I first crossed paths with Michael Chen, who resigned from his position as an assistant professor of public health at Nazareth College (now University) in December 2022, at an online pandemic pedagogy conference the year before. His presentation struck me as particularly thoughtful; I even wrote about it for the newsletter. We stayed in occasional touch. Chen, like many newsletter readers I’ve corresponded with, struck me as an instructor working hard to do what a faculty developer would encourage: make classes engaging and demonstrate care.
But it was clearly taking a toll on him.
Indeed, Kim McGann, who led Nazareth’s teaching lab during the pandemic, described Chen and a couple of other junior colleagues who left as “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.”
In 2023, I asked Chen to be a panelist for a Chronicle webinar I was moderating. I learned he’d left his tenure-track position and was teaching as an adjunct while working full-time outside of academe.
Chen’s story stayed with me. It was a clear-cut instance of the concern Sarah Rose Cavanagh had raised in a 2021 Chronicle advice piece titled “Your Most Important Resource is Eyeing the Door.” Instructors have been asked to do a great deal to support students in recent years. But for the most part, they haven’t gotten much support from their institutions. And while many professors will stay — because they love what they do, or because they can’t change gears as easily as Chen — the cracks are showing.
After Chen agreed to participate in my story, I talked to Cavanagh about the points raised in her piece. Nothing seems to have improved. Chen also told me about “The Professor is Out,” a private Facebook group for academics who’ve left, or are looking to. Its founder, the author and consultant Karen Kelsky, shared that the group had become much larger than she’d envisioned, and that she was struck by how many members were in tenure-track and tenured positions.
I also spoke with some of Chen’s colleagues who’ve stayed in their full-time faculty roles. Those conversations reminded me that a professor’s departure has many ripple effects — and that part of how some professors have remained on the job is by renegotiating their relationships with work. While that renegotiation is probably healthier for the professors, I’m just not sure most colleges are prepared to operate in a world where fewer of their employees are willing to work themselves to exhaustion.
All that is to say, I suspect much of Chen’s experience will feel familiar. And, while I understand that many colleges are on even weaker financial footing than they were in 2022, that feeling seems like something colleges might want to attend to.
I hope you’ll give it a read. And I’d love to hear your thoughts. When I was working on it, I mentioned to Beth that at a few points during the pandemic I expected colleges to do more to support professors, but it never seemed to happen. But, of course, there could be examples I missed. If your college took action to acknowledge the extra work professors put in during and after remote instruction — or if you’re in faculty development and have plans to elevate instructor support — please write to me about it.
Summer break
Don’t worry, Beth and I know better than to suggest that it must be nice to have the summers off. We know that most professors keep working.
But we hope you’ve been able to do so at a different pace, or at least build in some breaks. And we want to know: What are you doing to unwind, regroup, and have fun? Let me know at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and we’ll share some examples.
It doesn’t have to be something impressive or ambitious, by the way. You may see yourselves — and maybe also your students — in this recent newsletter post, “We Don’t Need to ‘Make the Most of Summer,’” by the science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer. “Rather than obsessing over what we can do to make our summer the most epic (or productive) one imaginable,” she writes, “maybe we should ask ourselves whether we can build lives that make us feel satisfied all year around. Not ‘optimized’ lives, but lives in which there is balance.”
If you have found a path toward balance in your life, or have ideas on what might help professors do so, I’d love to hear about that, too.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
— Beckie
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