Faculty Burnout: How Are You Doing?

Learning and Teaching Commons Scholar Julia Zay reflects on faculty burnout in her introduction to the April 2025 newsletter.

Spring! Kids wonder why they have to go to bed while it’s still light out, and evenings are available again for long sunset walks and cherry blossom gazing.

A year ago this week, I was beginning a quarter of medical leave to address chronic mental health needs. I share this candidly because I want to normalize talking about our mental health at work. I want to talk to you about burnout.

The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job;
• reduced professional efficacy.

“The keyword in that definition is ‘workplace.’ Burnout is a workplace phenomenon, a cultural problem that creates an environment of unrelenting stress for those working in the organization. It’s much easier to assume that burnout is a personal failing or individual weakness. If it’s a personal problem, we can focus on the individual’s mental health, offer them coping strategies, or even allow (or encourage) them to walk away. But if it’s a culture problem, whether at an institution or throughout higher ed in general, that’s orders of magnitude more complicated,” writes Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at Georgia Institute of Technology, and author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (2022).

I became a parent at age 49 in 2019; we celebrated Rowan’s first birthday in May 2020 in our front yard with drive-by visits from friends and little kids, during a week filled with Zoom classes, while the rhododendrons did their magnificent thing. It wasn’t until spring 2024 that I understood my struggles- an inability to focus or stay organized, tears on the drive to work, the onset of high blood pressure, and pervasive feelings of anxiety and dread about standing in front of a classroom- were not badges of honor, battle scars, or simply challenges to “just push through” on my own. They were significant indicators of burnout. Although I begin my story here at the onset of the pandemic, burnout is not a recent issue within institutions, and I suspect the seeds of my burnout had been planted and cultivated for years prior.

Elsewhere, Pope-Ruark writes, “The impacts of burnout stretch far beyond the pandemic and are only compounded in its wake. Faculty burnout was at high levels pre-pandemic because the culture of higher education is one of expectation escalation and competition, and the external attacks to higher ed coming from neoliberal government entities add additional stressors. Among faculty whose reputations and mobility depend on their scholarly reputations or teaching evaluations, burnout can feel like a shameful personal secret to be hidden so as not to damage their careers and lives. And suppressing burnout only makes it worse.”

In higher education, where intellect and autonomy are highly valued, burnout carries a particularly high level of stigma and remains largely invisible. But burnout is not a personal failing. Burnout is a cultural and structural workplace issue that predates the pandemic. Currently, there is public discourse about workplace mental health, including the 2022 Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-being, and some higher education institutions are starting discussions about human-centered workplaces and addressing overwork. As faculty, we look to our institutional leaders for acknowledgement of this crisis and moves towards change. We know academic leaders are experiencing burnout right alongside us.

Pope-Ruark continues, ”…dealing with burnout is tricky. Most of the interventions those advocating for burnout resilience, myself included, recommend are individual or small group–such as therapy, coaching, and the ubiquitous self-care–or support groups like the one I run for women+ faculty at my new institution. Coping strategies, really, are all we seem to have, thus throwing a systemic problem back on the individual. The definition of burnout ties it directly to workplace culture and stress. Individual interventions don’t address those underlying cultural issues that cause the problem of burnout in the first place.”

One of my projects this year as LTC faculty scholar is to ask Evergreen faculty: How are you doing? The 2025 Evergreen Faculty Experience Survey aims to understand the faculty experience, focusing on well-being and the overall workplace environment. My hope is that with strong survey participation, we can gain a vivid picture of how we’re doing and what we need to enhance our vitality and sense of belonging, achieve better balance and boundaries in our work lives, and find more support and understanding from our peers, leaders, culture, and structures. The brutality of the new US political regime makes this call to center our humanity in the workplace even more urgent. This is a time for all of us to come together to ask each other: How are you doing? To ask our collective selves: How are we doing? And to envision: What can we do differently, now?

I invite you to take 20-30 minutes to ask yourself, How am I doing? by completing the 2025 Evergreen Faculty Experience Survey. Check your email for the invitation and link. If you aren’t able to find it, please email learningandteaching@evergreen.edu, and we’ll get you set up. The survey closes Wednesday April 9, 2025 at 11:59pm.