Unraveling Faculty Burnout Chapter 1 Culture

In this episode, I give you a sneak peak into Chapter 1 of Unraveling Faculty Burnout on higher ed culture.

Transcript

In this special episode of the agile academic podcast, I explore Chapter 1 of my book Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal. The chapter is on higher ed culture.

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Welcome to this special series of bite-sized agile academic episodes about my book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways for Reckoning and Renewal, available from Johns Hopkins University Press. I talk through what you’ll find in each chapter, read a short excerpts, and even share thoughts from women who contributed to the book. Unraveling Faculty Burnout ships September 20. Links are in the transcript. I’m your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. And now, on to the mini-episode.

The first numbered chapter of the book is about the culture of higher ed. If you missed me talking about the book’s introduction, go back and listen to the last episode of season 3. I read an excerpt about my own burnout experience and talk about how the book came into being.

The overarching theme for chapter 1 is that higher ed is designed to expect more and more of you, so much that for many of us, burnout is the natural conclusion of following that logic to the end. I wanted to include a chapter on culture because, as the World Health Organization’s definition of burnout tells us, burnout’s a workplace problem. The famous Peter Drucker quote, the culture eats strategy for breakfast, while clichéd at this point, is also true in the case of higher ed. 

Here is an excerpt from the book’s chapter on culture:

I’ve publicly written about burnout, and since the pandemic I’ve led what feels like countless burnout-resilience workshops for institutions ranging from small privates to huge R1 institutions, even an Ivy. I always start these workshops the same way, with a few questions. After giving the participants time before we start to jot down some thoughts about what they give themselves permission to do or not do, say or not say, during our hour together, I ask them to add to the chat their favorite things about working with their colleagues and students. Answers are usually similar—smart colleagues who care about students, students actively engaged in classes, the joy of big ideas, and seeing realization dawn on students’ faces. No one ever says meetings or grading or bureaucracy.

            The second question I ask is, “How are you doing, really?” I have them take the much-abbreviated version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory and rate themselves for each question along a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (very often) (see appendix 2 for the full exercise). They then input their most common score—mostly 3s or mostly 5s, for example—into an anonymous Google poll that lets us see the results in a real-time pie chart. The number of attendees at these workshops ranges from twenty to fifty, but the results are pretty consistent: half of the people rate themselves as mostly 3s, or “at risk.” Maybe one or two people rate themselves in the “no danger” category, and there are always a few in the "danger” zone of mostly 5s. The remaining 25 percent fall into the “at some risk” and “at serious risk” categories.

            Then I ask participants to interpret the results, nonstatistical as the results may be. Again, I hear the same things: “some of our colleagues are in serious distress” and “at least 60 percent of our colleagues feel some significant danger of burnout.” Someone invariably comments that they “thought there would be more 5s,” to which someone else always responds that “people who most need a workshop on burnout can’t or won’t attend.” The reasons given for the latter’s nonattendance vary: not knowing they are in burnout danger; not being emotionally ready to talk about or hear about it; or just being plain scared of outing themselves as “a burnout.” And some notice that the vast majority of the workshop attendees are usually women.

            For many, this is the first time they have thought seriously about burnout in themselves and possibly their colleagues and what it means to be burned out. Higher ed is not a culture that is kind to perceived weakness in faculty, whether we like to admit it or not. And burnout can look like weakness—the exhaustion, the pushing away, the thoughts that nothing we do has any meaning. I could spend years trying to make this argument, but other have already taken up that charge. In this chapter I focus on a few aspects of our culture that foment burnout. I zero in on academic capitalism specifically and the ways it breeds elements of emotional and hope labor, exploitation, and competition.

            But I don’t claim that higher ed culture is only bad or destructive. Higher education at its best is a haven for intellectual exploration, lifelong learning, and civic optimism. Higher ed can nurture creativity, inspire innovation, and connect people in indelible ways. I have collaborated with enthusiastic colleagues on research and teaching, been awed by the ingenuity of my students’ work in our communities, and served with peers and administrators who truly believe in higher education’s potential to foster students’ intellectual, social, and civic growth. Before burnout, I believed this too. But the burnout took over, and I was at my most cynical, seeing only capitalism, exploitation, and competition. I’m still working back from that.

The rest of the chapter looks at women’s experiences with this workplace culture; a culture of productivity, expectation escalation, competition, and reputation building. Kelly J. Baker, in her book Grace Period, encapsulates the perspective when she writes:

academic love is inherently one-sided. I could love my field without reservation, but the field could never really love me back. That’s the danger of investing wholeheartedly in any work; the return never matches the devotion. This love is sacrificial and rarely redemptive. The price it extracts is too high. It breaks our hearts into sharp, pained pieces. Love, like optimism, can turn cruel. . . . And here’s the problem: Exploitation doesn’t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work more—to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job. I clung more tightly to academic love at the low points of my career, as if all I needed was love to remedy my situation.

The toll of the culture she describes defines how many of us fall into burnout, by giving more and more of ourselves until there is nothing left to give. Higher ed is an industry, and like all industries it must produce something – knowledge, publications, graduates, etc. And believing we are called to the work of this industry can be exploitative as well as transformative in good ways as well, as I note in the excerpt. 

The culture chapter dives into these contradictions and how higher ed fosters burnout as a cultural product. In the next episode, I’ll share some insights from the identity chapter.

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Thanks for listening to this mini-episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed based on my book Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways for Reckoning and Renewal. The book is available from Johns Hopkins University Press, and you’ll find a link to the page in the transcript. If you are interested in doing a book club on your campus and having me speak with your faculty, please email me at agilefaculty dot rpr at gmail dot com.