Concluding My Chapter on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

This morning I finally wrote a draft of a conclusion to the paper that I’ve been writing on teaching as a response to a campus crisis. As readers of this blog know, this paper is destined for an edited volume on campus crises. Yesterday, I shared the basic outline of the paper with links to the previous sections on the blog.

I have to admit that writing this paper against the backdrop of increasing violence toward students on college campuses across the US has been a challenge. In particular, I’ve been struck by the lack of empathy toward the students (even if one doesn’t agree with their political positions). One wonders whether this is an indicative of how professionalization across the institution compromises how groups understand the range of commitments present across the campus community. My paper, of course, doesn’t really engage with the current events, but it felt necessary to at least acknowledge them in my conclusion. 

Conclusion

The students in these courses channeled their frustrations surrounding the UND budget into academically and intellectually productive activities. The publication of books, the coordinating of events, and the engagement with the larger campus community created opportunities for students to develop a more sophisticated and nuance understanding of the budget and bridge the knowledge and professional gap between students, faculty, and the administration. The impact of the course beyond the semester remains unclear. Administrators who received copies of the students’ work, were not particularly inclined to engage with it. One expressed some disappointment in the the students’ conclusions, but did not explain why. Faculty who received copies of the book generally viewed them as tokens or even novelties rather than significant intellectual interventions in an ongoing campus crisis. While students planned to circulate the book among their own social networks, these remained largely closed off to me as a faculty member. There is some evidence, however, that the students took their experiences in these classes with them after they graduated from UND. Wyatt Atchley, for example, made Wesley College the topic of his M.A. in Public History at North Dakota State University and has collaborated with me in subsequent publications on both the budget crisis and our efforts to document the now-destroyed buildings. While the continued interest of one student is suggestive, larger impact of these classes remains unclear. 

In some ways, this was unsurprising. On our campus, student activism is rare. Moreover faculty (and student) workloads ensure that outrage often offers a more convenient outlet than the kind of understanding needed to bridge the divide between professional administrators and the faculty rank and file in a productive way (although note Zerr and Gjellstad 2018). That said, interventions like these classes may offer faculty and students firmer ground from which to critique administrative processes and the structures that produce them. 

As I write this conclusion, campus protests over the Israeli invasion of Gaza have turned violent evoking the fraught campus politics that inspired the teach-in movement and inspired a generation of campus activists. Amid this crisis, divisions across the campus community have created situations which have taxed our collective capacity for empathy and understanding. Divisions without our institutions, forged by a half-century of professionalization, specialization, and competition on campuses has compromised our ability to respond to campus crises, by assuming adversarial or, at very least, incommensurate perspectives across the institution. I grounded my contribution to this volume on the assumption that these divisions require subversive practices which will allow students and faculty to critique and even participate more thoughtfully in the decision making process. Perhaps this hoped for outcome misses the mark. Maybe creating spaces for cross-campus dialogue during crises are more important for creating institutional (or even community wide) reserves of empathy and compassion during fraught times. In the end, despite the anxiety that our budget crisis created among students and faculty alike, the stakes were comparatively low. The current campus violence, however, reminds us that the next crisis may not be. Understanding the diverse positions and responsibilities across campus and recognizing the potential of teaching as a space for cross campus dialogue may help us develop alternatives to violence when the next crisis occurs.