Another fall semester has arrived, with its now-typical warning for faculty members to “prepare for an academic year that’s like nothing we’ve seen.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve become numb to that phrase. Part of the reason is simple exhaustion — as the online joke goes, “I’m tired of living in unprecedented times. Can we please have something precedented?”
Technically, every new academic year has always been “like nothing we’ve seen” — new classes, new students, time has passed. But there are degrees of differences, and today’s feel weightier. With a global pandemic and a tumultuous summer of “racial reckoning,” and the subsequent (and virulent) backlash, 2020 is an obvious inflection point. But there have been others since: generative AI, student protests over Gaza, financial and enrollment woes. At every institution I’ve visited over the last several years, the common refrain has been: “Things are different. Students are different. I am different.”
All this may strike you as an odd way to start a column ostensibly geared as a “survival guide” of sorts for the new semester. But if we’re going to think about how to not just survive but to have a chance to actually thrive, we first need to acknowledge the terrain of our new world. Talking about how to navigate another “unprecedented” year suggests it’s an aberration, a blip, when in fact, upheaval is the new status quo. Perhaps the fundamental truth about teaching in higher education in 2024 is that disruption is the new precedent.
Our new landscape, I will admit, looks pretty grim. We’re in an election year in which Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy has already intensified the continuous stream of overt — even violent — racism and misogyny that’s tainted public discourse for years. The attacks on DEI and, in some cases, on the very enterprise of education itself, have caused not just curricular damage but exacted a toll on people working on campuses.
Discourse has an increasingly sharp edge to it, both in and outside of the college classroom. Many of us are returning this fall to campuses with fewer programs, fewer colleagues, fewer supports for students and staff members, and — given this year’s FAFSA debacle and the impending “demographic cliff” — potentially fewer students.
How, you may wonder, are you supposed to endure all of this, much less flourish? Isn’t the very premise insulting and obtuse?
No, it’s not. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s essential that you go beyond mere survival to center thriving. No doubt the new academic year will bring difficult challenges. Coping with them is your ultimate aim — but in ways that can sustain you, your colleagues, and your students. It’s in that spirit, then, that I offer the following suggestions:
Set up boundaries, and stick to them. Two of the most precious resources for faculty members are time and energy (both cognitive and emotional), and you need to be strategic in how you manage the multiple demands upon them. To that end, Karen Costa, a writer and teacher, has developed a useful tool to help you define a “scope of practice.” Drawn from the work of therapists, counselors, and other mental-health professionals, the scope-of-practice framework asks you to list the types of work you are qualified to do and the tasks you are responsible for, and then focus on the things that sit at the intersection of both categories. Those duties — and only those — fall within your scope of practice.
This is a powerful exercise, and one that can bring much-needed clarity to a faculty workload that often feels like it’s spinning out of control.
As educators, we value professional competence, but we also approach our work with a high degree of personal and emotional investment in what we think of as a vocation. In caring about your students and their welfare, it’s all too easy to take on labor that you are qualified to do but not technically responsible for (for example, a long conversation with a student who is not our advisee about their career options in another field). And sometimes you may take on tasks that you are not qualified to do (such as counseling a student who comes to you with financial-aid problems).
Figuring out when and how you take on work that oversteps your areas of expertise and obligation is the first step to a liberating clarity.
The scope-of-practice framework offers a way to identify tasks that you can (should?) say no to, and it helps you articulate clear and compelling reasons for doing so. Replying “I’m just too busy” to a request that goes outside your scope of practice may be true, but it’s also vague and easily dismissed as whining (“Come on, everybody’s busy!”). Here’s a better way to turn down a new demand for your time: “I have two new course preps this semester, an overload of advisees, and serve on the university budget committee. So right now, I can’t take on any more responsibilities, and I’m not sure I’d be the best choice for this particular role.” That situates your decision in the larger context of labor you’re already doing.
Finally, the scope-of-practice framework helps you avoid the many tempting — but also draining and potentially damaging — distractions of campus life that fall outside of your formal duties. It’s easy to get pulled into departmental drama if you’re not careful. But really: Is it your responsibility to play peacekeeper in the latest iteration of two colleagues’ long-running feud?
Another example; I can be a sympathetic listener and trusted advocate for struggling students (that is my responsibility). I cannot, however, serve as their therapist or take on the burden of their problems myself (I am not qualified to do that work).
A common denominator that has emerged in recent books on faculty burnout is the toll taken by emotional labor, much of which we take on without realizing how much there is or how heavy that burden will become. It may sound cold-hearted, even somewhat ruthless, to approach student struggles this way. But no one — not students and certainly not you — is served well by nobly intended yet unskillful interventions, or by providing a student with an off-ramp from the necessary road to professional help.
Don’t go it alone. Find your comrades on the campus, or in your professional communities, and build solidarity:
- If your institution has a center for teaching and learning, that’s an ideal location to find a group of like-minded colleagues who can not only affirm and support your teaching practice but foster improvements in a supportive — as opposed to punitive or evaluative — fashion.
- Writing groups — in person or virtual — are another way to find collective support in what is all too often a solitary endeavor. Not only do they add an element of sociability to the work of writing, but the benefits of the peer-mentoring approach they embody ripple outward into other aspects of our faculty work.
- Be attuned to opportunities to participate in groups like faculty learning communities, or communities of practice, or perhaps faculty mentoring programs, depending on what your institution offers. If there aren’t any, consider if it’s feasible to start one. Yes, it’s an investment of already-precious time, but the benefits that accrue from these types of collective practice make them worth the effort.
- Moreover, there’s another form of solidarity with a proven track record of actual material improvements in our working conditions: the faculty union. This is, unfortunately, not an option for those of us in states with “right to work” laws, but where they exist, they have been powerful forces for actual change, particularly for term and contingent faculty (Additionally, the American Association of University Professors is also an important outlet for advocacy and collective action.)
Sustaining one another is the foundation of surviving and thriving in this difficult moment for higher education. None of us does this work by ourselves, at least not in any meaningful or lasting sense.
Be generous with yourself and others. Given all the professional challenges you face — layered on top of the personal difficulties that everyone encounters at some point — it can be easy for that ambient stress to latch onto the nearest target, rather than the appropriate one. Sometimes that target is whoever first crosses your path when your anxiety and frustration is ready to boil over. On other occasions that target is the most conveniently located one: you.
I want to be clear: I am not suggesting we embrace toxic positivity, excuse others’ inequitable actions toward us, or grit our teeth and ignore genuinely bad behavior.
But I do think there’s a lot of room for us to act with compassion and grace, and to be more intentional about cutting our colleagues and ourselves some slack. Teaching is more difficult after the disruptions of pandemic pedagogy, and the faculty job market remains a smoldering crater — it can be difficult to avoid negative patterns like impostor syndrome or excessive perfectionism even as our work environments become more challenging.
You can’t blame your own actions (or inactions) for systemic barriers, even as you work for their diminution. Nor can you blame those around you who are also trying to teach, learn, study, and thrive within the institution as it exists. As academics, we often default to critical lenses, and the ways in which faculty culture valorizes the individual (the lone scholar digging through the archives or spending nights in the lab) can make it difficult to remember that you are part of a larger, interconnected community — and that its members are allies and not adversaries.
So maybe in that first rush of irritation after a thoughtless remark, when you assume hostile motivations, take a pause, a deep breath. Disrupt the instinct that has you careening into anger or frustration, and remember where your battles truly lie. See if this merits your energy. And if not, preserve the emotional and cognitive bandwidth you need to fight the real problems.
Whatever power you have, use it. There’s a reason scholars who study authoritarian regimes warn us against ceding our agency: When we feel powerless and don’t act because of that feeling, the powerful have an open field before them.
Even in the most trying circumstances, you still have power. (To be sure, the amount you possess is shaped by the nature of your position and job security, among other factors.) What can one person do to fight unfairness, to help bring about a more just and sustainable future? Well, a lot. One person in one classroom at a time can model possibilities.
Mariame Kaba, a writer and activist, challenges us to consider: “What’s the next best thing you can do from where you are? For you, in this moment, in this possibility space that you have, what’s the next best thing?” That phrase, “possibility space,” is an apt way to describe the college classroom. The weight of one classroom here and one classroom there accumulates quickly and exponentially. What other job gives you the opportunity to shape the communities of the future — their leaders, their values, their habits of mind, their critical faculties — at such a scale? Your own power can contribute to mighty collective effects; don’t surrender it through inaction.
This is, of course, an incomplete list. It is also — by design — lacking in the types of neat pedagogical tricks or productivity hacks that often populate this genre of advice columns. I understand that might be frustrating to some readers, but I’m also firmly convinced that any meaningful strategy to not only survive, but thrive, in academe is going to take more than tips and tricks.
It is a wildly different proposition to work in higher education today than was the case even a few years ago. We need different strategies to make our way through this changed landscape — strategies that embrace solidarity, generosity, and compassion. Any opportunity to thrive in the coming academic year, and to help our students and colleagues do the same, depends upon our cultivation of those qualities.