Mental health centers on campuses around the country are stretched thin—after all, it’s hard to imagine a well-staffed counseling office being more of a sell to prospective students and their check-signing parents than a state-of-the-art climbing facility. As an emergent “solution,” faculty development programs are offering classes on handling students in distress or in mental health crises. Margaret, another former colleague who is tenured at a public university was encouraged (but not required) to attend a suicide prevention training session after she had a student come to her with suicidal thoughts. Many well-intentioned departments are now training instructors in everything from how to respond to students who are unable to afford food to how to handle vets with PTSD. Surely instructors want all students to succeed, but to expect a couple hours of training to sub in for professional student support systems provided by the university is unrealistic and dangerous.

The instructors and college administrators I’ve asked about this issue uniformly agree that all students should have access to a holistic battery of supports. However, the expectation that instructors engage in uncompensated emotional labor by serving as untrained front-line proto-counselors is doing everyone a disservice, especially the students who are receiving this “care.” In a pedagogy course I taught, I asked instructors to name their “worst-case scenario teaching fears.” Without exception, every teacher expressed anxiety about handling unbalanced students. One instructor wasn’t sure what to do when a student had come to office hours to tearfully disclose an eating disorder. Others described fearing unstable students might come to class on the verge of an emotional or physical breakdown. Less-experienced instructors in particular are terrified of how to handle students who are emotionally distraught and potentially a threat to themselves or others.

This expectation for emotional labor falls disproportionately on women, who are overrepresented among contingent faculty and face well-documented bias in student evaluations—the most important, and in many cases singular, measure of their job performance. Research done by my former teaching center colleagues at Ohio State University indicated that when students evaluate instructors, they react most strongly to two things: how much they feel they learned in the course, and how much they feel their instructors cared about them. And what passes as “caring enough” is affected by implicit biases students may hold.

A recent study demonstrated that identical teaching practices were judged differently based on the gender identity of the instructor. While instructors identified as male were judged to be brilliant and effective, women were described as bossy. Therefore, women who abide by feminine norms by being sensitive, kind, and caring get better evaluations. A female non-tenure-track sociology instructor, who did not want to be named, recalled skipping a department meeting to counsel a female student who was dealing with the fallout from a sexual assault. “I was watching the clock,” she recalls, “but I did not want to send her away feeling upset or ignored. But selfishly, I also didn’t want the reputation of being unsupportive toward my students, knowing that my reappointment in this new teaching position was 100 percent contingent on student evaluations.”