We’ve been pondering the question: Is academia worth it? It’s because of deadlines and emails accumulating until there’s no time left at all, faculty meetings that go nowhere or make things worse, toxic colleagues that no one seems able to stop, and a sense that bureaucracy encroaches more than serves. It’s the shrinking world of grant funding, the weird surveillance of peer review, the longest probationary periods in the workforce at a time in history where anxiety is rampant, and a commitment to diversity that seems to perpetuate more problems than solutions.
It’s a loss of the joy and satisfaction in work that we love.
Professional development resources for academics are more available than ever – but they remain significantly undeveloped, under-utilized, and under-resourced. Every day we see institutions offering programs that are too little/too late to faculty and academic leaders who are challenged to fit anything else into their day. In our own coaching and development programs, we see a host of downstream effects – the costly consequences of things not cared for or dealt with in better timing.
And now this: a growing number of faculty reaching out to us to ask: Is this worth it? What are my alternatives? How could it be possible to stay? How do I know when to leave? These questions are sobering – and useful. We’re committed to working with faculty and institutions to answer them.
We’ve been talking to faculty about what helps – and how we might provide new kinds of resources. We are hearing two major themes. First, there is a deep hunger for a new kind of community in academia, one that sustains and informs, nourishes and cultivates and has room for laughter while also effectively bringing diverse perspectives together to work hard on common problems.
Second, there is a need for expertise, structure, and facilitation. A full professor coaching client of ours told us, “I’m a sociologist and still I didn’t understand how caught I was in academic culture until you described it.” After a training on the basics of group dynamics, a participant shared, “This changes everything: grant review panels, department meetings, group meetings, and so many other professional group discussions and decisions.”
So, community and education – that’s our new mission. We’re creating classes for academics that provide knowledge and tools. We’re connecting individuals who want to make a difference in their departments, disciplines and institutions. We’re developing forums and discussions that harness the desire for change into effective mechanisms for achieving it.
We’re beginning with an online course we’re calling Overwhelm in Academia: Restoring Hope and Choice in an Academic Career. It will be structured like a college class: weekly sessions, optional attendance, frequent quizzes, an online discussion forum, and a final essay question at the end. We’ll use Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul as our textbook: eight sessions, eight chapters. Her book is a lovely demonstration of what needs attention before we can realistically grapple with asking if any important endeavor is worth it.
We have more classes in the works (that group dynamics course is next!), and we continue to welcome your ideas, requests, concerns, frustrations, and hope. Meanwhile, take good care of yourself. What you bring to academia matters – and bringing it does not seem to be getting any easier.
