BY NATE HOLDREN

Faculty members are exhausted. That’s no surprise given that we are overworked in a distressing world. I’ve begun to suspect there’s an additional factor in our exhaustion, which I call “moral distress,” and which administrators are worsening without realizing it. 

Several commentators have talked about medical workers facing moral injury. That’s when someone can’t live up to deeply held values, to a degree that they suffer genuine harm. Medical workers care greatly about patients yet are often set up to fail due to short staffing and other forms of mismanagement that worsen patients’ health outcomes. Many blame themselves. The resulting moral injury can damage medical workers’ mental health, even cause post-traumatic stress disorder.  

Though healthcare workers have it far worse, I think faculty members are in a similar situation, facing moral distress instead of moral injury. We care about our performance and the well-being of our students—and students are not doing well right now. My inbox has overflowed with email from students struggling with mental health problems, financial trouble, and additional caretaking responsibilities, and many of them or their family members have contracted COVID-19. (Heartbreakingly, students often apologize and blame themselves, experiencing their own moral distress.) 

Many of us may agree with what a friend said to me recently: “this is the worst teaching I have ever done, even though I’ve never worked so hard at it.” While my friend is teaching face-to-face, I have the same experience teaching online. Many institutions have made faculty members the point persons for students’ additional needs and stresses resulting from the pandemic, thereby adding to our already unsustainable workloads. It feels especially bad to not succeed when students need so much. Overall, faculty members have been set up to fail and to blame ourselves, despite how hard we work. The resulting moral distress intensifies our exhaustion. (My sense is that primary and secondary teachers are in similar circumstances.) If I’m right, it is important to find a remedy. Unlike being overtired, moral distress doesn’t necessarily go away with rest alone. It requires coming to see that it’s not our fault if we fail in circumstances where we were not set up to succeed. 

Personally, by the end of the spring 2020 semester I had something like depression, but only about teaching. I enjoyed time with friends and family, the little writing I got done, and household and personal projects. I deflated, however, when I tried to plan my fall courses, read any of my many emails about how to teach online, attended mandatory summer meetings about teaching, or even thought about my course evaluations. Before June ended, I had multiple nightmares about my fall teaching. 

I began to think I had pulled a teaching muscle, so I decided to not read anything about teaching. I soon felt better but had relapses around the mandatory teaching meetings or when I thought guiltily about the unread emails in my ballooning inbox. It was new for me to find contact with teaching painful. I like teaching, went to grad school because I wanted to teach, and had previously always enjoyed reading about pedagogy and thinking about syllabi. I still value that activity but it had become painfully associated with feelings of falling short. I felt worse when I realized I was avoiding teaching, since being a dedicated teacher is a part of my sense of self.  

I started my fall semester exhausted. I finished feeling destroyed and—like many faculty—I found myself reading articles about making a career change. Over the holiday break I tried to reframe my understanding of the situation. Journaling and talking with several friends and colleagues helped get into my head that this was not a situation in which I could succeed according to my old standards. Dialing down those standards was the only way to stop feeling so awful. This reframing worked in that it made me feel better (well, less bad) when my spring semester started. Reframing plus rest was more effective than rest alone had been over the summer. In the spring I also reduced assignments in my classes so I would have more time to rest and to be available for students’ many and intense pandemic-derived needs. I am still worn out now but no longer destroyed. I do still have twinges of moral distress periodically, especially with high-stakes student needs, or when I read emails with teaching advice. 

When administrators send emails and hold meetings about serving students well, doing pandemic teaching well, and managing research, they aggravate faculty moral distress. They encourage us to treat being good faculty according to our prepandemic standards as a part of our sense of self, reinforcing the values many of us feel we are falling short of and reminding us of the activities in which we fail to measure up to our personal standards. I think that’s why I’ve felt surprisingly unhappy sometimes reading personal messages of gratitude from administrators. Those reminders that my performance hadn’t met my normal standards made gratitude hard to take in. Many friends and colleagues report similar feelings. 

However well-intentioned, emails and faculty development initiatives in response to the pandemic have tended to intensify faculty moral distress. Personally, instead of a thank you, I’d rather get a message saying “this is all too hard, I’m so sorry.” What would actually help, though, is giving us more control over what we do and do not work on and reducing workload. With less work we could rest and do better at the remaining work we value. It can’t be good for anyone’s health to feel inadequate for so long. Being set up to fail and to blame ourselves is an occupational hazard that our employers have a responsibility to remove. If they won’t, we will need to take action ourselves. 

Guest blogger Nate Holdren is associate professor in the Program in Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University. He is a US historian and the author of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era.