Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make It Better for Others, and Transform the University

by Roberta Hawkins, Leslie Kern

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.

240 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2024

Reviews

[Alex Jonker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved everything about this book. There was so much validation for things I’ve already been feeling as a grad student and now in my first year in a tenure-track position, and sparked so many ideas for things I want to try to implement in my own teaching, mentorship, research, and the ways I think about my work. I particularly liked the actionable items at the end of each chapter that ranged from little things to implement immediately, to larger, more far reaching things to slowly chip away at. I find that often books like these leave the reader with only high-level changes that end up making you feel like one person can’t really make a difference, but this one was not like that. Suggestions were made for PhD students, contingent faculty, full-time faculty, and administrators alike. This book has left me feeling cautiously optimistic about my future in academia.

[Judd Street · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Higher Expectations" is a lovely, challenging, and encouraging book about rethinking our relationship with the university. Through a series of short, thematic chapters, Hawkins and Kern perceptively diagnose many of the ills with the modern university and engage in a series of reimagining exercises: suggesting alternative practices, encouraging reader reflection, and casting alternative futures (e.g., "what if instead of being X, it was Y...").

It is, at times, hard to take in and remember all of the different suggestions made. Because they cover so many different aspects of institutional life, and make a multitude of alternative suggestions for each theme, there are hundreds of suggestions present... which can be a little difficult to translate into action.

That said, it also means the book is an incredibly rich treasure trove of ideas. Many of these are likely ones that caring educators have considered already (e.g., ensure RAs are paid well; consider changing how you teach and assess to be more inclusive; etc). But, the refresher is well presented, and it's the kind of book that I could see going back to regularly for inspiration and reminders for rethinking parts of my practice that are becoming ossified.

If there was a critique to be made of the book, it might be about the realism (and potential contradictions) of implementing these ideas. Many of the recommendations, for instance, call for increased investment. I'm a big fan, for example, of suggestions they make around inclusivity when it comes to conference planning (e.g., ensure childcare is provided; plan robust and inclusive activities; prioritize accessibility in meaningful and comprehensive ways; provide significant scholarships for junior and marginalized scholars). These are phenomenal ideas and should be absolutely implemented. At the same time, though, these measures /do/ drive up the costs of organizing such meetings, which flows through to someone/somewhere, creating worsened accessibility problems (e.g., what was a $250 conference reg becomes $800, and suddenly is even less accessible).

I don't mean to suggest that these are bad suggestions. They're well worth doing. But, IMO, the challenge with personal action-based suggestions is that they often just push around the problem. It's great to say in the chapter on mental health, for example, that an example of protecting mental health could be reducing the number of peer reviews that you perform. But, in a very real way, that just pushes around the burden, resulting in editors soliciting more reviews from others to try to make up that emergent gap.

The solution, I'd argue, is likely bigger. If we're worried about the peer review burden, the answer is fewer publications and slower science. Maybe it's something like a /maximum/ number of publications per year per author, rather than a publish or perish culture. Imagine if we designed academia to allow people to only publish two articles with their name on per year: you publish the /best/ work and spend a year polishing it. Likewise, if you're worried about conference accessibility, maybe the answer is to wrest back control from for-profit convention organizing firms, and return to university-based meetings that take place in classrooms rather than glassy meeting halls.

So, on one hand, I recommend this book unabashedly. It's an absolutely tremendous resource of ways to be better by being good to each other in our academic world. At the same time, you should read it with some caution for its underlying individualistic approach to problem solving. While this kind of individual action can be more readily implemented, it does risk being a bit of 'deck chairs on the titanic' to the systematic changes we likely need. Hawkins and Kern flag this well, and are very cautious to put in appropriate contextual qualifiers... but we need both halves of the duality: systems are made up of individuals so individual action is powerful, but we also cannot retreat to the individual when we need system transformation.

[Hobbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

For context, I am going to be beginning my master's degree this fall. Overall, I found the book to be a helpful outline of what one can expect a career in academia to entail, although the book necessarily paints a rather dread image. Either way, having a greater understanding of the relationship of adjunct or teaching faculty to the university, the way performance is reviewed, the hiring process within universities, the problems with collaboration (or lack there of) between researchers, and so on was a nice glimpse into the black-box that can be the administrative side of academia. The content tended to skew more towards the issues faculty face, but there were still frequent valuable pieces of information that prospective or current students can likely pull from. Additionally, some of the advice given may not be equally applicable to the ways that research and teaching is done in all fields (at my naive estimate at least) but I think being exposed to the content is still very valuable irregardless of one's discipline. Different sections of the book will appeal to and seem important to different people, and the only way to find out which may benefit you is to grapple with it yourself. Additionally, I appreciated the referencing to other laboratories or research groups that are demonstrating some of the philosophies discussed here, it makes change seem more achievable and gives some good resources to draw from. I am glad I read this book, and will likely return to it sometime later in my academic journey, in the meantime, I am looking forward to starting a writing/reading group soon!

[Daniel Macgregor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of great advice to try at all levels of academia.