A few weeks back, in the midst of year-end summary posts, Aileen McHarg, Professor of Public Law at Strathclyde University, tweeted, “Proposal: any academics boasting on social media about how productive they’ve been in 2018 to be required to add a report on the state of their personal life.” This sparked a discussion about who should or gets to brag and who can and cannot separate out their work and personal lives. But, what McHarg’s tweet drove home to me is how much of my hardest work is invisible.

This is true of much formal service work and of other less formal and sometimes more desperate interventions—those, too, are a kind of service. The end of the year is a season of accounting, and moving forward from a year of #metoo as scholars across disciplines have pushed for greater accountability, we should all take personal note of what is required to address historic and systemic inequalities and to transform fields and institutions. Transformation is worked slowly and often at significant personal cost. In this, it is a kind of high magic, a great working with unpredictable consequences.

No doubt, campuses are contested spaces. Across the United States, universities are engaging in complex dialog about issues ranging from the rightful treatment of confederate monuments (as in the ongoing discussion about the University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam) to whether or not Steve Bannon should be keynoting a conference on computer entertainment to the proper interpretation and implementation of Title IX regulations. Individual faculty are often caught in the crossfire, sometimes dangerously, their public peril serving as a chilling cautionary tale for the rest of us; campuses are woefully behind on sorting through how best to protect those who do the great service of working as public scholars. The contestation of the university—its rightful purpose and parameters, who it serves and how–is played out dramatically in public, but there are also important discussions and interventions happening quietly.

Some of these are private by regulation or necessity, covered by FERPA or Title IX in particular ways. Others are quiet because they are, frankly, boring. Still others are quiet because even necessary actions can be risky for those involved and may have long-term personal or professional consequences. Jobs are lost or left. Bridges are burned. Nobody wants to be known as a troublemaker but often someone has to make trouble. That trouble often comes in the form of carefully worded emails or faculty senate resolutions, but it is trouble, nonetheless. Regardless of why interventions happen off-camera, these less public actions comprise work and significant individual and collaborative effort that cannot be accounted for. They are also an important way that we can help improve the academy. When senior scholars stick their necks out to defend bullied junior scholars, when junior faculty call out casual racism in department meetings, when faculty complain about university policies that support inequality and undermine inclusion, they are engaging in some of the most essential, urgent work we can do.

I am not suggesting that we start putting our complaints on our CVs or naming and shaming bad actors on Twitter. I am saying we should honor all of those who take on the often grinding, demoralizing work of affecting change. For every individual case of academic protest that hits the national news, there are doubtless dozens of quieter arguments and organizing efforts happening to address issues large and small. I salute the bravery of friends and colleagues who have hired employment lawyers, who have pressed issues, who have formed unions, who have filed Title IX complaints, who have joined committees and filed grievances and stuck their necks out in subtle ways and dramatic ways both, who have wordsmithed formal policies and written reports and established metrics, who have requested records and discussed salaries, who have shared resources and changed standards.

This is the quiet, plodding work of demanding accountability and pressing for change, much of it alienating, all of it aggravating, none of it, likely, what we wish we were spending time on. Few, after all, pursued a career in academia to write out diversity guidelines for faculty searches and I doubt any of us relish confrontations with cantankerous colleagues in department meetings. But it is through such work that we remake the world around us. When faculty push universities to be more transparent, more inclusive, more true to their values, we do so because of a deep faith in the possibilities of our fields and institutions. These actions, then, are a matter of personal and professional integrity; they are a deep wellspring of optimism and idealism, but also a taskmaster: When we demand the world be changed, someone, somewhere has to do the work of making it so. Transformation has a cost.

In Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, finding a way to do something that should not be possible is high magic, and magic aptly describes both the act of changing silver to gold and the working of accounting. It is not without cost, and much of that work is incremental and dull, largely invisible. Miryem can change silver to gold, using the mundane means of her excellent business sense in the human world and using magic in the winter kingdom. But, even in the winter kingdom, this is work—she must spread the coins out and change them in batches, the task requiring grueling physical labor alongside magic.

I doubt that anyone working in the university system today is engaged in Rumplestiltskin-style transformation of silver to gold, but thousands are committed to transforming fields and institutions through the more mundane types of magic that Novik’s characters rely on—accounting and bargaining, advocating for more just and equitable policies, working collaboratively to combine strengths and produce safe havens. There are thousands of ways to do this kind of work, some of it public and provocative, but much of it ongoing and less easily seen. All of it is necessary, and without it, the changes that help universities truly fulfill their important role as institutions for education and knowledge generation are impossible. Most of this work will not appear on anyone’s list heralding their productivity, because it is not productive but transformative: it is, instead, like Novik’s high magic, remaking the world around us using powers we barely know we possess.