[I…Just…Can’t…I Really…Can’t…-cr]
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
In April 2020, Lise Aubry learned that the daycare her children attended in Fort Collins would be closed for several weeks. Aubry, an assistant professor in the Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology Department at Colorado State University, and her husband, Professor Dave Koons, began to juggle childcare at home for their two kids – ages 4 months and 4 years old – and work responsibilities.
Aubry said she was happy after a successful day early on of balancing these duties, having completed at least six hours of work.
“Reflecting on the day, I felt pretty good,” said Aubry, also an instructor for the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology at CSU. “But I realized there might be other people – single parents, young faculty starting out – in the university setting who were really struggling.”
Aubry decided to conduct a survey of similar faculty across the United States to gauge how they’ve been impacted by COVID-19. She teamed up with Professor Zhao Ma from Purdue University and Theresa Laverty, postdoctoral fellow at CSU, as both have experience with designing surveys.
The results, “Impacts of COVID?19 on ecology and evolutionary biology faculty in the United States,” were recently published in Ecological Applications, a journal from the Ecological Society of America.
Among the findings, the team said that the majority of more than 600 faculty who responded to the survey were negatively impacted on personal and professional levels, and struggling to find a healthy work-life balance.
Aubry said female faculty, early-career researchers and those in caretaking roles were most impacted by the pandemic. In addition, people who did not have access to a private room to use as a home office were significantly more dissatisfied with their work-life balance.
Researchers hope that administrators will use these data when discussing faculty promotions or tenure applications, and that the study will also increase recognition for the problems being faced by faculty during the pandemic.
Aubry said she also views the survey as a “manifesto, a record of what we’re experiencing” that will be important as we recover from the “massive blow that COVID-19 has been to many people’s careers and personal lives.”
Research provides more evidence on pandemic’s impact
To conduct the survey, the research team used a list from the National Research Council to target 94 ecology and evolutionary biology doctoral programs in the United States.
More than 600 faculty responded, providing a response rate of more than 23%.
Ma, a University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, said what the team discovered adds to existing evidence and increases the recognition of the impacts of COVID-19 in an academic setting.
“Female and junior faculty members, people who have more responsibilities for either children or elderly relatives, are impacted more and are more stressed,” she said.
“We talk about the ‘leaky pipeline,’ and why women gradually disappear in STEM fields,” said Ma. “By the time you get to being a full professor, you wonder, ‘Where did the women go’? The pandemic will most likely exacerbate what we’ve seen.”
“This will affect faculty for years to come, and the long-term effect is concerning,” she said. “This needs to be addressed by university leadership, so that faculty can continue to be successful.”
Researchers said they are also seeing serious impacts on graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Ma said that she is spending more time mentoring students and postdocs than she did prior to the pandemic, which takes away from research activities.
“They are so worried and stressed,” she said. “In that particular time of their career, it’s already stressful. They don’t know what may happen after the pandemic, if their funding will continue, if they will have a job or what the job market will look like. Our survey really documents the need to look at the long-term impact.”
Anxiety for younger researchers
Laverty, as a member of the research team, is one of those early-career researchers. Her postdoc position in the Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology department ends in May 2021, and that’s already creating anxiety for her.
“It’s definitely stressful being on the job market,” she said. “I don’t have the same home life that Lise and Zhao both have, with children at home. But the effects from the pandemic will impact early-career researchers over the next several years.”
Laverty said the team found that while options like putting a pause on the tenure clock might be helpful for some faculty, promotions should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
“Rather than issue blanket statements or policies, we suggest that universities acknowledge the difficulties faced by faculty, especially women,” she said. “Administrators need to recognize that what is happening will affect tenure and promotion applications.”
‘Suck it up, cupcake’
As part of the survey, Aubry and the team included an open comment box, which was completed by one-third of the people who responded. Some faculty responded with a line, while others typed out pages.
Aubry said the comments were insightful – ranging from thoughts on home schooling older children, balancing work and life as a single parent, and the need for increased mentoring of students – and are grouped by themes in the research paper.
“A big proportion of the respondents were full professors, and what I appreciated from them was a recognition that they were doing okay, working from home, but they showed concern for their students and younger colleagues,” she said. “It showed that our larger community of ecologists and evolutionary biologists is not just resilient, but also empathetic, and we need empathy now more than ever.”
On the flip side, the scientists also received a few negative remarks, including one faculty member whose advice was: Suck it up, cupcake, we’re all in this together, so what’s the big deal?
Aubry said this person “couldn’t be more wrong. Not everybody is impacted the same way by the pandemic.”
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Every week it’s a new group
Women
Ethnic minorities
The obese
Etc
Next week it will be left-handed people…
Left handed people are sinister.
Also, grandma in Planned Parent facilities in Democrat districts. Collateral damage from super spreaders of social contagion. That said, the lead cause of excess deaths is still Planned Parenthood et al operating under the liberal quasi-religious philosophy (“ethics”) for social progress.
Planned + Parent[optional suffix] = institutionalized solution to unwanted carbon units
“We talk about the ‘leaky pipeline,’ and why women gradually disappear in STEM fields,” said Ma. “By the time you get to being a full professor, you wonder, ‘Where did the women go’? The pandemic will most likely exacerbate what we’ve seen.”
The emphasis on STEM for all, with special emphasis on diversity, is a crock. Jobs in the academic setting even more so. Colleges and universities in the U.S. are graduating far more STEM students than are needed based on growth and replacement rates. Take engineering for example. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 1.7 million engineers in the US., and growth in the field over the next decade is projected to be a meager 14,000 per year. So higher education needs to turn out about 54,000/yr, 40,000 to cover attrition plus another 14,000 new jobs. At least 150,000 new students enroll in engineering each year, with a retention rate of around 80%, so the U.S. is turning out more than 2x the need. My alma mater alone is approaching an engineering enrollment of 25,000, enough to supply nearly 10% of U.S. demand for engineers. While that is an exceptionally large enrollment, there are >400 institutions in the U.S. with accredited engineering degree programs.
I have colleagues in the sciences who hastily retreated from the oversupplied, dog-eat-dog, publish or perish world of academic research and teaching. In the wider job market, I wonder what percentage of STEM graduates end up in non-STEM jobs. Is it any wonder that there is a growing credibility crisis in “post-normal”science (e.g., activism, non-reproducibility, academic misconduct, media “rock stars,” and feeding at the trough of politically motivated government funding)?
As for COVID, yes it is impacting academia, but comparatively little other than inconvenience. Enrollments this fall were up practically across the board. At least the whiny professor still HAS a job and a livelihood, which is more than many can say. I have worked in higher education administration for the last two decades, and we could actually benefit from some healthy contraction in the bloated world of academia.
“I have colleagues in the sciences who hastily retreated from the oversupplied, dog-eat-dog, publish or perish world of academic research and teaching.” Saw it happen, went from publish, or equivalent expression of thought, every so often to statistical counting, been reading lots of repeats, overlap to varying degrees. Those devoted to teaching (my experience is that teaching is more difficult) were hurt the most. Lots of other causes, incautious attempts to fix, we always had women and others so-named discriminated against, more than a little unavoidable. Wildlife, fisheries, and now all this applied ecology shows a big lack of homework, rise of advocacy. Management and assessments, while intertwined, were taught in their proper context. Now it’s too often save the “earth.” Just check the evolution of ecology texts. If they spent more time in the ocean they would understand. Some still do, produce amazing stuff.
I know a very good researcher, never got a high school degree, worked his way up from “dirty” work and beyond that he was so good at, retired more successful than a high percentage of Ph.Ds. We had a janitor once that I got transferred to the motor pool because he was so mechanically gifted. No offense to janitors, some of these new homebodies will get this education. There may be at least a small silver lining in the current situation.
Speaking of silver linings!
https://apnews.com/article/jackson-climate-change-lakes-environment-glaciers-ccd0ab2c11be89acf55f7781cd2ea050#:~:text=JACKSON%2C%20Wyo%2C%20(AP),so%20centuries%20of%20glacial%20runoff.
“Sediment suggests Teton Glacier longer-lived than thought……In some form, Larsen found, the Teton Glacier — the range’s largest — had persisted through many, many millennium, including times when the climate was warmer than it is today. Potentially, that resilience could repeat.”
STEM = science, technology, engineering, math.
‘They’ tried to amend it to STEAM, because Art is veryvery important tooo; but that effort failed. Using the ‘A’ for Academia would dilute the meaning of STEM the same way Art would have.
Cupcake (and others like her) is Academia, and is not in a STEM field.
(The fresh-outa-school engineer grad we hired last year lasted 6 months before he decided on being a financial advisor)
Jordan Peterson has written a lot about women in the modern workforce. One his more interesting articles was about the “gender paradox”: as societies become more gender-equal in their social and political policies, men and women become more different in certain aspects, rather than more similar.
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/the-gender-scandal-part-one-scandinavia-and-part-two-canada/
If they’re still getting their checks, they shouldn’t be complaining.
What I found interesting was that the impacts of Covid-19 she talked about were impacts from the shut-downs, not impacts from the disease itself. I understand that the disease is awful and deadly to some, but my biggest fear regarding it has been the constant threat of suddenly having to quarantine and have my (admittedly privileged – I still have my job and my kids are independent adults) life thoroughly disrupted.
As a follow up study, compare and contrast the “impacts” on faculty with the impacts on nursing home residents.
The word you were looking for is omphaloskepsis which means “the contemplation of one’s navel”.
She’s got problems? No those are first world problems. real problem’s like dying or having your spouse die, or having your business and fortune wiped out, she is not speaking to.
Suck it up, buttercup.
suck it up cupcake gets MY vote
would appear their own evolutionary biology is slipping if they cant cope with FAR less than grandparents did with multiple kids work and tiny homes no handouts or childcare etc
Sarah Palin appears to have originated the derogatory “suck it up, cupcake”, which of course is a variation of (and slightly more derogatory) “suck it up, buttercup”. The irony is that “suck it up, cupcake” couldn’t be more applicable than to those screaming and crying about a “stolen election” and “election fraud”. Trump lost, so suck it up, cupcakes.
“successful day early on of balancing these duties, having completed at least six hours of work.” – so does she work part-time to maintain that balance, or just not expect to actually work some hours while employed?