A colleague who was dear to me, now passed, admitted to being burned-out long before her retirement. As the years past, she lost interest in writing and research. Her mantra was: “one more publication isn’t going to improve the world.” She kept up her advising and teaching but dropped research, publishing, and keeping up with the literature entirely. The books on her shelf in her office accumulated dust, with no new arrivals for inspiration. 

This was a colleague who followed a practice that others have done to simplify the competing demands of faculty life. She streamlined the effort put into dissertation supervision in a way that many of her students greeted with enthusiasm for all the ambiguity and uncertainty it eliminated. All her students conducted research with the same database accumulated from a survey administered by the Department of Education in the 1990s. All started the project in a course she taught about structural equation modelling. Nothing new came from the research, my colleague would observe, but those who graduated developed expertise in the research method.