Geese on Campus | Photo by Bethany Althauser | The Wright State Guardian
The start of the new semester is a time that is not only stressful for students, but for faculty as well. Differing opinions arise within the campus community on the ability for faculty to perform duties with a new workload.
First semester stress
The mental brain-drain, which is familiar to all after the first midterm, is currently upon the Wright State University community. As students are able to slow down after the stress of the first half of the semester, professors continue to face struggles which may go unrecognized.
The first half of the semester allowed for faculty to exercise the newly implemented workload policy, which impacted a large amount of faculty.
The policy regarding faculty workload, determined whether a their workload, or amount of classes required to be taught would increase or decrease.
This determination was based on offsets, or a faculty members’ scholarly productivity outside of the classroom, which further credited the member to their profession. These offsets often take the form of research and publication of work.
A high dedication to one or more offsets would determine the amount of courses a faculty member would be required to teach.
The familiar stress of midterms on top of the new policy made for a change that arose differing opinions among faculty.
Stress and work overload is an issue recognized by WSU often, usually targeted towards the student population. WSU’s prioritization of students’ mental health has been more apparent among the campus community compared to previous years.
The faculty had contributed to the effort of improving students’ mental health through creating meaningful relationships with students and going through proper mental health training to be prepared in situations involving mental health.
Faculty are a major part of the WSU community, stresses and mental health issues faced by faculty members are an important issue.
The university prioritizes faculty mental health with available resources, though some faculty point increased stress to the new policy, while others have a different outlook on managing workload.
Contributing factors & opinions
The importance of destigmatizing and calling attention to mental health by university officials, like Provost Amy Thompson, has made many students aware of the many resources offered at WSU.
WSU has continued to advocate for mental health and provide the community with counseling at the Counseling and Wellness Services center.
Additionally, WSU has promoted Suicide Prevention Month in September, created events for World Mental Health Day and provided numerous resources for those in a crisis are provided on their website.
These efforts have all contributed to the de-stigmatization of mental health issues such as depression, stress and anxiety.
For faculty, mental health resources, like counseling, can be time consuming when attempting to balance several classes, but are also available from WSU.
WSU Human Resources offers the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which, according to the website, provides short-term counseling and additional services. Services include mental health sessions, work-life resources and referrals, life coaching and several other services to improve stress and help manage areas of life.
These services are free and available to all employees of WSU.
For some faculty, however, managing mental health is in correlation with ability to manage workload.
While the policy does not guarantee a higher amount of work for faculty, members claimed it is highly likely.
According to faculty member Bobby Rubin, a highly involved professor in the College of Liberal Arts and president of AAUP-WSU, obtaining a decreased workload is a challenge.
“The vast majority of faculty are teaching at least one, if not two extra classes per year than what they previously taught,” Rubin said.
Rubin also noted that with a decent amount of faculty members leaving the university this past year, this is not taken into account with the increased workload.
The university recognized the higher retention rates, being up 5.5%, according to Provost Thompson’s newsletter, crediting the increased enrollment to faculty.
Rubin asked, “Now that enrollment is back up, why are we not replacing faculty who were lost with full-time faculty?”
With high enrollment and limited faculty, this leads to increased class size, causing a stressful workload.
The policy was initially created with the intention of aligning WSU with peer universities, such as University of Dayton, as to enhance scholarly research and retention rate.
Members of faculty worry that the desire to align with peer universities’ policies may take away from valuable qualities of WSU.
“[WSU] should do what we are good at doing, and that is having faculty with enough time and enough resources to dedicate that to our students in a way that we’ve been known for ever since the inception of [WSU],” Rubin said.
Rubin’s passion for the students is one that is shared across the WSU faculty, which many claim is the reason the new workload is manageable.
Dr. Mary Rucker, chair of the Department of Communication and author of political work, claimed that the new policy has resulted in an increased personal workload, but that the work has been manageable.
“When I keep my perspective on the student and interact with the student, whether it’s an increase in workload or not, the students make it worthwhile, because we are all there because of the student,” Rucker said.
Rucker claimed to have found the new policy implementation manageable, regardless of the professor’s additional class, a perspective shared by many faculty members.
As many faculty hold differing views on the new policy implementation, a commonality is shared among WSU’s highly involved professors, which centers around students.
The choice to stick with the policy and continue involvement at WSU points to faculty’s passion for teaching and creating meaningful relationships to WSU students.
