For Some Anxious Faculty, Family Offers Relief

An ever-contracting job market and expectations to juggle teaching, research and administrative duties can contribute to many faculty members’ anxiety. However, faculty with close family relationships, including parents who are academics, are less likely to suffer from anxiety, according to preliminary research findings.

“Having family nearby who can offer different types of support—financial, social or emotional—can definitely make a difference in how much anxiety and worry surrounds the jobs,” said Natasha Tonge, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Mason University, whose own mother moved nearby and often helps care for Tonge’s two toddlers. “If I’m in a pinch and need to stay up late to finish a grant application, just knowing that I don’t have to coordinate childcare on top of everything else relieves a lot of stress.”

Although many studies have focused on anxiety among students, there’s a dearth of comprehensive data about faculty anxiety. And that’s something Tonge and her co-authors wanted to change with the release of a new study on faculty anxiety, which was preprinted earlier this month and is currently under peer review.

Marina Holz, co-author and dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at New York Medical College, said she and her colleagues often talk about feeling anxious about looming deadlines, but that without definitive data, it’s hard to know if they’re unique or if anxiety “is an across-the-board feeling for many professors.”

So, to get large-scale information on faculty anxiety and learn how it could be mitigated or exacerbated by factors such as family support, academic rank, discipline and having an academic parent, Tonge, Holz and two other researchers analyzed survey responses of 2,106 professors across 62 higher education institutions of varying types—including public research universities, liberal arts colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions.

The study found that faculty rank was one of the biggest predictors of faculty anxiety, with tenure-track assistant professors showing the highest anxiety scores. And just getting a job on the tenure track often requires many early-career academics to make a big move, typically far away from their social support networks.

“Working in academia over 1,000 miles away from any family is really tough,” one respondent said. “We have young twins, and my husband is a professional, so we are both in stressful jobs trying to raise kids without support. Definitely the worst thing about academia.”

But researchers found that while it may help, tenure isn’t a cure-all for faculty anxiety, especially when professors don’t have family nearby.

“The fact I live alone and that my close relatives live far away is a constant source of anxiety and depression even though I am a successful tenured faculty member,” explained one respondent. “It hasn’t gone away after tenure.”

Additionally, the survey showed minimal difference in faculty anxiety levels across institution types, with one exception: Professors at HBCUs and HSIs without strong support systems had much higher levels of predicted anxiety than those at other institution types. However, professors at HBCUs and HSIs who did report having close family relationships or an academic parent had predicted anxiety levels on par with faculty at other institution types.

“People who work at HBCUs and HSIs may come from a different background, work with different types of students and face all sorts of academic biases that probably affect people’s anxiety levels,” Holz said. “They also may have different relationships with their families. These findings imply that for those people, family really matters and helps to alleviate anxiety they may otherwise feel.”

Close family relationships and having academic parents also lowered predicted anxiety levels across faculty ranks and most academic disciplines. Marta Elliott, chair of the sociology department at the University of Nevada at Reno, has written about mental health and the workforce. She wasn’t involved in the study but said the findings reflect her experience and offer valuable new data on the underresearched subject of faculty anxiety.

“I had two faculty parents, and it was a huge advantage for me because I was raised in this culture and don’t feel like an outsider,” she said. “My mother was a department chair and I’m a department chair. I’d call her all the time with my dilemmas and we’d talk about it. Academic parents have experience, and they can be great consultants.”

Elliott also agreed with the paper’s conclusion that institutional interventions focused on building supportive environments could alleviate faculty anxiety, especially for those who are first-generation academics or don’t have family nearby.

“Social support protects people from depression and anxiety,” she said. “Having a family that’s supportive provides an alternative if things go wrong. What’s particularly stressful about academia is not getting tenure, which is why the tenure-track professors are most anxious. If you have a family or place to escape to, they can tell you you’re all right, because higher ed is not going to tell you you’re all right.”

For those without that family support, the authors of the paper suggest that colleges and universities could develop targeted support programs for early-career faculty that are explicitly designed to acknowledge and address anxiety, offer more flexible working conditions and on-campus childcare, and foster stronger community connections, particularly for those faculty without an academic parent.

“Social support and how big of an impact it can have on mental health doesn’t get as much attention as individual interventions,” said Tonge, co-author of the study. “We see a lot about wellness, personal accountability and learning how to be more mindful. But institutions could also consider how to support faculty more holistically—not just what they can do to relieve their own anxiety, but how they can lean on others and receive additional social support.”

And as the survey found, some faculty members are eager for their institutions to take those suggestions seriously.

“Faculty, not just students, need communities of care within their schools,” one faculty respondent wrote. “It feels like—and I often think—that no one gives a damn about me, my work, anything at my place of employment.”