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Abstract

Objective: Given funding concerns and heightened work expectations at baccalaureate degree-granting community colleges, we set out to understand faculty advisors’ emotional labor in such context. Methods: We conducted a supra analysis, which is a form of secondary analysis of qualitative data. Existing interview data were drawn from a mixed-methods study focused on changes in academic advising policies and practices at baccalaureate degree-granting community colleges. Results: We identified three interrelated themes: (a) putting students first; (b) overextending oneself selflessly; and (c) pressures of neoliberalism and bureaucratic checkpoints. Conclusion/Contributions: This work addresses an important gap in the literature as it pertains to the complexities of the work and professional lives of community college faculty at CCB-conferring colleges. In addition to highlighting the emotional labor of CCB faculty advisors, this work further illuminates how community colleges have “normalized emotional labor as part of the community college faculty role”.

Keywords

community college baccalaureate emotional labor community college faculty academic advising

Introduction

The community college is an educational institution under constant change and reform (Dougherty et al., 2017; O’Banion, 2019; Sydow & Alfred, 2012). Faculty are key to transformational changes—especially those involving curricular redesign and expansion (Klempin & Karp, 2018; Yeager, 2017). Without faculty support, expertise, commitment, and collaboration, reform efforts and changes are unlikely to succeed (Klempin & Karp, 2018; Yeager, 2017). Among the various curricular developments on the rise at community colleges is the community college baccalaureate (Bragg et al., 2021; Kramer et al., 2021).

In May 2021, Arizona became the 24th state to authorize community college baccalaureates (CCBs; Weissman, 2021). The rise in CCB programs is reflected in the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred at public community colleges (Kramer et al., 2021). Recent calculations by Kramer et al. (2021) show an increase from 525 bachelor’s degrees conferred at public community colleges in 2001 to 13,283 in 2018. Celebrated as both “evolutionary” and “revolutionary,” scholars suggest the community college baccalaureate movement is one of the most important ideas ever to influence the community college (Floyd & Skolnik, 2019, p. 123; O’Banion, 2019). While celebrated, this movement has also raised various concerns and controversies (Bragg et al., 2021).

Early on, Levin et al. (2006) argued that offering baccalaureate education in the context of community colleges would challenge faculty “further in their status, professional development, and work” (p. 141). Some of these challenges have been illuminated in a growing, but still modest body of research on CCBs, including additional labor expectations related to accreditation of new educational programs (Martinez, 2019), supervision of students in upper-division field practicums (Floyd & St. Arnauld, 2007), and intentional preparation and delivery of upper-division courses (Ross, 2007), which faculty report as more taxing and held to a higher standard than lower-division courses (Nasse, 2013). Additional expectations discussed in the literature include the need to engage in research and research-related activities (Martinez, 2019; McKinney & Morris, 2010) and increased interactions with students in the form of academic advising (Martinez & Elue, 2020a; Martinez & Elue, 2020b; McKinney et al., 2014; McKinney et al., 2013).

Given limited financial resources, these obligations have come with little to no rewards (Martinez, 2019; Floyd & St. Arnauld, 2007; McKinney et al., 2014), which is not particularly surprising considering the greatest concern expressed by public community college presidents with offering CCBs is “stretching community college budgets too far” (Insider Higher Ed, 2019, p. 13). With community colleges receiving less public funding than 4-year institutions and the continued funding crisis, a more recent study of the financial implications of CCB adoption suggested that “CCB adoption may represent a way for community colleges to generate much-needed revenue in the form of additional tuition and fees from newly adopted bachelor’s degree programs” (Ortagus & Hu, 2020, p. 1072).

Scholars such as Aguilar-Smith and Gonzales (2019) and Gonzales and Ayers (2018), argue that community colleges lean into their faculty to cover resource gaps. Gonzales and Ayers posited that in lieu of much-needed financial resources, community colleges tap into faculty members’ emotional labor. Drawing on the theory of institutional logics, they explained that community college faculty are expected to work as emotional laborers, given the community college’s tie to key institutions, including democracy, religion, family, the state, and the market.

As funding-related questions surrounding the CCB remain unanswered (Floyd & Skolnik, 2019) and faculty have experienced shifting and heightened work expectations (Martinez, 2019; McKinney & Morris, 2010), the purpose of this study was to understand faculty advisors’ emotional labor at CCB-granting institutions in such context. We conducted a supra analysis, which is a form of secondary analysis of qualitative data (Heaton, 2004). Existing interview data were drawn from a mixed-methods study focused on changes in academic advising policies and practices at baccalaureate degree-granting community colleges (Martinez & Elue, 2020a). Participants steered us toward this line of inquiry as they discussed experiences that spoke to emotional labor during the interview phase of the original study.

This work addresses an important gap in the literature as it pertains to the complexities of the work and professional lives of community college faculty at CCB-conferring colleges. In addition to highlighting the emotional labor of CCB faculty advisors, this work further illuminates how community colleges have “normalized emotional labor as part of the community college faculty role” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 474).

Relevant Literature

In this section we provide an overview of full-time community college faculty work expectations, including how the CCB has impacted the major areas of teaching, research, and service. Following a discussion of teaching, research, and service we pay particular attention to faculty advising, which in most cases counts toward the service component of faculty work (He & Hutson, 2017; White, 2015). We close by presenting how faculty work expectations solicit faculty’s emotional labor.

Teaching, Research, and Service

Faculty responsibilities and the ways in which they allocate their time are closely tied to the teaching mission of the community college (Braxton & Lyken-Segosebe, 2015; Cohen et al., 2013). Therefore, community college faculty make their primary contribution in teaching and teaching-related activities (Twombly & Townsend, 2008). Most full-time faculty carry a 5:5 teaching load or five courses per semester (Snart, 2017). In a national survey of 32 CCB-conferring colleges, McKinney et al. (2014) found that only 9.4% of colleges offered different contracts for faculty who taught in baccalaureate programs and faculty who taught in associate’s programs. One of the colleges they highlighted assigned CCB faculty 12 teaching credit hours per semester versus 15 hours for non-CCB faculty. Similarly, Martinez (2019) noted a reduction in teaching load for CCB faculty (12 units per semester) versus non-CCB faculty (15 units per semester). Meanwhile, Nasse (2013) found that loads remained the same among faculty regardless of if they taught in baccalaureate programs or not.

Other, yet insufficiently examined facets of community college faculty work, include research and service (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019; Lester, 2008). Although previous works that drew upon the 2004 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:04) data indicate that community college faculty hardly ever publish (Rosser & Townsend, 2006). Braxton and Lyken-Segosebe (2015) rightly pointed out that “these rates provide only a general measure of article production and may produce an inaccurate indicator of the level of community college members’ participation in research and scholarship” (p. 7). When examined through Boyer’s (1990) scholarship types, studies find community college faculty are involved in research focused on improving teaching and learning (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019; Terosky & Gonzales, 2016b) and solving real-world problems (Braxton et al., 2015; Palmer, 2015). Moreover, scholars note that some faculty do engage in traditional or basic forms of research (Terosky & Gonzales, 2016a).

Research and research-related activities have been notably observed at CCB-granting institutions (Levin, 2004), either to provide undergraduate research opportunities and/or enhance disciplinary knowledge (Martinez, 2019; McKinney & Morris, 2010). Interestingly, both Levin (2004) and Martinez (2019) identified some divisions or tensions and differences in work orientations among new faculty at baccalaureate-granting institutions. New faculty in the 4-year degree programs wanted “research time” (Levin, 2004, p. 9) or “wanting to do the same level of research they would do at, let’s say, a big research university” (Martinez, 2019, p. 14–15).

Although some community college faculty engage in research/scholarly activities because it is required of them (McKinney & Morris, 2010) or because they are passionate about their learning and constructing new knowledge (Terosky & Gonzales, 2016a), others sacrifice their scholarly endeavors to fulfill service expectations (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019; Lester, 2008). Lester (2008), for example, found this dilemma to be pronounced among women who were expected to perform the “glue work” (p. 207) of the department, such as taking notes and organizing social events. Additional service responsibilities expected of faculty include curriculum, personnel, and governance committees, as well as academic advising (He & Hutson, 2017; White, 2015), which is recognized as playing a key role in student retention and completion (McArthur, 2005; Swecker et al., 2013).

Faculty Advising

Debates about who should conduct advising, and if it is faculty, toward which component of their work should advising count, are longstanding (He & Hutson, 2017; White, 2015). Faculty involvement in advising and reward mechanisms are based on various factors, including the institution’s mission, administrative structure, academic programs and policies, student body composition, faculty interest, and costs (Pardee, 2004). According to White (2015), institutions that “depend on faculty [to advise] do so often without much, if any, extra compensation for advising responsibilities” (p. 276).

Utilizing a critical qualitative inquiry approach, Aguilar-Smith and Gonzales (2019) sought to understand work expectations “placed upon” and “taken up” (p. 8) by community college faculty. They also examined if faculty, administrators, and organizations reported similar or dissimilar expectations. Their analysis revealed that all stakeholder groups expected faculty to serve as generous educators, defined as “faculty who invest in teaching, student success, and the college with near boundless commitment and empathy” (p. 8). However, they found differences in the ways faculty were expected to enact these responsibilities. One of the various ways through which faculty demonstrated their generosity and served as institutional agents was intrusive advising (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019), which calls for active, intentional, caring, and consistent interactions with students (Varney, 2013) and has been associated with positive student outcomes (Donaldson et al., 2016; Ryan, 2013; J. S. Smith, 2007). Faculty wanted to engage with and advise students in a hands-on, face-to-face, high-touch manner, while the community college preferred technology-based platforms (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019), which tend to depersonalize the process (Gaines, 2014; V. N. Gordon, 2004).

Significant time investments are required of faculty advisors in terms of meaningful interactions with students, staying abreast of information to provide students with personalized procedural assistance (Deil-Amen, 2011), and training and development (Brown, 2008). In CCB contexts, advisors need to learn “new conceptual and structural models for students who will stay at the institution through the baccalaureate” (Helfgot, 2005, p. 12) and, in some cases, decide to pursue graduate education (Martinez, 2018; Cuellar & Gándara, 2021; Gandara & Cuellar, 2016; Grothe, 2009). In exploring the role of academic advisors in promoting graduate education at CCB-granting institutions, Martinez and Elue (2020b) highlighted the passion with which academic advisors, including faculty advisors, validated students and strived to develop and strengthen graduate school pathways. Although graduate education was not the primary motivation or rationale for their colleges offering CCBs, participants found much satisfaction in carrying out this work (Martinez & Elue, 2020b).

Soliciting Faculty’s Emotional Labor

Recent works highlight how community colleges exploit faculty’s sense of vocation, generosity, and commitment to their work, especially to their students (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019; Gonzales & Ayers, 2018). The following quote in Gonzales and Ayers (2018), illustrates one community college administrator’s expectations of faculty, including advising:

Teaching loads are heavy . . . assessment and re-accreditation takes a long time. We’ve had to increase our time advising students . . . We’ve always had advisees, but with new financial aid regulations . . . we have to approve courses the students take to make sure they count for a degree. I’ve always been pushing my faculty to really contact their advisees. Before, the college didn’t require a student see their advisor before they registered for classes, so they didn’t have to see anyone, but I’ve always pushed it. I want them to have a relationship with the students to push them . . . (p. 470)

Such expectations, which seem totally legitimate and normal, solicit faculty’s emotional labor (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018). Establishing relationships with students includes demonstrations of care, attention, sympathy, and empathy, to name a few emotional displays (Larson, 2008).

Emotional expectations (Larson, 2008), high teaching loads (Borst & Latz, 2020), the always growing administrative and bureaucratic work (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019), and the lack of institutional and departmental support (Sallee, 2008) place community college faculty at risk of burnout. Borst and Latz (2020) highlighted faculty susceptibility to burnout in their phenomenological study on community college faculty teaching in a 2-year honors program due to heavy workloads. One faculty member described his workload as “We teach overloads, then we advise, serve on committees, design new courses . . . but it’s okay, that’s the way it is” (p. 138). The idea that “it’s okay, that’s the way it is” (Borst & Latz, 2020, p. 138) aligns with aspects of Gonzales and Ayers’s (2018) argument regarding faculty as emotional laborers, which we discuss below.

Conceptual Framework

This study is guided by the theory of emotional labor (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983/2012; Kruml & Geddes, 2000) and existing literature on emotional labor and community college faculty (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018; K. A. M. Smith et al., 2020). Emotional labor requires managing or regulating one’s emotions to comply with display rules or norms about exhibiting emotions at work (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983/2012). According to Hochshild (1983), emotional labor consists of two forms of acting: surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting means “the body, not the soul, is the main tool of trade” (Hochshild, 1983, p. 37). Surface acting relates to outward appearances and feigning emotions that are required by one’s job. On the other hand, deep acting involves “real feelings that [have] been self-induced” (Hochshild, 1983, p. 37). Individuals actively alter their feelings (Kruml & Geddes, 2000), thus experiencing the emotions they display. Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) recognized genuine acting, which is the expression of naturally felt emotions.

Converging the theory of emotional labor and the theory of institutional logics, Gonzales and Ayers (2018) posited that emotional labor has come to be expected of community college faculty. Their emotional investment is used to compensate for historical inequities that afflict the community college, including scant public investment. Gonzales and Ayers explained that institutional logics can be understood as “sense making frames” (p. 457) and “provide understandings of what is legitimate, reasonable and effective in a given context” (Guillén, 2001, p. 14). Logics are tied to major organizing institutions, such as the nuclear family, the Christian religion, democracy, the state, and capitalism (Friedland & Alford, 1991). Individuals gravitate toward these central institutions as they make sense of their life and work. Thus, institutions impact people’s and organizations’ lives (Friedland & Alford, 1991).

Gonzales and Ayers (2018) noted that the community college is an organization that is shaped by these very core institutions—family, religion, democracy, the bureaucratic state, and the market or neoliberalism. Drawing from existing literature and previous empirical projects of their own, Gonzales and Ayers argued that emotional labor expectations of community college faculty are normalized through multiple institutional logics, including the logic of family, the logic of democracy, the logic of religion, the logic of neoliberalism, and the logic of the bureaucratic state. They theorized how each of the logics solicit faculty’s emotional labor in distinct ways. Highlighting works that used the metaphor of family to discuss the community college sector, Gonzales and Ayers noted the logic of family not only “encourages congruence” (p. 465), but also evokes an inclination or disposition among faculty to carry out their work on a familial basis. Operating from a familial orientation “. . . compel[s] an individual to nurture, care for, empathize with, and provide support for those in their charge, and to do so outside of the employer-employee compensation framework” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 465).

Like the metaphor of family, the notion of community colleges as “democracy’s college” (Cohen et al., 2013, p. 4) holds expectations of faculty. The logic of democracy calls for faculty to provide resources and services to which students have been denied access. Rather than overhaul the system, faculty are expected to “create and uphold opportunity” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 468) for students within a system that systemically disadvantages them.

As depicted within the logic of religion, faculty are expected to carry out this work selflessly; it is their moral responsibility. Such selfless expectations assume agency triumphs over structure. As Gonzales and Ayers (2018) observed, “community college faculty members [are] being asked to act above and beyond based on a sort of moral and heroic agency” (p. 468). In addition to acting above and beyond, faculty are expected to “do more with less” (p. 473)—a reflection of neoliberalism. The logic of neoliberalism speaks to the positioning of the community college as a market good, resulting in the expansion of faculty roles amid scarcer state resources and increased accountability. Levin et al. (2018), for example, observed that adhering to the logic of neoliberalism resulted in “large class sizes, reduced administrative support for students, and less time for faculty to devote to students (and more time to outcomes assessment, planning and rationalization of programs) affected the quality of students’ education and training” at one of the three community colleges in their study (p. 214). Related to increased accountability, the logic of bureaucratic state is more concerned with control, process, and accountability (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018).

Research Design and Methodology

We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data using a supra analysis approach, which “transcends the focus of the primary study from which the data were derived, examining new empirical, theoretical, or methodological questions” (Heaton, 2004, p. 39). The new questions we explored in this study were:

1) What are the emotional labor expectations of faculty advisors in CCB contexts?

2) In what ways do CCB faculty advisors perform emotional labor?

The interview data utilized for our secondary analysis were drawn from a mixed methods study underpinned by the interpretivist paradigm (McChesney & Aldridge, 2019). The primary study, which involved both survey and semi-structured interviews, focused on changes in academic advising policies and practices at baccalaureate degree-granting community colleges (Martinez & Elue, 2020a). We were particularly interested in understanding these changes from the advisor point of view. During the interviews, faculty advisors discussed experiences that spoke to emotional labor, which led us to conduct a secondary analysis of the issues of emotional labor among this group. In the following subsections, we briefly describe the sampling and methods used in the original study and the procedures used in our secondary analysis of the data.

Participants

Participants in the original study included faculty advisors, professional advisors, academic advising administrators, and administrators with responsibilities over various areas, including advising. Individuals were selected to participate in the original study based on their affiliation with academic advising within the 63 U.S. public community college baccalaureate granting institutions identified by the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA) as of 2014. Based on the colleges on the CCBA list, we generated a list of potential participants by reviewing each college advising/counseling website and selecting them based on their title, role, and association with academic advising. Subsequently, we sent them an email invitation, along with a copy of the informed consent form and a link to our Qualtrics survey. Of the 93 individuals who responded to the survey, 62 completed it. Of the 62 completers, 26 agreed to participate in a follow-up interview. After a couple of follow-up emails, a total of 21 individuals completed the interview. Of the 21 individuals who participated in the interview phase, 7 were faculty advisors. These seven individuals, listed in Table 1, made up the subset of participants for this study. We assigned all participants pseudonyms and did not collect demographic data on our participants per IRB approval. Our seven participants came from three different colleges in three different states located in different geographical areas (i.e., South, West, and Northwest). All participants held the rank of professor across a range of academic disciplines, including education, business, nursing, technology, science, and social science. Given the small size of the programs and colleges where participants worked, which is why we elected not to attach specific identifiers/details to participants, three out of the seven participants also held leadership roles within their programs and/or departments.

Table 1.

Participants.

Primary role	Participants	Total
Faculty	Becky, Catherine, Joanna, Josiah, Marissa, Sheldon, Travis	7

Semi-Structured Interviews

In the original study, participants were given the option of a phone interview, an online/remote video interview, or an in-person interview. Of the individuals represented in this study, five interviews were conducted in person, one was conducted over the telephone, and one was conducted online. Our semi-structured approach allowed us the flexibility needed to ask follow-up and probing questions (Alvesson, 2011). We provided participants the opportunity to choose the time and location of the interviews. All interviews, which lasted 30 to 90 minutes, were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim by a secure third-party transcription service. Interview questions focused on academic advising policies and practices, their approaches to advising, as well as their experiences advising CCB-seeking students. We also sought recommendations they would offer to other community colleges wishing to adopt baccalaureate degrees.

Secondary Data Analysis and Trustworthiness

As we reflected on our new research questions, we carefully read and reread the original interview transcripts to reimmerse ourselves in the data. Similar to the original study, we coded our data manually. Given our new research questions, the specific coding methods utilized in our present analysis differed from those we employed in the original study: process, structural, and versus coding (Saldaña, 2016). For purposes of this study, we re-coded the interviews using both inductive and deductive or a priori coding (Saldaña, 2016). The inductive analysis allowed us to derive codes from the data. The deductive analysis allowed us to apply Hochschild’s (1983/2012) theory of emotional labor and Gonzales and Ayers’s (2018) theoretical argument regarding faculty as emotional laborers to the data (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2021). Some of the inductive codes we developed included: undervalued work, keeping others happy, exhaustion, burnt out, passion, above and beyond, compensating, compensation, and prioritizing others. Pre-existing codes included deep acting, surface acting, genuine acting, and display rules. Additional pre-existing codes centered on the institutional logics advanced by Gonzales and Ayers. Codes related to the logic of the bureaucratic state, for example, included: monitoring, surveillance, control, accountability, accountability measure, and standardization. As another example, for the logic of religion, codes included: self-less, care/caring, devotion, dedication, and heroic agency. To enhance trustworthiness, we maintained an audit trail (Glesne, 2016). In addition to a detailed record of our research process, we obtained external reflection and input from a critical friend (J. Gordon, 2006) who co-authored one of the primary works guiding our analysis. Their feedback on our preliminary analysis included stimulating and clarifying questions, strengthening our analysis.

Findings

Given funding concerns and heightened work expectations at CCB institutions (Martinez, 2019; Floyd & Skolnik, 2019; Insider Higher Ed, 2019; McKinney & Morris, 2010), we set out to understand faculty advisors’ emotional labor in such context. As faculty advisors discussed changes in academic advising policies and practices and shared their experiences advising CCB-seeking students, they pointed to various tensions, including limited resources and expanded roles. In the following sections, we present three interrelated themes: (a) putting students first and foremost, (b) overextending oneself selflessly, and (c) pressures of neoliberalism and bureaucratic checkpoints. Within these themes, we highlight how the various logics advanced by Gonzales and Ayers (2018) weighed down on faculty advisors in CCB-granting institutions, thereby “positioning them not only as educators but as emotional laborers” (p. 471).

Putting Students First and Foremost: Operating on Family Grounds

As argued by Gonzales and Ayers (2018), the community colleges to which our participants belonged, seemingly tapped into, or relied upon faculty advisors’ emotions to compensate for insufficient resources within the shifting dynamics of their institutions. Like other participants in this study, Josiah pointed to his college’s “economic realities” as he made sense of his role as faculty advisor and spoke about his experiences:

I don’t know whether they’ll approve the expense of giving me a student worker to help make this transition or not. It’ll be a negative impact on students if I don’t get additional administrative support, but I also understand the economic realities that we may still be cutting the faculty here. So, it’s a juggling act, but you’ve got to put the student first. If you’re not going to put the student first as an advisor, you have no business talking with them.

Even as he waited for approval to hire additional assistance, Josiah stressed the need to prioritize students. In most cases, participants were the only ones charged with supporting and advising CCB students in their programs, especially if their programs were relatively new. As Joanna explained, “I was kind of a one-woman operation when I started it.”

Joanna and the other participants recognized the importance of collaborating with professional advisors/counselors and other student services professionals to facilitate their work; however, they also pointed to various challenges leading advising, mentoring, navigating, and advocating to “fall back” on them. Becky, whose college used a shared model of delivering advising services (Pardee, 2004), described some of the challenges with what she referred to as “general advisement” as follows:

What I have found is that if students just go for general advisement with the advisors up above at student services or whatever, they tend to get a little off track, or are taking classes they don’t need, or they don’t understand that we enroll people in our program by points.

Becky elaborated on the ways in which her program has attempted to address these issues, such as improving communication. “We’ve gotten better over the last couple of years,” she added. Travis observed similar challenges at his college. He stated:

There’s a bit of a disjuncture here I think between those of us who are advising for the [said baccalaureate program] and our other advising center, which is much broader and starts with an AA or AS and associate’s base for advising. That’s an issue that I don’t think we’ve come up with a good solution to solve, but it’s an important one.

Whether in a one-person operation or collaboration with others, participants carried out their work with students on familial principles, which entailed relationships of care, responsibility, and commitment. Consistent with the principle of family, participants were compelled to tend to their students and did so “outside of the employer-employee compensation framework” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 465). Josiah and other participants recognized advising as an “uncompensated” aspect of faculty work. He explained:

Advisement is one of those uncompensated facets. So, some would rather not be as involved, and I think that has negative bearing on the student success. Personally, I do not have any documented proof, and I haven’t got any study to support that. But I think it’s really important that [students] know they have us here, and we want to see them every semester. We really do, and find out how’s the life, what’s going on. Are you still at the same company? How are the kids doing? I keep a pretty big file on each of my students, and they know how to reach me.

Although uncompensated, participants strived to develop meaningful relationships with their students. Josiah’s description of his interactions with students, including the kinds of questions he asks them, exemplify intrusive advising (Varney, 2013) . Faculty members’ work with students went beyond course scheduling; they explored and honored students’ lives, stories, goals, and aspirations. Travis, for example, supported his students’ goals regardless of what his college expected of him. He explained:

We have a lot of students who aren’t planning, they’re not on the traditional two-year track, or four-year track. They’re wanting to take two or three courses a semester. In not all cases, but in many cases, because their job or in some cases, they’re here because their spouse has a job and they’re just filling in some stuff. Of course, we get pressure from administration to push the 15 to finish, but a lot of these students know that that’s not how they want to pursue degrees and it’s really not . . . just not vital for them to finish in that.

Although pressured by the administration to urge students to take more semester credit hours, Travis put his students’ best interests first.

Participants humanized the practice of advising, which required them to conjure certain emotions. Sheldon, who was conducting all the CCB advising and faculty training for his program for congruity purposes, explained the importance of the human touch:

So, everybody has a different story, and you need to listen to that. Here you’re getting a very human and really diffuse way of approaching advising, from someone who’s not a humanities or advisor person. I’m a scientist, and a [said] scientist at that. But that’s my take on it, is that it’s a human-to-human thing. It’s fun, but it’s challenging. To make it work, it has to be human to human . . . So that’s my approach. It has to be, and I have to emphasize that human being bit of it. Science majors can be hard to crack that way too, sometimes.

While highlighting the importance of the human touch, Sheldon noted he was not a professional advisor—a role whose primary responsibilities and training center on advising and advising-related activities (Self, 2008). He also made it a point to emphasize his identity as a hard scientist—individuals who are generally viewed as emotionally uninvolved/detached from various aspects of their work (Koppman et al., 2015). Yet, Sheldon understood the value of getting to know students on an interpersonal level and validating them. Marissa operated from the same perspective. Of this, Marissa said:

I think a big part of that is the idea that we do take the time to acknowledge how important it is that they are individuals, and they have these outside lives and just kind of acknowledging that and seeing who they are as . . . kind of honoring their own journeys and goals.

Honoring students’ journeys entailed creating a personal, welcoming, caring, and familial environment. The family-like atmosphere was palpable during our in-person visits. Participants recognized the importance of connection, so much so that they made themselves available to students through various methods of communication, including their personal devices. While Josiah connected his office phone to his cellphone, Catherine provided students with her personal cellphone number. “I have a lot of advising sessions. I give my students my cell phone number from the start so that they can text me with questions and email me with questions that I get on my phone. A lot of advising is done with questions that way as well,” she shared. Indeed, participants’ availability and approachability reflected an availability and approachability that one extends to family. In doing so, they overextended themselves.

Overextending Oneself Selflessly to Realize the Community College Mission

Faculty supported students in any way possible, including sustaining the community college access mission. In accordance with the logic of democracy, participants worked to “create and uphold opportunity” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 468) in various ways. Josiah described his role as a faculty member and responsibilities related to developmental education and other important skills baccalaureate degree-seeking students should possess. Josiah stated:

So, we have to work with them to upgrade their writing abilities. Their research skills are significantly lacking, so I’ve put a research methods class into the new bachelor’s. Now I’m forcing them to take it, so that everything else that they do will be elevated: their writing, their critical thinking, and their ability to really look at sources and determine this is a viable source and this is not.

Like Josiah’s development of a new methods course, Travis created an independent study for a student who expressed interest in pursuing graduate education and with whom he held a mentor-mentee relationship. Travis’s efforts focused on building the skillsets required in graduate school. Faculty members endeavored to serve students better and provide them with opportunities that would position them well to meet their future goals and aspirations and reap related benefits. For those students who were unsure about their major or career choice, faculty made time for them as well. Academic advising involved career advising. Marissa explained the career advising aspect as follows:

I think from the get-go, one of my biggest goals is transparency about what this degree will offer to them because there is some confusion about what it takes to be a [said professional role]. And that’s a certification that we don’t actually offer, so I think it’s really important that we let students know what this degree will qualify them to do before they even enter the program.

Marissa and other participants engaged in career advising before and after students enrolled in the program. Although Marissa’s college, as well as the other institutions in which our participants were situated, had a career center to help students explore career opportunities, Marissa discussed issues related to the availability and accessibility of student services. She elaborated:

Our student services offices are usually closed by 5:00. There’s one day a week when they’ll stay open until 8:00, and there’s usually one person or two people representing different departments there. But it’s very difficult for our students to try to . . . I think it just popped here, they’re open until 6:30 on Tuesday, that’s their late night. So for our students to get off work at 6:00, there’s no way for them to access the service without missing work.

Faculty over-extended themselves to support students structurally and did so in a caring, nurturing, and supportive manner. Yes, as Gonzales and Ayers (2018) stressed in their argument, participants in our analysis enjoyed serving students; however, it should not be accepted nor expected of faculty to compensate for the lack of resources and support needed to address issues related to broader educational and social inequities.

The way in which faculty over-extended themselves to make up for what is an institutional responsibility aligns with the logic of religion. Faculty worked selflessly. They consistently went above and beyond to serve their students. They had a deep emotional connection to their work. Josiah, who taught an overload every semester, spoke of his work as a calling. He stated:

This isn’t work. This is more of a calling, I guess you could call it, if you approach it that way . . . It really isn’t. I mean at this stage, we’re changing lives. And I don’t mind doing the extra work. I mean I’ve got a family. I’ve got grown children and a wife and all those other things that everybody has, but God, I love it when one of these students at graduation comes up and says I couldn’t have done this if you hadn’t pushed me. I mean geez, if I had a heart, I’d cry.

Josiah’s love and commitment to his students are praiseworthy. His emotions and view of his work as a calling served as a catalyst to serve additional students. However, his love was unmet by more resources. Recall how during this study, Josiah was waiting to hear back if he had been approved to hire a student employee. As he used his emotions to carry out his work, the institution used his emotions.

All participants put in what Josiah referred to as “extra work.” In addition to giving out her personal cellphone number, as described earlier, Catherine answered her phone and texts at inconceivable times to ensure that she would not forget any of her students. She explained:

I have seriously thought about putting a Murphy bed on that wall. This past year was tremendously wild. I was in the office, and my students were calling me on the phone by five o’clock in the morning all year. And I was checking texts before going to bed at night and those kinds of things because it’s just faster to answer those questions than to forget somebody. And I don’t want to do that.

In addition to phone calls and texts, Catherine made herself available via Skype. “We see them anyway. I think it’s important, and I think it makes a difference in the program rather than just saying everybody’s got that and then when they come to us, I will fix the problems. That doesn’t work well, but it retains students. I think that personal piece retains students,” she added.

Catherine was deeply and devoutly committed to her advisees and their success. So much so that the demarcation between home and work was nonexistent. Like Josiah, Sheldon, Travis, and all other participants in this study, Catherine gave so much of herself to serve and support her students. They were omnipresent or strived to be. Still, participants’ pious efforts sometimes resulted in heartbreak. Consider Becky’s experience with an advisee who did not meet the CCB program admission requirements. Becky recalled:

That’s one of the most heartbreaking things I think, is when they think they’re ready and they’re not. Or their points are too low. Cause our minimum points according to our grid is 35. I just dealt with this not long ago, we figured it out several times, and the student and I did, and found that she was short points to apply for the program. And that was hard. That was really hard, because she had worked so hard, and her grades just weren’t high enough. So, it shot her points down, and she wasn’t able to apply. So those kinds of challenges are the hardest for me.

Becky had to manage her emotions to relay the distressing news to the student. Despite some of the challenges participants faced, including heartbreak, high advising caseloads, and high teaching loads, their devotion matched the “missionary zeal” (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018, p. 467) of community colleges.

Pressures of Neoliberalism and Bureaucratic Checkpoints

The expansion of faculty roles amid scarcer state resources was evident among the faculty in this study. As embedded throughout the previous sections, faculty were doing more with less. The pressure to be efficient and productive carried growing administrative and bureaucratic work. As Josiah waited to hear back if he had been approved to hire administrative support, Joanna’s request for another full-time faculty was denied. Consequently, she and her faculty colleagues were carrying overload. Joanna explained:

I needed another full-time faculty in the [said area] side this year, and I just wasn’t given that because of the budget. And so, then my existing faculty here are having to do overload. I’m teaching more classes than I shouldn’t really be teaching given I have all the administrative work as well. And it’s difficult to get adjunct faculty that have the qualifications because essentially our adjunct faculty pay is minimal, and you have to find people that just love teaching or the idea of teaching if they’re new to it.

As Joanna suggested, a love of teaching or the idea of teaching was expected to eclipse minimal pay and unfavorable working conditions. Overload was a common theme throughout all our participant’s narratives. As Becky shared, “Minimum is 15 credits a semester, last semester I had 22. Right, and we’re required to have office hours. Which is where those advisements fit in best, is during those office hours.” Community college faculty regularly teach overload due to poor compensation and high living costs in certain areas (Levin, 2007); however, participants also carried high advising loads. Josiah expounded on his advising load and the amount of work it involves:

I cannot, time wise, field all 200 students, I also a carry a full load plus every semester. And for us, a full load is five classes, and I’m usually six to seven classes every semester. I do invite them all to get an appointment. Like I said, I try to twist their arms. This year, I just did the numbers for my annual evaluation, I’ve advised 113 so far, which is heck of a lot of students. Because my advisements take an hour, I run degree audits, we go through it completely, everything from their GPA to what they’re struggling in, how think they’re going to do this semester. I try to get a full picture, so they can reflect.

Josiah’s hour-long advising sessions, which he described as “very time intensive,” provided students with the required assistance and attention. Participants worked diligently and efficiently to ensure students did not take any unnecessary courses or miss a course when it was offered. Sheldon referred to it as “high-pressure” advising. He explained:

We have to be really efficient. We’re, enrollment-wise, very small. All the programs, except the bachelor’s programs, except for the [said] program, are extremely small. So many of the programs have two-year rotations, which is an advising challenge. If the students get . . . they can enter the two-year rotation at any time for the bachelor program. They don’t, they have to complete it in that order, but if they want to finish in two years, they can’t miss anything. So, it’s high-pressure advising.

The time and effort participants put into advising and the functioning of their programs went unrecognized and uncompensated. Catherine, who estimated an advising load of “a little over 200,” explained how the amount of time she put into her work was underestimated precisely because of how much time and work she put in:

Well, I mean the one that no one can give is time. That’s the biggest thing. I’m not opposed to giving a lot of time, but I think then there should be . . . Well, an understanding then, compensate your people in a way. But I’m not . . . It’s not about pay for me either. It’s just about realizing that there are times where it’s a lot bigger than it may appear to be, ‘cause if we do it well, it appears to be really smooth. And if the program’s growing, nobody’s gonna complain about the program.

Programs grew because of the work faculty put in; however, the resources they received were decreased or remained the same. As resources decreased or remained the same, administrative and bureaucratic work increased—primarily through record keeping and program assessment and evaluation. Most faculty were expected to adopt new technologies to comply with these requests. These technologies facilitated monitoring and standardization. Catherine discussed her extensive record-keeping:

Then I just changed [the degree map] all the time. And it works well to individualize for students. Then, I keep that in my file so that when they then come back to me and I say okay, I pull up their record. Did they do it according to plan or what changes and then I update it, date it, give it back to them, keep it again, make copies, put it in their file so I can see the trail of how we’ve progressed. If we need to . . . Especially when they get into the program officially, and are getting closer to student teaching, do they have all those requirements and they’re getting closer to graduation. Several checks go through to make sure that have everything and the new changes.

The “several checks” Catherine carried out allowed her to guide and track her students’ progress. Just the same these checks served as bureaucratic checkpoints, allowing for scrutinization at the organizational level.

Extensive record-keeping allowed faculty to fulfill assessment and evaluation expectations. Joanna described this expectation as follows:

Right, I just did a recent survey because my vice president for that meeting wanted me to collect a lot of data on enrollment for the last few years, retention, graduation, and also student success after graduation. And so, I have an email list with the phone numbers and all that so I can contact the graduates. When I had actually surveyed them about two or three years ago from earlier cohorts that graduated it was a pretty good response rate, I guess. So, they, like I said, just wanted to stay in touch. We have a Facebook page now that we’re developing with graduates.

Most participants discussed the implementation of technology to facilitate advising, but also for standardization purposes. Sheldon referred to standardization as “internal consistency.” Internal consistency aimed to ensure all advising activities aligned with one another, likely leading to an increase in efficiency and productivity. Plus, consistent practices facilitated the supervision of advisors and the advising process.

To ensure standardization, the college offered training. Although participants were encouraged to use technology to promote consistency, online tools proved difficult. Sheldon referred to his college’s system as a “database retrieval nightmare.” Marissa noted the limitations of technology at her college as follows:

So, there are some things that our systems just not ready for . . . our degree audit system just, within the last month, has the bachelor’s degree in it. And we’ve got students ready to graduate in June, so it took a year and a half from the time it was actually approved for it to get loaded up in the system, which has made her job incredibly difficult.

Although Marissa and other participants were expected to use technological systems, the systems were inadequate. Travis noted:

I have enough colleagues at other schools that are using the same software we are, it’s possible we bought some bottom-of-the-barrel version that doesn’t allow, but everyone else . . . I’ve been at schools where it’s basically student can select their own courses but then it sends an email to the advisor within the software and said, “Do you approve these?”

Seemingly, the “bottom of the barrel” version Travis believed his college purchased served more as a performance management system than a content management system intended to enhance the academic advising experience.

Discussion and Implications

Converging the theory of institutional logics and the theory of emotional labor, Gonzales and Ayers (2018) posited that emotional labor has come to be expected of community college faculty. Drawing from existing literature and previous empirical projects of their own, Gonzales and Ayers argued that emotional labor expectations of community college faculty are normalized through multiple institutional logics, including the logic of family, the logic of democracy, the logic of religion, the logic of neoliberalism, and the logic of the bureaucratic state. Overall, the work of faculty advisors represented in this study were linked to the institutional logics advanced by Gonzales and Ayers. Participants carried out their work on a familial basis and strived to uphold opportunity for their students. They worked selflessly. Participants went above and beyond, making themselves as available as possible, and documented their work in ways expected of them. Recall how Catherine, who had “a little over 200” advisees, took phone calls from as early as five in the morning, “on top of teaching several classes every day and five and six student teachers, which means [she’s] in the field.” It is no wonder she considered putting a Murphy bed in her office. Catherine and the other participants in this study exemplified the notion of generous educators (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019). They were fully invested in “teaching, student success, and the college with near boundless commitment and empathy” (Aguilar-Smith & Gonzales, 2019, p. 8), making them susceptible to burnout (Borst & Latz, 2020).

Our participants had a deep emotional connection to their work. Their love and passion for students radiated during our conversations. Josiah, who joked, “If I had a heart, I’d cry,” perhaps had the biggest heart of them all. The environment they set out to create for their students was evident during our interactions with them, whether virtually or in person. Also evident was their overexertion and exhaustion due to the lack of resources available to them, including a denied request for additional faculty, delayed response to requests for administrative support, and inadequate technological systems and support. Faculty did more with less (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018). They prioritized serving students while waiting for the institutions to do the same with the needed support for faculty in their work. Faculty experienced doubt, frustration, and exhaustion but displayed excitement and hope when talking about and working with students.

Although participants’ love and commitment to students and their work is laudable, the exploitation of these emotions is precarious. As noted by Gonzales and Ayers (2018), “having an emotional connection to one’s work, a deep passion, or a sense of calling is not problematic when that passion remains under one’s own control. However, it is problematic when employers tap into it as a substitute for desperately needed resources” (p. 472). This point could not be more powerfully stated.

Like Gonzales and Ayers (2018), we encourage community college leaders, particularly those in CCB contexts, to reflect on the Gonzales and Ayers piece as well as our study and consider how these logics operate at their institutions and weigh down on their own faculty/faculty advisors. In what ways are they exploiting faculty emotional resources? What has offering baccalaureate degrees meant for their faculty/faculty advisors? In what ways have their roles expanded since offering CCBs? What additional resources have been made available, if any? What resources do faculty need to carry out their work with students, particularly advising?

As scholars have indicated, the CCB is not a simple add-on to the community college mission; the various costs, both financial and non-financial, associated with CCB programs have been underestimated. Given the “economic realities” of community colleges, leaders must be prepared to advocate for the community college and their faculty at the state and federal levels as well as seek alternative funding sources as they continue to pursue these degrees.

Our study, while insightful, has limitations resulting from the nature of secondary data analysis (Heaton, 2004). The data used in this analysis were collected as part of a larger study focused on academic advising policies and practices at CCB granting institutions and not to explicitly examine the emotional labor of CCB faculty advisors. Thus, we encourage researchers to explore CCB faculty’s emotional labor further. Future research should also explore possible gender differences in how the various logics advanced by Gonzales and Ayers (2018) weigh down on faculty. Researchers might also consider exploring what differences in emotional labor, if any, exist between faculty teaching and advising in baccalaureate programs and those teaching and advising in AA and AAS programs that lead to baccalaureate programs as well as differences in emotional labor between contingent and noncontingent faculty in CCB programs.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Edna Martinez

Author Biographies

Edna Martinez, Ph.D. is the Associate Vice President and Administrator in Charge of the California State University San Bernardino, Palm Desert Campus. Her research focuses on issues of access and equity in higher education.

Sharon Velarde Pierce is an associate professor of Public Administration at California State University, San Bernardino. Her research centers on the unique experiences of Latina women in leadership positions, first-generation college students, and, more recently, the challenges faced by undocumented students.

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“You’ve Got to Put the Student First”: Faculty Advisors as Educators and Emotional Laborers in Community College Baccalaureate Contexts

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Relevant Literature

Teaching, Research, and Service

Faculty Advising

Soliciting Faculty’s Emotional Labor

Conceptual Framework

Research Design and Methodology

Participants

Semi-Structured Interviews

Secondary Data Analysis and Trustworthiness

Findings

Putting Students First and Foremost: Operating on Family Grounds

Overextending Oneself Selflessly to Realize the Community College Mission

Pressures of Neoliberalism and Bureaucratic Checkpoints

Discussion and Implications

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biographies

References