Frayed: Leadership Burnout Among Women in Higher Ed (Johns Hopkins, September 2026)
Higher education has begun to take burnout seriously—except when it comes to its leaders. Deans, chairs, directors, provosts, and presidents are expected to absorb relentless pressure without visible strain, even as institutions face enrollment declines, political scrutiny, labor unrest, and financial uncertainty. Frayed centers the voices of women leaders navigating this reality.
Rebecca Pope-Ruark draws on interviews with women across administrative roles to document how burnout takes shape in leadership positions that allow little room for vulnerability. These leaders describe chronic exhaustion, isolation, distrust, and the emotional toll of being held responsible for decisions they did not control. Gendered expectations intensify these pressures—particularly for women of color—who face additional scrutiny and fewer margins for error. Pope-Ruark offers concrete strategies for rebuilding trust, practicing compassionate leadership, cultivating peer support, and modeling sustainable work practices. Pope-Ruark also considers how institutional reward systems, crisis governance, and chronic under-resourcing concentrate stress at the top, making burnout appear personal rather than structural.
Frayed reframes burnout as an organizational outcome—one that demands collective responsibility rather than individual endurance. The book speaks directly to leaders who feel alone in their exhaustion and unsure where to turn. Frayed fills a critical gap in conversations about leadership and well-being and insists that institutional change must begin with acknowledging the human cost of leading.
Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins, 2022)
PRESS FOR Unraveling Faculty Burnout
You’ve Burned Out: Now What? Chronicle Review
Author Charts Way Back from Severe Burnout, Inside Higher Ed
Coming Back From Burnout: “Every Academic Has a Story to Tell,” Times Higher Education
As faculty, we talk a lot about how busy we are, overwhelmed, tired, stressed, as if those things are badges in academia. But for many of us, this sense of overwhelm, exhaustion, and cynicism goes far deeper than malaise at the end of a semester or academic year. Just opening up to a few colleagues and posting some preliminary ideas about burnout on Twitter showed me just how many of my peers and colleagues have either themselves experienced burnout or know someone else in higher education who has.
Burnout happens to the best of us. Burnout can also be contagious in a culture that breeds it. But burnout cannot remain hidden and shameful if we openly discuss it. Without language to understand what is happening, faculty experiencing burnout might detach from aspects of their work that used to bring them joy, avoid peers and students to protect themselves emotionally, change jobs, or even leave academia. When this happens, we all suffer that loss.
Burnout, a mental health syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress, is endemic to higher education in a patriarchal, productivity-obsessed culture. In this unique book for women in higher education, Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD, draws from her own burnout experience, as well as collected stories of faculty in various roles and career stages, interviews with coaches and educational developers, and extensive secondary research to address and mitigate burnout. Pope-Ruark lays out four pillars of burnout resilience for faculty members: purpose, compassion, connection, and balance. Each chapter contains relatable stories, reflective opportunities and exercises, and advice from women in higher education.
Blending memoir, key research, and reflection opportunities, Pope-Ruark helps faculty not only address burnout personally but also use the tools in this book to eradicate the systemic conditions that cause it in the first place. As burnout becomes more visible, we can destigmatize it by acknowledging that women are not unraveling; instead, women in higher education are reckoning with the productivity cult embedded in our institutions, recognizing how it shapes their understanding and approach to faculty work, and learning how they can remedy it for themselves, their peers, and women faculty in the future.
Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching (University of Chicago, 2017)
Digital tools have long been a transformative part of academia, enhancing the classroom and changing the way we teach. Yet there is a way that academia may be able to benefit more from the digital revolution: by adopting the project management techniques used by software developers.
Agile work strategies are a staple of the software development world, developed out of the need to be flexible and responsive to fast-paced change at times when “business as usual” could not work. These techniques call for breaking projects into phases and short-term goals, managing assignments collectively, and tracking progress openly.
Agile Faculty is a comprehensive roadmap for scholars who want to incorporate Agile practices into all aspects of their academic careers, be it research, service, or teaching. Rebecca Pope-Ruark covers the basic principles of Scrum, one of the most widely used models, and then through individual chapters shows how to apply that framework to everything from individual research to running faculty committees to overseeing student class work. Practical and forward-thinking, Agile Faculty will help readers not only manage their time and projects but also foster productivity, balance, and personal and professional growth.
Edited Collections
Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
In the competitive and achievement-driven world of higher education, the mental health and neurodiversity of faculty and staff often remain overlooked or misunderstood. While institutions increasingly prioritize student mental health, the challenges faced by educators are frequently ignored, leaving them to navigate a culture that values excellence at almost any cost. In Of Many Minds, editors Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bessette give voice to the experiences of faculty and staff dealing with anxiety, depression, and neurodivergence amid a culture of stigma and exclusion.
This essay collection provides a platform for faculty and staff to share their stories and critically examine the culture of mental health in US higher education. Contributions normalize conversations about mental health and neurodiversity while offering insights to transform the academy into a more inclusive, supportive space. The essays combine personal accounts with actionable critiques, addressing topics like workplace stigma, ableism, and systemic barriers to seeking treatment. With contributions from a diverse group of educators and advocates, Of Many Minds challenges the status quo and fosters empathy for those living with neurodiversity in academia.
At a time when burnout and faculty attrition rates are soaring, this book urgently calls for higher education to reimagine its values and prioritize the care of faculty and staff. Of Many Minds empowers educators to advocate for themselves and others while breaking down the stigma that has silenced too many for too long.
Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First Century Undergraduate Education, edited with William Moner and Phillip Motley (Johns Hopkins, 2020)
The future of liberal education in the United States, in its current form, is fraught but full of possibility. Today’s institutions are struggling to maintain viability, sustain revenue, and assert value in the face of rising costs. But we should not abandon the model of pragmatic liberal learning that has made America’s colleges and universities the envy of the world. Instead, Redesigning Liberal Education argues, we owe it to students to reform liberal education in ways that put broad and measurable student learning as the highest priority.
Written by experts in higher education, the book is organized into two sections. The first section focuses on innovations at 13 institutions: Brown University, College of the Holy Cross, Connecticut College, Elon University, Florida International University, George Mason University, Georgetown University, Lasell College, Northeastern University, Rollins College, Smith College, Susquehanna University, and the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Chapters about these institutions consider the vast spectrum of opportunities and challenges currently faced by students, faculty, staff, and administrators, while also offering “radical visions” of the future of liberal education in the United States. Accompanying vision chapters written by some of the foremost leaders in higher education touch on a wide array of subjects and themes, from artificial intelligence and machines to the role that human dispositions, mindsets, resilience, and time play in how we guide students to ideas for bringing playful concepts of creativity and openness into our work.
Ultimately, Redesigning Liberal Education reveals how humanizing forces, including critical thinking, collaboration, cross-cultural competencies, resilience, and empathy, can help drive our world. This uplifting collection is a celebration of the innovative work being done to achieve the promise of a valuable, engaging, and practical undergraduate liberal education.