Professors Are People. Take Care of Them.

U. of Richmond

College support for faculty members isn’t limited to professional-development opportunities. Increasingly, institutions are looking at scholars’ well-being — a more holistic approach that takes into account their personal as well as their professional needs.

Stereotypes of academic life paint it as all-encompassing, grueling, a test of one’s toughness. And to read some “quit lit” essays, it can still be a deeply unhappy place. But having content, healthy faculty members is good for a college — good for students who are taught and mentored by them, good for the quality of their research, and good for faculty retention.

“That interior life is important,” says Kiernan Mathews, executive director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, or Coache, which is conducting a three-year survey on faculty retention.

Faculty members leave for personal as well as professional reasons. Institutions are responding in various ways, helping spouses find jobs, creating more flexibility around child care, fostering a sense of community and belonging, and taking care of the myriad details of relocation — finding doctors, new schools for children, a place to live.

Some examples:

In addition to numerous professional-development programs for faculty, the University of California at Davis has programs to help professors settle into a new place or a new role as a parent.

A program called Capital Resources Network, paid for out of supplemental money from a National Science Foundation Advance grant, helps new faculty members and their partners get settled so that the new hire can focus on her or his work. It includes help finding a partner employment in the area, and assistance with finding housing, schools, and other services.

“I think we forget how involved a move is,” says Binnie Singh, assistant vice provost in the office of academic affairs.

The program is intended to help recruit and retain the best talent, as well as increase new employee productivity and loyalty.

UC-Davis also identifies faculty work-life advisers who have taken parental leave or modified duty to care for children and connects them with faculty members looking into those options.

At the University of Richmond, Patrice Rankine, new dean of the school of arts and sciences, has been thinking a lot about how people thrive.

To him, that means looking at the whole person and asking more than what a faculty member produces. It’s asking, “Is the whole person well?”

“The academy has to change,” Rankine says. He created a new position for an assistant dean of diversity, inclusion, and thriving who will work with both faculty members and students.

“We do better in cohorts. We do better in communities,” he says, where faculty members and students can feel comfortable and relaxed. Richmond is striving to diversify both its student body and its faculty, competing with larger research universities for top scholars. When it recruits them, it wants to keep them. Part of that is making them feel at home and part of the community.

The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity offers a 12-week Faculty Success Program in which faculty members coach their peers on wellness topics that include getting enough sleep and having a life outside of work.

One homework assignment is to get eight hours of sleep a night for a week and see how it feels. Sleep has a direct link to cognitive performance, says Kerry Ann Rockquemore, who developed the organization and the course. Yet many scholars, who think for a living, believe they can still function at a high level on just four or five hours of sleep a night. In the course, participants are asked to record how that eight-hour stretch makes them feel.

At first, there is typically resistance, Rockquemore says. Then, by the middle of the week, there’s a recognition of how much better participants feel and how their minds are working better, too. They can accomplish more quicker, freeing up time for interests and people outside of work.

“It’s not just high productivity,” she says. “It’s having a life.”

Kasi Jackson, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at West Virginia University and a faculty coach in the program, says the course was “life saving” for her. Before tenure, she was working such long hours that her health was suffering and her entire existence was work. Through the course, she learned how to structure her time and build a life outside of her job. Now she promotes that redefinition in her coaching.