I’ve spent the past four years researching the higher-education workplace, sharing what I’ve learned along the way in essays and in a forthcoming book. And there are still so many issues to explore. But the truth is, one problem preoccupies my recent thinking more than others: Colleges still fail to adequately support faculty and staff members.
For a brief moment after Covid struck, institutions — and, more specifically, the people who lead them — demonstrated genuine momentum to deal with workplace problems. There were a bevy of webinars and conference panels on career burnout and on how to retain staff and faculty members. Some institutions amended policies on performance review, while others rolled out flexible work arrangements and purchased access to mental-health services.
There was some real wind in our sails. We weren’t moving at breakneck speed, but we had direction. These days, it feels like we’ve hit the doldrums — still afloat but with no breeze to be found. And we didn’t get nearly far enough to tackle some of the most deeply ingrained issues, such as understaffing, excessive workloads, dead-end jobs, and terrible pay. We’re left with webinar recordings buried in human-resource webpages, while the cultures and structures of most campuses remain largely unchanged.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting there hasn’t been any improvement. While working on my book, I had the privilege of visiting a rural community college that has established a “culture of caring” through its strategic priorities, values, and cross-departmental planning, and a public research university that is reinventing onboarding, recognition, and professional development through its employee success center. I traveled to Chicago to meet with union leaders, then to Minneapolis, where I spoke with the authors of a resolution uniting faculty and staff members around reinvesting in the university’s work force. There are certainly leaders who care about their employees pursuing creative ideas.
But I selected some of those sites because they are more exception than norm. It was difficult to find a plethora of institutions being really innovative when it came to supporting faculty and staff well-being. Despite widespread rhetoric on social media about the importance of combating toxic workplaces and the expense associated with replacing versus retaining talent, the reality for many higher-education workers is that their experience on the job today isn’t substantially different from 2019 — raising the question of what, if anything, we learned from the pandemic.
The currents have also shifted in ways that are pushing the higher-education workplace backward for some employees:
- Institutions have, according to one scholar, “burned through” people working in the area of DEI, only to later eliminate their positions.
- At the same time, colleges are cutting academic programs — and with them the jobs of professors who built those programs over decades.
- Financial instability mixed with political attacks on tenure and academic freedom are pushing faculty members to “voluntarily” leave their institutions.
- AI evangelists have predicted the automation of routine tasks in dozens of offices, making it possible to cut staff jobs. Just a few years after widespread calls to make higher education more humane, we’re instead considering how to replace humans altogether.
The truth is that exceptionally few of us working on a college campus feel secure in our positions. Some workers, of course, were never secure to begin with because they were on short-term contracts or working for third-party staffing companies. A wider swath of the higher-ed work force is now sharing in the anxiety: Will the wording of a program draw the ire of policymakers? Will our lectures be surveilled and subject to disciplinary measures? How long before our college’s budget will lean into the red? We keep our résumés and CVs dusted off because our productivity is increasingly monitored and we understand that, ultimately, our record may not save our jobs.
I’ve considered reasons why leaders have struggled to translate their endorsement of workplace well-being into action. One common explanation I hear: Leaders are too clueless, callous, and craven to care about more than their own careers or institutional advancement at all costs. I’ve interviewed too many leaders across all institution types to subscribe to that view. All of us in higher education can get so caught up in the immediacy of our own tasks and troubles that we don’t see colleagues whose experiences differ from our own.
Instead of placing sole blame for our slow progress on the shortcomings of leaders, I’m persuaded by a different set of explanations.
Campus planning is more fanciful than pragmatic. I don’t think colleges and universities have really figured out how to integrate questions of capacity into strategic planning. We establish all manner of goals — without then linking them to the talent we have, the talent we need, the level of our present workload, and the investments in people necessary to bring ambitious new ideas to fruition. Strategic planning isn’t a cure-all, of course. But, done carefully, it has a way of alerting everyone at an institution to what matters, giving disparate units direction, sparking action, and, ideally, holding administrators accountable.
Leaders are being pulled in too many different directions. Many are themselves so overwhelmed with work that they go into triage mode, focusing only on what’s clearly in their purview. And for most leaders, there’s relatively little in their job descriptions or performance incentives related to supporting the well-being of staff and faculty members.
There are good leaders in higher education who still need help taking steps toward a more caring university.
Rather, they are expected to grow enrollment, increase faculty awards and sponsored research, improve student-success metrics, and enhance students’ job-readiness and “return on investment.” It’s not lost on many of us that these outcomes are inherently shaped by the contributions of staff and faculty members who recruit, mentor, teach, advise, and counsel students.
We lack clear answers on what works. In studying the higher-education workplace, we still don’t have universally agreed-upon standards for employee well-being, or metrics to measure it. Leaders could understandably ask what we’re really talking about and how to tell if our performance lags. Moreover, the growing body of literature on problems within the higher-education workplace hasn’t always been paired with interventions that have proved effective. Leaders have a better sense of what’s wrong than they have clear guidance on what works.
Simply put, much of my research to date leads me to the conclusion that there are good leaders in higher education who still need help taking steps toward a more caring university. That is precisely my mission in writing this new column. I aim to elevate our understanding of important issues in the higher-ed workplace, while offering leaders concrete advice on fixing those issues.
Ultimately, I hope the column will generate just enough wind to start academe moving again on workplace issues and offer a sense of where to steer next.
This will be a column about trying new things. My goal is not to propose definitive answers to what are often complex questions. Instead, I want to talk about offices, programs, and institutions that are experimenting with solutions. And I want to bring forward compelling stories from staff and faculty members so we can better understand their experiences. That is especially true of staff members, graduate students, and contingent instructors whose voices are less often represented in articles about the college workplace.
You can expect a mix of critique and hope. It’s important for us to bear witness to complex problems and resist the urge to look away. And I’m not afraid to look outside the usual group of institutions that we lift up or even outside of higher education for good ideas.
Welcome to Working Better. An effective yet caring higher-education workplace is possible and worth our collective effort. And right now is a perfect time to start.
