Toxic Academic Cultures and the Faculty They Suffocate

Certain variables poison an academic context and, if that context refuses to accommodate change, undermine its future. Among them:

• politics and politically oriented motives;
• negative competition and insecurity;
• indoctrination without formal, macro-level knowledge and know-how;
• centralising one's own thoughts, and being stuck in one place for years believing that the university culture one learnt is the only approach that exists in academia.

Academic contexts and practices change continually, and so do the needs around them: student profiles and needs, workplace needs, and other extra-academic demands. If none of this is accommodated, new faculty, the fresh blood in the system, will find it hard, even impossible, to breathe and unleash their potential.

A Failure of Leadership

That kind of work atmosphere reflects a lack of leadership. It stresses errors, punitive methods, unnecessary warnings and constant policing. It runs a factory model of shifts, as if everybody should imitate the administrators' nine-to-five, when faculty in academia do not need to abide by that pattern. Administrators are paid additional stipends or fees to do so; faculty are not.

Such work cultures do everything they can to "keep faculty busy", to the point of exploiting them. Where else on earth, in the GCC region or beyond, do faculty do more than two, or at most three, invigilation shifts? Usually administrative clerks handle invigilation, or faculty and others are paid to do it.