Faculty Morale in 2025: How Academic Leaders Can Respond to Higher Ed Challenges

Faculty morale, redux, again

In my previous life as an academician, I looked forward to mid-September when the chaos of the academic year’s beginning gave way to the normal rhythms of campus life. I could then turn to the top responsibility of any academic administrator, which is to support the work of their faculty colleagues. This work has become increasingly challenging as the environment for higher education has shifted. Those pressures have only mounted in recent months and are exacting an increasing toll on faculty morale and ultimately on the student experience.   

This essay won’t attempt a comprehensive review of the challenges faced by professors or academic administrators in today’s climate. Instead, I want to review a few of these well-discussed factors and concentrate on some of the ways that leaders can successfully address these challenges to faculty morale. Even as institutional leaders address topline challenges for their schools, they must be mindful of an important constituency for student learning, retention, and graduation: the faculty.

Common factors that affect faculty morale 

The factors affecting faculty morale in 2025 are a function of long-term trends in higher education, and a product of more recent developments that promise to have an enduring impact. Of course there are innumerable issues that are specific to individual institutions, but there are also challenges that are common to almost every school in higher education, whether they are prestigious, well-resourced institutions or schools with limited resources. Here I concentrate on just three of the most common factors that affect faculty morale at nearly every institution in the United States.  

Institutional Finances. Most institutions—regardless of size or prestige—are experiencing budget pressures of some magnitude. There’s been much coverage in 2025 of the financial challenges faced by elite institutions as a function of abrupt policy changes by the Trump administration, especially regarding contested grant cancellations. However, for most institutions, financial headwinds have been a persistent part of their external environment for some time. The stories from individual schools are plentiful and ubiquitous. 

One direct implication of these challenges is a decades long stagnation in faculty salaries. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this year that faculty members are earning less than they were 20 years ago in inflation adjusted terms. The erosion of their earning power has been compounded by the rapidly increasing use of contingent faculty, who are compensated at a dramatically lower rate than their tenure track colleagues. Of course, these are the circumstances for faculty members who have retained their positions and have not been discharged in a reduction-in-force. Most institutions are striving to reduce their payrolls by not replacing faculty who retire or depart, or alternatively by simply discharging full time faculty members, many who have tenure. 

Limited Institutional Support for Professional and Program Development. Institutions with financial challenges are also investing less in the professional development of their faculty in support of their scholarship, and in innovation of curricula and pedagogy. In the absence of institutional support, faculty members must either abandon ideas that would improve teaching and learning, or the must underwrite those efforts with their proverbial “sweat equity.” Faculty members everywhere report that they are called upon to do more with less, which might be an effective short-term response to challenges but is not a long-term strategy to ensure the meaningful engagement of faculty and their important work. 

Challenges to Academic Freedom and Autonomy. One of the key features of being a college or university faculty member is the opportunity to engage with and lead discussions of issues in their fields of expertise. Even in the most modestly resourced institutions, faculty members have historically had the freedom to pursue areas of research and teaching that were part of the scholarly discourse in their fields. But over the last decade, faculty members report that the discursive terrain of their work has shrunk and that the area of remit for their scholarly work is smaller. For understandable reasons, there has been a dramatically shrinking appetite for professors to address contentious issues in the classroom.  

Challenges of academic freedom and faculty autonomy in higher education 

By what mechanism has the freedom or autonomy of faculty members been enjoined? Websites like Campus Reform and Professor Watchlist post the names, pictures, and other information about faculty members who purportedly espouse anti-American positions or are critical of conservative political positions. Faculty members who appear on the lists receive death threats, doxing, and other harassment. When my friend and colleague, Jeorg Tiede, was at the American Association of University Professors, he told the NYT, “They serve the same purpose: to intimidate individuals from speaking plainly in their classrooms or in their publications.” 

More recently, schools under pressure from federal officials have fired faculty or, like in the case of UC Berkeley mid-September, provided lists of faculty who potentially have contravened policy positions of the federal government. Academic leaders are concerned. In mid-September, Inside Higher Ed released the latest iteration of their Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers; more than one in five provosts reported that the academic freedom of their faculty has been negatively impacted by the federal environment, with 50 percent reporting that academic freedom faces more general challenges. 

How are higher ed institutional leaders supporting faculty morale? 

Even though the work of faculty can vary significantly between, say, R1 institutions and community colleges, faculty morale can be affected by these challenges at every institution, and leaders are employing a variety of approaches to support faculty.  For my colleagues serving in campus leadership roles, these areas of focus will be very familiar. Pursuing any of these areas can require either reallocation of internal resources or, alternatively, securing extramural funding. I return below to the latter option. 

• Provosts and deans are identifying means of supporting the scholarly and artistic work of faculty, a task that can be tricky in a context of constrained resources. One approach is to connect faculty with internal peers and, when possible, peers from other institutions. For instance, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) hosted a “Grants Lab” for faculty from member institutions in which participants devoted several days to working on funding proposals, sharing their work with colleagues, and getting feedback for revisions and submission. The result was not only the immediate developmental outcome of the meeting, but the development of a nascent epistemic community that connects like-minded faculty from different institutions. 

• Most institutions will require curricular and program revision to meet the changing external environment, e.g. artificial intelligence, changing learning patterns/modes of students, etc. The process of redesigning curricula and academic programming has a persistent and positive effect on faculty morale, and can even be supported on campuses who are rebalancing their curricular offerings. The annual meetings of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) are three of the many association meetings that showcase varying approaches to this process. 

• More than ever, faculty members require support in the face of heightened scrutiny of course content, especially in curricular areas that are ideologically charged. There has been a growing concern among faculty in recent years that has spiked in recent months in response to the Executive Orders focusing on DEI initiatives and some of the discussions that focus on antisemitism and Title VI. The University of Texas, Austin, has a Ford Foundation-funded program that provides development support for faculty. The Difficult Dialogues Initiative also supports curriculum development to aid faculty’s efforts to incorporate challenging material in the current environment, with courses that focus on topics such as cultural heritage and representation, immigration and cultural pluralism, and human rights and ethics. 

All of this work is important, since effectively addressing issues of faculty morale will require new, innovative initiatives at a time when operational budgets are under stress. How are schools underwriting this work? In a 2025 survey of chief business officers, 64% responded that their institutions needed to diversify their revenue streams to address institutional priorities. 

Extramural funds can support faculty capabilities and increase school innovation 

A direct way to address faculty morale is to identify extramural funds to underwrite faculty initiatives on campuses that are building new programs or revising existing ones. In our work at McAllister & Quinn, we support institutions of higher education to do just that. For instance, even as the National Science Foundation (NSF) undergoes internal restructuring, the NSF has released grant award notifications (GANs) for some of their key programs, like the Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM), which makes multi-million dollar grants supporting faculty mentoring, student scholarships, and innovative curricular and co-curricular supports for students. Some institutions are also pursuing congressional earmarks–known now as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate—that can fund initiatives that are consonant with the policy priorities of Members of Congress. Earmarks can support exciting initiatives like new or updated equipment for STEM labs or enhanced relationships between faculty and community partners for workforce development initiatives. And finally, there are private foundations that continue to support faculty work, like The Mellon Foundation, The Teagle Foundation, and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, all who provide funding that can support collaborative work by faculty who are innovating in the humanities. 

Conclusion: Resources that academic leadership can leverage to improve faculty morale 

The “care and feeding” of faculty is the top responsibility of chief academic officers, some who will be gathering at the end of October for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ (AASCU) Academy for New Provosts. Only one week later, CAOs will gather in Indianapolis for the Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC) Chief Academic Officer’s Institute. There is no magic bullet that CAOs can use to address the persistent issue of faculty morale, that is certain. But, they can secure additional resources that fund faculty collaboration, advance the learning goals of the academic program, and underwrite the scholarly work of the faculty. For institutions who are resource constrained, this is essential work for higher education that will require more, not less, engagement with the sources for extramural funding.