By Sheila E. McGinn
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed so many challenges across society it tends to be blamed for every problem, even those whose roots pre-existed it. The “great burnout” is one such reality. COVID did not create this issue; it revealed insidious dynamics in American businesses that have been festering under the surface for some time.
U.S.-based industries have moved increasingly toward a 24/7 framework, expecting salaried employees to respond to company demands not only during regular working hours but also on evenings, weekends, and holidays, even during vacations or when the employee is on sick leave. A 50- or even 60-hour work week is no longer rare, although many of those work hours are done outside of the office setting. And, of course, none of these statistics includes the hours one spends in unremunerated “housework” in addition to actual paid employment hours. Sound familiar? This has been faculty life for a while, with administrators and students sending emails or texts at all hours of every day and expecting near-immediate responses.
Employees with hourly-wage jobs are no better off than professionals. While unlikely to work more than 40-hours/week for an individual company, many hourly staff have to keep two to three jobs to earn enough income to sustain a family. In not one county in the United States can a person afford a two-bedroom apartment on the income from one, full-time, minimum-wage job. Furthermore, with childcare costs averaging $9,000 a year per child, nearly 50 percent of income from one job would be consumed by that single expense.
Staff at our universities feel these kinds of economic pressures, yet university administrations have repeatedly “downsized” support staff over the last decade, expecting more work from fewer people, and U.S. businesses—including Jesuit universities—engage in union-busting tactics to prevent employees organizing to negotiate for better wages.
Ample research shows that such work schedules are deleterious to one’s mental and physical health. Rather than alleviating the situation by changing their work culture to ensure respect for employees’ personal time, some U.S. companies— again including Jesuit universities—have started charging higher health premiums to employees who exhibit high blood pressure, higher than average BMI, and other health concerns associated with overwork environments. Such policies exhibit the company’s disregard of their employees’ wellbeing and compound stress levels rather than reducing them.
Specifically in the higher education sector, additional pressures create a veritable crockpot for stress: declining admissions, rising tuition discounts, the erosion—or outright elimination—of tenure and academic freedom. The increasing corporatization of higher education steadily erodes the culture of shared governance, creating ripe conditions for persistent misunderstandings between administrators and faculty. Long before COVID, the balance of power at universities was shifting to bureaucrats with little or no understanding of the unique nature of the university enterprise.
Board members ignorant of university mission made suggestions like “why don’t we teach the conservative arts?” Deans were heard to opine that university mission interferes with market success. Upper administrators’ obsession with the “bottom line” as a numerical figure on a spreadsheet (instead of the creative instructional and formative goals of the university enterprise) led to bloated administrative lines at the expense of support staff, elimination of full-time tenure-track faculty lines, rising numbers of contingent faculty, and other policy changes fundamentally corrosive of the university as an educational and research enterprise. Faculty and academic support offices were pressured to do more and more with fewer and fewer personnel.
Then came COVID-19.
Faculty pivoted on a dime, creating online course content and hosting classes through remote systems they learned on the spot. ITS staff scrambled to develop the necessary infrastructure for remote teaching. Student affairs staff reached out with mental-health interventions and other means of support. Everyone did this for the good of the students, because of their commitment to the university mission.
Animated by their commitment to the Ignatian educational mission and student learning, many Jesuit university faculty like Gabriel Saucedo (above), associate professor of Accounting at Seattle University, worked with instructional designer colleagues to leverage digital tools as they co-created engaging educational content. Photo courtesy of Seattle University.
Typically, these extraordinary efforts have been taken for granted, not compensated. Even no-cost rewards systems are abjured so that annual evaluations, which could be used to build morale by recognizing such enormous efforts, instead are skewed by stringent policies forcing supervisors to “grade” their reporting personnel as simply “meeting expectations.”
Gaslighting—manipulation that tries to get people to question their own reality, memory or perceptions—dominates administrative responses to concerns about compensation. In some institutions, COVID is used as an excuse for still more layoffs of staff and faculty, the functional elimination of tenure, sudden program eliminations, and other targeted reductions, imposed by boards or administrators without faculty consultation and in violation of established procedures of collaborative governance.
As universities normalize post-COVID operations, little thought has been given to the ways these decisions reify patterns destructive to employees and the university community as a whole. Constant overwork, unreasonable obstacles to telecommuting, exploitation of commitment to mission, doublespeak about university decisions, cant about “community building” in the midst of chronic disregard for faculty and staff needs and expertise—all these factors have become embedded in the post-pandemic university environment, creating a perfect incubator for burnout. Because these factors have been created by executive fiat, faculty and staff have every reason to be suspicious rather than trusting of university boards and administrators.
“The only way forward involves a return to true joint governance and a reversal of these exploitative trends. Will Jesuit universities choose to walk the mission and not simply mouth the words? That remains to be seen.”
Sheila E. McGinn is professor emerita of Theology and Religious Studies at John Carroll University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Christian Erfurt via Unsplash.