At a lunch event recently, I found myself sitting next to a mental health professional. We’d just met, and when he learned what I did for a living, he said, “Ooh, tough time to be in higher ed.” I nodded in agreement, and then as we munched through our salad course, we counted the ways: protests and arrests on Ivy League campuses, continued media skepticism over the value of a college degree, state legislature restrictions on what can and can’t be taught, the specter of a coming enrollment cliff, the disruption that AI presents to everyday teaching and learning, and this year’s FAFSA debacle that has a lot of families holding their collective breaths as they hope to make wise decisions. “Gee,” I thought, once we’d ticked off all the items, “and here I’d just thought it was a regular Tuesday. I know how things are, but when you lay it all out like that….”
Mentally, I had to counter-weigh that lunch time conversation with another I’d had just the week before. This one was with a former police officer. He’d spent two decades in gangs and narcotics before retiring and wondering what to do next. Turns out that a gig opened up to do an interim public safety job at his nearby college. It was six months. “I gotta tell ya, I loved it,” he said. “I didn’t know I would but I did. I’m thinking about going back full-time. You know why? And this really caught me by surprise.”
“No, why?” I asked.
“Because college is such a hopeful place.”
“Oh my God, he’s right,” I thought. “College is such a hopeful place, maybe the one place where everywhere you look around you, everyone you see, is hoping to accomplish something, hoping to take the next step to a better life, and where everyone is rooting for them.” And there again, until that conversation, I’d thought that it was just another weekday.
Where’s the truth? Is higher ed in a dismal state, a doom loop to the sewer, or is it still a hopeful place where people step towards their dreams?
I don’t think we’re going to find some Aristotelian mean that answers this question. I don’t think it’s an either/or. It may not even be a both/and. Well, it may be a bit of a both/and, but not a cool one—not the kind where the equation is balanced at 50-50 and there’s a happy homeostasis. More like a both/and where things are trending in a direction that moves away from the hopeful side of the spectrum.
We’re academic leaders, but on the day-to-day, we’re often academic managers. Now is the time that we need to invest a little more into the leadership side of things—the inspirational, hopeful side. I hope that The Leader is and has been helpful in that regard. I love that it’s a newsletter that’s been written by colleagues, for colleagues, and for the greater good of a vital enterprise.
