Faculty and staff are experiencing increasing demands for service in higher education, particularly for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. These demands are often framed in terms of care for students. This is not, in and of itself, problematic. I am one among countless faculty who engage in service—and DEI work in particular—precisely because we care deeply about our students. There are many ways this care about students may be expressed, both interpersonally and institutionally. Among them is advising and mentoring, providing thoughtful and comprehensive feedback on work, listening to personal challenges and assisting in identifying useful resources, empowering students to advocate for themselves, being in solidarity with them, advocating for them when they’re not given the opportunity to do so, and reshaping the institution—often while facing significant resistance and commitment to the status quo—to remove unjust barriers to student success. This work falls most heavily on those who are underrepresented and historically marginalized, especially when serving students that share axes of their identities. While this work is time consuming and emotionally taxing, there is no question to me that it is valuable.
Institutions of higher education also seem to recognize the value of this care, but only insofar as it benefits them. They recognize both the power of expressing a commitment to care—which helps with recruitment and retention—and what caring people are willing to do when called upon. Institutions often fail, however, to fairly share in the burdens of the very care they are demanding. While faculty and staff invest increasing time and energy into their students, they usually do not have other commitments reduced to ensure a manageable work-life balance, and are not compensated proportionately (if at all) for this labor. When this occurs, institutions’ increasing demands amount to what I call care exploitation.
It’s not novel to claim that institutions of higher ed engage in exploitation. Ballooning tuition costs and resultant student debt or institutions built and funded with slave labor likely come to mind. Robin Zheng has analyzed the structural and gendered dimensions of growing precarity faced by contingent faculty, who are overwhelmingly women or people of color. But care exploitation is a distinctive injustice: it is a failure to respect someone’s dignity by taking advantage of their vulnerability, which arises from caring about others. It can occur in both interpersonal and structural relationships when one person is called to aid in the flourishing of someone by another (individual or institution), and the call is made because the caring individual cares. Importantly, I use “call to aid” as a term of art to refer to cases where one presumes that the caring individual would not choose to act otherwise. The call could be actively issued as an opportunity for service, or passively issued by sitting back and waiting for someone to take up a task that is otherwise recognized as necessary. An example of this might be advocating for a genderqueer student experiencing a housing crisis and supporting them as they navigate bureaucratic barriers that are insensitive to their testimony. The university recognizes this as necessary because student retention is a constant concern, while the faculty member recognizes this as necessary because their student’s well-being is undermined by cis-normative housing policies. Regardless of the reasoning, the university presumes the faculty member will show up for their student because they care—and, unsurprisingly, they do. Such calls to aid fail to conceive of the caring individual as capable of exercising agency or self-authorship in choosing to do otherwise, which fails to respect their dignity. In the case of faculty and staff, calls to aid are further complicated when service is a significant part of one’s job, and refusing could make one’s employment precarious.
Additionally, whoever issues the call expects some disproportionate benefit from doing so, including evading their own caring responsibilities. Colleges and universities, for example, gain increased enrollment and retention (and tuition dollars) without sufficiently supporting those doing the caring labor required to ensure these gains. While it’s difficult to pin down exactly who is responsible for issuing calls to faculty and staff, among the most obvious candidates are upper-level administrators, who admittedly may be responding to pressures from boards of trustees or state governments.
To understand faculty and staff’s caring about students as a vulnerability doesn’t require characterizing it as a problematic weakness, or as the lack of something essential (contra dominant accounts of vulnerability like those offered by Robert Goodin and Alison Jaggar). Rather, we can understand some vulnerabilities more positively as an openness to others. For faculty and staff, caring vulnerability requires allowing oneself to be affected by students, which is necessary for maintaining non-hierarchical relationships and practicing a pedagogy of non-domination. When faculty and staff are vulnerable in this way, they are receptive to and centering of students’ perspectives, rather than unilaterally deciding what is best for students. But by being open in this way, faculty and staff can have their own flourishing strongly and negatively impacted, because their dignity risks being undermined as their care is exploited. The openness of caring faculty and staff makes them susceptible to this exploitation precisely because they are invested in the flourishing of their students and feel the need to support them, especially when called to do so.
Notably, this care exploitation can be obscured when faculty and staff embrace the structurally reinforced myth that their work is its own reward. This may leave them feeling their work does not also warrant fair compensation and appreciation, or that they should feel guilty for refusing calls to aid students in favor of protecting their own well-being. I point this out not to suggest that faculty and staff are complicit in their own exploitation, but instead that institutional conditions are ripe for unfairly taking advantage of their care. Furthermore, I contend that academic institutions place faculty and staff in oppressive double binds by issuing calls to aid students, even when such calls are not answered.
Sukaina Hirji has recently offered an account of the structure of oppressive double binds, arguing that they are harmful because they “limit an individual’s freedom at the level of their very agency” (659). She characterizes oppressive double binds as “choice situations that arise when a member of an oppressed group is forced to choose between cooperating with and resisting some oppressive norm, and in which whatever the agent does, they end up reinforcing to some degree the oppressive structures in place” (652–53). Additionally, these choice situations are “necessarily self-undermining: whatever [the members of an oppressed group] do, they are forced to act against themselves, becoming a mechanism in their own oppression.” (653). Hirji explains that this happens because both prudential good (like security, power, or avoiding punishment) and moral good (resisting oppression) are at stake and bound together. By constructing choice situations in this way, oppressive double binds give agents the illusion of freedom while simultaneously limiting their self-authorship. Even though the choice may be made fully informed and rationally, one is bound “to act against [oneself] no matter what they do or how they understand their own action” (667).
To understand the implications of this, I’ll offer an example from my own experiences, which in many ways mirror the example Hirji opens her piece with. I am the only female tenure-track faculty member in my small department, as well as the only non-binary person. I am a teacher-scholar at heart that grapples with the issues genderqueer people and students face, as articulated by Imogen Sullivan. I am often approached for advice about navigating university life by women in our program and genderqueer students from across campus. I work as a fierce advocate to implement intentional gender-affirming policies and share information on gender inclusive practices informed by student perspectives at my institution, everywhere from the classroom to registration and records to housing. This work, while also necessary and pressing, has largely been called for in the interest of DEI efforts. I know from the positive impacts experienced by students that this work is valuable. I also know that it is emotionally exhausting and largely uncompensated, taking significant time that could be dedicated to research or rest. I admittedly convince myself of the myth that my work is its own reward right now to avoid burnout and resentment. This is because in our non-ideal world, I know other rewards are almost impossible to come by without significant solidarity from (also overworked) others, and I’m not willing to step back and do nothing. I’m not willing to maintain an unjust status quo via inaction that undermines the well-being of genderqueer and other marginalized students.
And so, I and caring peers find ourselves in a double bind, because it is widely known we care. If caring faculty and staff cooperate and continue to answer increasing calls to aid—maintaining the prudential goods of job security and avoiding professional reprimands for failing to adequately perform service—“they reinforce the very oppressive norm that in the long run controls their access to security and power” (Hirji 654). Additionally, gaining the prudential good of evading reprimands comes along with the long-term (and likely more grievous) prudential risk of suffering the lasting effects of burnout or resentment, and is at odds with realizing the moral good of resisting oppression. A complexity is introduced, however, that Hirji’s account does not capture. While cooperating with calls to aid precludes the moral good of resistance, doing so still promotes the moral good of acting in a way that aligns with what one finds valuable: namely, caring. Cooperative faculty and staff continue to support students because they care about them, and work tirelessly to mitigate negative effects on students’ well-being arising from structural injustices that are entirely beyond students’ control.
If a faculty or staff member rejects the call to aid, they realize the moral good of resisting the oppressive demand to continually meet the needs of students in the face of increasingly disproportionate burdens and thus challenge the status quo. But realizing the moral good of resistance comes with the prudential cost of being immediately sanctioned as selfish and uncaring. This prudential cost undermines the resistant faculty or staff member’s credibility regarding commitment to the mission and values of the institution, as well as the resultant power within the oppressive system that results from such a commitment. In turn, a moral cost is incurred: the faculty or staff, by losing credibility and power, is put into a position where their long-term ability to resist is undermined. They may be written off as not appropriately appreciating what higher education requires (i.e., caring at whatever cost necessary), and denied a seat at the table in conversations determining how the system can become more just. As in the case of cooperation, a complexity is introduced with resistance as well. Resisting calls to aid incurs the additional moral cost of requiring the teacher to act against a value they are otherwise deeply committed to: caring. When a caring faculty or staff member resists calls in pursuit of the moral good of challenging oppressive systems, this comes at the cost of being unable to care, or care to the full extent, for the very students they are dedicated to supporting.
It is important to acknowledge that institutional care exploitation disproportionately affects individuals that are oppressed by virtue of other aspects of their identity. This is because individuals often (but not necessarily) come to be caring as a result of being socialized to show deference to and be at the beck and call of others. This socialization to care is contingent on features of one’s identity—typically, gender, race, and/or class. As a result of this socialization, caring individuals are well-prepared to privilege the perspective and recognize the needs of others, where those others are often not themselves members of oppressed communities. It may appear that membership in marginalized communities accounts for the oppressive double bind caring faculty and staff find themselves in, and their caring is entirely beside the point. For example, one might think that the double bind caring faculty of color find themselves in when choosing between making up for institutional gaps in supporting students of color and prioritizing their own research and well-being has little to do with the faculty member’s caring. Instead, the only reason they are presumed to answer calls is their race.
But this objection loses sight of the fact that all faculty and staff are subjected to calls to aid by their institutions of higher ed. And those that are caring—regardless of how they came to care—are placed in oppressive double binds when they are called upon to disproportionately bear the burdens of providing care. These double binds might arise simply because one cares, or because calls to aid further compound and reinforce oppressive norms around who ought to provide care (e.g., femme people, people of color, or economically disadvantaged people). Attending to how expectations surrounding care can cultivate oppressive double binds is important for determining how best to reinstate agency for those that find themselves unable to escape these problematic choice situations.
I’ve argued that calls issued by institutions constrain the choice situations of caring faculty and staff in a way that places them in oppressive double binds. I suspect this explains the all too familiar phenomenon of caring faculty and staff coming to resent that they care—an otherwise virtuous trait. My hope is that my account of care exploitation, in illuminating these conceptual connections, enables those subjected to this injustice to better understand and process their lived experiences. With this, we will be equipped with a shared language as we come together in caring solidarity to undo oppressive binds and reshape our academic institutions to be more just.
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Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer
Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer (they/them) is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Butler University. They’re an affiliate faculty member in the Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (RGSS) program, as well as the Efroymson Diversity Center RGSS faculty fellow. Lav’s area of research is feminist social and political theory, focusing on care theory, exploitation, liberalism, and global justice. More information about Lav’s work can be found at lmsweitzer.com.
