When Celeste Chamberland, a professor of history at Roosevelt University, in Chicago, is asked how many committees she serves on, she has to stop and think for a minute. “I think there may be committees I’m on that I don’t even know I’m on,” she said.
On top of serving as director of the history and international-studies programs, Chamberland is a faculty representative on the Board of Trustees and a member of the board’s committees on finance and governance. She belongs to the faculty senate and the executive committee of the college council for the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences. She advises two student groups. And she supervises the history program’s tutor and its graduate assistant.
All that work is important, she said, but she estimates she spends about twice as much time on such service as she used to.
“I’m completely burned out,” said Chamberland, who is also teaching three classes a semester. “And it makes me feel bad, because I want to be able to give my students 100 percent.” She wants to walk into the classroom every day refreshed and energetic. She doesn’t want to rob her students of the experience they went to college for. But “it’s just hard to have that energy.”
Chamberland isn’t alone. Higher ed is feeling tired and overworked.
A Chronicle survey conducted last fall found that more than six in 10 academic employees reported working more than they had five years ago, with more than four in 10 saying they were working significantly more. About 4,100 people employed at two- and four-year colleges across the country responded to the survey, with roughly even numbers of faculty, staff, and administrators represented.
Beyond the volume of work, though, academic employees in all three categories described in survey responses and in about 20 interviews a sense of exhaustion. Some said they couldn’t see a brighter future ahead in higher ed. (In some cases, people talked with The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about their situations.) Work ramped up during the pandemic and hasn’t let up since, they said. Many picked up responsibilities from colleagues who had retired, quit, or were laid off and never replaced. High turnover in leadership often means a steady stream of new programs to be executed with no new resources. Students now require more of professors’ time outside the classroom. For many, stagnant compensation has helped sink morale even further.
Burnout has been an issue in academe for some time. But recently, the stress of working in a sector battling for its very existence in the face of declining student enrollment, political attacks, and public skepticism about the value of a college degree has also taken a toll. Many say that while they still love their work — and particularly working with students — they don’t know how long they can maintain their current pace.
“Most of us are working seven days a week just to keep up,” Chamberland said. “That’s not sustainable at all.”
Notably, Chamberland is a full professor, not a junior academic scrambling to make tenure or a freeway flyer piecing together adjunct jobs. “The conditions of work in academia have this year deteriorated so drastically that it’s almost hard to articulate,” said Karen Kelsky, founder of The Professor Is Out, which offers career coaching to academics considering leaving higher ed. When she started her business — and the Facebook group by the same name — in 2020, she expected them to attract mostly adjunct instructors, but she estimates about half of the group’s 34,700 members now are tenured or tenure-track.
Professors tell The Chronicle that their jobs have become more complex and that the sheer amount of work has increased. They report that many students are disengaged and struggle to complete even basic assignments, including reading, and that AI has complicated grading. Instructors spend time tracking down students who stop going to class, only to learn that they are dealing with significant financial, family, or mental-health issues that their teachers don’t feel equipped to handle. Budgets for teaching assistants have shrunk. And as colleges increase their reliance on adjunct instructors, or shrink their tenure-track faculty through attrition, service requirements for those who remain have multiplied.
According to the Chronicle survey, 55 percent of faculty members are less satisfied with their jobs now than they were five years ago, compared with 46 percent of staff members and 38 percent of administrators.
Like Chamberland, many professors are feeling stretched by service. Revising curricula, developing new classes, and sitting on committees are eating away at instructors’ core duties: teaching and research. Some feel they have to limit their research mostly to the summer and assign fewer writing assignments to make grading less time-intensive. Nearly half of the faculty members who responded to the Chronicle survey said committee work had been a minor contributor to their stress level over the past year, and a quarter said it had been a major contributor. “There simply aren’t enough tenure-line warm bodies to do the labor of running a university,” says Kelsky.
Matthew Hotham, an associate professor of religious studies at Ball State University, entered academe because he wanted to help transform students’ lives like his professors did for him. The son of a house-cleaner from Boise, Idaho, Hotham said he likes teaching at Ball State partially because he can work with so many first-generation college students.
“They will live a different life than generations of their family had because of this degree,” he said. “And so that feels really meaningful.”
But lately, Hotham finds himself laboring away on tasks that are less fulfilling. Three years ago, for example, the College of Sciences and Humanities embarked on a reorganization project aiming to reduce administrative overhead, among other goals. Departments were invited to seek “conversation partners” with whom they could “synergize,” which led to hours upon hours of meetings and memos. Faculty members spent a significant amount of time debating whether the exercises were optional before arriving at the understanding that they were essentially required to participate, Hotham says.
Asked for comment, Greg Fallon, a Ball State spokesman, said the college had undergone “programmatic adjustments aimed at navigating declining enrollment in specific departments,” that no faculty members’ employment changed as a result, and that the university is “committed to providing the programs and courses most sought by our students.”
Recently, Ball State started requiring faculty members to use a software system adopted by many colleges to track their time and productivity in research, service, and teaching. Professors are required to use the software when applying for tenure, promotion, and merit-based raises. Hotham said the system requires hours of data entry and troubleshooting, which places an especially heavy burden on the faculty members who are less tech-savvy. Those who can better navigate the system end up spending hours helping their colleagues. Administrators like the system, Hotham said, because it’s easy for them to run a quick report to, for instance, see how many articles the college’s faculty members have produced in a year. But they don’t seem to recognize how much time faculty members waste as a result.
Fallon, the spokesman, said Ball State had adopted the software based in part on faculty feedback as the university “moved away from a more cumbersome document-based cloud-platform review process.”
Professors typically put together promotion and tenure packets, a labor-intensive process, twice during their career. But Indiana’s State Legislature enacted a law last year that requires tenured faculty members to be reviewed every five years to ensure their teaching is ideologically balanced.
Chelsea Wahl, an assistant professor of public health at St. John Fisher University, in Rochester, N.Y., was floored to realize one day at her previous college that she didn’t even want tenure anymore. All she could see ahead was burnout. At the time, she was less than three years out from receiving her Ph.D.
When Wahl started her job at Nazareth University, also in Rochester, in 2020, she was fresh out of graduate school. She taught four classes each semester and led a new institute for technology and AI. In the fall, her workload was manageable, she said. But by her second semester, the number of students who signed up for her classes had skyrocketed, and she was teaching a total of more than 80, while some of her colleagues had only 30 or 40.
The overload made itself felt class by class. Teaching 25 students at a time is feasible, because everyone is engaged in the same conversation, Wahl said. But teaching a class of 35 is entirely different, because multiple conversations are often happening at the same time.
Having more students also required more time outside of the classroom. A small class might include one student with mental-health issues or financial problems, for example, requiring Wahl to spend two to four hours per week providing emotional support and directing them to other resources on campuses. But larger classes meant chances were good she would have several students with such complex needs. And while Wahl was happy to help however she could, collectively, these students took away time from her other responsibilities as a professor. Thirty-five percent of faculty members who responded to the Chronicle survey said that meeting the needs of students was a major contributor to their stress in the last year.
Wahl got to the point where she felt like she was being punished for succeeding as a teacher. Maybe, she thought, if she did worse at her job, she could survive.
Colleagues suggested that Wahl scale back the number of assignments to make her grading less onerous. “It was painful to be in this position where I felt like I had to be so careful with my own boundaries at work,” Wahl said. She wished she could just teach how she thought was best.
Wahl’s department chair, she said, was incredibly supportive. But ultimately, the chair wasn’t able to decrease the student cap on Wahl’s courses or otherwise reduce her workload.
At times, Wahl felt hopeless. “I kept running into that same feeling of feeling disrespected or feeling unappreciated,” she said. After taking a maternity leave in 2023, she decided not to return. She started looking for jobs outside of academe but heard from a friend about a teaching position at St. John Fisher. Now, with a lighter courseload, she said she’s able to enjoy her work — and work toward tenure — again.
Part of the strain of working in higher ed comes from colleges being expected to make up for societal problems, experts say. Jody Greene, associate campus provost for academic success at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said colleges have jumped in to take care of students’ basic needs — such as housing, mental health, and food security — as the social safety net has frayed. As a result, everyone working at colleges is expected to take on more duties, Greene said. But providing such support can put professors in the difficult position of trying to decide how to allocate their time.
“We should never have had an additive model in the first place,” Greene said. “We should have tried to think about how to redistribute faculty roles and faculty labor such that this new, more student-centric university could make sense.” After all, they said, “There’s still only so many hours in the day.”
Like other professors, Kurt-Alexander Zeller, a professor of music at Clayton State University, in Georgia, has new responsibilities that others used to handle. The music department has lost three tenure lines in the past decade, leaving three full-time tenured professors and an emeritus professor who teaches part-time, along with a lecturer. Those who remain have each taken on a greater share of tasks like high-school visits to recruit new students and adjudicating at music festivals. When one colleague left last year, the number of students Zeller advises grew from about 20 to about 30.
Of all the things Zeller would like to have more time for, at the top of his list is rehearsing with his students. “We are practitioners of the art form that is, at its most basic level, about the organized and manipulated elapsing of time,” Zeller said. “You can’t play the Beethoven sonata in half the time. … It will take the time it takes.”
Staff members working in higher education — including those in administrative support, admissions, counseling, financial aid, and student affairs — have long felt overworked and underappreciated. Some are now eyeing the exit doors. Fifty-five percent of staff members surveyed by The Chronicle said they had thought about leaving higher education over the past year, compared with 48 percent of faculty and administrators.
An executive secretary at a mid-sized private institution in the New York metropolitan area said in an interview that she serves multiple roles, including working in student affairs and supporting two senior administrators. The institution is hemorrhaging staff so quickly, the secretary said, that she often doesn’t know who she should contact to get things done. She winds up doing a lot of the work herself. And because she’s been at the college for close to two decades, many on campus turn to her with questions that have nothing to do with her job. They figure she’ll know the answer.
“You can’t continue to pile work onto people and not give them raises,” said the secretary, who spoke with a reporter while she was working from home despite being sick because, she said, there was no one else to do the work. Colleagues joke that the college promotes people to assistant directors rather than giving them raises.
“Morale is super low,” she said. Beyond the unmanageable workload, she said, “there’s no actual appreciation of staff.” When employees raise concerns, she said, “we get comments from the head of HR like, ‘Well, you don’t have to work here.’” The secretary holds an advanced degree and has taught as an adjunct but found that it paid less than her secretarial job.
One of her current responsibilities is to provide data for the planned restructuring of the college, in which she expects she will lose her job. Administrators have said there will be a new job for her. She doesn’t expect to know anything officially until July.
For all the downsides of working in higher ed, she still loves working with students. But she doesn’t know how long she will stay. “One of my co-workers said it’s like being stuck in a really bad marriage,” she said, where you love the idea of your job, and you have loyalty to it. “And yet, you’re miserable every day.”
Brian O’Leary, senior interactive news producer, contributed to this report.
