During the departmental meeting on Friday, I made a very loud and clear statement to the effect that nobody should approach me with requests to teach 1, 2, 3, etc extra courses for no extra pay. Actually, I wouldn’t teach them for extra pay either but that’s not the point.
Nobody has been asking me to take on extra work for no pay, mind you. I made my statement preemptively. And aggressively.
The sky didn’t fall down and the apocalypse did not begin after I said this. Now a question: why do tenured people with Full Professorships meekly accept teaching extra courses for free when I’m not afraid to “just say no”?
I just met an instructor who didn’t get to teach this semester at all because a tenured professor agreed to teach his courses for free.
Why are people doing this?
Yes, I asked them in person but the answers don’t convince me.
Clarissa's Blog 
So why did they do it? I’m curious now…
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The explanation is that the administrators said there would cancel the courses if they didn’t agree to teach them for free. And that would make it impossible for students to graduate.
A completely ridiculous excuse that people only buy if they feel like it. Why the profs really did it is an absolute mystery.
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Not a mystery, I can see that happening – I am myself the sort of naive idiot who could be made to feel like I am responsible for stopping students from graduating if I said no, so I can understand why people would do this. I am lucky that I am learning to see these sorts of feelings as being imposed on me by manipulative others rather than being completely mine, but it is hard work – balancing trust and generosity of spirit against self-protection, resisting cynicism, is difficult.
I would also infer elements of low self-esteem – they believe they will only be valued if they do this extra thing, that only doing the job they are contracted to do is not enough – and also a sort of avoidance of other work – “look at me, I am SO BUSY with this EXTRA TEACHING that I am too busy to do all this self-indulgent research other people do” – of course as you have said before research is actually public spirited and very hard work, and having a ‘legitimate’ reason to not do hard work by doing easy work instead AND claiming martyr status can be very tempting! Especially as there is more scope to ‘fail’ at research…
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“I am lucky that I am learning to see these sorts of feelings as being imposed on me by manipulative others rather than being completely mine”
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Making themselves feel they are indispensable to the organisation in their own eyes.
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“Making themselves feel they are indispensable to the organisation in their own eyes.”
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The complaints are also useful, to heighten one’s sense of virtue.
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One of my favorite books ever is Power! by Michael Korda, to paraphrase some of his thoughts on people who want to be indispensable. They don’t all necessarily apply that well to a university but I’ll use any excuse to get these ideas out there
“Many people spend their working lives attempting to make themselves indispensable, a search for absolute security which seldom pays dividends.”
“the management point of view is basically correct, nobody is indispensable. No matter how important you are, replacing you is at worse of question of inconvenience, expense and time.”
“In every corporation, the people who think themselves indispensable and are generally regarded as such by their colleagues eventually get fired. The reason for this is simple, but seldom accepted – no corporation can afford to believe that is existence is dependent on the health, sanity and good will of a relatively small number of people – especially if it’s true”
“the more you try to prove how much you’re needed, the more you are likely to attract the attention of people who wonder whether your job is necessary at all.”
“Those who try to make themselves indispensable is like a swimmer clinging to a piece of flotsam in a raging storm when it might be safer to let go and swim.”
and my favorite
“The world is full of people who will work a fourteen-hour day to hold a job that could easily be done in seven hours, exhausting themselves and irritating everyone around them in a useless struggle to prove that life cannot go on without them.”
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