How Professors—Not Administrators—Got Students Through the Pandemic

And what that tells us about the administrative bloat that has permeated academia in recent years.

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I was taking calls around the clock. Zooming with students around the country and in places as varied as Italy and China became the norm, writing emails at 5 a.m. was common, and practically all of my students met my toddler virtually during the first half of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down colleges and universities and scattered students through the nation and the world. While trying to keep my students calm, focused, and learning throughout the pandemic was a huge challenge and I regularly changed how we would run my classes to adapt to the realities of being off campus, my students and I were in this together and I had no intention of letting them slip into depression or lose credit. In fact, almost every professor whom I spoke with regularly in the midst of the pandemic had no intention of walking away from our almost sacred obligations to help educate and lift up our students, and we threw ourselves into our roles more deeply than before. 

Class times and teaching became so much more than just an investigation of purely academic material; COVID-19 gave me and many others the chance to get to know our student’s families, their hometowns, their local communities and their varied struggles with the shutdowns. I had a window into the very personal and private lives of my students, and I was happy to share mine as well. We became a close community that supported each other throughout the darkest days of the pandemic and despite the losses that many were facing along with great distance and intermediated interactions, I was honored to be able to backstop my students who still managed to thrive, learn, and move their lives forward despite many setbacks.

At the same time, my students repeatedly told me that they felt ignored and abandoned by the school and the many administrators that they hear from on a constant basis, from the dean of students to the many personnel in the Residential Education office. While it may be the case that various individual administrators tried to help, students seemingly felt that they were not being heard or helped while story after story emerged about various professors creating community, from care packages to group Zoom cookie baking. And these stories were not limited to my own school, Sarah Lawrence College; tales of professors stepping up around the country emerged and even though stories of faculty burnout were common, another narrative is warranted now, too: Professors were instrumental in getting their students through the pandemic. A new nationally representative survey from College Pulse of more than 2,000 students demonstrates that during those trying months, students felt far more close to their professors than to the huge cadre of administrators whose sole jobs are to work directly with students to meet their personal needs. 

What is particularly notable with this new narrative is that despite colleges making  student development and wellness both in and outside the classroom a top priority, the legions of administrators who have been hired and work with students to promote countless initiatives aimed at promoting inclusion, health, and professional, academic, and interpersonal development were not where students really turned in a time of need.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    As a student at a public university a few years ago, I barely knew any administrators. All the relationships I had were with professors or students or TAs/grad students (except in one or two cases). I had pleasant interactions with a few admin people, and definitely got help from them with things like going abroad or going to the job fair. But they mostly seemed ancillary.

    I think there are certain administrators who do important work. But many/most could probably go. Maybe students would learn a bit more independence that way. Once I learned I could basically do what I wanted at school, i only went to administrators for perfunctory meetings (usually so they could sign something).

    That said, I might have put TAs/adjuncts/grad students in some cases higher than professors. Not all, I had some excellent professors. But I also had ones who didn’t care and who basically had their TA do all the work. I knew plenty of TAs and adjuncts who worked super hard to make sure students succeeded and basically got paid minimum wage. If universities paid according to how much students got from their mentors, these people would make more than most deans.

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  2. Frederick F

    Preach it. The professors who I stayed in touch with all worked tremendously hard to adapt to virtual learning.
    My academic advisor was my professor, which was great. I much prefer that to an administrator without connection to teaching.
    We of course need administrators to facilitate teaching and research, but at this point a skeleton crew of faculty seem to be facilitating administration.
    Glad we have this data now.

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  3. Avatar photo
    CP

    This piece needed some more edits, but on the whole, I agree. Professors are motivated by love of subject and students (and have made sacrifices in terms of pay, etc, to do work they consider meaningful). There are some stinkers, but nothing that justifies the “we are here to advocate for you against your mean ol’ professors” stance that I often see administrators take. There are lots of AMAZING (and necessary!) administrators who really do care as well, of course. But there is no excuse for the “administrative bloat” taking over universities especially. For a long time, American liberal education was second-to-none and the creative, rigorous thinking it inculcated helped us win “cold” and “hot” wars against autocracies and made good citizens willing to participate in institutions (rather than passive manipulable consumers designed to be cogs in machines). I pray it (or something like it) can serve that role again. And yes, in part I hope I can continue to be employed doing something I deeply believe in.

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    Nathan

    Therapist working at a major university in the South here. Let’s get some more precision on what you mean by “administrators.” Your claims are awful broad assertions backed up by the type of polls Sarah rails against. Anyways, you should see our service provision numbers throughout the pandemic to present. And I can assure you there is a high chance I spend more time working directly to support a student who is a client throughout their semester than the overwhelming majority of their professors. Glad you’re investing in your students but some of us in “the bloat” are existentially committed to some important work with students and have the numbers and the client satisfaction data (“opinion data”) as well as student outcome data to prove it too.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Nathan

      Also if one of your students “slip into depression” I hope you refer them to one of us folks who are qualified to do the work. We appreciate it when professors notice and take the time reach out.

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    Beth

    "It turns out that the group of people that students believe “see them” the most are not those who are actually tasked to see them. Instead, it is professors who students report being central to their collegiate experiences."

    Why does Professor Abrams think this is surprising or noteworthy? Shouldn't professors be central to the collegiate experience? Also, shouldn't good professors "see" their students, i.e. take an interest in their students' intellectual development and growth? Is Professor Abrams saying that professors really only are "tasked" with being disinterested imparters of rarified knowledge to classrooms of personless vessels to receive said knowledge?

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  6. Avatar photo
    Beth

    When faculty would like to run the residence halls and dining operations, interface with the myriad accrediting bodies and state regulatory agencies, manage the student health center, run the career center, order the library materials, manage the recreation center, write the marketing materials, recruit the students, manage the financial aid distribution and all the compliance, keep the books and financial records, hire people and take care of the onboarding, take care of all the buildings, manage the network, run the payroll, keep the registration records and comply with FERPA, then Professor Abrams may speak of administrative bloat. Some will lament why all this stuff is necessary, but they fail to see that managing a modern higher education institution is a complex enterprise. They are effectively small towns on themselves, and without all the fancy "extras" (residence halls, rec centers, athletics, etc.), the reality is that many colleges would fail to attract enough students in a highly competitive marketplace to cover the instructional costs. It's all well and good to say we should have colleges like in the 70s - the problem is that students don't WANT a college experience like the 70s.

    And hint, the "woke" stuff - which really seems to be his central beef - isn't usually coming from the administrators, in my experience it's often led by faculty demands to "do something." Further- if Sarah Lawrence was even able to open at all during the pandemic, I doubt it was the faculty that was doing the round the clock coordinating to get the campus up and running, the health & safety protocols in place (with the most stringent protocols often demanded most vociferously by faculty!), and managing the caseload so that the state wouldn't make them shut their doors again for case counts.

    Faculty are critically important, do not get me wrong. But this perpetuation of the faculty/administrative divide is just ridiculous. Perhaps it is out of hand at Sarah Lawrence, I don't know, but the majority of private higher education colleges outside of the elites are only just managing to breakeven, and it's usually the administrators' heads that are first on the chopping block when times get tough.

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    1. Ben M

      Yes. This. There is a lot of hubris and bad reasoning in this professor's article. Apparently, "being seen" is the same as student support. As someone very much on the front lines of higher education during the pandemic, I am confident I put in more hours than the typical professor. I'm grateful for all of my colleagues and friends on the faculty side. Their work is not just important, but should be the main focus of what higher education is. However, some seem to forget that they are not the ones following up with the reports they submit about struggling students. They aren't the ones handling the conduct cases that arise. They do not sort out the insane housing requirements brought about by Covid restrictions. They do not ever have to "be the bad guy" in any situation requiring compliance with unpopular rules.

      I think Prof. Abrams needs to leave the bubble and pop on down to the Student Life office. I believe the romanticized bloom would fall of that rose pretty quickly.

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    Kevin C. Smith

    I dunno. At both my undergrad and post-grad, I do not remember even wanting to feel “close” to an administrator yet I was very close with several professors.

    I would have found it incredibly strange had the survey resulted in something other than what it did.. but maybe that’s just me.

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  8. Mid 20's All-Around Good Guy

    Preach Mr. Abrams. As a relatively recent college grad, this could not resonate more. I went to a good (not elite) private school school in Texas*, and while we're not Yale, the problem is obvious there. I was lucky to have most of my costs covered through scholarships, but seeing annual 5% increases in tuition while the University pats itself on the back for the new army of Diversity and Inclusions officers that so few students actually use was nauseating. You would think that there is a huge market opportunity for University to cut tuition, fire all the worthless administrators that spend their time simply trying to justify their career choice, and give more recourses to talented professors that make or break their educational experience. Keep the recreational and basic health resources and trim the fat. Kids don't need Education Phds to help them fit in and be happy, they'll figure that out themselves. From what I know about Purdue, they seem to be getting right.

    *Go Frogs

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  9. Mathew A

    Very much agreed to all of this. Go back to the 70's or 80's (before bureaucratic bloat really took off) get a baseline level of admin, and cut most/all of the new bloat.

    Then reduce tuition based on the now MUCH lower cost of going to college.

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    Seth B

    I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this article, but it reminds me of when one of my students produces a correct answer that is, alas, "supported" by invalid reasoning. It's like cancelling the sixes in the fraction 16/64.
    Yes, there are too many college administrators. But colleges are primarily places where students go to *learn*... not to "be seen". ("I'm off to college. Here's hoping I'm SEEN by the cafeteria workers and especially by all seven associate assistant demi-hemi-semi Deans of Student Success!")

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      Michelle O

      This is an underrated comment and an excellent point.

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    2. Mathew A

      I think the point is most of these new bureaucrats are supposed to be student support. But they aren't actually supporting the students

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        Seth B

        The point is correct. The argument is poor.
        As David and Sarah are wont to say on Advisory Opinions, "bad facts make bad law". Well, bad arguments make for bad interpretations.
        One interpretation of the data Abrams cites would be that colleges need *more* administrators who job is to ensure that students are "seen" by everyone on campus - or that the existing administrators (and even the cafeteria staff!) need more training by diversity consultants or whatnot. Look at the article in Inside Higher Ed to which Abrams links:
        https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/02/10-ways-strengthen-connections-students-so-they-feel-seen
        There are good arguments to be made that college administrations need serious pruning. This was not one of them.

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        1. Mathew A

          I'm sure your right, that someone somewhere will think the answer is always more bureaucratics

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