Scaling the 11th Century Start-up, or, Why Universities Break People

On paper, the modern academic holds one of the most enviable roles in the knowledge economy. We get to be the ultimate autonomous agents, allowed the freedom to pursue blue sky thinking, to shape the next generation of high-performers, and to operate outside the quarterly financial returns and shareholder demands of the corporate sector. We stand above the day-to-day as the inheritors of a tradition formalized by Humboldt and solidified by Robbins, designed to fuse teaching and research into a single, noble pursuit.

So... why is the sector in the middle of a catastrophic mental health crisis?

Many will have personally felt the sharp edge of this crisis. This post is about understanding why the design of our role is failing, as a route to help us fix it. This does not diminish the very real impact overwhelm and precarity has in the sector.

Recent data suggests that 53% of UK academics show signs of "probable depression" and nearly a third feel drained every single day. If a private-sector company reported these metrics among its core operations team, the board would consider firing the CEO. Yet in academia, some still treat burnout as a badge of honour - a passion tax to be accepted to pay for our freedoms and vocational awe.

The mental health crisis in academia is a failure of organizational design, not of individual resilience. Or in other words: are we are attempting to manage 21st-century high-performance knowledge workers using 11th-century job structures?

The Myth of the Lone Wolf Genius

In 2012, Google launched a research programme on teams: Project Aristotle (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). The goal was to understand how high-performance teams – often with PhDs, doing complex research – were most effective. They considered variables spanning levels of extroversion, individual performance, offers of tenure, team size; all sensible design considerations, and all unrelated to team efficiency.

The single biggest predictor was psychological safety: the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up, admitting mistakes or taking risks. This was followed by dependability and role structure and clarity.

Contrast this with a modern university. Can university academics even be considered a team? Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of UC Berkeley put it pithily:

A university is a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance about parking.

The traditional academic "teaching and research" role is structurally designed to isolate, incentivising faculty sole traders to compete for the same resources. To be clear, many academics act benevolently and collegiately despite the role structure, but certainly not because of it.

While some areas - such as biomedical sciences - are exploring Team Research concepts, much of science and engineering clings to 19th-century "Great Man" (sic) theories. This can create a culture of negative competition, such that one colleague's win might be perceived as another's loss: for instance, two grant proposals to the same call, or different outcomes at a promotions round.

The Google study suggests that high-performance teams thrive on the quality of their interdependance. Academia idolizes independence above all. Universities have actively built roles rooted in isolation, and through peer-review, critique, which erodes psychological safety.

The Hidden Tax: Structural Inequity

The "Great Man" concept for academia doesn't just hurt performance; it, perhaps unsurprisingly, led to a role specification that is explicitly gendered.

Until 1908, there were no female professors in the UK; Edith Morley at KCL was the first. Progress has been slow: by 2000, only 13% of professors were female, and today, despite three decades of initiatives, we sit at just 31%. The role was historically optimized for a man who had someone else to manage his life, and we're still tackling this legacy.

This tradition assumes the academic is a frictionless unit of production - what has been called the fiction of the unencumbered academic. This standard is exclusionary by design; it decimates representation of disabled staff (at 7.2%, far below the 24% working age average). Another example: as my colleague Laura Wolz wrote, for those with caring responsibilities the standard expectation of travel without support is a further tax.

When a role makes great demands of cognitive bandwidth, those who cannot outsource their personal lives or health needs are systematically disadvantaged.

A Cognitive Decathlon

Perhaps despite its many failings, the elite individual model is entrenched because it is effective. Here can look to other fields; high individual performance is best exemplified in elite sports. Imagine an elite sprinter, first among equals on a team... who is also expected to sell tickets, maintain the track, coach the junior team, and file the club tax returns. This would clearly be seen as a management flaw; in academia, it is seen as "the job".

Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Framework tells us that both autonomy and skill variety are strong positive motivators. But, just as with vitamins, there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing". Modern academics often contend with cognitive fragmentation: the endless context-switching between deep research, active teaching, pastoral care, collegiate mentorship and pervasive administration.

This is a legacy of our roots. When Universities were small, they functioned like today's early-stage start-ups: self-governance required multitasking. But modern universities are now billion-pound enterprises, and a start-up is not a smaller version of a large company. By clinging to the generalist model while operating at enterprise scale, are we generating massive structural misalignment? Why does the modern university demand this? And how can we evolve to meet current needs?

Recent decades have seen a push towards neoliberal corporatisation of universities, driven by New Public Management frameworks. Public organizations are driven by three possible values: efficiency, fairness, and robustness. The corporate world optimizes for efficiency, but when we impose this onto universities, we create a tension. We do not achieve a streamlined business; we get a system in internal conflict – a toxic university – where efficiency drives erode the robustness required for long-term stability, periods of deep thought and conceptual risk-taking, and the fairness required for education, collegiality and equity.

Leading High-Performance Cats?

There is a cliche that managing academics is like "herding cats". This is an oversimplification, implying academics are ungovernable; the reality is far more prosaic. Leading highly motivated and autonomous experts is impossible with transactional management tools.

Leadership in a university context cannot be about monitoring grant income and publication spreadsheets; that is transactional leadership. In describing organizational psychology, Schein introduced three levels of culture - (visible) artifacts, values, and basic assumption. Transactional leadership creates and heightens conflict between espoused values (discovery, academic freedom, collegiality) and the visible artifacts of the job (REF scores, league tables, promotion outcomes). This is a classic recipe for a trust destroying environment.

Effective leadership in high-performance autonomous teams can be provided by transformational leadership, emphasising colleague empowerment to self-lead. A particularly fruitful approach is through the management of meaning: the leader's role is to protect colleagues' focus, interpret the chaos of the external environment, and to foster that missing psychological safety.

Three Levers

While we cannot and should not rewrite the sector overnight, there are routes to make positive shifts to the academic role while maintaining our core meaning as organizations.

1. Porous Pathways (career specialization and flexibility): We must reconsider the idealized "triple threat" academic, who is world-class at teaching, research and admin simultaneously: this entrenches the inequitable unencumbered academic paradigm. Let's introduce genuine, high-status specialization tracks with porosity built in. Allow all academics to focus on teaching without "publish or perish", or on research for a 3-year cycle. Specialization provides goal clarity, while embedded flexibility delivers role equity.
2. Radical Transparency (equity of process): The "black box" of probation, permanency or academic promotion is a key driver of anxiety. Where criteria or process feels opaque, perceived inequity rises. The mismatch between values and artifacts creates a cognitive dissonance, degrading trust in leadership. We must move to further open the process, with auditable and clear criteria.
3. Re-framed Administration (from a shared burden to process friction): Collegiality amongst principal investigators and dedication to the role are a strength; but when applied to viewing administration as a "shared burden", these can become pathological. Every hour spent on administration is an hour lost to delivery. This is a friction to be minimized through effective collaboration with professional support teams.

The Bottom Line

The current statistics on mental health are not an indictment of the people working in our universities; they are a lagging indicator of a system in conflict with itself. We have a sector full of world-class "players" - passionate, expert, and resilient - who are exhausted by playing a "game" whose rules haven't changed in centuries.

We don't need to "fix" academics, or even their primus inter pares leaders. We need to fix the model they work within.

This is the great opportunity. If we can re-frame the academic role, moving from isolation to interdependence, and from "heroic" generalism to supported specialization, we won't just alleviate burnout. We will be able to unlock a multiplier effect on innovation and education that benefits everyone. The goal isn't just a happier workforce; it is a university sector that finally has the structural capability to deliver on its intellectual strengths.