BY MARY A. HERMANN
Research, personal experiences, and watching our academic mother colleagues navigate the COVID-19 pandemic inspired the article in the fall issue of Academe, “COVID-19, Academic Mothers, and Opportunities for the Academy,” that I coauthored with Cheryl Neale-McFall. We wrote the article late last spring when we were optimistic about the length of time our lives would be affected by this crisis. As it turns out, the continuing challenges related to the pandemic have been far more stressful than we had imagined.
Even before the pandemic, universities had not recovered from the 2008 recession. Faculty were already doing more with less. Like the academic mother participants in our studies, we experienced rising academic workloads and a promotion system designed for a different generation of faculty who had secretaries at work and wives at home. For over two decades, researchers have called for changes in the academy to better support academic mothers. Yet it has been frustrating to us that even before the pandemic, combining academia and motherhood seemed to be getting harder. And during this crisis, the challenges for faculty, especially faculty with caregiving responsibilities, have intensified.
I started my career in academia over twenty years ago as a single mother. Now, I’m an academic grandmother with caregiving responsibilities for my grandson. My grandson’s day care closed in March, and my daughter needed babysitting help when she had Zoom meetings and other work tasks that required concentration—activities that were simply not possible with an active two-year-old running around.
My already significant workload also increased during the pandemic when I needed to restructure my classes and learn to teach in an unfamiliar online format while continuing to support my students as they navigated unprecedented challenges. One benefit of being a single mother in graduate school and during my early years as a professor is that I learned to work whenever I could. Knowing that I could be called to babysit my grandson or provide caregiving support for one of my parents, I have worked almost every day since the pandemic began.
In the first three months of the pandemic, I didn’t take a single day off. If I cared for my grandson in the morning, I worked all afternoon and evening. I took one day at a time, grateful that no one was sick, and I could keep working. Then, in early April, one of my best friends was diagnosed with COVID-19. She had mostly recovered by the time she received the test results confirming her diagnosis. The pandemic became real, not just something that was happening to people I don’t know. I was distressed, but I kept working. Then, in May, my father called me with the news that my sister had COVID-19 and was not expected to survive. I was devastated that she was sick and alone and that I couldn’t go visit her. But there was nothing I could do, so I continued to work through my tears. Miraculously, my sister survived.
During the summer, our program faculty made the decision to offer our fall courses online. Once again, I was faced with the challenge of preparing to teach more courses in a modality in which I was not trained. Though universities and professional organizations offered resources to support teaching online, I was overwhelmed at the prospect of learning more about online pedagogy while maintaining an active research agenda. Furthermore, in anticipation of pandemic-related budget cuts, the tenured and non-tenure-track faculty in our school were required to teach an additional course this fall, with nothing eliminated from our workloads.
The time faculty spend supporting students in nonacademic matters has increased exponentially as well. Students have been extremely stressed. Most students in our programs signed up for an in-person learning experience and have had to adjust to online learning. And it is frustrating when technology doesn’t work, a regular occurrence. Furthermore, some students have been diagnosed with COVID-19, others have expressed concern that they might have it, and some are grieving the loss of loved ones to the disease. Additionally, the current political climate and continued evidence of racism in our culture seem to be elevating everyone’s stress, especially racial and ethnic minority students, immigrant students, international students, and LGBTQ+ students.
Not surprisingly, like many of my colleagues, I am experiencing stress-related health issues. In the spring and summer, I tried to counteract my overall stress level and the new sedentary nature of my job by maintaining my usual routine of walking two miles a day, lifting weights, and doing yoga. Yet I still ended up with three herniated discs in my back. From the beginning of August to early October, I could not move, sit, stand, or lie down without pain. I managed to work through the pain, though I am not sure how.
Perhaps most unsettling is that there is no end to this pandemic in sight. Initially, we thought we would be quarantined for six weeks or so, and then all would go back to normal. Six weeks has turned into seven months and counting. Not only do we all seem to have Zoom fatigue, I don’t know anyone who isn’t experiencing pandemic fatigue.
My narrative may be unique in some ways, but most faculty will probably relate to various elements of my experiences. And unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t have full-time caregiving responsibilities. I don’t know how my colleagues who are responsible for the constant care of their young children are managing.
My coauthor and I ended our Academe article noting that the pandemic has presented a renewed urgency to restructure the academy in a manner that supports faculty with caregiving responsibilities. Given the political and social climate and the current expectations in academia, that urgency has become even more apparent in the months since we wrote the article. More than ever, we need administrators to remain aware of the workload, role overload, and trauma that faculty are experiencing. And we need administrators to continue to engage in trauma-informed leadership as they promote policies and norms that support all faculty.
Guest blogger Mary A. Hermann is associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Special Education at Virginia Commonwealth University.
