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When Student Care Becomes Unsustainable for Faculty
Chavella T. Pittman, Dominican University
I'm overwhelmed with teaching/mentoring students. . . . And the university doesn't value my . . . labor devoted to supporting students."—Woman faculty of color at a research university
Faculty care. We care about students’ learning, their well-being, their development, their futures. We care enough to redesign assignments, rewrite policies, overhaul entire courses, and re-imagine whole semesters when circumstances demand it. I’ve spent decades helping faculty implement effective yet efficient teaching practices in support of their success and well-being.
But in recent years, something has shifted. Increasingly, the institutional expectation is not only that faculty care, but that we should provide student care endlessly—expansively, exhaustively, and without limits.
In my work with faculty and campuses nationwide, I’ve noticed that the meaning of “good teaching” has quietly started to drift. It’s shifted towards a model in which faculty perform significant amounts of student care—addressing students’ personal, emotional, logistical, and sometimes crisis-related needs, in addition to pedagogical care.
Emerging research suggests that the more faculty take on student care responsibilities( no matter how much they truly desire to help), their burnout increases, and this has negative outcomes for faculty well-being as well as student success (Eisenberg et al., 2024).
What Counts as “Student Care”?
Faculty often describe student care as:
Responding to personal crises
Helping students navigate bureaucratic or logistical barriers
Providing emotional reassurance
Extending flexibility far beyond course design
Adopting roles of social worker, therapist, crisis counselor, or parent
Offering individualized support unrelated to learning conditions
In other words, student care attends primarily to needs outside the instructional sphere. It is responsive, relational, and deeply humane. But it is also boundless—because students’ needs are boundless. When institutions position student care as a hallmark of “good teaching,” they implicitly transfer responsibility for student support systems onto individual faculty, who cannot possibly meet these needs at scale or alone.
Pedagogical Care Is A Different Form of Care Entirely
Pedagogical care, by contrast, is the care we extend through teaching:
Designing clear, transparent assignments
Building predictable structures that also include flexibility
Creating meaningful opportunities for practice and feedback
Using inclusive teaching methods that support varied learners
Setting boundaries that foster autonomy & model well-being
Providing opportunities for connection without becoming the connection itself
Pedagogical care is bounded by instructional purpose. It isn’t about solving students’ external problems—it’s about designing and facilitating learning in ways that acknowledge students’ humanity while still centering the academic mission.
When we do not differentiate between these two forms of care, faculty often feel a pervasive pressure to “do everything” in their teaching. And it means institutions erroneously interpret pedagogical care primarily through the lens of personal service to individual students rather than through the accurate lens of systemic design for learning.
Understanding Faculty Care: Three Forms of Labor
Conversations about faculty care labor are often reduced to “emotional labor,” which individualizes both the work and the burnout. But teaching—especially when entangled with student care—requires at least three forms of labor. I discuss these more fully in my book Empowered (Pittman, 2025), but in short here’s what they are and how they might show up in faculty’s teaching labor (and overwhelm or burnout):
Emotional labor is producing, modifying, or repressing your own emotions while teaching. In pedagogical care it shows up as staying patient, encouraging, approachable. In student care it looks like absorbing students’ distress, frustration, or crisis.
Affective labor involves managing students’ emotions and relationship dynamics in the classroom. As pedagogical care it comprises building trust, creating belonging, or fostering engagement. As student care it involves maintaining endless availability, constant reassurance, or enmeshed personal connection.
Cognitive labor refers to the thinking, planning, strategizing, and problem-solving required to get and keep teaching up and running. As pedagogical care it encompasses designing assignments, curating content, or creating structure. As student care it entails a ceaseless tracking of each student’s circumstances, exceptions, and needs.
When student care is normalized as good teaching, faculty perform all three forms of the above labor at intensities that exceed what any one person can sustainably provide.
The problem isn’t that faculty are unwilling to care. The problem is that student care has become a structural expectation for teaching masquerading as individual faculty virtue.
The Institutional Drift Toward Boundless Care
Over the last decade, many campuses have experienced a rapid expansion of what “good teaching” is assumed to include (Mowreader, 2024).Syllabi are increasingly expected to be comprehensive wellness documents. Faculty policies are scrutinized through a “customer service” lens. Students often seek immediate, individualized support from faculty for challenges that used to be navigated through institutional offices.
At the same time, the landscape students inhabit truly has changed—financial instability, political climate, caregiving responsibilities, and competing demands are real. But rather than investing in robust, accessible institutional supports, many campuses rely on faculty to absorb these pressures directly via their teaching.
This drift isn’t always stated outright. Instead, it shows up subtly when administrators or teaching center staff say to faculty:
“Faculty who care about students/student success would…”
“Students need a place to process…”
“Faculty should anticipate that students need …”
“To protect students’ fragile mental health you should…”
“Students need you to understand…”
“Faculty who are committed to [insert current institutionally valued principle] would…”
Even well-intentioned teaching literature often collapses student care and pedagogical care into one category of “student support,” blurring the boundaries and magnifying expectations of faculty labor.
When every student problem is framed as a problem faculty must personally solve, teaching becomes structurally unsustainable.
A Path Forward: Redefining “Good Teaching”
A sustainable and effective model of teaching would treat pedagogical care as required, as it is fundamental to our teaching role and student learning. It would also treat student care as optional and bounded. That is, faculty can choose to engage in student care—and many of us will—but it must not be the default definition of good teaching. And this model would include institutional student care as essential because good teaching requires campus systems that must meet the student needs that faculty cannot and should not meet individually. In other words, we must shift the question from, “How can faculty care more?” to “What forms of care most effectively support learning and belong within the faculty teaching role?”
To move forward, we also need teaching culture, scholarship of teaching and learning conversations, and administrative expectations to adopt three commitments:
Name the conflation explicitly.
The scholarship of teaching and learning, administrators, and faculty should clearly differentiate student care from pedagogical care rather than treat all student support practices as interchangeable.
Protect and reward pedagogical care as instructional work.
Faculty should be supported, evaluated, and rewarded in review procedures for their often invisible pedagogical care that improves student learning and not shamed for not investing inordinate labor into unacknowledged student care.
Re/build institutional student support systems.
Good teaching is dependent upon institutional investment in student care. When institutions frame faculty as the primary responders to student needs, they absolve themselves of the responsibility to create robust, accessible, well-resourced support infrastructures.
Closing Thoughts
It boils down to this: Faculty should reduce their student care labor and reinvest in pedagogical care. Not because students don’t deserve support, but because student care is a structural need that requires structural solutions and pedagogical care produces learning. Good teaching is not boundless student care labor. In fact, that type of teaching leads to faculty burnout and overwhelm with negative outcomes for both faculty and students. Instead, good teaching is bounded, intentional, pedagogically grounded care that supports learning, respects faculty labor, and is embedded in a university ecosystem capable of meeting student needs holistically.
References
Eisenberg, D., Lipson, S. K., Heinze, J., & Zhou, S. (2024). The Healthy Minds study: 2023–2024 faculty and staff national data report. Healthy Minds Network. https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/HMS-2024-Faculty-Staff-National-Data-Report.pdf
Mowreader, A. (2024, January 30). Student wellness tip: Helping faculty help students. Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed.
Pittman, C. T. (2025). Empowered: A Woman faculty of Color's guide to teaching and thriving. University of Oklahoma Press.
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