Higher Expectations
How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University
Higher Expectations is a practical guide to navigating academia for people who want to improve their own day-to-day work lives and create better conditions for everyone. Universities are broken: they’re built on systems that are discriminatory, hierarchical, and individualistic. This hurts the people that work and learn in them and limits the potential for universities to contribute to a better world. But we can raise our expectations. Hawkins and Kern envision a university transformed by collaboration, care, equity, justice, and multiple knowledges. Drawing on real-world, international examples where people and institutions are already doing things in new ways, Higher Expectations offers concrete advice on how to make these transformations real. It covers many areas of academic life including course design, conferencing, administration, research teams, managing workloads and more. Designed for faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scholars, Higher Expectations delivers hope and practical actions you can take to start making change now. It is a must-have for everyone working in academia today.
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Praise
“Can a book that pulls no punches on the reality of working conditions in higher education be hopeful, even optimistic? Yes. In Higher Expectations, Hawkins and Kern deliver both a realistic assessment and a plethora of practical suggestions for change, ones that students, faculty, and staff at every stage of their careers can enact, individually or in community with others. By sharing examples from a broad range of institutions and disciplines, they demonstrate that transformation is not only possible but already underway. This generous book is a rallying cry for a better academia for all.”
– Jennifer Polk, From PhD to Life
“Higher Expectations offers both a manifesto of visionary change and a practical guide towards that change. Most universities are structured to valorize and embed individual pursuit, privilege, and competition for ever-scarce resources. This is not a natural or inevitable model—it is a distinctly constructed model, and thus, as Hawkins and Kern reveal, open to deconstruction and, importantly, reconstruction. Higher Expectations offers pathways to shift the often unexamined embedded hierarchical assumptions of individualized success and struggle. As Hawkins and Kern demonstrate, it is possible to not only imagine but to actually create ‘higher expectations’ based on support, teamwork, and community. It is a remarkable book.”
– Joni Seager, distinguished professor in Arts and Sciences, Bentley University and dean emerita, York University
“Academia, as wonderful an intellectual enterprise as it can be, is also at times extremely competitive, highly hierarchical, unwelcoming, and inhospitable. Hawkins and Kern’s Higher Expectations is a much-welcomed breath of fresh air, a respite from the hypercompetitive, gruelling academic environment. In this wonderful book, Hawkins and Kern offer a framework for how to rethink, rework, and rebuild academia using ethical core values and principles that guide our pragmatic choices in what are turbulent times for the higher education sector. Higher Expectations should be required reading for all academics.”
– Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, professor, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Mexico
“How can we visibilize and better structure our labour, create and sustain non-hierarchical solidarity in our writing, teaching, service, and adjacent activism? Hawkins and Kern offer much needed wisdom across these topics and more in Higher Expectations. I would have 100+ post-it notes in this book by now if I had had it in grad school.”
– Jack Gieseking, author of A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008
Contents
| Acknowledgements | |
| Raising Our Expectations | |
| Part 1: Collaborate | |
| Do Solitary Tasks Together | |
| Strengthen Research Collaborations and Labs | |
| Foster Teaching Communities | |
| Build Classroom Community | |
| Encourage Teamwork | |
| Take the Competition Out of Conferences | |
| Building Solidarity in a Union | |
| Part 2: Move Beyond Metrics | |
| Know the Time You Work | |
| Name Invisibilized Work | |
| Challenge Student Evaluations of Teaching | |
| Try Ungrading | |
| Survive Evaluation Processes | |
| Redefine Impact | |
| Address Career Disruptions | |
| Part 3: Dismantle Hierarchies | |
| Support Precariously Employed Workers | |
| Create Less-Hierarchical Labs and Research Teams | |
| Undermine Disciplinary Hierarchies | |
| Expand Roles for Non-Academic Knowledge Holders | |
| Give Respect to Service Work | |
| How to Use a Leadership Role for Good | |
| Dismantle Hierarchies that Encourage and Hide Abuse | |
| Part 4: Centre the Margins | |
| Transform Graduate Training | |
| Re-Envision Faculty Recruitment and Hiring | |
| Disruptive Pedagogy | |
| Rethink Course Design | |
| Push for Radical Policies | |
| Transform Citation Practices | |
| Use Your Privilege to Disrupt the Centre | |
| Part 5: Stay Whole | |
| Reshape Your Relationship with Work | |
| Take Back Control of Your Time Part 1: Saying No and Letting Go | |
| Take Back Control of Your Time Part 2: Managing Your Time Well | |
| Supporting Others to Stay Whole | |
| Leaving Academia | |
| Collective Rehumanizing | |
| A Higher Expectations Manifesto | |
| About the Authors | |
| Notes | |
| Index |
