The psychology of faculty demoralization in the liberal arts: Burnout, acedia, and the disintegration of idealism

Abstract

Although studies exist of general career burnout, no attempts have been made to study the psychology of demoralized faculty in the liberal arts. This paper gives a detailed phenomenological description, on the one hand, of the intellectual and moral life-world of the classical liberal arts scholar, and, on the other, of the university work environment as such a scholar perceives it. Here, contact with students usually is the main context for his/her ∗ professional exertions. It is argued that the range of student intellectual, moral, and spiritual concerns is self-disabling, that is, results in a severe and pathological impairment in students of their aptitudes, abilities, and sensibilities. This impairment, called acedia after the Scholastics, takes the form of a fundamental incapacity to cultivate leisure of a specifically liberating form. Daily contact with acedia brings about the demoralization that many university liberal arts faculty today experience. The entrapment of the liberal arts professor, in what for him is a pathological work environment, leads to situational depression, which has a complex dynamic of its own, and is responsible for a distressing and profound conflict both with the professor's personal sense of identity and with his conception of his role in the world. This condition is secondary to long-term, inescapable exposure to the pathology of acedia. The resulting state of mind is a form of axiological demoralization, rather than maladaptive mental illness, for which the only solutions involve a dilemma of assured discontent. For such an individual, adjustment to the workplace, to the environment offered by today's universities, is equivalent to destruction of self. But from the point of view of a society blind to liberating values, it is natural to judge liberal arts demoralization to be a maladaptive mental illness, for which individual adjustment therapy is called for. As a consequence, the outlook for the classical liberal arts scholar is serious, painful, and with few open choices.