If you’ve spent any time lately on academic social-media channels, you have surely read the stream of teaching angst from faculty members. Often posting under pseudonyms, they share their grievances, tips, and cries for help. If you looked only at the titles of the posts lately, you could be forgiven for concluding that this is the worst semester in the history of education.
I’ve seen so many faculty posts proclaiming, “I’m ready to quit,” and “I can’t take it anymore,” and “I give up.” Specifically, a lot of faculty members feel that students’ attention span and work ethic in the 2023-24 college classroom are at all-time lows, while misbehavior, misconduct, and cluelessness are at all-time highs. The many problems that were identified after in-person teaching resumed, professors say, have only gotten worse this academic year.
In the Admin 101 column this year, I’ve been writing about uncertainty and anxiety in the leadership ranks, and the need to focus on doing work that matters and building a culture of trust. The high turnover we are seeing for higher-education leaders is related to a broad array of financial, political, and internal challenges. For many faculty members, the “student-disengagement crisis” they are experiencing is just as serious and stressful.
Obviously any problem that affects faculty and staff members and students is a managerial and leadership problem, too. The question is: What can administrators do to help, and not make things worse through inaction or missteps?
Don’t ignore, hide, or downplay the student-engagement crisis. As an administrator, you probably have spent years in higher education, so your first instinct upon hearing anyone complain about “these kids today” is to point out that doing so is an age-old habit. Some 2,000 years ago, Seneca the Elder compiled a list of juridical arguments and declamations that he recalled from his “superlative peers” because, he felt, the “modern” generation of jurists and speakers had much less talent than his colleagues back in the “good old days.” Anthropologists have described such “tales of decline” in almost every culture and workplace. In fact, my very first Chronicle article, written almost a quarter century ago, was titled “Students Are Blithely Ignorant; Professors Are Bitter,” and described professional exasperation with that era’s students.
Should your role as a leader, then, be to quash or minimize your faculty’s discontent with the college readiness and classroom behavior of “today’s students”? To remind professors that generational complaints are nothing new? Wouldn’t that at least provide some perspective?
Perspective is good, but ignoring faculty frustrations about such a vital aspect of their work, or chastising them for criticizing students, achieves nothing, except to confirm their distrust of administration. Fight the impulse to “protect the brand” by sweeping these concerns under the rug. If student disengagement has reached a crisis point on your campus, in the eyes of your faculty, acknowledge the problem and its severity. Then show leadership, which, after all, is your job as an academic administrator.
Appreciate that the “disengagement problem” can vary by educational setting, population, instructor, and discipline. One of the slippery slopes of being an administrator and having access to the big data — institutional dashboards of aggregate numbers for graduation rates, enrollment, retention, and so on — is that it’s easy to lose sight of the need to disaggregate to individual groups and to individuals.
For example, here in West Texas where I have made my home for more than a decade, I’ve been consistently impressed by the work ethic and resilience of our “farm, ranch, and rig kids” — those who were raised in small towns and whose parents worked in agriculture or energy. They just are naturally able to take some of life’s blows better than suburbanites like me. Anyone who can clean up after a stable full of 1,000-pound horses, drive a combine, or work a derrick in the Texas heat can probably survive first-year composition and Calculus I. And they are more likely to follow directions easily and less likely to talk back to the instructor.
So not all college students are going through the same post-pandemic academic challenges. That means your potential fixes must be nuanced, even if you are talking about thousands of students in hundreds of courses. Student inattention may have different consequences in a lab course involving dangerous chemicals than in a survey course on European history. You must consider both the big picture and the local questions.
The best solutions may come from the collaborative efforts of department chairs in similar disciplines, rather than from a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach. Your role can be to get people talking and to come up with the money to support new programs they propose. As an administrator, you should advocate for your own constituencies and their special facets.
Instead of wondering how to respond to this problem, you should be asking, “How can we anticipate and prevent this?” We have to accept that today’s disengagement crisis is neither anomalous nor transitory. When I was teaching my first undergraduate courses in the 1990s, if a student misbehaved or seemed to be unable to grasp the concept of “college level” work, I and my fellow professors found such situations challenging but atypical. Now, many faculty members say, student disengagement is the new normal.
Our national pivot to emergency online education caused upheavals from which we and our students are still recovering. We’ve been playing catch up ever since. Once we acknowledge that these problems — poor study habits, limited attention span, aggressive behavior toward instructors — are no longer rarities, the next step is to create systems for dealing with such issues that are proactive, not reactive.
I see that already starting to happen. Indeed, I’ve noticed nationally that there is a greater willingness now among administrators, staff members, and professors to share information and brainstorm on how to head off some of the deficiencies in student work habits and study skills.
My own university has heavily invested in new and augmented mental-health and college-success programs. Let me give one small (in terms of time and effort) but brilliant example of what innovative professors, department chairs, and others are doing. Like most institutions, we already include codes of conduct and ethics policies (that often go unread) in student manuals and on course syllabi. Now, in addition, forward-thinking educators and departments are devoting a section of the first day of classes to a discussion on building a “social contract.” The professor outlines various expectations of student professionalism — submitting finished work on time, allowing other students to have their say without interruption, establishing the expectation of college-level workload. But the professor also invites students to talk about their own expectations. Rich conversations ensue about making the leap from a K–12 to a college-level curriculum and culture.
In the past, many of us assumed it was not our job to spark such conversations. But it is now, and pretending it’s not helps neither professor, student, nor staff member. To propel these efforts, administrator can:
- Organize and support meetings that bring together faculty and staff members to brainstorm: How can teaching policies and practices be revised and updated to deal with today’s classroom challenges?
- Avoid imposing any new bureaucracy on the classroom dynamic. Rather, give professors the freedom and support to adapt study-skills and prep programs to their particular circumstances.
- Find ways to reward — financially or with relief time from teaching obligations — faculty members who emerge as leaders in this pedagogical reset.
Such moves require some delicacy. These are complicated issues that touch on student success but also on academic expertise and autonomy. A leader needs to know when to encourage, when to mobilize, and when to back off.
Look for guidance off campus. Perhaps it’s time to expand your conversations to include people who shape college students and who produced the ones in your physical and online classrooms now — namely: schoolteachers, guidance counselors, high-school administrators, and parents. Include some undergraduates, too.
One of the academic norms that administrators can lead the way in abolishing — with the collaboration of faculty and staff members — is the idea that those of us who work on a campus are the only ones who should influence how college students are educated. For decades, too many of us have expected undergraduates to show up on the campus and magically know how to be a college student. When they don’t, we complain that the school system fails to prepare kids for college.
But for many of our students, and especially for parents who never got a college degree, higher education is akin to a massive Victorian novel with no prologue, preface, or explanatory introduction — let alone annotations — for the modern reader.
Given the depth of preparation problems that professors are seeing, we clearly need to do more to communicate our needs to schools and see how we can contribute to making sure high-school students understand what will be expected of them in a college classroom.
College administrators can advocate for rethinking higher ed’s relationship with schools, and especially with parents. We should be traveling, or sending emissaries to high schools and holding briefings, Q&As, and deep discussions with the teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and parents about “best tips” for success in college. These sessions could be field specific and/or general in scope. Start the conversation in the high-school gym about what college expects from a student, and how that differs from they’re used to. If we are not proactive, we are inactive.
We are seeing a competency, coping, and behavior crisis in higher education that is not just adults shaking their pedagogical canes at “these kids.” Ignoring the situation or despairing that it’s impossible to resolve will make it worse. One way for administrators to alleviate some of their own work anxiety is to leap into the breach and try to help solve one of the biggest problems we face. That’s our job but also our calling, and seeing positive outcomes will be fulfilling for the people you serve and for you as well.
