COVID 19, Psychological coping, psychoanalysis of the great resignation, what's up with the great resignation?
As the airwaves are alive with debates about COVID vaccination booster shots
and the profits that would accompany those shots both for the manufacturers and
the drugstores who administer them, the Great Resignation is also receiving
lots of attention. An NPR story stated
that on some polls 90% of people polled said they are considering quitting
their jobs. The Reluctant Wife, who
works with large amounts of job satisfaction data, states that opinion polls
about retirement track reasonably closely to actual behavior with one half to
three quarters of people who say they’re going to retire doing so, but only
about ¼ to 1/3 of people who threated to quit actually do so. But a quarter of 90% is big bunch of people!
In some of our industries, notably the restaurant industry, there are huge shortages of workers. People who were laid off have found other
things to do and/or are simply not returning – and many pundits are positing that workers
are reconsidering their careers and deciding whether they really want to be
investing the majority of their waking hours in washing dishes, peeling
potatoes, or being spattered with hot grease while customers and managers
complain that they are not working hard enough.
As compelling as this narrative is, and as true as it may be
in any individual case, it is almost surely, in those cases where it is true,
one strand in a really complex web of considerations. We have just had one planned retirement, one
unplanned retirement, one resignation, and one leave in our academic
department. One of the hallmarks of
academic departments is stability, and this level of resignation is
unprecedented. There are, I think,
common elements in each of the four resignations – and quality of (work) life,
and work/life imbalance – is an important consideration in each of the
four. We have met as a departmental faculty to
address work/life balance and are working to systemically improve that, but
this has not proven sufficient to stem the outflow.
A significant factor within our little world has been an
administration that is insisting that we be flexible with our students while
they are inflexible with us, something that I wrote about in
my last COVID post. They are also being recalcitrant and not listening to our department about program issues and resources to handle influxes of students. The most
difficult part is the failure of the administration to realize the pressure
that parents are under when daycare or school closes for extended periods of
time due to COVID and a parent simply cannot leave an infant or a toddler to go
to teach a class, something that they insist we do in person, even when virtually all of the students are attending by zoom - at which point we should use other, more effective forms of pedagogy than teaching with masks to small groups of students while the majority watch us interact via zoom.
If the reluctant kids were still at home, this would
intersect with my own wish to be more present to them and the guilt that I felt
about leaving them to fend for themselves in the world. It was only years later that I learned that
the plastic dinosaur that the reluctant son took to school every day had magical powers
and would grow to life size and protect him when he needed it.
COVID fatigue is also very real. Teaching in the above mentioned split classroom with the
majority of students on zoom and having to teach with a mask on to those in the
room while also trying to connect with those whose cameras are turned off is a Sisyphean
task. It gets old. Fast. But it keeps on being a thing...
This past week, after our initial rate of quarantine on campus plummeted
from a new high to a much more reasonable level, I implored the zoom students
to come back to the classroom. All but
about three of them did. After class, as
I was walking across campus, three students from the class stopped me to let me
know how much fun it was to be in class again with their peers. They acknowledged that it was better
socially, but they also spontaneously offered that they learned better in the
classroom than in the zoom room. How
could that not be the case?
I’m really not sure what we did before COVID that was so
much less draining. Was it really all
that invigorating to teach in person? On our free time, did going out to dinner with friends or going to a movie really improve the quality of our lives that much? Or was it just not as concerning to be able
to see people who are, horror of horrors, unmasked, and to wonder whether being
near them threatens our well-being? Is
this an opportunity to have an empathic bond with paranoid people everywhere
about how energy zapping it is to never be able to trust anyone?
I also think that there is a certain kind of isolation that takes place. The loss of water cooler contact - the moments before a class starts, which on zoom are awkward at best. You can't have a semi private conversation there.
Recently, I have been having many more dreams
of family reunions – and there is a gathering planned for weekend
after next in a state and county that has a very rate of infection. We have reservations to go, but I fear the
rest of the family is not going to risk the travel and the connection in public
places that will be part of it. I feel
that I cannot miss it. I feel so hungry
for familial (and familiar) contact that the benefits outweigh any potential
risks. I will be masked and take
precautions, and I will have at least some contact, so I will justify to myself
going, even if I am going without my immediate family.
So I can get that my peers are crawling out of their
skin. What is remarkable about that is
that faculty positions, not just in my department, are such stable
positions. The downside of tenure is
that there is not an open market for faculty – except at the very very top
ranks. So our salaries are relatively
depressed compared to what they might be in an open market (I’m not complaining
a great deal – our salaries are reasonable, and in an open market, we would
have moving expenses – and the psychological expense of adjusting to new
communities on a regular basis).
Tenure, as much as universities are trying to get rid of it,
is actually a good deal for them, too. They don’t have to spend time and money
attracting talent the way they would if the market were more open. We will have to do many searches over the
next year or two – or we will have to figure out how to share a greater load among
fewer people – who will burn out, so we will have even fewer people to share
the work. When things are functioning
along the old normal, reunions – even twenty five year reunions – allow students
to count on seeing faculty they remember and feel connected to.
But in the new normal, especially in fields like mine, where
it is possible to go directly into business rather than working for an
institution, will people flirt with academia – teach for a few years, and then
move on to working in a practice that is more flexible than the University in
terms of the work required? Will a few
old hands guard the administration of the department while adjunct faculty –
teaching as a sideline to their more lucrative jobs as therapists – teach the
courses? Will this kind of
specialization actually be good for students? This is already the norm in many institution in the liberal arts. We have largely avoided that at my University, but our administration has been limiting the number of tenured slots, especially when there are so many applicants for every open position.
Or is this resignation really more profound than that? Will we move away from our current cultural
norm of two income families? Will we
decide that a lower standard of economic living may allow for a better quality
of life? Will the pool of talent in many fields shrink? Does our desire for greater
connection with others predate the pandemic?
Does our concern about the consumerism that gets fueled by our incomes and
then contributes to climate change cause us to pull back?
Of course I am asking this in the context of incredibly
privileged individuals frequently with partners who are able to support a
family. They are also individuals with
very high levels of education that they can employ in alternative ways. Is serving students like serving
hamburgers? It may seem like a tone deaf
question, but are there points of convergence as well as divergence? What do we want to do with the rest of our
days? It seems like the environment is
conspiring to let us ask this question in a meaningful way.
I first asked these questions in high school. As a student at an alternative high school, I
imagined running away to live in an agriculturally based commune (Twin Oaks, still
running in Virginia). When it came time
to go to college, which I never doubted that I would, I had no interest in
going to a school that would teach me a vocation. I wanted to learn about the world. I found that at a great books school, St. John’s College.
After college, and working at jobs (in banking, construction
and as an actuarial trainee) that I found unfulfilling, I went to graduate
school to pursue a career that would be meaningful – both intellectually (I was
interested in understanding how emotion and intellect are related) and in
service (I wanted to help people lead better lives).
I have worked at that career for more than thirty years in
various ways. I have a much better
understanding, especially recently, of ways to address my intellectual
questions, and I continue to develop as both a clinician and a teacher,
hopefully helping others. I have also
had the opportunity to become a parent and a stepparent. And, as an added bonus, plying my trade has
provided a reliable and steady income. I
have lived my own version of the American Dream.
I am also discontent.
Something that the pandemic and social and climate crises have helped expose. There have been considerable costs in
pursuing the goals that I have set for myself.
Including that I don’t want to give up the pursuits that I have invested
so heavily in being able to engage, even to the point that I don’t have a clear
exit strategy for retirement.
On some very deep level, I admire the courage that my
colleagues are showing in deciding to re-examine the decisions they have made
that have led them to be in the places in their lives where they have found
themselves. I am glad that I am no
longer chair of our department and don’t have to deal with the downstream
effects of both the administration's foibles and the decisions of the faculty,
admirable though they may, in some ways, be.
I am reasonably buffered from the decisions they have made.
The University will carry on. The department will do so as well. Both of those entities may engage in some
soul searching of their own (the department has already begun that). As someone recently pointed out, the only
finite resource we have is time – and we don’t really know how much of that we
actually have. Sometimes we have to
resign ourselves to determine how best to move forward and live the lives that
we believe we were meant to live.
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