Sam, an associate professor in STEM, earned promotion and tenure two years ago at a comprehensive university. They took a year off
from what they referred to as the hamster wheel that is the promotion and tenure pathway; the journey to get there was not without its challenges, personal and professional. Sam is an out
LGBTQ faculty member on their campus but is still guarded given the campus is surrounded by rather conservative communities. Over the past two years, Sam went on sabbatical and was able to finish some lingering projects and felt good about having a clean slate
from which to build. Now that Sam feels like they are in a better space mentally and emotionally, they are eager to advance toward full professorship. Sam reached out to trusted colleagues to have preliminary conversations about their experiences and plans (some had already earned full professorship and others had plans to do so in the near future). Sam realized, however, that their colleagues were successful despite of a lack of resources and developmental supports at their institution, rather than due to targeted programming to help faculty members advance towards full professorship. Sam quickly realized they needed to take matters into their own hands but struggled to envision what those could (or should) be beyond some basic preliminary steps. Sam also realized their faculty handbook language was unclear about the general promotion process and timeline. For example, Sam heard three different associate rank requirements one must be at before submitting materials; Sam is also not clear if faculty at their institution need to be nominated by their chair to advance to full professorship or if self-nominations are accepted, given the mixed responses they are hearing. Sam is beginning to wonder if advancing to full is worth it, especially given the lack of guidelines, developmental support, and mentoring.
This chapter focuses on the ill-defined mid-career stage and the associated implications of that reality. Later in the book (see Chapters 7 and 8), I offer an institutional perspective into this problem; here I share insights and knowledge from the individual faculty member perspective. This reality has serious implications for how faculty members experience and engage in the academy after achieving P&T. For many, those implications are negative and can have long-lasting consequences at the individual and institutional levels.
Lack of Clearly Defined Hurdles and Developmental MilestonesâWhy Should We Care?
Characterized as the âbridge between employee generationsâ (Baldwin & Chang, 2006), MCF are the backbone of higher education institutions. They serve as mentors and sources of support for early career colleagues while also serving as formal and informal leaders on their respective campuses (Baker et al., 2019). Their contribution is critical to the success and vitality of their institutions (Strage & Merdinger, 2015). Simply put, âMidcareer, tenured faculty members power their institutionsâ (Flaherty, 2017). Yet, they offer their support with little to no institutional resources to do so effectively. In fact, teaching, leadership, and service often do not âcountâ toward professional advancement within the academy, a reality that is consistent across institution types (Baker et al., 2019) and is disadvantageous for women and faculty of color given they traditionally spend more of their professional hours engaged in these areas (Perry, 2014; Strunk, 2020). While on the surface, I think most people would agree this is problematic; I also think this insight should prompt the questionâWhy should we care?
Mid-career professionals are the least satisfied employee population, a finding consistent in higher education and industry (Baker et al., 2017; Gibbons, 2018). This finding should cause concern for all of us, especially given MCF are the largest cohort of faculty in the academy (Grant-Vallone & Ensher, 2017), and institutions rely on and are in need of their contributions to support the overall functioning and advancement of the institutions in which they are employed.
According to research, being ill-prepared and under-supported at mid-career has individual and organizational implications:
- Less than 50% of decisions made in mid-career were rated as successful (Minsky & Peters, 2019).
- Longer time in rank, or âstalling,â at certain career stages for women and other minorities (Baker, 2020).
- Loss of worker productivity and engagement; employee turnover is high at mid-career, particularly for college-educated individuals (Hagerty, 2016).
In the following section, I focus on the second bullet point and offer insight into the other individually focused implications most prominent in the literature: job burnout, faculty disengagement, and stalled career progression.
Job Burnout
According to the Mayo Clinic (2020), job burnout is defined as âa special type of work-related stressâa state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identityâ (para 1). One of the many problems associated with job burnout is that contributing symptoms occur over time, making it challenging for the individual to realize they are headed toward or firmly in a state of burnout. At the individual level, burnout looks like a cynical or overly critical co-worker, irritable or impatient with others. Job burnout looks like a colleague struggling to concentrate, stay on task, or complete a given task; someone with seemingly no energy or interest in projects, topics, or activities that were once a motivating force. I think many of us have witnessed this firsthand in relation to our colleagues or perhaps, experienced burnout ourselves.
Look no further than the list of contributing factors of job burnout such as loss of control, unclear job expectations, lack of social support, negative leadership behaviors, and work-life imbalance to understand why MCF are in need of support (Cleveland Clinic, 2020; Mayo Clinic, 2020; Valcour, 2018). These are the very characteristics that have been used by MCF themselves to describe their lived experiences in the academy during this phase of their careers (Baker & Manning, 2021; Mulholland, 2020). The global pandemic has only exacerbated these issues with faculty reporting even higher levels of burnout causing some to consider leaving the academy altogether (Course Hero, 2020). Job burnout is real and has implications at the individual, student, and institutional levels (Minter, 2009; Sabagh et al., 2018).
More recently, scholars have sought to better understand the contributing factors and implications of job burnout for faculty (Sabagh et al., 2018). This line of inquiry has examined the role of organizational and workplace climate (Dinibutun et al., 2020; Pedersen & Minnotte, 2017), work-family conflict (ZĂĄbrodskĂĄ et al., 2018), and job satisfaction and scholarly productivity (Woo et al., 2017) as contributing factors of faculty burnout. Taken as a collective, this line of inquiry revealed that context matters (see Chapter 7), relationships matter (see Chapters 6 and 7), culture matters, and investing in resources and support to help faculty combat burnout matters. When lacking, faculty membersâ physical and mental well-being suffer.
Faculty Disengagement
Research by Beauboeuf et al. (2017) targeted MCF members in an effort to move past the dominant focus on mid-career malaise to instead focus on the ways in which MCF highlighted the positive aspects of mid-career. Important to their work was a focus on faculty engagement (and disengagement). They found that MCF who participated in their research study focused a great deal on non-material needs, specifically the need to be recognized and to feel and experience a sense of belonging: âTo be seen, valued, and included was a critical aspect of their career satisfaction and affected the degree of connection they felt to their campusesâ (para 10). The absence of such support resulted in faculty disengagement, which could be linked to institutional practices that leave faculty members feeling undervalued, overcommitted, and expendable (Beauboeuf et al., 2017). No doubt, job burnout is but one contributing factor to faculty disengagement; when left untreated that disengagement comes at a high individual (and institutional) cost.
Recently, a colleague and I wrote an article titled, âPreparing the Next Generation of Institutional Leaders: Strategic Supports for Mid-Career Faculty,â to highlight the value and importance of succession management and onboardi...
