Weekly Briefing: You’re Burned Out – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Your eyelids weigh 25 pounds. It's dark outside, and even Dracula has gone to bed. The caffeine elixir that once was a cure-all has lost its kick. Now it's time to face the beast: Your work computer.

Am I narrating your morning, or last night? Unfortunately, for many professors this could be both.

Burnout is a problem in higher education. If you throw in a pandemic, shrinking institution budgets, and sometimes child care, burnout is inevitable. We're about ninth months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and for many educators the situation has only gotten harder. The end of the semester is right around the corner, and the Thanksgiving holiday is days away. But will the day (or days) off actually feel like a break, or will it turn into another desperate rush to catch up?

In a forthcoming survey of more than 1,100 faculty members, conducted in late October by The Chronicle and underwritten by Fidelity, two-thirds of respondents said they felt "very" or "extremely" stressed or fatigued in the past month.

Our Beth McMurtrie reported on faculty-member burnout, and wrote that for many instructors, the pandemic has stripped teaching of at least part of what makes it energizing, meeting students in person. That leaves them with the parts of academic life that were already challenging.

Some instructors are feeling increased pressure, especially Black and Latina/o professors who support students of color, adjunct professors who hope that budget cuts don't come for their jobs, and professors with children at home who need care and attention.

This week, Erin Marie Furtak, a professor of STEM education and associate dean of faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote an advice piece for parents in the last category. Furtak writes, "Seemingly inconsequential in the moment, those tiny interruptions add up and can interfere in a big way with our writing and research."

Furtak wrote that she and her husband found it hard to keep a schedule with their two children, ages 6 and 8. Instead, she had to decide what type of work was interruptible and what required more devoted attention.

But ultimately, there's no peer-reviewed method to curb burnout. Some professors have put aside professional ambitions to focus on students. Others are waking up early to get work done. Most people are doing the best they can as the pandemic shows no signs of stopping. This Thanksgiving, I encourage you to take a break for however long you can. It's been a wild year.

There will be no newsletter next week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. I'll be back in your inbox on December 5.

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Weekly Briefing: You're Burned Out - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero