This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The New Academic Workplace,” available in the Chronicle Store.
One Thursday morning in May, about 11:30, I fired off a set of work emails, adjusted a student’s history major, and set up my calendar for the next few weeks of appointments. Then I left my office and walked downstairs to my kitchen. My wife was at her laboratory and my kids at school, so the house was quiet. I emptied and reloaded the dishwasher. I took a flank steak out of the refrigerator and marinated it in soy sauce, hoisin sauce, garlic, and ginger. Then I made a sandwich and ate lunch at my kitchen table, scanning social media and the office chat on my phone. After that, I folded the laundry and started a new load. An hour had passed since I’d sent that last set of emails — I was fed, dinner was prepped, my living space was orderly, and I felt relaxed. I made a cup of tea and went upstairs to get back to work.
As American higher education lurches its way out of the pandemic, I have one piece of advice for campus administrators and managers: Let people determine the conditions under which they work, while assisting them to be mindful of how their own choices affect the well-being and work of others.
Across academe, conversations are underway about the pros and cons of remote, in-office, and hybrid styles of working. Notice right away that I’m not advocating a specific formula. Higher education — like all big employers in all sectors — contains too many different kinds of labor to dictate a “one size fits all” solution. But we can inject a large dose of trust into campus human-resources policies in ways that might move us toward a more humane culture.
Work and life could be integrated if that’s your desire, balanced if that’s what you need, or even fully separated if you want to keep your job out of your home.
Let’s flash back to March 2020, when students and faculty members on campuses around the country were told to go home because of Covid-19. But not everyone, as I noted at the time in an essay for The Chronicle (“What About the Health of Staff Members?”). A lot of staff members — including me — were told to report to work as normal.
I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to have one’s lack of agency made so stark even as a deadly disease descended upon our campuses. Having shifted campuses and careers — from being a tenured professor at Dominican University to an undergraduate adviser now at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities — I’ve experienced how the lack of status for staff members gets policed in a thousand microaggressive ways. But when Covid came, that lack of status felt potentially lethal. Eventually my university’s campus closed, as did many around the country, and office work moved home. I can’t speak for others, but I still carry resentment about that early disregard for my safety.
Now, as people return to campus, the same story is playing out. Decisions about the future of work seem to flow down from above, and even when administrators emphasize flexibility, they still focus on the needs of the manager to decide how work in the department or office is best done.
I’ve been participating in a working group at my university and the conversations have been excellent, focused around equity and agency. However, the actual document that emerged from the president’s office emphasized resources to “help supervisors” to “build the skills needed to make these decisions and manage flexible teams.” This is a policy that relies on having a good boss, instead of helping workers build the skills to determine the way forward for themselves and their colleagues. I have a very good boss. I trust her. It’s going to be fine for me, but counting on having a good boss is not a system for equity.
I spoke about these issues with Anne Helen Petersen, a journalist who has spent a lot of the pandemic co-writing a book, due out in December, on the problem and promise of working from home. The overarching goal, she said, is “bending work to your needs rather than bending you to work’s needs.” Each of us, she said, should be allowed to figure out what makes us better workers. “The only way to ascertain that is actual communication between managers and workers.”
Petersen is one of a group of smart cultural critics thinking about the future of work — not from a human-resources perspective, but from a human one, looking carefully at how we might change our work systems. She’s focused on how managers — at least those of good intent — can actually help by installing “guardrails” rather than pushing employees to individually construct healthy boundaries between work and private life. “Boundaries are the individual’s responsibility, and when they’re broken,” she writes in a recent essay in her newsletter, Culture Study, on Substack, “it’s because the individual failed to protect them. But guardrails? They’re there to protect everyone.”
Many managers are talking about determining a minimum number of hours in the office, but Petersen also says we need maximums both to ensure equity and to keep people from burning themselves out. Petersen’s work is inherently persuasive, convincing both employers and managers that flexible work is possible and productive, with better work outcomes for those who adapt to our new circumstances.
Campus administrators — the presidents, provosts, human-resources executives, and deans who are upper management — need to recognize that this is also a story about power. And if they locate power over how we work entirely in the hands of supervisors, problems will ensue.
As Tressie McMillan Cottom, an associate professor of information and library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes, “Some people go to work precisely for the pleasure they derive from surveilling other people. That is to say, some people like being the cops at your job.” What’s more, she adds, inequities will emerge that will be determined by bias around race in particular: “There is a persistent belief that Black workers cannot be trusted with the autonomy that is standard to our profession, much less to the autonomy that isn’t common to it. But a lot of Black workers report that the freedom from managing the hostility in white-dominant workplaces improves their productivity and well-being.”
So when I say the higher-education workplace needs a system based on trust, I don’t mean nebulous statements about flexibility.
I want guardrails.
And I want power and agency located — by policy — in the hands of the individual worker. Then we can consider the best way to do our work and engage in conversations with supervisors about how those determinations might affect our colleagues, co-workers, and students.
In the pandemic, I’ve learned to do my job online. My work as an undergraduate adviser to history majors has always belied flowcharts, with my in-person interactions with students ranging from almost none (summer) to well over 40 hours a week (the first weeks of any semester and right before registration). It turns out that most of this can be done remotely.
Still, I can’t wait for the campus to spring back to its vibrant bustle in the fall. I’m eager to throw open the doors and welcome my students, to buy them doughnuts or pizza, to hear their stories, to be in person with faculty and staff members. But a return to prioritizing in-person interaction doesn’t mean we should abandon the lessons of the past year. I want to know what it’s like to have more agency over my work schedule when not struggling through a global mass-death event like the Covid-19 pandemic. I want the administration to trust us to make good choices.
