Very interesting issue of your newsletter, thank you.
Funny you should mention Qubein. I work in High Point (in one of the few institutions that DOESN'T have a purple HPU umbrella or flag conspicuously displayed).
His influence is quite substantial and his name is everywhere, as in they just renamed a STREET for him. As HPU takes over more and more square footage in High Point, more gold-tipped fences go up around that square footage. The shopping center across the street from HPU has the side facing the university covered in astroturf, so parents and students don't have to look at, gasp, SHOPPING CENTER CONCRETE WALLS.
Forgive the snark, but HPU is a joke among locals. It's basically a finishing school for rich kids from Up North, (or any rich kids for that matter). Qubein is a fundraising MACHINE and HPU looks like a 5 star resort.
I hope the students are actually learning something other than how to be 'positive'.
Wow, Steph, I had no idea that HPU markets itself as "Life Skills University." The cult trappings are clear in this article. Thank you for sharing. This reminds me of a lesser-known institution in Iowa: the Maharishi University of Management. I used to take students there for an Illness and Health in Literature class, and the people were always very friendly, but it was much like HPU, only the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the charismatic leader. The combination of religious rhetoric and patriotic symbolism at HPU only strengthens the comparisons to the mega-church. If I were on the faculty there and eagles were flying during speeches, I might well be retching on my robe.
I hear you. I can't imagine what mental contortions HPU faculty have to go through if they aren't on board with that vibe.
HPU wants to be acknowledged as a local community supporter, yet you have to get by the guard houses to even set foot on their campus. The entire campus is gated and every entrance has a guard house, you cannot drive onto campus without passing through a security checkpoint of some kind.
We have plenty of other private colleges and universities in the Triad area of NC and none that I know of are completely gated and secured in that way.
I've never heard of the Maharishi University of Management, but that atmosphere would definitely make me wary.
How strange. This sounds like one of those minimum security prison-like places: Bob Jones used to be one of them, and I think Pensacola Christian College. God seems mentioned a lot in Qubein's talks, but I don't see anything obvious on the website about it being a Christian college, though it does have historical ties to the Methodist Church. Now I see that just below the logo is the slogan "The Premier Life Skills University" -- silly to have missed that earlier. Yet they claim to be "rooted in the liberal arts." I sorely wish that I had found the Daily Motivation before writing this post: "The Monday Motivation video coaching from Nido Qubein and
empowering quotes the rest of the week will propel you
on your quest to be extraordinary!" This could not be a clearer illustration of the positive thinking that Ehrenreich targets.
I'm going to chime in here as a coach; so, someone who's business it is to prompt professors to search for and explore possibility. At its core, my work is optimistic. And I agree with Ehrenreich and you in your shared diagnosis of universities adopting failed corporate strategy models (I have both experience with and thoughts on strategic planning, for example, and am leading a session for dept heads in a Humanities faculty at a large comprehensive in March). But I would diagnose the illness and possible cure differently. To keep with your religious comparison, I'd take a more Buddhist stance -- where academics (leaders, professors) and their students need to come to the keen awareness that suffering exists, imperfection exists; we will continually fail to hit perfection in any form; humans are flawed. So, it is our duty and obligation to bolster our compassion and connect with one another as human beings. What toxic positivity has none of is empathy. Toxic positivity doesn't SEE people, is not present with them. Leadership that foregrounded emotional intelligence and agility, and above all compassion, would chart a different path.
Great points -- thank you. Ehrenreich distinguishes between optimism (generally a good thing) and the more deliberate form of positive thinking as a discipline.
I love the term "toxic positivity." Exactly right -- any form of willful bright-siding that either outright denies imperfection or failure or pain is toxic. People suffering layoffs or budget cuts or a narrowing horizon for their discipline need to hold some space for that reality before turning toward opportunity. This is gold: "Toxic positivity doesn't SEE people, is not present with them. Leadership that foregrounded emotional intelligence and agility, and above all compassion, would chart a different path."
There are some such leaders. Ironically, some of them that I have known were originally military officers. One of them said to me that his philosophy is "My ship, my crew, myself -- in that order." The search firms that manage administrative talent do not encourage this approach. I would also offer that the empathic leadership that you describe also requires some long-term commitment. It's hard for people to trust that empathy is real if they can't trust that people in charge are "of" that place for the long haul or have a direct stake in how things shake out.
And "strategic planning" in universities = BARF. I invite people in leadership to look at alignment--but that has to start with actually having values that you want to adhere to. If decisions are made to maximize bums-in-seats, or to maximize visibility, or grant funding or some other metric (H scores or whatever they're called), then we lose the humanity of education.
I enjoyed, if that is the right word, reading this post. I'll just pick up on a few things;
1. Positive thinking. Back in the 80s I attended a few workshops about how to attract money and friends. I wasn't too interested in the latter, except if they happened to be girls. Anyway, the trainer would always be upbeat and talk about reciting 'affirmations' last thing at night. Being a cynic, I rapidly came to the conclusion that the best way of attracting money was to run courses on how to attract money. I thought it was all a load of rubbish, too superficial, although after one of these workshops several people started a conversation with me on the London Underground, something that is unheard of because talking to strangers is simply not British. So perhaps there was a sort of residual effect. I think positive thinking is better than negative thinking in particular circumstances. For example, during the pandemic it was pretty awful, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least we have a relatively robust health system, so things could be worse.
2. Being asked to do ridiculous and pointless things is an occupational hazard when working for management that are either (a) concerned about what things look like or (b) consumed by 'visions' or (c) both. I am planning to write an article about some of the stupid things I've been asked to do, but in the meantime people might find this mildly amusing: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/6-ways-to-respond-to-requests-for
My default response is to say I'll do it and then not, although I don't recommend this approach as it could lay one open to a disciplinary procedure. It's because in my experience these people never follow up because they think they have God-like powers, so that just saying something will be done means it WILL be done. Or else they go on to their next big vision/initiative and forget what the last one was.
3. As for your daughter's reading, good for her. In England we have a government that thinks the only value of a university degree is whether or not it leads to a decent income within a couple of years, and a depressing number of universities where the aim of the so-called education is to tell the students what they think they already know, and disallow any dissenting views as that leads to people feeling unsafe, and could also put off future customers -- sorry, I meant students. Much of this was predictable decades ago, as I wrote here: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/the-likely-effects-of-the-commercialisation last June.
Your point #1 is closest to what Ehrenreich targets in her book. Positive thinking as a discipline, as a cultivated behavior akin to prayer, is quite different from optimism. It often requires willful denial. Jason mentioned a clear example in another comment of how assessments can be framed in this way: with clearly disingenuous or flawed premises. But the exercise of doing them is more the point than the integrity of the results. I'm sorry to say that at U.S. colleges and universities the things you outline in #2 (and in your post) are often tied to accreditation, and so simply demurring or pretending to comply, but not, isn't really an option.
I missed this in my original post, but if you'd like, you can sign up to receive Daily Motivation from High Point University, including a Monday video from the cult leader himself! https://engage.highpoint.edu/dailymotivation
Thanks for the link, Joshua. I have I intrinsic motivation so I might have a look in the interests of being more informed, but the whole idea makes me sick. I got into selling products as a sideline some decades ago, and the one meeting I attended, a motivational one, was quite off-putting. Re "This trick is achieved by embracing change and thereby finding the opportunity hiding in every crisis." Also encapsulated in the language of firing, like "We're offering you a career enhancement opportunity ". Cynical or what?
Years ago I composed a phrase I thought was original with me: "Paranoia is a survival instinct!" Seemed funny at first, then went through a cynical period but is ending up as one of many guideposts. Thanks for the reminder.
Well said, Bob. Hypervigilance, as they say, is a symptom of PTSD. But I don't think many faculty are excessively vigilant in today's climate. If the threats are real, and if they keep coming for you, then it's not paranoia to be on your guard.
This is interesting, in light of the common discourse that if one fails at academia it is one's own fault rather than the fault of the system for not providing adequate support. This is compounded when one willingly (or unwillingly, but chooses to go) leaves academia.
This is very well said. A transactional, consumerist approach to education comes at a great price, and some of the biggest losers in this exchange are those who believe in it.
Thank you, Charles. As you say, there are many ways to define cost. My fear is that the harm done by chasing market trends -- trying to prove return on investment, cater to the "customers," etc. -- is long-lasting. I think about this as a parent: will my children be able to participate in the unending conversation in the way that I did? Or will others have decided for them that art and literature need to be "for" some other purpose, if they are preserved at all?
About 1 in 4 of my students can passably read at grade level. This means that *any* textbook is meaningless to them, and that they struggle to even read assignments. The biggest problem I've faced as a professor is not the lack of skill, or some lack of academic ability, but their ignorance and unwillingness to pursue such abilities. At least locally, it's clear that the problem is systemic, as many of these students are still A and B students both in high school and college. It's taken me years to design a curriculum and pedagogy that takes the students I have--not the ones I want--and not castrate academic rigor (of a different sort).
Good teaching does require meeting students where they are, but I think honesty also requires identifying insufficient preparation when we see it. I taught at a private college that wasn't terribly selective, but that was reputable enough, and I was astonished at how many scholarship candidates I would interview who would admit that they had never read a single book cover-to-cover. These were folks who were traveling to campus with their parents in hopes of receiving an award for academic merit. It's not curmudgeonly to raise the alarm in such a case: it is being honest.
I am returning to your point, as my original response wasn't on point.
In my experience, honest identification of inadequate preparation almost inevitably leads to a hostile pile-on by colleagues. At least here. But I've noted that it varies quite a bit by institution.
What I wish my colleagues would recognize is that while it's not an individual student's fault per se when prior institutionalized education has failed them, that doesn't change the standards of academic rigor. But the problems I see in most of my students are deeper: they don't actually desire education, or conceptual understanding, but appear in my classroom because college has long since become the pathway to a job. They view me as an authoritarian gatekeeper, or they "get it" and learn to love the field.
Yes -- the lack of curiosity is there. I'll admit to having been lazy, myself, as a student. I loved talking about ideas, but I wasn't mature enough yet to love persevering through difficult reading, and so I cut some corners. What you describe is characteristic of transactional environments. I have a friend who teaches at a commuter school, and it's much the same. He is less kind than you and has begun to deliberately scare students into complying, which I can't recommend pedagogically, but which I at least understand. When students can't even be bothered to purchase the book, they do perhaps need to be confronted with how insulting that is.
Ah. I was always the voracious student and sent myself to boarding school through a scholarship. I dragged my parents along on that one.
My students already have enough fear, and I do everything I can to tamp it down, which includes putting on quite the performance. The issue is that students have such low reading and critical thinking skills that the minimum requirements to study philosophy at all become very hard and off-putting for them. That is, most of them cannot, in practice and in every day settings, distinguish between truth, belief, and knowledge, or persuasion and logic. And yes, they cannot be bothered to buy the book, so I have played hardball on that one. Maybe you'd be surprised at how many think they can wait until two weeks in to buy the book ... maybe not.
But, as I mentioned earlier, some of my local problems are due to the fact that so many faculty here at this "commuter school" are also teaching transactionally....
In my case, about 1/3 of the students who start the course end up leaving or ghosting. About 1/4 ghosting is fairly typical for any liberal arts course around here. It's possible, given my lavish support, to do well enough in the course without being able to meaningfully read the textbook. But it takes real dedication to the supplemental materials (recorded lectures, third party videos, note outlines, written guides aiming to improve metacognition, etc.).
I'm quite honest with my students. It helps that my own upbringing was far more modest than most of my students. When I feel like I really need to "bring out the big guns," which I haven't done in years since I'm not convinced it is effective, I tell them what it's like to grow up amid rural poverty and see the despair in my friend's eyes as they realize, years later, that they're stuck in grinding dead-end jobs that could have been avoided. If nothing else, there's just been too much trauma the last few years to try that tactic.
Yup. This. My memoir is all about this--gaslighting and malignant narcissism in academia among other areas. Ehrenreich’s one of my resources--her chapter on her experience surviving cancer is chilling.
Yes -- I love her points about how anger can be purifying when it's justified. I had to cut some of that here for length, but she and Sandra Steingraber both suggest that their cancers were not genetic or accidental, but attributable to environmental causes. Hitchens also has a powerful cancer narrative, Mortality, which I often used to contrast with Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. Pausch is quite an exemplar of the positive thinking trope -- joking, doing pushups, easing everyone's discomfort with normality to the end. Students typically love Pausch until we start talking about how his particular cancer, pancreatic, enabled a guise of normality that many other cancers do not. When his Last Lecture becomes the master narrative that all people diagnosed with cancer must either align themselves with or oppose, it does real harm.
Well I would, except my memoir ain’t published. Yet. 🙂 Maybe I’ll put up an excerpt one of these days...
What I do in the book is a three way parallel: my career as an adjunct, my marriage to a narcissist, and also my life in the theatre. It’s called Next Time, and a major through line is what you talk about here: that we’re asked to give everything, receiving nothing in return (not even a living wage), and if we speak up in defense of ourselves, we’re labeled as difficult, blacklisted, or fired.
Powerful metaphorical parallels, Jenn. There is some danger in overstating my case. But I do think the defaults for how executives are trained leans away from traditional scholarship, and that this ideological difference (when combined with a power imbalance) contributes to gaslighting.
A lot of upper administrators now a days go through the finishing school of an Ed.D. When I was in Texas, there was one in Austin that was infamous for pushing out socially networked Ed.D.s with little actual understanding of education, but who were convinced they were prepared for management. We have the same thing here in Iowa. A few years on state-level college committees showed me that it's pretty much a state-wide phenomena here too.
Qubein is a pretty anomalous example -- using the Dr. title after having only earned an M.S. is quite something. A topic of discussion among faculty at High Point, I would assume. Undergraduate institutions conferring honorary doctorates on commencement speakers is a whole 'nother sidebar.
But to your point: there are such schools, and they are in conversation with search firms. I participated in the search that brought a Dean of Faculty to campus, and our president (also newly hired) brought along a search firm. It was revelatory to hear the firm weigh in on which candidates were rising stars, etc. I wonder how many candidates are aware that there are consultants putting their fingers on the scale in that way. But the other takeaway was that these rising deans/deanlets did not really belong to their institutions. They belonged to this parallel class, which helped them burnish their own brand. The high profits that search firms see during this period of high turnover among executives is perhaps its own article.
And it makes higher education into trade school. Which--trade school is great, don’t get me wrong, but universities should be about critical thinking more than anything else.
Yeah, I've been blacklisted for years. What really hurts about it is that people will privately agree with me, especially when I step up to protect others, but then gaslight me in public. For me, part of the life of the mind is excising double think, but around here....
Speaking of, 1984 should really be rewritten in the setting of modern academia.
Skepticism is good for the soul. At times in my life I was too cynical; I've always been skeptical. Regarding higher ed, when my alma mater, a small, state liberal arts college, goes awry, I point it out. Sometimes on a message board but often the old fashioned way: With a letter mailed at a post office. Maybe once every five years I'll get a, "I don't like the way you operate" comment from an admin, I hear it through the grapevine from my employee friends on campus. Usually I just get ghosted, no response to my letters.
I recently wrote a letter suggesting naming a building after a family that has done a lot for the school, and not just financially. I suggested a name change from something as simple as English Building. I mailed the stamped letters to the president and two other administrators. Of course I haven't heard from them, it would take too much to put in a little extra work for their six-figure jobs to actually connect with an alum.
Meanwhile, I'll poke the bear. Some think I don't like my alma mater. I actually really like the place; I want them to get better. The people staying quiet on the sidelines? I question their caring.
Excellent point. I left academe because I care too much. Very different from cynicism. I am, perhaps, cynical when it comes to the prevailing culture of leadership in higher ed today, for the reasons you mention and many others.
1. Had Bob Knight avoided his demise at IU, his book The Power of Negative Thinking would have been a good antidote.
2. The power of positive thinking is more ingrained in Christianity than one might expect--check out John Wesley’s works and the intersection of music and Methodism.
3. I may have missed it but it seems to me that tuition inflation has no remedy; thus, if the sky is the limit, then image is everything, and outward projections are rarely nuanced. See also rise of college sports, ACC, etc.
Good points. I've written a fair bit on #3, at least the sports angle. It's disheartening to read that my alma mater, Nebraska, just recorded record profits from athletics while slashing many academic programs. Athletics directly benefits from the academic reputation of the university and would not be what it is without that association, but it's quite clear that the business angle is now the first priority.
I wrote about this in October after seeing an ad for the University of Colorado that explicitly flipped the usual sequence: instead of leveraging the football team to promote the university, the ad (in my reading) leveraged a Nobel Laureate professor to promote the personal brand of the head football coach. Image is certainly everything for Coach Prime -- but even faculty at the highest levels of achievement seem to be jumping on that bandwagon. I don't get it.
I thank you for this. I read this when it first glided into my inbox and it's been niggling at me ever since. It provides another few pieces of the puzzle of what is going wrong in higher ed. The part about negative thinking landed hard, because I've experienced the gaslighting. I keep wanting to find the box cover of this puzzle because I keep finding pieces in odd places and they fit together but it feels like they should form a more coherent picture by now (which could be due to my own deficiencies). It's a picture that I suspect revolves around the fact that educational institutions have qualitative rather than quantitative goals and to teach how to think rather than what to think. Or maybe those are simply two more pieces of the puzzle of the picture that I cannot see clearly as a whole.
I'd like to cross-post it to my humble newsletter, if you don't mind (I hope you won't).
Thank you, Jeanne. If I had that box cover, I might not be still writing about these things a year after launching this series! Please feel free to cross-post if you think others will find it useful.
This is a lot, and I mean this as a compliment. My head is swimming. My colleagues need to read this article! Where I work, we are beset by all of these things -- toxic positivity (“faculty need to raise morale; misery is catching; come to our events we worked so hard to plan!; Deans, tell your faculty they have to attend Convocation” etc); gaslighting; fly-by administrators; a failed “strategic plan” implemented by a tourist president who beat the average tenure of such folks; a theocracy embedded in Christianity (but we are an unaffiliated college); and...the junior high-ification of our students, staff, and faculty. It feels like pain to work here, like a primally deep pain.
What you wrote about the lack of curiosity, intellectual interest, humility (“vision”), and wholesale lack of awareness of what good professors actually do with ourselves inside and outside the classroom...these things are part of the pain. There is a corporate overlay to the college and its administrators’ fantasies about ‘the point of college.’ If it’s not ‘give the customers what they want’ it is ‘give me what I want so I can hopscotch to my next job.’
The only thing missing from this superlative article is the nefarious corporate context, wherein board members’ buddies provide outsourced contractor services to colleges who have fired employees. And admins hire their friends to come be ‘thought leaders,’ which is like saying ‘we’ve hired a chef who specializes in cotton candy.’
Based on your comment on the Friday post, I thought this one might resonate. But it's too bad that it does. At least your president has not authored a book titled How to Get Whatever You Want? :)
But, seriously, your point about nepotism is an area worth pursuing. I know that many of Trustees at my former employer try to boost the school in good faith. Those in media try to use their platform to feature the school, and that's all fine. I'm not sure the extent to which those relationships work in reverse: if the school hires companies run by Trustees or contracts with businesses referred by Trustees. There could be a good muckraking article there, if one could find evidence of such a pattern nationwide.
Regarding the positive thinking of higher ed, the constant begging for donations saying it will uplift our wonderful only-place-in-the-world campus, here's the reality: My alma mater has had 5 presidents in 10 years, guessing more provosts in the same time, five athletic directors in a decade, numerous deans every couple years. These people don't care about the school, yet they want me to wear my passion for ol' alma mater on my sleeve? As the new Vice President for student engagement or something like that bored me with her speech at an outdoor winter presentation this year, I was wondering just what in the heck she does why do they constantly hire 6-figure administrators while their enrollment is down 7% from last year? They still don't get the disconnect on finances as noted in a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article quoting my alma mater's latest president.
Wow -- that's a lot of turnover. The president and dean at my former employer are beating the averages, but not because they are beloved. The faculty was smacked down by the Board after trying to express concerns through a series of resolutions (not quite votes of no confidence, but clear expressions of unrest). During that uncomfortable time, I requested and was granted a private meeting with the president, and he told me two things that shocked me into silence. First, "I could get another job tomorrow." Good for you if it's true, but it's not true for most faculty, so it's an incredibly tone deaf thing to say. And the most telling one, "I am not 'of' [this college]." I still am not sure why he told me that, but it revealed a great deal. This is partly what I'm getting at with the flaws in strategic planning. Most of the folks at the top are pretending to be "of" that place when, in their heart of hearts, they think the place is beneath them. Many of them do their best to trade up when given the chance. The Chronicle typically does not publish op-eds by college presidents because they are so clearly self-serving, but Inside Higher Ed does -- they published one recently by the president mentioned here, who claims to be voluntarily taking the "long view" of the presidency...after saying what he said to me.
If you want another example of absurdity, this op-ed was published by an administrator masquerading as a faculty member (or at least not admitting to being an administrator). This is gaslighting at its finest, because it came during a time when we were being pressured by the admin to cut majors, ostensibly to alleviate budget woes, but really to push people out (I was one who voluntarily left after that). So it's not that majors are being cut, it's that we're trying to embrace Rousseau's social contract. I think Inside Higher Ed published an anonymous letter to the editor in response to this, but the fact that it's still up on their pages -- despite the lie having been exposed -- really says something about their priorities.
The comments from your former president are indeed tone deaf, and quite arrogant. I don't understand the last 25-30 years fascination with administrative overflow. While colleges cut majors, they add administrators. It makes no sense to me.
Many of my former classmates recall the great profs they had, funny how not one of them mentions any administrator.
My snarky/funny/interesting Humanities and Social Sciences professors cared much more for the university than the fake Pollyanna adminstrators. The admins come and go every few years; most of my profs taught at the school 25-30 years before retiring there. They loved the institution much more than any administrator, they were just skeptical enough to call out the higher ed foolishness when it came their way.
Very interesting issue of your newsletter, thank you.
Funny you should mention Qubein. I work in High Point (in one of the few institutions that DOESN'T have a purple HPU umbrella or flag conspicuously displayed).
His influence is quite substantial and his name is everywhere, as in they just renamed a STREET for him. As HPU takes over more and more square footage in High Point, more gold-tipped fences go up around that square footage. The shopping center across the street from HPU has the side facing the university covered in astroturf, so parents and students don't have to look at, gasp, SHOPPING CENTER CONCRETE WALLS.
Forgive the snark, but HPU is a joke among locals. It's basically a finishing school for rich kids from Up North, (or any rich kids for that matter). Qubein is a fundraising MACHINE and HPU looks like a 5 star resort.
I hope the students are actually learning something other than how to be 'positive'.
Further reading here: https://www.theassemblync.com/education/higher-education/nido-qubein-high-point-university/
Wow, Steph, I had no idea that HPU markets itself as "Life Skills University." The cult trappings are clear in this article. Thank you for sharing. This reminds me of a lesser-known institution in Iowa: the Maharishi University of Management. I used to take students there for an Illness and Health in Literature class, and the people were always very friendly, but it was much like HPU, only the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the charismatic leader. The combination of religious rhetoric and patriotic symbolism at HPU only strengthens the comparisons to the mega-church. If I were on the faculty there and eagles were flying during speeches, I might well be retching on my robe.
I hear you. I can't imagine what mental contortions HPU faculty have to go through if they aren't on board with that vibe.
HPU wants to be acknowledged as a local community supporter, yet you have to get by the guard houses to even set foot on their campus. The entire campus is gated and every entrance has a guard house, you cannot drive onto campus without passing through a security checkpoint of some kind.
We have plenty of other private colleges and universities in the Triad area of NC and none that I know of are completely gated and secured in that way.
I've never heard of the Maharishi University of Management, but that atmosphere would definitely make me wary.
How strange. This sounds like one of those minimum security prison-like places: Bob Jones used to be one of them, and I think Pensacola Christian College. God seems mentioned a lot in Qubein's talks, but I don't see anything obvious on the website about it being a Christian college, though it does have historical ties to the Methodist Church. Now I see that just below the logo is the slogan "The Premier Life Skills University" -- silly to have missed that earlier. Yet they claim to be "rooted in the liberal arts." I sorely wish that I had found the Daily Motivation before writing this post: "The Monday Motivation video coaching from Nido Qubein and
empowering quotes the rest of the week will propel you
on your quest to be extraordinary!" This could not be a clearer illustration of the positive thinking that Ehrenreich targets.
I'm going to chime in here as a coach; so, someone who's business it is to prompt professors to search for and explore possibility. At its core, my work is optimistic. And I agree with Ehrenreich and you in your shared diagnosis of universities adopting failed corporate strategy models (I have both experience with and thoughts on strategic planning, for example, and am leading a session for dept heads in a Humanities faculty at a large comprehensive in March). But I would diagnose the illness and possible cure differently. To keep with your religious comparison, I'd take a more Buddhist stance -- where academics (leaders, professors) and their students need to come to the keen awareness that suffering exists, imperfection exists; we will continually fail to hit perfection in any form; humans are flawed. So, it is our duty and obligation to bolster our compassion and connect with one another as human beings. What toxic positivity has none of is empathy. Toxic positivity doesn't SEE people, is not present with them. Leadership that foregrounded emotional intelligence and agility, and above all compassion, would chart a different path.
Great points -- thank you. Ehrenreich distinguishes between optimism (generally a good thing) and the more deliberate form of positive thinking as a discipline.
I love the term "toxic positivity." Exactly right -- any form of willful bright-siding that either outright denies imperfection or failure or pain is toxic. People suffering layoffs or budget cuts or a narrowing horizon for their discipline need to hold some space for that reality before turning toward opportunity. This is gold: "Toxic positivity doesn't SEE people, is not present with them. Leadership that foregrounded emotional intelligence and agility, and above all compassion, would chart a different path."
There are some such leaders. Ironically, some of them that I have known were originally military officers. One of them said to me that his philosophy is "My ship, my crew, myself -- in that order." The search firms that manage administrative talent do not encourage this approach. I would also offer that the empathic leadership that you describe also requires some long-term commitment. It's hard for people to trust that empathy is real if they can't trust that people in charge are "of" that place for the long haul or have a direct stake in how things shake out.
Totally agreed.
And "strategic planning" in universities = BARF. I invite people in leadership to look at alignment--but that has to start with actually having values that you want to adhere to. If decisions are made to maximize bums-in-seats, or to maximize visibility, or grant funding or some other metric (H scores or whatever they're called), then we lose the humanity of education.
I enjoyed, if that is the right word, reading this post. I'll just pick up on a few things;
1. Positive thinking. Back in the 80s I attended a few workshops about how to attract money and friends. I wasn't too interested in the latter, except if they happened to be girls. Anyway, the trainer would always be upbeat and talk about reciting 'affirmations' last thing at night. Being a cynic, I rapidly came to the conclusion that the best way of attracting money was to run courses on how to attract money. I thought it was all a load of rubbish, too superficial, although after one of these workshops several people started a conversation with me on the London Underground, something that is unheard of because talking to strangers is simply not British. So perhaps there was a sort of residual effect. I think positive thinking is better than negative thinking in particular circumstances. For example, during the pandemic it was pretty awful, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least we have a relatively robust health system, so things could be worse.
2. Being asked to do ridiculous and pointless things is an occupational hazard when working for management that are either (a) concerned about what things look like or (b) consumed by 'visions' or (c) both. I am planning to write an article about some of the stupid things I've been asked to do, but in the meantime people might find this mildly amusing: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/6-ways-to-respond-to-requests-for
My default response is to say I'll do it and then not, although I don't recommend this approach as it could lay one open to a disciplinary procedure. It's because in my experience these people never follow up because they think they have God-like powers, so that just saying something will be done means it WILL be done. Or else they go on to their next big vision/initiative and forget what the last one was.
3. As for your daughter's reading, good for her. In England we have a government that thinks the only value of a university degree is whether or not it leads to a decent income within a couple of years, and a depressing number of universities where the aim of the so-called education is to tell the students what they think they already know, and disallow any dissenting views as that leads to people feeling unsafe, and could also put off future customers -- sorry, I meant students. Much of this was predictable decades ago, as I wrote here: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/the-likely-effects-of-the-commercialisation last June.
Your point #1 is closest to what Ehrenreich targets in her book. Positive thinking as a discipline, as a cultivated behavior akin to prayer, is quite different from optimism. It often requires willful denial. Jason mentioned a clear example in another comment of how assessments can be framed in this way: with clearly disingenuous or flawed premises. But the exercise of doing them is more the point than the integrity of the results. I'm sorry to say that at U.S. colleges and universities the things you outline in #2 (and in your post) are often tied to accreditation, and so simply demurring or pretending to comply, but not, isn't really an option.
I missed this in my original post, but if you'd like, you can sign up to receive Daily Motivation from High Point University, including a Monday video from the cult leader himself! https://engage.highpoint.edu/dailymotivation
Thanks for the link, Joshua. I have I intrinsic motivation so I might have a look in the interests of being more informed, but the whole idea makes me sick. I got into selling products as a sideline some decades ago, and the one meeting I attended, a motivational one, was quite off-putting. Re "This trick is achieved by embracing change and thereby finding the opportunity hiding in every crisis." Also encapsulated in the language of firing, like "We're offering you a career enhancement opportunity ". Cynical or what?
Who moved my cheese? Gaslighting literature :)
Indeed. 😨
Years ago I composed a phrase I thought was original with me: "Paranoia is a survival instinct!" Seemed funny at first, then went through a cynical period but is ending up as one of many guideposts. Thanks for the reminder.
Well said, Bob. Hypervigilance, as they say, is a symptom of PTSD. But I don't think many faculty are excessively vigilant in today's climate. If the threats are real, and if they keep coming for you, then it's not paranoia to be on your guard.
This is interesting, in light of the common discourse that if one fails at academia it is one's own fault rather than the fault of the system for not providing adequate support. This is compounded when one willingly (or unwillingly, but chooses to go) leaves academia.
This is very well said. A transactional, consumerist approach to education comes at a great price, and some of the biggest losers in this exchange are those who believe in it.
Thank you, Charles. As you say, there are many ways to define cost. My fear is that the harm done by chasing market trends -- trying to prove return on investment, cater to the "customers," etc. -- is long-lasting. I think about this as a parent: will my children be able to participate in the unending conversation in the way that I did? Or will others have decided for them that art and literature need to be "for" some other purpose, if they are preserved at all?
Local example.
About 1 in 4 of my students can passably read at grade level. This means that *any* textbook is meaningless to them, and that they struggle to even read assignments. The biggest problem I've faced as a professor is not the lack of skill, or some lack of academic ability, but their ignorance and unwillingness to pursue such abilities. At least locally, it's clear that the problem is systemic, as many of these students are still A and B students both in high school and college. It's taken me years to design a curriculum and pedagogy that takes the students I have--not the ones I want--and not castrate academic rigor (of a different sort).
Good teaching does require meeting students where they are, but I think honesty also requires identifying insufficient preparation when we see it. I taught at a private college that wasn't terribly selective, but that was reputable enough, and I was astonished at how many scholarship candidates I would interview who would admit that they had never read a single book cover-to-cover. These were folks who were traveling to campus with their parents in hopes of receiving an award for academic merit. It's not curmudgeonly to raise the alarm in such a case: it is being honest.
I am returning to your point, as my original response wasn't on point.
In my experience, honest identification of inadequate preparation almost inevitably leads to a hostile pile-on by colleagues. At least here. But I've noted that it varies quite a bit by institution.
What I wish my colleagues would recognize is that while it's not an individual student's fault per se when prior institutionalized education has failed them, that doesn't change the standards of academic rigor. But the problems I see in most of my students are deeper: they don't actually desire education, or conceptual understanding, but appear in my classroom because college has long since become the pathway to a job. They view me as an authoritarian gatekeeper, or they "get it" and learn to love the field.
Yes -- the lack of curiosity is there. I'll admit to having been lazy, myself, as a student. I loved talking about ideas, but I wasn't mature enough yet to love persevering through difficult reading, and so I cut some corners. What you describe is characteristic of transactional environments. I have a friend who teaches at a commuter school, and it's much the same. He is less kind than you and has begun to deliberately scare students into complying, which I can't recommend pedagogically, but which I at least understand. When students can't even be bothered to purchase the book, they do perhaps need to be confronted with how insulting that is.
Ah. I was always the voracious student and sent myself to boarding school through a scholarship. I dragged my parents along on that one.
My students already have enough fear, and I do everything I can to tamp it down, which includes putting on quite the performance. The issue is that students have such low reading and critical thinking skills that the minimum requirements to study philosophy at all become very hard and off-putting for them. That is, most of them cannot, in practice and in every day settings, distinguish between truth, belief, and knowledge, or persuasion and logic. And yes, they cannot be bothered to buy the book, so I have played hardball on that one. Maybe you'd be surprised at how many think they can wait until two weeks in to buy the book ... maybe not.
But, as I mentioned earlier, some of my local problems are due to the fact that so many faculty here at this "commuter school" are also teaching transactionally....
I concur.
In my case, about 1/3 of the students who start the course end up leaving or ghosting. About 1/4 ghosting is fairly typical for any liberal arts course around here. It's possible, given my lavish support, to do well enough in the course without being able to meaningfully read the textbook. But it takes real dedication to the supplemental materials (recorded lectures, third party videos, note outlines, written guides aiming to improve metacognition, etc.).
I'm quite honest with my students. It helps that my own upbringing was far more modest than most of my students. When I feel like I really need to "bring out the big guns," which I haven't done in years since I'm not convinced it is effective, I tell them what it's like to grow up amid rural poverty and see the despair in my friend's eyes as they realize, years later, that they're stuck in grinding dead-end jobs that could have been avoided. If nothing else, there's just been too much trauma the last few years to try that tactic.
Yup. This. My memoir is all about this--gaslighting and malignant narcissism in academia among other areas. Ehrenreich’s one of my resources--her chapter on her experience surviving cancer is chilling.
Yes -- I love her points about how anger can be purifying when it's justified. I had to cut some of that here for length, but she and Sandra Steingraber both suggest that their cancers were not genetic or accidental, but attributable to environmental causes. Hitchens also has a powerful cancer narrative, Mortality, which I often used to contrast with Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. Pausch is quite an exemplar of the positive thinking trope -- joking, doing pushups, easing everyone's discomfort with normality to the end. Students typically love Pausch until we start talking about how his particular cancer, pancreatic, enabled a guise of normality that many other cancers do not. When his Last Lecture becomes the master narrative that all people diagnosed with cancer must either align themselves with or oppose, it does real harm.
Care to explicate?
Or maybe link to a post?
Or that memoir?
Well I would, except my memoir ain’t published. Yet. 🙂 Maybe I’ll put up an excerpt one of these days...
What I do in the book is a three way parallel: my career as an adjunct, my marriage to a narcissist, and also my life in the theatre. It’s called Next Time, and a major through line is what you talk about here: that we’re asked to give everything, receiving nothing in return (not even a living wage), and if we speak up in defense of ourselves, we’re labeled as difficult, blacklisted, or fired.
Powerful metaphorical parallels, Jenn. There is some danger in overstating my case. But I do think the defaults for how executives are trained leans away from traditional scholarship, and that this ideological difference (when combined with a power imbalance) contributes to gaslighting.
Something you didn't mention, Josh.
A lot of upper administrators now a days go through the finishing school of an Ed.D. When I was in Texas, there was one in Austin that was infamous for pushing out socially networked Ed.D.s with little actual understanding of education, but who were convinced they were prepared for management. We have the same thing here in Iowa. A few years on state-level college committees showed me that it's pretty much a state-wide phenomena here too.
Qubein is a pretty anomalous example -- using the Dr. title after having only earned an M.S. is quite something. A topic of discussion among faculty at High Point, I would assume. Undergraduate institutions conferring honorary doctorates on commencement speakers is a whole 'nother sidebar.
But to your point: there are such schools, and they are in conversation with search firms. I participated in the search that brought a Dean of Faculty to campus, and our president (also newly hired) brought along a search firm. It was revelatory to hear the firm weigh in on which candidates were rising stars, etc. I wonder how many candidates are aware that there are consultants putting their fingers on the scale in that way. But the other takeaway was that these rising deans/deanlets did not really belong to their institutions. They belonged to this parallel class, which helped them burnish their own brand. The high profits that search firms see during this period of high turnover among executives is perhaps its own article.
And it makes higher education into trade school. Which--trade school is great, don’t get me wrong, but universities should be about critical thinking more than anything else.
I would like to see an except.
Yeah, I've been blacklisted for years. What really hurts about it is that people will privately agree with me, especially when I step up to protect others, but then gaslight me in public. For me, part of the life of the mind is excising double think, but around here....
Speaking of, 1984 should really be rewritten in the setting of modern academia.
Skepticism is good for the soul. At times in my life I was too cynical; I've always been skeptical. Regarding higher ed, when my alma mater, a small, state liberal arts college, goes awry, I point it out. Sometimes on a message board but often the old fashioned way: With a letter mailed at a post office. Maybe once every five years I'll get a, "I don't like the way you operate" comment from an admin, I hear it through the grapevine from my employee friends on campus. Usually I just get ghosted, no response to my letters.
I recently wrote a letter suggesting naming a building after a family that has done a lot for the school, and not just financially. I suggested a name change from something as simple as English Building. I mailed the stamped letters to the president and two other administrators. Of course I haven't heard from them, it would take too much to put in a little extra work for their six-figure jobs to actually connect with an alum.
Meanwhile, I'll poke the bear. Some think I don't like my alma mater. I actually really like the place; I want them to get better. The people staying quiet on the sidelines? I question their caring.
Excellent point. I left academe because I care too much. Very different from cynicism. I am, perhaps, cynical when it comes to the prevailing culture of leadership in higher ed today, for the reasons you mention and many others.
1. Had Bob Knight avoided his demise at IU, his book The Power of Negative Thinking would have been a good antidote.
2. The power of positive thinking is more ingrained in Christianity than one might expect--check out John Wesley’s works and the intersection of music and Methodism.
3. I may have missed it but it seems to me that tuition inflation has no remedy; thus, if the sky is the limit, then image is everything, and outward projections are rarely nuanced. See also rise of college sports, ACC, etc.
Good points. I've written a fair bit on #3, at least the sports angle. It's disheartening to read that my alma mater, Nebraska, just recorded record profits from athletics while slashing many academic programs. Athletics directly benefits from the academic reputation of the university and would not be what it is without that association, but it's quite clear that the business angle is now the first priority.
I wrote about this in October after seeing an ad for the University of Colorado that explicitly flipped the usual sequence: instead of leveraging the football team to promote the university, the ad (in my reading) leveraged a Nobel Laureate professor to promote the personal brand of the head football coach. Image is certainly everything for Coach Prime -- but even faculty at the highest levels of achievement seem to be jumping on that bandwagon. I don't get it.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/the-sports-boom-will-bust-universities
I thank you for this. I read this when it first glided into my inbox and it's been niggling at me ever since. It provides another few pieces of the puzzle of what is going wrong in higher ed. The part about negative thinking landed hard, because I've experienced the gaslighting. I keep wanting to find the box cover of this puzzle because I keep finding pieces in odd places and they fit together but it feels like they should form a more coherent picture by now (which could be due to my own deficiencies). It's a picture that I suspect revolves around the fact that educational institutions have qualitative rather than quantitative goals and to teach how to think rather than what to think. Or maybe those are simply two more pieces of the puzzle of the picture that I cannot see clearly as a whole.
I'd like to cross-post it to my humble newsletter, if you don't mind (I hope you won't).
Thank you, Jeanne. If I had that box cover, I might not be still writing about these things a year after launching this series! Please feel free to cross-post if you think others will find it useful.
This is a lot, and I mean this as a compliment. My head is swimming. My colleagues need to read this article! Where I work, we are beset by all of these things -- toxic positivity (“faculty need to raise morale; misery is catching; come to our events we worked so hard to plan!; Deans, tell your faculty they have to attend Convocation” etc); gaslighting; fly-by administrators; a failed “strategic plan” implemented by a tourist president who beat the average tenure of such folks; a theocracy embedded in Christianity (but we are an unaffiliated college); and...the junior high-ification of our students, staff, and faculty. It feels like pain to work here, like a primally deep pain.
What you wrote about the lack of curiosity, intellectual interest, humility (“vision”), and wholesale lack of awareness of what good professors actually do with ourselves inside and outside the classroom...these things are part of the pain. There is a corporate overlay to the college and its administrators’ fantasies about ‘the point of college.’ If it’s not ‘give the customers what they want’ it is ‘give me what I want so I can hopscotch to my next job.’
The only thing missing from this superlative article is the nefarious corporate context, wherein board members’ buddies provide outsourced contractor services to colleges who have fired employees. And admins hire their friends to come be ‘thought leaders,’ which is like saying ‘we’ve hired a chef who specializes in cotton candy.’
I need to go look for a real job....
Based on your comment on the Friday post, I thought this one might resonate. But it's too bad that it does. At least your president has not authored a book titled How to Get Whatever You Want? :)
But, seriously, your point about nepotism is an area worth pursuing. I know that many of Trustees at my former employer try to boost the school in good faith. Those in media try to use their platform to feature the school, and that's all fine. I'm not sure the extent to which those relationships work in reverse: if the school hires companies run by Trustees or contracts with businesses referred by Trustees. There could be a good muckraking article there, if one could find evidence of such a pattern nationwide.
Popping in to say that your daughter would LOVE the musical Hadestown if she hasn't heard of it already!
Thank you! We’ll check it out.
Regarding the positive thinking of higher ed, the constant begging for donations saying it will uplift our wonderful only-place-in-the-world campus, here's the reality: My alma mater has had 5 presidents in 10 years, guessing more provosts in the same time, five athletic directors in a decade, numerous deans every couple years. These people don't care about the school, yet they want me to wear my passion for ol' alma mater on my sleeve? As the new Vice President for student engagement or something like that bored me with her speech at an outdoor winter presentation this year, I was wondering just what in the heck she does why do they constantly hire 6-figure administrators while their enrollment is down 7% from last year? They still don't get the disconnect on finances as noted in a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article quoting my alma mater's latest president.
Wow -- that's a lot of turnover. The president and dean at my former employer are beating the averages, but not because they are beloved. The faculty was smacked down by the Board after trying to express concerns through a series of resolutions (not quite votes of no confidence, but clear expressions of unrest). During that uncomfortable time, I requested and was granted a private meeting with the president, and he told me two things that shocked me into silence. First, "I could get another job tomorrow." Good for you if it's true, but it's not true for most faculty, so it's an incredibly tone deaf thing to say. And the most telling one, "I am not 'of' [this college]." I still am not sure why he told me that, but it revealed a great deal. This is partly what I'm getting at with the flaws in strategic planning. Most of the folks at the top are pretending to be "of" that place when, in their heart of hearts, they think the place is beneath them. Many of them do their best to trade up when given the chance. The Chronicle typically does not publish op-eds by college presidents because they are so clearly self-serving, but Inside Higher Ed does -- they published one recently by the president mentioned here, who claims to be voluntarily taking the "long view" of the presidency...after saying what he said to me.
If you want another example of absurdity, this op-ed was published by an administrator masquerading as a faculty member (or at least not admitting to being an administrator). This is gaslighting at its finest, because it came during a time when we were being pressured by the admin to cut majors, ostensibly to alleviate budget woes, but really to push people out (I was one who voluntarily left after that). So it's not that majors are being cut, it's that we're trying to embrace Rousseau's social contract. I think Inside Higher Ed published an anonymous letter to the editor in response to this, but the fact that it's still up on their pages -- despite the lie having been exposed -- really says something about their priorities.
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/06/10/faculty-member-considers-his-professional-identity-light-his-institutions-academic
The comments from your former president are indeed tone deaf, and quite arrogant. I don't understand the last 25-30 years fascination with administrative overflow. While colleges cut majors, they add administrators. It makes no sense to me.
Many of my former classmates recall the great profs they had, funny how not one of them mentions any administrator.
My snarky/funny/interesting Humanities and Social Sciences professors cared much more for the university than the fake Pollyanna adminstrators. The admins come and go every few years; most of my profs taught at the school 25-30 years before retiring there. They loved the institution much more than any administrator, they were just skeptical enough to call out the higher ed foolishness when it came their way.
That column (that you linked to) is such ‘good’ gaslighting...I’m speechless.
I found much to nod along to in Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" during my time served.