The COVID-19 pandemic created a high degree of disruption for college staff, administrators, students, and faculty alike. In the spring of 2020, faculty, staff, administrators, and students were evacuated as campuses were closed to all but essential personnel. For many faculty, this shutdown entailed quickly developing facility with unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies, managing students’ technical and emotional needs in addition to their educational ones, and suspension and/or redirection of research (Berheide et al., 2022a; Carpenter et al., 2021). Many faculty were simultaneously facing disruptions at home with children requiring supervision and instruction or family and friends needing help with shopping and other forms of caregiving. All were operating in a condition of uncertainty about the course of the pandemic, which included anxiety about their own health and that of their loved ones, as well as uncertainty about institutional futures (Jefferson et al., 2021; Kirk-Jenkins & Hughley, 2021).

By the summer of 2021, the COVID crisis had affected faculty work conditions in new ways. Offices, studios, libraries and laboratories were no longer closed, but classes remained disrupted – whether held entirely online, in hybrid fashion, or in person but with masking and social distancing to prevent contagion and seating charts to facilitate contact tracing. These returns to campus and a semblance of normalcy may have reduced faculty experience of stress, or these newly disrupted work conditions may have contributed to an accumulation of that stress. With enough such strain, some faculty may have begun to experience burnout and even to consider exiting the profession (McMurtrie, 2020; Pope-Ruark, 2022; Tugend, 2020).

Drawing on job demands-resources theory, we use two waves of survey data, one from the immediate aftermath of the transition to remote instruction and the second a year later, to examine faculty experiences with work strain at three small liberal arts colleges (SLACs). Specifically, we ask whether status resources (gender, race, and tenure), disruptions to job demands and resources (teaching and research resources, student demands, emotional labor demands, and scholarship demands), and home and family demands (caregiving) affected faculty stress.

Job Demands-Resources Theory

The job demands-resources model has become common in research on workplace well-being as well as work-life balance and strain scholarship (Baker & Demerouti, 2007; Watanabe & Falci, 2016). The model posits that all aspects of a job can be classified as either demands or resources. Job demands represent sustained cognitive, psychological and/or physical efforts undertaken as part of the job. Job resources can include physical, psychological, social or organizational elements of a job or workplace which are used in accomplishing the tasks of the organization or occupation (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). Such models have attempted to account for both positive (motivation, commitment, engagement) and negative (strain, burnout) outcomes by examining the demands placed upon workers and the resources that those workers had to bring to bear on the problems they faced. When resources and demands were balanced, or when resources outstripped demands, workers experienced positive outcomes such as motivation and commitment.

Negative work life outcomes, including stress and burnout, emerged when the demands placed on workers exceeded the resources available to them to meet those demands. The particular forms of both demands and resources were occupation specific, as was the connection between well-being and those demands and resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). When such models have been applied to academic workplaces both for faculty alone and for faculty, staff, and administrators, they have predicted the positive and negative aspects of work life including satisfaction and commitment as well as stress, burnout, and turnover (Mudrak et al., 2018; Naidoo-Chetty & du Plessis, 2021; Watanabe & Falci, 2016; Zaynab et al., 2018; Zaynab et al., 2022). Typically, faculty positions, like other professional occupations, have been characterized by both high demands and high resources (Bakker and Demerouti, 2023). Some of the literature noted shifts in the resources available to, and demands placed upon academic faculty in the context of the emergent neoliberal university which has applied an increasingly corporatized model to higher education (Berheide et al., 2022b; Gardner, 2022; McClure, 2016; Mudrak et al., 2018; Vican et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2024) raising demands on faculty (and staff) while reducing the resources available. This corporatization of higher education formed the context within which the disruptions to academic work precipitated by COVID-19 took place (Amsler & Motta, 2017; Angervall & Beach, 2020; Finkelstein et al., 2016; Gardner, 2022, O’Meara et al., 2008; Rafnsdóttir & Heijstra, 2013).

The Effects of Domain Disruptions on Academic Job Demands and Resources

The COVID-19 crisis shifted the balance between the demands upon college faculty and staff and the resources available to them. One of the ways that the initial transition to remote learning may have affected faculty involved the need to quickly learn unfamiliar ways of conveying content and managing a now virtual classroom, particularly at the three institutions studied which, as residential colleges, had little experience with or infrastructure for distance learning. At the same time, faculty may have experienced greater demands from students unfamiliar with remote learning and uncertain about the shifting policies adopted by colleges and instructors. These disruptions to students’ lives and learning have increased levels of emotional labor performed by faculty (Berheide et al., 2022a; Lopes & de Camargo Santos, 2023).

The proximate consequence of the disruptions for faculty may have been an increase in time spent working. The increase in work time would be expected to have a substantial impact on strain, work-life balance satisfaction, and other indicators of well-being among college faculty as it has had for other workers (Fan & Moen, 2022).

Unlike many other personal and organizational disruptions, the COVID-19 crisis simultaneously disrupted both work and family life. But, depending on the context, some individuals’ lives may have been more disrupted than others in one or both of these domains. For instance, while schools and childcare centers were closed and vulnerable family members were isolated, a faculty member in a life course stage where they had fewer caregiving responsibilities may have experienced less disruption at home than one who was a caregiver (Carpenter et al., 2021; Pettigrew, 2021). Similarly, faculty members who had scholarship or creative work that could not be conducted during the early period of the pandemic because of lack of access to laboratories, archives, field sites, studios, or human subjects may have experienced a greater degree of stress than their colleagues who could continue their scholarly activities equally well from home (Carpenter et al., 2021).

Status Shields as Resources and Identity Taxation as Demands

While Lease (1999) found no effects of either seniority or gender on multiple dimensions of work strain among academic faculty, we posit that the pandemic-induced strain will be more intense for some faculty based on their status characteristics. In the academic workplace, several status distinctions provide protection for some faculty and leave others more vulnerable to increased work demands. That is, they represent a resource for “crafting” the demands placed on an incumbent by their job (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023). The most obvious of these is tenure, and the implications for the COVID crisis are fairly apparent. Tenured faculty have less structural need to be concerned about short-term disruptions to their teaching and research than their untenured colleagues. They have a status shield.

Hochschild (1983) coined the term status shield to refer to the protection from emotional demands that workers had when they belonged to a privileged group. She argued that women did not have the same shield as men did against the negative feelings of the people they served, which in the case of college professors would be students. Cottingham and colleagues (2015) found that male nurses’ status as men generally shielded them from performing as much emotional labor on the job as women nurses. Cottingham et al. (2015) argued that status shields were an interactional resource, the benefits of which were based on cultural beliefs that higher status people, such as men, were presumably more competent, were worthier of respect, and had greater authority.

Brooks (1982) found that men graduate students exhibited significantly higher levels of aggressiveness toward women faculty than men faculty. Similarly, white students have often challenged the authority of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty (Harlow, 2003; Pittman, 2010). Status shields not only protected privileged actors from emotional demands, they also protected them from affronts to their authority (Bellas, 1999) and from other kinds of additional job demands (Berheide et al., 2022a; Goodrum & Stafford, 2003). According to Hochschild (1983), the fact that women and others with lower status were treated differently on the job changed the nature of the job.

In fact, some faculty were subject to “identity taxation,” by having to perform additional work, including extra service expectations and more emotional labor, because they were a member of an underrepresented group (Eagan & Garvey, 2015; Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012). The pandemic may have exacerbated these extra demands in both visible ways from administrators and invisible ones from students (Berheide et al., 2022a; Clark et al., 2022; Kasymova et al., 2021; Melaku & Beeman, 2022; Mickey et al., 2022; Pettigrew, 2021; Porter et al., 2022; Yildirim & Eslen-Ziya, 2021).

COVID-Induced Strain and Related Outcomes in U. S. Higher Education

To date, examination of COVID-induced work strain in higher education has been limited. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s October 2020 survey of 1,122 faculty in the United States indicated that more than one third felt “extremely” and just over another third (36%) felt “very” stressed (Tugend, 2020). It suggested that many were “on the verge of burnout.” Winfield and Paris’ (2021) study applied a mixed method approach to the way that demand and resource changes induced by the pandemic affected burnout and turnover among 1080 higher education professionals (staff and administrators in admissions, registrars, and student affairs offices) at 782 institutions in the United States. They found that increases in demands were associated with higher levels of burnout and decreases in resources were associated with greater risk of turnover. Their analysis of qualitative responses revealed considerable concern among respondents about emotional and mental health.

To date, the other studies of faculty stress response to COVID in the United States are studies of single institutions. For example, Kotini-Shah et al.’s (2022) studied health sciences faculty at a public university with a medical school, finding high levels of work stress among 73% of respondents and high levels of home stress among 60%. Their latent class analysis identified two clusters of faculty with high stress both at work and at home: a group most likely to be pre-tenure women faculty with young children at home and the second a group characterized by women who were tenured associate professors with children at home. A third cluster, which was more likely to be men, tenured full professors without young children, exhibited moderate work stress and lower home stress. The final cluster of faculty who exhibited low work- and home-related stress was mostly made up of men without children in visiting and lecturer positions.

In their study of 58 faculty at a regional university, Chin and Clubbs (2022) found that pandemic-induced stressors moderated the relationship between values alignment and burnout such that they observed higher levels of burnout among faculty who more closely identified with the values of the institution and who had high levels of pandemic-induced stress. They posited the possibility of “moral injury” among these faculty due to a lack of workplace resources and supports. Moral injuries are a form of harm that occur when individuals are placed in situations where they are unable to act in ways congruent with their deeply held beliefs and values. Chin and Clubbs differentiated moral injury from burnout saying “[W]hile burnout can feel like a personal failing, moral injury is different because someone can acknowledge that they are trying to do the right thing but are faced with other things, such as policies and lack of workplace resources, that they believe they can do little about” (Chin & Clubbs, 2022, p. 58). While it was clear at the outset of the pandemic that faculty work lives were disrupted, it largely remains to be seen whether faculty maintained elevated efforts to adapt to COVID-induced disruptions of teaching, scholarship, and homelife over the course of the 2020–2021 academic year and what effects those elevated efforts have had on faculty well-being.

One study that, like this one, used repeated cross-sectional data revealed an increase in perceived stress among faculty. Eubank, Burke, and Orazem (2023) surveyed faculty at City University of New York in three waves in the spring and fall of 2020 and again in the spring of 2021. Their descriptive analysis showed that faculty’s levels of stress rose during the first year of the pandemic (April 2020 to April 2021) for both full time and part-time faculty. While this result is important, they did not analyze factors other than full time/part time status that might have predicted strain.

Our understanding of the effects of institution type on faculty stress during the COVID-19 pandemic are hampered by the fact that most published studies in the US examine it only at research-intensive universities (e.g., Eubank, Burke, and Orazem 2023). Studies on the pandemic’s effects typically sample faculty at a single university (e.g., Chin & Clubbs, 2022) or even a single school within one (e.g. Kotini-Shah et al., 2022). Analysis of faculty data by institution type tends to focus on other topics such as marriage and fertility (Perna, 2005a), hours (Winslow 2010), salary (Kelly and Grant 2012), and tenure and promotion (Perna, 2005b). Unfortunately, there is limited systematic empirical basis from which to develop a theory of how institution type affects faculty stress. Our research begins to fill this gap by analyzing data from three small liberal arts colleges.

In the United States, colleges outnumber research universities. The Carnegie Foundation (2024) classified just 279 institutions of higher education as very high or high research activity universities compared to 499 as public and private not-for-profit four-year baccalaureate colleges. Baccalaureate colleges provide a valuable context within which to study faculty stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lower research expectations may account for the widespread belief that faculty jobs at teaching-intensive colleges are less stressful than those at research-intensive universities. Yet those lower research expectations come with higher teaching and service demands (Wolf-Wendel & Ward, 2006). As Birnbaum (1988) observed, the carework faculty engaged in while nurturing students at these teaching-intensive institutions was time-consuming. Therefore, faculty at SLACs may have experienced high levels of student and emotional labor demands during the pandemic. To assess whether these demands predicted faculty stress, we surveyed tenure-stream faculty at three SLACs. In this paper, we address the following research questions:

Research Questions

  1. 1.

    Did overall levels of faculty members’ perceived strain increase, decrease, or remain constant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic?

  2. 2.

    Is work strain less prevalent among faculty who possess status shield resources and more prevalent among faculty subject to identity taxation demands?

  3. 3.

    Are faculty temporal/spatial/cognitive resources associated with less work strain?

  4. 4.

    Do faculty who report increased work demands experience greater work strain?

  5. 5.

    Do faculty with caregiving demands experience greater work strain?

  6. 6.

    Do the correlates of work strain shift during the first year of the pandemic?

Potential Contributions

This study will contribute to the literature on faculty work lives during COVID in several ways. First, we address a gap in the extant literature by analyzing data about smaller, typically residential, teaching-intensive institutions. Second, we examine shifts in faculty work strain at multiple points in time – early and later in the pandemic. Third, by applying the job demands-resources model to the issue of work strain, we seek to move beyond description of who experienced how much strain to attempting to understand covariates and potential predictors of that strain. Finally, we attempt to suggest remediation and mitigation strategies to ameliorate the lingering harms of the disruptions and prepare for potential disruptions in the future.

Methods and Materials

Research Context

The three small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) from which the present study’s samples were drawn are each selective, residential, and predominately white private institutions in upstate New York. These sites were selected because of the authors’ access to faculty at those institutions. The three have similar sized student bodies (2100–2700) and faculties (165 to 217).

All three were fully remote from mid-March to the end of the academic year in 2020. The campuses were closed to nearly all students, faculty, and staff until later in the summer. During the 2020–2021 academic year, each allowed faculty to choose whether to teach and students whether to attend online, in-person, or hybrid classes, maintained masking and distancing in classrooms, and provided regular testing for students and employees on campus.

While the similarities among the colleges were substantial, there were several important differences. First, one of the colleges used a trimester schedule, which was notable because while two were in mid-semester when the transition to remote learning occurred in March 2020, this shift occurred at the end of winter term for this college. Those faculty conducted the entire spring term online. Second, during the 2020–2021 academic year, two of the three colleges largely retained their original calendar while the third adopted a shifted semester model with an expanded 2021 summer semester to reduce the number of students and faculty on campus during any given semester. Because there were no significant differences in our primary dependent variable, work strain, between the colleges for either year, we were able to pool data from all three colleges in our analyses.Footnote 1

Participants and Procedure

We collected the data in two waves using a repeated cross-section of the faculty at these three institutions.Footnote 2 The first wave (Wave 1) data came from a survey of 204 tenure-stream faculty at these three SLACs in the spring and summer of 2020. We collected the second wave (Wave 2) in the spring and summer of 2021, after a full year of pandemic-disrupted academic life. Although we expanded the second-wave sampling frame to include full-time non-tenure stream faculty as well, in this paper, to ensure comparability with the first wave, we restricted our analysis of second wave data to tenure stream faculty who make up a large majority of instructional staff at each of the three institutions.Footnote 3 In the second wave, 157 faculty completed the survey, 126 of whom were tenure stream faculty and were included in this analysis.Footnote 4

Participants were recruited via an email from the college’s Provost or their designate inviting faculty to complete the survey. Follow up emails were distributed at several week intervals. A chance to win a tablet computer was offered as an incentive. Response rates among tenure track faculty for the first wave were 37% and 23% in the second.

While this repeated cross section design allows us to examine changes in levels of strain and the patterns of correlates, it is not as well suited to assessing causal relationships.

Measures

Work Strain

To measure perceived work strain, we adapted an item from Hämmig (2017) in which participants indicated how often, in comparison to the Fall 2019 term, they felt overwhelmed by work. We added two parallel questions about how often they felt stressed and exhausted. Participants responded on a Likert scale of 1 (much less often) to 5 (much more often). Items were centered at 0 and averaged to create a single composite score (alpha = 0.992). Higher scores indicated greater work-related emotional strain. These measures were replicated in the 2021 wave. The reliability of this index was similarly high in Wave 2 (alpha = 0.938).

Status Shield Resources/Identity Taxation Demands

We examined a set of status characteristics that may have entailed greater or lesser degrees of power and autonomy in the workplace, that is, that provided some faculty a status shield, which served as a resource protecting them from student demands or alternatively created an identity tax that subjected other faculty to higher work demands. These included measures of gender and race/ethnicity as well as tenure. We coded each of these as binary variables. For gender, we distinguished cisgender men from other faculty as an indication of their privileged status in the academy. To reflect the status privilege of white faculty, we coded race as white/BIPOC status. Finally, we used a binary indicator of tenure status (tenured = 1).

Work Domain Resources, Demands, and Disruptions

We assessed the effects of work-domain resources with questions about respondents’ temporal, spatial, and psychological ability to perform teaching and research. To operationalize faculty resources, we used six questions about whether faculty were able to dedicate “enough time” and “appropriate space,” as well as whether they had “trouble concentrating” on teaching and research in each of the two waves (e.g., “I have been able to dedicate enough time to my teaching”). The responses were a five-point Likert scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” After reverse-coding responses for the question about concentration, these reflect material, temporal, and cognitive resources faculty felt they could deploy. We averaged the responses across the six questions, with a high level of reliability in both waves (Wave 1 α = 0.77, Wave 2 α = 0.79).

We operationalized demands by measuring the degree to which faculty perceived increased demands for or barriers to teaching and scholarship because of the pandemic. To measure the possibility of disruption of scholarship, we asked respondents in both waves, “To what extent have you been able to accomplish your scholarship and/or creative work during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The response options were 2 (I have been a lot more productive than before COVID-19), 1 (I have been a little more productive than before COVID-19), 0 (I have been about as productive as before COVID-19), -1 (I have been a little less productive than before COVID-19), and − 2 (I have been a lot less productive than before COVID-19).

We assessed levels of teaching-related demands with a series of eight questions, five of which we adapted from El-Alayli et al. (2018). We could only use one of El-Alayli et al.’s (2018) standard work demand items (i.e., “students would send emails with questions about course materials and assignments”) and one friendship behavior item (i.e., “students would discuss personal issues such as mental health with you”) because the others all involved in-person contact that was no longer possible in spring 2020. We adapted three of El-Alayli et al.’s (2018) measures of the solicitation of special favors: “students would ask for adjustments or exceptions on grading (higher grades, extra credit, resubmissions),” “students would ask to meet (either in-person or via phone/Internet) and expect to be able to meet right away without scheduling an appointment,” and “students would ask for adjustments or exceptions on assignments (extensions, exemptions, reductions).”

The three items we added addressed experiences that might have increased due to the pandemic, specifically the increase in the types of behaviors that El-Alayli et al. (2018) labeled special favors (i.e., “students discussed with you whether they should take your course Pass/Fail;” “students discussed issues with Wi-Fi, computer access, or phone access that kept them from completing work for your course;” and “you needed to go to extra lengths to get in touch with students who dropped out of contact [i.e., sending extra emails, contacting student advising office, etc.]”).

Rather than ask participants to estimate how often students engaged in these behaviors in the typical term as El-Alayli et al. (2018) did, we asked them to rate how frequently these experiences occurred during the spring 2020 term or 2020–2021 academic year compared to fall 2019 on a 5-point scale consisting of -2 (much less often), -1 (slightly less often), 0 (about the same), 1 (slightly more often), and 2 (much more often). The eight items (one standard work demand, one friendship behavior, and six special favors) formed a single student demands index with high reliability (Wave 1 α = 0.77, Wave 2 α = 0.73) that was equivalent to what El- Alayli et al. (2018) found for special favor behaviors. Higher scores indicated that faculty experienced a higher number of these student demands more often during spring 2020 or academic year 2020–2021 than fall 2019.

We also assessed emotional labor demands with a series of six questions about emotional labor adapted from El-Alayli et al. (2018). These six items measured two forms of emotional labor: student-directed and self-directed. Self-directed emotional labor focused on the degree to which faculty felt that they had to adjust their behaviors and feelings when interacting with students (four items: e.g., “I was unable to express my true feelings to my students,” and “I was required to be ‘artificially enthusiastic’ to students”). Conversely, student-directed emotional labor centered around the degree to which faculty felt they had to help students deal with their emotions (two items: “I spent a lot of time helping students feel better about themselves” and “I spent a lot of time helping students deal with stresses and difficulties”). Participants responded on a Likert-scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Higher scores indicated greater emotional labor. We combined these two dimensions into a single scale of emotional labor demands with high reliability (Wave 1 α = 0.72, Wave 2 α = 0.80).

Home Life Demands

We operationalized demands at home as whether faculty had any caregiving responsibilities, which we calculated as a dichotomous variable by combining the presence of children under 18 in the household with the provision of care to others either inside or outside the home. We coded those with any caregiving responsibilities as 1 and those with no caregiving responsibilities as 0.

Working Time and Work-Life Balance

Finally, we introduced two variables examining how increased demands and decreased resources at work may have resulted in faculty allocating more time to work than typical, thereby changing their satisfaction with work-life balance. Faculty were asked to assess “Which of the following is true for the changes you made to your work schedule following the switch to remote learning during the Spring 2020 term/during the 2020–2021 academic year?” They could respond on a five-point scale from significantly more to significantly less each week (2, I worked significantly more each week; 1, I worked slightly more each week; 0, I worked about the same number of hours; -1, I worked slightly less each week; and − 2, I worked significantly less each week).

To assess changes in work-life balance, respondents were asked two questions: “Prior to/Since the COVID-19 pandemic, how satisfied were/are you with the balance between your professional and personal life?” each ranked on a six-point scale from very dissatisfied (1) to very satisfied (6). We took the difference between the two measures as an indicator of the change in work-life satisfaction, with negative values indicating a decrease in work-life satisfaction during the pandemic.

Analytic Strategy

Mean substitution was used to replace missing values.Footnote 5 Our analytic strategy began with a descriptive analysis and proceeded to an examination of correlations between each of the predictors and work strain. We then used a series of hierarchical OLS regression models (Ross & Willson 2017) to identify the sources of strain among faculty. Our models are constructed in blocks beginning with the status resources (Research Question 2), then adding the job resources (time, space, attention, for teaching and scholarship, and ability to sustain scholarship (Research Question 3), and student demands and emotional labor demands (Research Question 4). Caregiving demands are added to assess Research Question 5. Finally, Research Question 6 is assessed by comparing effects of job demands and resources between the two waves. Regression diagnostics including inspection of residuals plots to ensure normality and examination of collinearity diagnostics (VIF < 5) to ensure independence among the predictor variables indicated that the data met the assumptions of OLS regression.

Results

Addressing Research Question 1, our first analysis examined the overall levels of work strain in the two waves asking whether the amount of work strain fell between 2020 and 2021. As Fig. 1 shows, perceived levels of work strain were elevated during both the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2021 compared to Fall 2019. At both points, nearly half of the faculty answered that they felt overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted by work “much more often” than before the pandemic. For each individual item, between nearly three quarters and four fifths of faculty reported higher levels of work strain. Only a small number of faculty (between 4 and 8%) reported feeling overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted less often.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Measures of work strain among tenure-stream faculty 2020 and 2021

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The second part of our descriptive question was whether the level of work strain increased or decreased between the end of academic year 2019–2020 and the end of academic year 2020–2021. When we combined the three indicators into a single strain scale, we found no significant change in levels of work strain from the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 to the summer and fall of 2021. The average level of reported work strain for faculty was 1.11 in 2020 and 1.20 in 2021, a difference that was not statistically significant (t = -0.796).

Sources of Strain: Bivariate Correlations and Multivariate Models

We began analyzing the sources of strain by examining the bivariate correlations between work strain and each of the predictors as presented in Table 1 and 2. The bivariate correlations for both waves suggested that tenured faculty reported lower levels of work strain than their tenure-track colleagues. More work resources in the form of time, space, and concentration for teaching and research were negatively correlated with strain in both waves, though the association was stronger in the first wave. The ability to accomplish scholarship was associated with less strain in both waves. Increased student demands and emotional labor demands were correlated with higher levels of strain in both the first and second wave. Our measure of home life demands, whether the faculty member had children under 18 or provided care to another individual inside or outside the home, was associated with higher levels of strain in the first wave but not the second. Increased work hours were associated with more strain while increased satisfaction with personal-professional balance was associated with less strain.

Table 1 Descriptive statistics
Full size table
Table 2 Correlations and regressions of work strain index and selected predictors
Full size table

The multivariate analysis started with the status resources/demands that we used to reflect power and the potential for invisible labor in the academic workplace addressing Research Question 2. In both the first and second wave, neither gender nor race/ethnicity had observed effects on perceived work strain. Tenure status significantly predicted work strain in model 1 for both Wave 1 and Wave 2 with tenured faculty reporting less strain than their tenure-track colleagues, but this model only explained 1.3% of the variance in work strain in the first wave and 1.7% in the second.

Adding the indicators of work resources/demands reduced the effect of tenure status and increased the explained variance to 15.2% in the first wave and 10.7% in the second. In the first wave, faculty who said they were able to meet the demands of scholarly productivity reported less strain (Research Question 3). In addition, faculty who experienced elevated student demands reported increased levels of work strain (Research Question 4). Notable here was that our measure of emotional labor, which has a significant correlation with work strain in both waves, retained a statistically significant effect after controlling for the other variables only in the second wave (see model 2) (Research Question 6). In contrast, faculty caregiving was not a significant predictor of work strain in either model 3 or 4 in either wave (Research Question 5).

As model 4 indicates, those faculty who said they worked more during the two pandemic periods reported higher levels of work strain in both the first and second wave, though the effect was larger in the first wave. Conversely, those faculty who reported a positive change in personal-professional balance experienced less work strain. In this final model for the second wave, the ability to accomplish scholarship, which was correlated with lower levels of strain and a significant predictor in the first wave, did not have a significant effect after controlling for other variables. Instead, it was emotional labor demands that retained its significant relationship with strain in wave 2. Overall, the final models accounted for nearly one third of the variance in work strain in the first wave and almost one quarter in the second.

Discussion

The degree to which faculty reported being overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted by work suggested a high level of strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, the level of strain was equally high more than one year into the pandemic. Such an elevated and sustained level of work strain was likely to have deleterious effects on individual faculty members as chronic work-related stress has been associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes (Dewa et al., 2007). Prolonged work-strain may have also negatively affected the institutions at which these faculty work, as impaired psychological and physical well-being may have increased absenteeism, mental health- and disability-related leaves of absence, and intention to leave the professoriate (Barnes et al., 1998; Dewa et al., 2007; Reddy, 2010). Our attempt to illuminate the etiology of that strain suggested several correlates of the strain as well as some potential consequences.

Surprisingly, most of the status resources/demands we examined were not strongly related to work strain, at least directly. Neither gender nor race/ethnicity appeared to have significant effects on this outcome. Tenure status had an effect in the initial analyses, but it faded once controls for work resources and demands were added, echoing earlier findings on the lack of effects of gender and seniority on work strain (Lease, 1999). Perhaps less surprisingly, having caregiving responsibilities was not directly related to work strain. As noted earlier, other dimensions of spillover (when concerns from home interfere with work life and vice versa) and burnout may be more affected by both status resources/demands and caregiving demands. Similarly, more measures of disruptions in the respondents’ lives outside the workplace may help further illuminate work strain as well as spillover and burnout.

As these analyses have shown, work resources were a significant predictor of strain in the first wave, but that effect disappeared once we controlled for caregiving demands, implying a link between parenthood as well as other caregiving responsibilities and being able to muster the time, space, and concentration for teaching and research especially in the initial phases of the pandemic. This result was consistent with other pandemic-era research illustrating the impact of parenthood on faculty scholarly productivity (Carpenter et al., 2021; Kotini-Shah et al., 2022). Two work demands, both scholarship and teaching, were associated with work strain in the first wave. In the second wave, it was emotional labor demands that were associated with strain, suggesting that in the early phase of the pandemic, the disruption to scholarship had produced a disequilibrium in faculty’s work lives that led them to feel overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted. After the first full academic year of the pandemic, it was the necessity to manage the feelings of both their students and themselves that was wearing on them. That the disruptions to teaching and scholarship in the spring of 2020 were associated with elevated strain among faculty was unsurprising. A year later, many of the initial disruptions had either been substantially lessened or faculty could have become accustomed to them. Notably, research resources improved from the first to the second wave, but student demands increased even though its effect on strain decreased. The increase in emotional labor demands coincided with a period in which faculty may have been depleted from the efforts of the earlier disruptions and thus had lower emotional reserves to manage these continued demands. It was also notable that increased time spent working and dissatisfaction with personal-professional balance were strongly associated with work strain in both waves, the latter of which is consistent with pre-pandemic findings (Mudrak et al., 2018).

That emotional labor demands had strong effects on faculty feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted especially in the second year of the pandemic may have reflected the degree to which institutions extended the trend toward intrusive teaching (Goode et al., 2020). Intrusive teaching asks faculty to monitor and even intervene in the social and emotional well-being of their students, often in an effort to increase retention. The possible consequence of this trend on increased faculty strain and burnout deserves further attention both from scholars and from administrators.

The two waves of this study took place between what may be considered the immediate and intermediate periods of the COVID-19 pandemic (Christakis, 2020). While in the summer of 2020 the prospect of vaccinations appeared a distant hope, by the summer of 2021 vaccines were widely available and required for enrollment and employment at each of the institutions. It would appear that we were then in the intermediate pandemic period in which “…people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required” (Christakis, 2020, p. 250). Insights from the study of pandemics, in particular, and disasters, more generally, suggested that this long tail toward recovery during the period in which the immediate threat has receded but lasting aftershocks or additional waves may arrive can be a period of particular psychological disruption (Van Hoof et al., 2021). DeWolfe’s (2000) widely applied model of disasters’ psychological effects posited seven phases running from warning/threat, impact, rescue/heroic, remedy/honeymoon, inventory, disillusionment, and recovery/reconstruction. In relation to the lingering, episodic, and cyclical patterns of COVID-19 for college students – and colleges – Stowe et al. (2021) added a “sandbar phase” which sits between cyclical phases of impact, heroic, honeymoon, and disillusionment. The sandbar metaphor may be particularly apt given that the safety of a sandbar is nearly always only partial and temporary, and may be swamped or eroded with each new wave.

Limitations

This study is not without limitations, but these offer several opportunities for future research. First, these data are not drawn from a nationally representative sample of institutions or the population of US faculty. Overall, the student and emotional labor demands on the faculty in this sample may have been substantially higher than those for faculty at larger institutions, especially research-intensive institutions and those which are not typically primarily residential. The results may not be generalizable beyond similar small liberal arts colleges. Future research can test these models using a national or international sample—data that do not currently exist.

Second, our measure of faculty work strain is a subjective and self-reported one. Greater validity and reliability may be gained in future research by collecting objective (i.e. biometric and/or behavioral) measures.

Third, although the data are longitudinal, they are a repeated cross-section only allowing an aggregate comparison rather than the individual-level modeling that would be possible with panel data. This research design limits the degree to which we can attribute causality to the associations observed here. In addition, because both predictors and outcomes are measured simultaneously, we cannot disentangle reciprocal relationships between the variables.

Finally, we lacked baseline data from before the pandemic. Even with those limitations in mind, however, these findings nonetheless reflect important experiences of faculty during the pandemic period.

Conclusion

Our results are consistent with those of a national study that reported, many faculty were “on the verge of burnout” (Tugend, 2020). Thus, it is in the interest of both individual faculty and the institutions that employ them to find ways to ameliorate the elevated work strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To draw again from literature about disasters, one of the common distinctions is between remediation and mitigation where remediation is work to repair damage caused by the disaster and mitigation is work undertaken to prevent damage in future disasters. It is unknown whether another global pandemic might emerge in the near future, but the period of near-constant crisis in higher education – whether from local campus events; demographic and/or fiscal crises; local, national, and global political developments; or natural disaster – is likely to persist. In many of these cases, spatial and temporal disruptions to “normal” campus operations may be deemed necessary. And, while the campus disruptions of COVID-19 were unique in their ubiquity, they were not the first time campuses closed and adopted emergency remote instruction for protracted periods (Murphy, 2020). Colleges and universities should then find ways to alter both the demands placed on faculty and the resources available to them in the event of disaster. Having faculty and staff trained and attuned to the possibility of disruption is imperative. Further, some of the “crises” noted above are relatively “acute” short, sharp shocks, others are more “chronic” slowly building and lingering maladies (Erikson, 1995). Methods to address both chronic and acute disruptions can focus on both job demands and resources at the level of individual faculty member and the organization (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023).

  1. 1.

    Decreasing or Defining Student Demands. The organizational ability to develop and delineate clear policies and parameters within which faculty are expected to operate can limit the degree to which students make demands on faculty. At many institutions, including the three studied here, faculty flexibility was encouraged, which likely was an appropriate response. However, more clarity about the ways in which that flexibility should be exercised may have reduced both the level of student demands and the strain experienced by faculty in responding to it.

  2. 2.

    Managing Emotional Labor Demands. As our findings suggest, in the intermediate stages of the pandemic that were represented in the second wave of our data, the lingering effects of emotional labor demands had heavy consequences for faculty work strain. In fact, the level of emotional labor performed by faculty in the second wave was higher than in the first. It may be possible for institutions to augment resources allocated to the management of students’ emotional needs to lift some of that burden from faculty. However, because many faculty have come to see such emotional labor as an essential part of their work and because institutions have increasingly expected “intrusive teaching,” asking those faculty to limit or eliminate it may not be a practicable solution. An alternative may be to increase the resources that faculty have to manage that emotional labor, which may mitigate its effects, including faculty development programing concerning student mental and emotional wellbeing as well as expanding support systems for faculty. The danger with this approach, however, is that it will increase demands upon faculty to “do more,” which would both increase their workload and might interfere with personal-professional balance – each of which we have shown to have increased work strain.

  3. 3.

    Reducing Workload. One of the strongest correlates of faculty strain in this study was increased work time. Much of this time scarcity was driven by the transition to remote and then hybrid instruction, but also time spent on addressing student demands and engaging in emotional labor. In addition, some of the regular responsibilities of department and committee were service were increased. At the level of the individual faculty member, a strategy of job crafting (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023) could be pursued in which faculty, perhaps temporarily, redefine and reprioritize what they must do, and how they cognitively frame it. It is important to note, though, that this must be equally available to faculty regardless of their status at the institution. At the organizational level, considerations of what committee and department tasks are essential during a crisis should be proactively considered. Some may be suspended during a crisis, particularly given that others will be increased. Planning regarding the reasonable redistribution of those tasks should be considered as well (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023).