In a previous post, I offered some initial reflections on feelings of overwhelm I am noticing in students, colleagues, and myself. Recently, Inside Higher Ed released a report by Kristi DePaul called “The Engaged (and Supported) Professor.” The report itself is sobering, but also likely not surprising to anyone who has been teaching through the pandemic.
A main finding of the report is that faculty are struggling, that schools are struggling to find ways to support faculty, and that unless schools can find ways to offer this support, the entire sector of higher education is going to be in trouble.
The report offers actionable hope in several areas, and I want to highlight two that often don’t receive enough attention. First, DePaul suggests that a key factor of demoralization and burnout is that faculty workload is inequitable. Some faculty do more service, more invisible labor (counseling students, advising students, supporting students), and invest more time in their teaching. This imbalanced service burden often falls to women and minoritized faculty. DePaul suggests that we can promote faculty well-being by engaging in “equity-minded faculty workload audits.”I think there is a lot of wisdom in this idea, and I encourage us to think about how a more equitable distribution of service might promote well-being.
Second, the unending financial crises in higher education have caused many academics to devote significant amounts of time to what is called “institution building.” Think of all the higher education task forces meeting across this country right now, each struggling to create a rigorous and engaging curriculum for students under conditions of financial and other stresses. Think of all the time spent in these meetings that could be spent on what often holds the most professional currency: peer-reviewed scholarship.
DePaul’s report references the article “The Scholarship of Mission: A New Concept for Promoting Scholarly Work Advancing Institutional Goals” and this, too, is worth reading and reflecting on. We draw on our professional training and we do literature reviews when we work to promote institutional goals, so it may be useful to consider how we can “count” this work toward tenure, promotion, and other forms of professional recognition.
To that end, I want to remind the SLU community that I am here to help in a variety of ways. I can help review mid-pro, tenure, and promotion documents, and we can talk about ways of foregrounding the scholarly value of some of the service-related work we do on campus in these documents. As well, I welcome the chance to talk with department chairs and committees about what it would look like to do workload audits that promote wellbeing.
It is good that these issues are finally getting the attention they deserve. But this doesn’t mean the work ahead will be easy. I want to close by thanking everyone on this campus who is devoting their time, effort, and best thinking to improving campus well-being. This work risks demoralizing the very people who are already doing so much for this campus, and so I want to offer my deepest gratitude to everyone doing this essential work that benefits us all.