“Anything is never enough”: strategic rhetoric in the socialization of new faculty members

This study examines faculty onboarding as a site of strategic rhetoric within the neoliberal university. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 faculty members across five cohorts (2019-2023), we investigate how organizational socialization practices designed to support new hires can reproduce opaque, ambiguous, and extractive institutional ideologies. Using de Certeau's [1984, The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press] distinction between strategies and tactics, we analyze how institutions deploy rhetorics of individualism, victimization, and authenticity to resecure power and manage faculty labor, often at the expense of well-being. Findings show that formal onboarding programs struggle to counter these institutional forces. New faculty instead employ tactical communication, including building “shadow” systems of collective sensemaking, repurposing service for networking, and strategically complying with or resisting institutional demands to protect their professional integrity. We argue that faculty socialization is not a singular administrative event but a longitudinal pedagogical process through which faculty acquire and enact practical “counter-knowledge” for survival. We advocate faculty-led onboarding that develops critical literacy about institutional inequities and moves beyond transactional integration toward practices that protect faculty time, agency, and well-being within increasingly extractive academic systems.