When I first became an academic, there’s something I wish I’d understood deep in my bones. A senior colleague hinted at it back then, but it only truly clicked after a few bruising years:
Your department has no memory.
Not people; people remember plenty. Departments don’t. And if you’re coming from the private sector, this will feel very odd. In most companies, structure, process, and promotion paths create a kind of institutional memory. In academia, roles rotate, responsibilities shift, and records of who said what to whom, and why vanish into thin air. That absence of memory can cost you if you don’t see it coming.
Here are four areas where the lack of memory bites hardest, and what that means for you.
Promises made for future you
Departments have no memory of things promised. Promotions, seed funding, a lab or institute, a team structure, a lighter teaching load next year to pay back an emergency overload this year. The person promising may mean it at the time, but the ground is always moving. Heads of department rotate. Priorities change. Student numbers jump. Colleagues leave.
Typical scenario: you take on an extra course because someone resigns in week two. You’re told you’ll be “paid back” next year with two courses off. Next year arrives and there are five more departures and 200 extra students. That quid pro quo evaporates. Even if the same person is still in post, the constraints have shifted. There is no institutional memory that binds tomorrow to what was said today.
Deals done under pressure
Sometimes both you and the department have a problem. You agree a trade. You’ll catch a falling course mid-semester if you’re permanently spared a specific committee or partnership that drains your capacity.
It works until the role-holder changes. Handovers are sketchy at best. Your carefully negotiated deal never makes the cut in the baton pass. You’re now the person of record for that course, the hot potato has cooled in your hands, and your “in exchange” is invisible history. To the new workload lead, you’re just asking for a concession without giving anything back.
Problems and “solutions” on repeat
Early on, you’ll see an obvious problem and reach for an obvious solution. Around the table, seniors will rub their temples in silence. They’ve watched that fix fail five times already, and the department has no memory of the attempts, the pilots, the blockers, the unintended consequences. The wheel gets reinvented. Hope rises. Time is spent. The outcome is the same.
Implication for you: before proposing a fix, ask two grounding questions:
Have we tried this before here? What happened?
What changed since then that would make it work now?
If there are no written retrospectives, write short ones yourself when you run something. Two paragraphs on what you tried, what worked, what didn’t, and where the bodies are buried. File it somewhere obvious. You’ll save your future self months of déjà vu.
Administrative roles without walls
Many academic admin roles have no job description, no handover, and no clear boundaries. You rotate in for two or three years, director of research, chair of exam board, programme lead — and discover a maze by torchlight. The last person knew where the traps were. That knowledge didn’t travel. Sometimes one person stays put for a decade because they hold all the memory. That’s brittle. If they leave suddenly, the function collapses.
Why this all matters now
Years ago, mobility was the promotion ladder. You moved institutions to move up, which meant you were rarely around long enough to be haunted by lost promises or groundhog-day problems. Today, in many fields, there simply aren’t that many jobs to move to. People stay put 5, 10, 20 years. People remember. Institutions don’t. That mismatch is where frustration lives.
Forewarned is forearmed
At some point you’ll be promised something that drifts, trade something that gets forgotten, propose something that’s been tried, or inherit a role with no map. None of this is a moral failing on your part. It’s a structural feature of how departments are staffed and how roles rotate.
You can’t make the department remember, but you can remember they don’t remember. Not holding on to that delusion will save you alot of wasted time and emotional energy.