There’s one line in the student’s email that we keep coming back to in the midst of it all, however: “this feeling is not simply an unavoidable consequence of the pandemic.” We zero in on the double negative—“not unavoidable”—a suggestion that there’s nothing necessary or given or inevitable about the toll the shutdown has taken on all of us. It could have gone another way, any number of other ways. For some of our students, it has gone another way. For some of our students, the shutdown has served as a source of relief and liberation, an escape from an increasingly exhausting and soul-sucking grind. For some, who struggle with social anxiety or depression, who are tired of a lusterless classroom dynamic, who question the worth of the education they’re paying so much for, the shutdown has provided a chance to finally pursue their learning on their own terms. And so we tend to read into this double negative something else: however aberrant and unprecedented the catalyst for this screeching halt may be, it was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.
The Hypocrisy-Cynicism Complex
Two weeks before DePauw’s campus closed, the student of the extraordinary hats came to talk with me about their thesis. The premise of the thesis now seems altogether prophetic, shedding light on our shared sense that SLACs have been plummeting headlong toward a point of no return. Steve and I thought it deserved some attention in this discussion.
Inspired by the complicated nuances of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, this student conjured up a fictional world in which to play: a small liberal arts college of the future that is debilitated by nihilism. The dean (worried mainly about dropping enrollments and the hit the endowment is taking) enlists a philosophy professor, Walter Picardy, to pull the student body out of the dumps and help them envision another perspective. Through the medium of a radio broadcast, Picardy calls on his love of Nietzsche to rally the students (and himself), but in the process, he becomes more and more unsure of the way out. Hilarity ensues (sort of), but also dread. The cast of characters featured in the broadcast’s different episodes are modeled loosely (and satirically) on various characters and elements from Voltaire’s Candide. The dean is a version of Pangloss; the larger-than-life, bombastic, and egotistical music professor that shows up in the second episode is named Maestro Tronkh; the featured guest of the third episode is a professor named Martin, an educator who was once enthusiastic about and inspired in his teaching, but who is now just marking time until his retirement.
The penultimate episode features a student named Mauve. She’s not named for any character from Candide, so we can’t mistake her for a caricature. She is a member of a student group (she refuses the term “leader,” insisting instead that the group is a “non-hierarchical society”) that describes itself like this on the radio broadcast:
“This is a message of warning. … We stand as a front united against the tyranny of all authority. Rise up, students, and weaponize your anger for a cause that doesn’t pretend to stand for anything. The ‘representation’ that is our student government is a patronizing façade. Skip your classes. Trash your dorms. Vandalize. We are more than collective bargaining. We are the end of all things as you know it. Meetings are held on Sundays at midnight at the Student Union. Free pizza.”
In this satirical space, it’s easy to see the makings of the explosive campus dynamics that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. On the one side there are students who are exasperated with faculty and one another for their ham-fisted, archaic, and ineffective grasp of the intricate identity politics accosting these elite spaces. These students are responding to and reciprocating the antagonism and condescension that they feel on a gut level directed at them by faculty and administration. And on the other side is a faculty and administration that are too narrowly focused on their own pet interests and the college’s bottom line to create spaces of community and actual learning, too enamored of the sound of their own voices to listen to the voices of their students.
The thesis captures what we’d like to call the “hypocrisy-cynicism complex” that we fear forms the current culture of so many SLACs, the toxic distrust flowing from the top down and then all the way back up again. This complex includes the perceptions and biases with which people at SLACs too often approach one another: the suspicion (too often borne out) that administrators make decisions on a cost-cutting, rather than a pedagogical, basis, that time and resource-draining strategic plans are determined from the start, that the drastic and inhumane cuts across many college campuses are simply the result of the inscrutable visions of trustees, that students are just there for a piece of paper and don’t care about learning for its own sake. At a large number of campuses around the country, benefit of the doubt and goodwill are in rather short supply. SLACs say they want to be one kind of institution—places that nurture a love of learning, places that produce good and kind citizens, leaders, and entrepreneurs. They profess to value diversity and inclusion, equity, accessibility, risk-taking, and critical thinking. But they don’t enact these values. The students know it. We know it. And so, hypocrisy breeds cynicism, and it all undermines what we’re really here to do.
The thesis begins with this passage, the first of several reworkings of Nietzsche’s famous “eternal return” parable:
Imagine yourself in your loneliest loneliness. Aren’t you tired by now? Tired of bad faith? Tired of the same lies, repeated over and over? I’m not talking about lies like “‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it to class, I was feeling sick,” or, “Why yes, I am proficient in Microsoft Excel.” I’m talking about lies that kill truth. Lies that have existed forever and have been spoken so long that they’ve become the new reality. Maybe you’re aware of these lies; but actually realizing their exposure would be so devastating that you’d rather be complicit and miserable. It’d be nice if we could take up arms, wouldn’t it?
So many of us who teach at small liberal arts colleges are tired of bad faith, of the lies that have become the new reality. But we also share the extraordinary sense of loss that being ripped from our campuses represents. It’s a deeply ambivalent space, to feel both the promise of the residential model—to have experienced the magic that can and does happen on these campuses where people are living and learning together—and the profound disappointment that we’re not living up to our full potential. Not by a long shot.
Chain-Sickness
Before the shutdown, when this student came to talk with me about their thesis, it was because they were feeling a sense of resignation and dissatisfaction with the writing of the thing, a sense of being hemmed in by the conventions of the process to produce something that fit neatly into disciplinary boxes in ways they didn’t want to have to make them fit. They were right to feel this way. The thesis defense meeting made clear that the other members of the committee were expecting something far more conventional. They had trouble entering into the world this student had created, despite its bearing such a resemblance to our own, and despite its capacity to provide lessons for how we might address the toxic culture in which we find ourselves. On this side of the shutdown, through the lens of that push and pull between passion and its dampening, this student was more clearly able to articulate the source of that resignation and dissatisfaction. The student described it as the “apathetic masochism” of higher education. “We’re taught to be embarrassed about our love for our subject,” they protested:
We’re taught that we are supposed to put meaning and joy aside in the pursuit of ‘knowledge.’ What I most wish I had experienced in college was a full-on commitment to the mission. … I keep thinking about what will need to happen for everything to come to a stop. I don’t WANT school to end, I really don’t think most people should have another line cut off. It reminds me about Nietzsche’s chain-sickness. At this moment, I think chain-sickness is better for my authenticity than loneliness.
This