A Tough Love Letter to Higher Education from a Radical Student Affairs Lens

I used to believe in higher education as a path to become a better human. I still do in some respects, but I’ve learned to seriously challenge that attitude. I used to also believe in the university as a way to get a better job, something I’m slowly realizing is more complicated than even what the data tells us about college to career pipelines. However, aside from career attainment or knowledge production, higher education is actually a really violent thing where students face dehumanizing practices like high-stakes testing, racist curriculum, isolation and mental health barriers, assault and harassment, and more. It was, is, and will probably continue to be a violent place for humanity in whatever form it takes. At the same time, the university is this sacred space where community is built and strong relationships stand the test of time, but I’m leaving. After ten years in the field, I have decided to close a chapter on university life and would like to share a few words on why, the need for a (re)design of higher education, and where to next.

Why I’m Leaving

Recently, I’ve decided to join the exodus of educators and practitioners from higher education and student affairs (HESA). Unlike most of my peers, I’m leaving out of joy and love from the last position I held on campus as a program director with a social impact office. That department held space for study, critique, organizing, and designing amazing programs on campus. The job prior to that was pure hell, which led me to a really hurt place where I eventually hurt others along the way, but that’s an article for another time. I love my former position, but there’s a reason why I’m leaving. 

First, I had a pretty incredible experience with two student organizers (Bre Lambert and Priscilla Villasenor) in our office where we decided to respond to an incident in Utah where a young autistic Black girl, named Izzy Tichenor, took her own life because of racial and disability discrimination from the school. We worked with Black Lives Matter Utah (huge shoutout to Rae Duckworth!) and organized a vigil where a ton of community-members showed up and several news outlets were present as well. That night, I found a quiet spot in our office and cried as this wave of peace came over me and this whisper of a thought spilled into my mental saying, “you can walk away now.” Second, there came a stark realization that the university was not the only place to do good and that it is ultimately NOT the revolution so many of us need. 

So that’s why I’m leaving, but I also plan on remaining in some way as an adjunct professor, because colleges (even public ones) hoard a ton of wealth and resources, and it’s important to (re)route resources to our communities in need, but leaving full-time employment from the university as an educator and practitioner in HESA doesn’t mean I no longer care what happens to the college. I care deeply about knowledge and learning and couldn’t give two shits about improving a system whose purpose is to mass-produce workers for a dehumanizing economy or force people to undergo academic processes where they don’t feel like they’re smart enough. So making our higher education systems better is really just improving the way they pursue these purposes. Instead, I’m talking about burning this F’er down, taking the time to start over, and (re)imagining learning and knowledge for our many communities.    

The Need to (Re)Design 

Okay, I’m not talking about literally burning the university down. Actually, it’s kind of doing that on its own. Scholars argue that the university is already beyond reform and that its decline is a sign that we ought to hospice it towards its death, but in doing so we can also take the time to (re)design learning and knowledge as written in the following by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, and Dallas Hunt from the University of British Colubmia:

…hospicing would entail sitting with a system in decline, learning from its history, offering palliative care, seeing oneself in that which is dying, attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums, incontinence, anger and hopelessness, ‘cleaning up’, and clearing the space for something new.

Creating a new system is so important for our current world and future, and it takes all hands on deck to let something like the university die and work collectively to (re)design higher learning. While most people point to faculty and students for this rebirth or transformation, very few dialogue with us as staff. A limited number of people know who we are as educators and practitioners in HESA, unless those individuals are high-profile administrators or the president of the university. Nobody talks about the advisors, custodians, coordinators, program directors, or landscapers and so on. Everyone talks about faculty and students as the modes of change for the university, but there’s a whole labor-level to the university that often goes unrecognized, and what folks hardly understand is the tension we face as educators and practitioners in HESA of being in a position to advocate for students in our care but work with the demands of mass-producing degrees, which contradicts the time necessary to work with each student the way we ought to. 

My own experience at the university has been varied depending on the area I worked in. I’ve worked in admissions and recruitment, enrollment and registration, financial aid, grants and outreach, and student life. While some have been better than others, the systemic reality of the college plays out in all of them: individualistic, white supremacist practices, Euro-centric knowledge production, exclusive to minoritized and racialized communities, commodified learning, and so much more. That’s not to say that if you are an educator or practitioner in HESA that you have not done good. I have no doubt that the folks at HESA are committed–well, some of ya’ll might be–to the overall well-being of students. But that doesn’t erase the fact that you work in a system that maintains violent systems and that your role is more or less compromised. Sara Ahmed states that “When your task is to remove the necessity of your existence, then your existence is necessary for the task.” Whether we like it or not, our roles maintain the systemic nature of higher education. In other ways, our roles also indirectly feed the larger machinery of violence and oppression across the world. If you don’t believe me, read about the beginnings of U.S. higher education being directly linked to the transatlantic slave trade and genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, or about scientific racism and how that’s still a thread of thought amongst white supremacist ideology and how the university fueled it, or the pursuit of hyper-capitalism in all threads of society (the term is neoliberalism) and the desire to subversively convert all things public into profit that began with business schools in Chicago in the 60’s. The university has a role in all these things and so much more, so a (re)imagination of the university is needed more than ever. 

Neither Looking to the Past or Present

As the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are felt across all of higher ed, renewed interest has begun in how we transform or (re)design the university. While these demands are critical to our future, the progressive Left points to what most higher education scholars refer to as the Golden Age of the modern university. This Golden Age ranged from the 40’s to 70’s where federal support and state funding were at all time highs and did lead to strong academic and societal outcomes like innovations in the sciences, technological advancements, and new theoretical developments across the humanities and social sciences. However, this strong public initiative towards higher education wasn’t as human and environment-centered as we claim. Public systems still carried forward agendas like national superiority, white supremacy in education, unhealthy relational dynamics, and they still do. That doesn’t mean the inevitable corporatization of the field isn’t a threat either.  

In most meetings I’ve had with tech-affiliated individuals, they would be quick to point out the necessary interventions of private industry in higher education, but that’s a complex argument. Yes, new technology is needed in higher learning to improve access to content and expand modes of instruction, but that isn’t the same as an all out invasion of the private industry in higher education. Tech is needed, but not the prevailing logic of corporate infrastructure, because that creates a dynamic where if something doesn’t seem profitable then it's eliminated. A university president with strict allegiances to the corporate world could easily disappear the arts, humanities, social sciences or even trades that do not offer a strong profit margin within the institution. It doesn’t matter if it could be a form of public good or provide a foundation for healthy ethics in broader society. If it doesn’t recruit students, then it doesn’t make money, so we get rid of it. 

Some people argue that wise business or ethical private industry doesn’t operate that way, but it does on many occasions–like Amazon managers demanding people finish their shifts in the middle of a tornado–and universities are quick to disappear programs that trustees and other power-wielding stakeholders deem not profitable. Specific to educators and practitioners in HESA, that same corporate logic demands we give up our souls to the benefit of students while having little to no support for ourselves. We are worked to the bone, offered very little income, and told to keep going. At my institution we call this exceptional care, something that most of us now scoff at and respond, “care for who?” Megan Krone writes the following that reflects this lived reality:

In early 2020, the deep-seated, structural problems with student affairs could no longer be hidden behind the students — because the students just weren’t around. For over a year. There has been nothing to distract from the crush of the system and people who uphold it…It also became clear that no matter how much loyalty our institutions demand of us, they will never be loyal to us in return. Student affairs professionals are supposed to be in it for the love of the ‘calling’ and to serve students. Then, when budgets are cut, we’re let go like in any other field…We’re overeducated, overworked, underpaid, undervalued, and unable to advance…

The pandemic unveiled deep structural issues with the university and in the era of the great resignation Krone reminds us that there are explicit labor justice issues among employees of public institutions, particularly education. However, paying us better or improving the conditions for HESA staff will not create a more equitable or healthy system for higher education, because the systemic pillars of the university remain. To put it more concretely, Robert M. Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory…There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding…,” because the word systems gets thrown around way too much in too many settings. For example, like when we’re animated and excited about creating programs that challenge the university or engage some pretty radical shit on campus we say things like, “we’ve got to dismantle systems!” But this is often followed with pushback like, “well, that’s the nature of systems,” and we resolve to eventually repeat failed experiments that do not move needles of any kind. Personally, I don’t believe higher education systems will budge.

Folks will point out the major reforms that have happened in higher education such as initiatives like diversity, equity, and inclusion offices (DEI/EDI), but I don’t believe these efforts will do this either. Roderick Ferguson produced two marvelous works The Reorder of Things and We Demand to demonstrate how diversity and inclusion work had been co-opted by universities and state agendas to exploit representation to maintain the status quo. For example, has anyone wondered where the term inclusion comes from? Read up on the Salamanca Statement from 1994 and you’ll learn that these ideas spawned from integrationist and assimilation efforts during the 90’s in refugee-packed London. Indigenous political thought and the Black radical tradition also provide insights into the dangers of inclusion, because when humans are included within the nation-state (like the U.S.) they have to follow the color-code scheme of race. You are no longer human. You are a race. You are no longer your tribe. You're a singular nationality, American, hyphenated if you are racialized, African-American, Mexican-American, Tonga-American, Native-American and so on. Inclusion means you operate on the conditional terms of someone else, a state-like entity that says you exist, but on their terms.

Inclusion kills human complexity because this is how disruption and transformation are avoided like in the following: include to better accommodate and by accommodating you better belong and by belonging there is no longer a point to changing systems because you are now the system. I’m not saying good things don’t happen with DEI work, but they’re designed to spin wheels, to accommodate the demands of protest and eventually institutionalize any radical push for change. This is the nature of inclusion, to not trouble systems but to be better integrated with them and this is not a new idea. A great example is the complexity of representation, because one day you’re onboarding all these amazing Brown and Black educators and administrators who all of a sudden are actually groupies to hyper-capitalist and Western ideologies! No hate on these folks, but that’s the power of systems, and it’s complicated because representation matters in many ways but it’s also exploited to maintain the status quo! 

Looking to the Future 

The public university is in shambles as it faces an enrollment cliff. Students coming out of high school and unfulfilling employment are rethinking their participation in something that demands so much time, energy, and financing that they are seeking alternatives or just taking gap years since what they can earn at your local fast food is 2X higher than what we make on campus as university professionals and you know what, I wouldn’t listen to myself either in this current state. We’re also realizing that minoritized and racialized students are feeling the brunt of what’s currently happening in higher education, but that always seems to be the case because we keep working within the same systems. My personal opinion, crisis creates opportunity, for better or worse. Noemi Klein makes a compelling argument that systems of hyper-capitalism cause or exploit crisis for further financial gain and continued fiscal repression of working-class peoples. I think this is a strong caution and one that deserves attention, but I also believe crisis crafts action and compels thought-leaders from the ground and around to mobilize. 

If we are going to take the (re)imagination of the university genuinely, or better said, higher learning and knowledge seriously, then we need to engage the systemic reality of higher education and its complexity, that it is both violent and liberating while realizing that it will take internal and external forces to make it happen, and that these initiatives can no longer come from the top because they stand the most to benefit. Sitting with that realization grounds us with the understanding that we ought to not invest our whole selves into bettering or improving the institution. Rather, it ought to be a pathway to seek frameworks and practices that can be pivoted to outside of campus where we create spaces for relationships that engage deep study and conversations to theorize and wildly experiment something else. 

In that sense, I don’t care if the public nature of the university dies. Let it. Maybe that’ll force us to share knowledge within and among each other outside of structures and bureaucracies, particularly when minoritized and/or racialized communities can no longer pay tuition and are already not benefitting. Maybe micro-certificates, bootcamp completions, and industry apprenticeships take off and force the arts, social sciences, and humanities underground where they thrive. Maybe college programs find a complex middle-ground where the disciplines are not isolated by departments, but become multi-disciplinary spaces where philosophy majors utilize data visualization to better support their theories, computer engineers come to understand antiblackness and settler colonialism to craft ethical approaches to AI, or art majors are trained as public policy strategists and automotive mechanics pick up emergency medical training, and so on! I have no freaking idea, but something! Anything! Instead, political and scholarly circles have created ideological camps and weird political arguments concerning skills and theory when both ought to operate hand-in-hand! If a student chooses to undergo any formal education, they should do so with both skills and theory readily available, like back to my example of philosophy and technology. Cathy N. Davidson writes that university education shouldn’t be grounded on technophilia (complete adoration of tech) or technophobia (all-consuming fear of tech) and that disciplines ought to intersect and complement each other. Why can’t we do this? We can and ought to try and think up anything, but for some reason, as David Graeber and David Wilson mention, we’ve become stuck in our “modern” era despite a long human history of innovative and varied forms of social and political governance, which have led to diverse forms of learning and knowledge engagement. 

I can already hear critiques coming from multiple angles on what I’m proposing and rightly so. I don’t have all the answers, no one does. The material realities of working-class communities matter and despite what I said about college not benefitting us as minoritized and racialized peoples there is plenty of research to suggest otherwise, that when we go to school many of us do gain something and are able to climb the social ladder via educational opportunities. But I’m looking for something where ALL of us benefit, where every single soul and community has something that works for them and that isn't tied to a ladder of any kind and where people can just learn if they want, but we can’t do that if we remain thinking the way we are. Is it impossible? It might be. I like to be hopeful and if that erupts in my face and things go terribly wrong, I can live with that and I imagine many of us can, because we tried and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to continue and try harder. 

Where to Now…

My next steps are outside of higher education. After 10 years of working in various spaces of the university, I’ve decided to enter something similar but not quite the same. I’ll be working at a non-profit and am looking forward to the challenge, because it will be. I want to learn about how to take the things I’ve gained and transition them into other spaces that directly impact our many communities. That being said, my commitment remains to higher learning and knowledge attainment. I believe that leaving for a minute or two will grant me the time necessary to look elsewhere for frameworks and methodologies or ideas and tools that we can use to craft new visions of what higher learning and knowledge attainment could look like. 

To all my HESA folks, particularly the ones from minoritized and racialized backgrounds, I get it. I get why you’re leaving. Too many of us were and continue to be treated horribly, particularly within predominantly white institutions (PWI’s). So if you need to leave, I think you should. However, if education is still your passion then I encourage you to learn about your field, look into its history, and gain insight outside the field and read up on decolonial and Indigenous scholarship, learn about the Black radical tradition, engage historical texts of the many forms of higher learning that exist and have existed on this planet. Then connect with others in HESA (those who remain and/or have left) and organize yourselves into thought pods or spaces of community study. The senior administrators and well-known academics will continue to act as if they are the answer, but they don’t have their shit together either and they don’t have your experiences. History tends to be recognized from the top, but the bottom and around write and record their own stories as well. Your narratives matter and who knows when they’ll inform struggles unforeseen in the world of education, learning, and knowledge. If not now then I’m sure a few of our radical seedlings will have the courage to take on structures and systems and (re)make the world as we know it and to them I say, be human as praxis…