Over the last two weeks, I’ve been interrogating the hustle culture embedded in the sprint toward tenure and the broader culture of busyness in academia.
You can access those posts here:
Today’s episode asks what happens after the tenure sprint is supposedly over.
The promise of tenure is that the pressure will ease, the finish line will hold, and a more spacious academic life will finally become possible. But for many scholars, the habits formed during the pre-tenure years do not simply disappear.
When you spend years working inside ambiguity, trying to discern what will count as “enough,” overproduction can start to feel like the safest answer. Saying yes becomes more than a habit; it becomes part of how you prove you are serious, generous, collegial, and deserving.
I also look at why advice about “just saying no” often misses the deeper problem.
Not everyone has the same freedom to set boundaries without being judged, penalized, or read as insufficiently committed. Service, mentoring, diversity work, and emotional labor often fall unevenly on scholars whose belonging has already been made conditional.
I want to hold both truths together: individual strategies for saying no can matter, especially as acts of self-preservation, but they are not enough on their own. The deeper work is building departments and institutions where labor is transparent, shared, and recognized and where exhaustion is no longer mistaken for commitment.
