Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 2 (2022)
Continuing to Labor in A Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture
Genie N. Giaimo
Middlebury College
ggiaimo@middlebury.edu
Introduction—Yet Another COVID Semester
I initially wrote this piece at the beginning of fall 2021, as the Delta variant was surging, to prompt our field to challenge the rhetoric around pandemic-era learning modalities and worker responsibilities. Since then, every 3 – 4 month period appears to correspond with a new COVID-19 variant and subsequent surge, in the United States. I updated this piece while I taught winter term (online) during an even larger rise in cases with the BA.1.1 Omicron variant. Now, we are seeing a rise in BA.2 create another surge this spring semester. Since late fall, transmission rates at my institution have hovered around 10% (though testing has significantly declined) and the end of fall term was book-ended with another sudden and stressful campus-wide return to virtual learning. Each semester this academic year has been precipitated by a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions like masking and regular testing. Each semester this academic year has once again been disrupted by the pandemic.
The world has moved on quickly and suddenly after each new surge, despite the rapidly growing hospitalizations and deaths accompanying the fall and winter surges. Because my academic year starts late—after Labor Day and the Jewish High Holy Days—I had the uncanny experience of looking to colleagues’ experiences across the country to see my future. Many of my colleagues returned to in-class learning. Some were teaching without vaccination mandates, others without mask mandates, many expressed fear in returning to the classroom while yet others were teaching in-person for most of the previous academic year. The flexible work policies put in place during spring 2022 have all but disappeared. A return to in-person teaching and tutoring—has become the default even as surge after surge wreaked havoc on class attendance, student/faculty/staff well-being and health, and instruction continuity. Since the fall, I know of several people who plan to exit our profession or who have already left.
While in fall 2021, I felt like the pandemic would never end, I now feel like the pandemic has ended. In its place we have localized idiosyncratic policies and messages of moving on, even as cases creep back up to fall 2021 levels. Perhaps this is what it means to move into endemicity—an endless disruptive cycle of infection peaks and troughs punctuated by absent policymakers and the end of mitigation practices. While the pandemic hasn’t ended in actuality for the purposes of our lived experiences in the United States the pandemic is over. It is a strange liminal space to occupy when the threat of COVID-19 is still omnipresent for me even though ~60% of Americans have antibodies from previous infections (Mandavilli, 2022).
This piece builds on one published in Praxis in the summer of 2020. A lot has happened since then. After the spring lockdowns, racial justice protests, and harrowing election year. At that point, we faced a very different kind of experience in the pandemic. It was still new. There was no vaccine. We weren’t sure that masks prevented people from becoming ill. We had periods of lockdown to “flatten the curve.” Now, many of us are teaching and laboring in the sixth, seventh, or even eighth semester of the pandemic and institutional responses seems to have fractured even more than I thought was possible when I wrote my original piece. While furloughs and freezes (hiring and salary) are still occurring, the great restructuring of higher education appears to have slowed down—or perhaps is less newsworthy—and in its place the “great resignation” (a term shamelessly borrowed from the NY Times comment section) or #NotDyingToTeach (Kelsky, 2021) remains the topic of the day. Teachers and professors and even administrators are quitting in protest over what they see as the refusal of institutions to protect them.
The stories are harrowing. The professor with a baby on the way who begs their students to wear masks while brandishing a sonogram. The departmental chair who resigns after realizing that the institution has refused to put in place a sensible indoor mask mandate. The teacher who quit during their first class—their students left to scramble to find a replacement so they can graduate on time. The immunocompromised lecturer—who has survived multiple bouts of cancer—required to teach in person and who cannot retire because they need the health benefits (Svrluga, 2021). These are just some of the stories I have heard. Institutions removing online teaching options, even as cases peaked again in winter, and are ticking back up again this spring. Other scholars are collecting stories at their colleges and universities to counter the “fetishization of the normal” (Weineck, 2021) and the risk shaming faculty and staff are encountering in yet another COVID-19 semester.
Many of us are burnt out. Many of us are heading for the exits. Many of us are unwilling to die for our profession.
Yet, amidst these stories of resignation, there are also stories of people who eagerly returned to the in-person classroom. People who were excited to open their physical writing centers to students. People who could not wait to do in-person tutoring work. I have to admit, I am not part of this group.
At the same time, I am growing increasingly alarmed at administrators (and sometimes faculty) advocating for getting back to “business as usual,” the backlash against online modalities because of “Zoom fatigue,” and the frenzied approach to work that I am witnessing in aspects of my job as well as professional service work for my field. It seems like so many of us have been holding our breath for over two years, waiting for in-person events and programming to return, are now speeding up and churning out more things than ever before. The number of events is dizzying: hundreds every week at my small liberal arts college…
How Did We Get Here?
A lot has changed from the early days of the pandemic. Our work shifted from a triage model—so prominent in spring 2020—to one that could have more sustainable working conditions but for all the external forces pressing upon how we labor. Contrary to a more sustainable, greener, and non-space dependent writing center model that embraces digital technologies, we are contending with a return to pre-pandemic in-person models while the pandemic, yes, still rages on. At the same time, however, that external forces like administrators and politicians beckon us back into buildings to do work that many of us have done remotely for over two years because they believe that in-person work is better, despite all the metrics that identify the ways in which remote and flexible work schedules lead to happiness and more productivity. Even as I review articles for this journal, I am struck by this small but very vocal group of folks who see in person learning and work as the default and view the past 2+ years as a kind of aberration. A thing that needs to be corrected with in-person, community-focused work.
And while I applaud writing center practitioners (and others) who are trying to make their spaces more inclusive, more community-focused, and more activist-oriented, I wonder, have we not been doing this work all along as we have reshaped our writing centers during the pandemic? And, if we have not, is the online modality to blame for failure to do this work or is there something else happening that has affected our communities? The conflation between community and in-person face-to-face engagement is concerning; it assumes all writing centers have communities worth preserving, it also presupposes that community building is contingent upon in-person work. Finally, it places pressure upon writing center administrators to create community which even in pre-pandemic times was difficult. In pandemic/endemic times, is community—as we have previously understood it—even possible to create in our centers?
To answer these questions, I to turn to labor studies. The expectation that during a worldwide crisis we carry on with business as usual or, worse, are morally obligated to make the world better through our work, is not something that I think we organically or instinctually feel—though some of us may cope with uncertainty and stress in this way in the short term. I believe that we have been pressured by our institutions and higher administrators to embrace “workism” and place it at the center of the forces motivating our professional lives.
Workism is “the idea that work is not just a means of economic production but is also a centerpiece for identity, community, and purpose” (Blair, 2006). We find workism in the hallways of our institutions when faculty and staff talk about what they do as “labors of love” or “not even real work” (Jaffe, 2021). We read about workism in our profession where people talk about going above and beyond—despite struggling with very real and personal mental health or other concerns—for their tutors and students (Wooten et al., 2020). We feel the very real and toxic effects of workism when we burn out on our positions and consider leaving them altogether.
Workism guides so much of how we handle our day-to-day administrative and teaching duties, particularly within writing center administration. Whether it is the incredible amounts of advisement and research mentorship that we provide to our students, or it is the extensive training and professional development opportunities we develop for our tutors, or it is the service work and other work that we do for free as our budgets and support structures shrink, or it is the countless weekends, nights, and summers that are taken up by any manner of crises or needs, many of us place our work at the center of our identities and community building at the center of our work. I personally cannot count the number of colleagues who I have heard working for free or without contract above and beyond their job responsibilities for “the students.” I cannot count the number of colleagues who have struggled with unaddressed health concerns because they have been unable or unwilling to step back from their administrative work. I cannot count the number of times that I have personally pushed past my own self-imposed boundaries to offer students and colleagues around me extensive feedback, extensive advisement, extensive amounts of care during off-work time. And while some of workism might seem like it is a personal choice (however one might understand systemic pressures as they work upon our decision-making processes), workism is also encouraged and uplifted by academia and other businesses because austerity measures make it impossible to do the amount of work we need to do with the current staffing and support we have. In place of meaningful support, we are given “wellness days” or self-care newsletters. We have wracked our brains to make our training more approachable and shorter. We have wondered what more we can do to make our workplaces “thrive.” As I have written elsewhere, these shallow interventions are simply not enough to mitigate the stress that austerity and crises create in our work. It not all in our control.
Previously, I wrote about the opportunism of administrators and institutions during the early stages of the pandemic. Before we knew how long this crisis would take to unfold, higher administrations were cutting entire tenured departments, were furloughing, or freezing current staff and faculty, and were crying about a budgetary crisis. At that point, we were less than a couple of months into the pandemic. These tactics have continued throughout the pandemic while, at the same time, the S&P500 had returns that were nearly double (~21%) the average rate of returns over the past 50 years (~11%). Of course, since the winter, those returns have been tempered by months of chaos abroad and at home. The war in Ukraine, energy crises around the world, and the creeping dread of rising inflation rates and continued supply chain shortages. Still, institutions’ endowments have grown and colleges—at least ones with hefty endowments—have became richer overall during this crisis. Yet even as these institutions saw their endowments growing, they engaged the same wage theft tactics (hiring freezes, salary freezes, and scarcity circumstances) that were used by many of the wealthiest institutions in the United States before the pandemic. Of course, the situation is more dire at public institutions, community colleges, HBCUs, and other perennially under-funded institutions. But even wealthy institutions are crying poverty to justify underhanded labor tactics such as hiring freezes, pay freezes, retirement and other benefit cuts, etc.
Navigating the Austere Writing Center
You may ask, what does all this money stuff have to do with my writing center work? Everything, I would argue. Because as the slice of the pie has disappeared and left only crumbs, many institutions cut the budgets and positions of writing center administrators. There have been countless stories on our listservs and at our professional events of writing centers losing half or even all of their budgets. Writing centers that have been operating without directors or leaders for years on end. Writing Center administrators that have had to choose between working for free and shuttering their centers. The labor crisis has come home to roost in the writing center, and, like the pandemic, it is sabotaging our daily lives, at home and at work. And without support or sustainability, I argue, we often revert to what we believe that we, as WCDs, can control. We can control how much we work. We can also control how much we center or make meaning through our work. We can control how we interact with and support those around us. This is the insidious way in which kindhearted and moral people become subsumed by workism. We beat back the tide of austerity and neoliberal extraction by creating “homey” and otherwise pleasant spaces on our campus. We create community but without acknowledging the very real labor that it takes to create these communities (Concannon et al., 2020), especially when we are drawing from personal—rather than institutional—reserves to do so. In short, we deplete ourselves further as our institutions become more and more extractive.
The pandemic has created a perfect storm where those of us who have become indoctrinated to workism culture are also being acted upon by administrators who share similar values (though they benefit from workism culture because the neoliberal university operates and benefits under such extractive models). So, as we confront our own struggles with or usages of workism to get us through, we are also being guilted, bullied, or downright forced into working beyond our means, beyond our capacities, and, sometimes, against our better judgements, by external forces.
Counternarratives about Pandemic Writing Center Work
In place of workism rhetoric about our work—particularly teaching and writing center work—we need to uplift our accomplishments and recognize the limitations we have been laboring under for the past several years. We also need to recognize and examine the labor issues that the pandemic has cracked wide open in our field but that were around well before March 2020. While it is easy to gloss over the past two years and to see them as an aberration, because of the climate crisis and other disasters that shape our everyday lived experienced, this disruption might be better described as our “new normal.” Therefore, we need to contend with everything that the pandemic has revealed. Some of it is dismal. But some of it might allow us to engage with our work in new and more sustainable and healthy ways; to rethink our pedagogies and practices and untether them from workism.
So, I propose here three counternarratives to those that populate my inbox, my professional meetings, my hallway and zoom conversations, and even some of the scholarship that is being developed about the pandemic. These three counternarratives are:
The pandemic has sabotaged much of our daily lives—not just work—and the fact that we are coming through with any output is miraculous.
Online modalities are as good, or perhaps even better, than in-person tutoring and teaching.
We don’t need to pivot quickly in one way or the other just because our administrations dictate that we do. It is OK to slow down our responses.
1. The pandemic has sabotaged much of our daily lives—not just work—and the fact that we are coming through with any output is miraculous.
The scarcity model that many of us are laboring under is affecting our work and our lives. The fact that we have been able to do anything during the pandemic—host a tutor training or a Zoom gathering, write a chapter for an edited collection, or, even, move our centers online—is entirely miraculous. Don’t let the bootstrapping rhetoric of disaster capitalism get you down. Don’t denigrate what you have accomplished over the past two years. Don’t call the online pandemic writing center suboptimal or otherwise lacking. I saw colleagues in NEWCA, SLAC-WPA, IWCA, ECWCA, RMWCA, SWCA, and countless individuals and other groups move mountains in their work. I saw colleagues running free workshops, webinars, and mentorship meetings and I contributed my own workshops on wellness and care to our profession. I also saw a lot more discussion about the missions and values of such professional organizations and re-framing our work and goals as moving beyond the annual conference model so prominent in our field to include inclusive and anti-racist practices.
The levels of connectivity in the past two years may be unprecedented—particularly given the regional structure of many affiliate professional organizations—while the amount of conversation about our profession is far more visible and critical. It is worth honestly retracing and reflecting on that work without allowing the messages of optimization and deficiency to steep in. Of course, these messages are older than the pandemic—administrators touting new ventures to generate revenue otherwise lost from State and other funding sources—yet the pandemic has ripped away the blinders, so to speak, on the financial sustainability of many institutions in higher education. And, as Enstad (2020), identifies, revenue generating projects cannot solve the crisis in higher education. So, while we might feel like our extra labor and embrace of workism in a time of crisis will make the difference between X and Y (a flourishing writing center and a defunct one, perhaps), the system is rigged and individuals are left to contend with the poor decisions of the collective. So, when faced with suboptimal work conditions—which so many of us contend with anyway in non-pandemic times—we must reframe our labor so as not to be complicit in this unjust “workism” culture. Instead, our work should be seen as miraculous (and finite), particularly in this extended moment.
2. Online modalities are as good—or perhaps even better—than in-person tutoring and teaching modalities.
Over the past several months, I have heard a lot of negative sentiments about online teaching modalities. People apologize for yet another meeting in Zoom or yearn for the time when we can all be back in person. Some people are scheduling meetings in-person without offering modality choice while others are fully online. This kind of hybridity started in the fall and continues as we experience peaks and troughs in COVID-19 infection rates. Our day-to-day engagement has become chaotic and unbound from early pandemic conventions. This rhetoric has crept into the ways in which we talk about tutoring as well as our administrative work. I have read articles under review that lament the lack of community in writing centers during the pandemic. And, while I appreciate my own community, these kinds of arguments give me pause—why are we responsible for creating community in our workplace? What is wrong with working online? Are these wistful laments yet another part of our work(ism) culture (and work indoctrination) that lead us to frame everything with do within the rhetoric of optimization?
I want to challenge framing online modalities as suboptimal, because it upholds a lot of incorrect assumptions that are not in line with the issues of social justice that so many of us concern ourselves with. So, here is a list of all the ways in which in-person work—especially meetings—are non-inclusive:
They reward and encourage those who are comfortable speaking in front of a group.
They reward and encourage neurotypical people who do not struggle with fluorescent lighting, fragrances, focusing, sitting, being still, navigating physical space etc.
They reward and encourage people who view the office as a social space vs. a production space or an action space.
They reward and encourage people who are comfortable in their bodies and who do not mind having their bodies on display for others to see—this includes dress, physical appearance, gender identity, racial identity etc.
They reward and encourage people who do not struggle with mental health concerns like PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.
They reward and encourage people who are not afraid to traverse physical spaces—mainly, white cisgender people without disabilities.
So, taken together, in-person meetings—and this can extend to teaching and tutoring—privilege extroverted abled people who are white, who are neurotypical, who do not have mental health concerns (or physical health concerns in pandemic times), and who do not struggle with gender or body dysmorphia. It also demonstrates what disability scholars mean when they say that “disabled embodiment” is overlooked in many discursive (and physical) spaces (Snyder & Mitchell, 2001; Kumari Campbell, 2009), replaced by a normalized and normalizing embodiment. In never previously being given modality options, how many of us simply pushed past our pain and discomfort to perform our work?
This work model also rewards people who are comfortable navigating power structures through personal engagement rather than official (albeit potentially opaque) channels. People who, again, think of their work as a place filled with social opportunities and friends rather work as a space filled with microaggressions, violence, or other forms of negative stressors that come from interacting with people and institutions in physical space (especially during a pandemic).
For the rest of us, in-person meetings can be great sources of anxiety, stress, and yes, even danger. I didn’t realize how much discomfort I felt in navigating physical workspaces until I didn’t have to for over a year. I didn’t realize how happy I was not to think too much about my appearance or how my body is perceived by others. I didn’t realize how much more quickly I got my work done because people weren’t volunteering me for additional work at the spur of the moment or stopping by my office to talk about workplace politics. I realize that I am describing feeling a reprieve from the invisible labor that marginalized faculty (people of color and women) regularly perform (Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, 2017), yet the labor continued, I was simply more adept at calibrating my response and setting up boundaries online. Moving online was a way for me to engage in less rumination about work. Moving online gave me the critical distance I needed to prioritize my goals and shed unnecessary busy work. Moving online was revelatory for me.
I am not alone in finding online work revelatory. In a host of articles by the New York Times, folks like to split the virtual workers and the in-person workers into separate and equal camps, which, again, as the comments section and actual research shows isn’t true. Most folks enjoy more online time away from the physical constraints of their workplaces. Most folks like not having to commute for hours. Most folks like more life-work balance.
In educational spaces, online teaching modalities have expanded in popularity, scope, and possibility. The recent creation of the Online Writing Centers Association and resources like Hewitt’s The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors (2015) demonstrate the popularity and growth of online writing tutoring modalities and the demand for empirical research on this subject. Elsewhere, and during the pandemic, people are writing about how virtual spaces have helped radically alter teaching practices and made online teaching more attractive (Lee & Hubbs, 2021). It has also been found that faculty satisfaction with online teaching has increased with institutional support and engagement (Lederman, 2020). Additionally, for people with chronic health issues or other barriers, remote learning could be a “game changer” (Morris & Anthes, 2021). So, there are a lot of positive outcomes of online education for faculty as well as students that we are only starting to explore in earnest because of the pandemic and our move to remote learning for several semesters.
Of course, even as I write this, I acknowledge my position as a child-free academic with decent internet access. I know that systemic inequities plagued many people in the pandemic. Many women with children experienced additional burdens placed on them in a remote environment. Many unhoused students and students with poor internet access struggled to attend school. These issues often intersected with women leaving the workforce to care for (and educate) their children. I would argue, however, that these burdens are a perfect storm of weak social policies, aging infrastructure, and antagonistic labor practices rather than an issue with online work and learning environments. This statement doesn’t make it any less true that women left the workforce in overwhelmingly larger numbers than men or that attendance plummeted among working class students and students of color. But I think it warrants exploration around systemic inequities that have always existed but that the pandemic placed in stark relief.
Additionally, many corporations stepped-up to close the internet access gap by offering free wi-fi to students in need during the pandemic. Institutions paid for students to have emergency wi-fi hotspots and laptops. Why aren’t these (and other) equalizing opportunities offered in a regular year, outside of a crisis? I haven’t seen such offers since early 2021. Why aren’t we invested in better internet access from an institutional and infrastructure standpoint?
So, in thinking about the move to online tutoring and teaching—was the modality the reason for dissatisfaction or, again, did the pandemic dampen most experiences? Was the issue the online modality or the ability for students to access internet? We must not blame online educational models, but the systems of inequality that create educational gaps.
3. We don’t need to pivot quickly in one way or the other just because our administrations dictate that we do. It is OK to slow down our responses.
My final point is similar to my first point. Just because the whole world seemed to move on from the pandemic sometime around the summer of 2021 (and then again this winter, 2022) doesn’t mean that we are all ready to move on. This coming year might be the first year where COVID-19 is considered endemic—a part of our daily lived experience—and, given the prolonged stress of managing living with the virus, we WCAs might want to ask ourselves what we are honestly capable of doing workwise. Do we need to create the same kind of community that writing centers had prior to March 2019? Do we need to do more and more with less and less? Do we need to create solutions to problems that aren’t really problems (like, for example, whether online tutoring is good enough for our institutions?)
Of course, I believe we need to become comfortable talking about writing centers outside of evaluator models, especially in the era of COVID-19. Instead of talking about what we cannot do, we should reflect on what we have accomplished. And, in addition to showing gratitude to ourselves and others, I hope we can work towards preventing even more burnout in our professional lives by engaging in sustaining and affirming practices including:
Wellness and care policies and programs
Community-oriented goal setting
Honest assessment of bandwidth
Labor-forward policies and practices
This issue of labor is one that is critical to the work that we do. And, in a strong pro-labor environment, we might not want to scramble to make up for perceived losses over the past several years. We might, instead, reorient and reimagine our work in more sustainable, more manageable, and less extractive ways. Already, around the country workers in different industries—including higher education—are advocating for their rights. Student workers are demanding safer working conditions and better payment. Non-tenure track faculty are doing the small at liberal arts colleges not so unlike my own. Let’s imagine a future where work is sustainable, safe, rewarding, justice-oriented and helps us grow.
Until Next Time
My pandemic writing center work has taught me that crises are likely to be a regular part of the work that we do as we face the outcomes of climate change and encroaching neo liberalization. If we are continually in crisis than that becomes the new “normal” and we must respond in kind. So, in an endemic writing center, we cannot count on business as usual no matter what platitudes are offered to us from on high. We must find a new more sustainable and kinder way forward. I know I am ready for that and am finding it in online spaces (yes, still). What are you doing?
Works Cited
Blair, J. (2020). Capitalism, Workism, and COVID-19, Harvard Political Review.
Concannon, K., Morris, J., Chavannes, N., & Diaz, V. (2020). Cultivating Emotional Wellness and Self-Care through Mindful Mentorship in the Writing Center. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 44(5-6), 1-19.
Enstad, N. (2020). Why Revenue Generation Can’t Solve the Crisis in Higher Education, Or, What’s That Smell? Journal of Academic Freedom, 11, 19-22.
Hewett, B. (2015). The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. United States: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Jaffe, S. (2021). Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Hachette UK.
Kelsky, K. (2021). #NotDyingToTeach. The Professor Is In Blog.
Kumari Campbell, F. (2009). Having a career in disability studies without even becoming disabled! The strains of the disabled teaching body, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 13:7, 713-725.
Lederman, D. (2020). Faculty Confidence in Online Learning Grows. Inside Higher Ed.
Lee, A. & M. Hubbs (2021). How COVID-19 Created Opportunities for Teachers and Students. Campus Technology.
Mandavilli, A. (2022). The Coronavirus Has Infected More Than Half of Americans, the C.D.C. Reports. The New York Times.
Morris, A. & Emily Anthes (2021). For Some College Students, Remote Learning Is a Game Changer. The New York Times.
Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group. (2017). The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39, 228–245.
Snyder, S.L., & Mitchell, D.T. (2001). Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment. Public Culture 13(3), 367-389.
Svrluga, S. (2021). With students back on campus, many faculty members are worried about covid — and pushing back. Washington Post.
Thompson, D. (2019). Workism is making Americans miserable. The Atlantic, 24.
Weineck, S. (2021). The Dystopian Delta University Organ loss, cancer, pregnancy — at Michigan, in-person teaching exemptions are hard to come by. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Wooten, C. et al. (2020). The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration. Utah State University Press.