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On forgiveness and letting go

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become acutely aware of the need to express and foster care for others – our students and our colleagues – as well as engage in self-care for ourselves. It has been well established in extant research that the working conditions and job characteristics in contemporary academic settings can be conducive to burnout (Watts and Robertson, 2011; Wray and Kinman, 2021), and that academics’ well-being (Prasad, 2022; Richards et al., 2016) and health (Berg et al., 2016; Hurtado et al., 2012) – and, in particular, mental health (Guthrie et al., 2017; Padilla and Thompson, 2016; Urbina-Garcia, 2020) – are often negatively affected as a result of stress related to increasing workloads, audits, performance management and metrics (Morrish, 2019; Morrish and Priaulx, 2020). In order to survive and thrive in academia, we urgently need to establish a new ethic of care – one which meaningfully attends to the needs of each other and ourselves. In the context of business schools, critical management scholars have highlighted the need for us to ‘relate to each other in accordance with an ethics of care’ (Butler et al., 2017: 474). Indeed, there are plenty of real-life examples of caring about, supporting and helping each other, both through ‘institutionalised’ channels – for instance, through professional development workshops held at conferences – and in more informal ways – in and through our daily working practice of ontological empathy (Prasad and Śliwa, 2022). Supporting another person and showing that they are cared for has benefits not only for the supported individual but also for the one who does the supporting. Indeed, being kind to the other is truly rewarding for the giver of kindness. And it is not, actually, that difficult. We are usually well capable of empathising with someone whom a party – either a specific person or, more generally, the ‘organisation’ – has treated unfairly and harmed. We do not wish to be apathetic bystanders; we want to, and often do choose to, stand on the side of equity and justice. There is, however, a caveat here: it is quite easy to empathise with someone when our own ego and professional interests are not at stake; when we are not directly involved as an injurious actor, in a situation in which someone else has been hurt or mistreated. When a colleague tells us about something bad that has happened to them and about someone else having done them wrong, we rarely question what they are