Scarcity in Higher Education: When It Fuels Toxic Dynamics — and When It Doesn’t

I’ve been reading Mary Clearman Blew’s This Is Not the Ivy League, a memoir about teaching at a small, open-admissions college in 1970s Montana.

At one point, enrollment drops nearly 20 percent in a single year. Because state funding followed headcount, the budget contracts immediately. Faculty are let go. The library budget is cut. Offices sit empty.

But Blew’s most powerful observation isn’t about the money.

It’s about what scarcity does to people.

She describes “vicious blood-battles” over who would keep their jobs. Colleagues who once assumed mobility realized they were geographically and professionally stuck. What had felt temporary became permanent.

Alongside the enrollment crisis came a political shift. Legislators increasingly framed the college as a workforce pipeline. Its value was measured in job preparation, not intellectual formation.

The pressure wasn’t just internal.

It was structural.

Reading it now, it feels less like history and more like recognition.

As a library director at a regional institution, I don’t read Blew’s account as nostalgia. I read it as a leadership case study.

Scarcity Is Structural Before It Is Personal

We are entering another contraction cycle. The demographic cliff. Enrollment volatility. Workforce rhetoric. AI acceleration.

In many states, funding models still tie dollars to enrollment or performance metrics. Public conversations about higher education increasingly revolve around return on investment.

Funding structures shape behavior.

When incentives narrow, mission narrows.

Scarcity becomes ambient. It reshapes tone before it reshapes budgets. Meetings grow cautious. Departments compete to appear “essential.” Innovation feels risky.

Survival begins to masquerade as strategy.

Scarcity itself is not toxic.

But unmanaged structural scarcity often becomes relationally toxic.

How Toxic Dynamics Take Root

Insecurity erodes trust long before budgets collapse entirely.

When uncertainty rises:

• Information is withheld.

• Leaders overcorrect through control.

• Programs justify themselves in economic terms.

• Adjunct and contingent faculty feel increasingly precarious.

• Silence replaces candor.

Toxic dynamics are rarely about personalities.

They are about unmanaged pressure.

Scarcity becomes relational before it becomes financial.

And when fear goes unnamed, it organizes culture.

Inclusion Under Pressure

Scarcity is never neutral.

In times of abundance, institutions speak confidently about diversity, equity, and access. In times of contraction, those commitments are tested.

When budgets shrink:

• Whose programs are labeled “low enrollment”?

• Whose roles are deemed “non-essential”?

• Which initiatives quietly disappear?

Institutions rarely announce mission drift. They adjust incentives.

Historically, contraction disproportionately affects adjunct faculty, staff roles, humanities programs, and access-oriented services.

Blew’s institution was not the Ivy League. It served rural and first-generation students. It absorbed economic realities that elite institutions could avoid.

Regional and open-admissions colleges still do.

Inclusion is not proven during expansion.

It is proven when resources tighten.

When Policy Narrows Purpose

One of Blew’s most striking observations is how quickly legislative framing reshaped institutional identity. As enrollment declined, the state redefined the college’s purpose around workforce preparation.

The shift was not accidental. It was incentivized.

Today, similar pressures are visible. Funding formulas, political rhetoric, and performance metrics increasingly define institutional value in economic terms.

Workforce readiness matters.

But when funding structures dictate mission, governance becomes reactive rather than principled.

Education compresses into credentialing. Inquiry becomes harder to defend. Mission becomes marketing language.

And under sustained pressure, survival replaces scholarship as identity.

Scarcity Is a Leadership Test

Contraction cycles will continue. They always have.

The defining question is not whether institutions face pressure.

The defining question is how they lead through it.

Will fear define culture?
Will inclusion become conditional?
Will we allow incentives to quietly rewrite mission?

Or will we communicate clearly, confront structural pressure honestly, and align decisions with stated values?

Scarcity does not automatically produce toxic dynamics.

But silence does. Avoidance does. Fear-driven leadership does.

Enrollment can recover.

Trust, once eroded, is much harder to rebuild.

Survival is necessary.

But if survival becomes the organizing principle, institutions may remain operational — while losing the intellectual and ethical foundations that made them worth sustaining.

And that loss is far more difficult to reverse.