The negative effects of academic burnout on teaching, service, and research are considered, along with societal, institutional, and individual causes of burnout. Prevention and intervention for burnout are addressed, and suggestions are offered to improve faculty evaluation procedures in order to promote the use of clearer and more systematic and objective evaluation guidelines. The improved guidelines would be designed to help reduce faculty anxiety about meeting retention and promotion criteria. Problems facing faculty members include heavy teaching loads, unappreciative students, inappropriate instructor evaluation methods, and an unsatisfactory reward structure. It is suggested that burnout among faculty is linked, also, to societal demands that they accomplish too much with too few resources, along with inadequate institutional account of the problems facing faculty when evaluating their performance. Suggestions are made for reducing instructionally related stress and for supporting faculty's attempts to provide students with quality instruction. An approach to ensure appropriate use of student evaluation of instruction is proposed that would decide on the number and weight of specific teacher evaluation components and would develop evaluation forms to allow evaluators to judge a candidates's performance and collateral materials according to designated criteria. (Author/SW)