Month: January 2021

Higher Education, Hope, Resilience

Spring into Action

Missy Alexander

This week is the start of WCSU’s spring semester, and I am excited. We have faced the hurdles that all campuses have faced in this COVID-19 environment. We now have a multitude of teaching modalities, from face-to-face to the myriad possible combinations of hybrid and online. Our safety measures on campus proved very effective in the fall, so we will continue them this spring, with an increase in testing and a continuation of masks and reduced classroom capacity. Our students and faculty appear to have adapted to online advising, and we continue to try to drive our students to the academic and social supports that we are offering online. In short, we have learned from our experiences last fall and we are ready dive into spring, better informed and with new insights.

Even though we must start online so we can safely bring our residential students back to campus (we move to the blended learning environment next week), I still feel that wonderful sense of excitement and optimism that comes with the start of a new semester. That feeling that once came from the smell of new course texts and the smooth paper of new notebooks, now arises from a neatly organized calendar, a full schedule of meetings, and the hope of moving initiatives forward. I love the constant renewal that comes from the rhythm of higher education. The rest of the world waits for New Year’s Day for resolutions, we get to do this every semester.

Nevertheless, I feel time slipping away. Oy! The spring semester, though the same length as the fall, always flies by. I usually describe this as the downhill slide to commencement. I suppose it feels faster because of the summer break at the end. Or perhaps it is because the many projects started in the fall are nowhere near complete. And since the opportunity for action is limited by the finite number of campus meetings that are possible, the time crunch is real.

How wonderful this urgency feels. You see it is a normal feeling. It is the usual, pre-pandemic sensation that comes with the launch of the spring semester. As we obsess about when vaccinations will be available, and what the prognosis might be for the next fall, it is easy to feel that this quasi-lockdown status will never end. But it will and we should be thinking about the world after. The good news is, once you recognize that, the wait for a more normal world doesn’t seem as long.

So, here is my to-do list for the next several months:

  1. Focus on equity in the curriculum. The issues driving the Black Lives Matter movement have not disappeared and they must not be forgotten. While there are many areas of the university that deserve attention when it comes to equity and inclusion, as provost, it seems that a thorough look at what we are teaching is a good place to start. It took all fall to get this project started, but we are off.
  2. Determine the right blend of online, hybrid, and on-campus offerings for a post-pandemic world. This is hard to do quickly, and I must admit we will only have a first draft of a plan this spring, but we need to learn from everything we just, well, piloted. We must identify and evaluate the appropriate variables to determine the right mix of learning modalities for next year.
  3. Prioritize investment in academic success programs. In what is likely to be a multi-year path to financial recovery for all of higher education, we must not neglect the initiatives that will best serve our students. It is natural to think that we cannot afford new things, but our data are telling us that we must intervene where students struggle. The task is to reimagine our constrained spending plans to meet these urgent challenges.
  4. Increase awareness of all the important work that our students and faculty are doing in the surrounding community. COVID-19 has provided lots of opportunities for WCSU to partner with health care, education, and other city services. We have risen to these challenges and worked with partners throughout. But we always do this, and no one seems to know. Now is the time to make our expertise and community engagement visible.

This is the short list of specific things to work on this spring. It may be short, but it is strenuous to be sure. I am diving in with optimism and enthusiasm, not just because of the renewal I feel with the start of a new semester, but because all of it has real value for students and the future of the university. There is nothing like working for things you believe in to inspire hope.

But that short list is just a small glimpse of my dreams for higher education. In reality, my list starts here: 1. Re-imagine the role and structure of the regional comprehensive university such that it provides opportunities for all learners and supports the informed citizenry necessary to sustain a democratic society. This is what I wake up thinking about every morning and it both inspires and frightens me.

But I am not afraid today. It is the start of a new semester. Students and faculty have returned to my inbox, if not my office. My calendar is full of opportunities to move things forward. And hey, there’s even a little more daylight to celebrate. I am ready!

equity, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cultivating Equity

Missy Alexander

As I awoke to the many tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. this morning, I happened upon an editorial by Martin Luther King III, in the New York Times. He draws our attention to MLK Jr.’s efforts to address poverty. With stark images from the Poor People’s Campaign, King III points to his father’s commitment to advocating for policies that lift people out of poverty. He concludes his piece with a call for the creation of a Cabinet position focused on fighting poverty and the urgency of passing a universal basic income. Amen.

Supporting access to education will never offer relief from systemic racism if people remain hungry. It is clear at every level, from pre-K to higher education, that people who struggle with food and housing and healthcare also struggle in school. Our claims of the benefits of education, in terms of social mobility, are limited by this essential barrier. While thousands of students do manage to earn high school diplomas and even college degrees while hungry and homeless they are tasked with having to work twice as hard as their better funded peers, usually carry greater debt, and frequently hover near academic suspension because they cannot keep up with it all. Succeeding under these conditions is nothing short of miraculous. It sure as hell isn’t equal or equitable. No, without an end to poverty there will be no equity in anything.

But we have been fighting, at all levels of education, for that equity for many years. Indeed, the Head Start program (started in 1965) is one such effort. Giving under-served preschoolers access to reasonable pre-kindergarten programs is a great idea. Indeed, it is so important, one wonders why we do not yet have universal pre-k programs.

We have free lunch in the K-12 system as well, and the importance of this was never so clear as in this pandemic. Many districts scrambled to get breakfast and lunch to families in need while schools were closed. It was an excellent effort. Still, I wonder why we ask schools to solve the hunger problem, when other family members may also be hungry. It is a burden schools take on, but it doesn’t feel like good policy.

We have Pell Grants to allow some of the neediest students to attend college at no cost. Well, sort of, because when we factor in the cost of food and housing, these funds are in no way sufficient. It seems like this program, though well intentioned, just masks the funding problem. If we had free higher education (instead of these last dollar “free” programs, that just play shell games with costs and loans), perhaps we could focus on addressing the real costs of college attendance.

I know, I have said variations of these things lots of times. Today, though, there is one tiny but significant thing I would like to point out in King III’s essay. He calls for the establishment of a Cabinet position to fight poverty. I agree, but I would like to suggest that we abandon the word “fight.” I want a Cabinet position to cultivate equity instead.

We have already had a War on Poverty, a War on Drugs, and a War on Terrorism and not one of them has been a success. Each one may have led to winning a small battle or two, but they never ended poverty, they never stopped the use of drugs, and fighting terrorism just seems like an impossible and endless task. No, we need a new metaphor that abandons the battle stance.

Lakoff and Johnson’s classic work, Metaphors We Live By, lays out the ways in which our metaphors shape our understandings of the world around us and the tasks at hand. Battle/war/fighting metaphors may be useful for short term struggles. They help build energy and bonding against the “other” at hand. But for long term thinking, well battles are too draining. We lose soldiers over time and without some clear wins, the esprit de corps wanes while the hatred remains. Ending poverty and supporting equity are ongoing and long-term. Wars and fighting will never suffice.

So, I am asking for a Cabinet position that draws on a growth metaphor. Let us cultivate the relationships and commitments necessary to build a poverty free world. Let us understand that poverty is a (the) root cause of inequity and examine all of the branches of our society that are contributing to sustaining poverty. Let us understand our policies as the life supports of an ecosystem that needs constant attention and nurturing, and plan for continuous review so that system never gets so out of balance again. And most of all, let us understand the fundamental need for collaboration, because nothing grows in isolation.

Yes, Mr. King, III, I agree with the need for this important Cabinet position. And I agree wholeheartedly, with your father’s statement that “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” But let us avoid the fighting and start cultivating instead. We have been fighting long enough. It is time to nurture that poverty-free and equitable world together.

Critical Thinking, Dialogue, Higher Education

The Trouble with Truthiness

Missy Alexander

When Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” in 2005, I had a good laugh. Indeed, it was at the high point of my laughing at the nightly parodies of the ridiculousness of the political world, seen on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were adept at selecting clips from news briefings and news coverage to tell stories of hypocrisy, absurdity, and outright lies put forth by, well it seems like everyone, but particularly conservatives at the time.

Those evening news parodies were an interesting development. Comedy Central was taking on the mainstream and less mainstream media, when those traditional outlets seemed to have abdicated their responsibility to get at, well, the truth. Mainstream media had become all that Neil Postman described in his classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Spurred on by the 24-hour news cycle and the profit-making imperative supported by the erosion of the Fairness Doctrine, regular news had devolved into soundbites with no analysis and lots of snappy hairdos. Stewart and Colbert filled a cultural void, calling out the media as much as the politicians they were skewering.

It was a deliciously sarcastic position and I laughed. But eventually, I stopped watching. As great as some of the follow-up programs have been with Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and even Colbert, slowly but surely my ability to laugh faded away. It just wasn’t funny anymore. My sense of humor seemed to be signaling to me the world that was to come–one devoid of any commitment to reason and facts at all. In other words, I left that wonderful world of parody before 2016. Apparently, I could see what was coming.

Now here we are at a shocking moment in US history and all I can think about is the notion of truthiness.

Truthiness is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

“Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1][2] Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.”

Yes, I chose Wikipedia over Webster’s in deference to the original presentation on The Colbert Report, in which books were called elitist (I can still laugh at some things).

Now the joke was meant to name a practice that was (is) widespread, calling it out so we might guard against it, or at least notice it. (I take the liberty of claiming that intention, but I think I have read the strategies of irony correctly.) Unfortunately, what seems to have happened is a complete embrace of the “gut feelings” that Colbert cited in his announcement of this word in 2005, without any desire to consider the (f)actual arguments that might undermine those feelings.

The trouble is the joke only works if there is a commitment to the habits of logical reasoning. As any media ecologist can recite, while the roots of good argument are debated in Ancient Greece, the habits of logical reasoning for the masses emerged with mass literacy and mass education. Moving away from mass literacy and toward television and social media has undermined the very idea of logical arguments and makes seeking truth look silly. Indeed, truth is almost impossible to pursue in a world where there is no time allotted to evaluation. Instead, we focus on the new, the next, the statement devoid of context. As we replaced sustained arguments with decontextualized “conversations” that take place in brief videos, inflammatory Facebook posts, and impulsive tweets, we made truthiness the standard, not the joke.

We are in a pickle folks because truthiness is no way to run a democracy, fight a pandemic, or resolve injustice. Something’s got to give.

Now don’t get me wrong, we have always operated on the gut feelings that trigger truthiness. It is the starting place for most (all) opinions. We all live in a worldview that shapes those gut feelings, and they are not without biases. These worldviews shape everything from food preferences to ideas about international political structures and there is no sense in fighting those initial feelings. They are, indeed, our reality. No, I am not trying to suggest that our connection to our gut feelings is new, nor are they without value. However, I am suggesting that what happens next is what matters.

What happens next must be a commitment to the thorough investigation of those feelings. Those investigations must include a well-developed understanding of logic and contradictions. They must include at basic understanding of statistics and probabilities. It must have a foundation in how science works. It must engage the moral frameworks that are shaping how we see the world. And yes, it must include some clarity on how political systems work.

It should not surprise anyone that what I am calling for is a commitment to education that truly weaves together the arts and sciences that make up our understandings of the world. In the last week, there have been many voices in higher education who are reminding us of the value of the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular. I don’t disagree, but I want to be just a little more specific. We need to commit to direct instruction in logical reasoning.

In a world that is no longer situated in the assumptions of a literate culture and its habitual search for coherence, higher education must teach these skills directly. We cannot assume that our students are getting the structure of arguments through our investigations of texts or through their exposure to laboratory procedures. No, we need to lay the foundations of logical reasoning as deliberately as we once taught sentence diagramming.

Education must commit to exposing and wrestling with contradictions in every class. We need to dig into the limits and the strengths of making decisions on probabilities wherever those decisions are present. We must not shy away from engaging disagreements in moral codes, but rather hold them up as questions to be wrestled with. We need to fully commit, not just to offering a liberal arts education, but to seeing that our students are developing the habits of mind that such an education should foster.

There is nothing new here. It is a classical liberal arts education that I am describing. But the context has changed, and the urgency of the understandings we hope to foster is clear. So, I’m giving up truthiness as a joke. It isn’t funny anymore. It represents an abdication of responsibility for seeking actual truth. But it is a useful idea and it neatly describes all that has occurred in the last week.

So let’s not laugh about truthiness anymore. Instead, I am asking all of us to commit to using the idea of truthiness to start the important conversations about logic and belief that must be the point of education. I am also asking us to be accountable for the changes we must make to our curriculum to make it happen. We can do this, and we must. The future of our country is at stake.