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Another Look at Care Work in Higher Education

In her article, "The University Cannot Love You," Brenna Clark Gray discusses the care-work of faculty members in mentoring and providing pastoral care for students, especially during the emergency shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.  She makes a strong point that "care does not have to be burdensome, but it becomes so within systems that refuse to make space for it."  In other words, if a university's demands on its faculty members are not realistic given the amount of time and energy faculty spend in care-work, then the care becomes a burden. While Gray acknowledges the fact that this burdensome care falls more squarely on the shoulders of female faculty and that the pandemic highlighted the role women played universally as shock absorbers for care-work, the university DOES provide a great deal of student care.  The question is, should the "help" the university is providing be redesigned or redistributed to better serve faculty and students?


Universities love their students...to the tune of millions of dollars a year.  For example, private 4-year institutions spend on average 66% of their annual budgets on student academic help, including mental health services, tutoring labs, and more. This is care-work that supports student learning over and beyond what faculty can do. However, studies on help-seeking in higher education show that students do not always use these resources due to lack of awareness, social stigma, or lack of campus integration, especially for minority student groups (Clegg et al, 2006; Bornschegel, 2020).  Perhaps these help systems need to be redesigned to better meet the needs of the students.  Perhaps universities are creating accessory services while the mentoring and pastoral care is done best by front-line faculty members, and resources would be better spent by being redistributed so that faculty have smaller classes and reduced loads to actually do the mentoring and care work that is best done by faculty.

Bornschlegl, M., Meldrum, K., & Caltabiano, N. J. (2020). Variables Related to Academic Help‐Seeking Behaviour in Higher Education–Findings from a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Review of Education, 8(2), 486-522.

Clegg, S., Bradley, S., & Smith, K. (2006). ‘I've had to swallow my pride’: help seeking and self‐esteem. Higher Education Research & Development, 25(2), 101-113.

Comments

  1. YvetteFebruary 1, 2022 at 6:21 AM

    Thanks for bringing in this perspective to the table of the amount of spending for student care. I like your idea of looking at ways to redesign/redistribute resources to support faculty mentoring and care work by having smaller class sizes and reduced loads.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownFebruary 7, 2022 at 10:01 AM

    I love the universities love students to the tune of millions of dollars a year haha... in one of my previous roles I would discuss this with universities as they were taking advantage of Pasifika students by decreasing the grades required to get in so that can get "butts on seats" which gave them a false sense of the level that would be required of them in their first year. Families would sell their cars, refinance their homes to get their kids to university and then they would really struggle in their first year. I told them they needed to change this but they said admin would never agree to it so sad :(

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