If academic service isn’t recognized, valued, and equitably shared, faculty members will simply renounce it altogether. As any chair, dean, or provost can tell you, this is already happening and has been exacerbated, like every other problem we face, by the pandemic. The risk posed by the decline in faculty participation in service is not only that the distribution of academic labor will become increasingly less equitable; it’s also that this work will grow so unappealing as to disincentivize any sane faculty member from agreeing to it. And we all know that when faculty members step out of service, the bureaucrats step in. You do not want bureaucrats writing your curricula, evaluating your scholarship, and depleting your budgets — not any more, that is, than they already are.