Be Collegial, Or Else

I was going to write another satirical blog from the VC of University of Lezzerton but realised as I started writing that I am too invested in the notion of being collegial to send it up.

This blog is written for academics and those interested in the conditions in which academics currently labour. The observations I make come from general observations and conversations with colleagues across the sector. Any resemblance to specific people or institutions is coincidental. The point of the blog is to trace the changing meanings of a word that most academics hold dear – that word is collegiality.

Nearly a decade ago, Pat Carlen and I wrote a chapter warning about the rise of what we called “corporatist research culture” in universities (Carlen and Phoenix, 2017). We argued that something quiet and consequential was happening: university managements were increasingly shaping researchers’ understanding of their role — away from producing new knowledge and towards bringing in large grants, generating measurable “impact[1],” and serving the corporate interests of the institution. We suggested that this corporatist culture was more concerning than the market culture it fed off, precisely because it operated without noise — taken for granted, unspoken, making everyone in a department complicit. No one could opt out. We warned that the people most affected would be early career academics, who were being — in the words of Hillyard and colleagues that we quoted — “brutally socialized” into “a conformist corporate culture” as the price of getting a permanent post (Hillyard et al., 2004: 382).

Since writing that chapter, I have watched on as the work allocation we academics received from our ‘line managers’ or Heads of Department/School each year includes a nebulous category called ‘citizenship’ or ‘collegiality’. And I have been thinking and about a question we didn’t quite reach.

We described the structural mechanism — how the REF, the impact agenda, the grant economy, and the ethics committees in universities all worked to narrow the space for critical, qualitative, and theoretical research. But we didn’t fully name the interpersonal mechanism — the everyday vocabulary through which that silent corporatism is transmitted between colleagues, dressed up as professional virtue. I want to name it now. The word is “collegiality.”

“Collegiality” used to mean something quite specific. It meant that scholars — people who had spent years acquiring expertise, who understood their fields in ways that administrators typically could not — had the right to govern themselves. It meant collective decision-making among equals. It meant that unique type of authority present in a university, one derived from knowledge, not from occupying a position in a management hierarchy. Weber (1922/1978) analysed it as a principle for limiting monocratic power. Waters (1989) formalised it as an organisational form parallel to bureaucracy — characterised by formal egalitarianism, professional autonomy, consensus decision-making, and peer scrutiny. Freidson (2001) built an entire theory of professional life around it, arguing that professionalism constituted a “third logic” irreducible to either the market or the bureaucracy, with collegial control by the practitioner community at its heart. For centuries, the collegium was a defining feature of the university: a body of experts who decided, together, what should be taught, who should be hired, how research should be judged, and what standards should be upheld.

That meaning has largely been lost. And the loss has been so gradual, so complete, that most people in British universities these days are, I suspect, unaware it happened. I always knew I was the last of a generation. I worry that I am the last of the generation that remembers these other meanings of the word.

Here is what “collegiality” tends to mean now, in institutional practice. It means: don’t question the restructure. Don’t object when the committee you sit on turns out to have no real authority. Don’t point out that the “consultation” was a fait accompli. Don’t note, in a meeting, that the Dean’s or Head’s or Deputy VC or other administrator / leader / manager’s strategy contradicts the available evidence. And don’t say anything that might embarrass the institution or make your colleagues uncomfortable. If you do these things, you risk being labelled “uncollegial.” You may encounter that word in your annual review, in the notes from your probation panel, in the quiet conversations that shape promotion decisions. You won’t find a clear definition. But you will find consequences.

The American Association of University Professors identified this drift in 1999 and issued a careful warning (AAUP, 1999/2016). They noted that “collegiality” was increasingly being added as a fourth criterion in faculty evaluation — alongside teaching, research, and service — and that it was being conflated with expectations that academics display “enthusiasm,” “dedication,” a “constructive attitude,” and, most revealingly, “an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion.” Their description of what a university full of uncritically agreeable academics would look like remains striking: “a college or university replete with genial Babbitts” — the sort of place to which “society is unlikely to look for leadership.”

In the UK, the shift took a different form — less through formal evaluation criteria and more through the dismantling of the structures through which collegiality had actually operated. The Jarratt Report (1985) recommended recasting vice-chancellors as chief executives and reducing the authority of senates. The post-1992 universities were designed from the outset along managerialist lines. The older institutions gradually followed. I remember that around 2011 there was a concerted effort by the then Vice Chancellor of Durham University to turn Senate from a powerful governing board into little more than an academic board that approved educational programmes and the like. The result was that the infrastructure of collegiality — the committees, boards, and senates through which academics exercised collective authority — was progressively weakened. But the word survived. And into that emptied-out concept, the workplace changes that accompanied managerialism in university inserted an entirely new set of expectations.

“Collegiality” in a contemporary UK university now typically means: mentor your junior colleagues (unpaid). Review manuscripts (unpaid). Second-mark assignments (without complaint). Sit on the working group (which may well be ignored). Attend the away day (and be positive). Demonstrate “good citizenship” in your promotion application. Do the things the institution needs but declines to resource — and do them willingly. Fleming and Harley (2023) offered a useful theoretical frame for this. Collegiality, they argued, has become a form of “concertive control” — a mechanism through which universities extract labour that doesn’t formally “count” by appealing to professional norms that academics hold dear. You can’t easily refuse to review that thesis, because doing so would feel uncollegial. The institution gets the work; you absorb the cost.

This is where our chapter’s argument about corporatism connects. Pat and I described how impact coercion operates silently — how researchers make project and publication choices based on what will have a non-academic wider ‘beneficial’ effect without anyone having to issue an explicit instruction. The demand to “be collegial” is, I think, the interpersonal face of that same quiet coercion. It is how the institutional logic of corporatism gets translated into something that looks like a personal shortcoming. You’re not being managed; you’re being uncollegial. The structural pressure recedes from view, and what remains visible is a deficiency — yours.

There is a harder edge to this too. “Collegiality” can also function as a disciplinary instrument. I know this not only from the literature but from experience of what happens when a university decides you are not being collegial enough. What is usually meant, in practice, is that you are not being compliant enough. This came out in my employment tribunal against The Open University when one of my main harassers suggested that I was not collegial. There are far more examples and I have heard academics bemoan that they are accused of being uncollegial when they raise questions that others find uncomfortable. This can be research questions. Or it might be when you are declining to pretend that a policy which may be unlawful is perfectly acceptable. In most of these circumstances, “collegiality” ceases to be an aspiration and becomes a warning.

Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist (2016) have coined a useful term for the institutional version of this: “collegiality washing.” Universities create elaborate consultative procedures — staff surveys, town halls, working groups, task-and-finish committees — that look like collegial governance but which often serve to legitimate decisions that have already been taken. The appearance of shared decision-making is maintained. The reality of centralised control is left undisturbed. Pat and I described something analogous in our chapter: how senior academics who sit on REF assessment panels end up clothing the exercise with the very professional legitimacy it lacks — “they know the emperor has no clothes so attempt to kit him out with their own.” The same dynamic applies to collegiality washing. Academics who participate in consultative governance structures lend their credibility to processes that may have little genuine influence on outcomes. And if you draw attention to the gap between form and substance, you are the one creating difficulties.

What makes this so effective is that academics genuinely care about collegiality — the real thing, not the institutional version. I know I do. I genuinely care about our colleagues – those at Reading and outside. As a professional group, we want to be supportive. We believe in shared intellectual endeavour. And it is precisely this commitment that makes the inverted concept so hard to resist. As the CUNY Faculty Senate observed, “imposing ‘collegiality’ as another criterion makes willingness to work with colleagues turn into agreeing with colleagues.” You are not being told to comply. You are being told to be collegial. And it feels churlish to refuse.

I think most about the people Pat and I were most concerned about in that chapter: early career academics. We described the impossible position of senior colleagues who must advise them. If they encourage young researchers to follow the corporate logic — pursue the large grants, choose the safe topics, produce the measurable impact — they compromise the professional ideal of independent inquiry. If they encourage them to follow their intellectual convictions, they may be placing their careers at risk. The expectation of “collegiality” is woven into that socialisation. It is the warm, reasonable-sounding language through which institutional conformity is presented as professional development. Be a good departmental citizen. Be collegial. What this often means, if we are candid, is: learn to accommodate the institution’s requirements quietly, or your prospects here will be limited.

This matters because what is being described is not collegiality. It is, in an important sense, the opposite. Real collegiality — the kind that Weber analysed, that Waters formalised, that Freidson identified as the organising principle of professional life — was a claim against managerial authority. It said: we govern ourselves, because our work requires judgements that only we are competent to make. The version now current in our institutions is a claim for managerial authority, expressed in the language of professional community. It asks academics to be agreeable, to be helpful, to be uncomplaining — and, above all, to be quiet.

I would love it if we could reclaim this word, or at the very least be more precise about what we mean when we use it. Because a term that once described the right of scholars to govern themselves has come to denote the obligation of employees to comply. And unless we can name that transformation clearly, we will find it very difficult to undo.

AAUP (1999/2016) ‘On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation’. Policy Documents and Reports. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Carlen, P. and Phoenix, J. (2017) ‘Alternative Criminologies, Academic Markets and Corporatism in Universities’ in P. Carlen (ed.) Alternative Criminologies. London: Routledge.

Fleming, P. and Harley, B. (2023) ‘Collegiality as Control? How Uncounted Work Gets Done in the Neoliberal Business School’. Academy of Management Learning & Education 23(1): 243–262.

Freidson, E. (2001) Professionalism: The Third Logic. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hillyard, P., Sim, J., Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2004) ‘“Leaving a Stain upon the Silence”: Contemporary Criminology and the Politics of Dissent’. British Journal of Criminology 44(3): 369–390.

Jarratt Report (1985) Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. London: Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals.

Sahlin, K., & Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (2016). Collegiality in modern universities – the composition of governance ideals and practices. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2016(2–3). https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v2.33640

Waters, M. (1989) ‘Collegiality, Bureaucratization, and Professionalization: A Weberian Analysis’. American Journal of Sociology 94(5): 945–972.

Weber, M. (1922/1978) Economy and Society, edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[1] Research Excellence Framework defined impact as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.