Academic Doomscrolling, Old School Style
For someone who probably seems like an optimist, I’m actually a pretty negative person. When I began working in administrative roles (as Director of Undergraduate Studies for my Psychology department), I began to pay attention to occasional writing about Higher Ed — and when I stepped into my current role (Associate Dean in our Honors College), this tendency exploded. Being who I am, eventually, I get impatient with the relatively minimal nature of the news article, and I look for ways to a deeper dive.
So, I could have read optimistic tributes to the value of college, or accounts of visionary institutions such as Deep Springs — and some valued mentors pointed me towards highly useful, research-based volumes, such as Kuh and collaborators Student Success in College, which takes a series of case analyses of institutions that are doing better than expected by their students and draws some conclusions about ways all of us in Higher Ed might follow suit.
But, that is just not how I roll. Instead, I start with the old-school version of doom scrolling. Which means a lot of books, preferably in paper form, with very negative titles: Academically Adrift, The Great Mistake, Lower Ed, Excellent Sheep, Paying for the Party, Paying the Price…..and The Case Against Education.
My pessimism takes the form of a focus on identifying and paying attention to problems — that’s what the doom scrolling is about. In fact, my home discipline of Psychology has always noted that losses loom larger than gains, and negative emotion focuses and narrows our attention in adaptive ways. What this means is that the problem focus can be positive and useful — it can be a catalyst for innovation and making the world, or at least my tiny corner, better. For example, when I served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in my home department, the advising staff showed me that our policies about transfer credits, applied to the institution from which a large majority of our majors began their college careers, were creating inequitable outcomes. With support, encouragement, and collaboration from my own department and college, as well as the faculty and administration at the transfer institution that students were coming from, we were able to change our policies to make for a more equitable experience across our majors. I remain really proud of that work. So, doom scrolling — problem-focused thinking — is a key strategy for making the world better, no?
But, there’s a catch. All that doom scrolling is also a catalyst for anxiety and defensiveness, and one meta-problem, if you will, is that I’m not the only one doom scrolling. What if all this doom scrolling is putting many of us in higher education into a kind of defensive, threatened mode? In individuals, threat, and associated emotional distress, serve to narrow attentional focus, can heighten biases and hostility towards those who are not like us, and to paraphrase a beloved friend, serve to make even brilliant people partially blind. And, doom scrolling, as we all know, doesn’t necessarily go towards solving problems, but rather often ends in wallowing in them, or hopping from one problem to the next related problem until the whole of what is wrong in the world feels overwhelming.
By contrast, positive emotion and optimism may be associated with more novel and creative thinking (see also Broaden and Build theory). (Note that I’m skimming details here, and linking to more general audience sources). So all the doom scrolling could be making me narrow and defensive instead of creative and engaged, and as a collective, we might be all heading down that path simultaneously.
Worse, when the threats are real and sometimes immanent — because they are being read by policy-makers, politicians, and those who can impact the ability of public higher education to pursue its mission — we higher education people find ourselves in a defensive, threatened state of mind while simultaneously under real pressure to “innovate” our way out of it. And, the threats themselves, I believe, after a summer of old-school doom scrolling, are located in some fundamental disagreements about the value and purpose of higher education generally, and public higher education in particular.
One way to (over)-simplify these disagreements is to say they’re between a vision of public higher education as workforce preparation in an increasingly skill-based, technologically dependent economy and labor market, and a vision of public higher education as an accessible and inclusive cultivation space for engaged citizens who are informed, and who are capable of remaining informed in a world of rapidly accumulating information (and disinformation). Both of these purposes have long been part of what we do in U.S. higher education. But the contrast between workforce preparation and shaping an engaged citizenry is taking on new urgency as large companies begin to offer training for free, and to treat this type of training as degree-equivalent in terms of hiring (see this article about Microsoft and this one about Google), while public university funding is declining, student debt climbing, and there is much gnashing of teeth and wailing about the “return on investment” of education — defined narrowly in terms of earning potential, resulting in prejudice against “degrees to nowhere.”
One part of this development — Microsoft and Google offering training and non-college paths to employment — sounds, and can certainly be pitched, as good news. It could look like employers stepping up on providing specific training, and more opportunities for people earlier in the lifespan. It could look like employees having more straightforward access to training that is low cost, and directly tied to workforce needs. But it is also a move to bypass the role of higher education in training future employees of Microsoft, Google, and other companies — at least for entry level ranks.
If you think that we should prioritize a workforce preparation vision of the purpose of higher education in general and public higher education in particular, these are sobering developments. Why? I believe that a narrow, workforce preparation vision of public higher education cannot compete effectively with training programs offered by companies themselves. The latter are likely to be more finely tuned, brief, and efficiently conducted in part because of their very limited purpose.
But, if you think we are really in the “business” of educating people towards informed, engaged citizenship capacities, we’re still in trouble even though Microsoft and Google are hardly stepping up to take on that task. Right now, regardless of which purpose you endorse as most high priority in public higher education, the fact is that both those purposes are presently intertwined (bundled). And, as Thelin’s book on the History of Higher education reveals, that bundling has been part and parcel of higher education in the United States from the beginning. This means that losing a competition for one purpose may place the other purpose at grave risk — and that is all the more likely when the discourse about why public higher education deserves public (taxpayer) support narrows to issues of workforce preparation, whether couched in individualistic (you will get a good job with our degrees) or collective (our state needs people with more software skills) terms. And I’m not even getting to the point that educating informed and engaged citizens needs to be something we do for all citizens, not just the proportion who begin post-high school education, and absolutely not just for the proportion who successfully complete at least a 2-year, post-high-school degree.
Worrying about educating citizens, I have to concede that my academic doom scrolling is running right into the other doom scrolling that colors everyone’s days — the one where the difference that could be, and indeed is being, made by informed, engaged people committed to democracy is evident (sometimes by absence). Our role in workforce preparation is one thing; but our other role — the need for that is everywhere I look. Now, I just need to get myself into the kind of positive emotional space where I can think about that role in a creative way. And hope that the rest of those committed to this purpose of higher education — or indeed, public education more broadly — are doing likewise. I’m wishing us all alot of luck finding that positive space, because we’re definitely going to need it.
