We Are Not Okay

Shout it from the rafters and for the people in the back. Emblazon it on a t-shirt and parade around campus: We are not okay.

Higher education is not okay. Our institutions are not okay. Our staff and leaders are not okay.

Many of us all already know this, but knowing it and declaring it are two different things. Knowing we're not okay without saying it leads to avoidance, isolation, and inaction. On the other hand, declaring to one another what we know to be true demands vulnerability and courage. It opens up new spaces for community built around our shared knowing and creates new possibilities for action. Perhaps now more than ever we must proclaim it and seek to create those spaces and possibilities.

Because we are definitely not okay.

Of course, it's not just higher education. Economic and political instability appear to be the new global norm.^Footnote1 "Polycrisis" is a word most of us didn't know just a few years ago, yet here we are.

But higher education does seem to be in the midst of its own special kind of crisis. Trust in higher education is at an all-time low, and that distrust is now manifesting in the form of state and federal actions that threaten our institutions' financial security, our intellectual and academic autonomy, and our long-held institutional values.^Footnote2

Many of us were already feeling stressed out and overwhelmed in our day to day work before these past few months. In EDUCAUSE's survey of technology leaders last year, 70 percent reported having excessive workloads that had increased over the previous twelve months. In our recent survey of teaching and learning professionals, respondents reported experiences of stress and burnout from being overworked and understaffed.^Footnote3

Technical debts are mounting for institutions as well, as important device and system updates are being deferred and technology implementation decisions are being rushed or shortcut. For many institutions, it's unclear whether those debts will be addressed anytime in the near future.^Footnote4

Even under the best circumstances, higher education technology work can feel daunting. But through the mire of persistent workload and staffing challenges, and with the potential of drastic budget cuts and programmatic disruptions still to come, it can feel downright impossible.

Indeed, we are not okay.

But, thankfully, we are never without hope.

Although political action, legal recourse, and widespread cultural disruption may be appropriate responses at scale, for many of us such approaches are beyond the scope of our day-to-day work, making it difficult to know what to do in the face of it all. I offer the reflections below, then, as smaller, more immediate considerations, areas where even in our daily work we can begin to declare and open up spaces for institutional community and action.

As writer and activist adrienne maree brown reminds us, "Look here. Here." Focus on the small things in front of you as places where we may begin, bit by bit and over the longer arc of time, to be more okay.

A Renewed Commitment to Flexibility

One of the few bright spots of the COVID-19 pandemic was that we all suddenly remembered our shared humanity and saw each other as people with families, pets, hobbies, homes, and personal challenges and needs. We offered one another more flexibility in the workplace—flexibility with where we worked, when we worked, and how we worked.

Flexibility made our workspaces kinder and gentler. We were less likely to be stressed when we had options for flexible work arrangements and flexible hours. We were less likely to be looking for employment elsewhere when we had flexibility in our work, especially when institutional policy and practice aligned with our personal preferences for work arrangements. And flexibility allowed us to be more responsive to the many diverse needs and experiences of the people who make up our teams.^Footnote5

We must remember and revisit these lessons in flexibility, especially now when, yet again, a kinder and gentler workspace may be needed by so many of us. We may need to dust off those old COVID-era policies and consider the role flexibility plays in our work. At the very least, it's time once again to acknowledge our shared humanity and the importance of our physical and mental well-being and to consider the ways in which our current workplace policies and practices may be more or less conducive to employee thriving.

(Finally) Doing Less with Less

At many of our institutions it's past time for serious, clear-eyed conversations about doing fewer things and doing them more efficiently. Looming budget constraints will only exacerbate current staffing challenges, hindering the ability to create, hire, and retain the staff positions needed to maintain critical technology supports and services.

When technology leaders report experiencing negative impacts of staffing challenges on their work, they're significantly more likely to

• describe their workloads as excessive,
• report experiencing work-related burnout over the previous twelve months,
• express a desire for more realistic and fair workloads, and
• anticipate applying to other positions in the next twelve months.^Footnote6

In other words, excessive workloads and unreasonable expectations of our staff are linked to both diminished staff well-being in the short term and the risk of increased workforce churn in the long term.

Institutional leaders who are not in a position to increase technology staffing in the foreseeable future must give serious consideration to reducing existing workloads and sunsetting less critical areas of support. They must also consider more efficient approaches to accomplishing their work. Affordances available through emerging AI technologies and tools, for example, can help free up staff time and capacity by automating repetitive processes and offloading administrative burdens and tasks.^Footnote7

Reaching Across the Institution

The days of the traditionally siloed, slow-moving higher education institution may very well be behind us. The world is shifting and evolving quickly, and institutions find themselves increasingly in need of nimble, adaptive approaches to planning and operations. It's a moment for higher education that demands technology leaders who are connected and collaborative and who can understand and effectively adapt solutions to the institution's most pressing needs.

It has long been a goal of EDUCAUSE to see technology leaders become more integrated into the strategic fabric of their institutions. Our research has consistently found that technology leaders who report directly to their president/chancellor and/or who sit on the leader's cabinet are significantly more likely to report efficacy in their work and in their overall strategic influence on the institution. We know, too, that successful technology implementations both big and small require skilled communication and change management with key stakeholders almost as much as they require the technologies themselves.^Footnote8

Institutional leaders must interrogate their planning and decision-making structures and identify missing voices and inefficient processes. For their part, technology leaders and staff must take a more intentional and strategic approach to building cross-institutional bridges that aren't yet there while mending the bridges that are broken or not yet strong enough to support the weight of collaboration.

Foster a Culture of Hope

Perhaps most importantly, we must remember to hope. For some, "hope" may have connotations as naïve, wishful, or irrational. This misconstrues and misuses hope as a salve that allows us to ignore the dangers and risks around us, to plant our heads in the sand, and to wait until somehow, someday, things get better.

I like to think of hope as bold and forward thinking and active. We express it through intentional and strategic thinking and planning, by facilitating future-focused conversations across the institution about the ideal future we see for our institution, and then mapping out the actions we can take today to start building toward that ideal future.

It's a hope that animates us and gets us up and moving, however we can, rather than a hope that defers personal responsibility and enables inaction. It's a hope that begins with a clear-eyed declaration about the way things are—that we are indeed not okay—and that opens up spaces for coming together to imagine what possibilities we may yet have and to begin to chart a path forward.

So shout it once again from the rafters and for the people in the back. Emblazon it on a t-shirt: We are not okay.

Declare it, and then let it open up new spaces and new possibilities.

Notes

1. Ian Bremmer, "Welcome to a World Defined by Polarization, Instability, and Disruption," Carnegie Corporation of New York, February 24, 2025. Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩
2. Susan Grajek and the 2024–2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10 Panel, "2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10: Restoring Trust," EDUCAUSE Review, October 23, 2024. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.↩
3. Mark McCormack, The IT Leadership Workforce in Higher Education, 2024, research report (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, March 2024); Kristen Gay, 2025 EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning Workforce in Higher Education, research report (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, April 2025). Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.↩
4. Mark McCormack, "EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: The Varied and Compounding Effects of Institutional Debt," EDUCAUSE Review, February 3, 2025. Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.↩
5. Mark McCormack, "EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Stress in the Workplace," EDUCAUSE Review, January 15, 2021; D. Christopher Brooks and Jackie Bichsel, "EDUCAUSE and CUPA-HR QuickPoll Results: The Misalignment of Preferences and Realities for Remote Work," EDUCAUSE Review, September 10, 2021; McCormack, The IT Leadership Workforce in Higher Education, 2024. Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.↩
6. McCormack, The IT Leadership Workforce in Higher Education, 2024. Jump back to footnote 6 in the text.↩
7. Jenay Robert and Mark McCormack, 2025 EDUCAUSE AI Landscape Study: Into the Digital AI Divide, research report (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE: February 2025). Jump back to footnote 7 in the text.↩
8. EDUCAUSE & The Integrative CIO, an EDUCAUSE Review Podcast; Mark McCormack, The Adaptive CIO: Balancing Institutional Structure and Culture, research report (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE: August 2022); Sean Burns and Mark McCormack, More than "Going Live": Achieving Institutional Transformation through ERP Implementation, research report (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE: June 2023). Jump back to footnote 8 in the text.↩

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Mark McCormack is Senior Director of Research and Insights at EDUCAUSE.