Today I hosted a conversation in the CTL that I planned to be on joy as a high-impact practice. Given the composition of the group, we ended up taken the conversation in a completely different direction.
What emerged from our discussion was a sense that the career that many of us thought we were signing up for is changing. This sentiment was shared by new faculty members and faculty with many years of experience.
Part of the issue, of course, is the pandemic. Our work changed drastically over the pandemic years. But there seems to be more to it than that. Students seem to have changing expectations, parents seem to have changing expectations, and faculty are often left with the difficult task of discerning how to address those expectations while remaining true to their sense of their work.
The issue, it seems to me, is much more than the concern that higher education is becoming commodified and thus parents and students see themselves more in the role of a consumer than a learner. (This concern is real, and I love Agnes Callard’s discussion of it, but it isn’t the whole story.)
Rather, several things are happening at once. Faculty working at small colleges have been socialized into increasingly specialized fields, and this can make it hard for us to find a common purpose. The purpose of residential liberal education is becoming similarly fragmented. Not from a lack of care or only from consumer pressure but because there are just so many things we want a college education to do and to be.
In the coming weeks, I hope to bring faculty together to discuss their feelings and ideas about the changing nature of our work. How do we socialize new faculty into the work of being a professor at a small residential liberal arts college when this works seems to be in flux? How do we respond to or adapt to the changing nature of the work while remaining true to our sense of what the work is? How do we support our colleagues and our students–their wellbeing and their sense of purpose–in this environment?
I expect the pace of change to only accelerate. As faculty, I think we need to make this change work for us, or risk demoralization. I look forward to facilitating and contributing to these types of conversations.