Jonathan Malesic argues that the key to college is simply “a willingness to learn”.
I’ve had my doubts about pinning issues with student success on motivation.
In a basic sense, of course Malesic is right—and I particularly appreciated his point that students who think they know everything already are never going to be able to learn.
That applies to more than students, however. “Knowingness” is strongly performed in the academy: in our writing, in our arguments with each other, in our institutional presence. The one place that some faculty don’t show it, perhaps, is in their pedagogy—but even that is complicated. Sometimes showing a willingness to learn, a sense that the professor doesn’t know everything, unsettles or upsets students who expect knowingness. For faculty who are vulnerable to student evaluation—especially faculty who are subject to various forms of bias—that can be even worse. It takes a careful kind of discriminate judgment to know when to model not-knowing and when to go ahead and be as knowing as you’re expected to be. And this balance gets more difficult as you age precisely because as you know more, you are more keenly aware of the vastness of what you do not know. That awareness is not only hard to demonstrate in front of students who expect you to show confidence and authority but as many professors have observed over the years, it has a tendency to curdle up inside your professional sense of self, to make you feel less and less capable at a time when you should feel more serenely confident.
If we ourselves contribute to the problem of “knowingness” among students, then I think even more we contribute to what Malesic diagnoses as the second obstacle to students achieving that simple desire to learn, namely, careerism.
If careerism is keeping students from really succeeding in college, then this is to a significant extent something that higher education did to itself, or at least passively acquiesced to. Faculty grouse a lot about the career-mindedness of students, the demand for a “return on investment”, but see it mostly as a new problem inflicted on the academy by neoliberalism. It’s old and we are a part of it.
Think about the story that we’ve allowed to be told about American academia, that we’ve often told ourselves, in which the GI Bill and a massive influx of public funding after 1945 built a system of higher education that became the envy of the world and the central engine of social mobility in American society. This narrative has always been a trap.
If the socioeconomic structure of American society became more equal and a new middle-class became in relative terms far more wealthy than they had been before the Great Depression, this was not simply—or even substantially—because men returning from war were finally given affordable access to a university education which in turn gave them access to new labor markets.
Keeping in mind that no matter how we attribute the growth of a much broader middle-class (which did happen) in those years, we’re first off talking about white men as heads of nuclear-family heterosexual households, not “Americans” overall, the shift rested on much wider foundations than just “college became accessible”. It rested on widespread unionization. It rested on a tax structure that returned wealth to the society as a whole and on a strong program of public spending with meaningful social democratic provisioning. It rested on a general growth of both professional and working-class workplaces and on relatively few barriers to entry to any of them—in particular, on relatively limited forms of meritocratic screening and hierarchy compared to the 1980s and onward.
The problem is that in the 1980s, the transformations pushed by Reagan and his advisors brought an end to a society that worked well for many people in favor of a society that favored only a few. What higher education accepted—foolishly—in that transition was a retelling of the postwar story in which the GI Bill alone was the major reason for a wider range of American prosperity, perhaps on the calculation that this story would guarantee strong continued financial support from federal and state governments for both public and private universities.
Instead, as we should know by now, what it did is assign higher education the blame for a labor market and social order that has become vastly more forbidding and tenuous for almost all Americans, even those in relatively favored upper middle-class positions.
Once upon a time, students from upper middle-class families weren’t careerist in college because college wasn’t going to determine their access to future careers. College was going to determine their social capital, it was going to reproduce their cultural status, but not in and of itself provision a job. The child of a doctor or a lawyer or a professor might, of course, fuck up in college so badly (or be so unmotivated) that they effectively knocked themselves out of their social class position, or put themselves in a situation where they’d have to climb up effectively on their own. But if you secured your sense of identity, there was security in your future work waiting for you.
For students trying to move up the social ladder, college did provide access both to training for work and to the social capital that secured a place in a new social strata. And it often also facilitated cross-class marriages, as well social relationships to people from way outside a striver’s existing social network, which almost always provided a further toehold up the socioeconomic ladder.
After 1980, that changed to an accelerating extent: hospitals, universities, law firms, Fortune 500 companies—any workplace of any kind—became precarious, unpredictable, treacherous. Union factories where fathers handed good jobs off to sons and nephews were closed and moved abroad, or their unions busted. Professional workplaces got squeezed by absentee managers and shaken down for all the loose change under the institutional cushions. The big corporations stopped worrying about making money from their operations—and thus from the people working there in both the boardroom and the factory floor—and started prioritizing pleasing their shareholders and then after that doing the bidding of their hedge fund overlords. Which meant no jobs were secure and no achievable life provided an island of stability.
In that context, the GI Bill myth became lethal. Higher education was left holding the bag for all those other transformations and getting nothing in return for it but abuse and defunding. We now provide credentials that are necessary as a point of entry into a hellishly unstable, shifting and treacherous labor market.
And hence, it’s frankly kind of useless to decry “careerism” as a dysfunctional obstacle to student success. It’s not really something that we can ask students to simply ignore unless their trust funds are of sufficient size that they will never feel a moment’s insecurity. If we want students who are willing to learn, it will have to be a willingness that is compatible with “careerism” rather than wholly in the absence of it.
Image credit: Photo by John Salvino on Unsplash