Academic success should not depend on cultivating strategic incompetence

Some of the advice for early-career researchers that I have read circulating on X – and, indeed, which I have received myself – is that to be perceived as a successful academic you must remain aloof from the academic housekeeping that keeps institutions ticking over.

This advice can be distilled into the following. Either you must take it upon yourself to perfect the art of saying no or you must enact a kind of “strategic incompetence” or “strategic helplessness”, replying slowly to emails if you reply at all or professing ignorance about organisational labour such as booking rooms or ordering catering. In both cases, the hope is that you will be relieved of those responsibilities and free to focus on tasks you find more compelling.

This latter kind of strategic ineffectiveness needs to be carefully cultivated: you must at once be considered ineligible for tasks like minute-taking, student recruitment talks or sitting on that committee, yet be seen as magisterial in your wielding of illustrious academic networks and the production of top-tier scholarship. In other words, you must be too busy, too important, too high-flying for academic housekeeping, as opposed to being too disorganised, too unreliable or too abrasive to navigate group settings.

This advice is well meaning. It hopes to free the women, people of colour and other minority-identity academics who overwhelmingly enact this labour to spend more time on research opportunities, which are much more likely to earn them permanence or promotion. It does, however, leave us with a tricky question: who should be doing this vital work?

Some may argue that this is precisely the kind of work that graduate students and early-career researchers should be doing – they need to cut their teeth, their relatively commitment-free lifestyles enable more flexibility, and this is one way in which they can get their faces and names known in their immediate academic communities. But this view belies the diverse reality of early-career researchers, many of whom are parents or have other caring responsibilities, and many of whose positions are precarious.

Moreover, this view denigrates academic housekeeping as work that people can do without training or guidance, despite many of its tasks – such as minute-taking – representing a legal requirement and being subject to specific standards.

Worst of all, when – as it almost always is – it is articulated by senior academics, this mindset propagates the kind of dogged individualism that proclaims that it is all right if someone else, someone lesser, is doing this work, as long as it is not me. In this way, the academic community becomes divided into two tiers: the glittering superstar researchers, and the “helpy helpers” who service them.

Hence, those advising us to cultivate strategic incompetence perpetuate precisely the kind of inequalities they claim to be motivated to dispel. We end up playing the game by the rules of those winning it, but the flawed rules remain unreformed.

There have been some useful proposals for practical means of redressing the balance. Examples include encouraging meeting chairs to select a new minute-taker at each meeting, or taking questions from more junior members and minority identities in a group setting before those who are more senior in order to foster greater participation. These are good suggestions, but I think that what is needed is a more ambitious cultural change that acknowledges the necessity of this academic housekeeping and adequately recompenses people for doing it, in terms of both payment and professional recognition.

After all, the skills required for good academic housekeeping are very useful ones. In my experience, the individuals doing it are also those who are cultivating networks and running projects that put those skills to use within a research context. These bastions of good practice know how to communicate effectively and how to respect the working boundaries of their colleagues. They know how to keep good records and work collectively and collaboratively so that all members of the team shine.

They are also the academics that students remember; they are the ones that spoke at the open day the student attended, who informally and formally mentored them, and who developed spaces such as reading groups where students could explore their interests.

The issue of academic housekeeping recognition is tied up with the rampant over-work and under-payment prevalent in academia. The more universities are commercialised and evaluated according to set metrics, the less attention is afforded to important but amorphous values like “working culture”, “sense of belonging” and “sense of identity”.

If an individual is forced to choose between conducting career-progressing research and teaching or doing the unrecognised housekeeping, they will, of course, choose the former – if they can. But I like to imagine an academic culture in which no choice needs to be made because their symbiotic relationship is recognised.

Academic housekeepers should not be relegated to the sidelines, but acknowledged as the champions of good practice that they are – and rewarded commensurately.

Eleanor Baker is English subject lead and tutor for the Astrophoria Foundation Year at the University of Oxford.