Why Your Institution Is a Shit Show and Probably Always Will Be

Here is the thing you already know and have been trained not to say: your institution announces one thing and does another, constantly, at every level, and it has been doing this since before you arrived and will be doing it after you leave. The strategic plan says student success while the budget cuts advising. The town hall says transparency while the reorganization happens in a calendar invite you weren't on. The values statement says integrity while the exception gets made for the person who brings in money.

You have been told this is dysfunction. A failure of leadership, a culture problem, something the next strategic plan or the next provost or the next consulting engagement will fix. I want to offer you a worse (read: reality based) and more useful idea, and it comes with 60 years of organizational sociology behind it.

The shit show is survival strategy.

Every institution is the same shit show

Start with a question you've asked yourself at a conference: why does every university look exactly alike? Same org chart, same policies with the serial numbers filed off, same initiatives launching on the same two-year cycle. You move institutions and the furniture is different but the building is the same. A few years ago I attended an NCURA webinar titled, perfectly, "Same Same but Different," and the screen erupted in crying/laughing emojis because of how universally recognizable it is, even though we don't exactly know why.

Sociology explained it in 1983. DiMaggio and Powell called it institutional isomorphism, and named three forces that make organizations in the same field converge whether or not convergence helps them do their jobs. Coercive: the same regulators and funders impose the same requirements on everyone. Mimetic: when nobody can prove what actually works, and in higher education nobody can, organizations copy whoever looks legitimate, which is why your institution's answer to every hard question begins with what our peers do. Normative: the professionals staffing these places all trained in the same programs, attend the same conferences, and hold the same certificates, so they carry the same templates from job to job like seeds on a boot.

Notice what none of those forces is: pressure to be effective. Institutions converge on what looks right, because looking right is what the environment rewards. Your institution is identical to every other institution for the same reason every peacock has the same tail.

The fake is the point

Now the harder claim, and the one that reorganized how I think about my own career. In 1977, Meyer and Rowan published a paper arguing that organizations like universities adopt formal structures, policies, offices, committees, plans, as ceremony. The structure exists to signal legitimacy to the outside world: to accreditors, funders, legislators, donors, rankings. And because the ceremonial structure would collapse if anyone tested it against the daily work, the organization protects itself by decoupling the two. The policy lives in one world. The work lives in another. Evaluation is kept vague, inspection is kept rare, and everyone participates in what Meyer and Rowan called the "logic of confidence and good faith," which is the scholarly term for the agreement not to look.

Look around your institution. The assessment framework nobody consults when the actual decision gets made. The mandatory training that trains literally no one. The policy manual that describes a university that does not exist, maintained meticulously by people who know it describes a university that does not exist. None of this is hypocrisy in the individual sense. It is the adaptation of an organization that has to satisfy fifteen contradictory demands at once, teach, discover, heal the sick, house, win on Saturday, comply with everything, offend no one, and cannot actually reconcile any of it. So it just...doesn't. It performs reconciliation on paper and lets the contradictions live in the windowless basement.

This is why reform keeps failing in the specific way it fails. Every scandal, every mandate, every crisis produces a new office, a new form, a new dashboard, and the work underneath changes barely or not at all. The institution is not resisting reform. It is metabolizing reform the only way it knows how: by adding ceremony. Decoupling is not a bug awaiting a patch. It is the operating system, and it has been selected for, institution by institution, for a century, because the institutions that refused to decouple got eaten by their own contradictions.

That is the "probably always will be" in the title, and it is a load the theory carries, not me being bleak.

The ceremony has a payroll

Here is what the sociologists, to their credit, mostly missed, and what anyone who has worked inside these buildings knows in their bones.

The distance between the ceremony and the work does not manage itself. Somebody reconciles it. Somebody takes the policy that describes a university that does not exist and the Tuesday that actually happened and produces, from those two incompatible inputs, a document that satisfies everyone who is agreeing not to look. Somebody's spreadsheet is the only place where the myth and the reality ever meet, and somebody's weekend is the only budget line that never runs out.

You know who these people are. You may be one. It is the administrator who makes the numbers close, the coordinator who does the real onboarding after the official onboarding, the staff member who knows which version of the process is the one that actually works and surreptitiously runs it under the version that officially exists. I have spent years thinking and writing about invisible labor as a workforce problem, a burnout problem, a respect problem. It is all of those. But the theory reveals what it is structurally -- invisible labor is the cost of decoupling, paid by the people closest to the work, and its invisibility is not incidental. The labor has to be invisible, because if it were visible, it would be evidence that the ceremony and the reality don't match, and the entire arrangement depends on that evidence not existing.

Your exhaustion is not a personal failure of resilience. It is a line item the institution refuses to put on the books, because putting it on the books would mean admitting what the books are for.

What happens when someone looks

I said the system depends on nobody looking. Once in my career, I looked, and I want to tell you what happened, because it is the most theoretically clarifying thing that ever happened to me, though I did not have the theoretical framework at the time.

The pattern, stripped of anything that would identify anyone: I encountered a transaction, late in the life of a funded project, that made no operational sense and every financial sense, the kind of thing that anyone with the relevant experience would smell instantly. I did what the ceremony says to do. I used the official channel. I documented everything, thoroughly, the way the policy manual asks you to. And the institution did two things. It informed me there was nothing to see. And it made clear, in the way institutions make things clear, that my continuing to see it would be a problem for me.

I carried that as an injury, and it was one. But a sociologist named Tim Hallett gave me the better frame. He spent time inside a school where a new principal began actually enforcing structures that had always been ceremonial, and he documented what followed: turmoil. The rules did not change, but because someone started treating the existing rules as real it turned over the proverbial apple cart. The organization experienced the enforcer as the disruption. Hallett called the paper "The Myth Incarnate," and the title is the diagnosis -- making the myth real is a hostile act.

That is what I was. I was not reporting a violation, as far as the institution's immune system was concerned. I was collapsing a decoupling. The official channel I used exists to demonstrate that a channel exists; the hundred pages I filed were a semantic error, like bringing a fact to a ritual. The response was not corruption in the cinematic sense, no one twirled a mustache and laughed maniacally. It was an organism doing exactly what it evolved to do when someone threatens the mechanism it survives by.

If you have your own version of this story, and in this profession you probably do, understand it this way. You were not crazy, and it was not personal. You looked, in a system built on the agreement not to.

The fire, and the forcing function

Which brings us to now, because the environment that rewarded all this ceremony is on fire.

The current administration is tearing through the research enterprise, the funding agencies, the oversight bodies, with a destructiveness I have documented elsewhere and will not relitigate here. I hold two thoughts about it at once. The destruction is real and much of it is ruinous. And some part of me, the part that filed those hundred pages, has wondered whether a shock this size might finally force institutions to close the distance between what they say and what they do. Whether the fire is a forcing function.

The theory says only under one condition, and it is worth being precise about it. Sociologists studying law school rankings found the one documented case of ceremony being forced back into contact with reality at scale, what the literature calls recoupling, and identified why rankings succeeded where decades of accreditation and regulation failed. Rankings are public, continuous, and consequential. Everyone sees them, they never stop, and they move money and applicants. Under that kind of measurement, institutions could not maintain the ceremony, and actually became, for better and often worse, what the metric measured.

Pressure alone does not do this. Pressure alone produces more ceremony, and you can watch it happening right now. Every new federal demand is already precipitating new positions, new attestations, new mandatory trainings that train no one. That is coercive isomorphism doing what it does, manufacturing fresh myth at industrial speed. Fire does not recouple anything. Measurement recouples, and only measurement that is public, continuous, and consequential, which almost nothing in this sector's accountability apparatus has ever been.

So, is the destruction a forcing function? It could be, in the narrow places where someone uses this moment to build that kind of measurement into the system, and I spend a good portion of my working life now trying to describe what that would look like. Everywhere else, the honest prediction is that the institutions will do what they have always done, absorb the shock ceremonially, add a layer, and survive. That is the answer to the title. Yes, your institution is a shit show. Yes, probably always, because the shit show is how it lives.

What to do with this

Not despair, and I mean that practically, not as a pep talk.

First, stop diagnosing your institution as uniquely broken and stop waiting for the leader who will fix the culture. The brokenness is structural, it is universal, and the next reorganization will not touch it, because reorganizations are the ceremony. Knowing this is not cynicism. It is the end of a specific kind of wasted hope, and the beginning of aiming at the right layer.

Second, if you are the person whose spreadsheet is where the myth meets the world, name what you are doing, at least to yourself. You are not behind. You are not disorganized. You are performing the reconciliation the institution depends on and refuses to fund, and every boundary you set around that labor is a small act of making the cost visible, which is the one thing the system cannot metabolize.

Third, when you decide to look at something, and I am not telling you not to, go in knowing what the response will be, because it will not be gratitude. The channel is ceremonial. The immune system is real. Choose your moments, keep your records, and understand that the institution's reaction is information about the system, never a verdict on you.

The sociology on all of this is public, readable, and older than most of the people running your institution. They have not read it. You should.

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Further reading, for those who want the source code: Meyer & Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony" (1977). DiMaggio & Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited" (1983). Weick, "Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems" (1976). Hallett, "The Myth Incarnate" (2010). Sauder & Espeland, "The Discipline of Rankings" (2009).