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A Positive, Pro‐Active Vision for Rehumanizing Higher Education

2025; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/tl.20647

1536-0768

Laura M. Harrison,

Higher Education Governance and Development

My (Laura's) vision for this monograph was born of despair. Like many in academia, I have been watching higher education become a shadow of its former self through ruthless budget cuts, gutting of humanities departments, and attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Not a quitter by nature, I have tried to do my small part to fight these negative forces. Working harder has been an effective strategy for me in many things, but it did not seem to help with this particular problem. Maybe it was inevitable, then, that I would turn to two of the most positive people I know for help in moving from despair to hope. Pete Mather has been my friend and colleague for over a decade and always has a knack for starting with what is working and building from there. Samba Bah has been my Graduate Assistant for a year and a half and possesses a gift for eschewing isolation in favor of community. Together, the three of us crafted a vision rooted in love for what higher education was, is, and can be when centered on human development. We sought and found an incredible array of contributing authors whose voices provide uplift through creative ideas and concrete strategies. I open this monograph with a bit about the personal and academic experiences that formed my thinking on the idea of rehumanizing higher education, then introduce my fellow authors whose words offer direction for getting there. I entered college broken. My mom had died recently. I had no siblings. At 18, I felt alone. Lacking guidance, I only chose Ohio University because I had a friend who was going there. By the time we actually moved to campus, we were no longer friends in that mysterious way teenage girl relationships could end without any real reason. I did not have what you would call a strong support network when I embarked on my college journey. And yet I wielded a secret weapon that I only recently realized I had. It is not what you would expect. It is not character. I lacked both Carol Dwecks (2006) growth mindset and Angela Duckworths (2013) grit. I had some privilege, being White and middle class, but plenty of students with these advantages still give up when they feel alienated. The reason I did not give up is because I had won the time lottery, though I did not realize it until much later in life. When I say I won the time lottery, I mean I arrived on campus in 1991. I got to be in college back when faculty and staff had time for students, even at large, public, non-selective institutions such as the one I attended. My first campus job was in a dining hall, where most of my shifts involved pulling hard plastic dishes out of the Hobart. I stood on a thick rubber mat where I learned how to hold the hotter-than-hell dishes just long enough to neither burn myself nor drop them. I learned that skill on my own. I learned more interesting things from Maggie, the student worker supervisor. Maggie would frequently come back to the kitchen and talk to the other students and me about our lives, asking us the regular questions about classes and so forth while we stacked dishes and sorted silverware. She talked to us about her life, too, regular stuff like dating and money. Having no smartphone to which to attend, Maggie made eye contact with us when we conversed. She did not worry about the emails piling up because, like I said, it was 1991. My exchanges with Maggie taught me how to express myself in the workplace, striking a balance between stilted professionalism and oversharing. Also, Maggie's interest in us created that sense of belonging so crucial to student success (Strayhorn 2018). I benefited from even more adult investment in my next campus job working in residence life. My various supervisors met with student staff individually for 1–2 h every week, teaching and mentoring us with incredible care. I did not have this experience as consistently with faculty, but I did frequently encounter professors who made an effort to get to know me. Over 4 years, these experiences of being known and seen made me better. I left college mostly healed and no longer alone, a success story for me and a positive for my university's retention and graduation numbers. Now a professor at this same institution, I teach a helping skills course in our program in which I have many occasions to share these stories with my students. I have only recently begun to notice the incredulous look most students give when I talk about all the adult attention I received as a student. It is not that faculty and staff today do not want to pay attention to students; in fact, I suspect most of us would rather have a meaningful conversation with a student than attend a meeting, answer an email, or do one of the other countless tasks that get in the way of this essential work. We are simply busier now than people were in 1991. By "busier," I mean neither "harder working," nor "more productive." I sense people worked just as hard back then and were maybe even more productive depending on the metric one uses. I posit now we are just busier spiraling between endless meetings and emails and demands for enrollment numbers on various spreadsheets. If these things resulted in a robust and sustainable higher education system held in esteem by the public it was charged to serve, maybe we would have to accept this situation and admonish those who oppose it as resistant to change. But, as we know, it is not working and that should create a window of opportunity to challenge the dehumanizing consumerist status quo ethos of higher education. Public support for higher education continues to decrease when we treat students like commodities. Yet the conventional wisdom is that we should cling to this failed vision; in fact, anyone who opposes it is cast as a starry-eyed dreamer. When I suggest that enrolling more students while cutting faculty positions might diminish our whole purpose for being here, I am met with eye rolls. "More butts in seats, less hearts and minds, please," is essentially what I hear. Nearly every piece of research—my own and the large body of what can be broadly categorized as the student success literature—points to caring faculty and staff as the single most significant factor in retention and graduation (Astin 1993; Harrison and Mathuews 2022; Rendón and Muñoz 2011; Tinto 1975). Yet what are we told to spend our time on? Meetings, emails, and spreadsheets. The party line is that meetings, emails, and spreadsheets lead to that all-important goal of efficiency. But what if we have reached a point where all this efficiency is standing in the way of effectiveness? One of Martin Luther King's less quoted insights captures his prophetic concern about this point. Working for the Morehouse College student newspaper, The Maroon Tiger, an 18-year-old Martin Luther King Junior wrote, "Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society." I argue that contemporary students are victims of this efficiency menace. For all the claims that young people today are pampered snowflakes, they receive shockingly little real attention. I am not saying students lack resources; in fact, there are many more campus offices and support personnel now than when I was a student. But unless the people in these offices have the time and bandwidth needed to provide substantive and sustained care, they can miss the mark when it comes to providing what educational psychologist, Nel Noddings, called an ethic of care. We establish funds, or institutions, or agencies in order to provide the caretaking we judge to be necessary. The original impulse is often the one associated with caring. It arises in individuals. But as groups of individuals discuss the perceived needs of another individual or group, the imperative changes from "I must do something" to "Something must be done." This change is accompanied by a shift from the nonrational and subjective to the rational and objective. What should be done? Who should do it? Why should the persons named do it? This sort of thinking is not in itself a mistake; it is needed. But it has buried within it the seed of major error. The danger is that caring, which is essentially nonrational in that it requires a constitutive engrossment and displacement of motivation, may gradually or abruptly be transformed into abstract problem solving. There is, then, a shift of focus from the cared-for to the "problem" (p.25). I'm afraid that the transformation to which Noddings refers is happening on today's college campuses where efficiency has eclipsed effectiveness. We are letting the "butts in seats" mentality drive too much of what we do. The mere suggestion that other priorities have a place in higher education too often elicits protests about practicality. We must stop letting the naysayers shut down assertions that fostering caring relationships is worthy of human and financial resource investment. As Peter Felton and Leo Lambert showed in their book, Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, meaningful relationships are crucial for student success. They turn the practicality question on its head, arguing, "Even when budgets are tights, tensions, are high, and calendars are full, higher education's guiding question should not be Can we afford to prioritize relationship rich education? but rather Can we afford not to prioritize it?" (p.5). Felton and Lambert's (2020) words challenge us to move beyond the false dichotomy between what is right and what is pragmatic. Re-centering human interaction is both the ethical and practical path forward if we are to find a way out of what ails contemporary higher education. Continuing to double down on the same depersonalized, bureaucratic, managerial systems that created the problem makes no sense if we truly want to chart a better course. The first step is to refuse the taken-for-granted assumptions behind the "higher education should be run like a business" ethos. Again, if that philosophy worked, we might be stuck with it. Since it is not working, however, we should feel free to operate from different assumptions. This paradigm shift requires moving from an oppositional stance to one that articulates more clearly what we are for. In the following section, I posit a starting point for this process of moving from defensiveness to a spirit of pro-activeness. Moving from a "butts in seats" to an "ethic of care" sensibility will require both ideological and systemic recalibrations. We can start by rejecting the false dichotomy that care and practical concerns are at odds. We can also push back on the busy work that inhibits our ability to practice an ethic of care with students. I acknowledge there is a power element to that last assertation, one I am privileged to enjoy as a tenured faculty member. And we absolutely must advocate for the kind of systemic change needed to inculcate relationship-rich education. But as we also know, systemic change takes a long time and there are students in front of us right now. So even small pushbacks to the "butts in seats" mentality are important in turning our eyes from our screens to our students. Within the philosophy of Romanticism, the purpose of life is to free yourself from the confines of civilization. Find yourself in freedom and exploration. Passion, intuition, direct perception, and experience are privileged over reductionistic reason. Life is about the search for awe, or what the Romantics called the sublime. (Keltner 2023, p.122) What might be the features of a Rehumanizing Revolution in Higher Education? While an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this piece, I propose a few potential starting points. Like the Romantic Era thinkers, we find ourselves at a moment when technological developments both enchant and diminish us. When the Industrial Revolution began, individuals who worked as crafts- or trades-people found themselves transported to factories where they operated as cogs in machines (Shafritz, Ott, and Jang 2015). Similarly, we find ourselves displaced by machines that are not simply neutral tools, but that change us in ways that are potentially dehumanizing (Foer 2017). For example, Turkle (2016) documented care work being carried out by artificial intelligence (AI) in nursing homes where companion robots stand in for human visitors. She rightly points out that there is a difference between using robots for functions like medicine distribution and outsourcing the love and care that should belong firmly in the human realm. The tech-positive narrative encourages us to dismiss stories like this, arguing that we enjoy technology's many benefits and would not want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. In Digital Minimalism, Newport (2019) articulated a much-needed position showing that it is possible to simultaneously incorporate technology that serves our human values while rejecting that which sucks down our time, energy, and/or humanity. We believe rehumanizing education demands thought leadership in the spirit of Newport's assertion; this is why many of the pieces in this volume tackle some of the most pressing issues in this vein. In Newport's (2016) previous book, Deep Work, he made the case that the need for time and space to do one's best work is more important now that we no longer compete with local talent pools. Given the rise of remote work and AI, the pressure to cultivate one's unique talents is higher than ever as hiring entities have many more human and machine options than ever before. Working at the frontiers of one's abilities demands concentration and focus, states that are impossible to achieve when constantly digitally distracted. Again, tech enthusiasts jump on this kind of assertion by rattling off lists of widely enjoyed technological advances in an effort to cast critics as hypocrites for using computers instead of typewriters or stone tablets. I argue that rehumanizing education necessitates exposing these kinds of false dichotomies and engaging in thoughtful analyses of technology's contributions and excesses. Instead of asking the same tired questions about whether we would prefer to write on typewriters, what if we asked questions about how some restraint around the rollout of social media might have preempted some if its uglier side effects? Humanistic higher education leaders can and should play a leadership role in raising these questions about AI's effects in our world today. Thought leadership around AI's dehumanizing consequences is particularly important in light of its power to exacerbate and further systematize existing injustices. From facial recognition technology that confuses Black faces with apes to language detection software that disproportionately ascribes violent meaning to Arabic speech, the seemingly neutral algorithms that increasingly dominate our lives turn out to be incredibly biased (Gebru 2020). The obvious argument is that humans are also biased, but we can mitigate one another's biases in ways beyond the capacity of soulless machines. Eubanks (2018) provided a powerful analysis of this issue in her study of social services entities' transition from human case workers to automated systems. The machines could not account for nuance, make judgment calls, or provide personalized help in their cold and rigid calculations, resulting in people losing desperately needed assistance and being re-traumatized in the process. Not only did automated systems denigrate the clients they were charged to serve, they added another layer of administrative minutia. Automation failed so spectacularly to live up to the promise of efficiency that many agencies quietly returned to human case workers. The perfect machines could not deliver the services handled by the imperfect people not because they lacked efficiency, but because they lacked the ability to adjust across contexts, a talent asserts as uniquely human (Epstein 2021). My point is not that higher education ought to eschew AI; my point is that we should not let it eclipse our fundamental reason for being cultivators of human capacity. I would think the development of human capacity would be an uncontroversial ideal, but there are those who envision a future where people live like pampered pets while outsourcing their work to robots (Gibbs 2015). When I first read this idea, it reminded me of an experience I had as a child at Sea World. As I gazed at the majestic whales in their tank, I wondered whether this could really be a satisfying life for them. I asked one of the employees, who assured me that the whales were happy. I remember him being friendly and kind, making the effort to stoop down and look me in the eye as he said something along the lines of, "Whales in the wild can only dream about this kind of food security. And look at all the other animals who can just relax and not worry about being eaten by predators. They're all living the life here at Sea World!" I wanted to believe him. And yet some small part of me knew even then that he was wrong. I could not have articulated it at the time, but I had a sense that being fully alive was bigger than comfort. I had a sense that hunting is part of what makes a whale a whale and not a household pet or inanimate object. I think a similar parallel can be drawn between human beings and work. By "work," I do not necessarily mean paid labor. By "work," I mean the human flourishing that results from stretching one's heart and mind. Paradoxically, it is this kind of phenomenon that Somers (2023) wrote about in a piece lamenting how much he missed coding now that this work has been outsourced to AI. Somers experienced coding not simply as a means to an end but as something more akin to a craft that could be carried out with eloquence. This sense of intrinsic motivation is something to which a rehumanized higher education should re-connect after decades of pandering to the idea of universities as simple workforce development machines. This notion has been criticized as romantic and impractical, but, again, the current climate might provide an opportunity to show that it is crude vocationalism that may actually be the impractical idea. In their piece titled, Teaching in an Age of Militant Apathy in Higher Education, McMurtrie (2023) makes a compelling case that today's students do not buy into the idea of college as simply a place to train them for a place in a system they see as broken. Gen Z wants and is frankly demanding an education that speaks to them as whole human beings who need financial security, for sure, but also mental health, meaning, justice, and a sustainable environment. After years of struggling to articulate the value of the humanities in a higher education system hyper-focused on pre-professional majors, I argue the time has come for all of us to uplift the humanities as a necessary part of any meaningful postsecondary education. I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I'm convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what's going on in the people right around you… We're overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured. (Brooks 2024, para 5) Wherever we fall on the political spectrum, many are expressing a longing for a more elevated way of being in the community. I would not locate my own politics very close to Brooks', yet his words resonate because they evoke something deeper than memes and soundbites. Of course, memes and soundbites are popular because they are quick at a time when speed is too often valued at the expense of all else. The McDonalds drive-thru may be my fastest path to lunch, but is the food I find there worth ingesting? Might it be worth that extra 5 min to pack a lunch that offers nutrients rather than empty calories? These are the questions I argue higher education should be asking at this moment when the public is questioning its value. Scholars frequently express concern about the de-emphasis on critical thinking in higher education, a sentiment with which I agree. For example, developing an informed position, acknowledging different points of view, and assessing the credibility of courses are important skills for functioning as informed citizens in a democracy. The diminished state of discourse in our society demonstrates the costs of under-resourced, inequitable educations systems too driven by vocationalism. Hence critical thinking should be taken more seriously as an integral part of higher education. And yet critical thinking is not the only value we should inculcate in both our college students and structures. Fitzpatrick (2021) asserts that higher education needs what she calls, generous thinking to complement critical thinking. She opens the book with an example of teaching a text to which students reacted by poking holes rather than really engaging with and responding to the work. She calls for generous thinking, defined as "a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaborating over competition" (p.4). She goes on to assert that critical thinking without generous thinking creates "a politics that makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before" (p.25). Such a world becomes a bunch of individuals vying for attention through snark and putdowns rather than the beloved community Martin Luther King, Pope Francis, and many other spiritual leaders offer as a positive vision. I wrote this work in an election year when the discourse is often dominated by pro-Trump and anti-Trump sentiment. This framing allows the pro-Trump contingent to control the narrative, putting opponents on the defensive. of what they are for. Yardley (2016) wrote a compelling piece in this vein, framing President Trump and Pope Francis as the world's most powerful leaders embodying truly different values at their core. I found the work fresh and heartening for its positioning of at least two ways of being that are not merely oppositional, but truly their own paths in their own right. I do not agree with everything Pope Francis espouses, but his message of love and compassion resonates and offers a goal to run toward after years of feeling the need to run away. This pro-active vision embodies our hope for this volume, a place where authors move beyond re-hashing problems to envisioning ways to rehumanize higher education, an institution that has its share of problems, but which we ultimately honor with the ideas offered in this monograph.