ITHAKA Reviews

Too many managers, no room for promotions or advancement. Lots of people have been here for 10-15 years and are still in the same position. Micromanagement is a very real problem, every manager wants to feel important so every manager tries to manage as much as possible while also protecting their sphere of management. Under the IT team this is most prevalent, the micromanagement and ridiculous oversight forced upon you for even the simplest of projects makes any real change or progress a demoralizing experience. Employee morale is very low, most work under the guise of doing just enough not to get a negative review. Technology advancements are very slow and only done when absolutely necessary to support existing infrastructure. "That's the way we have always done it". Raises are minimal, 2-3% a year is the standard, anything more and you better be ready to fight for it.

Low morale and high turnover over the past year (2021). The root causes are likely uncompetitive pay and institutional dysfunction that continues to foment. The C-Suite thinks we're a flat organization and pretends everyone else is unaware of the salaries listed on the Form 990. Some wildly siloed and dysfunctional departments, despite several years of restructuring and realignment. Effort has clearly been made here with the implementation of OKRs, but this has done little to solve the patterns of incompetence, mistrust, and inertia experienced when trying to accomplish very basic cross-departmental collaboration. The culture seems to tow the line between non-profit and corporate-like whenever it's most convenient for upper management. Lower pay is justified because we're a non-profit, yet the expectation is for corporate working hours. Pervasive culture of Ivy-focused elitism is frustrating to be subject to year in and year out. The irony is not lost on me that a subgroup of the organization aimed at incubating change and advancing diversity in the Ivory Tower is a microcosm of the very exclusionary culture it seeks to dismantle.