On the Verge of Burnout: COVID19 Impact on Faculty Well Being and Careers

Many months into the pandemic, faculty members at all levels, from tenured profes-sors to adjuncts, say their workloads are higher, their morale is lower, and their work-life balance is almost nonexistent.Many longtime tenured professors face the challenge of virtual teaching for the first time; tenure-track faculty live in career limbo; and nontenured and part-time professors bear much of the brunt of furloughs and layoffs.A significant percentage of all ranks of faculty feel discouraged enough to think about retiring or leaving higher educa-tion for other jobs, according to a survey commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

More than two-thirds of faculty members say they felt extremely or very stressed over the past month, compared with about one-third at the end of 2019.

It is not surprising that all faculty mem-bers reported an increase in stress and fa-tigue since the pandemic started, but they also report much higher feelings of other draining emotions, such as grief and anger, and say they expected to continue those having those elevated feelings through the rest of the year.The survey also shows that while all faculty members are struggling, women more than men say their workloads have increased, their work-life balance has di-minished, and they have greater fear about the safety of returning to the classroom. Higher-education institutions’ attention is fixed on switching from remote learning to in-person education (and back on a dime), ongoing economic woes, and the men-tal and physical health of their students. Nonetheless, they are trying not to let their faculty’s tribulations get lost in the turmoil.They are focused — some more suc-cessfully than others — on helping with the immediate needs of faculty members, such as technology, child and elder care, and tenure bids, as well as on the potential long-term impact of the pandemic on what the faculty of the future will look like.The survey’s findings are grim.

But in more than a dozen interviews with faculty members, university leaders, and experts, some expressed very cautious optimism that higher education can emerge stronger. The twin pandemics of this year — health and racial justice — have forced to the forefront problems that have long seethed in higher education. The hope is that universi-ties will use what is learned to make signif-icant changes in areas such as the tenure process and academic evaluations to create a more equitable and diverse faculty. “If there’s hope, it’s that faculty are more interested in decisions being made at their institutions,” says Kiernan Mathews, executive director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “Faculty are often painted as uninterested in shared governance — I don’t think that’s the case anymore.” And he hopes faculty members use that engagement “to broaden the definition of excellence, to push for a more inclusive, a more empathetic, and more diverse academy.

About one-third or more of tenured pro-fessors answered affirmatively to the first three options. Sixteen percent selected only the option to retire.“I think about leaving academia almost every day now,” says one tenured professor at a state university who asked not to be identified. “But I’m only 50. I find myself jealous of retired colleagues and those old enough to jump-start their retirement plans. And I am tenured, with a course load not as intense as some others. I don’t have kids at home. If someone like me wants to bolt, how many more must there be?”Some 73 percent of tenured professors who responded to this question say they have moved up their retirement date. Al-most half say they plan to retire within two years or less; only 20 percent say that at the beginning of 2019 they thought they would retire within two years.Of course, there are those considering delaying retiring for financial reasons, or even because remote learning suits them better — as one respondent says, “Being able to work from home has made staying more tolerable.”The survey findings “fit my experience very closely, and I’m worried about it,” An-derson says. “While higher education may need to change quite drastically, it doesn’t need a third of the faculty to quit.”

However, Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the Universi-ty of Southern California, says the possibili-ty of more tenured professors retiring is not solely a negative, as many who will be leav-ing will most likely will be white and male — and their empty posts might make room for more women and professors of color.“I’m sad there are people who are no lon-ger enjoying teaching, but that’s a pro and con — we’re losing some highly talented people, but at the same time, there’s long been backlog of people to get in,” Kezar says. “There’s an opportunity in that shift.”Peter Starr, acting provost at American University, agrees. “We have an extraordi-nary opportunity to diversify our faculty as a function of retirement. The challenge is to be as inclusive as diverse since inclu-sion is where American high education has traditionally fallen down.”Of all the ranks of professors, those who are on the tenure track expressed some of the highest levels of stress and fatigue, some-thing Mathews says he found unexpected.Some 43 percent of tenure-track profes-sors replied in the survey that they had seriously considered changing careers and leaving higher education — the highest percentage of all faculty levels.“I thought it was surprising how much more precarious pre-tenure faculty were describing their position even compared to part-time and non-tenured-track faculty, who are typically described as the most under threat in these sorts of situations,” he says.That may not be that unexpected, given the enormous difficulties many professors are facing to continue their research in the face of the pandemic, something that weighs particularly heavily on tenure-track faculty members.Leslie Gonzales, an associate professor of higher education at Michigan State Univer-sity, also serves as a faculty-excellence advo-cate; she liaisons between the faculty, dean, and provost. In that role, over the summer, she interviewed about 30 professors out of about 200 in the College of Education.“

During the course of those interviews, I spoke to three pre-tenure faculty who are saying, ‘Why am I even going to try to go up for tenure? It’s just impossible,’” Gonzales says. “They articulated the idea that they might leave, and we know the greatest pre-dictor of faculty turnover is the initial ar-ticulation that someone is going to leave.”The road to tenure has never been easy. But it’s particularly difficult now. “I think in faculty at the very beginning of their careers — Year 1 through 3 — this is tough. This is very tough,” Gonzales says. “Earn-ing tenure at any institution is a huge challenge, but when you’re an early-career scholar who is pre-tenure and living away from family, with no day care or school for child care, and you don’t have your typi-cal support system, the hill to get tenure becomes even greater,” she says. “You’re thinking, ‘How am I going to do this now?’”On the other hand, Starr says, in spite of appearances, there may be room for optimism. “The rate of tenure lines becoming vacant because of retirement is far out-stripping historical norms, opening up the possibility for increased tenure-line hiring once we’re through the pandemic,” he says.

Of course, many faculty members don’t want, or can’t, leave their profession. But some also say they don’t know how long they can continue to work under the strain they’re feeling now.“The survey findings were an uncanny reflection on a macro level of my own expe-riences and those of colleagues I’ve com-miserated with privately,” says Mackenzie, the professor at the University of Washing-ton. “The increased workload and anxiety is something I don’t think non-teachers can quite grasp — for me, at least, to teach effec-tively and thoughtfully requires about twice the time, and there’s a constant sense you’re never doing enough. What so many teaching faculty are feeling is far beyond stress — it’s exhaustion, radical self-doubt, and wonder-ing how much longer we can sustain it.”“ I am in my second year in my new job, and the pandemic hit before I completed my first year in a new town. We are in lockdown, and I have no close friends nearby. At the same time, my workload feels like it has at least doubled, and I am struggling to keep up.”– Anonymous survey response

Although this year has been grueling for everyone, the responses from women pro-fessors consistently showed that they felt more over-worked and overwhelmed compared with men. When asked how their work-life bal-ance had shifted over 2020, 74 percent of all women faculty surveyed respond-ed that it had deteriorated, compared with 63 percent of men. Eighty-two percent of women professors said their workloads increased, compared with 70 percent of men.“Over all, the results are consistent with pre-Covid researching showing gender disparities in stress and work-load and that those differences have gotten worse during the pandemic,” says KerryAnn O’Meara, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland and the 2020 president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

It is striking that in every category of faculty, women were more likely than men to say that since the start of 2020, their workload has increased, and their work-life balance has deteriorated. What we need to ask is what are the likely factors contributing to making a situation that was already gen-dered and racialized worse?”Research has consistently found that women do more of the family caregiving, whether it be for children or other relatives. And the pandemic has essentially wiped out almost all the forms of assistance in this area: day-care and senior centers are shut down in many parts of the country; school-age children are at home, needing attention and help with learning; and in-formal but crucial help, such as grandpar-ents who can pitch in, might have disap-peared due to the health risks of spreading the coronavirus.“It’s not my case personally, but all of the faculty I know on my campus who have had to take leave to provide caregiv-ing, including unpaid leave, have been women,” Mackenzie says. “It seems inevi-table that more women academics will see their career trajectories stall as a result of the compounded pressures of caregiving a nd w or k .”Women, faculty of color, and gen-der-nonconforming faculty often also do more service on committees, as well as mentoring and helping students; Macken-zie, who is nonbinary, says “this has long been the case, but Covid is accentuating it as students are increasingly seeking more intensive forms of personal support from faculty.” These are not simply requests for aca-demic help or even morale boosts; pro-fessors talk of students who suffer from various types of trauma, as well as those who are potentially suicidal, seeking help.“

A lot of students are experiencing men-tal-health issues, and students tend to go to women,” Kezar, of the University of South-ern California, says.Faculty of color also are more likely to come from communities that have ex-perienced more coronavirus infections and deaths. “In my own family, which is working class, many are engaged in health care and customer service — which is very typical of Latino families — and several members have been infected with Covid,” Gonzales says. “Thank goodness my family members have all survived and are OK, but dealing with that level of loss, level of stress — that is an additional layer that faculty of color are very likely balancing.” And while the work burdens are real, re-search has also shown that women tend to be more self-critical, less willing to say no, and more fearful that asking for help might reflect poorly on them. So much of the attention on the challeng-es surrounding higher education during this crisis has been on how faculty mem-bers are teaching and how students are learning; less highlighted is the interrup-tions to scholarly research and what that will mean in terms of career advancement and tenure.But faculty members, and especially women, are well aware of the cost. The Chronicle survey asked if, since the start of 2020, they felt better, worse, or the same about meeting their responsibilities in four areas: teaching, service, research and pub-lishing, and mentoring students.

”Over all, the respondents say they felt worse or about the same in all the categories. How-ever, when broken down by gender, women professors felt slightly better than men in all areas except one: research and publication. In this last category, the divide was most striking among tenured and tenure-track facul-ty; 66 percent of tenured women professors and 69 percent of tenure-track women professors responded that they feel they have done a worse job meeting their responsibilities in research and publication, compared with 58 percent and 61 percent respectively of male professors.That is not surprising to Joya Misra, a pro-fessor of sociology and public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “My research shows that women tend to take time out of their own hides,” she says, “for example, putting as much time into their mentoring, service, teaching, but less into their research when they are pressed, such as when they have small kids, while men protect that re-search time.”She notes that a recent study, “No Tickets for Women in the Covid-19 Race?” showed that women were submitting proportional-ly fewer manuscripts to scholarly journals during the pandemic than men but contin-ued to accept peer-review invitations around the same rate as men.“Our findings indicate that the pandemic has already created cumulative advantages for men,” say the authors of the study. On the other hand, some faculty members, without smaller children at home and with a topic that can continue to be pursued, may actually have more time to focus on research and publishing. That’s why institutions need to acknowledge the unequal ways that faculty members have experienced the pandemic.One of the initial steps universities took — 259, according to the latest update of a crowdsourced Google doc — was to quickly extend tenure bids, typically by one year. Some allow professors to opt-in to the delays and some to opt-out.

While this early action was welcomed by many, a tenure delay raises its own problems, leading many to question what the next step could be. “The instant reaction in the immediate aftermath of Covid was to grant tenure-clock extensions,” Mathews says. Research has shown, however, “that gender-neutral — and you could argue race-neutral — policies such as ‘stop the clock’ benefit both men and women, but men ben-efit more. Black faculty and white faculty both benefit, but white faculty benefit more.” That’s because women and faculty of color will continue to face discrim-ination, and, in some cases, more difficult economic situations, that don’t stop when the tenure clock stops — on top of the extra burdens they shouldered during the pandemic.The second problem is that a tenure delay is also a pay and promotion delay. “By saying every-one is going to get another year, we’re further delaying — for pre-tenure faculty in particular — citizenship in the full rights and responsi-bilities of the university,” Mathews says.Some universities have taken specific steps to address the pay issue. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, will backdate the tenure-pay bump — if the candi-date is successful — to when he or she should have received tenure if the pandemic hadn’t interfered, Misra says As of July, a “pandemic impact statement” was also made part of the annual faculty review at her university. Professors don’t have to fill it out, Misra says, but it gives them the opportunity to say how the pandemic affected all aspects of their work.“Our sense is, two years from now people will forget,” she says, “but if we document it now, it will be in their record forever.” Misra created a two-page tool the university distrib-uted to assist faculty members in writing up their statements.This is particular-ly important when thinking about the tenure-promotion process, Gonzales says, because a person’s narrative becomes a key part of their document. She also suggests that institutions provide written guid-ance and direction for college deans, department chairs, review committees, and external review-ers to remind them that portfolios will likely look different. These initial moves are necessary, many say, but not enough. Now is the time, they argue, not just to tweak processes, such as tenure, that they find unfair, but revamp them completely. And a number of colleges and universities are in the midst of studying that option. If changes aren’t made, Misra says, the fear is that five years from now there will be fewer women and people of color in tenured positions, because they have been hit harder by the pandemic, adding that “if we continue to use the same strategies to evaluate, that’s likely what we will see.