Rebecca Schuman recently noted the case of an academic job applicant who lost out on a job offer because she dared negotiate:
[A] job candidate identified as “W” recently received an offer for a tenure-track position at Nazareth College… W viewed the original bid as the opening move in a series of negotiations, and thus submitted… [a] counteroffer, after informing the department—with whom she says she had been in friendly contact—that she was about to switch into “negotiation mode”…..However, instead of coming back with a severely tempered counter-counter (“$57k, maternity, and LOL”), or even a “Take it or leave it, bub,” Nazareth allegedly rescinded the entire offer.
So far, so strange. But it gets worse:
[A]s the story spread over the academic Web faster than a case of resurgent measles, it became increasingly clear that not everybody was flabbergasted. According to many outspoken residents of the ivory tower, W’s mildly aggressive email committed so many unforgivable faux pas that she’s lucky she’s not in jail….How dare this “women” think she could attempt to secure a better life for herself and her family? In this market, if a university wants her to wade around in pig crap, her only counteroffer should be: “Should I bring my own snorkel?” Any beginning academic who tries to stand up for herself is lunch for the hordes of traumatized ivory-tower zombies, themselves now irreversibly infected with the obsequious self-devaluation and totalizing cowardice that go by the monikers “collegiality” and “a good fit.”….
[I]n a substantial portion of the academic discussion, she is being eviscerated, all for having the audacity to stick up for herself for the first (and possibly last) time in her career.
Schuman is right, of course. But W‘s case is not just about academics and their craven kowtowing to bosses. Rather, the reaction to W, the anger at her temerity in speaking up for herself, for daring to suggest to those that sought to employ her that she might want to say something about her working conditions, is a symptom of a broader American worker response: the wholesale adoption of the attitude that the Boss is Always Right.
As I’ve noted in my posts on labor unions (here; here; here; here; here), there is a curious rejection underway–in the strangest of places, workers’ communities–of the notion of that employees and workers should attempt to change their workplace conditions, demand better wages and hours, or just push back in any way at managerial control. The workplace is where good old American enterprise and self-determination is to be denied to the worker; any evidence that the worker seeks to exercise his agency in demand better working conditions can only be interpreted as indications of bad faith on the worker’s part.
The academic workplace is no different: its workers are subjected to the same relentlessly myopic administrative procedures, the same ideological assaults, as other workplaces. And they have taken on and internalized, rather effortlessly, managerial perspectives and attitudes. Foremost among them: resentment and anger directed at those workers who seek to assert their right to a better life.
