The Care in the Academy Project
Welcome to the new home of the Care in the Academy project. From July 2022 to December 2023, thirty-eight individuals from campuses across the United States worked on "Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy after COVID-19," a Mellon-funded project that asserted that care must be placed at the center of the faculty and staff experience in higher ed.
We began with a recognition that, since 2020, administrators, faculty, staff and students held higher education together with willpower and determination. In the midst of a global pandemic, administrators juggled increasingly complex financial realities and public-health considerations. Faculty and staff were repeatedly asked to adapt to new workplace circumstances, juggling in-person, hybrid, and online modalities for teaching and student outreach. Campus communities expended tremendous energy in reimagining educational programs, support services, and co-curricular activities to reach students located on campus, within commuting distance, and multiple time zones away.
Even before the pandemic began, higher ed was riven with fracture. The competing stresses born by institutions following the 2008 economic crash, state-level funding cuts, the expansion of contingency, the student debt crisis, and the increasingly politicized attempts of legislatures to direct curriculum decisions within institutions themselves took a toll on those who worked within our colleges and universities. Deeply embedded legacies of racial exclusion, socio-economic gate-keeping, and gender-based discrimination continued to shape our student bodies and the professional experiences of all those involved in higher ed. Administrators, faculty, and staff across higher ed reported that they were burned out and exhausted.
This project was developed in response to these circumstances. In contrast to reactions driven by a mentality of scarcity and a desire to return to a normal that was already broken, we looked to generate forward-looking responses grounded in compassion and justice. We sought to recognize the distinct challenges our campuses faced while concurrently prioritizing the emotional, physical, and intellectual health and well-being of every member of our community. We needed leadership on these matters, and this project aimed to identify, cultivate, and support such leadership from members of all sectors of higher ed.
This project contended that compassion and care can be expanded beyond classroom activities to be centered and then applied to the work done by all members of a given campus community. What does it mean to imagine and generate structural change rooted in the principle of compassion? This project asked and answered this query first in the work of thematic teams that identified processes for turning abstract ideas into concrete change, and then in the work of teams organized by institutional type that took action on their individual campus and disseminate information and action plans across higher ed.
PHASE ONE
Phase One of this project organized thirty-six higher ed administrators, faculty, and staff into three teams, each focused on a particular area of concern:
Trauma: How do we work toward ensuring that our interactions with—and support of—all members of the campus community are trauma-informed (particularly in light of the effects of an ongoing pandemic)?
Disability: Academia, as a sector, is predicated upon ableist understandings of how humans work best and transmit knowledge. How might we acknowledge and transform this ableism in and out of the classroom, particularly as we consider the implications of the ongoing pandemic and the long-term effects of COVID on teaching, learning, and working?
Pedagogy: What does it mean to practice a pedagogy of care that extends to faculty and staff who are coming to terms with the effects of the pandemic on instructional modalities and student engagement?
Our work on each of these questions was driven by a collective commitment to justice. All three teams read widely about burnout, care, and mutual aid, and worked diligently to identify actions large and small that would make meaningful change in academia. You can read our reports in future posts, as well as learning about Phase Two of the project.
