So, as a result of this article, lots of people have been weighing in about the “stress” of being a college professor. This post isn’t really going to try to make a case for how hard we professor folks have it, but it’s also not going to be a “shame on you for being stressed out when you have it so great” post. Rather, I want, actually, to think about what stress is, at least from my perspective.
I think that stress for most people* originates from two general sources: 1) lack of certainty and 2) lack of control. As a tenured professor, I believe that when I feel stressed out, it is almost always because of one or both of these factors. And that is me speaking as a person with tenure – people who work in contingent positions or who have yet to earn tenure although they are on the tenure track feel even greater uncertainty and even less control.**
So let’s talk about the “lack of certainty” thing first. One of the things that people outside of academia often envy about the job of college professor is the autonomy that comes with that job within a seemingly very certain structure. Here’s what I mean: I get to decide (to some extent) what my schedule is like, the activities in which I invest my time, and the ideas that I pursue. Yes, there is a structure – I must teach my classes, attend meetings, do research, etc. – but within that structure there is a great deal of freedom. That seems like a luxury, right? Well, yes, of course. But it also means that there is a lot of uncertainty in whether I am doing the “right” thing within the structure, particularly when the goal-posts seem often to move from one semester to the next, from one academic year to the next. When I arrived at my job the “big initiative” was public engagement. By the time I went up for tenure, the big thing was “internationalization.” Now, all the upper administration can talk about is “student success.” Combine with those shifting priorities the fact that within individual departments senior faculty and department administration aren’t necessarily on the same page with upper administration, and it can seem like there is no “right” way to proceed, or even if you do determine a “right” way in one semester, that path might turn out to be wrong within six months. So autonomy is a luxury, but the cost of that luxury is that one can never be sure that one is doing a good job or how one’s job will be measured. And that’s stressful. And as far as I can tell, my experience here isn’t terribly unique: it seems to describe a college professor’s life across institution types and across disciplines.
Now, is that the end of the world? No. Does it mean that I don’t like my job and think that I do valuable work? No. But I can also tell you that this type of stress was not something that I experienced when I worked in other environments, even if those environments did produce other sorts of stress. While it might be mind-numbing and terrible to work in a cubicle watching the clock and waiting for the end of the day, there is something satisfying about having specific, repetitive tasks that one must complete, and there is a sense that one knows exactly what one must do in order to earn one’s paycheck at the end of the week.
The “lack of control” stress source might seem contradictory to the “lack of certainty” one. But I also think that there is a component of the job that is all about not having control. We can’t control our students, as just one example. I mean, sure, you can write the most legalistic syllabus in the world, attempting to plan for every possible situation, but crazy shit will happen that you didn’t plan for. We can’t control whether the state will slash our budgets, or even expect us to give allocated money back after we’ve already received it and used some of it. We can’t control whether the classes that we were assigned will actually make their enrollments, and since we can’t control that we might get assigned a brand new class right before the beginning of a semester. We can’t control our schedules in the event of family emergency or personal health crisis. I’m not saying that this is unique to academia, or that it’s the worst thing in the world. But is it a source of stress? Yes.
So here’s the thing (and yes, I know this wasn’t the point of the original article): I don’t think it’s useful to hold the Stress Olympics, just as it’s not useful to hold the Oppression Olympics. But I also don’t think that it’s productive to indicate that if we feel stress in our jobs as professors that those stresses are self-created, or that it means we aren’t in the right profession. A better conversation, probably, would be to talk about ways to productively manage the stresses that are in our jobs, to look at the causes and to look at ways to manage if not eliminate the stresses that result.
*In other words: I am not trying to compare the stress of people’s jobs who involve life and death decisions and consequences with the stress that most people feel in their day-to-day lives.
**I’m going to talk from the perspective of having tenure in this post; I welcome others to give their thoughts from contingent/untenured perspectives in comments.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
I think what I’m reacting to is the culture of complaint I experience–and really, I never noticed it that much before I started to engage a different professional culture as a secondary teacher. But from undergraduate forward, I have encountered a steady stream of professors who can enumerate absolutely everything that’s wrong with their colleagues, their universities, the administration, the culture around them, their students, and the profession at large. Perhaps it’s just that the habits of academic critique die hard but it’s pretty overwhelming–like I said, particularly now that I’m only tangentially involved in it. When I dip back in, I’m kind of jarred by how negative it all sounds.
So when my facebook feed is daily “Ugh, students! ugh, colleagues! Ugh, writing! Ugh, tenure portfolio! Ugh!” and the positive posts are “Finally got that article published only five more for tenure” or some worse mix of self-effacement and irritating self-aggrandizement and then we explode into “how dare you tell me my job isn’t hard!” I end up wondering if most professors realize how they sound, how they come across, and how desperate and awful they make their professions seem.
Which, honestly, is kind of the opposite of the public face I think academia should be presenting.
I will also say that I feel like I also have some autonomy but I also have a clearer framework for what constitutes doing a good job than what you describe here–probably at the cost of some autonomy but I wouldn’t say I’m performing mindless tasks. I’d say the same for PH’s job as a software engineer. He had a great deal of autonomy but within the context of a team making a product that needs to work. There’s something else going on there that has to do with the particular way feedback and evaluation of performance is handled rather than autonomy per se. The trade off isn’t solely between autonomy and cubicle world
I love being a medical school professor, and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world (except wildly popular rock and roll star). I also never complain about my jobbe.
Anastasia – Oh yes, there is a wide range of jobs and ranges of autonomy/clarity about expectations. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise – I drew the sharp distinction out of laziness and out of my own frame of reference.
Also, I don’t totally disagree with you about the “culture of complaint” stuff, although I do think it’s ok for people to vent now and again. I know that I used to be a LOT more negative than I am now pre-tenure, for example, and while I think some of that was natural, I also think that it wasn’t terribly helpful. A more generous reading of the “culture of complaint” stuff is that a) people felt like they didn’t know what they were getting into as they chose the long slog into the profession and b) that they want to caution those who might be thinking about following that path. I used to be in that camp, but as time has passed, and as I’ve advised more students, the more I’ve felt that this sort of approach is not, generally, effective. A less generous reading is that discontent breeds discontent, and that the more people bitch the more bitching people want to do, which I also think is often true. At the end of the day, though, I think that perhaps people would speak more positively about their jobs in higher education if they weren’t constantly responding to claims that they only work 6 hours a week, don’t have stress or demands on them, or have a guarantee of lifetime employment while leaching off the public. Perhaps if the narratives of our jobs in media and pop culture were different, the reactions would be different. I know P-12 teachers face some of the same narratives, but I also think that there are powerful counternarratives about how P-12 teachers have the power to change lives, and I think that does make a difference.
CPP – I wouldn’t complain if I had your job either. Well, except for that I would have to be a scientist 🙂
You would love being a scientist.
Great post Dr. C, and your comment at 6:11 is on the money.
I have tenure. This is my 5th FT job, not all of which have been TT or continuing, but all of which have been teaching and research. All my institutions were different. Three were at public R1s of different levels and types and regions, and all were low stress. Why: the autonomy was real and the control was real. You had support but you were also let alone, and you knew what was happening because people told you the truth. Also they all had the idea that they needed to support faculty materially in some way if they wanted top work. One could not give very good salaries but gave stellar insurance that included massage therapy for all, and it was out in the wintry boondocks so people banded together to be convivial! One had runners bringing you library books so you did not have to put your own snow boots on!
I also worked at a smaller school where they owned you body and soul. You were not really autonomous. At my school now, we have no control. You never know what kind of a curve ball the legislature will throw, and administrators are afraid to say what is really happening or what they might have to do about it, for fear of scaring people and also scaring themselves, I discern. So we have to keep guessing, we know what we should be doing officially but we never know what the obstacles will be so we have to keep jockeying our contingency plans and handling the stress of figuring out how we’ll meet deadlines if JSTOR access is cut off, etc.
So I would say it is tradition and funding and cognitive non-dissonance that makes for non-stress, on the one hand. If you are in a place that does not have its machinery well oiled, or is poorly funded yet trying to operate as though it were not, you will have stress.
On the other hand, tradition is can be a stressor if the traditions are alien to yours or to your purposes. I have learned that some people actually do not want autonomy, they want community and a flexible schedule. I don’t seek community as much, I want autonomy, but I find the kind of alienation I feel when I know something that will affect me is happening but it is a secret, very stressful. Also stressful is the alienation I feel when the institution is saying one thing and doing another, telling you they want this (officially) but creating conditions in which something else has to be done.
Thanks, Dr C – this is the most thoughtful and useful response I’ve seen.
Indeed, I think this is very helpful. I think the lack of control and the lack of certainty combine in teaching with the demands for (for example) assessment in terms that are countable. We’re held responsible for stuff we can’t control.
I know a lot of us who teach at public schools find the financial and legislative shenanigans really stressful, at least we seem to around here.
Thanks for this post. I think you’re especially right about not making this the stress olympics, but I don’t think that being overly optimistic about how things are going is the right path either (not that you were).
This is very helpful. And I think we should not underestimate the pressure caused by the changing frameworks we teach in, and the tensions between reward structures and those frameworks.. So I may be evaluated only on my contribution to scholarship, and my teaching, but I am responsible for all sorts of things outside that. No one will ever give me anything other than a gold star for participating in assessment, though it is required. You won’t get promoted for full unless you get the second book project out, but that dosn’t help with whatever your admin’s flavor of the month is. So it’s not just uncertainty and lack of control, it’s the pressure of contradictory demands.
I’d also add that most people will, if pushed, say they really like this part of their job, but this one not so much. This creates a lot of pressure in the academic world where people go into it because of their love of a subject, their desire to teach, whatever, and then find themselves faced with (usually) service expectations that are very draining. On top of that, we are often being “managed” by chairs, deans, etc. who were not necessarily given any support in learning how to manage people and work. Some people do spectacularly bad jobs of administrative tasks, and that is both tiring and stressful. I wonder if the academic world is unusual in the extent to which the things for which people go into the field cease to be the things they most have to do.
I agree that this isn’t a stress olympics, but the idea that we’re sitting around drinking sherry at 4 in the afternoon is crazy. We function, like everyone else in the US, in the neo-liberal capitalist economy, which functions as if workers are interchangeable and disposable. Individual work places value people, but the system doesn’t. And that’s hard on everyone.
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I’d like to second Z’s comments about the different pressures of different institutions (especially at smaller schools) and professorsusan’s about the … management dilemma of the academy and our location in the neoliberal capitalist economy (NLCE).
I think this last is especially challenging, both because we are (usually) inculcated to believe that our profession is outside and/or above such tawdry considerations and because the NLCE has so many negative material effects on our working conditions (hello, assessment; the reduction of TT positions, which increases the service load for those remaining; the imperative to “add value” out of nothing; the shift to contingent labor, and the worsening of their conditions) which are also –to return to Dr. C’s original taxonomy– beyond our control.
Great post. And Anastasia’s comment:
“So when my facebook feed is daily “Ugh, students! ugh, colleagues! Ugh, writing! Ugh, tenure portfolio! Ugh!” and the positive posts are “Finally got that article published only five more for tenure” or some worse mix of self-effacement and irritating self-aggrandizement and then we explode into “how dare you tell me my job isn’t hard!” I end up wondering if most professors realize how they sound, how they come across, and how desperate and awful they make their professions seem.” Smack dead on. This is why changing jobs really helped me. Because I understood that the constant kvetching and struggling was getting to me, but all those people were my friends, so it wasn’t as if I could just walk away from every conversation I was in.
I finally wrote a blog post about how uncomfortable bitching about and making fun of students made me. It’s super passive-aggressive, and not very nice, even though I realize it’s a way to blow off steam and seek community among people who may have too many students to take care of and too few resources. This generated a whole Facebook thread on a teaching page about how it was really ok to make fun of your students publicly, and anyone no one does it very much (not.)
“Stress Olympics” is a wonderful phrase, and I enjoyed your article very much. I’m also glad you mentioned, even if just in passing, that “people who work in contingent positions or who have yet to earn tenure although they are on the tenure track feel even greater uncertainty and even less control.” That’s quite so, I think, and as a 60 year-old adjunct whose tenure prospects expired a long time ago, I’ve found that one way to ” productively manage the stresses” indeed does involve looking “at the causes and…at ways to manage if not eliminate the stresses.” One method, one I’ve chosen, has been activism: fighting against the now forty-year trend of higher ed reliance on poorly paid, job-insecure non-tenure-stream faculty. Adcons, most part-time due to “caps” designed to prevent them from claiming benefits, are now the majority faculty, as many folks still do not realize. The feeling of community and purpose that arises from even a small protest, against what is so obviously a dreadful system of exploitation, is invigorating, and it improves as one sees others realize this and join in–from whatever faculty niche they may now occupy. So, cheers, thanks for the article, and I wish you all well in whatever forms of stress reduction seem to work for you. Alan Trevithick, board member, New Faculty Majority, the national coalition for adjunct and contingent equity.
I want also to share this article on Facebook and elsewhere. It’s an intriguing essay.
From the point of view of a contingent with a multiple-year contract and a relatively secure job (at least apparently, for the moment), I’d second Z’s comments on cognitive dissonance, and, especially, professorsusan’s on the reward structures. My main complaint at the moment is the inadequacy of my salary; my second is the fact that, because service isn’t part of my job, I don’t have much real say in curricular changes and issues that could be subsumed under facullty governance or lack thereof (particularly what I perceive as a trend toward the assessment tail wagging the pedagogical dog, often to an extent that reduces my autonomy in the classroom, which is to my mind, one of the major advantages of my job). The larger, overall source of stress is the difficulty with prioritizing, given the currently state of academia in general: should I minimize the effort I put into teaching (to the extent that my conscience and the reality of my students’ day-to-day needs will allow me to), with the goal of trying to publish (which doesn’t count for anything in my present job), in hopes of gaining a more secure, better-paying, job where I have more input in curriculum/governance, and at least equal autonomy and flexibility? should I do what I can to participate in initiatives, etc. at my current university, in hopes of perhaps finding a niche that might give me a bit more input into the conditions of my employment, or at least greater ability to weather major curricular change, etc.? Should I concentrate on developing freelance opportunities and/or other streams of income, in hopes of being able to survive the premature (by my lights) disappearance of my job, or of being able to deliberately choose early(ish) semi-retirement over what may become an increasingly frustrating job? I am, by nature, reasonably comfortable with clear structures, and clear systems of rewards. I’m also comfortable with the concept of choosing one thing as one’s main focus for the moment, with the knowledge that one will probably shift priorities later, perhaps repeatedly (an attitude which would equip me reasonably well for the traditional tenure structure, I think). What I have difficulty with is the sense that, whatever I choose to focus on, it may turn out, through no fault of my own, that opportunity, security, or both lie in another direction. Or perhaps in several of the directions, but switching back and forth will mean that I haven’t put enough energy into any of the options.
So, yes, I’d say the shifting priorities thing is a problem at my level, too, though, to be honest, whatever the official buzzword of the moment is, I’m pretty sure that the underlying trend is solidly toward trying to accomplish the basic levels of undergraduate teaching as cheaply and uniformly as possible (i.e. not with experienced Ph.D.s who earn/want to earn a living wage while retaining considerable autonomy). That means that any strategy that assumes I will be rewarded for teaching as well as I possibly can is almost certainly a bit of self-destructive self-deception on my part, whatever the administration may say (that’s where cognitive dissonance comes in; everybody will claim they value my work up to, and probably even past, the point where they decide they don’t need it anymore). At that point, we’re basically left with uncertainty as the main stressor: what will be my next job(s)? What do I need to do to prepare for it/them? And when will I need to be ready? And, oh yes — how do I manage to be an ethical, half-decent teacher in my current job while trying to answer the above questions, and act on the answers?
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