As I’ve written elsewhere in this newsletter, burnout is a serious problem in higher education—not only for faculty but also for students and staff. Defined by the World Health Organization as a “syndrome resulting from ...
Exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and depression are commonplace topics in most workplaces in the United States. Higher education is no exception. In the Healthy Minds study from the 2021–22 academic year, 44 percent of the student ...
This article first appeared in The Best of the 2022 Leadership in Higher Education Conference (Magna Publications, 2023). Today’s professionals use the term “burnout” to describe how a person might feel about their personal and professional ...
Over the past three years, I have given upwards of 30 workshops on burnout to different groups of faculty, whether through invitations to a campus (in-person and virtual), conferences, or retreats. I’ve talked to thousands ...
In academic leadership, we periodically find ourselves returning to a basic orienting question: What is my role as a leader? The daily grind easily fills in answers that involve the managerial tasks of keeping an ...
When the New York Times ran a story in 2021 about our skateboarding research, it highlighted skateboarding as a site of safety, community, and agency for youth from racially minoritized backgrounds. A faculty member at ...
“Stop thinking,” the petite Vietnamese nun instructed the small group of retreatants. We sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor in the enormous meditation hall at Magnolia Grove Monastery in Batesville, Mississippi. Our minds ...
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and “normal life” as we knew it came to a screeching halt in March 2020, schools at all levels, from preschool through college and university, had to figure out next ...
In a recent conversation I had with faculty development professional and online educator Karen Costa, she told me, “I spend a lot of time talking to faculty about humanizing higher ed, about trauma-informed pedagogies, and ...
Perhaps it is time for all colleges and universities to have a minister of loneliness as a full-time position on their campuses. I’ll say more about this position below, but first, some background.