ABSTRACT
The invisible work done by marginalized university faculty is necessary in order to serve all of our students, rather than just the privileged, and needs to be taken into account when balancing our workloads. Work such as checking in on our students' emotional health, advocating for their needs, pushing for changes to university policy, and the like often falls on the people who can identify and empathize with these marginalized students. As a queer, gender non-conforming professor with a learning disability, I am constantly asked by my department head, peers, and administrators to do more of this invisible work, but then I am told during yearly evaluations that I need to be “saved from myself,” implying that it's my own fault that I have taken on this “extra” work, and told that I'm not doing enough departmental work. If the only way to be a “better” faculty member for my university is to tell my students I don't have time to listen to their problems, or to know there were issues that were causing my students pain and do nothing to make our campus a better, safer, more equitable place—I have no interest in that goal.
