A recent national survey by The Chronicle of administrators, faculty, and staff members paints a mixed picture of what it’s like to work in higher education. Two-thirds of respondents say they work either “significantly more” or “somewhat more” than they did five years ago. Thirty-two percent say their workplace environment is either “toxic” or “often dysfunctional.” On the other hand, 54 percent report being equally or more satisfied with their jobs than they were five years ago.
These data points suggest pockets of optimism but also a substantial opportunity for improvement. With that in mind, we asked people who work in higher ed for their best, boldest idea for how to improve the day-in, day-out reality of working in the sector. —The Editors
End Pointless Meetings
We spend too much time on long-winded, bullshit meetings that sound good but don’t accomplish anything. I propose a solution: pay to talk.
At the beginning of every committee meeting (large or small), every participant receives a $50 bill. They may speak as much as they want, but the first time they speak, they must pay $50. If they keep silent, they get to keep the $50. Whatever dean called the meeting has to provide the funds ($50 per participant) from their discretionary budget. And for every additional hour the meeting takes, the price should increase by another $50 per participant.
This would incentivize people to keep silent and thus make meetings shorter. More importantly, it would incentivize deans and others to call fewer meetings. If a dean calls a committee meeting with 10 people for 1 hour, they have to pay $500. These committee meetings have tremendous marginal costs: A one hour meeting at my business school is equivalent to many tens of thousands in salary. It’s time we internalized these costs.
Jason Brennan is a professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Actually Train Leaders
A lot of the toxic work-environment issues don’t get resolved because people are not trained in how to manage such difficult situations. Higher education puts the least amount of funding into leadership development of any sector, which leads to many of the problems noted in The Chronicle’s survey.
Adrianna Kezar is director of the Pullias Center of Higher Education and a professor of leadership and higher education at the University of Southern California.
Pay More
When asked how to improve their workplace, it’s incumbent on workers of the world, regardless of profession or career, to offer one answer: more pay for all. It would also be nice if federal and state governments passed laws that, first, required universities to spend a substantial portion of their budgets and endowments on supporting teaching and research, and second, required universities to have at least 95 percent of their faculty be on the tenure track.
Daniel Bessner is an associate professor in American foreign policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
Let Them Eat Soft-Serve
Subsidized meal plans — and encouragement for staff and faculty to use them — could build connections with students and lead to better health outcomes. This wouldn’t be a “high table” situation reinforcing hierarchy, as in the classic British university scenario. Instead, faculty and staff would take unoccupied seats just as students do. We’d be able to offer better dining options with increased volume. And even a 60-year-old administrator like myself likes the occasional “cereal bar” meal or soft-serve dessert!
George Justice is provost at the University of Tulsa.
Bring Back Classroom Rules
Higher ed needs smarter, stronger rules and norms.
When I was chair of our first-year program, a seminar-based experience for all new freshmen, many faculty struggled with students’ chronic lateness, leaving class early, or wandering in and out multiple times during class. When I suggested that (in addition to checking in with students individually), professors should clarify expectations, an administrator whose title included “social justice” chided me that such expectations were insensitive to students’ life circumstances. The “equitable” solution, it was explained, was to abandon these outdated expectations and let the students come and go as they please. To do otherwise was an inappropriate, and even discriminatory, overreach of our professorial authority.
The pandemic sharpened this sensibility. Once instruction (sort of) resumed, deadlines, punctuality, and even expecting students to turn their video on, were considered unreasonable or even a form of “white supremacy culture.” At the New School, many abandoned the old rules. What the college celebrated as “flexibility” was in fact an act of educational neglect, especially of the students who already struggled most.
Now it’s been almost impossible to create a sense of normalcy and accountability. The laissez-faire approach to attendance and deadlines became the kindling for our combustible moment of campus protest. Last spring, I had to walk through our campus’s encampment to teach my class. I would occasionally stop to chat. One day, several students and faculty members were discussing how frustrated they were that the then-president had canceled a meeting with them, while acknowledging that they had broken the conditions of the meeting (by expanding their encampment). The consensus seemed to be that it was outrageous to expect that they abide by such rules. Sure enough, the encampment soon spread to an occupation of another building, while colleagues circulated petitions demanding that no one involved in any of these protests face the disciplinary consequences described in our code of conduct.
Institutions are only as strong as the collective respect and norms that bind them. When we ignore and attack these tenets, all of us suffer.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a professor of history at the New School. She is the author of two books, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Build Better Bosses
When employees describe their institutional culture as “toxic” or “dysfunctional,” they are most likely describing their relationships with their closest colleagues and their most immediate supervisors. During my years as a college president, we would interview as many departing staff members as possible to determine the chief reasons for their departure. No. 1, consistently, was a poor relationship with a supervisor.
There is no easy way to eliminate personality clashes, but there are steps to improve relationships between supervisors and those they ostensibly supervise.
First, provide better, more consistent, and more regular training in how to supervise. Like so much in academe, the process of learning how to manage people, particularly on the faculty side, consists typically of being thrown into the deep end of the pool and either figuring out how to swim or drowning. More often than not, the chair is chosen on the basis of seniority. Both our selection process and our training could be far better.
Second, offer more regular and detailed performance feedback to employees, both faculty and staff. This is something we, as a rule, do very badly. It is not unusual for an employee to go years without receiving any substantive feedback (and no, a half-percent merit increase is not substantive feedback). When performance reviews do come, they tend to be overly vague and often overly generous. While this might seem kind to those who underperform, it demoralizes those who work hard and effectively. It also fails to provide struggling employees with the honest assessments they need if they are to improve. Nobody wins in a workplace without accountability.
Brian Rosenberg is president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Audit Your Workload
Workload drift is an increasingly urgent issue, driven by the expansion of faculty and staff responsibilities beyond their primary instructional roles, including committee work, advising, recruitment, retention, and administrative tasks. Compounding this issue is the growing perception of students as consumers rather than learners, which shifts institutional priorities toward satisfaction metrics and immediate responsiveness, sometimes at the expense of academic rigor. Effective teaching requires significant time for preparation, meaningful student engagement, timely feedback, and adapting to diverse learning needs. To manage these evolving responsibilities, I would propose institutions conduct workload audits, streamline administrative processes, and foster emotionally intelligent leadership. Through the use of transformational leadership strategies, colleges can reduce burnout, support employee well-being, and create opportunities for professional growth, empowering faculty and staff to refocus on their core mission of student success.
Tiffany Watts is chief of staff and vice president for strategic initiatives at Fayetteville Technical Community College.
Ditch Ed Tech
The first thing I noticed when I retired in 2023 was that my hands stopped hurting. For this, I credit my liberation from academic technology. The various computer programs for advising, teaching, grading, job searches, graduate admissions, and submitting annual reports — and all the scrolling, clicking, trackpad dragging — all of that was over.
Billed as a convenience and a pedagogical advance, these platforms allow students to reserve course readings without leaving their dorms, or to get more rapid feedback on papers or exams — but all at the cost of faculty time.
Software solutions were initially sold to faculty as an ecologically mindful strategy for reducing mountains of paper and streamlining administrative staff. As it turned out, technology required even more highly trained and expensive people; UX design, security systems, software and platform licenses; routine maintenance and replacement of computers themselves.
All of this, we were told, would enhance “collaboration.” What it did was make the university less friendly as support staff were shifted out of departments and into administrative offices where students and faculty no longer ventured. Casual friendships forged across the university made the daily work of teaching, learning, and administration more personal. In 1986, it was a department secretary who proctored my written exams, showing up halfway through the six-hour ordeal with coffee. In 1996, it was a department administrator who stayed into the evening to help me proof and assemble my tenure file. In 2005, it was a friend in the registrar’s office who changed an advisee’s gender from “f” to “m” with a keystroke, a life-changing act that multiple deans had told me was not possible.
This is not mere nostalgia, nor is it Luddism. This world is retrievable, but only if we come to a shared agreement about the unintentional effects of software solutions.
Claire Potter is a professor emerita of history at the New School.
Mini-Sabbaticals for Staff
We should implement a mini-sabbatical for professional staff. These short-term breaks (anywhere from two to eight weeks, depending on the situation) would provide staff with the time and space to rejuvenate, learn, and focus on personal growth. Staff members should return with something tangible to share, so that others can benefit from their experience.
Colleges should also establish a “professional well-being and growth” fund that provides annual stipends for professional development. These funds could cover conferences, certifications, training, or support services. Professional development is often one of the first areas to be cut in tight budget years. It should be the last.
Dawn Meza Soufleris is vice president for student development and campus life at Montclair State University.
Become (Your Version of) Mr. Collegiality
Go to your office. Sit at your desk. Prop open the door. Talk to people who pass by. Invite them to coffee. See what happens. It has become too easy for academics to avoid the office except on the days they teach or have in-person meetings. We say we can get more done at home — which is very likely true — but academic work is not just about getting things done. A college is meant to foster a distinct way of life. It aims to live in accord with values that are rare elsewhere: collegiality and the free exchange of ideas. It’s hard to be collegial on Zoom.
When I was a full-time faculty member, I usually brought my lunch, ate it at my desk, and declined invitations to join my colleagues at the faculty table in the dining hall. I would not have won an award for Mr. Collegiality. But I went to the office five days a week. I stood in colleagues’ doorways for countless hours and was good for a beer after work at the bar across the street, where we would sit in booths by fishbowl windows and gesture for friends to join us as they walked past. Those conversations are among the things I miss most.
Jonathan Malesic teaches first-year writing at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of The End of Burnout (University of California Press, 2022).
Don’t Scrimp on Fun
This past November, I attended my university’s Thanksgiving luncheon — an annual meal for faculty and staff that kicks off our holiday season. During lunch, a staff member came up to me and thanked me for continuing the tradition, notwithstanding the budget pressures we faced (related to last year’s FAFSA disaster). As budgets tighten, it can be tempting to cut back on the “fun stuff” — the activities that seem optional, the “pizza money.” But pizza money is one of the last places you should look for savings.
The past few years, I’ve regularly convened a culture committee made up of senior leaders — we informally call it the “Fun Committee.” We look to pepper the calendar year with light-hearted events that bring the campus together: Halloween trick-or-treating and costume competitions, Christmas-tree lighting, Mardi Gras, a mid-summer carnival-type family day, a monthly happy hour. This might seem incongruous as we grapple with the budget headwinds, but it’s not: “Pizza money” is a comparatively tiny portion of the university budget and has an outsized impact on the campus climate.
Eduardo Peñalver is president of Seattle University.
End BS Make-Work
“Bullshit jobs.” It’s what the late, great David Graeber called pointless work made up “just for the sake of keeping us working.” I think of his argument almost every day. It pops to mind during my Sisyphean struggle with email. It looms when I battle some new website or portal to accomplish a task that probably should not exist, and surely could be done faster without a computer. My colleagues regularly report that every single part of their job — from annual reports to grant proposals, equipment purchases to graduate admissions to you-name-it — has gotten clunkier. Teaching and research takes an ever-shrinking share of my working hours relative to all the make-work.
How to counteract this trend? The best idea is the most familiar: Organize.
The bullshitification of academic life coincides with the corporatization of higher education. Today, universities are run by a leadership class mostly trained in business, law, or finance that lacks a basic understanding of their essential mission. In partnership with boards of trustees, who hail from the same worlds, they have transformed faculty from partners in shared governance to middle managers. When they want advice, they turn to expensive consultants, not to their own faculty.
It’s not too late to create democratic workplaces for ourselves and democratic universities for our students. Not only will it help protect the country’s teetering democracy — it will wrest back the tools to de-bullshitize our work.
François Furstenberg is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.
A New Academic Calendar
The traditional academic calendar has long needed reimagining. It no longer serves the needs of students or staff. At Paul Quinn College, we prioritize family time during the holidays. We do this by ending the first semester at Thanksgiving, allowing students to go home early and work for two months to earn additional money. This benefits students emotionally and financially. It also improves the quality of life for our faculty and staff by returning them to summer hours for the remaining few weeks of the semester and sending them home to their families early for the holidays.
Michael J. Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn College.
No Weekend Email
A friend once remarked that academics may know a lot of things, but they don’t know how to live. I pushed back at the time, but I confess that I knew what he meant. In our devotion to the “life of the mind,” we often spurn balance and pleasure in favor of study and work. And because we tend to think of our work as a calling, at once a privilege and pleasure (which it is!), we can easily find ourselves working all the time, at the cost of cultivating other parts of our lives.
Academics need to build better boundaries between work and what lies beyond it. We need a kind of academic “sabbath” devoted to rest and replenishment of the mind.
We could start with giving greater sanction to a weekend break. I for one wouldn’t mind if a dean or chair told me I shouldn’t, at the very least, respond to work emails, or send them myself, over the weekend. Schedule them to go out on Monday morning if you really must. But consider not writing any at all. Junior colleagues may say that this is easy for a tenured professor to say, and perhaps they have a point. But I’m not so sure. Being busy all the time is a praxis. And if you cultivate it early on in your career, you’ll likely be doing so still when it is too late to change.
Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Dartmouth College.
Encourage Bottom-Up Change
Faculty and staff should be empowered to suggest and then create change within their units. The people doing the work are the ones who can see what needs to be changed, what can be done to improve the working environment, but there is no space for them to suggest and then meaningfully make changes. I think part of our dissatisfaction comes from a feeling of powerlessness to make things better. We work to help students, to help our colleagues and peers, but rarely do we have the opportunity to work to help ourselves. Changes in higher education are almost always done to us, instead of with us.
Lee Skallerup Bessette is assistant director for digital learning at Georgetown University and an affiliated faculty member in the master’s program in learning, design, and technology.
Say No to Mammon!
What the world needs now are zones of respite from the brutalizing instrumentalization of thought and action that characterizes the advancing hegemony of quantification, commodification, and ubiquitous financialization.
Yes, science is real and powerful. Yes, market-based solutions to complex problems “work,” and can even be shown to be highly efficient — provided one sets modeling software just so. Yes, the pursuit and production of knowledge is and always will be deeply entangled with the business of getting and spending — deeply entangled with “business” itself. Nevertheless, values other than money are real, as well as necessary, and markets will never supply them.
And our markets have become market-markets: Finance capitalism (zero-sum betting on the market) has exploded in the last half-century, dwarfing our actual productive economies. What this means, among other things, is that purely competitive money-play has become, across the last 30 years, the runaway preoccupation of a distorting preponderance of educated persons across the globe.
Teaching at Princeton for 25 years, I have directly witnessed (indeed, one can say, even participated in, by means of countless letters of recommendation) these developments: More elite students than ever now go to work directly in finance. And a plurality of those who don’t find themselves in law or consulting, which increasingly function as support staff to those who are directly sucking and blowing in that titanic vortex of whirligig fatuity known as finance capitalism.
I am not opposed to wealth, and lots of rich people do kind and generous things with their money. The problem here is simply the dwarfing scale and relentless, pervasive monomania of this enterprise, which has not merely suborned our polity but has progressively insinuated the return-on-investment analytics of private equity into everything from the care of our grandmothers to the activity of teaching and learning. And this is bad.
What is, at this time, most special about colleges and universities is that they have a meaningful legacy claim to alternative traditions — to ends and aims and activities that will not be reduced to money value, to other ways of thinking about time, life, and, for that matter, matter itself. This is not to say that higher education has ever existed outside of the worlds of getting and spending. Not at all. But it is to remind us that colleges (like churches and synagogues and mosques and summer afternoons) have long held space for other things — indeed, are born of and in service to that which cannot be bought or sold.
Nietzsche said somewhere that big ideas are like cold baths: Jump in, and get out quick. So I won’t rehearse the charges against for-profit universities, or lament the resort by humanists-who-should-know-better to various supine defenses of their departments in terms of “job preparedness.” And let us leave aside the general list of the higher-ed ship to the flooding bulkheads of “innovation centers,” “entrepreneurship training,” and related profiteering-adjacent subdisciplines. What we need are educational spaces that boldly declare themselves SANCTUARIES, capable of providing some (temporary, partial, essential) respite from worlds that money is making.
D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history and history of science at Princeton University.
