David Trend
What kind of problem stays visible for years and still has no name? The sorting machinery of merit accounts for part of it, and the refusals that machinery provokes account for more. Something still lingers in a room after both have finished explaining themselves. This chapter looks at the roots of the missing vocabulary, the background issues beneath the disconnect. Faculty notice it first as an odd kind of restlessness. Students seem distracted, but not in typical ways. They’re present in the room but emotionally absent. There’s an undercurrent in the group dynamic, which lingers despite best efforts. When asked about their feelings, students report being stressed or preoccupied, but nothing quite describes what’s going on.
At issue is something more fundamental in the culture of higher education. On one level, it comes from a mismatch between who students are and the character of the institutions they inhabit. Gone are days of carefree learners confident that college was a ticket to a better life. Today’s student population finds itself on contested terrain, while often juggling a myriad of responsibilities in addition to studies, facing a future in which technological change and attitudes towards higher education itself present novel uncertainties.[i] The National Institutes of Health has further documented how intersecting factors of financial insecurity, political turbulence, and doubts about college are wreaking havoc on student mental health [ii]
Shifting demographics tell much of the story. Nearly half of all learners now work full or part-time while at college, often caring for family members or dependents, while struggling to finance tuition and fees. Besides these responsibilities, this new population is older, more diverse, and predominantly female. Yet for its part, the university has remained relatively unchanged, it’s teaching practices, student expectations, and administrative policies mired in habit and institutional inertia. This dynamic creates forms of emotional dissonance in the learner experience of higher education. Feelings of inadequacy and disconnection grow more common among individuals, while also fostering a culture of collective exhaustion and alienation. Because the structural effects of the resulting “affective economies” don’t easily translate into conventional metrics, they are often misinterpreted as performance deficits or resistance, as discussed in the last chapter.[iii]
None of this is accidental. Campuses are functioning much as they were designed, many clinging to the status quo in the name of standards and tradition. Meanwhile, schools are sustaining an emotional/affective atmosphere that today’s learners find increasingly hard to tolerate.[iv] Colleges founded to educate young men from privileged backgrounds were built on traditional pedagogies and power structures. As student populations diversified, these feeling-structures were slow to change (if they changed at all), resulting in forms of exclusion and discomfort for anyone not fitting in. The psychological toll now seen in campus counseling centers is but one indication of the growing numbers of students who feel like outsiders on their own campus.[v] Recognizing this disconnect means taking a closer look at what happens in classrooms, as well as perceptions of how a putatively “normal” student experience is depleting an entire generation of learners.
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