S2 E29: Addressing burnout in higher education
with burnout coach and Professor Rebecca Pope-Ruark
Key Takeways
I had amazing students and I had really wonderful colleagues. Over time, I just found myself doing too much, pushing myself too hard. And ultimately that led into a pretty severe bout of burnout. And I ended up needing to take some medical leave to get a handle on my mental health and ultimately decided that returning to my institution probably wasn't the healthiest thing for me.
So it was a combination of things that led me to the burnout. It was a combination of my own ambition and kind of constantly striving to do one thing better to keep moving up a ladder that was imaginary after a while. Just to continue to keep pushing myself to do better and better. It became, once you write a book, everything has to be a book. Once you give a workshop, everything has to be a giant workshop for big institutions.
So there was a lot of my own kind of ladder climbing there that was beginning to be unhealthy. And then there was also, there was some things going on with the program I was co-developing that, quite frankly, was traumatic professionally for me. So that really kept it off in terms of leading to a bit of a breakdown and needing to take a break from my role as a faculty member at my institution. So it's been about three years, three and a half years now that I've been dealing with this.
We decided that was a good shift for us to make, a clean start. To try something different, to be somewhere different and to just restart our life a little bit with a little bit more healthy approach to our lives, into our own mental health.
I still do regular therapy and I'm not ashamed of that and in the slightest, but I do also feel like I've done so much work on myself in the last three years that burnout isn't really something that's going to happen to me again, I'm a different person now. I have a much better sense of balance in my life and what I'm willing to do and what I'm not willing to do in terms of my job specifically. It was an opportunity to make a really positive change.
I love higher ed, as much as I'll critique it, I do love it. And I'm connected to faculty and I really want to make sure that they're having kind of vital careers and experiencing the flourishing that they want to be experiencing and supporting them when they're not flourishing and going through some things, when they're thinking about maybe leaving their role or leaving their institution or even leaving academia. When they're excited about opportunities and need support prioritizing, and that kind of work. It's really a joy to work with faculty as they're developing their careers and how they want to move forward in their lives
A big focus of my work, a purpose of the work that I do in burnout is that people don't have a language to talk about mental health related to faculty, specifically related to burnout because the idea of burning out is really a shameful thing. Higher ed, our brains are a currency where reputation is our gold. So the idea that you might not be quote unquote, "doing your best work" or there's shame attached to that. So my goal has really been to provide the clinical definition and really make sure people understand the clinical definition and some of the symptoms of burnout so that they can know they can see it in themselves or perhaps in their colleagues, because when I was going through it, I initially I had no idea what was wrong with me. I just thought I was depressed or anxiety, was having a bad patch with my anxiety. But those were more symptoms of a larger problem, which ultimately was burnout and that workplace stress piece.
It's workplace connected. Which means it's a cultural issue because workplaces cause this. So it isn't necessarily someone's fault that they burn out. They're products of a culture that has led them in that direction. That higher ed can certainly do that. It's specifically stress. It's being unable to complete those stress cycles and manage that stress in different ways.
And the last piece is that it has not been successfully managed, but I think framing that way makes it sound a little victim blaming. So I think that if we focus on it as a workplace syndrome, driven by stress, that you don't have an opportunity or any way to manage because it's continuous, it's always coming at you. It's very overwhelming.
You want to be on the lookout for, extended emotional, physical, intellectual exhaustion over time. So that might manifest itself and not being able to focus, not being able to care, not being able to have conversations about maybe intellectual topics that maybe you have, enjoyed or done your whole professional life.
We're on the lookout for when someone starts to really pull back from the things that they really have appreciated or enjoyed in the past about their workplace and their jobs. For me, I was a teacher's teacher. My students were my everything. When I started to have panic attacks going into class, because I had to deal with students or when I started hiding in my office and not having office hours.
It's a difficult thing to change institutions or to leave higher ed completely because we are so indoctrinated in the sense that this is the ivory tower. This is only the elites and the few get into this. If you leave, does that mean failure as opposed to moving to something else? So it's very easy when that identity is wrapped up in a lot of the socialization of higher ed as an industry to feel that pain.
We model for our students. They see us doing whatever it is. And if it's overworking, if it's giving way too much of yourself, if it's burning out, our students see that and they begin to think that's normal, not necessarily students who are going into higher education, but absolutely our PhD students in our master's students can see that in our undergraduates can see it as well. So if we're not setting boundaries for ourselves and taking care of ourselves, they might see that as the way things are done. And then we do them a disservice as they set up their lives as young professionals.
There are ways to cope that there are coping strategies, but also that if we want to eliminate burnout, we have to change the culture of higher education. And that's going to take all of us, making some big steps and pushing our administrations and our professional organizations and our unions to make some big changes so that we can have more balance in our lives and fulfill our purpose and connect with the students and people we need to connect with as academic professionals.
Burnout is through the roof. I don't know very many academics who haven't experienced some level of trauma and burnout from the past 18 months. That moment aside, I think it was increasing because I think institutional expectations were continuing to creep up, the level of free labor that we were being expected to do was creeping up. The proliferation of the adjunct nation basically, and taking advantage of our continuing faculty was causing that stress and workplace burnout. So I think there are a lot of factors in the industry that were leading burnout to be epidemic in American higher education. Anyway, and then the pandemic just exacerbated that so dramatically.
I think that the industry was created for men in, in the last thousand years. Been created for men in that kind of environment. It's very competitive. We are trained to be very competitive with each other to be stingy with our work so that we don't get scooped. collaboration is a very strained process. We do know that there are definitely inherent biases when students are doing course evaluations for women and people of color and sometimes adjuncts as well. So we do have the research about those biases in higher education. And a lot of that stuff is in other industries, just manifesting itself in different ways. We're not necessarily unique in that way, but what we are unique in is the fact that, at the risk of sounding cheesy, we are preparing the next generations of citizens and whatever culture we're showing them.
If we can train more people in the definitions and what to look for in terms of burnout, we see it more regularly. We can come together more likely to start pushing our administration to change those things. Our professional organizations can get more involved with the recommended policies and things like that for us to use and recommend to our institutions. It's we have to be willing to recognize it and people have to be willing to speak out about their episodes of burnout.
How do we start thinking in a way that is, dare I say nurturing to us and to our students, to our graduate students as they're coming up as well. How do we change culture? And we have to do it from the ground up, but also from top down, I think there needs to be a groundswell on the bottom, but I think higher administrations need to be really listening to their faculty, listening to what's happening and be willing to put their money where their mouth is on a lot of those things, because it's very easy to speak to, we're going to change culture, but you're not going to change culture without offering people time and money to do that, to really make a difference. So the initiatives have to come from both ways I think.
Women aren't necessarily just leaking out. They're being pushed out by cultural factors, usually driven by men. So how do, we need to address that because those women are also burning out. They're not just, they're not leaving because they can't cut it. They're leaving because the cultural conditions do not make it possible for them to live a healthy work life.
Make sure people understand what burnout is and know that definition. There’s the Maslach Burnout Inventory that people can take and see if they fall on the spectrum of burnout so they can check for those behaviors. And then knowing, where you fall can help you think about what measures you might want to take to improve the quality of your life connected to burnout.
I think that higher education broadly needs to start being aware of burnout as an epidemic in our culture, and really start looking at more systemic ways of addressing the toxicity of the culture and that's just going to take a lot of work.
Bio
Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD, is a Faculty Teaching and Learning Specialist in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. She is the author of Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching (2017, University of Chicago Press) and the forthcoming Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways for Reckoning and Renewal (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press). She is also the host of the agile academic podcast for women in higher education available on Apple, Google, and Spotify platforms.
Links to Additional Resources
