How to think about burnout and academia

Plus a lot of quotations from a book I am reading, important updates on my hair, and a shoutout to my running partner, Sammie.

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here.  

A few months ago, I was feeling pretty spent. My motivation was low. I was tired. My calendar was full to bursting, my email inbox was well beyond that, and the weather was awful even by Saskatchewan-in-February standards. So I did the two things within my agency that seemed to be a reasonable response at the time: I got a major haircut and I called in every library book I could find about burnout.

(Important note: while I chopped off a lot of my hair, I did not get bangs. It was not a distress signal!)

My library haul was plentiful but most of the books were useless for me. Too earnest. Too boring. Too ‘go girl.’ Too “wellness” (aka diet culture – fuck, no) focused. Too full of cutesy acronyms that tried too hard. (As the inventor of EASY goals, I tread carefully with this last critique.) 

But one book resonated with me: Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout. Malesic is a former professor who left academia due to burnout. Coming from our shared academic world, his stories were familiar to those I have heard from colleagues  — and my own mind at my lower moments. For example:

“All of this wears me out. It’s not an intellectual challenge. (It’s a challenge, just not an intellectual one.) And it isn’t really rewarding, since most students don’t seem to profit from it, and those few who do don’t give me any thanks.”

and…

“By going into academia, I thought I was becoming a citizen in the republic of letters. But in reality, it is still just a job, with a bureaucracy and a schedule and boring things that need to get done by five o’clock.”

and…

“I began to question if it mattered that I went above and beyond the strict requirements of the job. It seemed like I would get the same reward, regardless of whether I pushed myself to do more. I sometimes regret caring as much about the college as I did. I could have done do much less.”

Ahem… 

At a personal level, I am happy to report that I am no longer feeling spent and tired. My schedule isn’t as full, I am (mostly) on top of my email, and the weather is now quite lovely, particularly for Saskatchewan-in-April standards. But Malesic’s book has many ideas I want to explore with you. And that’s what today’s small thing to try immediately is about.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Consider how ‘burnout culture’ might be impacting your work

Most of my ‘small things to try immediately’ are little tips and tricks to make academic work a bit easier (hence my newsletter title). I share simple but effective ideas such as travel strategies and packing lists, backward planning tools, systems for managing student reference letters and for dealing with student grade complaints. Occasionally, though, I ask you to consider different ways of thinking about your work. Today falls into the latter category. 

Malesic’s book asks readers to see the cultural underpinnings of our contemporary economy. Cultures are hard to see. As David Foster Wallace stated in his famous “This is Water” commencement speech, which starts with a parable about two fish who aren’t aware of the water in which they are swimming, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” And even when we do see them, they can be challenging to push back against both at a societal level and in our own thoughts. (Those of us with experience trying to unpack decades of deeply ingrained diet culture bullshit know this all too well.) So what follows here are some small steps to simply start considering academic work through a burnout culture lens.

1. Understand that academia is neither immune nor special. Unlike the self help-style books on burnout in my library haul, Malesic takes an academic approach to the concept of burnout. He spends a fair bit of time on how burnout is conceptualized and measured. He writes about how burnout reflects different societal ideals that have evolved over decades and centuries. And – importantly to me – Malesic discusses burnout as a cultural phenomenon rather than an individual failure. 

Academia exists within this larger culture. Malesic writes, “In every sector of the economy in the past several decades, the typical job has become more stressful and less rewarding” and “To participate in the work culture of our era just is to risk burnout. You may as well try to swim without getting wet.” While Malesic mines his academic past in discussing his own experience, his work makes it very clear that burnout is not a uniquely post-secondary sector phenomenon. Academia is not special in experiencing burnout culture. (Just ask your friends working in non-academic sectors!) And while academic work (depending on one’s position and job security) can have considerably greater flexibility and/or autonomy than other sectors, higher education experiences the same pressures of the larger economic context. Academia is not immune to burnout culture.

2. Be mindful of some particular burnout risks within academia. For some people academia may have heightened risks of burnout due to how it is often idealized. We go into academic careers imagining the joys of research and writing without appreciating the frustrations (shout out to anyone who has dealt with an unhelpful research ethics board!) and the tedium. We go into academic careers imagining the eager, intellectually-motivated students we remember our past selves to be and are confronted by students motivated by future employment anxieties, disinterested in the subject matter, and/or trying to balance their studies with employment, family, and health demands. (I wrote a Skills Agenda column about this: “Teach the students you have, not the student you were.”)  And we go into academic careers often blind to service loads, the workload pressures that can accompany increasingly strained institutional funding, and the time and energy of emotional labour. (Watch for upcoming Skills Agenda columns on the emotional labour topic in the months ahead.)

According to Malesic, “That gap between our ideals for work and the reality of our job is burnout’s origin point. … we want more than just a salary from our jobs. We want dignity. We want to grow as persons. We might even want some transcendent purpose. And we don’t get these things, in part because work has become emotionally more demanding and materially less rewarding over the past several decades.” It can be disheartening to move from an idealized vision to seeing academia as a, well, job.

3. Consider your personal agency to counter – or at least stop contributing – to burnout culture. Many of my past newsletters have focused on taking steps to avoid individual burnout. (See, for example, “How (and why) to avoid burnout”, “How to take the weekend off’, and “How to prepare to take a (real) break”.) But, as Malesic writes, “The question, in the end, cannot just be “how can I prevent my burnout?”; it has to be, “how can I prevent yours?” …. the cure for burnout has to be cultural and collective, focused on offering each other the compassion and respect our work does not.” Cultures are hard to change. In future Academia Made Easier newsletters, I intend to discuss ideas of how personal agency can be directed at collective solutions to addressing burnout culture in our spheres of influence.

Watch this space.

Until next time…

What are your own thoughts about and/or experiences with burnout? Do you agree with the idea that burnout is cultural or does it sound like a bunch of hooey to you? I would love to hear your thoughts; please share them in the comments. And if you are still teaching, be sure to check out my most recent Skills Agenda column, “Practical strategies to end your courses on a high note”, and share it with your colleagues. 

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. With longer days here and the ice and cold temperatures gone, I am back to running outside with my buddy, Sammie. Running with Sammie is 95% pure joy and 5% terror that an impromptu Canadian goose chase off the cliff edge and into the ice-cold river will lead to our eventual demise. But if you look at that face, I think you would agree that the risks are worth it:

My new book, For the Public Good Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities, which will be released this month! If you are involved with social science or humanities graduate education in any way (supervisor, administrator, staff, student, etc.), please preorder now. Also, to invite me and/or one of my coauthors to speak at your campus about the future Arts graduate education, please reply to this email and I will get back to you. 😊

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