Ask Me Anything: On Resentment
Did I ever resent my students?
Few things excite me more than getting a submission for my monthly Ask Me Anything (AMA) series, and this month’s is such a good one. It’s a perfect follow-up to reading Burnout, and I think it speaks to the reason some choose to leave academia (or feel flooded with relief once they do), but also to the disparate expectations in the workplace we often face based on things like our race, gender, and more.
Here it is:
Did you ever feel resentment, and resulting guilt, towards your students? In academia, there’s so much language about “serving students” and we pour our hearts and souls into supporting them. There are students who completely soak up our efforts, whereas others take our efforts for granted. At the end of the day, institutions need to pour into us so we can support our students. There’s so many levels that go into resentment and burnout!!!!
Whew! I’ll start with the direct answer to the question, about what I felt and experienced, but I’ll also address the social, political, and institutional factors that shape experiences like these, and what we might do about it.
It’s been over 4 years since I was last in the rhythm of full-time faculty life; I walked out of a classroom on March 4, 2020 not having any idea I’d never again walk back into one as a full-time faculty member. (First came spring break, then the onset of the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders, then the summer of turmoil at my institution, then an academic year of fully remote work given my recent lung trauma, coupled with my exit to industry. I taught one adjunct evening Senior Seminar course a year later, and that experience affirmed for me that I was, indeed, done for good.) So in some ways, it’s already hard to remember the feelings I experienced in that first long chapter of my career, from when I began teaching as a grad student in 2005 until that moment in 2020.
But I know I was always limping along, exhausted, feeling unable to say no to anything —I had to prep and teach my class sessions, of course; I had to grade student work; I had to attend office hours and faculty and department and committee meetings; I had to do research since that was the primary basis of my tenure and two possible promotions —excellent researchers can be meh teachers but excellent teachers cannot be meh researchers; I had to write and review articles and books; I had to devote extra (uncompensated) teaching time for research honors students and independent studies; I had to contribute to academic communities beyond my institution; I had to offer career workshops and counseling; I had to hand over several Saturdays per semester to convincing high school students and their parents to send their beloved kids to our scrappy institution; I felt I had to show up for all of the extra workshops, student events, special talks (nevermind the work of organizing many of them) and to make small talk with anyone who floated past me at the expense of desperately needed time to do all of the above, because to not do so for men meant you were brilliant and serious but for women it made you a bitch. And I say that loaded up with privilege as a white cis-hetero US citizen who presented as (and now is) comfortably middle class and who does not deal with physical or cognitive disabilities —the expectations and challenges for those without those privileges are far greater. I also didn’t have caregiving responsibiliites outside of the home at the time, other than to a dog who thankfully had a bladder of steel.
Some may look at that list and point out things that I could have easily given up. But I always felt like the things I could say no to were never the things I should (or wanted) say no to: investing in meaningful DEI work, caring personally for students (the entire pitch, beyond our athletics program, for coming to our failing institution), mentoring those many amazing young people who were invested (both financially and ethically) in what we were selling —the hope of finding their ability to not just do well but to do good out there in the world after graduation. That was the stuff that I used to believe my institution actually invested in and cared about until they showed us otherwise. As the AMA question rightly notes, “there’s so much language about ‘serving students’ and we pour our hearts and souls into supporting them.”
Did I resent the students? Almost never. But that doesn’t mean that when the person who asked the question said “There are students who completely soak up our efforts, whereas others take our efforts for granted” they were off-base. (Indeed, I could name names to this day of students in each of those categories!) It’s simply to say that their next sentence, “At the end of the day, institutions need to pour into us so we can support our students” is SPOT ON.
So, to the question asker, your resentment is completely valid, but I want to encourage you to release the guilt —that guilt, that blame, rests with your institution, which is sadly likely not unique. In short, if you resent these students, your institution should feel guilty, because it is failing you.
Here’s what that system, and too many institutions within it, does that deserves our indignation:
It sells the dream of a life of the mind to students and faculty alike, leaving too many students with crippling debt and paying the people who produce that intellectual experience pennies on the dollar. (This isn’t about income-producing majors —as if it were that simple in the first place. It’s about a flawed funding structure for higher education as a whole, and a social and political system that does not fundamentally believe that we all deserve the individual and collective benefits of a collegiate education.)
It magnifies this hope, and therefore this burden, for students and faculty from marginalized backgrounds, who experience enhanced pressures to achieve excellence, often at the cost of their financial and mental health.
As I’ve discussed previously, it creates fundamentally different jobs based on the body of the person occupying them —those with more privilege are granted more authority and leeway, while those with less take on additional (and too often unrecognized, uncompensated) care work that also competes with the time they need to complete their job duties and therefore earn the rewards needed (things like promotions, tenure) for ongoing success. Some of my colleagues who held more gendered and economic privilege could talk in circles and shirk their core responsibilities and still be considered brilliant, while those of us with less relative privilege (and, again, I still have a lot of privilege) had to pick up their slack, do all of the extra emotional labor, and be twice as good to be tolerated.
It frames all of this as work we do primarily for love or passion, undermining our ability to see it as fundamental labor necessary to produce the student experience that we sell to students and their families, and ignoring the economic foothold it takes to not have to care about how much you are actually paid. In this way, it replicates unearned advantages, increasingly making it only comfortable to be a professor if you already came from family wealth.
It asks exponentially more of faculty members who are tenured or on the tenure track, already a too-small minority of the academic teaching labor force, while still shunting the majority of teaching labor to contingent faculty who are paid poverty wages. This creates a workforce that is divided against itself, as contingent faculty rarely know how regularly we beg for more tenure-track positions to help share the load and resent us, only to be told that we are selfish and spoiled already by administrators who also resent us for having the audacity to ask for a living wage and reasonable work hours and expectations.
It also increasingly fails to trust us to be experts in the areas in which we’ve invested years and often hundreds of thousands of dollars, eroding our control of our classrooms and curricula, while blaming us for indoctrinating students by teaching them things like history and critical thinking.
Student support staff are also encouraged to resent us, often wrongly assuming we work far less than we do while being paid far more; these jobs are often themselves rife with burnout. But I sat in countless meetings with staff colleagues where faculty as a whole were openly disparaged; in any other workplace comments like these would be cause for HR intervention. In some ways this makes sense: they don’t have the protections of academic freedom like faculty (rightly) do, so hating us was their only available outlet. But it created a toxic workplace and added to the experience of constantly being abused.
And the worst administrators and Board members fail to lead but rather support all of the above elements of these institutions, because it makes their (admittedly very difficult) jobs easier.
Students? They just wander in the door and believe what we tell them —that we’re fully invested in their success and here to get them through. We are. But exactly as the question-asker notes, no one is doing the same for faculty. We are left to somehow find ways to do it for ourselves.
Faculty unions can offset some of this struggle; I’ve been inspired by watching the public university up the road from my former SLAC organize and file and begin to bargain. But it takes even wider collective political work to change the entire system of higher education to diminish some of these disparities in the first place. That takes time and commitment.
In the meantime, it may help to form your own No Committee, to find others who can hold you accountable for holding the boundaries that you think make sense for you at that time, or to explore steps that make you ready to exit if you should ever decide that’s right for you. It takes continuing to love yourself, because no one at the institution will. And that love is not just sentiment; you don’t have to feel love toward yourself. But you must act as though you do, granting yourself, as bell hooks rightly names, with “care, commitment, responsibility, knowledge, respect, and trust.”
Readers, what does that look like for you? How can we pour into ourselves when our institutions do not? Let’s talk about it, and anything else I missed or you would like to expand upon, in the comments.
One thought I have is that if we find ourselves resenting our students, that could mean we have too many, which is also an institutional problem, if our schools have large class sizes in order to decrease faculty pay.