As a practitioner-academic I often feel like I inhabit several different worlds at once.
What I love most about being the head of an academic department is that it allows me to bring those worlds together – drawing on my experience as a psychologist, coach, and academic leader to think about how we can better support staff and students in university settings.
It won’t be news to anyone that higher education is struggling. Here in the UK, we’ve seen unprecedented financial pressures, workforce shrinkage and organisational change on a scale that many of us have never experienced before. Some institutions are faring comparatively well against much of the sector, but even there, staff are still feeling the ripples of what’s happening elsewhere.
Like many colleagues in leadership positions, I often find myself holding two seemingly contradictory feelings at once. On one hand, I share the sense of sadness and uncertainty that these changes are creating across the sector. On the other, I find genuine challenge and purpose in helping to lead my team through the necessary process of adaptation, reorganisation and strategic change.
However much I may enjoy that leadership challenge, I can’t ignore what I am hearing from colleagues. Comments that once felt rare in academia – “I’ve checked out,” “I’m just doing what I need to get by,” “I’m keeping my head down” – now seem commonplace.
Making sense of the response
Recently, I attended the British Psychological Society Division of Coaching Psychology conference, where the theme was belonging.
Sitting in the audience, I realised that what I was observing across higher education wasn’t simply low morale or change fatigue.
The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that what we are witnessing may be a crisis of belonging. Belonging can be defined in many ways, but I particularly like Thissen et al.’s definition in which belonging reflects “…being valued, needed or important for others in a specific context and the feeling of fitting in through shared or complementary features.”
In psychology, belonging is generally understood to be a fundamental human need rather than a workplace luxury. Decades of research have shown that feeling accepted, valued and connected to others is closely linked to wellbeing, motivation and resilience. When belonging is disrupted, people don’t simply become less satisfied at work: they can begin to question their identity and place within a community.
Seen through that lens, many of the responses we are witnessing in staff across higher education suddenly make more sense.
Finding your tribe
I often talk to coaching clients and mentees about the importance of finding their tribe – a group of people, sometimes surprisingly small, with whom there is shared understanding, common purpose, and mutual trust. Tribes create that sense of individual belonging. They also provide psychological safety, creating spaces where ideas can be explored openly and where we can show up as our authentic selves.
You might imagine that authenticity would come naturally within universities. They are often viewed as intellectually curious and socially liberal environments. Yet I’m not sure that was ever entirely true. Academia has always been competitive. Expectations around performance and outputs can feel relentless. Challenging accepted wisdom or established ways of doing things is not always as comfortable as we might like to believe. It’s not a surprise that many working in academia feel a need to filter their authentic self in the workplace.
In that context, belonging does not happen by accident. It has to be actively created, nurtured and protected through thoughtful leadership and supportive communities.
Most of us belong to multiple tribes, but during the middle years of life our work tribe often becomes one of the most important because it is where we spend so much of our time and energy.
What concerns me is that many of those tribes are disintegrating around us, both physically and metaphorically.
The physical loss is perhaps the most obvious. Through restructuring, redundancy programmes and sector contraction, many of us have watched valued colleagues disappear from our day-to-day professional lives. Some move into different roles. Others leave institutions. Some leave higher education entirely.
The consequences extend beyond those who leave the sector. For those who remain, there is a quieter loss that often goes unrecognised. Years spent building trusted relationships, developing collaborations, creating shared projects and supporting one another can disappear remarkably quickly. The professional networks that took years to cultivate can fragment within months. We’re left with uncertainty and unease across many facets of our working world.
There is also a more subtle, metaphorical loss.
A different kind of loss
Compared to even a decade ago, academia simply feels different. Smaller workforces mean that many of us are being asked to do more with less. Research, scholarship and knowledge exchange activities are often squeezed by the demands of keeping core operations running. Beyond the obvious implications for universities and wider society, this shift may have important psychological consequences.
Psychologists have long recognised that our identities are shaped by the groups to which we belong. We do not simply think of ourselves as individuals; we understand ourselves through our membership of communities that matter to us.
For many academics, professional identity is not primarily tied to a particular institution. It is tied to being a psychologist, historian, engineer, biologist, or sociologist. It is forged through years of collaboration, conference attendance, mentorship and shared intellectual endeavour. It is built through specialist communities that provide meaning, purpose and belonging. When those communities begin to fragment, the loss is not merely practical. It can feel deeply personal.
Perhaps that is why so many colleagues seem lost, and as though their only means of survival is to “keep their heads down.” The challenge is not simply increased workload or uncertainty about the future. Many people are also navigating the loss of communities that helped define who they were professionally.
In some respects, what we are seeing resembles a form of collective grief. Not only grief for colleagues who have left, but grief for ways of working, professional identities and communities that once gave meaning to academic life. This creates an important challenge for university leaders.
There is no denying the scale of the task facing those in leadership positions. Financial sustainability matters. Organisational structures matter. Policies matter. Institutions cannot function without them. Yet these are fundamentally systems-level responses.
Coaching psychology makes excellent use of Self-Determination Theory to explain a range of workplace stressors. We know from this work that people are more likely to thrive when they experience competence, autonomy and meaningful connection with others. Universities have understandably invested enormous energy into redesigning structures and securing financial stability. But if belonging continues to erode, many staff will struggle to reconnect with the motivation and sense of purpose that drew them into academia in the first place. The challenge for leaders is, therefore, not simply to redesign organisations. It is to create the conditions in which communities can reform, and people can reconnect with a shared sense of purpose.
Belonging is not something that can be manufactured through a policy document or achieved through a single initiative. It requires time, investment, and genuine attention. It grows through relationships, trust, and shared endeavour. Academic leaders – myself included – need to recognise that something important has been lost. Alongside the difficult work of organisational change, we need to think much more creatively about how we help staff rebuild connection, rediscover purpose and find new tribes.
Because if we fail to do so, and somewhat urgently, I fear we will lose something far more significant than funding, structures, or organisational capacity. We risk losing the very communities that make academic life meaningful. And that is a loss from which the sector may struggle to recover.
