Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of a new column on how to improve the higher-ed workplace. Read the previous essays here.
It’s easier than ever to find doom-and-gloom rhetoric in higher education. In April I wrote about what it’s like to work in a labor sector targeted by its own government: We often feel angry, abandoned, adrift. Many of us have days when we want to do something about it, yet quickly become overwhelmed by the obstacles or stalled by self-doubt.
But that’s only part of the story. It’s also true that, in the face of ceaseless attacks from the White House and governors’ offices, some faculty and staff members are standing up for academe.
To hear their voices, I started interviewing people I call the doers. Talking with them challenged my assumptions about what taking action — individually and collectively — looks like in this moment and helped me see a path through panic and pessimism. What surprised me most is that the doers weren’t a bunch of unrealistic idealists. Instead they offered a pragmatic playbook for change. My aim here is to distill and pass along what I learned from them.
It turns out, we’re bad at this activism stuff. If it makes you feel better, many faculty and staff members in higher ed have a hard time figuring out how and where to begin the fight.
First, you are trained — through disciplinary specialization and organizational silos — to stay in your lane. It’s often been hammered into your head that you’re a mathematician or instructional designer, and you’ve been conditioned to believe that someone else with more expertise is better suited to champion a cause or engage in grass-roots organizing. You reason: There must be a social-movement scholar or someone else whose job description better lines up with this problem.
Second, graduate training can sometimes prevent you from trying things outside your comfort zone. Jessica Riddell, a professor of English and a Shakespearean scholar at Bishop’s University, in Canada, and author of Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing, explained to me in an interview: “As we progress through the academic hierarchies, we are increasingly named as authorities. But if we’re expected to be perfect, impervious experts on a particular subject, then there is little room for the vulnerability or emergence to challenge the actual in the name of the possible.”
Third, a specialist’s fervor for nuance and carefully weighing the evidence on a particular issue can become an impediment to action. It’s easy to fall victim to the “just one more book fallacy” — that’s when you struggle to take meaningful first steps because you believe you need to study more. Or you get caught up in debates about the most effective course of action and convince yourself that strategies won’t work. After years of turmoil in higher ed, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing will get better. However, as Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, argues, it is precisely that type of cynicism that maintains the status quo.
But, argues Riddell, you do have a choice here: You can give in to despair, or you can practice hope. “Hope is not a stance,” she said. “It’s not optimism. It’s not Pollyanna. It’s a verb. And while despair gets monolithic and detaches us from each other, hope gets granular, proximate, and in conversation.”
So what do the doers teach us about practicing hope?
Step 1: Connect with a community. A petition with more than 4,000 signatures affirming the essential role of higher ed in a democratic and free society originated in a group chat. Daniel Laurison, an associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, drafted the petition with the help of a group of scholars who had been talking regularly to create a support network for people doing work on issues pertaining to queer, trans, and other marginalized communities.
That group was organized by Alison L. Gash, a professor and department chair of political science at the University of Oregon. “At first, we were just talking about mutual aid, or stepping up to fill in gaps left by institutions, or creating support that was never there,” Gash explained. When Laurison reached out with the idea for a petition, there was already a group ready to help make it happen.
The lesson here is that you don’t need to join a big or formal organization. Sometimes the first step toward defending your profession is as simple as having regular conversations with a group of trusted colleagues.
Step 2: Don’t discount small steps. I asked Laurison and Gash if they ever questioned the effectiveness of a petition. “The letter, by itself, doesn’t do very much,” Laurison admitted. “But there is a lot of fear out there right now. For some people, simply adding their name is a brave first step.”
If you’re anxious about getting involved in politics, seeing all of those names suggests that there are others who share your values. And after taking that first brave step, you might feel emboldened to take another. Petition signers, Gash said, “also realized there are a lot of different ways you can show your support for the values of education, diversity, and human dignity that don’t require you to be marching down the street.”
The petition allows people to check if they are interested in being connected with others on their campus who signed it, creating an additional opportunity to be part of a community. For Karen Costa, an adjunct instructor and faculty developer, it’s those small steps in tight communities that truly drive change: “Small things will eventually scale if we keep doing them and start building our communities. So the way I take action is to say to myself, ‘What is the next, best, smallest step that I can take?’”
Step 3: Leverage your strengths. A theme in my conversations with the doers was that they found ways to use their existing knowledge and talents. A good example is Karim Mattar, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies Palestinian literature and was involved in organizing the April 17 National Day of Action for Higher Ed. Mattar reminded me that there is a continuity between what many people already know how to do in higher ed as educators and the work of organizing others for action. “This work is about engaging with people and meeting them where they are,” he said. “It is about having difficult dialogues and constructive conversations.”
Abby André, a doctoral fellow at Ohio State University, was spurred into action because of her experience as a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice. “I’m a former fed,” she said. “Many of my friends are still there. People who I consider my chosen family are there, and they were on the front lines of these changes. And the more I was talking to people who don’t have that experience, the more I really understood that communities outside D.C. don’t really understand how the federal government touches their lives.”
André started The Impact Project to visualize how cuts to the federal work force and grants affect everyone. One of her goals was to provide data so that the public could understand what’s happening across the country and make sound decisions. “This is just an honest and earnest attempt to represent the data,” André said. “And that is very much in alignment with who I am. We all have to find our own paths, our own ways of being in the world that won’t drain us in this very chaotic time.”
Step 4: Prioritize your mental health and clarify your role. “How do we live and work in this era of permacrisis? It’s a good question, and people really want answers.” That is how Costa, who specializes in climate pedagogy, neurodiversity, and trauma, started our interview. “It’s very difficult to do any of these sort of movement strategies when people are not feeling well.”
She sees widespread signs that faculty and staff members are struggling with their brain and nervous-system health right now. “My climate pedagogy work is grounded in my ability to stay healthy,” Costa said. One simple outlet to help with her mental health has been meeting regularly with a pottery class. She also receives professional help: “I’m very happy to be transparent that I take two medications and do other things to give me a baseline of safety and capacity to take action.”
The point: Take the time to put yourself in the best position mentally and physically to pursue your activism.
Which brings me to Costa’s other tip: Figure out your marching orders. If you’re like most of us, you feel so flooded with feelings and inundated with breaking news that you aren’t sure what to do next. “I think people really could benefit from taking an hour to sit down and reflect about what you see as your role,” Costa advised. “Get off the internet. You can’t find your role on social media.”
Think about what kinds of things you feel comfortable doing to defend higher education and your profession, and which ones are outside your comfort zone. “Even when I have all the emotions,” Costa said, “I can say that I feel like I know what my part is. I have clarity about those priorities. It’s wiggly and it’s messy, but I know what my role is and what my role is not.”
Step 5: Embrace the possibilities of hope as a verb. Perhaps the most important lesson that I took from these conversations was that practicing hope is itself hope-giving. Doing something good in the world does a world of good for us as humans. Very few of the people I interviewed set out to solve a giant, structural problem in one fell swoop. Rather, they got, as Riddell said, “granular, proximate, and in conversation” with others.
Mattar put it best: “Getting involved in these communities, both locally and with colleagues at other campuses, offered succor and a feeling of solidarity and connection in what otherwise would have been a moment of deep isolation and despair. These communities have been sources of hope for me in such deeply meaningful ways.”
On a personal level, I’m starting a leadership role in my department, and I’m already implementing these steps. I’m doing things I know are good for my mental health and writing out my values. I’m replacing scrolling with strolling to coffee with colleagues. And remembering that small acts — even “easy” ones squarely in my wheelhouse — can clear a path for subsequent steps.
