The HMS Faculty/Staff Survey analyzes toll taken on health using two measures:

• “In the past 12 months, my job has taken a toll on my mental or emotional health.”
• “Supporting students in mental and emotional distress has taken a toll on my own mental and emotional health.”

Out of all professors/instructors, 58% noted that the job had taken a toll (63% from 4-year institutions and 46% from community colleges). It might seem like supporting students in mental and emotional distress would be a small facet of the job. However, 90% of faculty agreed that “student mental health is significantly worse now than when they began their careers,” and 72% of faculty in the sample said they “had one-on-one conversation/s with a student about their mental or emotional health in the past year.” By the same token, close to half (47%) of faculty reported, “Supporting students in mental and emotional distress has taken a toll on my own mental and emotional health.”

What, Exactly, Is Burnout?

One misconception about burnout is that it’s the same as exhaustion. But in chatting with Dr. Christina Maslach, a leading burnout researcher and author of The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs, I learned that burnout goes beyond exhaustion, though that feeling is a part of it. In fact, there are three core attributes of burnout:

• First, we feel exhausted and as though we have no energy to do good work.
• Second, we feel cynical and have negative attitudes toward our projects. We also experience a sense of disassociation from those projects and from the people around us, whether coworkers, friends, or family.
• Third, burnout makes us feel ineffective, as though we’re accomplishing significantly less than usual and can’t muster the fortitude to be productive.

Experiencing any one of these dimensions serves as a precursor to being fully burned out. But there’s more to it. To really understand what’s causing burnout, you have to dissect and pinpoint its sources.

Ultimately, there is really only one thing in our work (and life) that causes burnout: an overwhelming amount of chronic stress.

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

Research shows that an oppressive classroom environment impairs learning and academic performance for students with oppressed identities. Less research examines faculty perceptions of their classroom, but such research could reveal whether an oppressive environment impairs teaching effectiveness. Although the literature shows that women faculty of color spend a disproportionate amount of time teaching, researchers have not systematically examined their classroom experiences. My study relies on transcripts of 17 in-depth interviews with women faculty of color at a large, predominantly white research institution. Despite their legitimate authority as professors, these women describe gendered racism in their classroom interactions with students. Specifically, they depict white male students as challenging their authority, teaching competency, and scholarly expertise, as well as offering subtle and not so subtle threats to their persons and their careers.

Typically, tasks that fall in the emotional labor category have no clear location on our CVs. The efforts of faculty of color are even further minimized, as people presume that their support of their own communities is natural or self-serving and thus not work. (In contrast, the efforts of white professors are probably at least noticed by those around them.) Although our labor is rewarded by students’ gratitude and successes, our institutions largely ignore it.

How do we make our institutions value such emotional labor? As a white cisgender woman, considered senior in some academic circles, I feel compelled to use my white cis privilege and institutional status to try to answer this question.