Apple TV’s “most-watched show ever” wrapped up its second season recently, firmly establishing its status as a cultural phenomenon. “Severance” follows a small group of workers at a company called Lumon who choose to undergo a surgical procedure that separates their work-life memories from their personal memories, creating two distinct identities known as “innies” and “outies.”
The primary character is Mark, a former history professor, who is motivated to take this job to assuage his grief after the loss of his wife. The show is completely original, although it echoes Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.” Viewers find each scene rich in detail, gleaning meaning and nuance from its writing, performance, cinematography and production design.
YouTube is awash with episode guides breaking down fan theories and identifying Easter eggs. The show’s official LinkedIn page, one of the few television series to successfully leverage the platform for marketing, leaves clues to upcoming episodes and posts inside jokes for viewers. Its headline reads, “Giving employees the best work environment they’ll never know, with our patented and extremely safe Severance procedure.”
This article is part of a biweekly series provided by the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges.
“Severance” is essentially about co-workers who struggle to hold on to the best parts of their humanity despite the strong grasp of Lumon’s technology and a climate of control. Victoria Livingston, managing editor of MLN, a peer-reviewed journal of literary scholarship, published a piece in Time magazine last September called “I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT.”
Mark Watkins, director of the Mississippi AI Institute, where he trains faculty in AI literacy, revisited this topic in his essay, “The Costs of AI in Education,” writing, “How much is higher education spending on AI? This seemingly straightforward question has so many layers that the true cost is nearly impossible to measure. And I don’t just mean material costs. People are burning out. Some are retiring. Others are outright quitting.”
We teach in different areas of instruction-information technology and the liberal arts, and both of us have worked in our community college system for more than 16 years. However, neither of us remembers a time when encouraging our fellow faculty members — both inside and outside our departments — felt so imperative. It would be easy to blame generative AI for the burnout, but the truth is as layered as a “Severance” episode guide.
A challenging climate
Changes to federal funding and the U.S. Education Department are causing a challenging climate in higher education, but the deepest challenges might be felt on a more local level. Demographic shifts affecting enrollment, student learning gaps persisting since the Covid pandemic, low faculty pay (especially in some states) and the loss of legacy leadership to retirement or the private sector are chronically significant factors in faculty workplaces. And for those of us who teach online or provide support to online instructors, colleges seem to vary widely on their support of eLearning. To be sure, teaching is hard in 2025.
The struggle of work-life balance and burnout are relatable across many industries. Show writer Dan Erickson was initially inspired to write “Severance” because of his job at a door factory, which caused him to wonder what it would be like to completely disconnect from a long day “at the factory.”
Disconnection is very tempting for instructors whose students expect round-the-clock “customer service.” Faculty often find themselves the recipients of numerous Zoom, Google Meet and Teams meeting requests regardless of the boundaries set around office hours or faculty breaks. Often, academics report that the greatest part of a vacation was leaving laptops behind or turning their phones on airplane mode for a day.
Will AI sever us or reintegrate us?
When administrators attempt to understand the connection between AI and faculty burnout, they assume it is fueled by concerns about plagiarism or the overwhelming number of AI tools demanding perpetual upskilling. That is a foundational layer of the issue, but what leaders may be overlooking is the fatigue faculty have from actually pursuing AI innovations to find unclear parameters and scant recognition.
Since ChatGPT arrived on the scene, administrators have been encouraging faculty to embrace the possibilities of incorporating AI into curriculums. For community college instructors and students, it is not hard to sell us on the need for AI literacy. If the industries our students wish to pursue expect AI skills, then we adapt to that need. Period.
Faculty have been quick to collaborate on AI tools, projects, lessons and grants to fill the need. Less quick to adapt have been the policies and frameworks to guide faculty on which tools and procedures are safe for student data and affordable for community college budgets. This has caused immense frustration for faculty and staff. It isn’t lost on us that higher education moves slowly and community college policies take time. We felt the need to keep pace with the innovative speed of the industry to best serve our students, but our organizations, for the most part, are not designed to support that speed. Faculty need bold leadership to reconcile AI innovation collapse. It is encouraging to see presidential summits organizing to strategize around these pain points.
In both seasons of “Severance,” the four main characters — colleagues at Lumen — survive and even thrive because of their shared commitment to each other. Despite the climate, the technology, the discouragement, they have each other. One way their fight for humanity is visually communicated to viewers is by the changeup between digital cinematography to real film at key moments in the series.
The finale includes a moment of real film ending on a freeze frame reminiscent of the films “The Breakfast Club,” “Thelma and Louise” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” In each of those films, as with this series, it was human relationships that transcended it all. AI will be a test for professors, a test for educational institutions, but it will also be a test for human relationships. To navigate the AI Century, we need collaboration, interdisciplinary work and valuable professional networking experiences. We need leaders who instinctively understand this and plan even shoestring budgets around those priorities.
It is not the time for isolation, silos and distrust. Brian Christian, author of book The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, wrote, “We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test.”
We hope this serves to remind faculty that their work is “mysterious and important,” and they aren’t alone in this freeze-framed snapshot in time. In the words of the “Severance” character Irving, “Hang in there.”
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Brittany Hochstaetter is a senior professor of communication at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is chair-elect of the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) board of directors.
Chad McKenzie is a professor in the information technology division at Wake Tech. He is a 2025 Business-Higher Education Forum Innovation fellow, Certiport ambassador, Pearson IT advisory board member and ITC board member.
