thesis, it was because they were feeling a sense of resignation and dissatisfaction with the writing of the thing, a sense of being hemmed in by the conventions of the process to produce something that fit neatly into disciplinary boxes in ways they didn’t want to have to make them fit. They were right to feel this way. The thesis defense meeting made clear that the other members of the committee were expecting something far more conventional. They had trouble entering into the world this student had created, despite its bearing such a resemblance to our own, and despite its capacity to provide lessons for how we might address the toxic culture in which we find ourselves. On this side of the shutdown, through the lens of that push and pull between passion and its dampening, this student was more clearly able to articulate the source of that resignation and dissatisfaction. The student described it as the “apathetic masochism” of higher education. “We’re taught to be embarrassed about our love for our subject,” they protested:
We’re taught that we are supposed to put meaning and joy aside in the pursuit of ‘knowledge.’ What I most wish I had experienced in college was a full-on commitment to the mission. … I keep thinking about what will need to happen for everything to come to a stop. I don’t WANT school to end, I really don’t think most people should have another line cut off. It reminds me about Nietzsche’s chain-sickness. At this moment, I think chain-sickness is better for my authenticity than loneliness.
This description resonates with us and serves as a touchstone for our manifesto. Nietzsche’s concept of chain-sickness—the collective paralysis and resentment, and the crystallization and reiteration of so many practices of our own devising that are making us sick—provides a perfect framework. Chain-sickness grows out of the self-deception that the values and institutions that we have created are somehow given and necessary, eternal and transcendent. It festers when we forget that we have the power to change our values, when we view ourselves as powerless beings subject to forces outside of our control. The fictitious dean of the thesis points to the symptoms, as she sees it, of this condition: “[The students] meander about campus like sedated livestock; they refuse to do their academics, they overindulge each and every weekend just to make it through the next slog of a week! The students are sick.” In true-to-character, one-dimensional fashion, the dean places full blame on the students, lacking the larger awareness of how these symptoms reflect the manifold ways in which the system has broken down. Even so, the multipronged accusation has more than a little merit, as those of us teaching in SLACs can attest. “Work hard, play hard” has become something of a mantra, a catchall phrase used to brush aside the insidious heavy-drinking culture and its fallout—deaths, assaults, sexual assaults, date rapes—so prevalent on these campuses (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism), not to mention the fatigue, that sense of slogging through, manifested increasingly in the classroom. Six months before the pandemic, a student described it this way:
I think this semester I have become particularly bored with the monotony of school. While I have found my courses to be engaging, I have found it to be increasingly more difficult to reach a level of eustress that allows me to be productive and motivated. … It is not that I am unhappy or sad, but rather I am disconnected from my emotions and have found it difficult to always keep in mind the reason for why I am doing this in the first place. I am 19 years old, and, although I have career goals, I have no idea if that is actually where I will end up or what I will end up loving. While it would be nice to be able to jump straight into a career and figure out right away if it is actually something I am passionate about, our societal structure has made it increasingly difficult to do that. Within today’s society, it is critical that I attain an undergraduate degree before I begin learning about what I truly believe myself to be interested in.
This insight is from a student who still managed to create a breathtaking final project, a “This I Believe” statement (modeled on the classic NPR program), built on Tilt Brush, a virtual reality platform, that explored the principles and individual and collective implications of universal design. And yet she captures so stoically this sense of disconnection, the disembodied quality of the thing, the just-going-through-the-motions essence of it all.
This is the chain-sickness. We know our students are engaged, we know that they want to learn, and we know that they have the capacity to produce extraordinary things. We suspect, à la Lukianoff and Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, that a portion of the growing sense of fatigue in the classroom can be chalked up to the substantial identity politics often provoked on predominantly white campuses with a heavy Greek presence, such as DePauw’s, and to the sharp rise in mental health issues so many of our students are facing. Certainly, too, a good bit of it has to do with the vast range of learning styles, learning goals, and intended paths for life after graduation that are represented in any given course.
But much of it, we’re convinced, has to be attributed to the ratcheting up of the high-stakes testing culture that our students have been subjected to since kindergarten and the data-driven, assessment-and-outcomes-crazed, “college and career readiness” mentality that has overtaken education as a whole. Our students are collectively burnt out. We have burned them out. So all this talk about “student-centeredness” means nothing if we don’t hear what our students are telling us, if we don’t listen to what it has felt like for them to have been told for thirteen years that they are primarily valuable as data points, as cogs in a wheel, as a means to a bottom line. We reiterate this message every time we sell their successes on our websites, every time we shape the narrative of success along normative lines, and every time we tell students how they need to master the narrow subset of knowledge we have deemed most important for them to know.
The title of the student’s thesis we keep returning to resonates particularly in this context: “Become What You Are: The Student Handbook to Fighting Nihilism.” From kindergarten on up, our students have been told who to be and how to be, how to learn and what to learn. It is so rare for us to say that the task of higher education is to help students become who they are. Authenticity. It’s a clichéd term, perhaps as empty as “student-centered” in this self-help-saturated cultural moment in which we live. But so much of the brokenness, so much of the toxicity of the culture we don’t want to return to, is, we believe, a function of students who are not being authentically encouraged to become who they are, and of institutions that do not have the vision to become what they truly are.
As this student describes it, overcoming chain-sickness involves committing fully to a mission rather than succumbing to the “apathetic masochism” that these institutions tend to breed, despite their stated intentions. We think so, too. And we return to the email exchange between the DePauw student and the VPAA, which demonstrates with a raw clarity the pain of this chain-sickness, this sense, fueled perhaps by resignation, that the system we have created must necessarily continue in the same fashion, even if there are no good solutions. It’s the sense of being locked in. And as we see it, the Janus-faced nature of this moment of crisis presents a call to action for SLACs: to turn that chain-sickness into health.
PART TWO
THIS REALLY ISN’T WORKING
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