Can we talk about quiet quitting again?

Hi,

I’m a middle-aged associate professor in the humanities at a private university that is thriving as far as these things go. I used to be quite active on this sub, and it helped me both through and past a long period of burnout in 2021–23. Due to some poor thinking and carelessness on the part of administrators, my salary declined last year because I didn’t get as much summer teaching. Downloading my W2 this past week and seeing the impact has kinda wrecked me. I can’t believe at my career stage I earned less in 2024 than in 2023.

My immediate reaction is “they pretend to pay me and I’ll pretend to work.” So I’d like to stop saying “yes” to service requests, pushing scholarship through conference presentations to publications, and freeze development on my pedagogy. The issue is that if I pull back from giving a full effort, none of the people who caused this—my unit-level head, staff and admin in the budget office, the senior leadership of the school, and the finance-bro board of trustees—will even notice. But people who have done me no wrong—my students, my colleagues, my department chair—would be impacted. They’d have to pick up my slack, rope others into doing what I currently volunteer to do, get less interaction with their instructor, etc.

I know this issue has been raised a million times, but please indulge me: what’s the appropriate response to falling salary when for personal and profession reasons switching institutions isn’t an option? How do you frame a decision to pull back to colleagues or chairs you respect?