Exit, voice and the university

So here we are again, roughly a year since my last Substack, which was also about the industrial action in UK Higher Education. This is itself shows that little progress has been made - in fact far from achieving what we were asking for, things have mostly got markedly worse. Academic pay, already stagnating for well over decade, took a real terms hammering over the last year, just like most other workers, especially in the public sector. The pensions situation has got theoretically better, since the inflation that has eroded our salaries has paradoxically dramatically improved the financial position of our pension fund, the USS. But so far there is no clear commitment from our employers to reverse the cuts in future pensions entitlements they cynically forced through, exploiting the financial chaos of the early stages of the Covid pandemic. And I have yet to see any big changes in gender equality or precarious employment (although I guess I might be less likely to notice).

So why are we still on strike? What have we been doing wrong?

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At the risk of offending dear colleagues, the biggest issue we face is the relatively patchy adhesion to strike action. Academics work from home a lot and can easily reschedule many activities, so imposing real costs on our employers through concerted action faces many challenges. And even with activities that are much harder to work around - notably scheduled in-person teaching - there are large numbers of colleagues crossing picket lines, undermining the impact of the action others are taking. Sure, campuses are quiet on strike days, but a lot of activities are going ahead as planned. Meanwhile, here is a picture I took in Euston station, around 10am, on the first day of the UCU action:

Now *that* is a strike.

Why are academics so reluctant to fight together to improve things? One of the problems, I fear, is that academics are too smart for their own good. Striking is a classic collective action problem: whatever is achieved by the strike is a collective good, from which none of us can be excluded, whether or not we make a contribution to it. Any economist will tell you that the dominant strategy for any individual, in this scenario, is to ‘defect’ - mind your own business, you come out winning whatever happens. No wonder I have yet to see any economists on the picket line.

When it comes to understanding collective action, we need to go back to the classics. The ‘free rider’ problem was outlined by Mancur Olson back in 1965, in his book The Logic of Collective Action. The basic insight, that there was no robust ‘selective’ or individual incentive to take part in the provision of collective goods, has powerful applications across the social sciences, but there is one big problem: it fails to explain how in fact, collective action dilemmas are consistently overcome in social and political life. We vote, we join trade unions, we pay our taxes - well, most of us, Nadhim Zahawi - we abide by a range of informal but important social norms. We do this all the time. All Olson could really tell us is why some of the time we fail to act together, but he did a poor job of explaining why we often do.

Another classic, Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty, brings us closer to an answer. In short, Hirschman distinguishes between two distinct kinds of response to a collective dilemma: exit, in other words, exercising the individual option to seek a better outcome for oneself outside the organization or group, and voice, an expression of protest from within an organization or group to attempt to steer things in a better direction. The first is an individual choice, the second a collective one. What determines why people sometimes choose voice over exit? On this Hirschman is less clear, but loyalty - a commitment to the organization above and beyond whatever individual benefit one might get out of it, is a key condition. Loyalty pushes us to try and change things rather than simply wash our hands and leave. However it is also what makes it less likely that voice, rather than exit, might work. Like a football fan faced with an exploitative club ownership, too much loyalty without a credible threat of exit makes voice less effective.

Hirschman’s framework, like Olson’s, gives few indications of why some groups are better at collective action than others. But it does present a paradox - most academics have few exit options, because academic careers are an investment in very specific skills which are not always easily transferable outside. Worse, the choice to be an academic is in itself an expression of deep commitment to a life of intellectual pursuits almost regardless of the material benefits (not to overstate it, but most of us could earn as much or more doing something else, in some cases a lot more). So in the absence of exit options, voice - the last resort of the forcibly loyal - should be the default response to a problem. Yet many academics ‘exit’ from the ‘voice’ option - they leave the voicing to a small minority who are barely able to carry the burden. This does not make sense - if you are stuck in a profession, to neither exit nor voice is simply to resign oneself to a lifetime of exploitation. So why do so many opt to do nothing?

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this one out. One answer is that academics are disproportionately drawn from high income, high education backgrounds, and/or are disproportionately beneficiaries of what is inelegantly described as ‘assortative mating’. In other words, for many academics their university salaries and associated benefits are not the sole source of material security: an inheritance here or there, a well-paid spouse, and the travails of academic life look a little more tolerable. In fact, it could even be seen as a kind of almost monastic choice to forego material excess, in the knowledge that a comfortable lifestyle (or at least a nice house) is in any case assured.

But this doesn’t work for many. Another answer points in quite the opposite direction: academia has become such a precarious, cut-throat business that an individualistic devil take the hindmost attitude is a requirement for survival. Solidarity is a luxury the hard-pressed and precarious academic under-class cannot afford. In an academic world where stable employment is increasingly out of reach, the last thing a young scholar needs is to risk a black mark against their name for either their activism, or for simply disrupting the operations of their academic superiors. Best keep your head down.

These explanations focus on the supply-side: who is up for it? Who has the resources? But there is also the question of what the payoff is. This differs quite a bit across the profession. For early career scholars the answer is pretty obvious: what kind of academic life can they aspire to have? If you want to do this job, you want it because of some kind of passion for learning. If you have committed a decade or more of your best years to become an academic, you don’t want to live a life of precarity and poverty, and you certainly don’t want to imagine that you’ll never be able to afford to have the family or the home you want, or to retire at a reasonable age. If that’s not going to happen, you either fight for it or give up and do something else.

For a sadly no longer even mid-career, tenured talking head like me, the payoffs are more limited. I’ve got three decades of pensions contributions behind me and enjoyed permanent contracts the whole time. What do I get out of striking? To me the answer is obvious: I’m sick of the overwork and bureaucratic burdens that have made my dream job, well, hardly a nightmare, but unnecessarily, needlessly, annoying and exhausting. I want to write, mentor, engage. I don’t want to fill in forms and sit in committee meetings. But it’s hardly existential for me. It’s more a matter of principle. That must be the reason why I’m usually the oldest person on the picket line.

Finally, the aesthetics of strike action must have something to do with the way people react. For those with some kind of left-leaning identity, the marches, the drums and whistles, the banners and chanting, is all part of the fun. I suspect that for many academics, it’s silly and undignified. We’re not French, for God’s sake! More seriously, UCU’s leadership is way to the left of the majority of academics, despite what the Daily Telegraph seems to believe. Most academics are instinctively fairly conservative. They don’t vote Conservative because the modern day Tory party is an anti-intellectual ragbag of opportunists, racists and snobs. But we are not radical by any stretch of the imagination. So activism should probably focus on the stuff we can all agree on: good employment conditions and a fair deal on pay and pensions. Forget the other stuff which either polarises or leaves the majority indifferent.

In the end though, it all comes back to loyalty. Loyalty to the profession means accepting the interests of the collective come before the interests of the individual. We can all whine about how UCU did this or that thing that p*ssed us off, or failed to do whatever thing we thought was important. If you’re in a union, you have to go with the majority view, and if you don’t like it, get involved and try to change it. Yes, that’s costly and that’s why most of us don’t do it - it’s hard work, it brings no personal advantage, often the opposite, and if it succeeds you share the rewards with everyone else. But if some people take on the responsibility, the rest of us have to make our contribution. If you’re free-riding on the activist minority, you shouldn’t complain if you don’t get your way on union policy and strategy. Sadly, politics - in the workplace but also more broadly - seems increasingly to revolve around the ethics of individual responses to issues, rather than acting as a collective to shift policy in the right direction. If you can’t exit and don’t use your voice, you’re going to lose.

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