Even before the pandemic hit, many public-college employees were struggling. Their workloads had ballooned due to budget cuts and hiring freezes. With many of their colleagues heading toward the exit, those left behind were forced to pick up the slack. In the years since, things have only gotten worse: More work is spread across fewer faculty members and administrative support staff.
The pressure on publics is no accident. It is part of an effort by conservatives to whittle away at higher education, both through funding cuts and through attacks on its credibility. Across the country, politicians have inserted themselves into the workings of colleges in part by weakening tenure and making it harder for professors to teach certain topics, particularly those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Depriving higher education of both public money and public trust is part of a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization means that colleges have less independence to govern themselves. Politicians interfere in the curriculum, admissions decisions, and personnel matters, all while campus leaders engage in partial defenses — worrying more about short-term budget gains than plummeting public trust. Our public institutions are, in effect, being materially and socially hollowed out. It’s no surprise this is exacting a heavy toll on faculty and staff members.
If leaders of institutions, advocacy organizations, and philanthropic foundations were to spend significant time with higher-education workers, they would encounter people who are tired and for whom the joys of the job are harder to find. Unfortunately, our research has shown that few of these leaders are making efforts to truly understand the consequences that the hollowing out of higher education has on the everyday experience of employees. Instead, we see presidents and funders pushing ahead with strategic priorities and reforms as if the existence of institutions is a given and the people who sustain them are inexhaustible.
The stubborn refusal by leaders to meaningfully contend with the current reality gives staff and faculty members yet another reason to question their future in higher education. The only thing that crushes the spirit of academic workers more than legislative attacks on our profession is the silence of people in a position to do something about it.
When leaders aren’t being silent, they are asking for more from their employees in an effort to navigate strained budgets while expanding services and support for students. Decades of research demonstrate that tenure-track faculty members have had increasing job responsibilities and performance expectations, both of which contribute to stress and burnout. The demands on these employees, at least, can be partially offset by perks like autonomy and job security. That isn’t the case for contingent faculty, research faculty, and graduate workers. Studies show that campus employees with less job security often take on work beyond the scope of their contract — they fear saying no will put their jobs in jeopardy.
Employees often work more because there simply aren’t enough of them to complete all the work. A 2017 report by the National Education Association revealed widespread declines in the number of support professionals in higher education since the 2008 recession, which led to increased workloads. In an ethnography of campus custodians, for instance, higher-education scholar Peter M. Magolda shows how some universities try to minimize labor costs through consolidated shifts, outsourcing, and layoffs.
The only thing that crushes the spirit of academic workers more than legislative attacks on our profession is the silence of people in a position to do something about it.
At some institutions, staffing can be so lean that it pivots from a point of pride to an institutional liability. Of the more than 500 institutions surveyed by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators in 2022, 80 percent were concerned about their financial-aid offices’ ability to meet federal administrative requirements in the future. Over half were concerned about adequately serving students at current staffing levels. We’ve heard similar worries from information technologists, registrars, and grant managers. The stakes can be high for workers in those units, where errors can lead to federal complaints, cybersecurity breaches, and criminal prosecution. Chronic underinvestment in staff puts important processes and systems in the hands of a small number of employees, which can lead to problems if people leave or fall ill. Expensive new programs can fail because there were never enough workers to roll them out effectively.
There are other consequences too. Doris Santoro, a philosopher of education at Bowdoin College, has researched demoralization among teachers for over a decade. She noted that teaching is morally rewarding when “educators feel they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves.” Demoralization happens when “the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards … are now inaccessible.” In the same vein, public policy has rendered many public institutions shells of their former selves. It’s harder for academic workers to do right by our students and colleagues.
The political attack on higher ed only adds to the strain. Faculty and staff members are left with a handful of questions. Will the programs they painstakingly designed and ushered through approvals be axed? Will the hours of labor they gave to DEI committees and programs be all for naught? Will their values, identities, and contributions put them at risk of having their jobs scrutinized or eliminated? Will searches for presidents or deans be subject to back-channel political games? Life at hollowed-out institutions entails regular feelings of frustration and fear.
Much of the discourse around improving higher ed is cheerfully oblivious to the everyday experiences of higher-education workers. A proliferation of language on campuses declares that “students come first” or that “students are our top priority.” Meanwhile, college workers are frantically bailing water and patching holes, trying to keep institutions afloat. How do we prioritize students if we don’t invest in the people who work with them? It’s like being vocally pro-train and pouring money into faster engines while letting the tracks rust away.
Thankfully, some are aware of the challenges. Naspa, one of the main associations for student-affairs professionals, released a statement acknowledging how “the coordinated, intersectional nature of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion … create toxic educational and work climates.” In the face of these attacks, the statement emphasized, “you and your work matter deeply.” A statement isn’t going to magically reduce workloads, but it can show employees that someone is paying attention to their hardships.
John C. Cavanaugh, former president of the University of West Florida and chancellor emeritus of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, in a recent essay urged more senior leaders to publicly defend institutions from attacks. “Silence reflects a decision,” he wrote. “To be sure, at times silence is an extremely powerful statement. When the attack is institutional, though, silence likely won’t work.” And as Cavanaugh notes, it’s crucial for governing boards to support presidents and fulfill their sworn duty of protecting institutions. Cavanaugh is one of the more than 200 signatories of PEN America’s program, Champions of Higher Education, which coordinates the efforts of leaders to counter political interference on campuses. Coalition-building like this is a good start, but we’d like to see more.
We need campus leaders, as well as advocacy organizations and philanthropic foundations, to publicly stand up for academic workers. We need them to denounce policies that undermine colleges, support striking graduate students, and fight for better working conditions on their campuses and around higher ed. Too often, leaders are short-term thinkers, doing what it takes to secure the revenue needed to make up for state funding cuts. These partial defenses may help colleges survive the next legislative cycle, but they don’t meaningfully tackle the policies weakening our institutions. And they don’t give their employees hope for anything but slow institutional decline.
Much of the discourse around improving higher ed is cheerfully oblivious to the everyday experiences of higher-education workers.
Leaders can also take more practical steps. The hollowing out of public higher education has meant that many institutions have become bad employers. They have failed to care for their workers. Even in states that have become unreliable partners for higher ed, campus leaders have the ability to better anticipate and plan for how the strategic priorities they pursue will affect the workloads of staff and faculty. They can tackle understaffing and workload problems before launching big efforts to increase enrollment, completion rates, or grant-funded research.
Funds are always scarce, which can serve as a built-in excuse not to invest in people. However, it is folly to sink those scarce funds into a major effort or reform without ensuring the human capacity to see it through. Indeed, problems will only be made worse as faculty and staff inevitably contrast spending on new programs with insistence from leaders that there is no money available to invest in people.
What’s more, investing in people doesn’t always require a huge infusion of resources. A good starting point is to better understand the everyday experiences of employees, assess workload equity, and develop realistic goals aligned with the institution’s actual work force. Some institutions may need to dial back their goals or focus their strategy — continuing to squeeze employees is a recipe for exacerbating the burnout and turnover that have defined the past three years.
At its best, public higher education empowers people — students, faculty, and staff — to feel agency in their lives. That sense of agency enables rich engagement with communities, from voting to voluntarism. In other words, higher education is central to public life.
To fulfill the promise of public higher education, we need robust institutions staffed by people who have been given the resources and power to do good work, not sapped of energy and hope.
