Bradford Stucki explores how the social construction of academic culture contributes to mental distress amongst University students and staff, and how the same processes can be directed towards care.
Introduction
In the late 1970s, Lev Vygotsky theorised that understanding and meaning are developed in coordination with other human beings (Amineh and Asl 2015, 11). This postulation—later known as social constructivism—holds that knowledge is not simply transmitted but co-created through social interaction (Vygotsky 1978). Universities are, in principle, among the most potent sites for this kind of co-creation: spaces where professors and students share research interests, challenge hypotheses, and generate new understanding together, such as a graduate student bringing a fledgling idea to a mentor, who in turn collaborates with the student to situate it within the broader scholarly conversation, can be considered as social constructivism.
Yet universities also construct something else: a culture of relentless production, competition, and, for many, significant psychological distress. If meaning is socially made, then so too are the expectations, hierarchies, and narratives that shape academic life. What follows is an examination of how the university’s socially constructed culture contributes to the mental health difficulties experienced by students and faculty alike—and to consider how those same constructive processes might be turned toward a different kind of story—one that is co-created.
The University as Pressure Cooker
The metaphor of the “pressure cooker” has appeared repeatedly in the literature on academic life. Feld and Shusterman (2015) use it to describe the stress students experience even before university enrolment begins, while Galvin and Smith (2017) apply it to the psychological confinement reported by trainee clinical psychologists. The prevalence of the metaphor captures something important: that the pressure is not incidental to academic culture but is built into its structure.
Faculty, too, inhabit this pressurised space. Lashuel (2020), writing from personal experience as a professor, describes the cumulative toll of grant deadlines, tenure preparation, teaching loads, publishing obligations, and administrative demands, compounded by personal stressors that the institution neither acknowledges nor accommodates. What Lashuel’s account makes visible is not simply a list of tasks but a felt experience of being stretched beyond capacity by a system that treats overwork as a prerequisite for belonging.
Paulo Freire (2000) offers a useful lens for understanding why these structures prove so resistant to change. In his critique of what he calls the “banking” model of education, Freire describes institutions that position knowledge as something to be deposited into passive recipients rather than co-created through dialogue. While Freire’s primary concern was with oppressive educational systems more broadly, the logic he identifies—a rigid hierarchy in which the authority’s role is to narrate and the student’s role is to receive—resonates with the unidirectional pressures that characterise much of contemporary academic life. When universities prioritise metrics of production (i.e., publications, impact factor, citations, external funding) over the relational and dialogical dimensions of scholarship and service, they risk enacting precisely the kind of dehumanising education Freire warned against.
Constructing Distress
If social constructivism teaches us that meaning is made relationally, then university culture functions as a powerful meaning-making apparatus. The messages it circulates, about what counts as success, who belongs, and what sacrifices are expected, become internalised by those who inhabit these spaces. In my own clinical work as a licensed marriage and family therapist who has practised in university counselling centres, I have repeatedly encountered students and faculty whose distress is entangled with, rather than separate from, the institutional narratives that surround them. A doctoral student who cannot sleep is not simply experiencing a disorder; she is living inside a story that tells her she is not productive enough. A junior professor experiencing panic attacks before tenure review is not merely anxious; he is responding to an environment that has constructed his worth as contingent on a committee’s judgment and his productivity metrics.
This is not to minimise the reality of clinical anxiety or depression but to insist, as the critical medical humanities encourage us to do, that these experiences are never purely individual or biological. They are shaped by the intersectionality of people’s lives. As Plotnikof and Utoft (2021) argue in their analysis of academic life during the COVID-19 pandemic, the toxicity of academic culture is not an aberration exposed by crisis but a pre-existing condition that the pandemic merely amplified. The expectation to function at full capacity regardless of circumstances reveals an institutional narrative that treats human limitation as failure.
University culture can also affect those whose backgrounds or perspectives do not align with the dominant institutional narrative. When departments fail to acknowledge diverse experiences and contributions, the result can be a deepening of isolation, a sense that one must subscribe to or mask an identity that does not belong to them in order to survive. The socially constructed understanding of “what is expected” becomes, for marginalised members of these communities, an experience not only of pressure but of erasure.
“That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It”
Schaff (2019) describes a familiar platitude in education: “That’s the way we have always done it.” This phrase captures the rigidity of systems that have naturalised their own conventions to the point of invisibility. In higher education, this mindset manifests as the assumption that professors must acquire external funding, publish prolifically, teach full course loads, mentor students, serve on committees, engage with communities, and grade—all while maintaining the appearance of effortless competence and the ability to go home at 5 pm. The fact that these expectations are socially constructed, rather than inevitable, is precisely what makes them so difficult to see and so painful to live within.
Hooks (1994) offers a counter-narrative. In Teaching to Transgress, she argues for a pedagogy grounded in well-being, in which teachers and students alike are recognised as whole human beings rather than functions of an institutional machine. For hooks, the classroom should be a site of excitement, care, and mutual vulnerability, a space where education is understood as “the practice of freedom” rather than the reproduction of hierarchies. Her vision is, in Vygotskian terms, a call to construct a different social reality within the university: one oriented toward flourishing rather than mere production and promoting the university’s name.
Reconstructing the Narrative
If the distress experienced by so many in academic settings is at least partly a product of socially constructed expectations, then social constructivism also offers the possibility of reconstruction. This is not a matter of individual resilience—the familiar injunction to practise self-care while the institution remains unchanged—but of collective reimagining.
What might this look like in practice? At the institutional level, it could involve reducing the scope of what is expected for tenure, so that scholarship can proceed with depth rather than desperation. Alternatively, other components of productivity, such as community outreach, community service, mentorship, or committee positions could be elevated to a more significant role, rather than being considered as a supplement to tenure. Universities could also elevate open-source venues as a viable publication source, to 1) improve accessibility to the public with up-to-date research and dissemination; 2) erode the perpetuation of the ivory tower (i.e., new knowledge and research findings in some circumstances are not publicly available, but instead locked away in elitist and expensive publication journals; and 3) co-create a space acknowledging that published research can be valuable in multiple settings, not just peer-reviewed scientific journals. It could mean expanding paid assistantships for students, creating genuine mentoring relationships rather than transactional ones. It could mean investing in health insurance plans that provide adequate mental health coverage, so students can utilise service providers both on and off campus, rather than relying on overstretched campus counselling centres. At the cultural level, it requires something more difficult: a willingness among professors, administrators, and students to use language, interpretation, and conversation—the very tools of social constructivism—to invest in and challenge the narratives of prestige, competition, and burnout that have come to define academic identity.
Universities exist, in part, to educate and innovate. When adequate resources and appropriate expectations exist across different levels of the institution, each member of the system can benefit. The socially constructed narrative need not be one of scarcity and overwork. It can, instead, become one of genuine support, intellectual vitality, and attention to the human beings who make the university what it is.
About the Author
Bradford Stucki teaches g graduate-level marriage and family therapy courses at Abilene Christian University’s Online Marriage and Family Therapy programme. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with clinical experience in university counselling centres. His practice, BridgeHope Family Therapy, specialises in anxiety, stress, trauma, and relationship difficulties among faculty, staff, and students.
References
Amineh, Roya Jafari, and Hasan Davatgari Asl. “Review of Constructivism and Social Constructivism.” Journal of Social Sciences, Literature, and Languages 1: 9–16. 2015.
Feld, Laura D., and Alexander Shusterman. “Into the Pressure Cooker: Student Stress in College Preparatory High Schools.” Journal of Adolescence 41: 31–42. 2015.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum. 2000.
Galvin, Jane, and Andrew P. Smith. “‘It’s Like Being in a Little Psychological Pressure Cooker Sometimes!’ A Qualitative Study of Stress and Coping in Pre-Qualification Clinical Psychology.” The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice 12 no. 3: 134–49. 2017
Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. 1994.
Lashuel, Hilal A. “What about Faculty?” eLife 9: e54551. 2020. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.54551
Plotnikof, Mie, and Ea Hoppe Utoft. “The ‘New Normal’ of Academia in Pandemic Times: Resisting Toxicity through Care.” Gender, Work, & Organization 29 no. 4: 1259–71. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12778
Schaff, Robert L. “Overcoming a ‘That’s the Way We Have Always Done It’ Mindset in Schools.” The Learning Counsel, 2019.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1978. Mind in Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
