A recently released report from the Chronicle highlights ways that university leaders can motivate and retain faculty in tough economic times—and emphasizes the importance of considering stress on faculty, using research from the IU School of Education.

Allison BrckaLorenz is a Senior Research Scientist and the director of the College + University Teaching Environment (CUTE) and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement assessment projects. Her research focuses on faculty educational practices, faculty success, and the relationship between environmental issues and faculty work, with a recent concentration on what motivates and supports faculty to do their best work. BrckaLorenz believes faculty are not recovering well from all of the changes that came out of the pandemic and points to an “absence of humanity” in the discussion about how faculty are doing overall. 

“Faculty are asked to do more to educate an increasingly diverse group of students, continue serving their institutions and their respective fields, and create more scholarly products (research, grants, engaging courses, etc.) But we haven’t seen an increase in supports or resources to do this work,” she said. “Adding federal and state political pressures is just compounding the stress and contributing to an atmosphere of fear that’s really crushing morale. When institutions assess faculty, they usually focus on counting scholarly products (annual and merit-based counts of productivity) or they participate in general satisfaction assessments. None of these pinpoint actionable ways that institutions are falling short in supporting faculty to do their best work.”

When assessing the research done with CUTE, BrckaLorenz has found that faculty with differing identities or employment characteristics or at different kinds of institutions strongly relate their feelings of “balance” between work and life or within their work tasks to their intentions to stay in their current position at their current institution.

“I know that ‘balance’ is controversial in some circles, but it’s very clear to me that flexibility and understanding for our human selves is important for faculty. Unfortunately, another common theme is for faculty to respond about something and then write something like ‘not that anyone cares’ or ‘not that anything will change.’ There seems to be a real lack of trust and hope that things could be better. This feels to me like another symptom of overlooking faculty humanity,” she said.

The connection between faculty morale and student success is directly related, supported by evidence from many studies, including some from BrckaLorenz.

“Faculty want their students to be successful, and they’re willing to put in the effort. We just need to help inspire and support them to do their best work. I love that institutions want to support student success, but I think we need to follow airplane safety advice and get more oxygen masks on our faculty so that they can help get more masks to the students,” she said.