Sustained Strain: Faculty Work Strain Under COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic initially placed college and university instruction into an emergency remote mode. The subsequent periods of the pandemic presented new challenges. This paper examines changes in faculty work lives in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the pandemic and reports on results from surveys of faculty at three selective liberal arts colleges in 2020 and again in 2021. Specifically, we investigate faculty experiences with work strain. Drawing on job demands-resources theory, we develop an analytic framework that examines the effects of status resources (gender, race, and tenure), work domain demands and resources (teaching and research resources, student demands, emotional labor demands, and scholarship demands), and home and family demands (caregiving). Our findings suggest that work strain was elevated in both periods and that only tenure among the status resources predicted less strain. We show that the sources of elevated strain shifted from teaching and research demands in the initial phase of the pandemic to emotional labor demands during the first full academic year of it.