Thinking about high quality jobs (idea)

This article begins with two important questions: Are our jobs in higher education sustainable? If not, what would it take to change that?

These questions have good foundations. The public share of funding for higher education has been declining since the 1980s, a process accelerated by the 2008 recession, when institutions supporting the most disadvantaged students had fewer resources. Colleges and universities are expected to deal with complex student issues such as mental health issues and the learning loss of COVID-19 with fewer resources.

At the same time, decades of wage stagnation have been compounded by the rising cost of living, which has resulted in many higher education professionals unable to live near the colleges they serve, facing food insecurity and a lack of medical care. Even people in supervisory jobs report overwork and dissatisfaction with pay, forcing them to consider other careers. Many students in our classrooms, talented current and aspiring higher education professionals, express concerns about the quality of life and financial stability of higher education careers. With declining enrollments creating new questions about the financial viability and longevity of the institution, we find ourselves advocating for the value of our field while looking to what may come next.

As two tenure-track students and one tenured faculty, we know that these burdens are not borne equally across higher education. Institutions rely on contingent, temporary and low-paying positions to balance budgets while maintaining resources. Adjunct faculty, who make up the majority of faculty employment, do the bulk of the teaching on multiple campuses while receiving lower salaries, benefits and institutional recognition. Stagnant wages, overwork and poor working conditions have led graduate students across the country to pursue new unionization efforts. These stories stem from settler colonialism and systems of oppression that prioritize white capitalist values ​​and glorify overwork and exploitation.

In addition, CUPA-HR research documents tolerance gaps in pay based on race and gender across higher education roles. Underrepresented and underrepresented professionals often do work that goes unnoticed on campus in addition to their already strong workloads. For example, female faculty tend to have larger service loads and provide greater anonymous supervision while publishing less. Throughout higher education, neutral professionals experience race fatigue, when they encounter racism and its consequences while simultaneously providing disproportionate support to racist students.

What can we in higher education do in the midst of these difficult challenges? We believe that we must find ways to disrupt the status quo in order to instill the individuality and integrity of higher education professionals. Recently, we learned how university staff negotiate these challenging working conditions while supporting students. Previous research has documented that stressors around things like supporting students with mental health issues, bias incidents and emergencies contribute to stress, burnout and secondary trauma for teachers. Our research adds to this body of literature by examining strategies used by individuals and communities to promote sustainability in higher education practices. These courses, which focus on the topic of job creation and social care, may provide valuable tools for higher education professionals navigating difficult roles and working conditions.

First, we examined how student support workers engaged in job creation during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Job design refers to how people change the boundaries of their jobs to pursue balance and satisfaction. The scholarship has defined three types of work performance: (1) doing work, adjusting the amount, scope or nature of work obligations; (2) relationship skills, changing the person with whom you work; and (3) the art of understanding, changing the way one interprets activities and their meaning and value. Many people do construction work illegally, although the extent to which a person can do their work can vary depending on the role and position of the organization. In particular, the workers in our study adjusted when and where their work took place (eg, working from home, flexible hours). However, employees in our study discussed the importance of getting “permission” to change and adjust their work practices.

In addition, many engaged in relationship building to maintain their connections with students and colleagues—these connections strengthened their love, even in the midst of stress and uncertainty. Importantly, employees’ abilities to engage in job creation were often limited by their busy schedules, and their colleagues were already working; these limitations often meant that employees had to decide between prioritizing tasks or relationships. From these findings, we suggest that managers deliberately discuss the construction work with employees and explore how roles can be changed in ways that lead to greater job satisfaction.

We also considered how student affairs staff experienced and protected from compassion fatigue in intensive, student-facing roles. Compassion fatigue refers to the secondary trauma, exhaustion and/or stress experienced after showing care and compassion for others in stressful situations. Building on previous research on how higher education staff in support roles cope with the negative effects of compassion fatigue, we identified social and organizational factors that can reduce compassion fatigue.

Specifically, we identified the importance of teamwork and caring cultures that helped employees process burnout and stress, connect with mentors, and shape boundaries. Rather than placing the responsibility of self-care on individual employees or providing superior self-care strategies, programs, departments and campuses should recognize the realities of compassion fatigue and cultivate and provide spaces for employees to process and communicate, receive counseling. and cultivate boundaries. These strategies increase staff communication, reduce burnout and ensure that programs and staff can continue to provide quality services to students.

Our research highlights how individual and community approaches can support professionals navigating unmanageable work environments and serve as important self-sustaining tools. However, on their own, they are an incomplete solution. Ultimately, creating caring and humane higher education workplaces requires a cultural and structural shift away from valuing overwork, overproduction and sacrifice. A sustainable career in higher education requires concerted efforts to address pay inequality, invisible performance and indifference among higher education professionals. Systematic change requires concerted effort and sustained commitment rather than quick fixes or “best practices” that may provide only temporary relief. It also requires us to use our collective visions to see what we want higher education workplaces to be.

To this end, Sandy Grande urges us to “reject the university” and the ways in which it operates to maintain settler colonialism and other forms of oppression that create an alienating and dehumanizing system of higher education. Drawing on the wisdom of the Kahnawá:ke, Grande sees rejection as more than a human act of resistance; it is a social responsibility that can be done together with others. Refusal can be especially powerful when it is done in a form of solidarity as it involves people breaking apart, identities and circumstances to collectively move away from what is and towards a shared vision centered on the equality of what could be. This approach allows students, staff and faculty to contribute knowledge, skills and wisdom to the process of building something new, different and better in higher education. More importantly, cooperative refusal is based on care, communication and management. It is based on critical hope and the idea that we can build the universities we want if we have the will, humility and courage to do so.

There is no manual on how to collectively refuse a university. However, we invite you and others to join us in envisioning and creating institutions that are more than places where we work to live but thrive. We hope that by issuing this call, or as we currently offer technical support, we can start a different conversation next year.