Scholar Skills: Unraveling Faculty Burnout

The Academic Life

“I’m burned out” is a familiar phrase in higher ed these days. This episode explores:

• What burnout is and is not.
• One scholar’s personal experience with burnout.
• How higher ed’s culture and the “expectation escalation” encourage burnout.
• Academic capitalism and its relationship to faculty burnout.
• The missing voices from the conversation on burnout.
• Imposter syndrome and how it plays out for women, especially, in the academy.

Our guest is: Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) as well as the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, co-producer and co-host of The Academic Life channel. Dana is energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences for folks across the academy and beyond. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers University Press).

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

• This Chronicle of Higher Education article on how to cope with Covid-19 burnout.
• This Inside Higher Ed article on beating pandemic burnout.
• The Maslach Burnout Inventory for Educators (MBI-ES).
• This Academic Life conversation on community building and how we show up.
• This Academic Life conversation on being well in academia.
• This Academic Life conversation on finding your people and making meaningful connections.

Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

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