Why does higher education leadership frame moments of institutional strain through the language of resilience? To balance budgets, many academics are expected to absorb increased workloads with reduced teaching and marking supports. Those able to persevere under these intensified demands – often at a significant cost to their well-being and work-life balance – are celebrated for their resilience.
As an Indigenous woman, I know a thing or two about being resilient, and it is not an attribute I want to be congratulated for. My community, Little Saskatchewan First Nation, has been repeatedly displaced by flooding from hydroelectric dams – waters deliberately diverted to protect priority regions.
As a result, members of my community were forced to live in hotels for years, some for nearly a decade. These are not tests of fortitude; they are systemic failures where choices were made to protect some communities at the expense of others. Celebrating my capacity to endure obscures the structures that make my endurance necessary to begin with.
Many of us are being asked to “do more with less”, amid rising labour and inflation costs, so that universities can get back to a balanced budget. In many institutions, this looks like hiring freezes alongside growing class sizes, cutting programmes or the quiet replacement of secure roles with contract teaching.
Within this context, the language of resilience functions as a tool: a way of shifting attention away from governance decisions, budgetary priorities and systemic inequities, and toward the individual effort required to survive them. Praising resilience reinforces the notion survival is an individual, not an institutional, responsibility.
Balancing the budget might be necessary, but the question is how that balance is achieved – and who is asked to absorb the cost. How many of my colleagues will be unexpectedly laid off before that happens, and will I be one of them? These are the questions that keep many in higher education awake at night.
And yet, the conversation rarely turns to the decisions that have produced this precarity. By focusing on resilience as a virtue, universities can frame overwork, stress and fatigue as character-building exercises rather than consequences of structural choices. This framing is not harmless. When resilience is celebrated in the absence of structural change, it allows institutions to sustain austerity, while avoiding accountability for the systems that produce overwork, insecurity and exhaustion.
It shifts responsibility from budgets, policies and governance to the individual, normalising a cycle in which endurance is expected, praised and extracted. The question is not whether we are capable of resilience – many of us have proven, repeatedly, that we are – but whether we should be celebrated for enduring conditions that could, and should, be changed.
It is time to stop applauding endurance as a solution. True institutional strength comes not from the capacity of individuals to survive, but from systems that are designed to support, rather than exploit, their communities. To stop treating endurance as a virtue, we need to name the cost resilience demands – and the structural decisions that make it necessary.
These costs can include:
- Longer working hours with limited support for teaching and research
- Emotional and cognitive labour of managing students, colleagues and institutional demands (often unevenly distributed based on gender, race, ability, etc)
- Physical and mental exhaustion from sustained overwork
- Professional precarity in the form of contract work or layoff risk
- Loss of work-life balance impacting family and community relations.
Taken together, these are not incidental side-effects – they are the operating conditions of a system that relies on overextension to function.
What if, instead of teaching us how to be resilient, institutions took responsibility for the environments they create and the things they ask of us?
Resilience can help us survive institutions as they are. Accountability asks us to imagine what those institutions could become.
Rachelle McKay is educational developer, Indigenous knowledges & ways of knowing at Dalhousie University’s Centre for Learning and Teaching and teaches in the Indigenous studies programme.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
