Author: Patrick Beauchesne one of our 2021-2022 Hub Faculty Affiliates
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash
“A punishing intensification of work has become an endemic feature of academic life. Again, serious discussion of this is hard to find either within or outside universities, yet it is impossible to spend any significant amount of time with academics without quickly gaining an impression of a profession overloaded to breaking point, as a consequence of the underfunded expansion of universities over the last two decades, combined with hyperinflation of what is demanded of academics, and an audit culture that, if it was once treated with skepticism, has now been almost perfectly internalized.”
(Gill, 2016: 46)
I have long wondered why academia has normalized the concerning amount of stress and problems with mental health both faculty and students experience. I first felt that something was ‘off’ during my Masters, when it became rapidly clear to me that success would require working 12 hour days for nearly two years straight. I had thankfully learned some organizational and coping skills by the time I began my PhD, but the expectations were similarly onerous, particularly in the first few years while balancing coursework, my emerging dissertation work, and forming new social networks. What’s more, I began to notice that instead of questioning, challenging and pushing back against these unrealistic and unsustainable workloads, my fellow graduate students had become conditioned to accept the status quo, proudly declaring how burdensome their lives were. They wore the stress, anxiety and anguish as badges of honor. They had normalized and internalized these working conditions. It was performative suffering and workaholism to a ‘T’. They were doing it ‘right’ and deserved their projects, grants and degrees, while those who didn’t perform the acceptance of these standards, or who were perceived as less ‘productive’ (more on that later!), were looked at with derision, as if they were granted the fruits of success without having gone through the proper rituals of suffering to earn it ‘fairly’.
The stress that university systems place upon students and faculty is unsustainable. It is deeply damaging to mental health, but also to our bodies. This is especially true for those who aren’t able bodied and/or already coping with mental health strain. I didn’t come to this realization alone. A lot of scholars, many of whom are cited in this essay, have been thinking seriously about this for a long time. I take particular inspiration from Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s wonderful book, The Slow Professor.Much of what these colleagues say about the impact of stress on our wellbeing truly resonates with me as an anthropologist who studies the relationship between culture and health. In this, and my upcoming posts, I wanted to apply the perspectives of other scholars concerned about these issues, as well as my own, to hopefully begin a discussion about work, stress, and health on this campus. My primary audience is the faculty (both tenure-track and LEO) of UMD – I hope this post resonates with you and you feel less alone because someone is publicly discussing these issues. I also hope that our students feel seen here, as I address some of their experiences as well. Finally, I hope that administrators see this and that this spurs conversation at that level as well. This first post will explore the research on the current state of academic life as it pertains to mental health. The second will explore how stress, and the complex emotional states it produces, affects our health and our ability to think, write and teach well. In my second post I will also explore strategies we can employ to relieve some of this stress and find ways of becoming healthier in mind and body within this system.
This essay will contain a lot of unsettling and frankly depressing statistics about the state of mental health in academia. It pains me to relay these statistics because I truly love my job, particularly teaching, despite the depth and breadth of problems this profession presents on a daily basis. I consider myself deeply privileged (with no small measure of luck) to be where I am, but I also feel a responsibility to help raise awareness of these problems to not only improve my own mental health, but that of my colleagues’ as well. And so I write these words not to yell into the void or out of a desire to tear it all down, but from a place of genuine concern, empathy and care. I also want to heed the wisdom in The Slow Professor that correctly points out that catastrophizing our current problems can only lead us to paralysis. If academia is already in ruins, why bother working for change? It’s vital we remember that we have agency and we have many avenues to push back against a culture that overworks and undervalues us. Too much of what counts as ‘success’ in academia comes at the cost of our mental health, our families, our friends, and of the other joys in life that keep us whole (and possibly, human?). For many of us, our careers and lives depend on making these changes because the weight of mental illness is preventing us from flourishing. Change begins with acknowledging there’s a problem to begin with. I hope that this post, along with my subsequent ones, first spurs internal reflection, followed by some small changes we can all do to lessen the weight of the pressures we face. For those who have already spent time reading and thinking about these issues, I hope you find it comforting to hear that others are with you and also desire change. At the very least, we can and should talk about these problems openly, and support each other through our struggles.
You Guessed It, the Pandemic Made Everything Worse
The effects of the pandemic on academia are still emerging, but I wanted to acknowledge some of the effects that have been documented here. The experience of the pandemic was somewhat paradoxical, at once feeling like everything stopped, yet the pace of work increased for most. Much of the ‘pivoting’ that was done during the height of the pandemic was student centered, which is laudable in many ways, and needed, but there was little attention to our reimagining of “academic spaces, delivery systems, and ways of doing our work”. Faculty were asked to shoulder a lot of extra work, particularly in the move to online teaching, and we are only now learning how difficult this was for many. The pandemic brought with it an ‘entering of the home’, where we all experienced a form of fusion of work and home life that has escalated preexisting problems, particularly for women and BIPOC faculty. Others have noted that the pandemic forced a “collision of work and home life” that was profoundly gendered. These collisions of work and home life caused a lot of stress and exacerbated existing inequalities. As we slowly begin to emerge from the pandemic and take stock of what that experience was like, and what we can learn from our efforts, I hope we find the time to reevaluate our priorities. Faculty need to be able to detach from work, to be with their families, and to make the time and space to manage their stress levels. Our emotional states matter. Reducing stress and improving mental health isn’t just important for everyone’s general wellbeing, there’s a direct impact on our states of mind when thinking of new research projects, how we circulate that knowledge, how we interact with students and each other. If we don’t collectively move in a direction that prioritizes faculty and student wellbeing, I fear for the future of higher education, for the mental health of all my incredible colleagues, and for the students we will underserve and leave behind.
Struggles with Mental Health Define Academia
“Mental health in academia has never been so tenuous”. The problem of poor mental health among faculty is widespread and notably, a global phenomenon. The numbers are truly staggering. A 2003 study of Australian academics found that markers of poor mental health among academics were four times higher than the general population. A 2010 study of Canadian academics revealed that a quarter of all faculty had severe mental health issues. A more recent look at this issue European academics showed that nearly 40% of faculty members reported struggling with mental health. An updated study of Canadian academics found that two thirds of faculty report struggling with mental health. Results from similar surveys of faculty in the US reveal similar trends. The psychological weight of this stress affects both tenured and tenure-track faculty, as well as lecturers (contract faculty), albeit for different reasons, with lecturers emphasizing the precarious nature of their contracts, poor pay, and excessive workload.
The mental health of students is in many ways, bound to the mental health of faculty. While this reflective essay is geared at sparking conversations among our faculty here at UMD, I want to acknowledge and give voice to the stress that graduate and undergraduate students face as well. In the undergraduate population, mental health problems are at an all-time high. A recent report by the Newport Institute found that 87% of undergraduates report that college is a significant source of stress in their lives. Two thirds of those students feel that planning for the future is ‘impossible’. The pandemic has greatly impacted undergraduate enrollments, particularly among Native American, Black, Latinx and Asian students. This report reveals that students are most stressed by their financial burdens, the emphasis on grades, and by an overreliance on tests/exams. It was revealed in a recent report in the Michigan Daily that 40% of Michigan undergraduates report chronic depression, and eleven percent have had suicidal thoughts at least once in the past year. Similar numbers are reported elsewhere across the country.
Graduate students are perhaps suffering even more than undergraduates under the weight of the expectations placed upon them. Graduate students experience depression at a rate that is six times higher than the general population. This same report highlighted the fact that one third of graduate students report being severely depressed. The causes of these levels of mental crisis are complex, but many students report their self-worth being questioned constantly, the hyper-competitive context of academic fights over grant money, prestige and publications, and by the low chances of “success” (landing that dream job, or even any academic job). Exploring the experiences of graduate students is important for (at least) two reasons: 1) they are a unique student population that deserves to be understood and seen in their own right; and 2) the common experiences of graduate school speak to how young faculty enter the profession and reveal that the lower ranks of faculty begin their careers, in many cases, from a place of weakened mental health.
To illustrate this point, I was granted permission to share a personal reflection from a friend, a current graduate student, about their lived experience:
“Graduate students occupy both a place of immense privilege and one of stress and economic uncertainty, with many of us surviving just above the poverty line. What truly compounds that day to day stress is that in decades past, success for graduate students was often articulated as that ‘dream job’ – that coveted academic position that fit them, and they may be able to achieve with hard work, networking, and their advisor’s help. Now, for most graduate students, success may be just landing any tenure track academic job, which require increasingly more publications, networking, costly conference attendances and self-embellished application materials to be competitive.”
The quote I highlight above represents a lot of graduate students, but not all. The decision to leave (voluntarily or otherwise) academia can also be challenging for a number of reasons. To illustrate this, I’d like to introduce some compelling thoughts from another graduate student I know well:
“There’s a lot of stress and presumed failure associated with leaving when sometimes it’s a grad student’s choice to leave academia, or in many cases, they are forced to because of the practicalities of that precarity. For example, I’m really feeling this stress knowing this is my last year with health insurance. I have a short runway and might have to take a job outside academia because I can’t stick around waiting for employment if I can’t get the meds to even live”.
I would like to share just one more example, again from another graduate student I know well, that sums up a lot of what I think graduate students experience in the day to day ‘ambience’ of academia:
“Patrick… between you and me…. it is [expletive] brutal. The politics of academia is really, really bothering me and I am at a point where I’m really not sure if it’s a path I want to continue on or if it can be conducive to me living a happy and fulfilling life. I care deeply about the work I am doing/hope to do in the future, but I don’t know how to thrive and be happy and myself in a toxic environment.”
Another core issue that students of all levels face, and frankly, faculty as well, is the notion that labor can be thought of in universal and neutral ways. Our conceptions of ‘work’ too often rely on normative, ableist, and neurotypical understandings of what that means. I would like to cite the work of Stefanie Kerschbaum here (2015: 10), as it’s particularly relevant:
“We need to imagine what happens when disabled students are in our classrooms, and this imagining needs to happen before someone actually discloses a disability. Whether disclosures happen or not, disability will always be part of classroom life everywhere.”
In short, when we design our courses and think about the work students will do with/for us, it’s vital to design these assignments with our students’ multiple identities in mind. I would also extend these considerations to how we think about ourselves as faculty.
Regrettably, for both undergraduates and graduates, getting help can feel impossible, due to a lack of critical investment in their health. For example, 90% of directors of campus psychological services programs say the number of students reporting problems is increasingly dramatically, but health centers are overrun, understaffed, and students are underserved. Our students are suffering, and we seemingly can’t muster the resources needed to address the severity of the problem. ‘Student success’ is a theme prevalent across universities nationwide, but without access to basic (mental) health care that is affordable and timely, we will lose many students along the way, despite our efforts to help them academically.
Publish or Perish
“[O]ur feelings of lack of productivity and not measuring up have not led us until now to “read” the university; our self-blame has played into corporate values” .
(Berg and Seeber, 2016: 13)
The statistics presented above are probably shocking to many. Isn’t this a dream job? We get to pursue our intellectual interests with passionate fervor after all, shouldn’t we be grateful for all the freedom and benefits that come with this type of work? In some cases, this view of what academia is accurate, and this is certainly how the public thinks about us. But for most, I would argue that this idealized state of work remains elusive, a story we tell ourselves, but practically speaking, is out of reach. The simple truth is that we are being asked to do too much. We are constantly being asked to defend our existence, and there is no place where academics are free from excessive demands, it is truly an International phenomenon. We are expected to be brilliant, engaging teachers, employing the latest pedagogical techniques and practices. I would venture that many of us feel like student success rests on our shoulders, and it can be a heavy burden to bear, both for the sheer amount of time it takes up in our lives, and for the emotional weight of the work. Further, we are often pressured or ‘volun-told’ into time consuming service duties where our precious moments of free time are consumed by meetings, reports, and other forms of frequently “thankless” labor. Initiative fatigue is a real thing, and a consistent contributor to faculty burnout. But above all, we’ve been encultured into believing and living by the mantra of ‘publish or perish.’ Brianne Roos and Carey Borkoski have poignantly identified that the ideal neoliberal faculty member is “dedicated, undistracted, and constantly working, calling to mind the vision of a professor who never leaves campus, in both literal and figurative senses.” They are not alone in making this observation: we are expected to publish more, in less time, and that all of our time, seemingly every waking moment, must be ‘productive’.
The pressure to produce, constantly, is deeply problematic. It is a root cause of the psychological and physiological stress faculty experience daily. I would also argue, as have others, that it is bad for the quality of scholarship we collective create. The typical pressures of the ‘publish or perish’ mentality undermines the quality and public value of much of what we publish. I have felt the pressure myself, to subtly reword my research findings to feel more ‘splashy’ and impactful. I have certainly seen this in other scholars, having spent a few years now reviewing their work for journals. There is a reason that phacking is so widespread in the sciences, despite the very questionable rigor and quality of the work being done. It has become clear that eliminating “p-hacking entirely is unlikely when career advancement is assessed by publication output, and publication decisions are affected by the p-value or other measures of statistical support for relationships”. It is also vital to note that a lot of research is only interacted with by a very small number of academics, and even fewer members of the public. This is problematic for multiple reasons: it alienates us from our work, and makes us question why we bother working so hard on publications to begin with. Further, the desire for productivity undermines the work of teaching (a core aspect of our work), and has led to the ballooning of new journals, seemingly just there to absorb the desire for more publications. This also atomizes and individualizes work in academia, pulling us away from each other, from students, from meaningful service. For many recent hires, the message is clear: our work isn’t about intellectual pursuits, education or community, it’s about output for the sake of output. To make matters worse, the funding and ranking of colleges (driven by smaller pools of students and increasing tuition) is often tied to faculty ‘output’ or ‘productivity’, further reinforcing this model. Prestige or academic success is quantified; qualitative assessment takes a backseat or isn’t valued at all.
The corporatization of the university has had other cascading effects. Many scholars note the increasingly hostile and toxic tone of peer-review as competition for limited space in top-tier journals intensifies. The ethos of productivity means that genuinely positive and necessary moments of rest, reflection and revitalization are increasingly sparse and hard to grasp. Many faculty feel as if the “ideals of discovery, enquiry, and intellectual advancement” we all aspired to as young academics are increasingly fleeting, and risks poisoning the love we all had with our disciplines as we began on this journey. Instead, the university is rapidly becoming a place of competition, struggle and knowledge marketization. Faculty positions are increasingly precarious, while administration budgets continue to balloon. Faculty ‘accountability’ and benchmarking has fostered atmospheres of self-interest, instrumentalist career planning, destabilized relationships among colleagues, and the industrialization of academic labor. The neoliberal university increasingly views professors as inherently irresponsible, and thus warrants constant monitoring and evaluation by external policing and managerial practices. As others have noted, this creates a lived experience of feeling constantly overwhelmed. We live in a time when rising stress levels, and our persistent emotional and physical distress is simply ‘the new normal’. What the university ultimately values fosters self-doubt, anxiety, and imposter syndrome, and ultimately leads to the crisis of mental health outlined in this essay.
The Insidious Incentives of Workaholism
“Academic work is by its nature never done; while the flexibility of hours is one of the privileges of our work, it can easily translate into working all the time or feeling that one should” .
(Berg and Seeber, 2016: 17)
I often wonder why we collectively tolerate such toxic working conditions. I don’t have any easy answers to this question, but I think a number of factors are relevant in how we might think about our current state of affairs. As we saw with the data on graduate mental health, we train graduate students and emerging faculty to value productivity above all else, including taking appropriate care of one’s own health. We have trained younger faculty to embody a “sacrificial ethos”, where the self is subjugated to the demands of academic life. What’s worse, since the 1980s, the bar is being continuously raised for each subsequent academic ‘generation’. Although this mindset affects everyone, too often, women bear the brunt of this ethos. For example, a recent survey of the women faculty in the University of California system found that they regularly worked 100 hours a week, when accounting for work done in the home, in addition to their scholarly work. There’s an exodus of women leaving the workforce (writ large, and also within academia) and the emotional burdens and burdens of care that women face at work and at home are significant contributing factors. Women still spend twice the amount of time doing household work than men and when high achieving women leave academia, two thirds of them cite lack of support at home as a primary cause of their departure. These types of inequalities (which are often racialized as well) are often reproduced at work, in the form of service demands. Men who do service are often placed, or only desire to work in high status/visible positions, while women will often take on less visibly rewarding work, often citing a sense of duty for the broader mission of the university and their students. Put plainly, women faculty members will often work harder, sleep less, and suffer more.
As academics, we often have much of our identities interwoven with high performance and achievement. Most of us are deeply passionate about of respective fields, and there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation to work hard and pursue scientific or creative interests. We really do care about the work that we do. But we are also challenged constantly, and those confrontations threaten to reveal shortcomings, promote unrealistic upward social comparisons, and drive excessive standards of approval. In short, failing to ‘meet’ these challenges threatens not only the security of our work, which is increasingly precarious at the best of times, but also who we are as people. For many of us, our identities are perhaps too enmeshed with our work. This cycle lays the groundwork for the shockingly high prevalence of burnout, anxiety, and depression that faculty report. Admitting that you might be struggling is too often seen as a blow to our core sense of self. Unfortunately, another sad reality is that faculty who are workaholics tend to be paid more, because of the values reinforced within the neoliberal system. There is tremendous peer pressure to conform to this way of work, despite the obvious harm it causes. I will have more to say on how to change this mindset in the next blog post on this topic, but for now I will simply say that the burden of change cannot be solely placed on individual faculty. There needs to be a concerted effort by administrations across the academic landscape to value and prioritize faculty wellbeing. As I will argue in my upcoming essay, investing in faculty health will improve teaching and student success, and also make us better researchers and colleagues.
Citations
Gill, R. (2016). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. Feministische Studien, 34(1), 39-55.
Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2018). The slow professor. In The Slow Professor. University of Toronto Press.
Kerschbaum, S. L. (2015). Anecdotal Relations: On Orienting to Disability in the Composition Classroom. In Composition Forum (Vol. 32). Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash