Building systemic resilience is critical to fostering well-being in the higher education and health care professions, says School of Graduate Studies professor Karen Gordes.
Photo: Attendees at the Values in Action Speaker Series event on Dec. 9 formed breakout groups to discuss the event’s topic.
As the second speaker in the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Values in Action Speaker Series, Karen L. Gordes, PhD, PT, DScPT, put the focus on UMB’s core values set of Well-Being and Sustainability on Dec. 9 at the 4MLK building.
Speaking to a group of in-person and virtual attendees, she zeroed in on resilience and well-being in the context of higher education and the health care professions and discussed how a focus only on fostering individual resilience — rather than addressing and building systemic resilience — can be detrimental.
“What do we know about the general status of the health and well-being of higher education communities from the literature?” asked Gordes, professor and director of the Master’s and Teaching Graduate Certificate in Health Professions Education programs at the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies (UMSGS). “The data is a bit concerning. There are quite a few studies finding high rates of anxiety, stress, and burnout in faculty, staff, and students. These symptoms are not reflective of well-being.
“A lot of the information that is funneled toward us about how to build resilience focuses on putting the onus on the individual — specifically, what the individual can do for themselves to foster their resilience,” she added, noting that practices such as engaging in mindfulness, getting good sleep, eating well, and being grateful all focus on individual behaviors.
She pointed to a PowerPoint slide that listed the following topics: “Enhancing Well-Being Through Mindfulness Practices”; “Recharging Your Personal and Professional Batteries”; “Lifestyle Strategies for Sustainable Faculty Well-Being”; and “Building Academic Resilience Through Self-Care.”
“This is a sample of presentation titles from a recent educator conference I attended — each was a presentation slated under the conference theme of ‘Mental Health, Well-Being, and Resilience in Academia,’ ” Gordes said. “What’s consistent here is that each presentation solely focuses on how the individual is responsible for their own resilience through self-care and lifestyle strategies.”
If the dialogue about resilience focuses only on the individual, she said, it “can lead to a perspective that achievement or failure of resilience is purely personal.”
“The fact is that individuals are embedded within social systems, and those systems may or may not be able to support an individual’s resilience,” she said. “When we focus so strongly on the individual, I ask you to consider: Are we then normalizing and enabling systemic problems — potentially deflecting addressing root causes of adversity?”
Within the health care professions, Gordes noted that health care provider burnout was seen as a problem that resided within the individual health care provider — that the individual lacked the resilience to withstand the work environment and it was their responsibility to find solutions for their burnout.
She quoted a clinician who said, “It is absurd to believe that yoga will solve the distress from not being able to treat a patient in need of critical care because of a declined insurance authorization.”
The discussion evolved, she said, and the burnout issues being experienced by health care providers shifted to the concept of “moral injury.”
“Moral injury describes the challenges in simultaneously knowing what care patients need but being unable to provide it due to constraints beyond our control,” Gordes said. “From the moral injury perspective, there is a need to look at what might be broken in the system and what system solutions are needed.
“This shift to the concept of moral injury does not mean that an individual’s engagement in their own processes to support resilience and well-being are unnecessary,” she added. “It does, however, recognize that individuals are part of a larger system, and that system must function in a manner that supports the individual.”
Gordes next pointed to a slide that listed “cross-cutting stressors” in higher education such as excessive workload, insufficient resources, limited autonomy, lack of recognition, school/work-life imbalance, and financial insecurity.
Each of these stressors has some correlation to the structural environment created by the higher education system in which the individual is embedded, she said.
“Resilience is often reported as ‘an individual’s ability to cope with adversity,’ ” Gordes said. “While early research on resilience did focus on resilience as an intrinsic trait or attribute of an individual, current researchers suggest that resilience is a process, and that this process is shaped by the interactions and interdependence between individuals and their environment.”
Gordes concluded by saying for UMB and other institutions to have success and a sustainable future, they must embrace the concept of resilient individuals working within institutionally resilient systems.
“Whereby the individual is responsible for engaging in coping mechanisms, mental sets, and operation of personal agency, the system is responsible for creating structure and routine, fostering caring and supportive relationships, creating opportunities for meaningful participation and contribution, and fostering individuals’ sense of power and control while providing equitable access to resources,” she said.
The Values in Action Speaker Series is a collaboration between the Core Values Program at UMB and the Office of Values and Strategic Initiatives at UMSGS. The series was created to recognize the ways that all members of the UMB community bring to life the hallmarks of our community. The organizers thank everyone who attended the Dec. 9 event and extend an invitation to the next event, which will be focused on the core values set of Equity and Justice. It will be held March 9, 2026, with guest speaker Rhea Roper Nedd, PhD, MA, assistant vice president, UMB Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.