In the corporate world, meritocracies are the norm. Personalities that don't like competition and having to produce results may default to academia, but they may not find it the psychological safe haven they think it is. America is producing more PhDs than ever and only one sixth of them will be able to stay in school after their degree - since universities have the choice of the best and brightest, the "rainmakers" who will aggressively bring in big NIH grants - everyone else can be an adjunct professor or a blogger at Scientific American and never get a chance at tenure.
That freedom from the grant cycle and 'publish or perish' culture brings its own pitfalls. Non-tenure-track academics experience stress, anxiety, and depression due to their insecure job situation, according to a survey in Frontiers in Psychology. Contingent faculty workers, such as research adjunct faculty, lecturers and instructors, are off the "tenure track". They work under short-term contracts with limited health and retirement benefits, often part-time and at different institutes simultaneously.
Gretchen Reevy from California State University and Grace Deason from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA, surveyed almost 200 non-tenure-track academics – mostly women, mainly from medium-sized universities in the USA. Questions focused on work-related sources of stress, mental wellbeing, and coping mechanisms, as well as about their background, family situation, and income. Almost one-third of the participants (31%) replied that the lack of job security was among the most stressful aspects of their work. Other frequently named sources of stress were a high workload, lack of support and recognition, low and unequal pay, and feeling excluded - just like a third of people doing every job in the world .
Non-tenure track faculty who wished for a permanent position and couldn't get it, or whose family income was low, were more prone to depression, anxiety, and stress. They were also more likely to suffer from those if they felt personally committed to the institution where they worked. On average, women reported encountering more sources of stress at work than men.
The results lead to obvious questions; is the inability to handle the stress of a meritocracy the reason they aren't more competitive with their peers and don't get tenure jobs? Or does the job situation cause the insecurity? There's no way to answer that so easy conclusions based on uncontrolled survey results aren't creating an actionable scenario.
The authors call on universities to attend more to the specific needs of their non-tenure-track faculty to avoid negative outcomes for institutions, students, and faculty. Suggestions include alleviating the sources of stress listed above and considering increasing the rate of hiring into more secure, tenure-track positions.