Care in times of the pandemic: Rethinking meanings of work in the university.

In this paper, we challenge the meanings of work that marginalize academic activities associated with care and contribute to inequitable gender divisions of academic labor. We argue that the pandemic crisis and the revision of the meaning of "essential work" that accompanied it has served as a catalyst for such concerns to get a hearing. But while there has been significant attention paid to domestic care demands and their impact on academic labor, there is less focus on the caretaking work we do in the university even though the gender unequal distribution of teaching, mentoring and service work has also intensified in the pandemic. We argue that this is in part due to the institutional discourses and practices that continue to devalue many components of everyday academic labor. In order to challenge these limits, we extend ideas from Feminist political economy (FPE) to university settings in order to reframe academic labor and revalue care as an essential part of it. We offer two suggestions, connected to FPE methodologies, for gathering and reconceptualizing data on academic work to push the project forward. We conclude with the argument that this project of revaluing caring labor is essential for achieving goals of equity, faculty well-being, and the sustainability of universities.

INTRODUCTION

Numerous studies have documented that COVID‐19 has exacerbated and laid bare a deeply gendered crisis of care in higher education (Anwer, 2020; Boncori, 2020; Guy & Arthur, 2020). For many, the closure of universities and need to work remotely coincided with the shuttering of schools and childcare centers, making the home a site where university labor, homeschooling, and dependent care took place simultaneously. This near impossible situation brought some institutional attention to the usually neglected unpaid caregiving responsibilities of faculty members and the inequities that result when these are not taken into account, especially for women faculty (Minello, 2020; Nash & Churchill, 2020; Tofoletti & Starr, 2016). Policies to address these issues have included reduced workloads, extensions of tenure clocks, and increased resources and support for caregivers.

Yet there has been less focus on the unequal distribution of care work taking place within the university in the context of the pandemic. Emerging research shows that women faculty have disproportionately covered intensified work such as mentoring, support for students, tending the survival of academic programs, community outreach, and other important labor holding the university together in the crisis (Docka‐Filipek & Stone, 2021; Shalaby et al., 2020). While administrators have acknowledged how essential these contributions have been to university life, it has been through a language of personal devotion and willing sacrifice, not a rethinking of what “counts” as academic labor or a recognition of its unequal distribution. Academics themselves have often used a similar language to describe this work: as motivated by care and responsibility for the well‐being of students, colleagues and higher education as a whole (Misra et al., 2011). While there are a number of factors that contribute to the gendered distribution and devaluation of academic care labor, this article focuses on the problems associated with the hegemonic framing of this work as a labor of love and personal devotion, rather than an essential economic activity that sustains institutions. This limits the possibilities for recognizing and supporting the multifaceted nature of academic work, stymies efforts to mitigate the negative impact of the COVID crisis on the care burdens of academic women, exacerbates gender inequality in academia, and challenges institutional sustainability.

In this article, we engage ideas from feminist political economy (FPE) to reframe the diverse activities that make up academic labor in order to challenge these limits. Feminist political economy has a long history of providing key insights into the power dynamics that devalue caring labor in both its unpaid and paid forms (Ferber & Nelson, 1993; Folbre, 2001). It also provides a robust challenge to that devaluation, advocating for new measures and policies to foster the “public recognition and reward” that such labor deserves (Folbre, 2001, 232). It has illuminated the ways that neoliberal restructuring has created conditions for heightened exploitation of care workers and consequent depletion of essential care contributions (Rai et al., 2014), which is applicable to the neoliberalization of universities. And the attention it pays to the diversity of productive activities that make up the economy in a more‐than‐capitalist world provides a framework for recognizing and nurturing work practices that do not conform to neoliberal capitalist constructs (Gibson‐Graham, 2006; Nelson, 2010). Utilizing these approaches can help to identify the multiplicity of economic activities that make higher education what it is and expand space for recognizing and valuing care activities within the university.

We believe that the pandemic crisis can serve as a catalyst for addressing this important but overlooked issue. The crisis has exposed the entrenched gender inequalities in the academic workplace, and spawned a search for new solutions to promote more inclusive and equitable outcomes in terms of faculty workload and reward (Malisch et al., 2020). The pandemic crisis has also exposed just how vital previously invisibilized institutional care work was to the functioning of the university. The crisis then, has served as both an impetus to work to transform academic labor policies and practices, and expanded space for such concerns to get a hearing in universities. The reframing we are suggesting in this paper also has potential to contribute to a broader rethinking about meanings of work, work with dignity, and appropriate recognition in post‐pandemic times.

In this sense, while we are writing in the context of the pandemic crisis, we are also inspired by Rosalind Gill's call for attending to the unspoken spaces of academia and the expanding rift between the work being done by faculty and what is recognized as work in the neoliberalizing university (Gill, 2009). We emphasize the connections between the world defined by the pandemic and what can, and what should, come afterward. We agree with Gill on the need for new ways of seeing the caring aspects of academic work as labor (Gill, 2014) and recognizing the gender inequity and unsustainability of current forms of recognition and reward. Therefore, we utilize and offer two interrelated moves in this direction: the first intends to unearth the often hidden and unequal burdens of caring academic labor in order to make them institutionally visible and valuable. The second aims to subvert existing quantification tendencies to explore the diversities of work we do and the rift between the time spent on work that is essential but invisibilized and the time left for the work that “counts.” Both moves build on the current momentum created by the pandemic, which has intensified this work in an unprecedented manner, made poignantly clear its unequal, gendered and racialized distribution, while also laying bare how essential it has been for ensuring institutional survival.

Our interest in this project took hold in a set of conversations we had in the first months of the pandemic regarding our own unsustainable labor burdens. We found ourselves sharing experiences about our usually hidden work activities and feelings of burnout, stress, exhaustion, anxiety, and constant fear that we were not doing enough, things we had never discussed with each other prior to the pandemic given that we work in very different academic contexts. The first author is an associate professor who works in an internationally ranked private research university in Turkey and has caring labor responsibilities at home. While the faculty is somewhat protected from Turkey's ongoing political turmoil due to the university's global reputation, the government's growing conservatism, authoritarianization, and the onslaught on academia and liberal intelligentsia is felt by everyone. The second author, in contrast, is a full professor with no child or eldercare responsibilities. She works at a branch of a major public research university in the U.S. that serves a large Black and immigrant population. As we shared our experiences, we began to connect them to the institutional practices of the academy writ large. Regardless of the differences in our situations, we could see how the pandemic conditions sharpened the need to institutionally reframe academic labor. We noted the increased attention being given to the value of care work in the economy‐at‐large as the pandemic crisis unfolded and wondered how this could impact higher education. We recognized that the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated our own and our colleagues' caring labor burdens and exhaustion reflects a longstanding pattern (Guarino & Borden, 2017; Misra et al., 2011). We also shared ideas and strategies for change as they were unfolding at our own universities. In sum, we felt that a reframing of academic labor could help us better explain why, at the end of most days, we (along with most of our colleagues) were exhausted, even though we didn't have anything “concrete” to show for this exhaustion. Perhaps it was time to shift the meaning of academic labor to better account for this work.

Therefore, while this paper is focused on making a conceptual contribution by applying frameworks from FPE to the university setting, it is also an attempt to make meaning about and foster change in our own situations (Ellis, 2007). Our inclusion of examples from our own experiences adapts the model set out by McCann et al. (2020) in integrating personal accounts with broader structural issues and struggles in higher education. We also follow ethical practices of social sciences by presenting these in a way that makes anonymization possible, so that the experiences of others are not made public.

The paper is organized as follows. We begin by discussing the hegemonic discourses of academic labor that invisibilize gendered care work and reinforce institutionalized gender inequalities. We then engage with the impact of the pandemic crisis on caring labor. Following that, we draw upon FPE to provide an analytical framework for re‐imagining the university workplace. Extending ideas from FPE, we offer two interrelated ideas for facilitating a work inventory and a reward structure that recognizes and values academic caring labor contributions. We conclude that this project of revaluing caring labor is an essential component of achieving gender equality in higher education.

WORKING IN THE GENDERED, CORPORATIZED UNIVERSITY DURING THE PANDEMIC

Academic work involves a diverse set of activities, but some of these are valued far more than others, particularly with the neoliberal marketization and corporatization of university life over the past few decades. The current governance perception that universities are just another industry that needs to be ranked and rewarded accordingly have led to an unraveling of the once integrated research, teaching and service activities for faculty members (Berry, 2005; Feldman & Sandoval, 2018; Frolich, 2011). Entrepreneurship languages have pervaded the academy, extolling the ideal of faculty self‐sufficiency and individualism (Damrosch, 1995). Research and teaching productivity expectations have been ratcheted up. A myriad of accountability and ranking schemes focused on research and, to a lesser extent, on teaching are now in place in almost every nation's higher education system and have become the metric by which faculty become “responsibilized subjects” who internalize these hierarchies of work (Gill, 2014).

Academics – especially younger, non‐tenured faculty – can feel terrorized by these ever changing and amplifying expectations of research (and teaching) productivity, which define what is “successful” or even just “satisfactory” performance evaluation (McCann et al., 2020).

The rift between the values that faculty see as central to academic work and the ways in which they are expected to conduct themselves for institutional recognition is widening (Robinson. et al., 2017). The rift has inspired a variety of individual responses that range from compliance to resistance, and from attempts to game the system to holding out hope that change is right around the corner (Anoubichr & Conway, 2021; Bristow, et al., 2017; Mackenzie & McKinlay, 2021). And yet these individual coping strategies themselves often become part of the vicious cycle from which academics feel they ultimately cannot escape (Bristow et al., 2019). In addition, the possibilities for adopting a particular coping strategy are conditioned by structural inequalities, such as gender.

Performance rubrics are often coded in a language of technicality and neutrality, based on myriad quantifications and rankings of research and to a lesser extent teaching, with campus service activities being the least recognized and valued of university work (Bird, 2011).

Yet critical scholarship has long recognized that these rubrics and valuation systems are neither neutral nor merely technical. The romantic and highly gendered notion of the entrepreneurial academic always working at his desk and in his mind, unencumbered by the mundane aspects of everyday life, is a dangerous myth that invisibilizes time poverty and its very much unequal distribution. This time poverty has three interrelated aspects. First, there has been an intensification and extensification of the things academics are expected to do on an everyday basis, ranging from responding to the bureaucratic requirements of accountability systems, meeting ramped‐up research expectations, addressing the needs of a diversifying student body in our classrooms to achieve retention goals, and surmounting the wide range of service work (Thomas & Davies, 2002). All of this takes increasing time, and workdays extend into evenings and to the weekends (Tofoletti & Starr, 2016). Second, the academic ideal of the unencumbered worker clashes with the fact that faculty members have care demands outside of work, and that these fall disproportionately on women (Tofoletti & Starr, 2016). Academics' supposedly flexible work arrangements can turn into never‐ending workdays for women with care responsibilities that carry a heavy if often hidden cost (Nikunen, 2012). Finally, the gendered divisions of caregiving work at home are reflected in the workplace. Compared to men, women faculty members take on greater amounts of less‐valued but time‐consuming emotional work with students and critical everyday “office housework” (Babcock et al., 2017; Guarino & Borden, 2017; Misra et al., 2021). Thus, women faculty often fall short of the neoliberal and masculine ideal of an academic that are coded in these performance measures, defined around a detached, self‐interested model and “weak relational commitment” (O’Connor et al., 2015). While the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid care work is a structural problem, neoliberal discourse frames it in terms private choice. This depoliticizes the gendered expectations and pressures that women face regarding both unpaid and paid caring work (OMeara et al., 2017) and contributes to the ironic fact that “women in academia are positioned as having equal opportunity to succeed within gendered inequality regimes, the existence of which is denied” (Nash & Churchill, 2020, p. 835).

These gender disparities and hierarchies of labor have been amplified by the COVID‐19 pandemic. As children's education went remote and care centers closed, academics with children found themselves facing ramped‐up unpaid childcare and domestic demands, with women disproportionately taking on this burden. With most universities shifting to remote work, homes became the workplace, and paid work and unpaid care were now carried out simultaneously in one enclosed space. A robust body of research has documented the physical and mental health toll of the pandemic on academic caregivers who are expected to be fully present from home for work and for children (Abdellatif & Gatto, 2020; Boncori, 2020; Guy & Arthur, 2020). Others reveal a disproportionate decrease in the time female academics have been able to devote to research, across the board, the disruption worse for those with children (Pettit, 2021b; Yildirim & Eslen‐Ziya, 2021). The disproportionate service burdens that women have taken on during the pandemic has had a negative impact on their careers and well‐being (Docka‐Filipek & Stone, 2021). The results of this aggravated inequality have shown up in academic publishing, with journal submissions by women academics decreasing and those by men were on the rise (King & Frederickson, 2020). The pandemic crisis has, in other words, cracked wide open the relationship between care and gender inequality in institutions of higher education.

Armed with this emerging research on the academic context as well as a spate of more general reports on the gendered labor implications of COVID‐19 (e.g., Madgavkar et al., 2020), faculty members attentive to gender equity issues have successfully pushed their university administrations to recognize and address concerns around domestic care burdens. Among emerging institutional initiatives are adjustments to tenure clocks, shifting research productivity expectations that acknowledge pandemic disruptions, and reduced service expectations (Clark et al., 2020; CohenMiller, 2020; Gonzales & Griffin, 2020; Pettit, 2021a). There have been diverse attempts to alleviate the care burden at home, through emergency funds and subsidies to support paid care help at home, leave policies, expanded care options, and more (Clark et al., 2020; Nash & Churchill, 2020). While these initiatives are focused on the current crisis, they also hold potential for inspiring longer‐term changes in the way that universities address the inequitable divisions of unpaid care labor at home and their impact on inequities in paid labor in the university.

Admittedly, these examples reflect shifts at mostly elite universities in North America and Western Europe. Other contexts have gotten less attention. In Turkey, the possibility for a university to launch such initiatives is dependent on the type of institution. In recent decades, new public and private universities have been set up in almost all cities of the country, many of which require significant teaching with very little time for or expectation of research. In contrast, there are a number of internationally recognized universities that pride themselves on staying on par with trends in North America. The university where one of the authors works is such a place. There has been some official recognition of the difficulty of maintaining work‐life balance under the conditions of COVID in these latter institutions, but that has not been translated into concrete policies. Still, the accumulation of examples of policy responses from Global North institutions, which internationally connected universities in the semi‐periphery countries such as Turkey often follow, may have an impact over time. We note this while at the same time being aware that contextually specific policies are needed to address the experiences of academics in environments such as Turkey where tenured jobs are more limited, academic freedoms are more tenuous and the economic and political pressures universities face are greater than in many global North contexts.

There is still a limitation, however, regardless of whether these emerging discourses and policies are adopted by more places. These policy discussions recognize and highlight the continuities between gender inequalities inside academia and unequal distribution of care labor at home. Yet, they do not address academic care work or its gender inequitable distribution. Definitions of academic work and success continue to be based, for the most part, on the idea of the autonomous entrepreneurial academic subject working to meet existing performance expectations. For instance, activities that produce particular kinds of research (those that bring in large grants and are published in select high‐impact journals) remain central to understandings of academic productivity and success in the pandemic. Calls to reduce service expectations during the crisis were meant to allow faculty to focus on the institutional definition of what's really important: research. While research and publishing are undoubtedly central to the work we do as academics, the pandemic has laid bare another pertinent fact for the economy as a whole, including academia: “service work” is in fact essential care labor (Docka‐Filipek & Stone, 2021; Jaffe, 2020).

THE PANDEMIC AND CARE LABOR INSIDE THE UNIVERSITY: CONTINUITIES AND RUPTURES

When the pandemic began, many university administrations circulated encouraging messages in recognition of the faculty commitment to student support, community engagement, and keeping the university together in unprecedented circumstances. These messages, often written in a positive and well‐meaning tone of “we got this!” were, however, at odds with many women faculty members' lived reality of feeling unsupported in this work (Fox & Anderson, 2020). Further, the “we got this” messages ignored the fact that just like the essential caring labor that has held our societies together during the pandemic crisis, this labor is unequally distributed by gender, and for those who do it, frequently overwhelming (Sprague & Massoni, 2005).

The care labor expectations and burdens we have discussed in the previous section mean that historically women academics have been more likely than men to be placed on “less prestigious” teaching‐focused employment tracks and/or service‐oriented jobs (Ivancheva et al., 2019). The relative devaluation of teaching compared to research also means that female and faculty of color disproportionately assigned to teaching positions make up a lower‐paid and contingent workforce (Cardozo, 2017). In addition, advising, mentoring, supporting research teams, tending programs and the like, have always been viewed as more “feminine” caring activities because of the complex interrelationships in academic work between gender and “women's lived experiences, organization practices and societal norms” (Özkazanc‐Pan & Clark Muntean, 2018, p. 380). Therefore, while it is relatively devalued no matter who is doing it, there is ample evidence that women and faculty of color, no matter their location or rank, take on a disproportionate share of it this work (Baker, 2012; Guarino & Borden, 2017; Nash & Churchill, 2020). As Cardozo wryly notes, “there is an inverse relationship between who cares and who advances” in academia (Cardozo, 2017, p. 409).

Another consideration is related to the widespread ethos that academic work is a noble calling, and that those who undertake it do so for intrinsic reasons such as devotion and love for what they do (McRobbie, 2016; Ross, 2000). This ethos is particularly salient when discussing gendered academic service work, which many women faculty, and particularly women faculty of color, approach with a sense of “duty” to support their students, colleagues, and higher education itself (Misra et al., 2011). However, when paid labor is associated with such motivations, it is often falsely devalued in an economic sense because the work is thought to be its own reward (England et al., 2012). Thus, this definition of work‐as‐love in higher education in general and academic care work in particular can be used to justify the oppressive working conditions of academics.

The limitation, therefore, with the administrative messages circulated during the pandemic is that although they recognize the crisis, their framing is predisposed to see these activities in terms of personal commitment and willing sacrifice, rather than as essential work. In this manner, they continue the historical tendency to value tasks that Brabazon (2015) calls the “housework of academia” (34) significantly less than published research, grants, and upper administrative tasks. The assumption that this work is motivated by intrinsic benefits can, however, end up naturalizing and justifying oppressive working conditions, even among those who are oppressed themselves (Alacovska & Bisonnette, 2019; Gill, 2009). Viewed from this perspective, such assumptions can reinforce the gendered organization of labor in higher education (Acker, 2006). And yet, the intensification and expansion of this work during the pandemic, as in the case of unpaid care labor at home, highlights this historical inconsistency between what is essential and what is valued, and creates a possible moment of rupture that can lead to more gender‐equitable definitions of academic work.

For example, the transitions universities have had to make to online and hybrid teaching could not have been possible without the faculty spending countless hours adapting course content and formats to online teaching, including figuring out new ways to connect to and support students in virtual classrooms. This experience was a potent reminder that many aspects of teaching labor have relational, caring components (Cardozo, 2017). Because women in higher education on average teach more than men and advise more students, including those students who need extra support, these burdens will likely be borne inequitably (Malisch et al., 2020). Relatedly, the health risks of returning to on‐campus activities will be much higher for those with greater teaching loads and less power of refusal. Further, students have needed more support while learning to navigate new teaching formats and dealing with the fallout in their own lives. As a result, the student care work that disproportionately falls on women and minority faculty has also intensified. Research into the effects of these shifts on higher education has shown that, once again, women faculty and faculty of color continue to take on crucial work sustaining diversity on campus, draining not just our time but also intellectual and emotional resources (Anwer, 2020; Tevis, 2021).

The case of Turkish universities, as experienced and observed by the first author, illustrates this. The need for student support at these universities went beyond guiding them through the transition to online systems and addressing the dislocations and fears of the pandemic. Turkey is facing a mounting economic and political crisis. There is record high youth unemployment of 24% (TUIK, 2021). The government is cracking down on student protesters (McKernan, 2021). Surveys show that more than 60% of young people do not see a future for themselves in the country (SODEV, 2020). The sense of isolation and uncertainty that students experienced when the pandemic sent them home added to their feelings of hopelessness. The sheer magnitude of the problem has meant that many faculty members find themselves providing significant support for students even while knowing that the macro‐level problems that they face are not something we can resolve. This support work has been very much gendered, which has become a topic of conversation about the otherwise “hidden” aspects of our work in WhatsApp groups and casual phone dialogs among academics, who also increasingly wonder what supports are available for them.

In addition to support for students, there has been an increased need to mentor colleagues through the uncertainties of the pandemic. In the U.S. context where the second author works, mentoring obligations for senior faculty, particularly senior women, expanded significantly as junior colleagues were trying to figure out how to best transition their courses online, adequately support students given new realities and needs, negotiate their career trajectory in the many cases where research stalled, and carry significant childcare and homeschooling burdens as their kitchens turned into classrooms. The budget uncertainties of the pandemic and administrative talk of program closures also fueled the need for increased mentoring and support for colleagues worried about uncertain futures. Further, it was again women faculty who made significant investments in documenting and addressing the dislocations of the pandemic for caretakers, doing, once again, the “institutional housekeeping” of equity work (Bird, 2011).

The service of simply keeping the university running in a time of crisis management also added to workload. Departments and programs facing financial and other crises have needed significant tending. This adds to the workload of faculty members as they participate in decisions on when and how to open campuses; how to operate facilities safely in COVID contexts; nurture ongoing collaborations across departments, centers and institutions; support vulnerable members of the university community, and so on.

These developments have brought to the fore the following realities. First, what used to be seen as “just” service work, and often belittled as a negligible aspect of academic work, is now clearly vital to the survival of programs, departments and the universities as a whole. Recognizing this creates an opportunity to revalue it. Second, the already skewed distribution of this multilayered work widened during the pandemic, with “caring” faculty likely to be punished if the disproportionate valuation of certain forms of productivity over others is not addressed. This is therefore a crucial moment and opportunity to rethink the meaning of academic work in order to get caring academic labor's true value reflected in evaluations, promotions, and academic workplace culture as a whole. In the absence of doing so, the future of higher education will only become more unsustainable. Finally, knowing that service work is often distributed unequally along gender lines means that, if unaddressed, pandemic and post‐pandemic conditions will also lead to intensification of gender inequality in academia. We need institutional discussions and practices that go beyond “we got this!” messages.

REFRAMING ACADEMIC LABOR: STRATEGIES, SMALL WINS AND DILEMMAS

While rethinking academic labor obviously involves work on multiple fronts, one clear need is a transformation in our shared understanding of what is acknowledged, measured, and documented as important work. We believe that FPE is useful for such a reframing because it conceptualizes care labor as a structural necessity and refuses the totalizing representations of capitalism that devalue such work. In this section, we borrow from these theoretical frameworks to outline two strategies for making visible and measuring the diverse components of academic labor.

The first idea we borrow from FPE is to classify the currently invisibilized and/or devalued forms of work we have been discussing thus far are under a broad umbrella of care labor. Feminist political economy scholars define this as work that is structured around service to others and/or involving caring motivations (Folbre & Nelson, 2000; Nakano Glenn, 2010). For a few decades now, FPE scholarship has focused on making visible and/or revaluing the enormous amount of caring labor, the majority of it done by women, that is essential to human flourishing in the economy. For instance, FPE scholars have challenged the inadequate metrics used to measure economic productivity for excluding or devaluing this work, from national income statistics to job performance measures (Folbre, 2006; Waring, 1988). They have also highlighted how caring labor fits into the diversity of values, motivations and economic forms that exist within workplaces themselves. As FPE scholars have shown, caring labor is essential to the functioning of organizations and economic systems – even those that define efficiency and productivity around masculinist ideals of individualism and detachment (Gibson‐Graham, 2006; Nelson, 2010; Steinberg & Figart, 1999). Reframing these aspects of academic work as care labor is an important move because it allows us to recognize it as proper work, requiring effort and resources that are not in infinite supply.

However simply recognizing it as work is not enough. Paid caring labor is recognized in the economy, but often devalued because it is viewed as an extension of unpaid caring labor and something to which women are “naturally” suited, rather than legitimately skilled work (Folbre & Nelson, 2000). Attention to intersectional politics is important, as class, race, and migration status structure the valuation of care work as well. Caring labor is not just gendered but also racialized (Nakano Glenn, 2010). In higher education, women of color face higher expectations to undertake support and service work than White women, and men of color taken on more than White men (Miller & Roksa, 2017). Thus a truly gender and race‐equitable approach would require a change in the flawed metrics of productivity in higher education, reinstating the importance of teaching, mentoring and student support work, underlining the contribution this labor makes to the university and economy as a whole.

Yet another issue to tackle is the widespread representation of the political economy of academia itself as an entirely neoliberal and capitalist sphere, in which there is no diversity or alternatives. Feminist political economy scholars have transformed thinking about the economy at large by showing it is made up of more than the activities of rational, self‐interested individuals in markets, drawing attention to essential contributions of unpaid household and subsistence labor as well as a diversity of motivations and processes. We can apply these insights to university settings. University administrators will often claim their hands are tied by the “realities of the market” when they employ discourses of competition and market discipline to justify policy changes, adopt corporate models of “efficiency” to evaluate academic labor, reframe students as “customers” and education strictly in terms of human capital development for the workplace and so forth. Interestingly, the critical literature on academic labor often reproduces this same discourse in their representations of capitalism as a totalizing force in higher education, where managerial techniques, performance rubrics, rankings, and curricular reform all line up under a regime of “total administration” to serve neoliberal agendas (e.g., McCann et al., 2020). Essentially, these representations, albeit from different power and ideological positions, all reproduce the idea that the logic of neoliberal capitalism now drives higher education such that there is no alternative.

But, as FPE scholar J.K. Gibson‐Graham (1996) argues, this representation of the economy and/or individual organization as subsumed to the neoliberal order, even when employed in service of social justice projects, can paradoxically contribute to neoliberal capitalism's continued dominance. When applied to the university, such representations help constitute the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial, individualistic, self‐managing subject and neoliberal measures of productivity and worth as the standard against which all motivations and contributions will be, for better or worse, assessed. This makes it harder to recognize or fight to support the diversity of economic practices and motivations that constitute the university and help it to achieve its goals. It also lends credence to individualist explanations that end up blaming academics who do perform undervalued care work for their own “imprudent choices” while failing to address underlying structural inequalities.

What Gibson‐Graham calls for, echoing a long history of FPE scholarship, is a transformation of our understanding of the economy by acknowledging the diversity of non‐capitalist practices that exist in the sometimes unruly and incoherent spaces of our economic system, including universities. This is a strategy of reading for difference rather than dominance. Reading for difference allows us to foreground the diversity of economic activities that contribute to the well‐being of the university, and to see ways that these may not “line up” with dominant readings of economic life as determined by capitalist logics. We recognize that this is a difficult thing to do in some of the alienating contexts in which some academics find themselves. But in our experience, there is a great value in acknowledging that projects of neoliberalism, including those related to higher education, are not totalizing, and that motivations and activities outside of the neoliberal frame that are more in line with our values exist (Roelvink, 2016). Change becomes more of an open‐ended question rather than a given, allowing more space for imagining and enacting economic possibility.

To that end, our first suggestion for reframing academic labor is to acknowledge this diversity by building upon the openings provided by the pandemic crisis and mine the “hidden scripts” of everyday academic work life that emerge from “chats(s) in the corridor, coffee break conversations and intimate exchanges between friends” (Gill, 2009, p. 229). Here we would include, the “hidden scripts” of our casual zoom conversations, email exchanges, texting between colleagues deconstructing the messaging of “official” virtual meetings, and the like. We view these spaces as reminiscent of James Scott's “hidden transcripts,” discourses that are not shared in official contexts lest they challenge the hegemony (Scott, 1990). It is to these spaces we can look for information about academic work outside of typical registers and measures, and for producing forms of data not typically considered in dominant accounts. Here we are inspired by Gill's work on breaking the silence about inequitable work and harms in academia, but with a twist. While Gill uses hidden scripts to show the ways that neoliberalism has crept into university work life, we are interested in gleaning these scripts for economic difference. Through this process, information will be gathered about the inequitable distribution of already‐recognized forms of academic labor that can be used in making departmental practices more equitable (Misra et al., 2021). But crucially from our perspective, it will also unearth other activities that are rendered invisible in current notions of what “counts” as academic labor, and gets measured and evaluated in relation to neoliberal and masculinist values, norms and achievement. Finally, we believe that these hidden scripts can uncover the diverse motivations and activities that keep the university running to create an alternative framing and valuation system for academic labor.

The widespread recognition in the early months of the pandemic that the truly essential work of the economy was the caring labor of (mostly) women also created space for rethinking flawed prioritizations of economic activities more generally, including in academic contexts. This was certainly the case at the campus of the second author, where a number of faculty became emboldened to openly discuss their frustration with the unrecognized burdens they were taking on of essential work supporting students, staff, faculty mentees, and/or community partners in the pandemic. These conversations led to a letter of concern about care and gender equity, sent to university administrators, and eventually, the establishment of a Care and Equity Task Force on campus and a set of formal, structural responses from the University Provost in consultation with Task Force members. While admittedly unpaid care burdens were a main focus of the Task Force, the question of both valuing and not overburdening faculty with paid care activities was also always on the agenda. As an example, the Task Force came up with COVID impact statement guidelines that encouraged faculty to list their activities related to creating courses that connect with students, providing myriad forms of crucial student support, mentoring colleagues and research assistants, and engaging in community outreach in the pandemic. Prior to this, there was little to no space to record many of these activities within the template of annual performance reviews, or have them considered in merit pay. The recognition of these activities in impact statements has in turn has led to other high‐level conversations addressing the visibility, distribution, and value of these activities at the university beyond the pandemic, such as at College Executive Committee meetings, thus establishing new cultural norms around the value of academic caring labor. The pandemic, therefore, created the conditions under which university administration was coaxed into recognizing the typically silenced and gender‐inequitable care work that Gill (2009) identified. The current challenge is to redesign reward and appraisal structures so that these narratives of recognition stick. As Nancy Fraser has argued, it is only when the recognition of diversity (in this case diversity of essential work) operates in tandem with redistribution that moves toward gender equality can be sustained (2000).

In addition to building on hidden scripts to change the way we think about the political economy of the university in order to imagine alternatives, a second strategy involves an inventory that can better capture the diversity of activities that hold our institutions together. This inventory approach has been influenced by FPE scholars who have drawn attention to the essential care work that makes up the enormous amount of unpaid labor performed in the economy but typically goes unrecognized. The goal of the inventory is not total coverage. Rather, it is a project of de‐legitimizing dominant economic knowledge to “take back the economy” (Gibson‐Graham et al., 2013) by populating it with and valuing the contributions of many kinds of economic activities. We are drawn to this idea of producing an inventory of diverse economic activities that make up academic labor. By documenting the intensification and diversification of the academic workload during the pandemic crisis, we believe we can open up new possibilities for defining what labor means more generally. Years before the COVID crisis, there was already discussion on the intensification of academic labor and its distance from what “counted” as “real labor.” Gornall and Salisbury (2012) explained, for instance, the extension of academic workload, and the ways in which academics cope with it individually, such as trying to protect their research time by staying home or working outside of the official weekday. Further, the individualization of academic work and the treatment of it as a “calling” make it less likely for this time and space extension to be documented as a work contribution. This is a structural problem that has made it difficult for faculty to negotiate better work conditions (Gornall & Salisbury, 2012; Ross, 2000). We propose that the hyper‐visibility of depletion among especially women academics during the pandemic crisis tells us that the so‐called “life‐work balance” we are supposed to create for ourselves individually is an impossibility for many. An inventory approach could help to capture what exactly happens in the everyday of academic work.

Along these lines, in the first author's campus, a recently established Gender Equality Task Force, set up initially in response to European Union (EU) requirements for grant applications, has become a much‐needed forum for discussing these issues. The Task Force, comprised of faculty and administrative staff have been collectively discussing commonalities and differences across departments and brainstorming to improve the institutional environment, in ways that both respond to and go beyond the objectives of the EU requirement. For instance, the task force has been working on developing new data collection techniques for capturing gendered experiences and time poverty in the institution, thinking beyond the set of descriptive statistics on gender inequality already available, such as distribution of leadership positions, academic rank, and teaching hours in which the university does relatively well. In this manner, these meetings have become a venue for collectively thinking about ways of making visible previously hidden scripts of depletion and creating new data. To us, they signal the possibility of using already in place institutional goals for achieving change toward gender‐equal and gender‐sensitive definitions of what constitutes work and how it is distributed across the university.

Within FPE scholarship there is a long‐tradition of utilizing time‐use surveys to document the time poverty for those undertaking care labor; the diverse activities this care labor involves; and its staggeringly unequal distribution (Folbre, 2006). Recently, Rai and True (2020) have offered a new model for studying time‐use, the Feminist Everyday Observatory Tool, combining the two research strategies of shadowing and ethnographic time‐use survey. The tool, designed to combine data on activities in specified time intervals with people's reflections on the work, can be appropriated for identifying and valuing economic diversity in universities. Time‐use surveys carried out with these goals in mind could document both the diversity of activities that happen over the course of an entire week and the toll they take, and allow us to capture structural patterns of differences by gender, ethnicity, age, and academic rank. They could also develop a thick description of who is disproportionately overworked, and when/where depletion occurs (Rai et al., 2014; Rai & True, 2020, p. 7). The categories of work that faculty could be invited to consider in these surveys could reflect the diverse economic practices we have identified throughout this article. Faculty responses would also include information on where the activity was done, the focus of the work, what other work was being done simultaneously if there was multi‐tasking, who other participants were, and the intended beneficiaries of the work (Rai & True, 2020, p. 12). Whatever patterns of inequality that emerge in the survey data could be used as a basis for more qualitative data collection such as interviews and focus groups.

We believe that these strategies are doable given the significant experience that institutions of higher education have in designing assessment tools to measure and quantify institutional performance, gauge staff and student satisfaction, and scale the contribution of different types of work to the needs of the university. If such a survey were designed by faculty members based on a collaborative discussion among colleagues, it might have greater traction and legitimacy precisely because those who are asking the faculty to fill it out are embedded in the same networks (Meyerson and Tompkins, 2007). If undertaken, such an endeavor could help redefine academic work and revalue currently devalued aspects of it in academic cultures and perhaps, even in institutional policies.

Of course, we recognize that these gains are not in any way revolutionary. The strategy is focused on effecting change through “small wins” (MacKay, 2021). In our pessimistic moments, we each worried that our work on these Task Forces might be reproducing a “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) in which a desire for paid care activities to be more visible and valued institutionally would be futile while ironically adding to the service burden of largely women members on the committees. Yet we both also believe, and in fact have written about in other contexts, that there is a need to challenge overly pessimistic views of feminist engagement in institutions as always already coopted by neoliberalism (Altan‐Olcay, 2020; Bergeron, 2017). In the contingent, contradictory and diverse economic spaces of the neoliberalizing academy there remain openings for feminist change to occur. Also, we know from other institutions' experiences that if such initiatives receive support at the highest level, the space is widened for the formerly hidden scripts to become part of larger institutional narratives about the value of caring labor activities to the success of the university, without formulating it as something we do in addition to our “real work” (Clark et al., 2020) which can only lead to its depletion. A final point here is that such change is worth pursuing given that a far worse form of “cruel optimism” can occur when existing gender equality policies promise a fair outcome but fail to deliver because they do not challenge current definitions, measurements, and valuations of academic labor (Lipton, 2017). Thus, universities committed to gender equality would be well‐served by undertaking such activities.

CONCLUSION

As we write this conclusion, many months have passed since the pandemic upended all of our lives. One thing that has become clear during this period is that the historical and systemic denial of care work's economic significance has contributed to numerous failed responses to the pandemic around the world. Consequently, many are feminists are organizing around the crisis to change the ways that policy responses are framed, resources are allocated, and institutions are structured to better support essential paid and unpaid care labor in the future. In this article, we have proposed doing this with a focus on academic care work.

The current devaluation of academic care labor does not serve universities, many faculty members or students well. It is neither equitable nor sustainable. Not valuing that labor erases and/or devalues essential work of caring for students, the university and each other, contributing to the eventual depletion of that work. The failure to recognize and value the diverse economic practices that go into academic work also produces an ethos that continues to penalize those who undertake this essential labor as making bad choices, rather than recognizing it as structural problem that reinforces gender and race inequalities. Furthermore, this failure also services the devaluation of academic labor in general, including research activities, because it becomes far easier to talk about university work in its totality as something people do out of love and thus not worth valuing economically. Feminist political economy traces both the politics of devaluing care labor to naturalize inequalities and spaces of resistance to these discourses and practices. Ours is an attempt to extend this feminist research to reformulate academic labor in recognition of its diverse forms, begin developing strategies to document the magnitude of care labor and contribute to creating institutional discourses that resolve its structural undervaluing and unequal distribution. We believe this is a crucial task if universities hope to address gendered workload inequities. We also believe it is essential to make this caring labor visible and valuable if universities are to achieve their mission of retaining and supporting diverse faculty and students. As the pandemic crisis has underscored, the work of academic caring labor is essential to maintaining caring and thriving institutions.

The COVID‐19 crisis and its impact on higher education provides a critical opportunity for rethinking and transforming gendered distributions and valuations of work in the academy. But given the impacts of the crisis on making caring labor more visible as “essential work” more generally, we hope that the rethinking we offer around the meaning of academic labor can help feminists working to create change in other fields. Drawing upon FPE, we provide theories and strategies to help challenge the distance between the lived reality of everyday paid work, the ways in which it is distributed temporally, and what gets recognized in terms of institutional measures of productivity and performance. This challenge, we believe, can help to shift policies and practice to change meanings of work that are more gender‐equitable in university work settings and beyond.