Walking Away From Your Dream Job

Michael Chen was visiting Disney World with his wife and kids in 2019 when he got the news he’d been hoping for: Nazareth College wanted to hire him as an assistant professor.

The job met all of Chen’s criteria. It was a tenure-track position, in his field of public health, in Rochester, N.Y., where his family had already settled for his wife’s job. And it was teaching-focused — a plus in Chen’s book, though he had learned in graduate school that academics weren’t supposed to see it that way. At Nazareth, which became a university last year, Chen’s classes would have 30-some students at the most, allowing the kind of close-knit environment he felt was important.

Chen had worked before graduate school, at a nonprofit that supports Asian-American families and communities in Boston and at a nonprofit consulting firm. And his graduate program prepared researchers to work in a variety of settings, not just higher ed. But when he accepted Nazareth’s offer, he thought: “If I don’t screw things up, as long as I do a good job, I’ll know what I’m going to do for the rest of my career.” He planned to spend the next three decades at Nazareth, preparing a new generation of public-health professionals, the work he’d come to see as his calling.

And maybe that’s what would have happened, if the pandemic hadn’t arrived so soon after he started, or if he’d had more support. But what did happen is this: Just a few years after accepting his tenure-track job, Chen resigned. It wasn’t because he stopped loving teaching, and it wasn’t because he screwed up. Instead, he burned out.

This decade has so far been a grueling one for the faculty work force. The job isn’t as stable as it used to be — even tenure is no guarantee if a college shuts down programs or closes completely, or a state imposes post-tenure review. Teaching through the pandemic was difficult, stressful, and often unrewarding. Students needed more support; professors scrambled to provide it. In most cases, their institutions kept asking them to do more, and more, with little reward or even acknowledgment. For many instructors, the pandemic teaching experience seems to have poked holes in the assumption their jobs are better or special — they are jobs.

Stay informed on teaching topics

Nien-Ken Alec Lu for The Chronicle

Want to continue the conversation on ChatGPT and other teaching topics? Sign up for our free Teaching newsletter.

Things haven’t exactly stabilized since. Many professors continue to struggle to get students to come to class, participate, do the reading. They have cut back the workload and offered more support, but it hasn’t always been enough. Students’ expectations have shifted: Many think they will pass pretty much no matter what. Colleges, in some cases, seem to expect the same. Just when it started to seem like the sun might be peeking through the clouds, many professors realized that generative AI would allow students to hand in passable assignments without doing the work.

Some months before he walked away, in 2022, Chen joined “The Professor is Out,” a private Facebook group meant to serve as a safe sounding board for “academics who are moving on and moving out.” The group, created in 2020 as an extension of the academic job-market hub “The Professor is In,” has some 33,000 members. Its founder, the author and consultant Karen Kelsky, was surprised at how many people joined — and how many of them were in tenure-track and even tenured positions. The active group remains a window into faculty disillusionment.

“The faculty are the least important people on a campus right now,” Kelsky says. If colleges valued their work, she says, they wouldn’t have allowed “adjunctification” to happen in the first place. The current wave of faculty departures — which colleges don’t even seem to have acknowledged — is simply the latest twist in a decades-long deterioration.

“Institutions’ indifference to faculty leaving,” she says, “is a reflection of their indifference to faculty’s being there.”

To some professors, the job they’ve worked so hard for feels untenable. And that’s particularly true for those who, like Chen, pour themselves into their positions and strive to connect with students on a personal level. That’s something that colleges sell to students, but it’s not something they seem actually willing to invest in.

Like any new teacher, Chen had a lot to learn, but his first semester went well. Chen taught everything from intro to capstone courses. New faculty members got a course release their first semester, but the norm is a 4-4 load.

At his alma mater, Brown University, going to class sometimes felt like attending a concert, Chen says. At Nazareth, he got to build relationships and form a community. He felt energized. He loved getting to know his students. He was asked to take on a service-learning course, and connected with a mentor who ran one in another department.

In his second semester, Covid hit. Chen’s pandemic teaching experience was similar to many other professors’, especially those attempting to balance it with parenting. He taught, at first, over Zoom, trying to connect to a screen of black boxes from a desk nestled between two closets in his bedroom. It felt less like teaching, Chen recalls, than “casting a question into the abyss.”

His kids, who turned 6 and 3 that spring, were home, the oldest doing virtual school. His wife, an OB-GYN, was working at a hospital. Those first few weeks, she slept there — a precaution to reduce her family’s risk of illness.

One day during the spring of 2020, Chen took his kids to the park so they could complete a scavenger hunt — the sort of DIY socially distanced activity popular during lockdown. While they searched, he logged into Zoom to teach a senior seminar.

At one point, his younger kid nearly wandered into the street trying to find something from the list. “So basically, my students heard me scream at the top of my lungs to the kids,” he says. He doesn’t remember exactly what he yelled, probably “stop!” or “freeze!”

After things calmed down, he remembers a student saying something like “Hey, Dr. Chen, we don’t have to do this right now.”

In hindsight, trying to teach while supervising two young kids at the park is absurd. But at the time, it felt like a way to try and meet everyone’s needs.

After getting to the finish line of that first pandemic semester, Chen was determined to do better. He wanted his classes to be more interactive, and he wanted to be there for his students. Zoom, instructors were realizing, wasn’t the solid substitute it had seemed at first. Chen read Small Teaching Online, a book by Flower Darby and James M. Lang that became popular among professors seeking a crash course in better online pedagogy, and articles about how to teach in the format. He explored digital tools, like Slack, that students could use to connect.

But it only got so much better. Attendance was irregular. Chen wasn’t sure what, if anything, his students were even learning. Chen compares teaching to blowing seeds into the wind and trusting some of them will flower. But during Covid, it was like he had his eyes closed. There was no way to tell if anything was growing.

Chen wanted to talk about difficult issues, like racism in public health, with his students. He thought it was important to create a classroom where they could be vulnerable. But teaching that way also made students more comfortable coming to him with their problems. “I don’t mean to sound like, ‘I’m amazing,’” he says. Maybe a more experienced teacher puts up higher walls. “But part of why I took this job was, I’m here to shape young people. And to me, shaping young people is not just about ‘let’s read the textbook and do lectures and write papers.’ It’s about cultivating authentic, meaningful relationships.”

Chen set class time aside for students to check in on how they were doing, just as people. They were not doing well. Many, Chen now knew, were balancing competing priorities like caregiving responsibilities and paid work, often as essential workers. Some were really struggling. And because Chen was kind and approachable, some of them told him.

He wasn’t their dad, or their therapist, or their sponsor. But Chen still had a front-row seat to their suffering. And while some other courses might offer a bit of a break, letting students and their professors lose themselves for a while in ancient history, or cellular biology, or Spanish literature, Chen’s field was public health. His classes were largely focused on Covid, the same illness that kept them from being together.

Some professors, Chen knew, were handling it all quite differently, setting policies — like requiring students to turn their cameras on in Zoom — that he thought were inadvertently harming students. None of his colleagues had prepared to teach like this; he wasn’t blaming them. But it was still another burden. He wanted to intervene, to help the students.

“I feel like I was failing as a teacher,” he says. “The part of me that, as a parent, as an older brother, is a little bit wanting to protect was also feeling like, oh, yeah, I am really sucking at protecting. But maybe that’s my lack of boundaries, right?”

The thing was, Chen wasn’t doing so great himself. His parents, who live in Toronto, were dealing with significant health issues. His kids were young and needed a lot of attention. Chen’s scholarship is on the role of fathers, and he’s thought a lot about the kind of dad he wants to be. He didn’t want to yell at his kids. But patience is finite, and he found himself raising his voice at times.

Chen felt like he was falling apart. When he was washing the dishes one evening, he had heart palpitations. He decided to reach out to a therapist he’d spoken with before. Chen is a helper; needing help felt uncomfortable. When he put those appointments on his calendar, Chen noted them using his provider’s name instead of describing what they were for, even though his wife was the only other person who might see them.

In one of their first sessions after reconnecting, his therapist blew a seed that blossomed for Chen: You can’t give what you don’t have.

“I think I ran out of gas,” Chen says. “Both in terms of teaching — like the actual, pedagogical, ‘I want to share my passion and knowledge about public health with you, young people, and help you become future leaders,’” and “asking students, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How is your dad in the hospital? How are things at your job? How is your sibling?’ and then not being able to meaningfully help.”

Chen started to consider other options. He knew he had them. In 2022, a classmate from his Ph.D. program reached out to see if he’d like to do some side work for a nonprofit. Chen picked that up, and enjoyed it. Chen remembered there were other places to do good work, and that he might enjoy being there. He started to read “Quit Lit” accounts of academics who had left, and he joined “The Professor is Out” on Facebook.

In December 2022, Chen resigned. He transitioned to a full-time job at the same nonprofit behavioral-health consultancy where he’d been working on the side. (He has since moved to a new job at JSI, a nonprofit where he had worked before graduate school.)

Chen missed students, and teaching. But “what I loved,” he says, “was also what ultimately contributed to my needing a break or feeling burnt out.”

No two professors had the same pandemic teaching experiences, but Lisa Hiley has a pretty good understanding of Chen’s. Hiley, an associate professor in the communication sciences and disorders department at Nazareth, mentored Chen in teaching a service-learning course, and has become a general sounding board and friend. Her children are close in age to Chen’s; she, too, spent the pandemic working from home and being the primary parent while her spouse went into work.

Maybe it’s her clinical training — she is a speech pathologist — or her longer teaching experience, or even just her personality. But Hiley’s perspective is that her students are adults. She’ll ask if they have the support they need, and if they say yes, she lets that stand.

What could have gone differently, to make Chen stay? Hiley says she isn’t sure what Nazareth could have done. She draws an analogy from her research on children. Children have risk factors, but also protective factors. Chen, in her view, had a number of protective factors at work: good colleagues, flexibility, and fewer research expectations than he might have at a different sort of college.

At the same time, Hiley says, “I don’t know that, other than in higher ed, a tenure-track position is coveted. All the dumb hoops we jump through — for what? So some old, white guy can tell me I’ve achieved enough? On some level, I wonder if generations coming up will reject that hierarchy. I could have a job by next Friday making more money doing clinical work.”

If there’s anything special about being a professor, it’s working with students. But that’s also what makes it so hard.

Kim McGann thinks that Nazareth could have done more to support professors during the pandemic. Indeed, she asked the administration to do more. McGann, a professor of sociology and chair of the department of sociology and anthropology, ran the college’s Teaching Integration and Innovation Lab during the pandemic. Among other things, she held a “happy hour” over Zoom each Friday, giving professors a place to connect, commiserate, and support one another.

In the spring of 2021, she says she asked the college to acknowledge how hard professors were working. Could she have the budget to buy them each a $4.99 glass with a logo? No. Would an administrator sign handwritten cards to each faculty member, if her team wrote them? No.

McGann, who is an informal mentor to Chen, was on sabbatical when he decided to leave. She was disappointed, but not surprised. She knew of two other fairly new professors, including one in her own department, who left around the same time.

These former colleagues, she says, “are the kinds of teachers that a school like Nazareth really wants. They’re gifted in the classroom, they want to get even better in the classroom, and they care. And they get just torched with burnout, with expectations under our teaching load and all of the other things they have in their lives.”

The strongest teachers, McGann says, end up with the heaviest workload. More students take their classes, which means not only bigger enrollments and more assignments to grade but also more students wanting advice and support. Nazareth is the kind of college where professors spend a lot of time advising students, McGann says. And professors who are women or people of color, she adds, often do additional emotional labor.

Both students and professors benefit from the contemporary idea that professors are more of a guide than an expert far removed from students’ concerns, McGann says. But no one has yet figured out new norms of engagement for students and professors. The relationship is ambiguous, furthering disparities between professors in how much of this care work they take on.

Nazareth was far from unique. In the summer of 2021 — shortly before leaving her own tenured job — Sarah Rose Cavanagh offered a warning to college leaders in an essay for The Chronicle: “Your Most Important Resource is Eyeing the Door.” Cavanagh, now a senior associate director for teaching and learning and an associate professor of practice in psychology at Simmons University, described the many challenges faculty members were facing and the comparatively mild efforts colleges were making to retain them. And she wrote that, in the end, there were two resources that really count for professors: time and money.

Cavanagh continues to expect more professors to prioritize their time, money, and well-being — and leave. “I really worry,” she says, “about a mass resignation of faculty.”

These days, Chen can close his computer at 5 in the evening and not open it again until 9 the next morning. There are no more late-night worries about how to fine-tune the next day’s class or if he did enough to help a student who’s struggling. The pay is a lot better, too. When he was an assistant professor, Chen’s students would land first jobs making close to, and sometimes more, than he was making. Money isn’t his main motivation, but that was discouraging.

Chen has been able to keep a foot in the classroom, too — he’s teaching students in Nazareth’s master of public health program as an adjunct.

For McGann, the loss of Chen and the other junior faculty who left is painful. She lost colleagues she enjoyed spending time with, and she feels disappointed in the institution where she continues to work. She knows it’s been a hit for students, who miss out on being in those professors’ courses and becoming their mentees. And it makes more work for the professors who remain: someone else has to teach those classes, pick up those other tasks. In her own department, it has meant hiring and training a replacement — also more work.

McGann still cares about mentoring junior faculty members. But she’s no longer looking to do that beyond her own department. She left the teaching-center role and says she won’t ever go back. She advises junior faculty to guard their time.

Chen’s generosity with his time was meaningful to some of his students. Take Tatianna Trojnor-Hill, who graduated from Nazareth in 2021 with a double major in international studies and public health. Chen has been a mentor to Trojnor-Hill.

Trojnor-Hill landed a position working at JSI, where Chen had worked before grad school. In what she calls a full-circle moment, her professor returned to the nonprofit after she’d been there a while and is now her colleague, though they work in different areas. To Trojnor-Hill, Chen’s career is inspiring. “He is a great example of someone who has constructed their own path,” she says. More than anything, what Trojnor-Hill says she’s learned from Chen is that “life is very much what you make of it.”

It’s a lesson he won’t be around to teach to the next crop of undergraduates.