Today, 15 May 2026, is my last day of working in the Virginia Tech Honors College.
I began in honors 14 years ago as one of the founding faculty members in the VT Presidential Global Scholars Program (PGS), the Honors College semester abroad experience operating out of VT's Steger Center for International Scholarship in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland. Four years later, I was asked to join honors full-time to serve as the Director of Honors Laureate Program, the Director of PGS, and the Director of the Honors Reading Seminars, helping 12 honors students a semester teach their own credit-bearing university courses on books they love and ideas that matter. And for the last five years, as the Honors College Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, I have worked closely with amazing colleagues to create a truly distinctive honors education for our students, one that focuses on their engaging in transdisciplinary, collaborative, service-learning groups to work on real world problems with a wide range of industry and nonprofit partners, from local to international in scope. It's been a helluva ride, and I am quite proud of what we have accomplished. As a first-generation college student, I could never have dreamed that I could be so very fortunate, could not possibly have imagined this as my professional trajectory nor the joy and usefulness that I have come to know as a result.
But such efforts come with considerable costs. There's a downside to working non-stop, no matter how fulfilling the work. For me, the last few years have seen a slow but inexorable slide toward innovation fatigue, combined with ever-increasing, debilitating levels of stress as we academics are being told to do more and more with less and less by people who have no idea of what teaching and learning actually entail. Of late, we are engaged in high stakes experiments about how best to keep our students in our classrooms and programs, which is to say how best to keep them from going to other people's classrooms and programs, and maintain our small market share in the university economy.
I have been counseling my students and colleagues for years about the devastating effects of overcommitment and burnout. I've been a bit of a nag about it, really, since every day at work I encounter someone who is barely hanging on given the inhuman and inhumane levels of work we expect of students and our colleagues, especially the most ambitious and motivated of them who have been running full-speed without a break since they were five years old. I harass them, doggedly, with the question, "What do you do for FUN?" And I swear that some of them literally tilt their heads to one side, like my dogs do when they hear something strange, seemingly incapable of grasping the concept.
So, given my self-righteousness, the irony here is pretty arch. Imagine my surprise when -- despite my endless badgering of those around me -- I ended up in the local mental hospital for four days between Christmas and New Year's this year, where I received official diagnoses of anxiety and panic disorders. As you likely know, I am a recovering alcoholic, and I have been sober for 37 years now. The skillset I learned in AA has seen me through all sorts of difficult situations without me coming apart: 9/11, the shootings here at Virginia Tech, the diagnosis of my son's autism, the deaths of my parents, my wife being paralyzed from the neck down for a month and on a respirator for 10 days, our daughter and her cousins surviving a drunk driver, who crushed their car like an accordion, and the relentless whine and spew from a stunted little boy who wants to be king to impress a dead father who did not love him. In short, my AA toolkit is pretty amazing.
It is important to note that I have also been seeing doctors and medicating as prescribed with Prozac and then Lexapro and meeting occasionally with a really good therapist for a couple of years now.
The frightening thing here is that this rich, proactive combination of AA, meds, and counseling did nothing to prevent me from coming completely apart. The stress has been building for a very long time, and there inevitably came the straw that broke the camel's back. For me, that came on a Saturday morning during our winter break, when I realized I was scheduled to meet with a toxic colleague on Monday. And I started shaking. And I shook all day Saturday, and did not sleep, and shook all day Sunday, despite multiple doses of my prescribed meds, just pacing around the house feeling like I needed to tear off my own skin. About 3:00, Aileen asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital, it was clear that I really, really needed to do that.
In the emergency room at our local hospital, they gave me some Ativan, and when I had stopped shaking, they asked if I wanted to get a full mental/emotional assessment, because I had never really had one. They gave me two choices: "We could patch you up tonight, send you home, and you could work with your primary care physician, or we can take you up to our facility in Pulaski and find out what's going on with you." Aileen and I immediately agreed that I should go, so I signed the papers, they put me in an ambulance, and took me 40 minutes away from home to what I learned later was lockdown unit.
Oddly enough, this was the best thing that could have ever happened. The doctors, the staff, the other patients were all amazing people: smart, kind, generous, with empathy and support going in every possible direction. As a result of my hitting this emotional bottom, things have gotten much, much better. They are moving in the right direction. I have ongoing care from three excellent doctors now, all working together, a different set of meds which work far better than the previous ones ever did, an increasing knowledge and intuition of how and why things went off the rails in such a spectacular fashion, an embracing of the fact that I am and will always be mentally ill (above and beyond being an alcoholic), and the realization that any continuing relief I get will come as a result of looking hard at family dramas and dysfunctions that were in operation long, long before I was born.
As it turns out, the care I got in Pulaski may have been too good and the relief I felt too broad and palpable because I felt good enough to go back to work in early January to run our study abroad program, which was a mistake. I stopped eating and stopped sleeping and had to come home six weeks early, leaving all sorts of work for my generous and understanding colleagues to pick up. These days, I am struggling badly with insomnia, with an inability to focus and organize my thoughts, with a serious stammer that's even worse in stressful conversations and when speaking in public, and worst of all, my memory is just shit. I am incapable of most kinds of administrative work. It's all pretty humbling.
As a result, I am leaving the Honors College today and returning to my position as Associate Professor in the VT Department of English. I will be on three months of medical leave this summer, starting tomorrow. In the fall, I have a research leave during which I hope to rekindle my scholarship on writing and nonviolence and learn how to teach writing effectively in the age of AI. I will return to teaching in Spring 2027.
This was always the plan, actually. I had always planned to return to the English department as I neared retirement, but not at this time and not under such conditions. Even so, after 27 years of administrative work here at VT, the thought of doing just research and teaching makes me just giddy with anticipation.
Enough. All of this is amounts to a truly urgent plea to my colleagues and students to dial it back -- seriously -- as quickly and as much as you can. No one is going to reward you for losing your health and your mind for the sake of your job. In fact, our institutions and bosses encourage and reward those who are willing to do so. But burnout is real, and it sucks, and I never saw it coming. It is astonishing how quickly it all went to shit for me. I was utterly powerless in its grip. And I thought my self-care was pretty good. Turns out, not so much.