Why do schools and universities have such toxic workplace cultures?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Pre-amble: I’ve worked in around education and corporate training for ~22 years. I have two post-graduate degrees in education (and almost a doctoral degree, long story…), and have worked in state secondaries, independent boarding schools, universities, technical colleges and private training companies in three continents. I’m not saying I know everything, but I’ve been around…

My thesis goes thusly…

While a generalisation, and plenty of exceptions abound, schools and universities have pathologically awful workplace cultures. As soon as you cross the bridge into professional/corporate training provision, however, these issues seem to vanish.

Some details:

1. Tribalism, favouritism and cliques. While hardly unique to education, the degree to which tribalism exists in educational contexts is unrivalled. Academic departments can loathe each other for generations. This extends to non-academic ‘support departments’ too - it would surprise no-one to learn that Transport hasn’t been on speaking terms with Catering since 2016, for example.

2. Poor management & leadership. Bullying, narcissism, ‘holier-than-tho’ syndrome, ‘do as I say, not as I do’, gaslighting & scapegoating are standard managerial practice.

3. Inflated egos and face-saving. No-one can ever admit that they are wrong. Even when you have clearly made a mistake, you are culturally obliged to tie yourself (and everyone else) in knots to make out how this is, somehow, someone else’s fault. With teachers, especially, the work that they do is of earth-shattering importance, and anything which prevents them from doing it precisely as they want it is a moral crime against God.

(I often see teachers pedestalised as selfless, angelic martyrs upon whom society cannot possibly lavish enough praise. To those who idolise teachers, I simply invoke you to spend some time working with them.)

However, once out of the fog of ‘education’, and into the clear blue skies of professional training, things all-of-a-sudden get a lot brighter. This isn’t to say that all training companies are 100% rosy all the time, but aren’t all by default suffocatingly toxic (which virtually all educational organisations are).

Por quoi?

The obvious difference between the two is that education is mostly the business of adults teaching children, or adults teaching young-adults.There is a clear status and power differential between those doing the teaching and those being taught. This is no-where near as clear in professional training (where it is usually adults-on-adults, with those on the receiving end often possessing more power and status than those on the giving end). So perhaps status has something to do with it.

A while ago I read a theory that had to do with sex/gender; namely that educational establishments are culturally feminine/effeminate. Before I go any further with this theory (which was nonsensical and misogynistic), though, I should add that secondary schools and universities are pretty evenly-spread in terms of gender balance - they don’t seem particularly culturally skewed in terms of one gender or the other. So I’m ruling this one out.

Perhaps it has to do with the kinds of people who choose to work there in the first place. Is there some truth to the adage that Those Who Can, Do, and Those Who Can’t, Teach? Education in academia is an extreme example of where bad apples go to rot (educational theory is one of the relatively few refuges in the social sciences where Marxists can quite happily and publicly call for the uprising of the proletariat and the abolition of capitalism and be deferentially cited for doing so). Every adult who has ever attended school will have a list of teachers they remember who, in the cold light of objective reflection, should not have been entrusted to vote, procreate or operate heavy machinery - much less educate children.

Or is it something about the workplace environment itself? As any parent will testify, managing children is hard. Managing large groups of them, when you are vastly outnumbered, and most of them don’t want to be there, is epically difficult. Maybe it is the stress of the job that makes people this way.

I know, I know. Some teachers, some headteachers, and some schools are great, and many of the problems I describe apply just as much to other industries, etc… As aforementioned, this is a gross generalisation with an acknowledgement that there are exceptions. However, I stand by my thesis there is, broadly, something seriously wrong with workplace culture in education - and I welcome any [humble] opinions as to why that might be…

2

This pings my bullshit meter. Since when, for example, have those major professional-training institutions known as law schools and medical schools been renowned for the positivity and frictionlessness of their institutional culture?

Or are you just comparing academic institutions in general, including law and medical schools, with a different kind of “training companies”? Do you mean businesses that do, for instance, skilled-trades training? Scuba diving certification programs? Pilot training? Or what? (And if you think that there isn’t significant sexist and sometimes racist harassment in the skilled-trades professional training industry, for example, you definitely need to fight your ignorance about that.)

You’re also, as you yourself noted, comparing the world of universal compulsory childhood education with the industry of instruction for adult professional-training students who have chosen to be there and who tend to have a lot of personal investment riding on their success. That right there is such an apples-and-oranges comparison that I don’t see how you can draw any justified conclusions from it.

So, my personal humble opinion is that the OP’s thesis is a poorly thought out exercise in confirmation bias stemming from personal experience that’s not necessarily indicative of general trends or consistent with the hypotheses proposed to explain it, and I would advise scrapping it and starting over.

3

Having worked for a university for 12 years, I can definitely attest to some things that the OP speaks of. I think part of it is that 1) academia really puffs people up, and so people who are managers/superiors in academia have a particularly inflated view of their minds, and also 2) people who work in universities are steeped in “justice/goodness/betterment-of-humanity” and hence think they’ve put in their righteous coins and are justified in behaving like assholes a bit more than usual. Kind of like Christians who leave church, feel they’ve done their pious duty, and hence are assholes to the restaurant staff at lunch.

4

In the UK at least my wife will attest to a lot of what the OP suggests.

She worked in industry for 20 years and moved to teaching, young people mainly. “toxic and destructive” are exactly the descriptors she was using when she decided to quit teaching in institutions and moved to the private sector. At the same time she was doing that I was delivering training and education to professionals in industry and not seeing the same issues she did.

When comparing woes (which of course we did) we both noted the same power differential that the OP did. In the educational institution there seemed to be a lot of people who rose to positions of power that really did not belong there. In industry, as a eductional resource you are often in a room with people who are at least your equal or outrank you and will sniff out and act on incompetence if they see it. You don’t get to enable toxic practices in the first place.

She is still in contact with many people from both her previous careers and guess which group is always full of dreadful workplace stories?

5

I’ve certainly seen this in action, particularly amongst those in the social science/humanities crowds. However, I haven’t completely unraveled the rationale behind it all - since when does having a Ph.D in the socioeconomics of milk maids in 18th century France entitle you to any claim of general moral and intellectual superiority? Especially when you are surrounded by others who are just as equally qualified?

No doubt that in schools and colleges people are promoted to positions of authority unmeritocratically. I think and presume that this is enabled (nay encouraged) by the fact that the end clients - the children - are not the ones paying for the service (and are, in any case, not entirely qualified to make judgements on who should best be promoted to the Head of English Department). While in a SCUBA diving school, say, if an instructor is awful, the trainees will make a fuss straight away (and the owner will be obliged to act on the issue immediately) - said instructor is highly unlikely to be promoted. In schools, no such [direct] feedback loop exists.

However, in universities, we are talking about adults who have chosen to study a specific discipline, and who paying (handsomely) to do so. You would think, then, that universities would be better behaved and run than schools are, because they are more likely to held to account by their client base. Yet, they don’t appear to be…

6

The same problems abound in private industry also. However, in private industry if they negatively affect the bottom line a cleansing will occur either by deliberate actions of management or failure of the business. In the public sector the correlation between an ambiguously defined concept of a bottom line and the toxic behavior is not readily distinguished. We can count most private schools as public sector because they are largely funded by donations and public money.

7

“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” Raymond Stantz, PhD

8

A private school I worked at for several years was funded mostly by fee-paying parents (although it also had donations as a meaningful ‘top up’). I think it got away with its awfulness by the parents being too far away to notice the institutional rot (and the children being too ignorant or disempowered to notice or do anything about it). If parents had seen the staff meetings we’d had, actually observed some of the lessons and read through some of our communications from management, I suspect they’d (quite rightly) be loudly asking what on earth they’re supposed to be paying for.

9

I really can’t speak to K-12 education (which is a different sort of culture that attracts a different personality type), but I think there are a few specific factors that make this a common, though by no means universal, phenomenon at the university level:

  1. It’s fairly easy for a smart person who doesn’t play well with others to get a PhD. So easy that graduate programs often become refuges for such types. It’s not as easy for such a person (or anyone, really) to get an academic job, but it does happen regularly, especially if they’re good at masking the doesn’t-play-well with others cues for the relatively short duration of an on-campus job interview.

  2. Once people have been hired, there’s often a strong culture against pushing them out, even at the point where they theoretically could be (pre-tenure). (I know of two people hired at my institution who had deeply toxic, program-killing levels of personal dysfunction. One of them wasn’t tenured, but only because their department took the nuclear step of voting to end the major in the subfield they were hired to teach. The other one was, and was eventually persuaded to take early retirement in exchange for a generous amount of cash. This person had a vindictive temperament and was a member of an underrepresented group with a legitimate history of discrimination at this institution. They were also genuinely incompetent and genuinely unable to get along with anybody.)

  3. Lots of people who make acceptable professors make awful chairs / deans. It’s a different set of skills, and a bad person in one of those positions can set a bad tone for an entire program. It’s not easy to tell who will be competent and who won’t until after they’ve become entrenched in the position, by which time it’s too late (nobody really wanted the job to begin with, and especially, nobody wants to be the chair after the awful chair).

Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle there are so many non-dysfunctional academic departments and programs out there, now that I think of it.

10

From Twitter:

I like the theory that elite higher ed divides into the kids who are good at group projects, who become miserable consultants, and the kids who hate group projects, who become miserable doctoral students https://t.co/KgD0vljQ66

— Jake Anbinder (@JakeAnbinder) September 5, 2022
11

I worked at a college for 25 years and rarely saw any of that.

12

ETA: partly ninja’ed in the last 20 minutes.

IANA educator in any way. I am however a former successful business starter / owner / manager, and have worked various roles in Fortune 500 corps and medium-sized for-profit and non-profit orgs as well. And I have a (mostly unused) MBA from a real school earned in residence.

I’ll suggest that any organization that primarily promotes shop floor workers to management gets incompetent unskilled management raised in a defective culture which they then perpetuate. Largely because they lack the managerial awareness and skills to do anything but perpetuate it. As well, in such an organization, the process of selecting which workers to promote to management is inherently inbred, which produces additional social forces in favor of perpetuation.

While such a culture might by happenstance be just and wonderful, there are many, many more ways for cultures to be bad. As Tolstoy famously had Anna Karenina say:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Getting it the right way is hard, wheras most of the entropy and friction leads towards a wrong way.

Conversely, an organization that hires its management as management professionals from outside to run the asylum of shop floor workers has the hope of being competent and effective. That hope is no guarantee; toxic MBAs are the butt of endless cynical stories for a reason. But the possibility at least exists that the managers have in fact learned how to manage in a non-toxic fashion and can mold and maintain a productive culture. In some ways them being unqualified to do the shop floor work frees them to have a better, more holistic view of the business of business and the business of management.


In my own industry, the pilots who hold managerial positions are infamous for being terribly incompetent managers; either utterly ineffectual or forever getting off on power trips. The doctors who become hospital administrators are likewise famous for managerially clueless power-tripping. Few journeymen lawyers think the partner tier at their company are great managers. etc.


I’ll also echo the comments of others above that our OP well understands the faults of his own industry but is necessarily pretty clueless about the faults of other industries. And so his perception has a lot of “grass is greener in the other pastures” effect to it.


I'll also echo the comment that government and academia (and many non-academic non-profits) have much more ability to tolerate failed cultures producing failed results than does private for-profit business. The market will (eventually) kill failed cultures in the for-profit world. Not so much elsewhere.
13

Good point. I have never heard of a headteacher who hadn’t worked their way up from the ‘shop floor’ as a teacher. To even consider such a thing would be considered heresy.

Guilty!

Although I can speak with at least a little authority when it comes to professional training, which was the reason to include it as a point of comparison in the OP. The gist was, to auto-paraphrase, that in both education and professional training the service and means of delivery is in essence pretty similar. However, one set of contexts (schools and universities) has a markedly more pathologically toxic work culture than the other. And, when we consider the monumental role that schools and universities play in society and culture, you’d think this is something we should all be at least a little concerned about.

14

That’s a very interesting perspective. I have heard literally the opposite from a business academic, a Brit commenting on the history of American business practice. He ascribed some of the distresses of modern American industry to its movement away from promoting shop floor people into management and the professionalization of managerial skills as embodied by the MBA. In his opinion the creation of the academic MBA track, while a completely logical development, led to a disjuncture between knowing how a specific industry works in practical reality and how generalized companies works in a generic and theoretical way. Often, though certainly not always, with less effective results.

I’m not going to outright agree with that take (it is appeals to authority all the way down), but I sorta sympathize with it. In my own very parochial experience (involving engineers rather than MBAs running things), I have seen outsiders with “fresh perspectives” but no specific industry background repeatedly screw the pooch.

15

My friends in academia don’t seem to report any more toxic work culture than my wife and I have experienced in the commercial world. Or indeed as much as doctors and lawyers in our circle report. If anything the university faculty seem to have better work/life balance and more collegial relationships at work than the rest of us.

Now when I was a grad student, I thought the culture was toxic. But that was way back when female grad students were “fair game” for male professors (there were no female professors in our department). And just generally there was no accountability either in the “me too” front or in any other form of discrimination/hostility. Not to mention professors passing off students’ work as their own. I’m hoping things have improved in the 30+ years since. Or maybe all my friends are now in the exploiter class, rather than exploited :slight_smile:

16

Reminds me of the conflicting advice I heard from two ‘captains of industry’ as a young man. The first explained to me how a good worker always has a clean desk. A clean desk is a sign of an organized mind. A person with clean desk has all their materials and tools put away in their proper place easy to find. To start a new task they don’t have a mess to clean up, instead they simply return everything to it’s place. The other ‘captain’ explained that an efficient worker has a messy desk. He doesn’t waste time putting things in special places, if something is in the way it goes wherever it fits. All the materials the worker has used recently will be available on his desk, no need to go rummaging through drawers to find papers or pencils. A messy desk is a sign of a nimble and active mind.

17

I have worked at many universities, hospitals, counseling centers, and retail places. The work culture is pretty much the same at all of them. I would argue that the problem is the toxicity of work culture, in the US at least, not simply educational organizations.

18

I was in academic medicine for several years, so I can attest to the accuracy of some of what the OP describes, as codified in Sayre’s Law.

Leo Bloom : Actors are not animals! They’re human beings!
Max Bialystock : They are? Have you ever eaten with one?

19

I taught high school for about 10 years and came away with the opinion that teachers usually make lousy administrators. In the district I worked, every administrator was once a teacher and pretty much tried to administer their peers the same way they did children. In turn, teachers being treated this way (and taking their cue from their own students) would often react like children when told what to do. It all added up to an emotionally immature work environment that I’m thankful I no longer have to endure.

20

I had never seen that expressed so clearly. Back when I was in grad school I recall someone explaining departmental politics in much the same way. Essentially, since the matters/issues being discussed and distributed are so minor, the parties get disproportionately intense in fighting over every crumb, and nurture every perceived slight.

(Well, that would hold true amongst much of tenured faculty.)