The grant officer has worked at her private Midwestern college for more than a decade, long enough to have gotten a good read on the place. She’s become an informal mentor to new faculty and staff members, so she’s gained a measure of respect from her peers. At the same time, she said, her workplace is less collegial than it once was.
For starters, there’s been a near-total turnover of the president’s cabinet in recent years, and the institution’s financial maneuvers have made it difficult, at times, to “trust that some decisions were made with the well-being of employees in mind,” she said. (The Chronicle agreed not to name the grant officer or other sources who feared retaliation for speaking candidly about their workplaces.)
Market pressures have prompted her institution’s leaders to evaluate the efficacy of some programs, which the grant officer said has “generated a certain level of competition, and sometimes friction, among departments that used to be, many years ago, more collaborative.” That jockeying for administrative attention — and financial backing — isn’t something she and her colleagues talk about openly, which only compounds a sense of isolation.
The grant officer’s assessment of the upsides and tensions at her workplace mirrors that of scores of higher-ed employees who completed a Chronicle survey fielded in the fall. The vast majority, 81 percent, of respondents, across faculty, staff, and administrative ranks, agreed or strongly agreed that they felt respected by their colleagues. And nearly half of the survey’s 4,107 respondents said that while their workplace had “some friction,” it remained “generally productive.” Still, a notable number — about a third — described their workplaces as “often dysfunctional” or “toxic.” That apparent dissonance sheds light on the benefits and frustrations many higher-ed workers feel about working in the sector.
Such dynamics are mirrored in the broader work force — and may send a worrying signal about employee morale. Gallup reported in January that 37 percent of U.S. workers responded that they “strongly agree” that they’re treated with respect, matching a record low the polling organization noted in 2022, at the height of the Great Resignation. The proportion of higher-ed employees who told The Chronicle that they “strongly agree” that they were respected at work averaged about 29 percent, though responses varied depending on their role and whether they felt respected by students, faculty or staff members, or administrators.
The Chronicle’s findings are also similar to Gallup’s measure of employee satisfaction at work, said Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy for the organization’s workplace-management practice. Nationally, 18.2 percent of employees told Gallup they were “extremely satisfied” with their jobs — a record low. Wigert compared that to the 20 percent of higher-ed employees who told The Chronicle that their workplace was a “healthy and productive environment.”
The sagging indicators of morale in the nation’s workplaces, coupled with an increase in the percentage of employees looking for a new job, have given rise to what Gallup terms “the Great Detachment.” The organization has observed “a real drop in clarity of expectations at work,” Wigert said. “People are having trouble understanding how to reorient to their job in today’s new work environment and where things are headed. At the same time, they’re having trouble connecting their work to their organization’s mission and purpose.”
Higher ed is beset by similar dynamics, though it also benefits from advantages not seen in the broader work force. Nearly all workers in higher ed — 97 percent — said they felt like they contributed to their institution’s mission. But a closer examination of open-ended responses to The Chronicle’s survey sheds light on the tensions higher-ed employees feel, many of which appeared to feed the sense that higher-ed workplaces are dysfunctional or toxic. Responses orbited around common themes: leadership woes, the painful effects of budget shortfalls, perceptions of a lack of communication and transparency, and unease with the rapid pace of change.
Survey respondents expressed dissatisfaction with specific leaders and their actions, as well as, more generally, with managerial approaches they saw as top-down and centralized, and more prescriptive than collaborative. Some respondents criticized leaders for being passive in the face of political pressure, or unwilling to intervene in fraught workplace situations.
People are having trouble understanding how to reorient to their job in today’s new work environment and where things are headed. At the same time, they’re having trouble connecting their work to their organization’s mission and purpose.
“We are a prototype of the campus with poor (or at least massively misunderstood) upper administration and a frustrated, burnt-out faculty,” one faculty member wrote. “We do not trust our leadership, which we find autocratic and disconnected. We do not trust their intentions, i.e., personal ambitions versus what is right for the institution.” Those, the faculty member added, are “not philosophical subtleties but practical frustrations” that make work more difficult. This respondent strongly agreed that they felt respected by students, other faculty members, and staff members, but they strongly disagreed that they felt respected by administrators.
Sometimes a few prickly personalities, often at the top, contributed most to a sense of toxicity at work. That was the case for an advancement officer at a private college in the Northeast: One or two people in her division were known to be “toxic and sort of mean-spirited,” she said in an interview, “and yet they were allowed to continue, and it was sort of justified in terms of, But she’s productive.” Because the problematic employees occupied senior roles, she said, morale was affected across the division, even among people who didn’t work directly with them.
Respondents across all three categories — faculty members, staff members, and administrators — cited micromanagement as a concern, with one faculty member describing themselves as “both micromanaged and not supported.” Both faculty and staff members cited shared-governance shortfalls and a lack of administrative transparency among their grievances.
Others, despite feeling respected on an individual level as middle managers, cited strained relationships with senior leaders, such as deans and vice presidents. “When you start to get higher into the organization, you sometimes feel like they don’t get it. They don’t get what you do,” a department chair at a community college in the South said. “I don’t think there’s a blatant disregard or disrespect that’s happening; it probably is misunderstanding what others are doing.”
Though many people lamented the strains on college budgets, like decreasing state funding and declines in net tuition revenue, others criticized their institutions’ actions in response to these conditions. One respondent described how “spreadsheet economics” had hamstrung administrators. “Our dean and our provost are driven by budget constraints to the point that they are shortsighted and looking for quick wins while ignoring areas of growth,” the staff member wrote. “Small investments in certain areas could really increase our enrollments and retention, but they are cutting so much that they are actually hobbling us.”
A shallower pool of financial resources, and a general sense of scarcity, was identified as giving rise to the twin troubles of understaffing and overwork. “There are too many people doing two to three jobs versus just the one they were hired to do,” an administrator wrote. “We need to either make some difficult decisions about things we cannot do anymore (meaning not a program here, initiative there, but big-unit/department-level decisions), or we need to staff up significantly to meet the demands on our time.”
Salary inversion and compression, and the lack of adjustments to cost-of-living pay at many institutions, led many respondents to feel that their work wasn’t adequately valued. (“Increases for parking alone are more than any increase in pay I get,” one staff member pointed out.) The advancement officer in the Northeast said the pay woes amounted to “mission gaslighting.” “Junior employees,” she said, are told “you’re not getting a raise this year because we’re worried about the demographics in higher education,” while senior leaders receive sizable raises. “They’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet lower-level staff people and administrators are picking up second jobs because they can’t afford their bills.”
Many employees said that a lack of transparency from administrators made for a difficult work environment. One faculty member wrote that they’d like “to be able to discuss unit, college, and university investments and to hear rationale for changes,” adding that decision-making meetings often occurred behind closed doors, without the chance to provide feedback. Insufficient consultation, another faculty member wrote, meant “those who are in positions to make decisions that impact the classroom experience are increasingly distanced from and disconnected from the consequences of those decisions.”
My job often feels like the Wild West instead of a consistent space where we can support and lift a region that very much needs us.
Several leaders also recognized that communication could be a problem on campus, though they ascribed the source of the problem elsewhere. A private-college president, for example, who answered “disagree” in response to whether students or faculty members respected her job, wrote that “the default setting of hostility to administration creates a culture of suspicion.” An academic administrator said their efforts at communication had been hampered from above. “I have tried to be a transparent leader,” they wrote, “but this is challenging when those in central institutional-leadership roles are not transparent about the financial situation of the campus and university.”
On other occasions, the breakdown in communication occurred between departments. As a staff member put it, “things are extremely siloed, with work often being repeated in different spaces rather than everyone working together toward a central goal,” creating unnecessary “barriers and defensiveness.”
Efforts to fix communication problems weren’t always adequate. “The college does think that they do a lot of surveying,” the community-college department chair in the South said. “We are asked for our input, but it does sort of seem like that’s obligatory and not necessarily really meant to really get our input.”
That lack of communication appears to be especially frustrating given the speed with which institutions have had to adjust to changes in recent years — like pivoting to online learning at the height of Covid-19 and responding to rapidly shifting economic and political pressures. “Leadership is putting too much stress on the organization. We have been incredibly innovative over the last 15 years, but we need to slow down and start checking we are doing the right things and doing them right,” one faculty member wrote. Similarly, even those who recognized the need for change nonetheless criticized the constant state of flux. “We are currently in a ‘start-up’ mentality,” one staff member wrote. “Many changes are being made very quickly, and communication is breaking down. It is difficult to know what the expectations are.”
Meanwhile, some administrators bemoaned faculty members’ resistance to change. One hoped for “more faculty members who embraced the mission and actively recognized the financial constraints, and other limitations, under which we’re operating.”
Those changes could be technical or logistical in nature; the community-college department chair said that, in the past two or three years, her institution has endured a sudden shift in learning-management systems, a transition from Google to Microsoft Office, and a new bookstore, all of which have necessitated new workflows and lots of training.
For others, personnel turnover, particularly at the highest levels of leadership, complicated matters. “The top-down instability of a revolving door of leaders has impacted the entire university,” an administrator wrote. “My job often feels like the Wild West instead of a consistent space where we can support and lift a region that very much needs us.”
In the broader work force, the “change fatigue” of recent years has persisted since the pandemic, said Gallup’s Wigert. “We’ve actually seen this organizational change and disruption increase over the last two years,” he said. Many organizations are now “in a reorientation period, where they’re figuring out where they want to go now. We’re experiencing now this second, third, or fourth wave of change.”
One Midwestern community college has found itself navigating that reorientation period. In his response to The Chronicle’s survey, a longtime senior technical-support specialist at the college said his workplace was “often dysfunctional,” citing turnover in senior management and widespread layoffs. For those who kept their jobs, he said, there was, “turmoil and survivor guilt and wondering when the next shoe is going to drop, because it didn’t seem like it was just one shoe.”
When reached in January to discuss his answers, the staff member had a different view of things. “Dysfunctional” was no longer an accurate descriptor of his work environment, he said. His institution’s new administration has had time to settle in, he said, and has shown an impressive commitment to transparency. Morale has improved. “We may have bottomed out,” he said, “and there seems to be a glimmer of hope, maybe a light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t an oncoming train.”
