I found the following post saved in “drafts” and never posted.  Although I wrote it several years ago, the issues I was mulling over back then haven’t gone away.  If anything, my concerns about faculty burnout have intensified as post-COVID changes in student needs and engagement and the encroachments of AI have only added to challenges in the classroom.  I have been carrying Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity book around for the last week, without finding time to read it (would skimming it quickly count as irony?) and had planned to respond here when I’d finished it.  In the meantime, I’ll post this long-delayed reflection on faculty burnout……

Recently our teaching excellence program held a brown bag discussion about faculty burnout.  As our facilitator explained: “Faculty well-being is a pedagogical issue…we’re better teachers when our own burnout is managed.”  It’s a topic I’ve been mulling over since a friend shared with me this Chronicle article that asked, Does High Impact Teaching Cause High Impact Fatigue?  It was a relief to see that I was not the only one among my peers with an interest in this question.

We discussed some of the daily tasks that wear us down and coping strategies for reclaiming, reframing, and retooling.  We reviewed 4 Ideas for Avoiding Faculty Burnout  including “Take Time Off, If Only for an Evening” and “Find Ways to Say ‘No.'” There was much that was useful and affirming, and yet I was struck by how studiously we avoided any larger critique, how willingly we accepted personal responsibility for the problem and its solutions.  Looking around the room, I felt confident that at least half of us would have noticed if, in a class discussion, our students were focusing only on individual level explanations for complex social problems and ignoring the dialectic of structure and agency.

For example, we chose not to acknowledge that all but one of the participants were women.  This frequently happens at these gatherings, but it seems especially germane to a discussion of burnout.  Likewise, there were a few moments when the different working conditions for tenured versus non-tenure-track faculty burbled up without further comment.

A discussion of email was especially telling, I thought.   We talked about how email and online learning management systems make it possible to be available to students and to work outside a traditional 9 to 5 day.  One participant volunteered that she didn’t check email in the evenings or on weekends and the person seated next to her said, “You’re a better person than I!”  There followed a show of hands:  “How many people set boundaries around checking email?”  Some hands were raised, some were not.  And then the conversation moved on.

I doubt that those who didn’t raise their hands had never considered “setting boundaries” just as “taking time off, if only for an evening” or “saying ‘no”” are likely admonitions we’ve heard before.  The question I am grappling with is not “who sets boundaries?” (and the implied “who is a better person for it?”) but “Why do some of us feel as though we need to check email in the evening or on weekends?”  I spoke later with a friend whose eye I caught when neither of our hands were raised.  She said that most days, there is so much to do during the day that evening is the only time to check email and failure to check email regularly just compounds the demands when you finally do get to the seemingly endless queue.

I also wonder how many women in the room (and especially those whose year-to-year contracts are contingent upon student evaluations) were mindful of the items on student evaluations asking if we are “accessible” and if we “care” about helping students learn.  Some studies show that women instructors are vulnerable to lower student ratings if they fail to meet traditional gender expectations of women as nurturing, caring, and accessible.  Most of our students are online “constantly” or “several times a day” and if they don’t expect us to be right there with them, they do appreciate it when we are (i.e., we’re “super-accessible” and we “really care”).  I agree with the colleague who suggested we need to work with students to set reasonable expectations (but notice that there it is again–work for us to explain, persuade, justify).

Even if we succeed in letting students know that we won’t respond to emails in the evening, this is just one facet of the “always on” problem and one over which we likely have the most control.  At the faculty meeting this week, one of my tireless colleagues mentioned in an aside that the timestamps on the emails of her committee indicated people were working in the wee hours of the morning and/or rising before dawn to engage in the electronic collaboration it took for their committee to do their work.

Let me be clear:  I don’t want the moral of this story to be criticism of those who organized this discussion.  I appreciate the open acknowledgement of the issue and I am always cheered by the dedication and creativity and support of my colleagues when we gather to talk about teaching.  But here are some topics for a different discussion I’d like to have:

  • How are changes in support for higher education creating pressures that are borne by individual instructors (and disproportionately by some more than others)?  For example, how has the nature of faculty work changed due to cuts in funding, requirements to document measurable outcomes, exhortations to “high impact” practices, and increasing competition to recruit and retain students?
  • In light of these larger trends, is self-help and self-surveillance adequate to mitgate the risk of burn-out? What would it take to change the conditions of this (and other jobs) that encroach on our lives a little more with each passing year?  What actions can we take collectively?

Back to 2024…..

I have continued to reflect on whether, in fact, I have more control than I assert over my working conditions and how I might use that constructively–for my own well-being and in collaboration with others.  Faculty do have more autonomy than many other lines of work and yet that same autonomy can complicate collective action to address increasing expectations for responsiveness and workload. One of my goals for this year is to look for opportunities to address burnout at a level beyond individual efforts.