The Caring University: A Review of Kevin McClure’s New Release

In recent years, higher education has found itself with a culture problem in the wake of the Great Resignation (Zehneis, 2025). The Great Resignation represents the 50 million Americans who left their jobs in 2022 (Smith, 2023). Quit rates reached a record high of 3% in late 2021 and early 2022 (Kenton, 2023). Yet the culture issues we face today do not stem from COVID-19 nor the Great Resignation alone but rather from several systemic issues that have plagued higher education for years. McClure and Fryar (2022) refer to the phenomenon as the great faculty disengagement. These issues are contributing to employee burnout (McClure, 2025).

For those already familiar with Kevin McClure’s regular contributions to The Chronicle of Higher Education, you already know that his writing strikes a unique balance of curious yet thorough, critical yet down to earth, and academic yet accessible. Reading The Caring University was much like conversing with a colleague. McClure spent the years since the pandemic studying how the Great Resignation has blindsided higher education and why it was particularly susceptible to its slow recovery. This book fills a gap in the literature regarding this relatively recent phenomenon, and brings to light the gravity of the culture problem within higher education institutions. The Caring University was released on July 1, 2025 through Johns Hopkins University Press. I recommend this resource for those who work in the field of higher education or for students studying higher education administration.

Sull et al. (2022) reported that the greatest predictor of turnover is a toxic workplace culture. Employers like Accenture, Blackrock, Mastercard, and Trader Joe’s top the charts for company culture (Sull & Sull, 2020), but higher education institutions have lagged in addressing long-known workplace culture issues. This is where McClure focuses his aim with The Caring University. Written over the course of four years, after 116 interviews and three site visits, the book outlines McClure’s theoretical framework, which he dubs ‘The Caring University.’ He articulates six organizational changes for university campuses, providing examples from his interviews and site visits, as well as recommendations from scholars within higher education and adjacent fields. McClure’s (2025) six organizational changes include:

• Prioritizing Employees’ Experience

• Empowering Rights & Voice

• Humanizing Policies & Practices

• Realizing Equity & Belonging

• Committing to Growth & Compensation

• Cultivating Caring Leaders

I will focus my attention on three of the themes for the purpose of this review: Prioritizing Employees’ Experiences, Humanizing Policies & Practices, and Cultivating Caring Leaders.

 

Prioritizing Employees’ Experiences

Tackling employee engagement in the post-pandemic environment is a tall order for higher education institutions. McClure (2025) reviewed the strategic plans of a random sample of 50 institutions of various types and found that only seven mentioned employee wellbeing and “two stated that fostering a culture of care was a priority” (p. 65). 

Data collection on employees was a point McClure took seriously. He spoke with representatives from College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) and shared their sentiments that by not collecting data on employees in our institutions, administrators are “signal[ing] the low value attached to employee data on many campuses” (McClure, 2025, p. 71). In environments where student data is abundant, McClure (2025) questions why higher education institutions have not yet begun this journey on the employee side. This is especially true as software used in higher education offices does not have a lingua franca–or shared language–between databases, which poses problems with data collection (McClure, 2025). McClure (2025) also urges administrators to consider data that goes beyond climate and engagement surveys. He suggests including exit interviews when staff members leave the institution to ensure feedback is captured. He also recommends pulse surveys to course correct at regular intervals. Uncovering these overlooked practices brought to light systemic issues that pit resources for student retention against resources geared towards employees in higher education.

Employee workloads are another serious conundrum McClure highlighted. An engineering faculty whom McClure (2025) interviewed shared, “You can’t run a machine at 100 percent capacity, and you definitely can’t run people at 100 percent capacity” (p. 73). Not only are workloads untenable, but they are inequitable, too. This is especially the case for certain demographics of employees. According to McClure (2025), “Women and faculty of color report spending more time on teaching, mentoring, and service, which can slow their advancement and increase stress” (p.74).

It’s also not uncommon for offices in higher education to reduce services, causing experienced employees to struggle with capacity issues, which Hamilton and Nielsen (2021, as cited in McClure, 2025) call the ‘austerity administration.’ Many institutions are focused on increasing belonging efforts for their students, but those same efforts are not made for faculty and staff (McClure, 2025). This is an important point, which only a few scholars have begun considering. Only once we turn the lens upon ourselves can we identify the ways we have made higher education institutions inhospitable to some and not others–and that has a ripple effect on our students.

 

Humanizing Policies & Practices

According to Sallee (2021), “the ideal worker is an employee who has unlimited time to give to work and no family responsibilities in the home” (p. 4). McClure (2025) provides a historical analysis of how work-life issues were viewed from the early 20th century to the 21st century and applies a critical feminist lens. It was due to segregation that White men were held up as the standard of the “ideal worker” because they had access to most professional jobs, and because most white men had wives at home to tend to the domestic realm (Davies & Frink, 2014, as cited in McClure, 2025). 

McClure (2025) notes that women have historically (and even currently) been encouraged to delay starting a family while working in academia. Many women experience a maternal wall in which their job prospects narrow after becoming a mother (Ogden, 2019, as cited in McClure). 

McClure (2025) states that the ideal worker norm can be especially difficult for disabled employees to grapple with, as their productivity can lag behind their non-disabled peers–especially considering flares in their conditions, necessary medical appointments, or time off from work under Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). As a result, disabled employees can often be pressured to “overcompensate by working more” (Humphrys et al., 2022, as cited in McClure, 2025, p. 107). 

McClure (2025) draws upon LaLoux’s (2014) theory of evolutionary organizations to identify several remedies to combat the ideal worker norm, including:

• Resetting professional norms

• Improving supports for caregivers

• Expanding supports for hybrid/remote work

• Creating guardrails to prevent work from consuming employees’ non-work lives

By guardrails, LaLoux (2014, as cited in McClure, 2025) is referring to setting internal policies around, for example, emailing after hours or while on vacation, so that staff members do not have to navigate boundary-setting around their email habits individually. The recommendations McClure offers up here provide actionable steps to enact change on the departmental level, which can help to create incremental positive culture change within an organization.

 

Cultivating Caring Leaders 

When it comes to our administrators, McClure (2025) is concerned that they are often not treated as fully human, and their mental health suffers for it. Keeling (2020) underscores the ways “the administration” is often spoken about as a monolith–as if they lacked humanity–ignoring the fact that many were faculty or staff prior to joining their administrative ranks. When it comes to the presidency, many higher education presidents are serving shorter and shorter terms. In the 2023 American College President Survey, over half of the current presidents stated that they planned to leave their posts within the next five years (Melidona et al., 2023, as cited in McClure, 2025). 

There is also the problem of interim leaders. In an article for HigherEdJobs, Martin (2024) reported that many institutions are finding that interim leaders provide some short-term benefits, especially in situations where the interim has served in the role previously, as they are providing a sort of safety net while universities struggle with the shortage of qualified administrators. McClure (2025) states that higher education institutions do not adequately train their administrators, and without pipelines, succession planning and mentorships, the interim has become a long-term contingency plan. 

Often, administrators are measured based on specific metrics, whereas it is more difficult to measure caring leadership traits like humility, compassion or self-awareness, particularly during an interview process (McClure, 2025). Hiring based on past achievements is a problem, because plopping a great researcher into an administrator role or a great director into a vice president role is not always effective. Thus, the need for pipelines, mentoring and succession planning is heightened (McClure, 2025).

Once administrators have secured their roles, they are often in positions where their schedules are packed with back-to-back meetings, making it difficult to commingle with the campus community (McClure, 2025). In an article for Harvard Business Review, Whillans et al. (2021) likened meetings to productivity killers and gave several strategies for how to cut down on the overload. McClure (2025) encourages those at the top to set the tone by making periods of respite the norm. In a podcast interview, Dr. Andrea Dominugue, then president of American College Personnel Association (ACPA) suggested that a sabbatical for higher education staff could prevent burnout and turnover (Edwards, 2022). However, with rumblings of cuts to sabbatical programs dating back pre-pandemic, it is no surprise that faculty are having to justify their productivity in terms of grant funds or publication when submitting their sabbatical proposals (Dingfelder, 2009). While sabbaticals may be what higher education employees need, they may be relegated to using vacation days–or if their health begins to wane, in the case of burnout–PTO or worse, FMLA.

While it may be easy to point to higher education administrators to solve the culture problems of higher education, McClure (2025) underscores that the farther up the chain we go, the more pressure mounts, and the more important caring leadership becomes—and yet, caring leaders become even more difficult to find.

McClure (2025) lists the following characteristics as qualities of caring leaders:  

• Compassion

• Self-awareness

• Listening

• Intellectual humility

• Trust-building

• Critical hope

• Taking responsibility

• Organizational thinking

 

Conclusion

Despite McClure’s intentions to provide equitable examples of both staff and faculty experiences through both interviews and examples, I did sense a bias in the book towards the faculty experience. For example, in chapter 7, when discussing middle managers, McClure (2025) listed deans and chairs, when assistant and associate directors would have made appropriate examples.

Another critique I would raise is the consideration of an ethical stance for The Caring University. Keeling (2014) uses an ethic of care approach when considering the ethical responsibility to support students on campus, and the themes underpinning the research align quite well with McClure’s framework. McClure could argue that not only is The Caring University logical, financially responsible, empowering, equitable, sustainable, and a space for growth–it’s also ethical.

In reading The Caring University, I was happy to see the multitude of approaches available for addressing culture change within higher education institutions. From D’Youville University opting for a 32-hour workweek to McClure’s recommended 20-days of bereavement leave to the concept of guardrails within a department, there is something for every higher education employee to takeaway and apply in their workplace today. It is doubtful that a single higher education institution could take on every approach from The Caring University and do them all well. But McClure is realistic about that impossibility. His plea is that—no matter where the change begins across the organizational hierarchy—universities choose now to begin (McClure, 2025). My recommendation? Begin by reading The Caring University–you’ll be glad you did. 

 

References

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Dingfelder, S. F. (2009, June). The end of an academic tradition? Monitor on Psychology. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/06/sabbatical 

Edwards, K. E. (Host). (2022, November 30). Employment in higher education: Workplace  challenges, supremacist cultures, and antidotes for action (No. 127) [Video podcast episode]. In Student Affairs NOW. https://studentaffairsnow.com/acpa-employment-report

Hamilton, L. T., & Nielsen, K. (2021). Broke: The racial consequences of underfunding public universities. The University of Chicago Press.

Humphrys, E., Rodgers, J., Asquith, N. L., Yaghi, S. A., Foulstone, A., Thorneycroft, R., & Cook, P. S. (2022). ‘To prove I’m not incapable, I overcompensate’: Disability, ideal workers, the academy. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 33(4), 698–714. https://doi.org/10.1177/10353046221125642

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McClure, K. R., & Fryar, A. H. (2022, January 19). The great faculty disengagement: Faculty 

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