“Don’t become a professor”: Faculty mental health in contemporary popular culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the United States, university faculty mental health (FMH) is impacted by neoliberalism, resource scarcity, institutional dysfunction, and many other stresses. Together, these pressures have affected the well-being of university instructors, adjuncts and tenured professors, alike. In recent years, popular culture has surfaced and critiqued these challenges, using humor to articulate serious stories. In this article, I consider The Chair (2021), Lucky Hank (2023), and American Fiction (2023) as cultural texts that explore FMH struggles. Drawing on critical media studies and cultural analysis, I explore how these three narratives reflect real-world systemic issues, and how humor functions in all three as a coping mechanism and a critique. I argue that popular culture plays a dual role: reflecting the real pressures university faculty face, while also shaping public perceptions of academia and helping non-academics grok the idea that systemic change is needed in postsecondary education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".