Today's NYT Science Times section featured this article on "pathological altruistm," also the title of a forthcoming Oxford University Press book. Here's how Times reporter Natalie Angier describes the phenomenon:
Selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones.
Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group, selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes. * * *
Train nurses to be highly empathetic and, yes, their patients will love them. But studies show that empathetic nurses burn out and leave the profession more quickly than do their peers who remain aloof. Give generously to Child A, and Child B will immediately howl foul, while quiet Child C will grow up and write nasty novels about you. * * *
Denial and mental compartmentalization also characterize people who stay in abusive relationships, who persuade themselves that with enough self-sacrifice and fluttering indulgence their beloved batterer or drunken spouse will reform. Extreme sensory denial defines the practice of animal hoarding, in which people keep far more pets than they can care for….
Read the full article here.
Burn-out rates for highly-empathetic nurses probably has no corollary for law professors. For the most part, our day-to-day responsibilities don't include responding to emergencies or extremely time-sensitive matters. But a student-centered, institutionally-minded, conscientious law professor might experience some compassion fatigue. Consider these statistics from the American Bar Foundation report After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the United States:
- "A much greater number of minority tenured law professors (53%) than white law professors (43%) reported that students “often” turn to them for advice or emotional support." (p. 39)
- "Approximately 8 percentage points more professors of color (29%) than white professors (21%) felt that they were performing an unfair amount of committee work." (p. 41)
- "About 58% of tenured women report that students “often” turn to them for advice or emotional support whereas only 39% of tenured men report this." (p. 50)
- "Remarkably, almost twice as many tenured women (36%) as tenured men (17%) reported that they perform an unfair amount of committee work compared to their colleagues." (p. 50)
The full report is here.
To my mind, these stats suggest that women and men from minority groups, as well as women of all colors, may be or feel (or both) especially over-extended. After all, there are only so many individual student meetings that one can have in a day. There are only so many student events that one can attend. There are only so many committee projects that one can execute well.
I admit that it is easier for me to give this advice, in my capacity as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, than it is for me to heed it myself. There are weeks, months and years when I do a better (or worse) job at finding and maintaining balance. The challenge is to not allow any one part of the job to become an excuse for not doing another part of one's job, or for work to turn into a reason not to fulfill and flourish with respect one's personal commitments (or vice versa).
Admittedly, when a particular class has gone poorly, it's easy to want to bury my head in scholarship. When my article gets rejected from X Law Review, it's easy to console myself by thinking that my students need me (even if those student law review editors didn't). When I haven't done the laundry in two weeks, I can focus on how needed I am at work. Therein lie the seeds of denial, perhaps. Or just the outline of the life of a busy law professor.