Marjorie Hass, PhD[1]
It has become commonplace to describe American higher education as in crisis—politicians and pundits all seem to agree. But the nature of that crisis is not straightforward and its descriptions are often in conflict with each other. Higher education is at the same time said to be too expensive (charging more than a student can afford) and too inexpensive (not charging enough to stay in business). It is both too radical and it’s propping up an old status quo of race and class hierarchy. It is not adequately preparing students for the job market and it is creating workers who are demanding better pay and fairer working conditions thus undermining corporate profitability. The students are too demanding and not demanding enough. The faculty are too liberal (in their politics) and too conservative (in their unwillingness to give up tenure or adapt to new methods of learning). The students are the passive recipients of indoctrination and they are uncontrollable. The leaders are too corporate (running the academy like a business) and not corporate enough (running the business at a deficit). College is a waste of money and it makes sense to bribe your kid’s way in. The critics often appear to be describing a Rorschach blot rather than, say, interpreting a CT scan. In other words, the diagnosis tells us more about the doctor than the patient.
I believe that these ubiquitous yet chaotic criticisms of higher education point to a deeper and more widespread cultural problem of which higher education is often only a convenient punching bag. In this essay, I briefly describe the broader problem and explain why higher education comes to stand in as its center of gravity. But my deeper goal is to help faculty members and those administrators and leaders who support them consider how to meet this moment in the classroom. Our duty is to our students even when we and our institutions are under attack. What can we bring to our encounters with students that can best help them learn and grow even at a moment of significant cultural disruption? And how can we maintain a resilient and spirited commitment to this work when its importance is questioned on multiple fronts?
A Benighted Age
Many Americans know something is amiss. We feel a variety of symptoms: an intensely polarized polis, an increasingly out of reach American dream, and a loss of faith in the stability of our democratic. We know something has degraded and we intuit some of its causes—social media, the pandemic, a shift in the global power structure—but our understanding is still preliminary. From the midst of any historic age, it’s hard to draw firm causal conclusions or develop a holistic explanation. But we can try to name our situation and thereby collect many fragmented experiences under a single concept.
When Hannah Arendt looked at her own context—the immediate post-war twentieth century—she labeled it a dark time.[2] By this she didn’t mean only the obvious and unprecedented atrocities of the concentration camps or the annihilating power of the atom bomb. But also that these evils were made possible by a more pervasive kind of darkness—one in which individuals were no longer held accountable for their actions. Dark times arise, she said when “truth is degraded” and the ordinary person has so lost trust in any external value system that they no longer know how to judge their own conduct or that of others.
More than fifty years later, Wendy Brown used the occasion of the Tanner Lectures to describe what she calls the nihilistic times of the early twenty first century.[3] For Brown, a nihilistic age is one in which all values are understood as ultimately undecidable and people live within moral chaos. The symptoms she reports are indeed familiar: “the careless breaking of the social compact with others,” “indifference to a fragile planet and fragile democracies,” “normalized deceit and criminality in both high and low places.” Brown asserts that the unsettling dislocation of values brought on by modernity has metastasized today for reasons as diverse as digital technologies, the unraveling of the post-war world order, and the existential peril of climate change.
If modernity is inaugurated by the recognition that cosmological stories—the ones that give order and meaning to our lives—are beyond the reach of scientific confirmation, then we are the heirs of several hundred years of cultural and theoretical failures to provide an alternative foundation for shared cultural values. From the vantage point of 2024, many of us are rightly suspicious of nostalgic calls for a return to absolute values. Whether instantiated by a fascistic right or a communist left, the result of self-certain, utopian thinking in the twentieth and twenty-first century has been both bloody and ineffective. Neo-liberalism—perhaps the most practiced attempt to thread this needle and gather support from both liberals and conservatives—has proven to be equally unsatisfying. It turns out that markets can no more justify or ground eternal values than science can. Plus, the rent is too damn high!
Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han recently described our contemporary moment as a crisis of narration.[4] For Han, our age continues to be shaped by the loss of cosmological religious narratives and thus by a general lack of meaning and orientation. Even the religious among us no longer have an uncontested way to articulate the meaning of our lives individually or as a species. “Life in modernity is utterly naked,” Han says, “the coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other.”
Dark. Nihilistic. Post-narrative. Any of these might suffice. But I prefer the term “benighted” to name our current drift. To my mind, a benighted age is one in which the flame of enlightenment has been extinguished, leaving a hollowed-out sense of meaning and a feeling of moral chaos. For many, this leads to a sense of urgency and a call to restore absolute values. We see this in desperate calls for installing Christianity in the public square and an insistence on drawing a bright line between the saved and the damned. We also see it in the self-satisfied certainty of those who would substitute a new orthodoxy of values based on a reified split between oppressors and oppressed. In a benighted age, many are ready to welcome the fake certainty peddled by conflict entrepreneurs (to use Amanda Ripley’s evocative term),[5] conspiracy theorists, and false messiahs.
Another common response is the cynical aping of values in order to score political points or increase power. Think Donald Trump selling bibles or multi-national corporations assuring us that “Black lives matter” to them. For others—including for many of our students—there is a disengagement with the political realm and a retreat to a narcissism in which cultural malaise is somatized into depression, anxiety, or exhaustion. It might be a sign of the extent of our current crisis that many of us can manage all of this at once—holding uncritically to the values we have managed to salvage while critiquing the bad faith of those with whom we differ, and meanwhile obsessing about our individual moods and worries.
I have presented our benighted age using the vocabulary of theory, but we can bring it down to the ground of ordinary experience. We no longer have a shared sense of what makes for a good life. And this makes it even easier to see why the college campus plays such an outsized role in our contemporary angst. In the American mythos, a college education is both the pathway to, and the guarantor of, the good life. Whatever the components of such a life—material success, responsibility for the general welfare, professional accomplishment, self-knowledge, access to Truth—college is where you go to get it. If we no longer believe that these things are attainable or worthwhile, the enterprise of higher education is called into question. Given this, it’s understandable why our fiercest debates about values and existential meaning often get asked in terms of “is college worth it?” and “what is wrong with campuses today?”
All sorts of competing visions are telling professors what their teaching should be about. From one perspective the faculty are so tied to their politics that laws have to be enacted to prevent them from indoctrinating helpless students. Viewpoint diversity has to be mandated; divisive concepts prohibited. From another perspective, the job of a faculty member is actually to form the character of students so as to prepare democratic citizens by inculcating big capital letter values such as Civic Engagement or Justice. Still others are convinced that faculty members should stop with all the professing and simply teach the skills needed to get a job. And yet others are insistent that professors should prioritize each student’s individual and personal growth. There is no way to please them all.
We can, and should, push back on the critics with facts: a college education does indeed lead to a significant increase in lifetime earnings; few faculty are doing anything remotely like indoctrinating their students; public investment in higher education pays off for society. But in a benighted age, facts don’t reassure or convince. We can, and should, organize and act politically on behalf of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. But we also have to prepare for a long siege. And we have to decide for ourselves—individually but also collectively—what the right methods and aims are for our students and our institution.
This brings me to the question I am thinking about most: What is our duty as educators in a benighted age? How do we retain our spirit for the work? And how do we—in very practical terms—engage with our students in ways that foster learning, shore up hope, and prepare them to create a world beyond darkness?
Teaching in a Benighted Age
One of my mentors used to say that there are two kinds of faculty: those who teach subjects and those who teach students. A benighted age definitely calls for an emphasis on the latter. There is something absolutely unique, almost holy, about the classroom. In a world of few rituals, the classroom retains a sense of order. We gather at a specific time and place for a shared purpose. What happens there is structured—there is a plan for the day, a syllabus, learning outcomes—but it is also absolutely unpredictable. What questions get asked, what insights emerge, who learns something—none of that can be predicted with certainty. Each class period is an open loop, a unique moment in time, a possibility. An opportunity for grace.
If we are to thrive in—or even survive—this benighted age, it will be because we find ways to make these classroom moments matter. In that spirit, I offer three pedagogical suggestions for teaching in a benighted age: insist on presence, focus on craft, and honor complexity. Let me take each of these in turn.
Insist on Presence
One feature of our benighted age is that we are rarely fully present. My body is in the room, but my eyes are in Paris watching a hilarious Tik Tok video, and my mind is at my mother’s house as I try to decipher an ambiguous text she just sent me. I am here. But not here. With this as our norm, offering your full presence to students is already a radical act. Insisting on their full presence is even more radical. Make this a class commitment. When we are together, we will be here. No phones. No distractions. Talk with students about how foreign and hard it is. Everyone might need to practice it. Acknowledge the feelings that full presence brings up: anxiety and boredom on the negative side, curiosity and even love on the positive side. Call it an experiment. Whatever the nature of the course, investigate how it feels to tolerate the feelings that arise from full presence.
If you plan to teach this way, you have to be fully present yourself. This inevitably means you bring your vulnerability with you. When you are fully present, you find yourself unable to dissimulate. You can’t pretend you got the subject matter from the mouth of G-d. You have to share your own efforts and uncertainties. You find yourself exploring your own hunger to know, your successes, and your current failures. You show students the process of your own learning as a means of helping them investigate their own minds. You acknowledge the weaknesses of the points of view that you like and the strengths of alternative points of view. You talk to your students with honesty and you expect honesty from them in return. In a world of fake news, honesty is startling. Students can taste it, just as they can smell your hypocrisy.
I learned the power of honesty in my own classroom years ago. I found myself dreading paper grading. There are lot of reasons grading is tedious, but I realized that my antipathy came in large part because I was holding back the truth of my responses in an effort to be “objective” and “helpful.” It came to a head one day when I handed a paper back to a student and witnessed him glance at the grade and then throw it in the trash. I had spent most of an hour reading and commenting on the paper. I offered a million edits to make the writing better. I had red pen all over the place. He didn’t read a word of it. What a waste of my time. What a waste of his time. This was not effective teaching or learning. I vowed right then to stop responding to student papers as a grader and to start responding as a reader. From that point on, I was perfectly comfortable saying to a student, “I stopped reading after the first page because you have too many typos and sloppy errors. It was unreadable. If you edit it tonight and hand it in tomorrow, I’ll see if I can get through the rest of it.” I no longer read student papers with a red pen in hand, editing as I went. I read each paper as I would any other piece completed writing. And then I typed up a paragraph or two of genuine response. I told them when their writing bored me and when it excited me. I admired their insights, disagreed with weak interpretations, told them exactly what I thought. I felt liberated. So did they. And the papers got better now that students knew someone was genuinely present and actually reading what they wrote. When the world offers hypocrisy and outright lies, honesty is an incredible teacher. When distance is the norm, presence is powerful.
Focus on Craft
A second piece of advice for teaching in this benighted age: teach your students about the craft of practicing your discipline well and the virtues that such practice requires. When we can’t assume that everyone in our classroom shares a worldview or accepts the same overarching narrative about the good life, we may be able to get wider buy-in and deeper thinking if we start more narrowly with professional ethics and the character needed to do a job well.
Every discipline is more than an abstract body of knowledge. It also includes the manner in which such knowledge is established, conveyed, and put to use. We understand this intuitively when we think of a craft such as pottery or welding. But we sometimes forget it when we are in the midst of teaching more esoteric material. But craft is always there. For example, doing philosophy well requires that we approach opposing views with generosity, that we aim for consistency, and that we evaluate arguments but not the persons holding the argument. It takes time to develop a philosophical character. There are ways to practice and get better at it. There are good and not so good models of philosophizing such that we can find examples of excellence towards which to aim.
Aristotle spoke of phronesis or“practical wisdom,” that is the good judgment and right character to do a particular task with excellence. He showed us that craftsmanship requires more than intellectual understanding, it requires a way of being—of living—such that understanding can be enacted wisely and well. The current benighted age strikes me as the perfect time to embrace practical wisdom as a means by which we can deepen student engagement and connect them to a source of wider meaning and value.
Invite students to consider what it means to be a good nurse, or historian, or scientist. Practicing these crafts with excellence requires developing certain traits—certain virtues—that are both general and unique to this craft. It might be patience. Or curiosity. Accuracy. Creativity. Encourage students to articulate these virtues and to consider how they will develop them. What gets in the way? What keeps them from pursuing and achieving excellence? Invite them into relevant debates: Must a good therapist be compassionate? Must a good politician be honest? Must a good writer be consistent? These kinds of questions are invitations to ethical reasoning for students who may otherwise have no model of what it is to discuss competing moral frameworks with respect and curiosity.
At the very least you will be educating a generation of practitioners able to recognize the relationship between what they do and who they are, perhaps inoculating them against the worst temptations of a benighted age. And at best, you might be developing a quiet hero such as Otto Krayer, a German academic who in 1933 refused a prestigious academic chair that had been made vacant by the purging of Jewish professors. In his letter turning down the promotion, he wrote:
“The primary reason for my reluctance is that I feel the exclusion of Jewish scientists to be an injustice, the necessity of which I cannot understand since it has been justified by reasons that lie outside of the domain of science. The feeling of injustice is an ethical phenomenon…I therefore prefer to forgo this appointment…rather than betray my convictions.”[6]
At a crucial moment amidst dark times, when values were topsy turvy, Professor Krayer drew on his professional ethics, the values of truth he had learned as a scientist, to make a difficult but inspiring moral choice.
One other note, it’s likely that there are meta virtues applicable to every craft, such as caring and attunement to quality.[7] Faculty can work with you collectively to identify such general virtues that can be built into the curriculum as explicit objects of study and practice.
Honor Complexity
And finally, a third suggestion: emphasize internal rather than external conflict. We have all too much familiarity with disagreement between groups. Our students have grown up in a highly politicized world where otherwise benign consumer choices are taken as deep political commitments, where every issue and person are pre-assigned a narrow and partisan lane. Identity markers such as race, religion, ethnicity, or geography are taken as determinative (not in Alabama of course, where such an idea is illegal…). Disrupting this ubiquitous ‘us vs. them’ mindset paves the way for freedom of thought.
Without the guardrail of authorized beliefs, I have to think for myself. I have to make my own judgements. If I can’t assume your social identity exhausts all there is to know about you, I have to listen to you carefully in order to know who you are and what you think. One way to help students do this is to emphasize differences and disagreements within identities and social groups and not merely between them. Another is to find issues for debate and discussion that haven’t already been co-opted by a political party or other marker of identity. When I taught critical thinking, I used to use the debate about genetically modified crops as an example of a difficult issue we would work through in class. Because this isn’t a clearly partisan issue, it made unlikely partners out of students who otherwise might have thought they had nothing in common. You will have to work harder today to find unclaimed territory, but it is worth it in that it allows your students to approach an issue freshly. No one has already told them what they are supposed to think. They can learn how to reason for themselves. They can enter into the spirit of discovery.
It’s also important to help students see that conflict often starts from within. The root source of uncertainty is often our own limitation. The root source of hatred is often our own insecurity. We are complicated, divided creatures. We literally do not know our own minds perfectly. Much of what we do grows from unconscious desires and fears. We spend a lot of time projecting what we don’t like onto others and comparatively little time interrogating our own assumptions. Awareness can help mitigate the impulse to externalize every bad feeling and offer courage to investigate even our most closely held assumptions.
Importantly, when conflict does arise in the classroom, we must be prepared to navigate it in ways that add to learning. Acknowledging differences of opinion with respect matters. So does articulating the ground rules and limits for effective discussion. Our classrooms may be the first time students are confronting differences up close and in person. This is their moment to learn how to tolerate disagreement. Helping them see that it is not easy but that they can do it is essential.
Concluding Words
In this benighted age, we cannot offer our students the comfort of a single overarching narrative. We are a divided society. But we can offer them the comfort of companionship in this existentially lonely time. We can provide a space for freedom of thought to emerge. Most importantly we can encourage them to grapple with the present from a perspective of hope.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
- Presence: Where in your own teaching are you less than fully present? Less than fully honest? What would happen if you committed to a more authentic presence with your students? How do students avoid presence and honesty? What changes could you make to your pedagogy to encourage a genuine shift?
- Craft: How do your students learn the virtues needed to practice your discipline with excellence? Can you make this a more explicit aspect of the curriculum? Where are there areas for debate or for students to experiment with various approaches? Does your institution aim at the formation of any set of virtues?
- Complexity: How confident are you in managing conflict in class discussions? What would you like to do better? What ground rules do you need to put in place to keep controversial conversations productive? How are your students coping with uncertainty? How can you help them expand their tolerance for complexity? How can you expand your own?
[1] I presented this as a keynote address to a gathering of faculty members at a conference sponsored by the Innovation in Teaching and Learning Center at University of South Alabama on May 6, 2024. I am grateful to the Center’s director, S. Raj Chaudhury, for the invitation and to the faculty in attendance for the lively conversation.
[2] Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times (Mariner Books, 1970).
[3] Brown, Wendy. Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Weber (Harvard University Press, 2023).
[4] Han, Byung-Chul. The Crisis of Narration, tr. by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024).
[5] Ripley, Amanda. High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out (Simon and Schuster, 2021).
[6] Paldiel, Mordecai. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution.” (Schreiber Publishing, 2000) p.34.
[7] Robert Pirsig offers a master class in this kind of teaching in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Mariner Books, 2005). Originally published in 1974, the book continues to be relevant and inspiring.