A Caring University: Prioritizing Well-Being

April 09, 2026

As we celebrate CFI’s Faculty Well-Being Weeks events, the CFI Well-Being Team wanted to take some time to share more about our approaches to prioritizing well-being. Our keynote speaker for the weeks, author Kevin McClure, offers strategies in his book, The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace after the Great Resignation, for transforming higher education workspaces so that faculty and staff can thrive. We hope the ideas we offer here can spark conversations and explorations in your own contexts about how we can care for ourselves and each other in all areas of our work and lives, including, but not limited to, teaching.  

Inclusion as Care 

While well-being is deeply personal and can be different for each individual, it is important to recognize that we cannot thrive or fully support our students if we are not okay. JMU defines well-being as "the optimal and dynamic state that allows us to flourish now and in the future." Well-being is holistic and multidimensional, and it is also both about self-care and helping to foster institutional structures and cultures that empower communities of care. As the Well-Being Area of the CFI, we align with JMU definitions and models of well-being and seek ways to center holistic and inclusive well-being. 

According to this well-being resource with tips from the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing, striving to be more inclusive has been linked to better personal well-being in addition to creating environments where everyone can feel like they belong. 

Some strategies to support workplace inclusion, especially neuroinclusion, may be drawn from Universal Design, or “design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” (Ron Mace, see also United Nations). As this article on designing for neurodiversity in the workplace argues, “all the elements that support neurodiverse individuals also promote comfort and achievement in neurotypical individuals.”  

Other ideas for inclusion you might explore include enacting a pedagogy of care, engaging with trauma-informed and healing-centered pedagogy, building career advocacy into our classrooms, considering UDL and Public Speaking, offering flexibility to students, taking the self-paced course from the JMU Libraries on Universal Design, accessing Digital Accessibility resources, or requesting a CFI consultation.   

The Faculty Lounge Podcast as Care  

Within The Caring University, Kevin McClure discusses Frederic Laloux’s model of evolutionary organizations which recognize the need for employees’ ability to express their authentic selves while prioritizing safety, wholeness, dignity, and flexibility. We believe the CFI Faculty Lounge podcast facilitates these needs and serves as a care outlet where employees can express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions as they see fit. The podcast audience can engage with colleagues if, when, and how they desire. Put more simply, listeners can choose to engage (or not) with the content while they commute, eat dinner, work out, or perform other various tasks. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the podcast is its asynchronous, à la carte delivery. Just as asynchronous resources support student learning, we hope the podcasts, along with other self-guided resources from the CFI, offer employees opportunities to engage in professional development on their own terms.  

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) as care  

McClure concludes his book with several lessons gained from what to do with his vision for a “caring university.” One of those lessons involves the idea that “employee well-being and student success are on the same team.” Especially since the COVID pandemic, faculty have carried much invisible labor caring for students’ mental health and well-being challenges on top of their normal workloads. What about faculty? MHFA provides participants with the skills to recognize a mental health challenge or crisis and respond as a first level of support. In our MHFA training at JMU, we emphasize not only how faculty can support students through this training but also each other. The latter point might help us listen better to our collective struggles and prompt our institutions to respond to faculty needs in ways that benefit all stakeholders. You can learn more about JMU’s MHFA training through CFI on our website and access case studies about MHFA’s impact on college campuses.  

A Caring University  

We hope a key takeaway of this (slightly unusual, but we like unusual) toolbox is that you are not alone: You have a lot of resources available to you as you work to support your own, your students’, and the community’s well-being. Because teaching is a helping profession, you might be most convinced by knowing that taking care of ourselves is essential to effective teaching, and to caring for our students. But you also, inherently and for no other reason than you’re wonderfully human, deserve care. We all deserve care, and we can all work together to build an even more caring university—and world!