This article is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The Future of Teaching: How the Classroom Is Being Transformed,” available in the Chronicle Store.
The people who work at your institution have been burning the candle at both ends for more than a year now, keeping higher education going in a pandemic. So when the topic of compassion comes up, you might think it’s about the importance of treating overworked, exhausted faculty and staff members with kindness and care.
And that is important. But among the many existential threats facing your institution now — program cuts, further layoffs — there is another to consider: You are about to lose some of your best and most-experienced people.
A recent study — conducted by The Chronicle and commissioned by Fidelity Investments — revealed that 55 percent of current faculty members “are considering retiring or changing careers and leaving higher education” following the pandemic. That national data corresponds with what I see happening in my own academic social network. Friends I consider quite young are contemplating early retirement. Colleagues are quitting to follow their spouses to well-paying jobs. Psychology professors are leaving to make more money counseling via telehealth or falling into the arms of big tech, which is desperate for people who know how to crunch data. Those examples aren’t from criminally under-supported adjunct instructors but from tenured and tenure-track professors. They won the prize — the supposedly coveted position — and they’re seriously considering turning heel and walking away from it.
With the academic-job market being as terrible as it is, you may think you can easily replace your departing employees. But many of you can’t afford new tenure-track lines, and nothing can replace the institutional knowledge and grounding that experienced, full-time faculty and staff members offer your students and your campus.
I am in the midst of a qualitative research study interviewing undergraduates about the determinants of their best and worst learning experiences. The interviews are underscoring what so much other research has made clear: When it comes to student learning, success, and retention, it is all about forming deep, meaningful relationships with a mentor. The stories they have told us have indicated that it’s about:
- Dropping by office hours to discuss a chemistry problem or decide between internships.
- Running into a professor in the food court and having a quick sidebar about philosophy.
- Receiving an unexpected but welcome email from a faculty member inquiring about the outcome of a job or graduate-school application.
- Knowing they can knock on the door of the tutoring-center director and get help with any problem, big or small.
Now, as you contemplate a full or partial return to business as usual this fall, and with your faculty and staff members teetering in their commitment to your institution, I strongly suggest you prioritize their well-being. As a colleague put it in a recent conversation (thanks Christine Nowik): Be guided by a mantra of “People First” in all of your post-pandemic decision making.
People-First Principle No. 1: Trust your faculty’s instincts in the classroom.
The last three semesters we have taught remotely, in person, and hybrid. We have pivoted back and forth between those modalities based on prevailing health conditions and local lockdowns. Administrators have heard some pretty hair-raising stories from students about how all of this went, and I understand the impulse to try to mandate and control what happens next in the classroom. Some institutions required their faculty members to teach a certain number of synchronous hours in an attempt to prevent them from simply posting readings and discussion questions and then checking out for the semester. Other campuses with face-to-face learning hired “room checkers” to be sure instructors were in their classrooms during assigned hours.
In any social system, there will be loafers and abusers — people who try to game the system to work less or accrue more resources. This is as true of human beings as it is of vampire bats and chimps. You can’t prevent it, and trying to do so is going to restrict and inhibit your hardest-working, most-innovative faculty members from doing what they know how to do best for their particular students and courses. You need to let go of some measure of control and let those faculty members shine.
During the remote pivot on my campus, an accounting professor, Paul Piwko, completely overhauled one of his typical assignments in his accounting course. He took a video camera (and a mask) and toured a local women-owned brewery, creating a vivid, short documentary of the business. He worked with the brewery owners to create a realistic mock-up of their brewing process and associated costs to share with students, who were invited to apply what they’d learned in class and make recommendations. The business owner then attended a Zoom session to answer students’ questions. When Piwko presented this project in an event for our teaching center, it struck me that he had probably sunk something like a full week’s work into the creation of this one assignment, when he could have simply posted the same assignment that he’d been using for years and that he probably could have graded in his sleep. This is the sort of teaching excellence your faculty members can achieve if you give them the freedom to do so.
Trusting your faculty to know what works best also means resisting the allure of continuing to require HyFlex and other hybrid models for most classes on most campuses in the fall semester. HyFlex can certainly be done well, so if you have the resources for fancy equipment, decked-out classrooms, extensive faculty training, and teaching assistants who can tend to the chats and technology while the instructor is trying to teach — then have at it. HyFlex to your heart’s content. But most institutions do not have those resources.
Making hybrid teaching work this past year — without the aforementioned resources — has required a combination of flexibility, innovation, and sheer brute force on the part of faculty and staff members. That level of effort, and the sinking feeling that one is doing a poor job even despite it, is part of why people are thinking about leaving academe. It’s not sustainable. It has also required quite a lot of grace from students, many of whom have not judged too harshly the product of these efforts because they, too, understand that this has been an emergency situation. This grace will not last forever, especially as they continue to pay high tuition dollars for what is ultimately a substandard product.
Trusting your faculty to run their own classrooms also means exploring how aspects of greater flexibility in remote work and teaching innovations should be extended into the future, to accommodate teachers and staff who have benefited greatly from some of the accessibility dimensions of the pivot.
Finally, if you really want to cut down on loafing and encourage innovation, then consider rewarding your hardest-working and most-creative faculty and staff members with awards, stipends, and promotions. Show them that you see them, that you appreciate them.
People-First Principle No. 2: Hands off our breaks. In a laudable effort to contain behaviors that could lead to virus outbreaks, many campuses canceled breaks and held classes on holidays. Lately, some administrators have proposed a long-term rethinking of the academic calendar. Should we always teach remotely after Thanksgiving? Or, more radically, should we get rid of summer breaks?
Some of the ideas for rejiggering the academic calendar are interesting. Maybe we should always teach remotely after Thanksgiving, rather than bring everyone back to campus — mixing viruses and burning fossil fuels — all for a lame-duck week or two between the holiday and end of the semester.
But we need breaks to refresh, to renew, and to catch up on work. Professors have come to rely on official breaks for this rest since, unlike most professionals, we can’t take vacations for a week of our choosing during the semester. As the educational developer Karen Costa told me in an interview, “If we’re setting our faculty up for burnout, we are absolutely ripping away their ability to form positive relationships with their students, which is cutting away the foundation of what we know works.” And students need those breaks, too.
If you mess with breaks, you also cut away at one of the few perks that an academic life has over other, more lucrative professions — namely, the flexibility of our work days. Teaching, scholarship, and service require long hours of effort. The benefit is that you may choose which hours you work and that you get scheduled breaks in between marathon stretches.
As we transition to a new normal, we need to restore breaks during the academic year. This summer we also need to take a break from training and programming and emergency committees. When I asked my community of educational developers about their plan for summer programming, most shared that it would be light and focused on restoring social connections among faculty and staff members, allowing them time to reconnect and to commune over what we’ve lost.
People-First Principle No. 3: To your faculty and staff, time and money are the only true resources. Give us some. During the initial pivot, someone I follow on Twitter who works at a campus teaching center posted a plea for ideas. Her administration had charged her with doing whatever she could to support faculty members in the abrupt switch to teaching entirely online. The administrators told her they would provide her whatever she needed to make it happen — as long as it wasn’t time or money.
Those are quite nearly the only two resources that matter to anyone.
I know that you don’t think you have money, and that giving faculty and staff members time off from teaching, for example, also costs money. But not offering such time and money has a price, too. A case in point: I have been teaching on my own campus long enough to see several different iterations of learning communities, and the comparison is instructive:
- When I first started on the campus, I participated in a learning-community program in which cohorts of first-year students took four courses together across two disciplines. In the group I taught, students took my introductory psychology course in the fall and introductory neuroscience course in the spring; they also took chemistry and biology courses in the fall and spring, respectively. Each of the professors got a course release for each year spent teaching in the program, meaning we taught one less course that year with no reduction in our salaries — thus granting us time. We used this time to collaborate: dovetailing the content of our courses to demonstrate connections and planning extracurricular activities. In addition, we received a decent budget to purchase food, tickets, and supplies for the extracurricular activities. We had a blast planning and carrying out activities — from a breakfast brunch with a nutritionist (talking about the chemistry and psychology of nutrition) to a brain-awareness week activity in which our students, decked out in neuroscience T-shirts of their own devising, taught elementary-school kids about the brain. The students formed close relationships with us and with one another, and we grew close as colleagues. Nearly 10 years later, we still get emails from those students about what they’re up to.
- Budget cuts meant this program was replaced. Now it only lasts a single semester. Participating faculty members get no release time from their other obligations, and the extracurricular budget is also far less. I have participated in this version of the first-year program with other faculty members. We’ve tried mightily yet failed to recreate the same level of connections and results that we were able to achieve in the longer, better-financed program. Why? Because no one had time, and there wasn’t money.
Sure, granting course releases and buying T-shirts can be expensive. But they’re cheaper than several students transferring out of your institution because they haven’t formed strong relationships on the campus.
Time is also required to develop the scholarly mentoring relationships that are at the heart of higher education — students and instructors working together on questions “at the very edge of our human understanding.” Such relationships are at risk if faculty workloads continue to soar. We need to consider how to ask our faculty and staff members to do less, not more.
In closing, remember: Your best people are your best resource. You aren’t paying them enough, and they’re working too hard. If they leave, you won’t be able to adequately replace them. Putting your faculty and staff members first in your post-pandemic decision making is not just the compassionate thing to do, it is actually the prudent thing to do — financially, operationally, and existentially.
