Juggling a full load of courses as a biology professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Ryan Rogers reached her breaking point when administrators required her to teach laboratory courses in-person during the pandemic.
“My mental health was trash,” Rogers said. “I felt it declining day by day. I did not sleep very much. My hair started falling out. I felt like I was running a race with no water stations in the heat and a moving finish line.”
In the fall, the thirty-three-year old molecular biologist and mother of two young children says she was running out of steam. "I just felt pulled in so many directions. I was doing a bad job as a professor and a terrible job as a mom. And then don't even mention trying to be a successful partner,” she said.
In October, Rogers submitted her resignation, giving up her dream job. “There were so many tears, like my shirt was wet," she said. "I couldn't do what I needed to do, and my well-being was more important,”
A popular professor featured in some of Wentworth’s online promotional videos, Rogers is one of at least 14 faculty members who’ve resigned, retired or been fired since the start of the pandemic. That’s 10 percent of the faculty. In interviews with GBH News, professors blame what they call “a mass exodus" on a toxic work environment and leadership’s lack of flexibility and empathy.
From Pennsylvania State University to the University of Alabama at Huntsville, some college professors are leaving their full-time jobs because, they say, working on campus during the pandemic has burned them out.
Seven of the fourteen Wentworth professors who've left are women — a considerable number for a small technical college where female faculty are underrepresented.
Administrators say they’ve tried to accommodate, but the college — like higher ed as a whole — is not immune to broader labor trends.
“The pandemic has brought about this national phenomenon of people moving, taking advantage of opportunities for greater salaries, career advancement. Some are retiring early,” explained Wentworth President Mark Thompson.
The college in Boston employs more than 500 people and administrators have been trying to be flexible with faculty while also responding to student demands for more in-person instruction.
“You always have a situation or two where that balance and that tension between service to students and employees needs can't necessarily be exactly met,” Thompson said. “But I felt we took a very compassionate approach.”
Thompson pointed out five of the professors who left took planned retirements. "I wouldn't characterize it as a mass exodus," he said.
Some members of Wentworth’s faculty disagree. Last fall, they took a vote of no confidence in Thompson, specifically citing a lack of support for women and caregivers.
Higher ed labor advocates say administrators across the country aren’t doing enough for women employed on campuses, who are thought to be leaving in greater numbers than men during the pandemic although no one is tracking faculty departures by gender nationally.
“Women have the additional burden of childcare,” said mathematician Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors.
Mulvey said last year young female professors couldn’t send their kids to school or child care and often had to supervise their learning.
That meant many mothers weren't able to teach, research and write.
“Female faculty members are submitting papers at a much lower degree than they did before the pandemic, and that’s going to make it more difficult for women to get tenure,” she said.
On a recent morning in Boston’s Bay Village neighborhood, Ryan Rogers snuggled her four-month-old son and then engaged her two-year-old daughter, playing with blocks in the morning light on their living room floor.
Rogers said administrators gave her no choice but to quit.
“I love teaching and I kind of mourn the decision to leave every day,” she said. “It was the hardest decision I've made to date."
Post-pandemic, Rogers said she will consider returning to the classroom, but for now she’s working on a children’s book series about female scientists who made major discoveries in molecular biology and genetics.
GBH News' Diane Adame contributed to this report. This article has been corrected to reflect the month Ryan Rogers was October, not December.
