Why Productivity Culture Has Such a Stranglehold on Academia
Or: This Newsletter Is Not About Productivity
From the outside, Publish Not Perish might appear to be about productivity—about writing consistently, completing manuscripts, and shepherding work into the world. And I do care deeply about these things, because scholarly insights trapped in our minds serve no one. Ideas need to find their way onto the page to matter.
But this newsletter has never been about extracting more output from people who are already stretched beyond reasonable limits.
Productivity culture operates from a particular premise: there is always more to accomplish, which means you simply need better systems, tighter routines, and greater discipline to manage it all. The underlying logic suggests that human capacity is essentially boundless if only we optimize our approach correctly. Most academics understand this is fundamentally untrue, even if we rarely find spaces where we’re permitted to acknowledge it openly.
I'm more interested in understanding why productivity culture has such a stranglehold on academia and why so many of us have internalized its metrics as personal moral obligations rather than institutional demands that serve the university's interests over our own.
Academia measures scholarly worth through tangible outputs—publications, citations, grant funding, and conference presentations. These metrics made a certain kind of sense when they were designed to evaluate the quality and impact of scholarship. But somewhere along the way, they transformed from measures of our work into measures of our worth as scholars and, more insidiously, as people. The number of publications you produce becomes conflated with how serious you are about your field, how committed you are to knowledge production, and how deserving you are of respect from your colleagues.
This conflation serves universities remarkably well, particularly as higher education has become increasingly corporatized and subjected to neoliberal logics of efficiency and output maximization.
When scholars internalize productivity as a personal virtue rather than an institutional demand, universities no longer need to explicitly require unsustainable workloads. We impose them on ourselves and then feel ashamed when we cannot maintain them. We become complicit in our own exploitation, measuring ourselves against standards that were never designed with human limitations in mind.
The stranglehold tightens further when we consider how academic hiring, promotion, and tenure processes reinforce these productivity metrics. A tenure file is essentially a catalog of outputs—publications, grants secured, students advised, and service performed. The file that demonstrates the most impressive quantity of high-quality work wins, and because the academic job market has been catastrophically poor for decades now, the bar for what counts as “impressive” keeps rising.
Early career scholars entering the market today are expected to have publication records that would have been considered exceptional for someone several years past their PhD just a generation ago.
The logic becomes brutally simple: if you want to survive in this profession, you must produce at an extraordinary rate, and you must begin doing so immediately.
This creates a particular cruelty for contingent faculty and those on the margins of academic employment, who are often working multiple jobs to cobble together a living wage while still being expected to maintain research agendas that require the kind of sustained time and mental space that stable employment provides. The productivity imperative doesn’t just ask these scholars to work harder. It asks them to perform an impossible balancing act where any failure to produce at the expected rate is interpreted as lack of commitment rather than lack of institutional support.
The stranglehold also manifests differently depending on where you are in your career and what identities you carry into academic spaces.
Scholars with significant caregiving responsibilities—disproportionately white women and women of color—face productivity expectations based on the myth of the unencumbered academic who has no outside obligations.
Disabled and neurodivergent scholars must navigate productivity metrics that assume certain bodies and minds without accounting for energy, focus, and capacity differences.
Scholars from working-class backgrounds often lack the financial resources to work unpaid or underpaid while building a CV, but the profession treats prestigious unpaid work and unfunded research opportunities as normal stepping stones.
What makes productivity culture particularly insidious in academia is how it disguises itself as meritocracy. The story we tell ourselves is that those who work hardest and produce the most will be rewarded, that the system recognizes and values dedication and output.
But this story requires us to ignore the profound inequalities in who has access to the time, resources, and support necessary to be maximally productive.
It requires us to treat structural problems as individual failings, to look at someone who isn’t publishing enough and assume they lack discipline rather than asking what barriers they face that others do not.
I want to be clear that I’m not arguing against ambition or against caring deeply about your scholarship. I’m not suggesting that we should abandon the desire to contribute meaningful work to our fields or that striving for excellence is somehow problematic. What I'm arguing against is the idea that productivity—defined as maximum output in minimum time—should be the primary measure of excellence and that scholars should sacrifice their health, relationships, and well-being for it.
The question I want us to sit with is this: who benefits when academics internalize productivity as a personal moral obligation? It’s certainly not the scholars themselves, who experience burnout at alarming rates and increasingly report feeling that academic work is unsustainable. It’s not our students, who deserve teachers who have the time and energy to actually be present with them rather than constantly distracted by the next deadline. It’s not even knowledge production itself, which arguably suffers when scholars are forced to prioritize quantity over the kind of deep, sustained thinking that produces genuinely transformative work.
Productivity culture asks, “How do I produce more?” This newsletter asks instead, “At what cost, and toward what end?”
These are fundamentally different questions, and they lead to substantially different choices.
Sometimes resisting productivity culture means taking on fewer projects rather than more.
Sometimes it means extending your timelines or declining opportunities that look impressive but would require you to compromise things you’re not willing to compromise.
Sometimes it means recognizing that the standards we’re holding ourselves to are not natural or inevitable but rather historically specific and deeply tied to institutional interests that are not aligned with our own flourishing.
If you’re seeking guidance that will help you optimize your output and produce more in less time, many excellent resources offer exactly that approach.
Publish Not Perish creates space for a different conversation—one that treats writing as a long-term, deeply human practice rather than a productivity competition and rejects the idea that scholars must choose between meaningful careers and livable lives.
The objective here is not to extract the maximum possible amount of writing from your limited years on this planet. The objective is to help you build a writing life you can actually sustain, one that honors both your scholarly commitments and your refusal to be reduced to your CV.