Book Review: Pope-Ruark, R. (2022). Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Abstract

Structured with a plethora of research regarding faculty burnout in higher education, Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s project reveals a fruitful conversation with her readers in a subject most educators would recognize these days as pervasive and, at the same time, wide-spread and challenging, but rarely investigated properly. The book is organized in two major sections, Chapter 1 (about cultural elements of faculty burnout) and Chapter 2 (about the four elements of faculty burnout: purpose, compassion, connection, and balance), plus Chapter 3 about purpose, Chapter 4 dealing with compassion, and Chapter 5 delving into the cultivation of connection to her peers, to which a coda is added with four appendixes. Unraveling Faculty Burnout strikes from the very beginning because of its freshness in the landscape of academia and the people who value their careers and share their views with anybody who might have the same feelings and opinions.