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Through surveys and interviews of 433 doctoral faculty and students, we explore professional self-care practices and related issues of academic guilt, imposter syndrome, and burnout. We argue that self-care should be included as a professional practice, taught and modeled, to prepare doctoral students for careers as functional and healthy faculty.
Self-care is a goal... I say that because I think that the university is such a colonial, capitalistic mechanism and it will take as much labor and time as we give it. And it will always make us feel as though we could just have given a little more. It works that way in order to sustain itself, that's the function of it. There are lots of ways to intervene in those kinds of narratives, but one of the ways of doing it, is by taking it as a job.
-Full professor interview participant
Working myself to death is just not one of the things that I want to do... I feel like in academia, that's the sort of expectation.
-Doctoral student participant
Over the last few years, a growing amount of concerning discussion about doctoral education has been emerging in the popular academic press: of graduate student and faculty burnout, of mental health challenges for both students and faculty, and of stories of "quit lit" and other high-profile exodus from the profession. Ardon Shorr, for example, warns of the "psychological beating" one takes in graduate school, while Alia Wong writes about graduate school's terrible effects on mental health. Similarly, Beth Godbee writes of the trauma of graduate education she experienced firsthand in her doctoral work in composition ("Trauma of Graduate Education"), and Kathryn Wedemeyer-Strombel writes about the differences between graduate school as challenging versus traumatizing ("Graduate" and "Why"). The rise of the "quit lit" movement, where graduate students and professionals are quitting humanities-based professions, are frequently shared, such as in Joseph Conley's recent piece in which he describes the justification for dropping out of his Ph.D. program in English. All ofthe articles we have cited above appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education or related publications in the months during which this manuscript was being drafted.
The challenges with self-care, burnout, and associated trauma in graduate school are largely borne out by national...