Prestige at a Price: Women Contingent Faculty Burning Out at an R2 University in the United States

Abstract

Background:

Burnout in higher education is widely documented, yet it is most often framed as an individual or occupational condition rather than as a consequence of institutional design. This dominant framing obscures how organizational structures and prestige-oriented priorities in higher education shape contingent faculty experiences. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory and scholarship on gendered organizations, this study situates burnout within broader institutional logics exacerbated during prestige-driven striving.

Focus of the Study:

This study examines how women contingent faculty experience burnout within the context of institutional striving for Doctoral Universities–Very High Research Activity (R1) status at one institution. It centers how organizational cultures, recognition practices, and legitimacy structures shape everyday academic work. The analysis foregrounds the intersection of gender, contingency, and institutional ambition in producing uneven conditions of labor. By focusing on women contingent faculty, the study highlights how burnout is differentially experienced and mediated across academic roles.

Research Design:

Using a qualitative heuristic approach, the study draws on extended interviews and contemporaneous diary reflections from 12 women contingent faculty. Participants were employed at an R2 institution in the northeastern United States during its transition to R1 status. Analysis attended to patterns across narratives while preserving the depth and complexity of participants’ accounts, culminating in a creative synthesis entitled, “A Day in the Life of Women Contingent Faculty in Transition.”

Conclusions:

Findings indicate that burnout is produced through gendered organizational cultures, perfunctory recognition, and constrained professional legitimacy that render teaching-centered and care-oriented labor invisible. Institutional striving redistributes risk from the organization onto individual faculty, normalizing burnout as a functional outcome of striving. Disciplinary valuation further mediates how women experience and navigate these pressures. The study reframes burnout as an institutional design problem, challenging deficit-oriented narratives of individual resilience and extending scholarship on gendered academic labor.

University educators are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout, with 64% of U.S. faculty reporting feeling burned out due to their jobs (Vyletel et al., 2023). This pattern reflects a broader global trend, with substantial proportions of faculty reporting burnout in Brazil (Alves et al., 2019), Portugal (Castro et al., 2023), and across contexts including Spain, South Africa, Canada, and China, where escalating job demands such as increased teaching loads, administrative responsibilities, research productivity pressures, and emotional labor are consistently linked to burnout (Sabagh et al., 2018). Collectively, this research suggests that faculty burnout has reached critical levels amid intensifying institutional expectations and expanding role demands in higher education (Fernández-Suárez et al., 2021).

In the United States, these pressures are shaped in part by the competitive landscape reinforced by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which groups institutions by degree offerings and research activity (American Council on Education, n.d.). Under the 2024 framework, Research 1 (R1) institutions are designated as Doctoral Universities–Very High Research Activity, signaling the highest levels of research expenditures and doctoral production. The pursuit of R1 status carries implications for funding, organizational priorities, and prestige, but often overextends institutional labor systems, particularly through undervalued service, advising, and teaching work disproportionately performed by women (Diep, 2023; Domingo et al., 2022).

These dynamics operate within organizations that are fundamentally gendered, as institutional structures and hierarchies continue to marginalize women (Acker, 1990). Persistent inequities remain evident in women’s underrepresentation in faculty roles, overrepresentation in non-tenure-track positions, and ongoing pay gaps (Bordieri et al., 2024; Casad et al., 2022; Moody, 2024). Women also face elevated risk of burnout (Artz et al., 2022; Rocha et al., 2020) and are disproportionately concentrated in contingent faculty roles characterized by high responsibility and limited security (American Association of University Professors, n.d.; Schneider & Bichsel, 2024). The purpose of this study was to examine how institutional striving toward R1 status shaped the lived experiences of burnout among women contingent faculty at one transitioning R2 institution. Although the findings are grounded in the U.S. context, they speak to broader dynamics affecting many higher education institutions, with variation shaped by local governance and labor arrangements.

Literature Review

The Phenomenon of Burnout

The term burnout was popularized by Graham Greene in A Burnt-Out Case, a fictional portrayal of a man consumed by career-driven exhaustion (1960). The concept later entered psychological discourse when Herbert Freudenberger (1974) used it to describe fatigue, diminished motivation, and disengagement among volunteers in a free drug clinic, linking burnout to both emotional and organizational conditions (Heinemann & Heinemann, 2017). Early conceptualizations defined burnout as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach et al., 2001), a framework later refined to emphasize persistent exhaustion, cynicism, and perceived inefficacy (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Burnout reflects an altered state of psychological and emotional well-being (Lackritz, 2004) and is formally recognized in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic, unmanaged workplace stress (World Health Organization, 2019).

Gender and Burnout

The intersection of gendered expectations, social norms, and institutional arrangements produces burnout among women as a patterned condition rather than an individual outcome. Women’s work is routinely extended beyond formal job descriptions through cognitive, emotional, and relational labor—forms of invisible and often nonpromotable work (Daniels, 1987)—that remain essential to organizational functioning yet are systematically devalued within gendered organizational structures (Acker, 1990). This persistent demand intensifies emotional exhaustion, erodes coping capacity, and contributes to women’s disproportionate experiences of burnout and attrition (Artz et al., 2022; Krstić et al., 2025; Rocha et al., 2020). For working mothers, these pressures are compounded as professional expectations collide with unevenly distributed caregiving responsibilities, amplifying strain across personal and institutional domains (Aviv et al., 2025; Cassidy-Vu et al., 2017; Seedat & Rondon, 2021). When institutional values privilege productivity and availability over care and equity, internalized gender norms further deepen burnout risk (Leiter & Maslach, 1999; Meeussen & Van Laar, 2018).

These dynamics and their impact are escalated for women positioned at the margins of academic power. Organizational practices routinely reproduce gendered and racial hierarchies, embedding inequity into everyday norms of legitimacy, recognition, and autonomy (Acker, 2006). Women, faculty of color, and contingent academics often labor within environments that valorize tenure-line, white, masculine standards while rendering their contributions peripheral (O’Meara et al., 2018; Wright-Mair & Museus, 2023). Service, work that is disproportionately assigned to women, becomes a key site through which inequities are sustained, as it is simultaneously demanded and devalued (O’Meara, 2016; O’Meara et al., 2017). As contingent and marginalized faculty absorb expanding service burdens without corresponding institutional support, burnout emerges as an expected outcome of structural precarity rather than a failure of resilience. In this sense, burnout operates as an intersectional institutional effect that is produced through how academic labor is organized, valued, and unevenly distributed.

Contingent Faculty and Burnout

Contingent faculty occupy a nexus where gendered labor practices and structural marginalization converge. Their work is shaped by constrained professional voice, limited mobility, and diminished agency—all conditions that compound exposure to burnout rather than merely accompany it (Bernstein et al., 2001). Although equity initiatives have expanded in name, contingency continues to be overlaid with persistent gender inequities in higher education, particularly in how academic labor is compensated, valued, and institutionally supported (Bingham & Nix, 2010; Bordieri et al., 2024).

Faculty burnout has emerged globally as a patterned response to escalating labor demands, a trend sharply intensified during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Across national contexts, burnout is consistently linked to organizational environments characterized by expanding workloads, resource scarcity, and misalignment between institutional priorities and faculty values (Fernández-Suárez et al., 2021; Pope-Ruark, 2022; Rahman et al., 2024; Sabagh et al., 2018; Wray & Kinman, 2021). In the United States, the pandemic laid bare the extent to which faculty absorbed expanded emotional and relational labor to sustain students and institutions, often in the absence of commensurate recognition or reward (Koster & McHenry, 2023; Vyletel et al., 2023).

These patterns are rooted in governance logics that privilege productivity and prestige while normalizing the commodification of academic labor and the expansion of precarious employment arrangements (Berg et al., 2016; Giroux, 2014; Rosa, 2022). The consequences of this governance model are distinctly gendered, as women are disproportionately concentrated in contingent academic roles both internationally and in the United States (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2024; Schneider & Bichsel, 2024). Within the U.S. context, contingent faculty constitute the majority of non-tenure-track positions, of which women make up approximately 57% (Palmer, 2026), and routinely encounter instability, isolation, and limited institutional recognition. These are conditions with material consequences for health, financial security, and career trajectories (American Association of University Professors, n.d.; Kezar & Sam, 2013; Nichols, 2023). Such arrangements depend on sustained yet uncompensated labor, reproducing professional precarity while constraining advancement (Finley, 2009; Reid, 2021).

Increasingly, burnout in higher education is theorized not as an individual deficit but as a structural condition produced through institutional cultures that systematically devalue care, equity, and sustainability. Godbee (2022) cautioned against resilience-based framings that obscure organizational responsibility, calling instead for collective and structural responses to chronic misalignments between academic labor and cultures of well-being. From this perspective, burnout constitutes a political and institutional failure—one that carries heightened consequences for women contingent faculty expected to sustain escalating demands under conditions of persistent precarity and inequity.

Institutional Striving

Institutional striving refers to higher education’s pursuit of external markers of prestige to elevate academic standing, a process that reorders organizational priorities and reshapes faculty work (O’Meara, 2007). Zerquera (2023) extended this concept by framing striving as prestige-seeking that moves beyond rankings to encompass the forms of power and leverage institutions accumulate through status. Within striving institutions, faculty labor is increasingly treated as a strategic resource, as prestige-oriented decision making recalibrates expectations for productivity, role clarity, and career advancement in ways that unevenly distribute opportunity and leave many faculty positioned at the margins.

These shifts tend to intensify gendered organizational dynamics by elevating research productivity as the primary marker of institutional value while rendering teaching, mentoring, advising, and service labor increasingly invisible or expendable (Fernández et al., 2022; Gardner, 2013; O’Meara & Bloomgarden, 2011). Within such contexts, women faculty are disproportionately positioned as institutional caregivers, absorbing what Guarino and Borden (2017) described as “academic housework,” such as mentoring, committee service, and relational labor that sustains students and programs but carries limited weight in recontracting and advancement decisions. Post-COVID pressures to accelerate completion, expand enrollment, and prioritize research productivity have intensified efficiency logics, shifting relational and instructional burdens onto faculty without commensurate recognition (Mickey et al., 2023) and deepening pre-existing inequalities (Natow et al., 2023). Together, this scholarship underscores how prestige-driven change embeds gendered assumptions about whose work counts, whose work is rewarded, and whose labor becomes structurally taken for granted.

The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education plays a central role in stabilizing and legitimizing these dynamics by structuring how institutions are compared, valued, and ranked within the U.S. higher education landscape (American Council on Education & Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2025). Although formally descriptive, Carnegie classifications operate as market-facing status signals that organize competition, thus making institutions more attractive to high-achieving faculty and funding agencies (Gunja et al., 2025). In response, doctoral universities frequently reorganize labor, resources, and faculty expectations to pursue upward mobility within the research hierarchy (Callais & Rubenstein, 2024). Such efforts commonly involve intensified research production and expanded doctoral education without parallel investment in labor infrastructure, amplifying inequities in workload distribution and institutional recognition (O’Meara et al., 2017).

Institutional striving toward higher Carnegie classifications unfolds within a broader neoliberal governance context that prioritizes competition, market rationality, and performance-based accountability (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Wieczorek & Muench, 2023). Within this framework, research productivity and external funding function as primary indicators of institutional value, while classification systems consolidate reputational hierarchies across the sector (Marginson, 2016). As institutions respond to these pressures, organizational risk is increasingly displaced onto faculty through expanding reliance on contingent appointments and escalating expectations under conditions of limited support. These arrangements normalize high-demand, low-sustainability working environments and heighten vulnerability to burnout, particularly for women contingent faculty whose labor sustains teaching and student support while remaining peripheral to prestige-based reward systems (Choi, 2023; O’Meara et al., 2017).

Theoretical Orientation

This study is not oriented toward applying or extending burnout theory; rather, it is grounded in a feminist standpoint that treats women contingent faculty’s lived experiences as legitimate and necessary sources of knowledge (Harding, 2004). This orientation guided how burnout was interpreted in the analysis, shifting it from an individual psychological condition to a culturally and structurally produced experience shaped by gendered power relations, institutional arrangements, and normative expectations within higher education. Interpreting the data through this lens foregrounded how participants made sense of exhaustion, invisibility, and precarity as outcomes of their positioning within the academy.

Building on this standpoint, the analysis conceptualized burnout as a product of structural exploitation embedded in higher education’s reliance on feminized labor that is simultaneously essential and undervalued. Prior scholarship has demonstrated that contingent faculty experience intersecting precarity and gendered oppression that reproduces academic “housekeeping” labor and sustains institutional hierarchies (Herzig & Subramaniam, 2021). This perspective informed how participants’ accounts of teaching, mentoring, and emotional labor were interpreted not as peripheral experiences but as central evidence of how institutions extract labor while limiting recognition and mobility. In striving institutions, prestige-driven priorities reinforce gendered ideologies that constrain women’s professional advancement and normalize inequitable labor expectations (Gardner, 2013).

Organizational culture provided an additional interpretive layer for understanding how these patterns were sustained. Drawing on Schein’s (2004) work, institutional culture was treated as an active force that shapes whose work is valued, how resources are distributed, and which forms of labor are rendered legitimate. Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations further sharpened this analysis by framing organizations as inherently structured through gendered divisions of labor, power, and interaction. Together, these lenses directed attention to how cultural assumptions embedded in striving institutions reproduced hierarchical relations that positioned women contingent faculty in subordinate roles. This study advances prior scholarship on contingent faculty burnout by situating it within institutional design and prestige-seeking priorities and reframes burnout as a structural condition produced through institutional striving.

Methods

The purpose of this qualitative heuristic inquiry was to understand the lived experiences of women contingent faculty who experienced burnout while employed at a transitioning Research 2 (R2) institution. Heuristic inquiry, a form of phenomenological research, involves an autobiographical connection and seeks to illuminate the essence of a phenomenon through deep engagement with human experience (Moustakas, 1990). This study was guided by the following research question: How do women contingent faculty express their experience with burnout as the university transitions from an R2 to an R1 institution of higher education? The analysis prioritizes analytic depth and theoretical insight, offering findings intended to be transferable to sufficiently comparable institutional contexts undergoing research intensification rather than broadly generalizable.

Context

This study was conducted at a striving public university in the northeastern United States that has undergone sustained organizational transformation over the past two decades. Originally founded in the early 20th century as a teaching-focused institution, the university strategically expanded into a comprehensive institution with an intensified research mission and then transitioned to an R2 Carnegie classification at the time of data collection. Central to this transition were heightened expectations for external funding, scholarly productivity, and doctoral education, alongside significant reconfigurations of academic labor. According to the university’s 2025 annual report, fewer than half of faculty appointments were full time, with approximately 55% of instructional staff employed in part-time or contingent roles, and only about half of undergraduate course sections taught by full-time faculty. Among full-time faculty, women and men were represented in roughly equal proportions overall; however, women were more heavily concentrated in non-tenure-track and instructional roles and remained underrepresented at the rank of full professor.

During the study period, the university pursued an explicit strategy of institutional advancement centered on capital accumulation, research expansion, and regional influence. Large-scale fundraising campaigns sought to raise approximately $240 million to support research productivity, innovation, and campus transformation, signaling a shift toward externally validated markers of prestige. Annual research and development expenditures exceeded $60 million, drawing on a combination of federally financed, institutionally financed, and externally supported funding streams. These investments coincided with rapid physical plant and programmatic expansion, including the construction of new academic and research facilities, the launch of additional professional and doctoral programs, and the formalization of partnerships with major healthcare systems and industry affiliates.

Participants

This heuristic inquiry involved 12 women contingent faculty members at a transitioning R2 institution in the northeastern United States. Purposeful sampling, consistent with heuristic inquiry (Moustakas, 1990), was used to recruit participants who shared a common experience with the lead researcher: burnout as contingent faculty at the institution. Recruitment was conducted through the university’s American Federation of Teachers adjunct listserv and departmental websites, using a mass email invitation that outlined the study purpose, participation expectations, and eligibility criteria.

Eligibility criteria included identifying as a woman, currently serving as contingent faculty at the institution, self-reporting experiences of burnout, and teaching at least two courses per semester at the university. Participants’ length of employment ranged from 1 1/2 to 12 years, ensuring that all had worked at the institution prior to data collection and were situated to speak to its ongoing transition toward R1 status.

Although not recruitment criteria, participants reflected varied personal and professional contexts, including marital status, caregiving responsibilities, and representation across departments. These characteristics were not treated as explanatory variables, because burnout was understood to occur across such contexts. All participants provided written informed consent, and participant profiles are presented in Appendix A using participant-selected pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

Data Collection

This study received institutional review board (IRB) approval (PRO-2024-183) prior to the onset of data collection. Data were collected from interviews, contemporaneous diary reflections, and a researcher’s journal. Each participant engaged in an extended interview, which allowed the researcher and participants to engage in open and honest dialogue that facilitated meaningful depictions of the experience (Moustakas, 1990). Interviews were conducted in 2024 using a structured protocol to aid in answering the research questions. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Heuristic inquiry seeks to validate the verisimilitude of the findings by continuously returning to the data, engaging in persistent reflection, and sharing the findings with participants (Moustakas, 1990). At the conclusion of the interview, participants received a copy of the transcript and were encouraged to reflect, revise, redact, or further elaborate on their responses.

Contemporaneous diary reflections were used to capture participants’ lived experiences of burnout in ways not accessible through interviews alone (Bolger et al., 2003). Diaries supplemented interview data by providing temporally grounded, participant-authored accounts that foregrounded participants’ voices and everyday experiences (McCombie et al., 2024). A brief diary protocol prompted participants to describe, in approximately 250–500 words, a typical day in the life of a woman contingent faculty member. All participants completed the reflection and submitted their entries via email.

Researcher journaling plays a significant role in heuristic inquiry, because it provides a space for exploration, reflexivity, and creativity, allowing for a deeper understanding (Sultan, 2019). The researcher’s journal connected the autobiographical accounts with the experiences shared by participants. A journal protocol guided the process of reflection and exploration of the interviews and contemporaneous diary reflections.

Data Analysis

This study followed the descriptive analytic process outlined by Moustakas (1990) for heuristic inquiry, using iterative cycles of immersion, reflection, and synthesis across interview and diary data. Interviews and contemporaneous diaries were analyzed concurrently to support analytic integration and temporal depth. Analysis began with repeated readings of all transcripts and diary entries to develop familiarity and to document reflexive observations through analytic memos. Open, line-by-line coding was then applied across both data sources, prioritizing participants’ language to remain close to lived experience (Saldaña, 2016). Initial codes captured actions, emotions, institutional conditions, and meaning-making processes (e.g., exhaustion, invisibility, boundary erosion).

Codes were compared within and across participants and clustered into preliminary categories through focused coding (Saldaña, 2016). Interview and diary data were examined together at this stage, with diaries used to extend and contextualize interview accounts by capturing shifts in affect and sensemaking over time. For example, interview references to overwork were deepened through diary entries describing nightly grading, emotional depletion, and anticipatory stress, allowing these experiences to be understood as patterned rather than episodic.

Themes were developed by synthesizing the focused, clustered categories into analytically meaningful patterns that reflected both individual experiences and institutional context. For instance, categories related to invisibility, legitimacy, and exclusion coalesced into the theme beleaguered belonging, capturing how exhaustion was experienced as lack of belongingness among contingent academic labor. Individual depictions were then constructed for each participant, integrating interview and diary data to represent the uniqueness of each experience. These depictions informed the development of a composite depiction representing the shared dimensions of the phenomenon. The final analytic phase involved a creative synthesis of the participants’ experience (Moustakas, 1990). In heuristic inquiry, the creative synthesis functions as an integrative analytic representation rather than a direct presentation of empirical data, capturing the meaning and coherence of the phenomenon as a whole.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness in this heuristic inquiry was established through prolonged engagement, iterative immersion, and systematic reflexivity, consistent with Moustakas’s (1990) approach. We engaged in repeated readings of interview transcripts and diary entries, supported by analytic memos and reflexive journaling to document decision-making and monitor assumptions. Credibility was strengthened through the integration of interviews and contemporaneous diaries, providing analytic convergence and temporal depth. Themes and depictions were revisited and refined to ensure fidelity to participants’ lived experiences, culminating in a creative synthesis that represents the shared essence of the phenomenon while honoring individual variation.

Positionality

Positionality statements are integral to reflective and ethical research (Brooks et al., 2014). We approached this study with an awareness that higher education institutions can reproduce patterns that contribute to gender inequities and burnout, particularly for women in contingent roles. One author—a White, cisgender woman, wife, mother, former contingent faculty member, and recent doctoral graduate—brought lived experience of burnout that informed both the research focus and analytic sensitivity. The other is a tenured, fully promoted professor and feminist researcher whose positionality, shaped by the access afforded through rank, contributed an institutional perspective that supported the examination of organizational dynamics affecting contingent faculty as well as the study’s conceptual development. Throughout the study, we remained attentive to power, representation, and voice, striving to conduct the research in ways that honored participants’ experiences while minimizing the reproduction of hierarchical dynamics within the research process itself.

Findings

This study explored how women contingent faculty articulated their experiences of burnout within the context of a transitioning Carnegie Classified R2 institution. As the institution pursued prestige, participants described the strain of navigating organizational structures that simultaneously relied on and devalued their feminized labor. Their narratives revealed burnout not as a personal deficit but as a structural outcome shaped by the absence of foundational support, recognition, and belonging for those in contingent roles. The findings are presented through a composite depiction organized around three central themes: clash of cultures, perfunctory praise, and beleaguered belonging. These themes illuminate the tensions between institutional ambition and the lived realities of contingent faculty. The section concludes with a creative synthesis, which is an imaginative representation that captures the emotional and existential core of the phenomenon (Moustakas, 1990).

Clash of Cultures

Participants described a persistent clash between the culture of contingent academic labor, grounded in care, relational teaching, and student advocacy, and an institutional culture increasingly shaped by prestige-seeking, speed, and bureaucratic indifference. These forms of care-oriented labor, disproportionately performed by women, were essential to student success yet remained undervalued within research-driven reward systems. Many participants entered the profession with a strong sense of purpose and ethical commitment to teaching, only to find themselves working within systems that offered minimal recognition, fragmented oversight, and limited support. This dissonance between participants’ pedagogical values and institutional priorities, shaped by gendered expectations about care and flexibility, emerged as a central source of emotional strain and burnout, particularly during the push toward R1 status.

Despite being underpaid and structurally marginalized, participants consistently described themselves as strong advocates for students. They spoke about designing engaging courses, providing detailed feedback, and remaining highly accessible, often in the absence of job security or consistent institutional support. Amelia, a writing arts instructor, shared, “I always take my role in the classroom seriously. . .. I always try to remind myself that I’m setting the precedent for what they will experience moving forward in their undergraduate careers.” Her reflection highlights a strong sense of responsibility for student success. Across participants, this commitment required sustained emotional and instructional labor, which, when combined with limited recognition and support, contributed to feelings of being overextended and vulnerable to burnout. Bridget, an English faculty member, described the mental and emotional effort she invested in her teaching, stating, “I put a lot of my, you know, mental and emotional labor into making sure that the course was successful, and I cared deeply for my students. . ..” She framed this labor as central to her work with students. Over time, sustaining this level of emotional investment contributed to feelings of exhaustion and strain.

Participants also described navigating inconsistent and individualized forms of institutional support, further amplifying burnout. Harper, an education faculty member, reflected on advocating for students amid unclear guidance and uneven mentorship, stating that a single faculty mentor became her primary source of safety and support. Her reliance on one individual rather than a formalized support structure highlighted significant gaps in institutional mentorship and professional development for contingent faculty. This fragmented system required Harper to construct her own support network, increasing emotional labor and reinforcing her marginal position within the institution.

Jessica, a writing arts faculty member, explicitly connected this fragmentation to the institution’s accelerated push toward R1 status: “I think the culture is very fragmented. . .. I think that [the institution] might be moving a little too fast for our kids. . .. they’re struggling more than they were before. . .. I have all these things to worry about.” Her reflection revealed anxiety about institutional priorities and the consequences of rapid prestige-seeking for both students and faculty. Jessica highlighted the accelerated speed at which the university was advancing, suggesting that institutional priorities were increasingly aligned with the benchmarks associated with R1 classification. Her reflections underscored how the rapid pace of prestige-seeking initiatives recalibrated institutional priorities toward measurable indicators of advancement and positioned her teaching-centered work as peripheral to the institution’s goals. In this context, speed functioned as a mechanism of prioritization that intensified attention toward attaining R1 status while diminishing structures that support student and faculty well-being. As the institution intensified its pursuit of research status, participants like Jessica absorbed additional emotional and academic labor to support struggling students, while receiving little acknowledgment or support themselves. This dynamic further entrenched gendered expectations of care, positioning women contingent faculty as buffers against institutional strain.

Collectively, participants illuminated a profound cultural mismatch. Although they cultivated classrooms centered on care, connection, and student success, they did so within an institutional environment that prioritized speed. The pursuit of R1 status intensified existing gendered hierarchies, privileging research-driven work while devaluing the feminized labor disproportionately performed by women contingent faculty. Caught between their commitment to students and an institution that rendered them expendable, participants’ stories reveal how institutional striving eroded professional sustainability and well-being, making burnout an unsurprising and structural outcome rather than an individual failing.

Perfunctory Praise

Several participants emphasized that the recognition they received as contingent faculty felt perfunctory and insufficient, functioning as formalities that maintained the status quo rather than offering meaningful appreciation or support. These forms of recognition were closely tied to feminized expectations that women’s teaching and care work should be routine, self-evident, and undeserving of distinction. Participants described teaching awards that were distributed broadly, which further diluted their significance and reinforced the sense that excellence in teaching was assumed rather than valued. When discussing the Adjunct of the Year Award, Jessica questioned its meaning, stating, “I’m doing what’s expected of me and I feel that’s not above and beyond. . .. I don’t know that you get rewarded for just doing what’s expected of you.” Similarly, Isabella reflected on receiving a Teaching Excellence Award, noting, “I won it, but everyone won it.” These accounts illustrate how recognition practices, particularly during institutional striving, rendered women’s labor visible only in symbolic ways, reinforcing gendered norms that normalize high levels of care and instructional labor while withholding substantive acknowledgment. Institutional striving reinforced gendered inequities that narrowed opportunity and recognition for contingent faculty. As advancements accelerated, the university institutionalized a hierarchy of worth that framed contingent faculty labor as routine rather than worthy.

Participants also implied that status quo recognition was received with the renewal of their contracts and other routine operational tasks. When discussing how she felt the institution acknowledged her work, Eva, a psychology instructor, stated, “I can’t say that I really feel that it is other than the fact that they continue to offer me courses each term. So, I kind of take that as a good sign that I’m doing ok.” Eva equated a basic departmental procedure with validation that her work was appreciated and valued by the institution. However, she was not alone in interpreting superficial actions as a form of recognition. There was an inferred level of status quo appreciation when Faith, a communications faculty member, highlighted her receipt of a recent email, by stating:

Departmentally, I would say, you know, you get the praise. . .. I actually took one of those faculty center, you know, online development trainings in the spring, and I got a direct email from the dean saying, “Hey you, congrats on taking that class”. . .. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say there’s much. . ..

When reflecting on her sense of acknowledgement, Harper, an education instructor, also appeared to have accepted superficial accolades as a sufficient form of recognition by the institution.

So, in terms of being included and acknowledged, a lot of that was electronically and I never felt that I wasn’t important. So, the communication in that sense was as clear and consistent. . .every faculty member that I’ve ever reached out, even if they don’t know the answers to questions that I asked them, will respond extremely quickly.

Amid institutional striving, Harper’s perception of being valued by the institution was shaped not by formal recognition but by basic procedural efforts. She equated electronic communication to a form of reward, even though such actions were likely routine obligations of faculty members. This dynamic reflected how within the context of institutional striving, minimal gestures took on amplified meaning, signaling how symbolic inclusion substituted for substantive recognition.

Participants’ accounts revealed that recognition was rare and, when offered, was largely limited to basic or routine acknowledgments. This superficial recognition functioned less as meaningful appreciation and more as a symbolic gesture that reinforced participants’ invisibility—stressing that the labor performed by women contingent faculty remained undervalued and misaligned with the institution’s priorities. Thus, diluted gestures of appreciation sustained a sense of provisional belonging for participants.

Beleaguered Belonging

Participants described a sense of disconnection and limited belonging during the institution’s pursuit of prestige, a condition shaped by gendered expectations about whose labor and presence matter. Although many expressed a desire for closer ties to their departments and the broader institution, they perceived that their contingent status, coupled with the feminized nature of their teaching and care work, limited their inclusion, visibility, and professional legitimacy within the institution. Cassey, a sociology instructor, reflected on feeling peripheral within her department during this period, noting that she was often excluded from meetings and departmental conversations:

I’ve always been the black sheep of the group because I’m geared more towards [specific sub-program] and everybody else is [the program]. . .. I don’t get looped [in with] the other instructors. We’re supposed to sit down and have meetings, but there’s been meetings with certain instructors, and I was never included.

Cassey’s account illustrates how departmental interactions and communication patterns contributed to feelings of isolation. During the institution’s push toward R1 status, participants like Cassey perceived that those whose work was less closely aligned with research-oriented priorities were more likely to experience exclusion from departmental spaces and decision-making, reinforcing a sense of marginality within the institution.

As women contingent faculty navigated the institution’s pursuit of prestige, some described feeling pressure to adapt to shifting departmental priorities and power dynamics. Participants spoke about the need to remain flexible and to reconsider their roles within an evolving institutional context. Isabella, a writing arts instructor, reflected on this experience:

I feel like I need to be very malleable. . .. I kind of need to fit the shape that the department is going in. I also feel like I need to change who I’m networking with because the power shifts pretty frequently with a department like that.

Isabella’s account highlights how institutional striving was experienced as ongoing change that required continual adjustment. During the transition, she perceived the need to renegotiate professional relationships and align herself with shifting centers of influence, which contributed to uncertainty about her role and sense of belonging as a contingent faculty member.

Participants described an overwhelming sense of isolation and lack of support in their roles as contingent faculty. Eva shared her experience as a contingent faculty member within the psychology department, which further highlighted a lack of support and a sense of disconnection.

There’s not a great deal of time and care given, and I don’t know if that is specific to the psychology department, or maybe just even like maybe that’s my experience because I’m teaching online. However, I was teaching face to face for years and the experience was no different. There’s sort of this sense of kind of being on an island, without much support.

Eva’s account conveyed a sense of frustration rooted in her feelings of alienation and lack of support during the pursuit of prestige. She described navigating the transition alone, uncertain whether the neglect she experienced was unique to her department or shared by others. This uncertainty underscored her professional isolation and disconnection from the broader institutional community. Using the metaphor “being on an island” illustrated the pervasive isolation and absence of support that she perceived defined her experience as she struggled to find a sense of connection within an environment that seemed indifferent to her role.

Delani, an American Studies instructor, described how the institution’s pursuit of prestige shaped her perception of uneven departmental support and heightened uncertainty about her future as a contingent faculty member. She observed visible investments in some areas of the university while others, particularly the humanities, appeared to receive less attention:

You can see it more in some departments. . .you’ll watch these lovely buildings being constructed for business or for sciences. . .they’re putting their emphasis where they’re putting their funding, leaving those of us on the humanities side kind of fighting for our ability to stay.

Delani’s account reflects how institutional striving was experienced as differential investment across disciplines, contributing to concerns about relevance and job security. As the institution prioritized areas aligned with prestige and strategic growth, she perceived her work as increasingly misaligned with institutional direction, reinforcing feelings of precarity and distance from the broader academic community during the push toward R1 status.

Participants frequently described a sense of disconnection and limited belonging during the institution’s pursuit of prestige. They reported feelings of isolation and exclusion, particularly as they perceived their roles as contingent faculty to be undervalued and increasingly misaligned with institutional priorities during the transition. Within this striving context, organizational structures and practices appeared to privilege forms of labor associated with prestige, while marginalizing teaching-focused work disproportionately performed by women. This misalignment reflects the operation of gendered organizational processes, in which access, recognition, and advancement are unevenly distributed. As a result, participants’ sense of professional belonging and perceived value within the institution weakened, creating organizational conditions that heightened vulnerability to burnout.

Creative Synthesis: A Day in the Life of Women Contingent Faculty in Transition

We labor in the margins of the institution’s ambition

Consumed by its relentless demands, we move through each day, navigating the quiet erosion of our worth. The lies we tell ourselves, and the ones we are told, are dressed in the language of progress. They run deep. They soothe just enough to keep us compliant, even as we bend to impossible expectations.

We are asked to be grateful and silent

As women contingent faculty, we are asked to be endlessly flexible and perpetually grateful. Our days are chaotic, overwhelming, and, paradoxically, filled with purpose. We give everything: our time, our intellect, our care. And in return, we are met with silence.

We are essential, yet invisible

The institution takes more than any full-time job has a right to demand. Its appetite grows with our commitment. We are outsiders; essential yet invisible. We are tasked with carrying the weight of student success while excluded from the inner workings of power and decision-making.

We build without being named

It expands. It aspires. It climbs toward prestige. And we are left unnamed in the narrative of institutional excellence. Still, we build: courses, programs, mentorships, pathways for others. Our contributions are foundational, but our presence is erased. We are acknowledged only in the moment of recontracting, never as legacy, never as belonging.

Our humanity is the hidden cost

A shadow grows within this system. Each request, each overlooked contribution, each silence chips away at our sense of self. In this architecture of advancement, our humanity is the cost. We know we deserve better. But the institution only advances, indifferent to what it leaves behind.

Discussion and Implications

This study examined the lived experiences of women contingent faculty experiencing burnout at a transitioning Doctoral University–High Research Activity (R2) institution in the northeastern United States. Centered on how participants made sense of burnout within the context of institutional striving, the analysis foregrounds women contingent faculty voices to extend scholarship on gendered academic labor, institutional change, and burnout in three ways. First, it shows how research intensification reshapes organizational culture by entrenching gendered hierarchies and women’s burnout as acceptable costs of progress. Second, it reframes burnout as an institutional design problem rather than an individual deficit, revealing how reward structures, employment arrangements, and cultural norms collectively produce burnout. Third, it demonstrates how disciplinary location mediates the experience of striving, concentrating burnout in fields less aligned with Carnegie-driven prestige metrics.

Entrenching Gendered Hierarchies

Participants described the institutional culture during the transition as fragmented and weakly supportive, marked by persistent ambiguity around roles, responsibilities, and long-term stability. This uncertainty did more than generate stress; it signaled that faculty and student needs were subordinated to prestige-driven priorities, raising doubts about the institution’s capacity to manage change without extracting unsustainable labor from its workforce. In the absence of coherent structures, communication, and resources, participants reported being left to absorb the risks of transition individually rather than collectively—conditions with direct consequences for faculty well-being. Gardner (2013) similarly documented how institutional striving without adequate infrastructure contributes to faculty burnout. Extending this work, the present study demonstrates that these conditions are not experienced evenly: women in contingent roles navigate institutional transitions from structurally marginalized positions within gendered organizational systems, intensifying precarity and accelerating burnout as they are expected to sustain change without stability, authority, or recognition.

These findings align with prior research showing that institutional striving often produces fragmented cultures marked by confusion and misalignment between institutional priorities and faculty responsibilities, particularly in relation to teaching labor (O’Meara & Bloomgarden, 2011). Such disjunctures are not incidental. Research-driven priorities systematically devalue the invisible and relational work disproportionately performed by women, producing gendered inequities through workload distribution rather than overt exclusion (Heiden-Rootes et al., 2024). While unclear expectations and insufficient support are established contributors to burnout (Edú-Valsania et al., 2022), for contingent faculty these conditions are structural rather than episodic. Consistent with scholarship documenting marginalization and fractured working environments (Kezar & Sam, 2013; Vicente, 2017), the findings suggest that institutional striving actively intensifies these vulnerabilities by distancing contingent faculty from decision-making, recognition, and stability.

As organizational cultures respond to external pressures by reorganizing divisions of labor, authority, and value (Schein, 2004), these adaptations work upon structures already gendered, thus further entrenching their hierarchies rather than unsettling them (Acker, 1990, 2006). Within neoliberal higher education contexts, pressures associated with competition, market rationality, and performance-based accountability have narrowed institutional definitions of legitimacy, often to what Morley (2023) characterized as an “Orwellian” extent. As institutions in the United States pursue R1 status, organizational cultures increasingly consolidate around research productivity and quantifiable outputs as dominant markers of value (Gonzales, 2013). This reconfiguration is not gender-neutral. Prestige-driven norms symbolically elevate research labor while displacing instructional and relational work onto contingent faculty, a workforce disproportionately composed of women, rendering gendered hierarchies of in/visibility, reward, and security not incidental but structurally produced.

Within this gendered organizational arrangement, neoliberal institutions depend on feminized, care-oriented labor to sustain teaching and student support while excluding that labor from dominant prestige narratives (Morris et al., 2024). Moreover, this arrangement forces women into exploitative, stereotypical roles associated with invisible caregiving (Reid, 2021). These divisions are reproduced through everyday interactional patterns that normalize asymmetries of power and voice, as well as through cultural expectations that shape how women contingent faculty come to understand appropriate work, availability, and belonging within the organization (Acker, 1990). Burnout thus emerges not as an individual condition but as an institutional outcome produced through the ongoing gendered organization of academic labor, revealing how neoliberal striving reproduces inequity and undermines the long-term sustainability of women’s academic careers.

Functionalizing Gendered Burnout

Participants described a deep commitment to their students alongside a recognition system that felt increasingly hollow during the institution’s pursuit of prestige. Although they routinely served as mentors, advocates, and sources of emotional support, this labor was rarely acknowledged and largely unrewarded. Participants’ accounts suggest that the work most central to student success was rendered peripheral within an institutional reward structure oriented toward R1 attainment. Given that women contingent faculty constitute the majority of the non-tenure-track workforce (Schneider & Bichsel, 2024), these findings point to another structural contradiction in higher education: those most responsible for sustaining teaching and mentoring are systematically excluded from recognition systems that define institutional value. In this context, institutional striving does not merely overlook contingent faculty labor but depends upon its invisibility.

Responding to longstanding calls to expand faculty reward structures beyond narrow productivity metrics (O’Meara & Braskamp, 2005), this study illuminates how prestige-oriented systems are sustained through the strategic design of what counts as merit rather than through omission alone. Contingent faculty labor—particularly the intensive teaching and relational work disproportionately performed by women—becomes structurally indispensable precisely because it remains outside formal systems of valuation. This configuration enables institutions to absorb instructional and emotional demands without recalibrating rewards, protections, or accountability mechanisms. Burnout, in this context, operates as a foreseeable byproduct of reward architectures that extract labor while withholding stability and recognition, transforming exhaustion into an organizing feature of institutional functioning rather than an unintended failure (Domingo et al., 2022; Nichols, 2023).

Striving Inequitably

Participants’ accounts reflected how institutional striving intersected with disciplinary location, as many women contingent faculty were situated within the humanities and social sciences. Humanities and social science fields are often more vulnerable during periods of Carnegie-driven research intensification because they align less directly with external funding, lab-based research, and other prestige metrics. Women contingent faculty in these disciplines may therefore experience the effects of striving more acutely, making burnout more visible and narratable. Under Carnegie-driven research intensification, institutional value increasingly centers on externally funded research and doctoral production, positioning these disciplines as less central to prestige-based metrics (Marginson, 2016; O’Meara et al., 2017). As a result, participants described heightened pressure to sustain teaching quality and student support within fields essential to institutional functioning yet structurally marginalized within research-oriented reward systems.

Women remain disproportionately concentrated in contingent roles within the humanities and social sciences, a pattern reflected in the composition of participants in this study. The absence of voices from the sciences and engineering should not be read as an absence of burnout but as indicative of a different labor ecology, one in which access to resources, status, and institutional protection is more robust or where contingent labor is structured through alternative arrangements, like the dependence on professionals with external employment in the field. This disciplinary clustering highlights how institutional striving operates unevenly across academic fields. Rather than exerting uniform pressure, striving reorders institutional value in ways that differentially elevate research-intensive domains while marginalizing fields more closely associated with teaching and service. In doing so, institutional striving intersects with gendered employment patterns through disciplinary valuation, concentrating precarity and exhaustion in areas where women are already overrepresented (Becher & Trowler, 2001). The prominence of humanities and social science voices in this study thus signals where the costs of prestige-oriented reorganization are most acutely borne, revealing burnout as a structural effect rather than a field-specific anomaly.

Implications for Research and Practice

Although this study did not empirically examine racialized dimensions of academic labor, it is important to acknowledge that racially minoritized faculty experience compounded risk within environments of institutional striving, where power relations intersect with precarious employment and intensified performance demands (Wright-Mair & Museus, 2023). In these contexts, women of color are often expected to shoulder disproportionate teaching, mentoring, and diversity labor while remaining marginalized within systems that privilege prestige-aligned research and market-based metrics of value (Chowdry, 2014; Culpepper et al., 2021). Recognizing these dynamics situates the present findings within a broader landscape of inequality and underscores the need for future research that directly examines how race and gender jointly shape exposure to risk, precarity, and burnout during periods of institutional striving.

This study focused on the experiences of women contingent faculty and did not aim to make comparative claims across gender. Informed by existing scholarship on gendered academic labor, our analysis offers a situated account of how institutional striving was experienced by women in contingent roles at one institution. The contribution lies in deepening understanding of these gendered experiences rather than extending claims beyond the population examined. Future research could build on this work by examining how institutional striving is experienced across contingent faculty populations more broadly, including comparative and intersectional analyses that further illuminate variation in precarity and burnout.

Taken together, these findings show that burnout during periods of institutional growth is structurally produced at the intersection of gender, contingent employment, and disciplinary marginalization. As neoliberal forms of institutional striving elevate prestige-aligned labor while devaluing teaching and care work, the risks of advancement are shifted from institutions onto individual faculty, with women in contingent roles bearing a disproportionate share. Burnout thus emerges not as a personal failure but as a predictable outcome of how academic value and risk are organized, underscoring the need for institutional responses that address workload distribution, reward structures, and support systems rather than relying on individual-level interventions alone.

Striving institutions must recognize that equity cannot be retrofitted after prestige is achieved. Institutional transitions should therefore include formal equity impact assessments and policy safeguards that examine how labor will be distributed, valued, and supported at each stage of research intensification, including contract stability, workload expectations, and access to resources. By explicitly linking burnout to institutional design, this study advances gendered academic labor scholarship and highlights the structural consequences of prestige-seeking reforms in higher education, underscoring the need for accountability mechanisms that prevent inequity from being institutionalized as just another price of prestige.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that burnout among women contingent faculty during periods of institutional striving is not incidental or individualized but structurally produced at the intersection of gendered organizational cultures, neoliberal prestige logics, and disciplinary stratification. The creative synthesis, A Day in the Life of Women Contingent Faculty in Transition, captures what the empirical findings underscore: women contingent faculty sustain teaching, mentoring, and student success while laboring at the margins of institutional ambition, excluded from the rewards and protections tied to prestige. Taken together, these findings challenge institutions to confront the human cost of excellence pursued without accountability. Prestige achieved through the erosion of women contingent faculty’s well-being reflects not neutrality but decisions about whose labor is rendered expendable. Without deliberate attention to how labor is valued and supported, burnout will remain a predictable feature of prestige-driven higher education rather than an aberration.