Prestige at a Price: Women Contingent Faculty Burning Out at an R2 University in the United States

Background: Burnout in higher education is widely documented, yet it is most often framed as an individual or occupational condition rather than as a consequence of institutional design. This dominant framing obscures how organizational structures and prestige-oriented priorities in higher education shape contingent faculty experiences. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory and scholarship on gendered organizations, this study situates burnout within broader institutional logics exacerbated during prestige-driven striving. Focus of the Study: This study examines how women contingent faculty experience burnout within the context of institutional striving for Doctoral Universities–Very High Research Activity (R1) status at one institution. It centers how organizational cultures, recognition practices, and legitimacy structures shape everyday academic work. The analysis foregrounds the intersection of gender, contingency, and institutional ambition in producing uneven conditions of labor. By focusing on women contingent faculty, the study highlights how burnout is differentially experienced and mediated across academic roles. Research Design: Using a qualitative heuristic approach, the study draws on extended interviews and contemporaneous diary reflections from 12 women contingent faculty. Participants were employed at an R2 institution in the northeastern United States during its transition to R1 status. Analysis attended to patterns across narratives while preserving the depth and complexity of participants’ accounts, culminating in a creative synthesis entitled, “A Day in the Life of Women Contingent Faculty in Transition.” Conclusions: Findings indicate that burnout is produced through gendered organizational cultures, perfunctory recognition, and constrained professional legitimacy that render teaching-centered and care-oriented labor invisible. Institutional striving redistributes risk from the organization onto individual faculty, normalizing burnout as a functional outcome of striving. Disciplinary valuation further mediates how women experience and navigate these pressures. The study reframes burnout as an institutional design problem, challenging deficit-oriented narratives of individual resilience and extending scholarship on gendered academic labor.