If you want your institution to flourish, it’s in your interest to make sure your faculty members flourish, too.
In higher education, the main source of faculty burnout is teaching. Thanks to Covid-19 and the challenges of remote teaching, many instructors this semester are feeling more exhausted than usual. Colleges and universities can do plenty of things to help on this front, and the burden shouldn’t fall entirely on faculty members themselves.
What’s more — given the importance of teaching and student success to institutional mission — it behooves campus administrators to take faculty well-being and job satisfaction seriously. So what can you and your institution do to prevent and combat faculty burnout?
- Treat all faculty members like faculty members. Don’t focus on just tenure-track and tenured professors. Burnout is just as rampant, if not more so, in the nontenure-track ranks, those who do most of the teaching. When departments and institutions treat the people doing the bulk of the teaching with the respect and value they deserve, those faculty members are far more likely to thrive. And so are the institutions.
- Take a Universal Design approach to faculty mental health. The key principle of Universal Design is that if environments are shaped to better suit people with extraordinary needs, those environments will better suit all of us. It’s crucial to conceive of mental health and mental illness as a normal part of a diverse professoriate — not anomalous or something that institutions should be surprised by. When you provide mental-health assistance to those who need it most, you create a culture of psychological wellness for all faculty members.
Continue reading: “3 Ways Colleges Can Help Faculty Members Avoid Burnout,” by David Gooblar
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