firms that advise the university managerial elite on how to manage restructures.
One could even imagine wildcat strikes (unprotected industrial actions outside bargaining periods) in which all academics nation-wide strike at the same time. This would require maximum mass participation and union coordination, as it is prohibited under the Fair Work Act.
The question is, how much do you care about your workplace?
Lament
The only thing I despise more than your learned helplessness is my own, when I was in your shoes. If I had mustered the courage to stand up earlier, I might not have had to write this Substack.
I am the cautionary tale of inaction, not your role model. But let me point you in the direction of people who are. Shoutout to the staunch ones, the colleagues who have stood up. I see and appreciate you. You are the example I wish I had lived up to before my candle burned out and I had no more energy left to give.
Reflective lesson
Burnout recovery requires accessing one’s emotions to process the feeling of overwhelm. On the topic of this post in particular, there is much sadness and anger.
That’s where the runes come in. For each article Benny Got Burnout I pull a rune to help me reflect on the topic at hand from a Jungian archetypal perspective. I’ve been reading runes for nearly ten years, and the practice has brought me comfort and clarity during times of difficulty. My reflection below was developed in dialogue with The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum (1983).
Thurisaz (reversed) – The thorn; gateway
The archetypal energy of Thurisaz in its reversed position points to stagnation, missed opportunity, or paralysis in the face of risk. It can point to holding back when action is necessary or clinging to illusion, hesitating at the critical moment when decisive agency is required.
Thurisaz (reversed) mirrors the dynamic of learned helplessness in academia and the refusal or inability of academics to act in the face of threat. They remain paralysed, knowing the threat from management is real but convincing themselves that words alone or solitary acts will solidify their position. Not even the most generous interpretation of reality could countenance this as a winning strategy.
Thurisaz (reversed) speaks to the illusions of safety, warning against clinging to the fantasy that compliance buys protection. Inaction does not shield academics from harm, but it does compound their vulnerability. It also speaks to wasted energy, of efforts spent in ways that don’t change outcomes or alter the fundamental balance of workplace power. If intellectual activity creates the appearance of resistance but leaves power untouched, it isn’t actually that intelligent.
From the perspective of Thurisaz (reversed), my critique is therefore not just a lamentation on “weakness”, it is about the danger of failing to cross a critical threshold because of the fear of risk. But what is the greater risk: stepping into our power or meekly standing still? I answer this bluntly: inaction leads to disempowerment and ultimately burnout. Though risky, collective action is the only path to reclaiming agency and power in conditions of such disequilibrium.
A final thought: The thorn of Thurisaz (reversed) can wound you whether you act or not, but only through conscious, collective action can it be grasped as a weapon rather than endured as a wound.
Resources
Books and articles with practical advice on how to get organised in the university workplace:
Alvesson, Mats and Spicer, André. (2016). “Chapter 9: Stupidity Management and How to Counter It”. In The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work. London: Profile Books.
Berry, Joe and Worthen, Helena. (2021). Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education. London: Wildcat (Pluto Press).
Mcalevey, Jane and Ostertag, Bob. (2014). Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. London and New York: Verso Books.
McAlevey, Jane. (2016). No shortcuts: Organizing for power in the new gilded age. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAlevey, Jane. (2020). A Collective Bargain Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. New York: Harper Collins.
Morton, Rick (2025). “‘Mind-boggling stupidity’: The consultancy that captured universities”. The Saturday Paper. 14 June 2025.
Rhoades, Gary. (2025). Organizing Professionals: Academic Employees Negotiating a New Academy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.