Two years ago, I went to dinner with several tenured professors from a public research university I was visiting. At some point, someone asked me what I liked most about my current career as a freelance writer and part-time instructor, after burning out and quitting a tenured job at a small teaching-focused college.
“I almost never do something I don’t want to do,” I replied. They looked stunned. For a moment, no one spoke. “Wow,” came the eventual reply. “That sounds amazing.”
It is. Quitting academe turned out to be a great career move. I rarely have to attend meetings. I don’t have advisees. I don’t have tenure, and I don’t care. Tenure would not help me do more of what I want to do. I miss the people I used to work with, but I am, over all, much happier and better off.
In the nine years since I quit, I have written a lot about work and academic life. What I’ve learned: You are more likely to burn out when there’s a growing gap between what you really want to do and what you actually do day to day. You try to bridge that divide, but as it widens, you’re stretched ever thinner across it. You lose resilience. You feel exhausted, angry, useless. One day, you snap.
Employers play a big role in whether their workers flourish or burn out. A college or university that wants to accomplish its mission will learn what makes its faculty members tick, and then do what it can to wind them up and let them run. (For advice on what institutions should be doing on this front, see The Chronicle’s Working Better series and its workplace coverage.)
But of course, you play a role, too, and you can help or hinder your own success. To be happy in a faculty career requires aligning, as best you can, the ideals of your vocation and the realities of your position.
There is no single “hack” I can offer to help you make that alignment and prevent burnout. But I can share five principles to guide your thinking about work. They’ll sound familiar, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to put into practice. And if you realize you need to make a big change in your academic career, these core principles can help you figure out what to do next.
First, know thyself. To identify where your job departs from your ideals, you need to know your ideals. So think back: Why did you get into academe in the first place? You could have tried other careers, but you chose this one. Why? What did it seem to offer? A chance to contribute to human knowledge? To train a new generation of professionals? To escape the corporate grind?
All ideals sound a bit embarrassing when you say them out loud. Mine sure do. I applied to Ph.D. programs in religion at age 21 because I wanted to “live the life of the mind.” I loved big ideas — God, the universe, the good life — and wanted to read and talk about them.
My ideals made me something of a dilettante intellectually — not well-suited for deep, focused research on a narrow topic. I was an enthusiastic teacher (still am), but the desire to teach was always secondary to the desire to learn. When, as a full-time faculty member, I encountered four sections per semester of students who just wanted to get their core requirement “out of the way” and who did not enjoy kicking around big ideas with me, I strained across the gap between my ideals and my reality.
It’s better to figure out now what you can sacrifice, before the world decides what to take from you.
To begin your own career analysis, then, push past the internalized cringe factor and take the time to identify your ideals and figure out which ones matter most to you. This process can be unpleasant. When you consider your ideals, you might find that you went into academe seeking prestige, or that your belief that you belong at a “better” (higher-ranked) institution makes you a difficult colleague. In that case, you’re probably making yourself miserable, too, because in looking ahead to what’s next, you’re blind to the collegial pleasures of where you are.
Next, live out those ideals somewhere in your workday. Academic culture still leaves faculty members mostly alone to structure their time and run their courses as they please. Take advantage of your relative independence to do things you want to do. For example, you may have to adhere to a common syllabus in your classroom, but there is usually room to deal with a topic you like or to innovate a pet project.
If your ideals include research, make time for it most days. That’s harder if you teach a lot and your research is in experimental particle physics, rather than, say, Latin poetry. You can’t just fire up a linear accelerator when no one is looking. But regardless of your field, there are research tasks you can undertake in 60-, 30-, or 15-minute daily increments: Read one paper, write one paragraph, edit a few lines of code. Build your whole day around those 15 minutes. Don’t make that work optional or something you do only when you happen to “find time.” Remember: It’s why you got into this line of work in the first place.
If higher ed’s siloed intellectual culture is not conducive to your ideals, you may have to get creative. A few years into my teaching job, looking for a big-ideas fix, I asked colleagues if they wanted to read a recent big-idea book together, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. At least 15 academics — from across departments and generations — said yes. The dean of the faculty bought us copies of the 800-page doorstop, and we met every few weeks to work through it. I was living out my ideal. I bet some colleagues were, too. And in fact, the reading group is still active, nearly two decades later.
Sacrifice something. We all must set priorities. You can’t be, at once, a top-notch researcher, amazing teacher, solid departmental citizen, social-media star, tireless activist, and loving parent, spouse, and friend. Something will have to give. It’s better to figure out now what you can sacrifice, before the world decides what to take from you.
If, like me, you resolve only to do work you actually want to do, you will face a cost — in dollars. When I left my full-time job, I took a massive pay cut. My freelance income has increased year by year, but when you consider that I used to have generous health-insurance and retirement benefits, I still haven’t approached the compensation I received a decade ago as an associate professor in an area with a low cost of living. My family can bear that cost because my wife has a good job that she enjoys on the faculty of a research university. Our health care and retirement income don’t hinge on my career. But make no mistake: The cost of my quitting has been very real.
Because you are finite, every good you pursue comes at the cost of another genuine good. My wife and I wanted academic jobs, and pursuing them cost us the years we lived apart. Later, I wanted to narrow the gap between my ideals and my day-to-day work, and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. I suppose I could have kept tenure, stability, and my salary, but I don’t want to imagine what that would have cost me personally and emotionally.
Be realistic about your own financial situation and act within those realities. If big moves — like quitting your tenured job — aren’t in the cards, aim for small sacrifices you can make to bridge the ideals-versus-reality gap.
Adapt. The unavoidable collision between ideals and finitude forces the need to change. And unfortunately, how that plays out in the campus workplace is not entirely up to you. A friend who teaches in a language department recently told me that enrollment declines meant he had to give up his beloved upper-level literature courses and teach grammar, something he felt unprepared to do. At first, he took little pleasure in the class.
But then, he said, “I reminded myself I was there for [the students] and not for my joy.” He started to experiment. He found short stories he thought students would connect with, and he used those readings to teach vocabulary and spelling norms. He built assignments around films. He even got students to do archival research; the results, he said, “blew me away.” His joy in teaching returned.
Another account of your career might only emerge once you admit the story you’ve followed is no longer coherent.
My friend found a way to exercise autonomy within the bounds of his new situation. “The class needs to be what the class title and description says it is,” he told me. “It’s up to me to find the allowable margins, and the edge of the envelope.”
If you know yourself well enough, you might discover work-related ideals you’ve long held below the surface. In my own case, I had written some not-very-good personal essays in college, trying to imitate one of my heroes, Annie Dillard. After I got my Ph.D., I wrote about my experiences on the faculty job market for The Chronicle. During what turned out to be my final year of full-time teaching, I started pitching story ideas to venues beyond academe. I realized at some point that I loved crafting essays. So when I quit, I decided I would “be a writer.” A different version of the life of the mind — lived on the page — had been dormant in me for 20 years.
Another account of your career might only emerge once you admit the story you’ve followed is no longer coherent.
Finally, connect with your colleagues and students. One dimension of burnout is cynicism. A key warning sign is when you see someone (or yourself) routinely respond to colleagues with anger, backbiting, and other antisocial behaviors. The cynical worker needs human connection, but of course, cynicism obstructs its own cure. If your work ideals involve other people — through teaching, collaborative research, or intellectual exchange — then you can’t realize those aims without connection.
If you want to improve a dysfunctional culture at your institution, you must recognize that you and your colleagues are not just victims of that culture. You are the culture. The atmosphere will not change if you — a person who contributes to that atmosphere — do not attempt to change it. It can be done on a small scale with conversations over coffee or lunch, dinner invitations, or organized retreats.
More important, connecting with co-workers is also a rare way to alter your working conditions on a larger scale. To bargain with your administration for better conditions, you have to do so collectively.
That’s why common advice for combating burnout — “learn to say ‘no’” — can be counterproductive. It only shifts work to whomever has the weakest boundaries around their time. To make faculty workloads more reasonable, entire departments and institutions need to say “no” to the endless proliferation of worthwhile projects. You and your co-workers need to decide, together, what the ideals of your department or institution are, and what, in the face of limitations, should be sacrificed for the sake of those group ideals.
A sustainable life. These five elements — know yourself, exercise autonomy, sacrifice, adapt, connect — are not just components of a successful and satisfying academic career. They are components of a good human life. If you do these things well, then you’re flourishing, period.
If you are thinking, “But my job stifles my ideals, I have no autonomy, and I hate my colleagues,” then the first thing to do is make sure that’s really true. Are there courses you could propose or connections you could make that you feel held back from? Is there something you’d like to try but you think, “Oh, I could never do that”? Why not? The way forward might not be obvious at first. It might even seem undignified.
If, after reflection, the situation really seems dire, then you owe it to yourself to quit. Put every effort you can spare into finding a new job, possibly away from a college campus. If you’re offered a buyout, take it. Alternatively, stay, but write a letter of resignation and keep it, unsigned, in your pocket. The knowledge that you have a way out might give you a greater sense of agency that will suffuse other parts of your job.
And if things still don’t improve, you can sign the letter and send it off. It worked for me.
