Open thread: On caring institutions

Photo by Abhishek Upadhyay on Unsplash

In our recent conversation on disengagement in higher education and the characteristics of caring institutions, Kevin McClure said that he would like to see “the employee experience…treated on the same level as the student experience, because the two are very much connected and that means…viewing faculty and staff and their well-being as kind of critical to the [institutional] mission.”

• If you are presently employed by a college or university, or if you ever have been, what do you think it might look like to make the employee experience as much a priority as the student experience?

• Have you ever belonged to a caring institution — academic or not — that achieved the balance between employee/client/student satisfaction that Kevin imagines?

• If you are a parent of a college student, or if you have children who will one day attend college, how vital to your child’s undergraduate experience do you think the wellbeing of their professors is? What kinds of questions might you ask during your college visits, and what might you look for throughout your campus tour, that could help you ascertain how caring the institution is to the people it employs?

Another snippet from our conversation:

…for the vast majority of hired workers, many of the problems…come down to workload problems…, many of which stem from underinvestment. That means that fewer and fewer workers are shouldering a larger and larger number of tasks, and this is, in my view, particularly acute amongst staff members…. I've talked to a lot of staff members who through the last three years have been doing multiple jobs and there's never really a conversation about compensation to be had about it. So that's a big piece of this is excessive workload, job demands, and what that does is basically produce chronic stress. People who feel like they never have an opportunity to kind of come down from a stress high.

• Jenn Zuko commented about this on Tuesday, noting the absence of adjunct faculty in my conversation with Kevin. And she is right — contingent faculty suffer more stress and receive fewer rewards than almost anyone in the college system. But I also appreciate Kevin calling attention to burnout among staff. If you have a staff position at a college or university and have been feeling, like Jenn, that you have been invisible in the conversation about the state of higher ed, please share your story. What have I been missing in my series that you might be able to speak to?

• My former employer has never been able to solve the workload problem for faculty. The English department had 8 full-time faculty when I was hired, and it presently has 3. Fewer people means heavier advising loads and other relentless service demands, such as assessment and committee work, on top of teaching and research. Lower enrollments lead to more pressure to participate in recruitment events, often on weekends. Some departments, because the institution simply does not promote them, are developing targeted recruitment efforts in high schools — very time-consuming initiatives that may feel necessary, but that also erode a sense of purpose. Some faculty respond to this crush of work with passive methods, like avoidance, and other cannibalize their own leaders in governance, blaming them for not alleviating the problem. It can feel like an inescapable cycle. Have you witnessed or experienced solutions to the workload problem?

Finally, Kevin cited two colleagues — Teresa Valerio Parrot and Erin A. Hennessy — who say that communications cannot fix leadership problems. While good communication is essential to healthy relationships and healthy institutions, Parrot and Hennessy mean that external brand messages or promotional materials cannot remedy internal problems within an institution. Do you agree? Examples to share?

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Inner Life

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<Mary L. Tabor>

on the HBO series Scenes from a Marriage.

Alicia Kenworthy

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Catalectic

, will also share a guest essay on Inner Life later today.