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We begin this essay with two key questions: Are our careers in higher education sustainable? If not, what would it take to change that?
These questions are well founded. The public share of funding for higher education has been declining since the 1980s, a process hastened by the 2008 recession, with the institutions that support the most marginalized students the least resourced. Colleges and universities are expected to address complex student issues such as mental health crises and COVID-19 learning loss with fewer resources.
At the same time, decades-long wage stagnation has been exacerbated by rising costs of living, resulting in many cases of higher education professionals being unable to live near the campuses they serve, facing food insecurity and lacking medical care. Even individuals in supervisory roles report overwork and salary dissatisfaction, pushing them to also consider alternative careers. Many students in our classes, talented current and aspiring higher education professionals, express concerns about the quality of life and financial stability in higher education careers. With declining enrollments creating new questions of financial viability and institutional longevity, we find ourselves advocating for the value of our field while bracing for what may come.
As two tenure-track and one tenured faculty, we know these burdens are not equally borne across higher education. Institutions depend on contingent, part-time and low-paying positions to balance budgets while maintaining services. Adjunct faculty, who make up the majority of faculty appointments, do the bulk of teaching on many campuses while receiving the lowest salaries, benefits and institutional recognition. Wage stagnation, overwork and poor working conditions have led graduate students across the country to pursue new unionization efforts. These issues are rooted in settler colonialism and systems of oppression that prioritize white patriarchal capitalist norms and valorize overwork and extraction.
Furthermore, CUPA-HR research documents enduring gaps in salary based on race and gender across many higher education roles. Professionals with minoritized and marginalized identities often perform unrecognized labor on campus beyond their already robust workloads. For example, women faculty routinely have greater service loads and provide substantial unrecognized mentorship while publishing less. Across higher education, racially minoritized professionals experience racial battle fatigue, wherein they experience racism and its effects while simultaneously providing disproportionate support to racially minoritized students.
What can those of us in higher education do amid these formidable challenges? We believe that we must find ways to disrupt the status quo to center humanity and wholeness for higher education professionals. Recently, we studied how university staff negotiate these challenging working conditions while supporting students. Prior research has documented how pressures around things like supporting students with mental health crises, bias incidents and emergencies contribute to stress, burnout and secondary trauma for educators. Our research adds to this body of literature by examining the strategies used by individuals and communities to promote sustainability in higher education careers. These studies, focusing on topics of job crafting and community care, may provide important tools for higher education professionals navigating demanding roles and working conditions.
First, we examined how student support staff engaged in job crafting during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Job crafting refers to how individuals shift the boundaries of their jobs to pursue balance and satisfaction. Scholarship has delineated three types of job crafting: (1) task crafting, modifying the quantity, scope or type of job responsibilities; (2) relational crafting, altering whom one engages with at work; and (3) cognitive crafting, changing one’s interpretation of tasks and their meaning and value. Many people engage in job crafting informally, though the degree to which one can craft their work may vary across role and organizational rank. Largely, staff in our study adjusted when and where their work occurred (e.g., working from home, flexible hours). However, the staff in our study discussed the importance of receiving “permission” to alter and adjust their working practices.
Further, many engaged in relational crafting to preserve their connections with students and colleagues—these connections sustained their passion, even amid stress and uncertainty. Importantly, staff members’ abilities to engage in job crafting were often limited by their busy schedules, and colleagues were already at capacity; these limitations often meant that staff had to decide between prioritizing tasks or relationships. From these findings, we suggest that supervisors intentionally discuss job crafting with their employees and examine how roles may be modified in ways that lead to maximum job satisfaction.
We also considered how student affairs staff experienced and protected against compassion fatigue in intensive, student-facing roles. Compassion fatigue refers to the secondary trauma, exhaustion and/or stress experienced after exhibiting care and empathy for others in stressful situations. Building upon prior research on how higher education staff with helping roles experience the negative effects of compassion fatigue, we identified communal and organizational factors that can mitigate compassion fatigue.
Specifically, we identified the importance of cultures of teamwork and care that helped staff process burnout and stress, connect with mentors, and shape boundaries. Rather than placing the burden for self-care on individual staff members or offering surface-level self-care strategies, programs, divisions and campuses should recognize the realities of compassion fatigue and proactively cultivate and offer spaces for staff to process and connect, receive mentoring and cultivate boundaries. These strategies increase staff connection, reduce burnout and ensure that programs and staff can continue offering excellent student services.
Our research highlights how individual and communal approaches can support professionals navigating unsustainable working conditions and serve as valuable tools for retaining them. However, alone, they are an incomplete fix. Ultimately, creating more caring and humane higher education workplaces requires cultural and structural shifts away from valorizing overwork, hyperproduction and self-sacrifice. Sustainable work in higher education requires systemic efforts to address pay inequities, invisible labor and precarity among higher education professionals. Systemic change requires collective effort and sustained commitment rather than quick fixes or “best practices” that may only provide temporary relief. It also requires that we use our collective imaginations to envision what we want higher education workplaces to be.
To this end, Sandy Grande urges us to “refuse the university” and the ways it operates to uphold settler colonialism and other forms of oppression that create the extractive and dehumanizing system of higher education. Drawing from the wisdom of the Kahnawá:ke, Grande envisions refusal as being more than an individual act of resistance; it is a community commitment that can be done alongside others. Refusal can be particularly powerful when it is done in a coalitional manner since it brings together people across differences, identities and statuses to collectively move away from what is and toward a shared equity-oriented vision for what can be. This approach allows students, staff and faculty to contribute their knowledge, skills and wisdom to the process of building something new, different and better in higher education. More importantly, coalitional refusal is grounded in care, connection and mutuality. It is grounded in critical hope and the idea that we can build the universities we want if we have the collective will, humility and courage to do so.
There is no manual for how we might collectively refuse the university. Still, we invite you and others to join us in envisioning and creating institutions that are more than places where we labor to survive but instead thrive. We hope that by issuing this call, even as we offer strategies to support professionals in the interim, we can start a different conversation next year.
