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

By Karen Kelsky | May 1, 2021

This post was delayed by my…. uh… burnout.  So this report is no longer recent. But it’s still vital info.
I am sharing this important report, On the Verge of Burn Out: COVID19’s Impact on Faculty Well Being and Career Plans, generated by the Chronicle of Higher Ed in collaboration with Fidelity Investments. It presents a pretty damning picture of the state of the professoriate after a year of COVID. I am sharing only the first two sections, focused on individual faculty struggles. Please read the original for the full report.

Many months into the pandemic, faculty members at all levels, from tenured professors 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 education 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 members reported an increase in stress and fatigue 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 diminished, 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 mental 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 successfully 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 universities will use what is learned to make significant 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.

”A glimmer of light in this dark time in higher education is that 50 percent of faculty members say their enjoyment of teaching has stayed the same or increased this year. The bad news, of course, is that 50 percent don’t feel that way.They are worried about financial and job insecurity, as well as their health and safety — on top of their teaching and research challenges.These issues are not new but intensified — at times greatly so — by the pandemic. After all, in 2019, the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University conducted a pilot survey of 550 staff instructors at four community colleges and one university; the survey found that 38 percent said they have some form of basic needs insecurity, such as food and/or housing. Perhaps most worrisome are the feelings of despondency the Chronicle survey uncovered. In response to a question about feeling hopeful, about 55 percent of those surveyed say they felt little or no hope over the past month, compared with a nearly quarter of faculty members who say they felt that way in 2019. And that 55 percent only dipped to 46 percent when asked if they expect to feel this way for the rest of 2020.Even given that these times are taxing for just about everyone, these percentages stand out, says Debra Frey, vice president for analytics and marketing for Fidelity Investments, which conducted a survey of the general population around the same time as the Chronicle survey.

The Fidelity survey (Fidelity is also the underwriter for this report) asked similar questions about emotions; 34 percent of the general population said they were feeling “very” or “extremely” hopeful, versus 13 percent of faculty members, Frey says. And 69 percent of faculty members reported feeling highly stressed, compared with 35 percent of the general population, she adds.That striking statistic may reflect the multitude of challenges professors are facing at the same time: worrying about the economic black cloud hanging over much of higher education and the ensuring job insecurity; handling their own fears and trauma as well as their students; losing a certain amount of autonomy and collaboration; and “the stress of learning a lot of new technology rapidly, and knowing that this technology is literally the way in which we will connect with, or fail to connect with, students who are themselves feeling so disconnected,” says Louisa Mackenzie, an associate professor of French at the University of Washington.

That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t teaching well. Barbara Anderson, a professor and head of the department of interior design and fashion studies at Kansas State University, says her faculty are doing a wonderful job. But they don’t necessarily feel that way, largely because of the difficulties their students have with the technology of remote learning.“Everyone is expressing a psychological exhaustion, a mental exhaustion, from not being able to do as well as you would like to do in teaching,” Anderson says. “I see a tremendous level of frustration.”Tenured faculty who have the most stability in this very unstable time would appear to be the least affected, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A Chronicle survey question asked this of all ranks of faculty: “Since the start of 2020, have you seriously considered: changing careers and leaving higher education; changing jobs within higher education; retiring; or none of the above?”“ I’m simultaneously teaching in-person and distance-learning students; each requires vastly different techniques. I feel like if I address one group properly, the other group suffers.”– Anonymous survey response

About one-third or more of tenured professors 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. Almost 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,” Anderson 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 University of Southern California, says the possibility of more tenured professors retiring is not solely a negative, as many who will be leaving 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 longer 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 extraordinary opportunity to diversify our faculty as a function of retirement. The challenge is to be as inclusive as diverse since inclusion 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 professors 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 University, also serves as a faculty-excellence advocate; 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 predictor of faculty turnover is the initial articulation 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. “Earning 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 typical 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 experiences and those of colleagues I’ve commiserated 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 effectively 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 professors consistently showed that they felt more over-worked and overwhelmed compared with men. When asked how their work-life balance 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 gendered 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 disappeared 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 caregiving, including unpaid leave, have been women,” Mackenzie says. “It seems inevitable that more women academics will see their career trajectories stall as a result of the compounded pressures of caregiving and work.” Women, faculty of color, and gender-nonconforming faculty often also do more service on committees, as well as mentoring and helping students; Mackenzie, 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 academic help or even morale boosts; professors 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 mental health issues, and students tend to go to women,” Kezar, of the University of Southern California, says.Faculty of color also are more likely to come from communities that have experienced 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 challenges surrounding higher education during this crisis has been on how faculty members are teaching and how students are learning; less highlighted is the interruptions 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 publishing, 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 faculty; 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 professor 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 proportionally fewer manuscripts to scholarly journals during the pandemic than men but continued 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 benefit 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 discrimination, 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 responsibilities 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 candidate 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 distributed to assist faculty members in writing up their statements.This is particularly 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 guidance and direction for college deans, department chairs, review committees, and external reviewers 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.

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Filed Under: COVID19, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Tenure--How To Get It, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Anna Clemens says

    October 11, 2021 at 10:54 pm

    These figures are extremely worrying. I wanted to write that we are steering towards an academic mental health crisis but actually we are in the middle of it. Departments need to take this seriously and the working conditions for faculty need to be significantly improved.

    Reply
    • Karen Kelsky says

      October 12, 2021 at 10:09 am

      Yes – faculty and students both.

      Reply

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