English translation of an article originally published in Portuguese in Observador.
Portuguese public universities rightly call for collaboration. They ask academics to share laboratories, co-supervise students, build long-term projects, and create critical mass. Yet academic careers are channelled through a system that encourages the opposite: internal rivalry, fear of scarcity, and strategic silence.
This is not a story about individual villains. It is a predictable consequence of dysfunctional institutional design.
There is an old intuition, familiar from biology and from any organisation that depends on cooperation: competition within a group carries special costs because it erodes the cohesion on which the group depends. When competition turns inward, the collective weakens from within and, inevitably, outwardly as well. A university depends on departments and research centres being able to compete 'out there' for students, funding, and reputation. When that energy is spent competing internally for scarce rungs on the career ladder, the institution pays twice: it loses trust and it loses performance.
The structural problem is simple to describe: we confuse recruitment with promotion.
In the Portuguese public system, 'promotion' is treated, in practice, as another recruitment process. A competition is opened for a higher academic rank and internal and external candidates compete as though the institution were recruiting: the former once again, the latter for the first time. How can a university be managed with this degree of uncertainty about costs? When a competition is opened, will someone be promoted, producing a marginal increase in expenditure, or will someone new be hired, creating a full salary commitment? This is where budgets become contingency plans, if not exercises in imagination. Financial planning becomes precarious. Risk is managed through scenarios and, often, improvisation.
This state of affairs has both internal and external costs. Within the university, departments close in on themselves and the atmosphere becomes tense and defensive. The incentive structure pushes each person towards self-preservation: in practice, my colleague is the greatest obstacle to my own progression. The result is predictable: people become less willing to share information and opportunities. The temptation to work in silence grows. It is a zero-sum game: if I win, my colleague loses; if my colleague wins, I lose. Once this permanent accounting takes hold, cooperation stops being a reflex and becomes an exception. Are we really naive enough to believe that a system designed to feed internal rivalry produces robust, open, ambitious institutions?
Outside universities, the effects are also serious, even when they are only reputational. To external candidates, and often to the public at large, these competitions look like local promotions coated with a veneer of open competition. The time invested in an application is frequently wasted. Discouragement grows, and with it the recurring suspicion of positions tailored to a predetermined candidate. Even when such suspicions are unfair, a system that produces them repeatedly corrodes trust. And an institution without trust recruits less well.
Recent internal promotion competitions correct part of the problem: they no longer draw external candidates into processes intended for internal progression. But the underlying problem remains untouched. Instead of a career based on predictable criteria and clear rules for progression, we retain a model in which advancing means defeating colleagues in occasional competitions. Scarcity continues to shape incentives, behaviour, and relationships. That is where the pathology takes root.
There is also a collateral effect that is rarely counted: litigation. A design that encourages internal rivalry and produces external suspicion tends to push conflicts into legal disputes. The cost is not merely financial. It drains time and corrodes relationships.
There is a simpler and healthier model: separate promotion from recruitment.
Promotion should, by definition, be internal and should operate by criteria rather than by competition. From the moment of appointment, every academic should know what is required to become eligible for promotion. But there should be no automatic advancement: eligibility should lead to a demanding evaluation, with external assessment and a reasoned decision. The precise definition of those eligibility criteria is a separate discussion, but in general they will involve the familiar dimensions of academic life: research, teaching, and engagement with society, with combinations and weightings that can be adjusted. This is not corporate comfort. It is institutional infrastructure.
It is also a condition for academic freedom. When progression is uncertain and competitive, the incentive to conform grows: avoid conflict, collect administrative 'points', remain permanently aligned. Freedom of thought does not require explicit censorship in order to shrink. A system in which disagreement may carry a career cost for reasons unrelated to merit is enough.
The central point is this: colleagues should not be in competition with one another. My success should not require someone else's failure, and vice versa. This is not about 'institutional peace'. It is about making cooperation rational and, in doing so, freeing energy to compete where it matters: externally, for students, funding, and reputation.
Recruitment is a different decision. When a university needs a new specialisation, a strategic shift, additional capacity, or simply to replace someone, it should open a genuinely competitive and open search. The objective is clear: attract the best candidates, diversify the institution's intellectual DNA, and bring in new blood. But recruiting well is not enough. An institution that wants excellence must also create the conditions in which excellence can occur: genuine integration, sustainable workloads, access to resources, and a demanding but fair career path. Otherwise, it recruits talent and produces frustration.
If anyone fears that this would lower standards, the answer is the opposite: standards should be demanding at every stage of the career. First, in recruitment: open, competitive searches aimed at genuine added value, bringing in people who expand the institution's intellectual map and help it grow not only in size but in quality. Second, in long-term permanence: a genuinely rigorous tenure-type mechanism, whatever its legal form, in which a panel with an external majority, conflict-of-interest rules, and a reasoned decision evaluates whether someone has demonstrated sustained excellence. Real decisions, not protection of established interests that merely feeds academic inbreeding. Finally, in promotion: demanding and public criteria, robust and predictable evaluation, without turning every career step into an internal contest.
Nor are we reinventing the wheel. This model is used in other university systems and shows that high standards, predictability, and serious evaluation can coexist.
In Portugal, the most common objection is: 'Promotion has to be open in order to guarantee fairness.' Openness is an important value, but in the right place: recruitment. In promotion, it is a misplaced mechanism that introduces uncertainty where predictable rules should exist and, even then, does not guarantee fairness. Fairness comes from public criteria, rigorous and transparent evaluation, and decisions that can be scrutinised. The other objection is budgetary: 'We cannot promise promotions we cannot afford.' True. Then that should be stated plainly and staffing should be planned accordingly; otherwise, we replace a rule-based system with a game of scarcity and call it 'excellence'.
A university is not simply another government service counter. It must serve the public, but it cannot be managed as though its function were to execute procedures efficiently. The university's mission is to produce knowledge, educate critically, and provide a place where ideas can be tested without fear. If we want universities that are more collaborative and more deserving of trust, the answer is not another slogan about merit but structural change: open and competitive recruitment when new blood is needed; long-term permanence with a high bar and firm decisions; internal promotion with clear criteria and demanding evaluation.
There is an essential point that outsiders often fail to see: in an academic career, much of what we want to reward is, by its nature, intangible and uncertain in its return. To 'extend the boundaries of knowledge' requires exploring hypotheses that may fail, investing in lines of work that take years to mature, challenging consensus, and opening paths that nobody asked for. Intellectual boldness requires a secure institutional foundation, not as corporate comfort, but as firm ground from which to explore without fear.
A university that wants free thought and discovery cannot build careers as a zero-sum game. It must build them as infrastructure for trust: predictable standards and verifiable fairness. Without that path, the institution does not reward boldness. It manufactures caution.