Against Student Success? No, I'm Not a Monster

Because I love my students, I am against student success. 

When I told a friend recently that I hated when I'm asked to do something in the name of "student success," she looked at me like I had just said the most blasphemous thing, and asked me, "but isn't that what we're all here for? Student success?" 

Let me explain. Of COURSE I'm a professor because I like students and I like to think that the work I do helps them succeed. OBVIOUSLY. It goes without saying. 

But I worry that institutions use "student success" to justify the demands they put on everybody who works for them. I worry they are taking advantage of the love we all feel for students. 

Work loads creep further and further into all the corners of our lives. I know too many colleagues who work upwards of 80 hours a week, and are just crumbling under the pressure. They love their students. When asked to do more, they are convinced that it supports student success, so they can't say no. 

Student success is hard to say no to. Who wouldn't want it? It can make all kinds of sacrifices seem worthwhile. "Student success" is used as the reason we are asked to increase our class size, take on more advisees, learn a new software for early-alerts, make ourselves compliant with loads of new pedagogical best practices, learn a new software for assessing student success, measure success better, do more, and more, and more... you get the idea.

Uwe Poersken, a Polish philosopher, describes "plastic words" as those that "silence" because they signal "science." That is, they are hard to say no to because they seem to be morally air-tight, unassailable, inherently good and right. Plastic words are "malleable" and have an "uncanny way" of  being "used to fit every circumstance. Like plastic Lego blocks, they are combinable and interchangeable."* 

In the context of my own work on a CSU campus, "student success" has become like "development" or "sustainability," a plastic word. It gets rolled out at administrative meetings and extolled as the justification for every decision, even ones that seem to undermine student success. Like, "In support of student success, we will need to go ahead and defund a great resource called the Institute for Student Success, which inspires the entire staff, faculty, and administrators to come together once a year to collaborate and get pumped up to start another year of teaching. Too bad it was working so well for you!" Or, "For Student Success (because that's all we care about), we will need to get rid of half our janitors."**  

"Student success" seems to be used for all kinds of purposes that have either nothing to do with student success (although most students I talk to really do feel that clean toilets are essential to their feeling of belonging on a campus, and can you blame them?), or they seem to even undermine it.

It raises the question, "who's defining 'success' here?" Like all plastic words, success is subjective, and without really clear, concrete, and narrow definitions, it can just swallow everybody up.

I hope it's clear that I'm not against actual student success in theory and as a worthwhile goal. I think people who pick it up as the beacon to guide all our budget cuts and programmatic decisions are genuinely trying to turn the university's focus toward students, in protest of the ways some universities have become about other things, like making money or building big (corporately-funded) research centers. 

I appreciate that very much. Yes, please! Let's get back to why we're all here: students! How democratic and grassroots. How... refreshing. I wish this is the honest motive. For the most part, I think most administrators who cut student success initiatives in the name of student success, as crazy as it seems, genuinely think they're doing the right thing. But you can see the plasticity here, no?

What I am against is how the term student success is used as a bludgeon to exploit my relationships with students to make me do more for an institution that keeps cutting resources. I am also against the fact that it seems like nobody sees how this is happening. 

It feels uncannily like... home.

The reason student success is so hard to say no to is the same reason I have a hard time saying no to my kids. If I love them, I will do all the things they ask from me in order to prove it. This assumption about maternal love is at the root of patriarchy. Exploiting maternal guilt is how the world goes round. Just like moms in the arena of domestic labor and "care work" don't keep score about how much work they do to care for their kids (they'd seem selfish and heartless if they did), so too are teachers and staff at my university expected to go the extra mile without protest, for love of their students. Why ever would they not? Don't they want success for their students? Tisk tisk. 

And, just like it is hard at home for me to say no to my family's requests for more mom, for fear they will not feel loved, it is hard for me to say no to any request made of me in the name of my students' wellbeing, happiness, good grades, full stomachs, feeling of being safe, access to educational resources, opportunities for mentorship, real-world applications of their education, fellowship, fun, clean toilets, and whatever else gets snuck under the plastic banner of "student success." 

There's an analysis of power here that I'm trying to offer up. Those in power use emotional appeals to extract labor. Such appeals distract us from the structural sources of the problem. 

I worry about being gaslighted for not caring about my students when there's an untenable structural arrangement that keeps pushing work onto the fewer and fewer people left standing after budget cuts. 

It's like we're in a boat. Somebody (I won't name names. No need to get nasty. It's complicated anyway) poked holes in this boat. Then, those same people started asking us to plug the holes with the tool they know we will be unable to resist supplying in these moments of "crisis"-- our loyalty to students. Meanwhile, the boat is made of straw and there's a huge storm going on. No amount of love for our students will plug these holes, so please stop talking about how plugging the holes is going to do the trick.

As much as I wish it did, loving my students (or my kids) doesn't magically produce more time or energy in my life. Pressuring people with guilt is a classic move by people in power. 

At some point, all of us who love students are going to get so burned out by the extraction of our care labor that we may start to ironically direct our resentment toward the very people "student success" is supposed to serve-- the students themselves. I, for one, confess to having started down this path more than a few times. Then, like I do at home when I get overloaded, I remind myself of the analysis of power: I don't have to sacrifice myself to prove my love of anybody. I cannot just love everybody's way out of these problems.

Maybe it's only the people who don't constantly battle internalized guilt about parenting who feel it's perfectly reasonable to weaponize love and guilt in work places. That's the only way I can explain why they think it's acceptable. When I hear the kinds of arguments at work that I hear at home to get me to do more stuff, I can't help but think there's something fishy going on.

The problem isn't the students. Just like we shouldn't hate our kids for having needs, we ought to look at the structural conditions that make it hard to meet all of our students' needs. Why are we losing so many forms of support for them, and for all of us? We also need to challenge the myths we carry around in our minds that cloud our awareness of how those in power manipulate our emotions. Let's wake up to our own exploitation. 

To be really for student success, we needn't just become obedient when the word is waved around at meetings. Instead, we can:

1. Define what student success means in our own work and lives. Seriously, write it down! Even better, model student success and ask your students to define their own success for you. That'll blow everybody's minds.
2. Hold yourself accountable to your own definition, not to the top-down terms laid out as some amorphous plastic concept that can encompass any and all policy decisions made by the powers that be to put smoke and mirrors up around unsavory budget goals.
3. Take care of yourself so you can keep being there for students and not burn out or resent them. 
4. Work to protect and create, if not demand, structural forms of support for students and for us.

If the ship is sinking, it may not be the holes that need plugging.

*Thanks to Clare Follman for letting me know about plastic words. See her Evergreen State College Master's thesis, "The Art of Arguing Science".

** Examples are fictional.

Greta Thunberg, Thanks for Getting Me Off My Lazy Butt

I don't consider myself an activist. I am way too hypocritical and impure for that. I don't typically participate in direct action or marches. It's really not the arena I feel I have the most to offer. Also, I don't like the earnestness, the black-and-white rhetoric, and us-vs.-them stuff, and the chest-pounding spectacle of moral superiority.

Through my research on environmental justice, the environmental movement, and environmental politics over the past 20 years as a scholar, I would never have said that my work slipped into anything resembling "activism." Advocacy, yes, because I would always conclude things like "we should stop doing X, and start doing Y to protect human and environmental wellbeing," or whatever. But a march? No thank you.

And I don't really like high-schoolers. Nothing against any of them individually, but high school was not a good time in my life, and even seeing high schools triggers me a bit.  I can do college students, barely, because at least they want to be there, and at least I can tailor my curriculum to their passions. They are ostensibly adults, so even on a high-hormone, poorly-developed pre-frontal cortex day, this pretense of maturity helps elevate the tone of our interactions.

So how did I end up speaking for the 30 or so Eureka high school students for today's Youth Climate Strike?

My daughter and friend school striking with us at the Youth Climate March

Sure, that's not a lot of people. But there was also once a time when Greta Thunberg was not a lot of people either.

What a march does is turns one person into thirty people into tens of thousands of people, right before your eyes, in the flesh, across the planet.

It counteracts all the ways that capitalism would have us think of ourselves as individuals, operating in our bubbles, tiny nobodies with no power to do anything against the monstrous beast of climate change.  Showing up is not my thing.  But showing up today because I couldn't see the grey area in the issue of young people really freaking out about the planet they will be inheriting, showed me that the showing up is a bolt of energy to everybody around you. It's also just the beginning, a symbol of what's to come. When you surround yourself with people working on solutions, hope is inevitable. As Greta Thunberg might say, you can't wait around to feel hopeful before you act. Action brings hope. 

I'm not likely to show up to a lot of marches or other showing up opportunities, but on occasion, especially when I'm offered a chance to, even in a small way bolster youth passion and help steer the narrative a bit as a speaker, I just gotta go.

Maybe it's the urgency of the situation, maybe it's the certainty of issues, maybe I'm getting older and feel like I have less time to dawdle over grey areas (though that's generally where you'll still find me), maybe it's having kids, maybe it's the Facebook algorithms. But I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I've become a bit of a climate justice advocate. I still don't like the mainstream environmental stance on climate change--it's all too much about science and facts and ice caps--and I really don't like the climate movement's inability to think about racial justice, but I am convinced that the movement is moving in the right directions. It's getting more intersectional, more savvy about identity politics, class, and justice, and more aware of how climate change is not about wilderness and rock-climbing, it's about urban infrastructure, access to resources, distribution of pollutants, and both human and natural resource exploitation. And guess who's fixing the climate movement to figure all this out? KIDS.

I'm blown away by the Sunrise Movement's language about social justice. I'm blown away by even what I'm seeing with the Green New Deal. It may not acknowledge colonialism, and it may not fully get the grassroots aspects of climate justice, but it really soothes my soul that this proposal is getting so much air time, and that it seeks to connect issues of social structure, class, race, geography, and justice with the environmental crisis. That's a revelation.

In the past, I would have said, it's not good enough. I would have put on my academic hat and criticized it line by line. I probably would have even called it oppressive, even bad for the environment. I would have argued that if mainstream politicians are backing it, then by definition it can't be good enough. My scholarship was perhaps more "radical" in my early days.

In the past, I would have poo-poo'ed marches as mere performances of self-righteousness. And of course, they don't themselves change anything. That is always the problem with getting people to show up for things-- showing up itself never changes anything, it just offers a space for people to vent about how bad things are.  Who wants that? Not me. I'm already overwhelmed with thinking about how bad things are. I can't stand the thought of amplifying my inner voice by hanging out with others who feel the same way.

But I'm starting to get that marches can offer a crucial ingredient for social change. That's why they're called an "action," even though I've often disagreed with that characterization. Knowing you are not alone in your frustrations and fears, and that you can huddle up with this group before you charge onto the field, creates a kind of awareness of collectivity that I have only recently begun to study. It turns out that this "infrastructure" of collective resilience and solidarity is really important. Researchers are showing that it is more valuable dollar for dollar to repairing communities in the face of climate disruption than what we spend on improved dykes, repaired highways, and new buildings.

That juice you feel when you realize you're not alone? That's not just warm fuzzies, that's the most important ingredient for climate adaptation.

I was amazed the high schoolers didn't just use the march as an opportunity to ditch class. I am amazed they were thinking passionately about the fate of the planet. I am amazed that they are willing to respond to parents and critics who say they should be working out these problems in the classroom by saying that the classroom isn't doing enough, and that it will be too late when those solutions come to pass.*

I am just in total awe that the youth climate movement is taking the narrative and the politics in their own hands.  Kudos to Stella Saba, Nigella Baur, and the high school students from Arcata and Eureka who had the courage to face climate change, their futures, and maybe even their parents, in the face. It feels like change is a'coming.

*Don't get me wrong, as a professor, I want students showing up. But it's ALWAYS a struggle. My students can barely stand being in class while the world burns and so much suffering is going on. I get it: though I disagree, I can see why students feel the classroom doesn't always feel like the place where solutions will emerge.