ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of academic resistance to wellness initiatives: identifying the various forms of resistance engaged in by academics; describing the various reasons and justifications for the resistance; and offering some possible strategies for addressing the resistance. It presents curricular wellness initiatives alongside other efforts to regulate and reform academic teaching practices within the broader discourse of 'educationalism'. The chapter describes the various ways in which institutional efforts to regulate and reform teaching practices are resisted by legal academics, and analyses that resistance by identifying its various causes and justifications. It presents some of the ways in which resistance to teaching reform generally and to wellness initiatives in particular can be addressed. Kath Hall attributes academic resistance to recognizing and accepting the existence of a wellness issue amongst law students to cognitive dissonance and rationalization. Resistance to regulation and reform is a pervasive and unavoidable phenomenon within all organizations, including the legal academy.
