The Unspoken Contract: How Academic Departments Run on Invisible Labor

I have been thinking for a long time about whether, and how to say this out loud. Not because the problems are subtle, but because naming them plainly is uncomfortable in systems that depend on people silently absorbing strain. What follows is an attempt to explain why I am choosing to name them anyway.

I knew I had made the right choice in pursuing public health early in my MPH program. In an epidemiology class, Dr. Monica Swahn described a framing that has stayed with me ever since: we can stand downstream pulling bodies out of a river, or we can walk upstream and ask why bodies are ending up in the river in the first place. Public health, at its best, is upstream work. It is the disciplined practice of identifying root causes and reducing harm before it becomes inevitable. I still believe there is no more important, or more humane contribution a society can make than preventing suffering rather than merely responding to it.

When I completed my MPH, I faced a fork in the road. I could stay in Atlanta and pursue a role at the CDC through the Presidential Management Fellows program, or I could return to the Rocky Mountain West, where I am from and where I have deep personal roots. I chose the latter. Instead of moving into public health practice, I returned to higher education and continued the career I had started prior to graduate school in research administration, beginning at the University of Wyoming.

That decision was not a retreat from purpose. It was a different expression of it. I chose research administration because I believe deeply that science and the systems that support it matter. The advancement of knowledge is not an abstract good; it shapes policy, improves health, drives innovation, and informs how societies respond to crises. Supporting that work is meaningful. It is upstream work of a different kind.

Seventeen years into this career, however, it would be dishonest to pretend the work has not taken a toll. The last decade in particular has burned many of us to a crisp. Across institutions and states, research administrators share remarkably similar stories: chronic overload, constant urgency, expanding compliance expectations, and a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the day-to-day experience of the work. Many of us have stayed anyway, not because the conditions are healthy, but because the pull of contributing to something larger than ourselves is strong. The mission still matters, even when the system does not seem to care for the people carrying it.

What I am increasingly unable to ignore is that the modern academic research enterprise is built on a foundation of invisible labor. It functions because skilled staff anticipate failure, absorb risk, and compensate for structural gaps without acknowledgment or authority. This is not a critique of individuals, and it is not an indictment of intent. It is a description of reality.

What follows is not meant to shame, scold, or provoke panic. It is an attempt to label, in clear and surgical terms, the lived experience of research administration staff across the country, and to explain why the current status quo is not sustainable. We are already seeing the early signs of labor market failure: departments expecting deep regulatory, financial, and operational expertise for salaries that no longer align with the market. The predictable outcomes are failed searches, chronic vacancies, or underprepared hires who unintentionally introduce compliance and audit risks in their wake.

This is not a temporary staffing issue. It is a systems problem.

The status quo will not hold. The choice is not whether change will occur, but whether it will be intentional or imposed by collapse. This piece is a clarion call to rethink how we design departmental structures, operational systems, and team capacity, and to do so with the explicit goal of building productive, effective, collaborative, and accountable environments that do not rely on burning people out to function.

The future of science depends on it.

The Unspoken Contract: How Academic Departments Run on Invisible Labor

Departmental units in higher education are not dysfunctional by accident. They are uniformly dysfunctional because they sit at the intersection of incompatible incentive systems, diffuse authority, and a chronic refusal to define operational accountability. The surprise is not that departments struggle; it is that they function at all.

At the center of the problem is a category error that higher education has never fully confronted: faculty are treated as if they are organizational leaders simply because they are subject-matter experts. In reality, most faculty neither know how departmental operations work nor feel any obligation to learn. This is not a moral failing. Faculty are hired, promoted, and rewarded for research output, disciplinary prestige, and grant capture; not for understanding payroll systems, compliance timelines, procurement constraints, or staffing capacity. The institution reinforces this disinterest by insulating them from consequences. When operational failures occur, faculty rarely absorb the cost in time, reputation, or evaluation. Someone else does.

That "someone else" is almost always research administrators and departmental staff. Their role, formally and informally, is to absorb ambiguity, anticipate failure, and correct errors in the background without escalating them. They translate incomplete information into workable submissions, retrofit noncompliant decisions into acceptable justifications, and smooth over missed deadlines, budget incoherence, and last-minute changes. Over time, this becomes an unspoken contract: faculty operate as if the system will catch them, and staff organize their work around catching them.

The contract persists because when staff stop catching, the consequences fall on them anyway by way of missed deadlines that become their failure to communicate clearly, budget errors become their lack of proactive guidance, compliance violations become their insufficient oversight. The system interprets refusal to compensate as incompetence rather than as a boundary. The department does not run on shared ownership; it runs on invisible labor.

This dynamic eliminates any possibility of a collaborative, shared-vision environment. Collaboration requires mutual responsibility and a common definition of success. Departments have neither. Faculty optimize for individual outputs: papers, grants, citations, prestige, while staff optimize for risk avoidance and institutional compliance. These objectives are adjacent but not aligned.

Consider what happens when a principal investigator submits a grant budget three days before the deadline with personnel costs that don't match current salary tables, equipment that hasn't been quoted, and subaward scopes of work that haven't been negotiated. The faculty member's incentive is to get the proposal submitted; incomplete is better than nothing, and revisions can happen later, right? The research administrator's incentive is to prevent audit risk and compliance violations. There is no shared success state. Either the administrator works late nights to salvage the budget and accepts the cost to their own capacity, or they escalate the problem and risk being labeled obstructionist. The faculty member, meanwhile, experiences neither scenario as their responsibility.

When problems arise, they are framed as communication failures or capacity issues rather than as predictable outcomes of misaligned incentives. Capacity and communication are certainly factors, but hardly the root cause. The language of teamwork is used, but the structure ensures that teamwork is always one-directional.

What is most striking is what departments do not measure. In any other complex organization, leadership would track operational metrics as a matter of course: cycle time, error rates, rework, bottlenecks, dependency failures, staff load, and variance from plan. In departments, these metrics either do not exist or are dismissed as bureaucratic distractions. This absence is not accidental. Measuring operational performance would require someone to be accountable for it, and the rotating chair model ensures that no one stays in the role long enough to be held responsible for structural patterns. It would also reveal uncomfortable truths: how much institutional risk is carried by underpaid staff, how often faculty behaviors create preventable costs, and how little redundancy exists in systems that leadership describes as resilient. The refusal to measure is a refusal to confront tradeoffs.

There is no systematic accounting of how much work is created by preventable behaviors, how often processes are repeated due to late or incomplete inputs, or how much risk is concentrated in a handful of overextended staff. Without metrics, there is no feedback loop, and without a feedback loop, dysfunction becomes the steady state.

The labor market is already beginning to correct for this dysfunction, and the early signs are unmistakable. We are seeing failed searches where departments expect deep regulatory, financial, and operational expertise for salaries that no longer align with the market. Seventy thousand dollars for work that carries institutional, legal, and reputational risk is not competitive; it's a cruel joke. The predictable outcomes are playing out in real time: positions remain vacant for months, sometimes abandoned. When they are filled, they are often filled by candidates who lack the depth of experience the role requires, not because they are incapable, but because no one with the necessary expertise will accept the terms. These underprepared hires then introduce the very compliance and audit risks the position was meant to prevent. In some cases, departments are quietly losing their ability to submit complex grants altogether. In others, research administrators are leaving mid-project, and there is no one to replace them who understands the compliance history or the terms and conditions of active awards. The risk doesn't disappear, it just becomes invisible until an audit, a site visit, or a financial reconciliation forces it into view.

Attempts to "fix" departmental dysfunction usually fail because they target surface symptoms rather than structural causes. New forms are introduced to manage chaos instead of reducing it. New tools are layered onto workflows without removing old ones. Training is offered to staff while faculty behaviors remain untouched. Committees are formed to discuss problems that no one has authority to resolve. Each intervention increases complexity, and complexity further obscures accountability.

The deeper issue is that departments are expected to function like operational units without being granted the authority, incentives, or leadership structures required to do so. Chairs rotate in and out with limited managerial training and limited appetite for enforcing standards that might create political friction. Central offices issue policies but do not experience their downstream consequences. Provosts and deans have the authority to redefine these structures, to establish clear operational accountability, to tie faculty advancement to collaborative behaviors, to resource departments appropriately, or to remove the fiction that rotating chairs can lead complex operational units. They have not done so, not because they are unaware of the strain, but because the current system allows the institution to function without confronting its true costs.

As long as staff continue to absorb the gap between how departments are resourced and how they are expected to perform, there is no institutional imperative to change. Staff are asked to be resilient, flexible, and collaborative in systems that are explicitly designed to rely on their overfunctioning.

This is why departmental dysfunction feels both universal and intractable. The system works precisely because it is broken in predictable ways. Research administrators compensate for gaps that no one else is incentivized to close. Faculty remain insulated from operational reality. Leadership avoids confronting tradeoffs that would require saying no, setting priorities, or redefining success. Everyone is busy, and nothing fundamentally changes.

What does collapse look like if these dynamics continue unchecked? It looks like departments that can no longer submit competitive grant applications because they lack the staff expertise to navigate compliance requirements. It looks like failed audits and returned funding when post-award management falls through the cracks. It looks like principal investigators unable to launch projects because there is no one to set up accounts, hire personnel, or process subcontracts. It looks like entire research portfolios stalled not because the science isn't ready, but because the operational infrastructure has fallen apart. Most concretely, it looks like talented staff walking away from the profession entirely, and institutions discovering too late that the knowledge they carried was irreplaceable.

Until higher education is willing to name these dynamics plainly, and to treat departmental operations as real systems with real costs rather than as administrative background noise, there is little reason to expect meaningful improvement. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure, and you cannot build shared vision in environments where responsibility is structurally one-sided. The choice ahead is not whether this system will change, but whether that change will be designed with intention or allowed to arrive through failure.