Rosie Perez speaks with Inside Higher Ed about the unseen labor involved in attending to students’ mental health
Although new guidance and resources are available to help professors help their students manage psychological distress, some say the effort is too large an ask of faculty.
An article in Inside Higher Ed reports that faculty members are “on the front lines of higher education’s battle to arrest declining student mental health, ravaged by nearly three years of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with such stressors as climate disasters, racial unrest, political incivility and culture wars.”
Institutions across the country, the article notes, are implementing and enhancing efforts to help faculty recognize and support students in psychological distress. Yet faculty members themselves are struggling to keep up with the demands the field as we know it requires.
“We’ve designed academia to be a place that prioritizes your productivity,” CSHPE professor Rosie Perez told Inside Higher Ed.
Overworked faculty demoralized by low pay are already fleeing the profession, the article states. Adding additional uncompensated responsibilities may only exacerbate this trend.
“When faculty are doing their annual evaluations, nobody is going to ask me, ‘How many students have you supported with their mental health struggles?’ And it is a lot—it’s a lot. But they are going to ask me, ‘How much money did you bring in? How much did students like your course? How many papers did you publish?’ Caring for students is invisible labor that is asked for and is needed. At the same time, there’s no acknowledgment that you’re doing it.”
Perez adds, "Faculty play an important role in contributing to and alleviating students' distress. But we need more than training and goodwill to support students. We need to work collectively to create more humane and caring systems of higher education where everyone's well-being matters since you can't pour from an empty cup."
