‘We are losing ground’: Professors log 55-hour weeks as pay stagnates and states question their workloads

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Kansas, Utah, and Wisconsin are tightening rules on faculty workloads. Professors say departments have shrunk by up to half while pay trails inflation.

Public universities helped make American higher education a draw for students and researchers worldwide. Now lawmakers and governing boards from Kansas to Utah want proof that the professors who teach there work hard enough.

Faculty say the premise is backward. Professors who spoke with Fortune describe 55-hour weeks, departments that have shrunk by as much as half, and raises that haven’t kept pace with inflation.

“We are losing ground,” said Renita Coleman, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

As scrutiny of higher education grows, state legislators, governing boards, and administrators have started questioning how professors spend their time and whether they deliver enough for their salaries and job protections. Some have pushed to limit tenure. Others are demanding a detailed accounting of faculty responsibilities.

Public confidence in American higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade. According to Gallup, 38% of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education in 2026, down from 57% in 2015. The share expressing very little or no confidence rose from 10% to 25%.

The weakening trust comes amid a convergence of concerns, from rising college costs and questions about the value of degrees to political battles on campuses. Those frustrations have fueled skepticism of tenure, which grants professors permanent faculty status after they meet a university’s standards for teaching, research, and service.

Tenure was designed to safeguard academic freedom. But the American Council of Trustees and Alumni acknowledged in July that the public increasingly sees it as “a mere promise of job security, even for incompetent or unproductive professors.”

Against that backdrop, lawmakers and university governing boards in states including Wisconsin, Utah, Ohio, and Kansas have moved to tighten faculty accountability.

For Coleman, the assumption that professors ease up once they earn tenure couldn’t be further from…

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