Academic Service Is Intellectual Labor

Journals and academic presses are finding it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to secure peer reviewers. Compared to autocratic takeovers of entire state-university systems or the exploitation of adjunct labor, this is a minor problem in the catalog of crises currently facing higher education. But when academics are unable to take on service work en masse, we should take note. Part of the issue is that service labor is distributed wildly inequitably in our profession. But fair redistribution is only the first step of the solution. To tackle the causes of this problem, we need to radically rethink the terms of service. We need to make service visible as intellectual labor.

“Service” in academe has long been synonymous with administrative tasks: reading applications, sitting on committees, advising students, or chairing the departments or groups that do all of this work. Campus-level positions (e.g., committees, chairs) are typically limited to tenure-track faculty, placing an increasing burden on a shrinking pool, while informal service (e.g., mentoring students or taking on ad hoc departmental responsibilities) regularly falls to those who are viewed as most accessible — often contingent or early-career faculty, as well as mid-career faculty pegged as “nurturing.” Frequently considered busywork, this is traditionally the disparaged portion of the faculty workload, ranking far beneath research and teaching.

Yet the “Service” section on a CV also includes peer and tenure review, editing, mentoring, hiring, curriculum development, labor organizing, and sitting on boards of national journals and organizations — none of which are simply bureaucratic tasks that fill file cabinets. We lump these things together under the heading “Service” in part because our profession maintains an extraordinarily narrow notion of the work that counts as intellectual. Disciplines in which single-author publications are the norm have begun branching out to include collaborative work, and hiring and promotion committees are starting to count public-facing and digital projects as scholarly products. But the academy still broadly assumes that intellectual work necessarily results in a publication of some kind. Everything that is not research or teaching — both considered properly intellectual — is then categorized by the catchall, service.

Despite this, much of the work we count as service is labor that directly supports the intellectual growth of our disciplines. To offer just one example: consider Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, a collaboration-focused online resource that aims to “reimagine how to teach Victorian studies through a positive, race-conscious lens.” Its open-peer-review process and shared syllabus bank reflect the movement across literary and historical fields to decolonize reading lists and reshape pedagogy. While its publication as a digital humanities project might count as intellectual work for its creators, the contributors of syllabi and their peer reviewers are doing what their institutions are likely to label “service.” Moreover, faculty members who wish to put this material to use will depend upon significant labor from multiple people: for every new course proposed on a campus, someone must fill out forms for approval and registration entities, sit on committees that review such proposals, and submit catalog-change information. While all of that “service” work is generally seen as simply administrative, it is in fact vital to the intellectual work of rethinking the field of Victorian studies.

The denigration of service as the opposite of intellectual labor has led to the uneven distribution of service work. Department chairs or campus organizers who have the task of assigning it may avoid asking those with the most established publishing records to take on service, deeming them too busy with their “important” work. The result: Their early-career colleagues take on additional labor. Thinking of service as “care work” (what Liz Mayo has described as “activities that are routinely categorized as an index to one’s unselfishness, moral goodness, and dedication to students”) means it falls more often to faculty members of color, queer or disabled scholars, working-class academics, and women — many of whom self-identify in ways that make vulnerable students feel comfortable reaching out. Thinking of service as a means of increasing the representation of underrepresented groups on a given campus often means that the same few faculty members are asked to serve over and over on committees.

The way service is distributed leads to a vicious cycle: Those who are assigned high service burdens lose so much research and writing time that they become perceived as “better at” service work than at research work. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts aimed at recruitment ironically may exacerbate these problems, as faculty members from minoritized groups are more likely to be at earlier career stages and thus feel least able to say no when asked to take on yet another committee assignment or advisee.

We ought to be asking ourselves: Whose work flourishes as a result of such disparities? And in asking that question, we must register the problem inherent in defining “work” exclusively as research and writing.

Lan Dong, a professor of English and interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Illinois at Springfield, reported at a recent MLA panel that 44 percent of the faculty at her institution are women, but they make up more than 75 percent of each of the heavy-workload committees, like the curriculum or tenure-and-promotion committees. Women also chair 100 percent of these committees. An editor at a major university press told me this winter that he has seen such a drop in submissions, and of completion of projects already accepted, by female academics since the advent of Covid-19 that he is starting to become anxious about potential public perceptions that his list is biased in favor of male authors. He attributes the drop to the well-documented fact that women have borne a dramatically higher proportion of the burden of increased caretaking — both on campus and at home — created by the pandemic.

Not incidentally, 21 of the 23 people in the audience for the MLA session at which Dong offered her distressing statistics — a session entitled “Addressing Women’s Invisible Labor in the Academy” — were women. Panels like these have become spaces for commiseration, which those with a certain privilege may choose simply to ignore.

Admittedly, some of the work we label “service” is the sort of administrative labor that must remain invisible. Department chairs and tenure committees take on student and personnel issues that legally require confidentiality, for example. Other work we label “service” is bureaucratic — forms, scheduling, email — and deeply unsexy but necessary to keep a department functioning. But the invisibility of such functions contributes to the ease with which academe treats all service work as necessarily invisible and thus implicitly minor.

We must say aloud, too, that the amount of service work that needs doing on campuses has increased exponentially as we seek to offer better support to diverse student needs (a laudable goal) and to assess programs to satisfy, for example, legislative fiats (a disastrous one). Drastic casualization of the academic labor force into contract employees — which obviously exploits many of our colleagues for their teaching labor — means there are far fewer people among whom to spread the tasks that faculty handbooks decree must be performed by tenure-track faculty.

And then there is the small portion of people who purposefully project incompetence. You know them. The ones who get away with never answering student emails because students understand them to be “brilliant and too busy.” They cultivate an image of being “not good” at service work, and thereby further burden others who pick up their slack.

As with many of the problems in academe, a proper fix requires hiring a lot more faculty into stable positions with benefits. More immediately within our control, we can and should push back against disaggregating service from what has long been considered our “real work.” How? By rethinking service as an intellectually valuable form of academic good citizenship, and then by insisting that all faculty members contribute equally as citizens of their campuses.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do, whether as faculty or administrators, is to make this labor more visible. As individuals, we should think capaciously about how we work toward the common good of our departments, institutions, and the profession, and record that work in specific terms of its impact as we fill out our annual reports, update our CVs, or provide documentation to those who review us. As chairs of committees, or whenever superintending other people’s service work, we should write short acknowledgment emails to committee members at the end of the year, copying bosses (department chairs, deans, provosts), with clear details of the kind and scope of the work performed and its value. Shelley C. Lowe, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, recently announced that the NEH is planning to do this for everyone who serves on a review panel for their grant applications. If the NEH can do it, so can we.

Department chairs should actively work to make the efforts of their colleagues visible to the rest of the department. This might include:

• having public roll calls of continuing committee positions before assigning people to new tasks so that everyone knows what everyone else has been doing;
  
• creating clear rotations for task assignments, rather than asking for volunteers, to ensure equitable division of labor;
  
• fostering a department culture of collaboration, in which faculty members routinely bring to meetings examples of their own innovations derived from their campus service responsibilities, to make the labor more visible and its outcomes more accessible;
  
• scheduling annual check-ins with individual faculty members about their research agendas, teaching, and service loads to help them set goals and aid chairs in balancing people’s workloads.

This last might seem like an enormous ask for already-overburdened chairs. However, it could be folded into existing structures — such as conversations that follow annual teaching observations for untenured faculty members — to maximize their benefit. And it’s important enough to warrant building new (time-efficient) structures as well: Chairs could host a half-day mentoring session for mid-career faculty members, or a department meeting could be devoted to mapping everyone’s service obligations to the campus, their disciplinary organizations, or community entities. All of the above would also go a long way toward demystifying the trajectory of “success” for faculty and thereby help ensure everyone has equal access to it. Armed with actual data about the service loads of faculty members, chairs would also be in a better position to advocate to deans and provosts on behalf of faculty who routinely face overloads.

Many campuses are already revising the language in their faculty handbook about how public-facing and digital scholarship count toward tenure and promotion. Provosts, deans, and other campus leaders ought to be spearheading similarly deep conversations about what “service” is, how it counts, and whether it is adequately compensated, including for department chairs. And if we are among the shrinking minority of privileged academics who are protected by tenure, we must recognize that sometimes we need to take on service positions precisely to push back against, or help refine, administrative programs.

As that last point hints, I am not naïve enough to suggest that all institutional structures and administrators necessarily operate with the best interests of faculty in mind. Higher education has faced decades of austerity measures that treat education as a matter of profit and loss, rather than as a public good with intrinsic value. In the face of aggressive legislative and trustee efforts to control curriculum and hiring decisions, cynicism about institutional desire to see faculty members thrive is wholly justified. But if we want the academy to change, we need to recognize that we are the academy. And we need to act in ways that support the changes we would like to see.

When we discount service as secondary work, and then unevenly burden some people with more of it, we punish the good citizens without whom the institution cannot function. In the worst cases, we implicitly demand that some of our colleagues — often those who are most disenfranchised, underrepresented, or otherwise exploited — martyr themselves with “service” in order to free others to pursue work that is considered more intellectual. Increased visibility and an increased sense of the value of service work will not stem the tide of casualized labor or growing student needs. But a shared vocabulary for articulating the intellectual stakes of this labor, labor that we ought to conceptualize as institutional citizenship, could help distribute the workload more evenly and resist some of the more insidious hierarchies of academe in the process.