Unraveling Faculty Burnout Chapter 2 Academic Identity

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.

Transcript

On this mini-episode of the agile academic, I discuss chapter 2 of my book Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal. Chapter 2 focuses on academic identity.

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.

In the Unraveling Faculty Burnout chapter on identity, I focus on what it means to us to be academics, focusing on academic identity specifically, because it was a way to ground burnout in culture again – our academic identities are bound up because we so deeply believe in a culture that it impacts every aspect of what work we do, how we do it, and what we ignore, such as invisible labor and hope labor. 

I wanted to explore academic identity because that identity took over every aspect of my life as I fell headlong into burnout. I was constantly working, convinced taking a break would let someone down or just make the workload even worse. I was doing the labor I was paid to do, mostly teaching and research, with what felt like a million service and free labor responsibilities. But I never felt like I was doing enough, that I was proving enough to those around me, that I was never good enough.

Part of that professional identity came out of my perfectionist tendencies learned in childhood. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter exploring perfectionism:

I have always set (often unrealistically) high standards for myself, which eventually spilled over into my expectations of colleagues and even my students. Those standards didn’t just include my work; I wanted everyone around me, including family, to think I had it all together and was doing brilliantly at life and career. This showed up in weird ways, such as hiring a painter at the very last minute to paint half of my home’s downstairs to impress my parents (they couldn’t have cared less as long as I was happy) or panic-buying new conference wardrobes so that everyone around me knew I was living my best life, even when I was miserable on the inside. It manifested in my professional anxiety, cleverly disguised as competitive spirit, that I would be overlooked for leadership opportunities or my work would be scooped at any minute, so I had to be always serving, writing, publishing, excelling, and producing to be my ideal academic self. But ideals are hard to live up to.

            T. Elon Dancy II and Jean-Marie Gaetane (2014) define perfectionism as the “belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable,” and they include among the aspects of perfectionism … depending on external measure of success, holding unrealistic standards, experiencing negative emotions such as anxiety and guilt related to work, and being unable to process failures as anything other than personal failing (361). Elements of narcissism and Type A personality may be present as well (Jamal and Baba 2001; Westerman et al. 2016). Nagoski and Nagoski (2019) contend that “a lot of us spend our lives pushing ourselves to work harder, do more, be better; feeling failure when we fall short of someone’s expectation; and chastising ourselves for ‘being arrogant’ if we celebrate success or ‘settling’ if we accept something short of perfection” (196).

            Perfectionism for me was likely a combination of nature and nurture; perfectionism was my strategy for both career success and coping with letdowns and rejection. When perfectionism as a coping strategy against stress reaches toxic levels, burnout results (Nagoski and Nagoski 2019, 194–95). In Hutchins and Rainbolt’s 2017 study, faculty experiencing imposter syndrome and toxic perfectionism dealt with imposter events “in harmful ways through negative self-talk, inaccurate attributions concerning success and failure, and [further] perfectionistic work tendencies” (207). They note that those with a bent to perfectionism spent a great deal of energy working to hide any trace of “weakness” or inadequacy, which led to higher instances of burnout (208).

            Brené Brown’s (2012, 2017) definition of narcissism might also be a definition of perfectionism: “When I look at narcissism through the lens of vulnerability, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose” (Brown 2012, 22). Being ordinary or unnoticed, as I shared earlier, was a deep-seated fear that drove me to judge myself and those around me by accomplishments. Similarly, Kelly J. Baker (2017) interrogated this drive as follows: “[My] melodramatic focus on accomplishments was not ever about my life, but the career that I thought I wanted. It was a to-do list that a younger version of me created. My plan equated life with career and career with success. A career is not a life. What an impoverished vision of success dependent on external validation and a weird obsession with success as our only option. Accomplishments are an awful way to measure the value of a life” (77).

            A career is not a life. That was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn when dealing with my burnout and perfectionism.

In the chapter, I also tackle imposter syndrome and what it means to be an “unhappy achiever.” Identity is often, if not always, a product of culture and engagement in a community. Higher ed may attract a certain type of individual if we are stereotyping. Many of us found validation in schooling, find pleasure in being an expert, and build an identity on being a professor. When your identity is solely in the hands of the culture of higher ed, as mine was, burnout may be inevitable. Yes, that’s a little dramatic and we need research to validate, but it was true for me at least and for other women I talked to for the book.

Dr. Kryss Shane contributed to the book and had this to say about why:

Hey everybody. I'm Dr. Kryss Shane. I use she/her pronouns and I contributed to the book unraveling faculty burnout pathways to reckoning and renewal as a longtime adjunct professor currently teaching remotely at five universities simultaneously, and as an G B T plus subject matter expert at a time when universities are debating, whether it matters to be intentionally inclusive, I have to admit, I had no idea that my feelings fit the definition of burnout. Instead, I chastised myself for the laziness of only working 18 hours a day. I felt embarrassed for taking more than 24 hours to grade all of the assignments my students admitted. And I wondered if I'd ever be enough. I contributed to this book because I know that I'm not alone in these feelings. And I know I'm not alone in recognizing that this is what burnout is. It's my hope that through this book, readers will better understand and empathize with faculty. And that those of us who are faculty members, especially the adjuncts and affiliates will better recognize that we owe it to ourselves to be as responsive to our minds and bodies and our needs. As we are responsive to student emails and to our boss' requests, just as we show up for them. I genuinely hope that reading this book will help you to show up for yourself. You deserve it. Happy reading.

Thanks, Kryss, and thank you for listing to this mini-episode. In the next episode, we’ll walk through the first of the burnout resilience chapters – purpose.

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.