Higher Ed Recruits Practitioners. It Does Not Onboard Them.

Universities say they want faculty who have done the work. Then they hire us and leave us to figure out the institution alone.

I spent nearly fifteen years in national laboratories and industry before moving into a full-time faculty role. The teaching was not the hard part. I had taught before, I knew the material, and I had spent years explaining technical work to people who needed to act on it. What I was not prepared for was the loss of every instrument I had used to run my professional life.

In my previous roles I knew my budget. I had a development plan that someone else was accountable for maintaining. I met with my manager on a schedule neither of us had to negotiate. Data arrived by default. Strategy was something you did with information, on a horizon of five years, executed in thirty-day windows.

Academia runs on a different operating system, and nobody explains it on day one.

The pull problem

Faculty life is pull-based. The budget exists, but only if you know which staff member to ask. The career path exists, but only as promotion criteria you have to translate into a plan by yourself. Access to leadership exists, but a chair responsible for dozens of faculty is doing exception handling, not management. Almost nothing is pushed to you.

None of this is dysfunction. It is the founding bargain of the academy. Total autonomy in exchange for total self-management. Nobody tells you what to do, and the hidden price is that nobody manages anything for you either. Faculty who came up through graduate school and the postdoc pipeline absorbed this over a decade. They learned it the way you learn a first language, which is to say they may not be able to describe it, because it never looked like a system to them at all.

Practitioners arrive fluent in a different language. We spend our first two years mistaking the absence of instrumentation for the absence of information, and asking questions that have no owner. Where do I see my program’s expenditures? Who reviews my development plan? What is the cadence for this? The answers, when they come, tend to be some version of you can build that yourself if you want it.

Why this is now a real cost

It would be one thing if the work had stayed what it was. It has not.

Faculty today run programs. We oversee budgets. We negotiate with industry sponsors and manage those relationships when they go sideways. We recruit, staff, and advise student teams that function like small engineering organizations. We hold responsibility for outcomes across multiple years and multiple stakeholders.

That is management-shaped work, and it is being done inside a structure that provides almost no management instrumentation and no management training. The data a department head would need to balance workloads across a faculty does not exist in most institutions. The data an individual faculty member would need to plan a career against published criteria does not exist either. It has not been hidden; it has simply never been built.

Institutions have recruited practitioners specifically because they want industry fluency, real partnerships, and programs that produce graduates who can operate. Those are operational capabilities. They then place those hires in a structure with no operational scaffolding and are surprised when the partnerships depend entirely on one person, or when that person leaves.

What the sector loses

The loss is not only attrition, although attrition is the visible part. The subtler loss is that the institution spends years training that instinct out of the person it hired for it.

Practitioners arrive with an instinct that turns out to be exactly what the institution is missing. We want to measure the things everyone is currently guessing at. We want a dashboard. That instinct gets read, often gently, as naivety, or as a corporate reflex that has not yet adjusted to academic values.

I want to argue the opposite. Autonomy without visibility is not freedom. It is fog. A faculty member cannot make good decisions about where to spend finite effort without knowing what that effort is worth to the institution. A department head cannot distribute load fairly without a defensible measure of load. Measures like these are what make that autonomy usable.

There is a real objection here and it deserves a direct answer. Measurement changes behavior. Instrument a thing carelessly and faculty will optimize for the instrument, which is worse than the current fog. That is a reason to build these tools thoughtfully and with faculty governance over what gets counted. It is not a reason to keep refusing to build them.

Four things institutions could do

None of these require money the sector does not have.

Onboard for the operating system, not the paperwork. New faculty orientation covers benefits, compliance, and the learning management system. It should also state plainly that the institution runs on pull, name the specific things a faculty member must request rather than expect, and identify who owns each one. This is a half-day session and a document. It rarely exists, because onboarding is designed by people who learned the system implicitly and can no longer see the parts a newcomer needs named.

Assign an operational sponsor for the first two years. Not a research mentor. Someone whose job is to answer procedural questions without the new hire having to discover that the question exists. Practitioners in particular do not know what they do not know, because in their prior environment they were never required to.

Publish the translation, not just the criteria. Promotion documents describe standards. They rarely describe what satisfying those standards looks like in practice, on what timeline, with what evidence. Faculty who came through the traditional pipeline received that translation informally from advisors. Career changers received nothing.

Give the builders a mandate. When a practitioner hire proposes measuring something the institution currently estimates, the default response should be curiosity rather than caution. Some of those proposals will be wrong. The ones that are right are free infrastructure, built by someone who already knows how.

The bargain, revisited

I am not arguing that universities should become corporations. The autonomy is real and it is the reason many of us came. I turned down more money and better instrumentation for the chance to do work that matters to me, and I would make that trade again.

But the bargain has drifted. Faculty accepted self-management in exchange for independence, at a time when the job was narrower than it is now. The job has expanded into program leadership, partnership management, and operational responsibility. The scaffolding has not expanded with it.

If institutions want people who have run things, they should expect those people to notice what is missing. That noticing is the capability they hired.