From Resilience to Resistance: Rethinking Faculty Well‐Being as a Moral and Political Problem in Nursing Education—Toward a Humane Ethics of Academic Care

This paper explores faculty well-being in nursing education as a moral and political issue, emphasizing a humane ethics of academic care that confronts institutional harm, moral distress, and inequality. Despite nursing's commitments to compassion, equity, and justice, many educators face excessive workloads, racial exclusion, and moral conflicts, leading to burnout and moral injury. Current wellness approaches individualize distress and hide institutional responsibility. Drawing on critical, decolonial, and ethical traditions, the paper challenges resilience-based discourses, framing faculty well-being as a collective moral obligation rooted in governance and power. It synthesizes decolonial scholarship, moral resilience, transformational leadership, and human rights, grounded in ethical principles and ESG standards. Using examples from faculty development and institutional practice, it introduces the Becoming HUMANE Framework as a lens, not a model, to understand healing, rights, resilience, accountability, belonging, and empowerment as essential to ethical academic environments. Nurse educators are positioned as tempered radicals whose reflective resistance turns moral distress into collective agency and accountability. Reframing well-being as a moral and political issue reveals the limits of individual resilience and advocates for humane academic systems. Nursing education must address institutional conditions affecting educator well-being to uphold its moral commitments.