What Keeps Stressed-Out Faculty Members Going? Their Students.

The Work Issue

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Daniel Charlton carries a heavy workload. Each semester, he teaches four to six courses because his department is short-staffed. He sits on five committees: two in the College of Education at Montana State University at Billings, where he is an assistant professor, plus another three at the university level. He is also finishing up his dissertation, conducting research, and mentoring future teachers.

Grading gets done in the evening and on weekends. The occasional yoga practice is squeezed in around 10 p.m. The area of focused happiness in his otherwise hectic schedule? Teaching. He calls it his “bright hour,” where he spends time in conversation with students, cultivating relationships and honing his pedagogical skills.

Last fall, Charlton participated in a campus study on the extent and causes of faculty burnout. In his focus group, he noted, none of the professors said that teaching was to blame. Rather, they described the classroom as a place where “we don’t have the chaos around us,” he said. “We can spend that hour knowing exactly what we are doing and what we were trained for.”

Is teaching the antidote to burnout? Perhaps not, but a couple of small studies, plus findings from a recent Chronicle survey, suggest that faculty members don’t think teaching and mentoring students is the root cause. In the Montana State study, for example, 57 percent of faculty members on their four-year campus, including 70 percent of tenured professors, reported high levels of burnout. Yet 95 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “working with students is the best part of my job.”

The Chronicle survey found something similar. While only about half of 1,443 faculty members surveyed would encourage someone to pursue a career in their current role, the most common reasons among those they offered for doing so had to do with working with students. Faculty members who wouldn’t encourage someone to pursue a career like theirs were more likely to point to a host of reasons other than student challenges.

And a small study on faculty motivation found that “intellectual engagement and a passion for education” were what drove people to pursue academe in the first place. “Faculty find teaching to be enjoyable, interesting, and important — arguably the best part of their job — and they have positive views of their students,” the authors concluded.

For years, though, professors have been saying that teaching is increasingly burdensome. More students are arriving underprepared for college-level work. Many need a lot of emotional support. Instructors have also scrambled to revamp their coursework to deal with a series of challenges, from moving online during the pandemic to reckoning with AI. How can teaching be a source of professional happiness but also a fountain of stress?

The Chronicle’s data, along with interviews with teaching experts and faculty members, hold some answers. Growing service loads and committee work, nebulous tenure and promotion guidelines, understaffing and budget cuts — all of these are stretching faculty members thin. The more satisfying parts of faculty work, including research and teaching, get squeezed into the margins.

When teaching challenges arise, professors often lack the time or resources to adapt. Political interference and public skepticism have also led faculty members to question long-held beliefs, including that teaching is a vocation worth the relatively low pay because it contributes to the betterment of society.

Still, many faculty respondents to the Chronicle survey described a sense of purpose working in education, particularly those who would recommend their career to others. “My life’s value rests on my teaching, advising, and connections with the variety of students I work with every day. It brings me joy!” wrote one longtime English professor.

Even those who complained of low pay or dysfunctional workplaces often described the satisfaction that teaching brings. “Getting in front of a classroom full of students and seeing that ‘Aha!’ moment is a thrill like none other,” wrote one STEM professor. “Even when I’m dealing with crazy administrators (and the administration at my institution is a doozy...), I can walk into a lecture hall and within the first 10 minutes, I remember why I do what I do.”

Faculty members at colleges that serve a high percentage of lower-income and first-generation students spoke of their institution’s public-service mission. And some non-tenure-track faculty members said they liked not having the distraction of research.

Casey Taylor, an assistant professor of energy and environmental policy at the University of Delaware who responded to the Chronicle survey, said that her professional happiness is rooted in a workplace that fully supports her focus on teaching. As a non-tenure-track faculty member, she doesn’t have the job security of tenure, but she also does not have tenure review hanging over her head. Nor does she feel that she’s treated as less important than her tenured colleagues. When she arrived in 2018, “they made it really clear that I was not going to be treated as a second-class citizen,” she said in an interview.

Taylor has faced the same challenges as her peers: the pandemic pivot to online teaching, undergraduates who lack critical reading skills, students using generative AI to complete assignments. But she said she is given time and resources to improve her pedagogy and rework her courses. She recently designed an upper-level course on the political economy of the environment, for example, to be more project-based, a task that took a significant amount of effort.

Among faculty members who would not encourage others to pursue a similar career, a different narrative emerged. Their explanations fell into five broad categories, including overwork and poor pay and declining institutional support. Challenges with changing student dynamics was the least frequently cited reason, and some professors couched those challenges in economic terms: On shoestring budgets, they could not support students properly.

“Our institution is at/near the bottom of the state’s community colleges in terms of success/graduation rates,” wrote a respondent who described themself as a longtime faculty member, “and while student support wanes, most, if not all, of the blame for students not ‘achieving’ is landing squarely on faculty, most of whom are overworked and many of whom (full-timers) are employed in second and third jobs elsewhere simply to make ends meet.”

Other respondents described how enrollment pressures, perpetual course modifications and changing student dynamics have hindered their ability to teach effectively and meaningfully.

Claudia Walters is in her 24th year as a collegiate lecturer of social sciences at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. She entered academe for the intellectual stimulation. “I enjoy being questioned by students, being challenged,” Walters, who responded to the Chronicle survey, said in an interview. But she gets less of that these days. Students are increasingly less prepared to do college-level work and more likely to ask what answer she wants from them. “If I tell them ‘I want an interesting post from you,’ they want to know exactly how many lines. They expect a checkbox approach.” Because her campus has struggled to draw in students, that influences her grading. “With the decline in enrollment, I cannot give the grades I would have given 15 years ago,” she said. “Students would complain that I’m a tough grader and enroll in other courses.”

Walters also has to do a great deal of work to continually redesign her courses. That includes offering the course in different modes — students want more online options — making videos, updating assignments, and adapting to AI. “You never get to the point where it’s a really good course and the students can get the most out of it.”

The researchers behind the Montana State study, Andrea Aebersold and Joy Honea, expected that the causes of faculty burnout would be rooted in the classroom. Aebersold, executive director of the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, had read faculty complaints on social media and in news reports that students’ behavior had made teaching exhausting. Honea, a longtime sociology professor and head of the faculty union, expected to hear about heavy teaching workloads.

But professors in their study, similar to the Chronicle’s survey respondents, described their burnout in terms of endless committee meetings, growing service work, vague or unrealistic tenure or promotion goals, and doing the work of others because of staffing shortages and high turnover. Someone might spend hours during the day fixing a problem for a student created by an inexperienced adviser, or sidelined by an ad hoc meeting. Teaching and scholarship got squeezed to the margins.

“In our focus groups one of the things that keeps coming up,” said Honea, was the sentiment that “‘If I could just do my job, I would be perfectly fine. I’m tired of doing the job of everyone else.’”

Charlton, the assistant professor of education, said that one reason he sits on so many committees and teaches an overload is that he worries saying no would risk his chance for tenure.

“We draw comparisons to each other, which I think is a dangerous kind of setup,” he said, adding that good performance seems relative when standards “aren’t defined.”

Aebersold said it is important for administrators to hear stories like these. If the structures and systems in place are leading to more work than is necessary or fair, then those structures should be changed. To say that students are the cause of burnout lets the people in charge off the hook.

“It becomes very easy for university administrators to go: ‘The faculty are all burned out and it’s those darn students,” she said. “It’s much easier to buy into that narrative because it doesn’t require institutional change.”

That’s the kind of message that Jeffrey Heilveil, chair of the biology department at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, would like to convey to the higher-education bureaucracy. His small college, which is part of a massive state system, struggles to balance its budget, he said, yet fails to recognize how time- and resource-intensive good teaching is.

“The people who are responsible for keeping the institution afloat, the administration, have to think about it like a business and have to worry about things like efficiency and making money. Except that education is not an efficient process,” said Heilveil, who responded to the Chronicle survey. “When faculty see resources getting put toward things other than the educational part of the mission, then they start to wonder, ‘Why are we doing this thing?’”

In his first two terms as department chair, eight years ago, Heilveil taught a full course load. No more. The constant assessments, requests for data, and administrative duties have squeezed out his ability to do much teaching. “I have 15 training certificates from the last three years and not a single one of those training sessions has provided worthwhile content,” he said, if the goal was to make him a more effective educator.

The flipside of burnout is motivation. That’s a topic that Aebersold and Honea want to explore more. One study they found helpful, in which the authors found that “intellectual engagement and a passion for education” were a central reason that people chose to enter academe, was co-authored by Michelle Pautz, associate dean for curriculum and student academic success in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Dayton.

Pautz and her coauthors surveyed 144 faculty members from institutions across the country, on the premise that a better understanding of what motivates people to enter academe could lead to professional-development strategies that reconnect faculty members with passion for their work.

The authors found that faculty members tend to hold positive views of students, and would ideally spend twice as much time on teaching as on research. Pautz hopes these preliminary findings can inform further research. “Let’s not jump to the conclusion that faculty just want to be holed up and do research and they think students are dumb and AI is taking over their brain,” she said. “If that was the case a lot of them would find other things to do,” including jobs with better pay and less stress. “There is some deeper calling.”

Robert Stupnisky, a professor and associate dean in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of North Dakota, runs the Faculty Motivation Research Group and has been studying the topic for the past 14 years. In a survey of 102 pre-tenured faculty members published in 2019, his group found that, when respondents described their work, teaching produced a greater number of positive emotions overall, and doing research produced slightly more negative emotions overall. Stupnisky surmises that is because teaching brings more immediate satisfaction, while research is often done in isolation and is tied to the stress of earning tenure.

The study was done before Covid hit and generative AI arrived. But Stupnisky said it is helpful to think about motivation in terms of three core components: senses of autonomy, of relatedness, and of competence. When instructors become frustrated with teaching, it often ties into lacking one or more of those three feelings. Not having enough time to devote to good teaching because of other work obligations or heavy teaching loads can affect their sense of autonomy. Struggling to create engaging classrooms because they don’t know how to connect with today’s students can affect feelings of relatedness. And not finding the time to adapt their courses to generative AI can affect their sense of competence.

“Burnout,” Stupnisky said, “is really a long-term consequence of not properly caring for these factors in individuals’ motivation over time.”

What can be done to help faculty members carve out space for what drew them to academe in the first place?

Rebecca Pope-Ruark, author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, says that administrators should start by recognizing how common burnout is. As director of the office of faculty professional development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she’s “talked to campuses anywhere from community colleges all the way up to Ivies,” she said. “And it’s just kind of the way it is.” She also thinks cultivating well-being among faculty and staff should be part of a campus’s strategic plan, just like student well-being.

At MSU Billings, Aerbersold and Honea are already working on a few ideas to do that. One is a service audit to document what work is being done and who is doing it. The result, they hope, is to spread that work more fairly and eliminate unnecessary committees. As the faculty-union president, Honea is also leading an analysis, at the provost’s request, of tenure and promotion guidelines in each department. Are they clear? Are they realistic? Is the university providing enough resources to ensure that faculty members can meet the criteria?

They hope those and other tailored strategies, such as improving how teaching is evaluated, will help protect faculty time and align their work with the campus reward system. Those changes would also hold leaders accountable.

“When you say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it because we’re in a budget crunch,’ the workload just gets pushed more and more on to the fewer and fewer people who are there to do it. And that has to stop,” said Honea. “I think we can enact policies that put guardrails around that and sort of force it back into the hands of the people who get paid the big bucks.”