Over the summer, Stacie Luman, a graduate student in clinical mental-health counseling at Texas A&M University at Victoria, received a steady stream of messages from her professors announcing, one by one, that they would not be returning in the fall. Most of the half dozen or so professors she had gotten to know had resigned, she soon learned, because of a new university mandate requiring faculty members to be on campus 40 hours per week, whether they were teaching online or in person.
So many professors left because of the new policy that when Luman started class last week, two out of her three courses had no professors assigned, she said.
“It doesn’t give you a lot of faith in the university that we didn’t even have teachers when we started the semester,” Luman said. “You’ve invested time, tuition, effort into this degree, and we should have confidence that the program can provide the education that we enrolled to receive.”
Higher ed — like corporate America — has had to negotiate, cajole, and sometimes insist that employees return to their offices post-Covid. Home Depot, Target, and Microsoft are among the companies that enforced stricter in-office mandates this year. Still, it’s clear that many employees enjoy working remotely and plan to continue. The Wall Street Journal declared in June that working from home is “probably here to stay,” noting that one survey showed an average of 26 percent of paid, full days were worked from home, down one percentage point from two years earlier and only slightly less than in 2022.
