Exhaustion, Frustration, Hope, and the Start of the Spring 2022 Semester
How long can our faculty keep this up?
Exhaustion and the Start of the Semester
It is the start of another pandemic semester. That means we are all sitting through another round of start-of-term faculty meetings that are full of the following:
- Descriptions of this term’s COVID masking and safety protocols
- Discussions of online, hybrid, and hi-flex course modalities
- Recommendations on how to accommodate students who need to miss face-to-face classes for COVID-related reasons
- Anger over how flexible teaching faculty are being asked to be with their syllabus policies, classroom practices, and their efforts to support student success
- Discussions about how stretched thin faculty are
- Expressions of frustration with how little central administrators seem to be concerned with faculty and student health
- Disgust with university actions that faculty believe only value generating as much tuition as possible
- Concerns about levels of preparation in students who completed high school during the pandemic.
- Anxiety about the mental health of students and the expectations that faculty will be able to identify students who need counseling.
- Expressions of exhaustion, anger, and confusion
- Desires for certainty about the future that can’t be answered definitively.
How much longer can our campuses keep doing this? How long can our faculty keep this up? As we move from pandemic to endemic status, how many of the anxieties that COVID has brought to us will stay with us? How much of what we adopted as coping strategies in a time of crisis will become the new normal? And how many of those strategies will stay with us because they work better for our students and ourselves? How many of those stop-gap measures will we normalize as part of a desire to routinize our professional lives? (Please forgive the barrage of rhetorical questions, but it is a time of questions without clear answers.)
I am worried about all of us.
Frustration Across Our Campuses
I worry about us not only on an individual level, but I am worried about how well our structures are handling the stress. There are a number of items in the news that prompt my anxiety:
- Recently, Inside Higher Ed published an opinion piece by Carol Bishop Mills, titled Faculty Shouldn’t Teach When They’re Sick. It is disheartening that Mills felt the need to write such a piece and that IHE felt that it would have broad appeal to its readership.
- Kevin R. McClure and Alisa Hicklin Fryar write recently in “The Great Faculty Disengagement” that our campuses are not immune to The Great Resignation, but that within higher education we are seeing fewer outright resignations and more withdrawal: “[Faculty] are withdrawing from certain aspects of the job or, on a more emotional level, from the institution itself. . . . Faculty . . . are still teaching their courses, supporting students, and trying to keep up with basic tasks. But connections to the institution have been frayed. The work is getting done, but there isn’t much spark to it.”
- We see periodically national headlines that highlight professors like Ferris State University’s Barry Mehler, whose start-of- the-semester video includes him saying:
“When I look out at a classroom filled with 50 students, I see 50 selfish kids who don’t give a shit whether Grandpa lives or dies, and if you don’t expose your grandpa to a possible infection with COVID, then stay the f[xxx] away from me. If you don’t give a shit about whether Grandpa lives or dies, by all means, come to class.”
- Articles such as “Enrollment Marches Downward” keep reminding us that we may reach the demographic cliff sooner than we all expected and that we may not be ready for the changes it will bring.
- Reports of votes of no confidence, or anticipated votes of no confidence against university central administrators have been frequently in the news. In 2021, reports of such votes occurred in West Virginia, Texas, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Michigan, and Alabama. Such votes don’t get taken–or contemplated–when faculty feel that the standard processes on their campuses are working.
Did I mention that I am worried about all of us?
The Possibility of Hope
All of these worries and anxieties–from the very, very local to the tectonic–operate alongside some other very clear truths:
- Faculty care deeply about the academic success and the personal wellbeing of their students.
- Faculty care deeply about their campus colleagues.
- Everyone in academia is motivated by a desire to learn, to create, to innovate and to share the results of our work: in the long run, we will be able to develop strategies that will propel our students and our campuses toward higher education’s inevitably refashioned structures.
- Administrators –from department chairs on up through presidents–care deeply about the academic and professional success of their colleagues and of their students.
- All of us on campus have been doing our best to support our students, continue our professional responsibilities, and keep our campus communities moving forward. We are doing this while trying to cope with personal lives that are all deeply disrupted.
- Regardless of differences caused by our differing perspectives and responsibilities, we share more in common than we often acknowledge.
And it is these truths that help me navigate through the worries. They give me hope. I see these truths in action as a faculty member wrestles with the best way to simultaneously show compassion and maintain their academic standards. I see these truths in action when I see colleagues listen to each other express views in conflict with their own. I see these truths in action when I see academic administrators or leaders of professional organizations work to accommodate the wide-ranging needs of their multiple constituencies. I see these views in action when I see colleagues talk to each other in the hall or when I overhear a class in progress as I walk down a hallway.
I won’t use the word resilient to describe what I see in these moments of hope: resilience is a word we are all tired of hearing. In these moments of hope I see the depths of our commitment to our students, our profession, and the transformative power of higher education.
