written by: Anne A. Thurmer
How COVID-19 Accelerated Existential Questioning in Higher Education
As a first-year college student at Moorhead State University, a regional comprehensive, in the early 1990s, I attended every event for my campus’ theme year. The annual theme was used to organize campus events, from lectures to concerts and special topics courses to crafts in the Union. My first year in college, the theme was What is an Educated Person? From big name lectures like Daniel Borstein and Maya Angelou to coffee conversations with visiting faculty from Bozeman and Kalamazoo, speaker after speaker weighed in on the question.
I swished through leaves, braved blizzards, and missed outdoor spring events because I had to know what an educated person was. I did not want to attend college and miss what it meant to be educated, however the speakers were non-committal. Each gave some version of “it depends” and then said something that seemed, from my seasoned perspective of 17 years, too small to answer for such a question. To be educated is to question? To be open? To discover? And? What else? I was questioning, open, and longed to discover, but I did not feel educated. Was my current state of confusion all I could hope for?
Greg: Who Decides What it Means to Be Educated?
The theme year raised questions, but one student seemed to have found answers. Greg was first person I knew who did not care about grades. I did not know what to make of his intense autonomy, but I was fascinated. With charisma and confidence, he was different in a way that made me wonder if all the rest of us were wrong or confused. He stayed up all night reading what he wanted and arrived in class with dark circles under tired eyes, unprepared, but fulfilled. He was brilliant, and always on the edge of academic failure. When I questioned him, he told me he was losing his sight and did not want to miss reading what mattered.
I was battling an incessant need to prove that I belonged in higher education, so while attending all of the events on what it meant to be educated felt like a safe way to question a system I did not think I belonged to, Greg’s rebellion seemed risky. I still needed the steady drip of grades to confirm that I was on the right track. I continued to do all the assigned readings even while I suspected Greg had discovered the answer to my question as he sought to devour learning on his own terms before his vision dimmed.
Before I met Greg, I was unquestioning in my belief that those in authority held the answers I sought about what it meant to be educated. I thought that Daniel Borstein and Maya Angelou would have more, or better, answers than the visiting faculty from Bozeman and Kalamazoo. In the same way, I trusted the authoritative voice of professors about what I should read more than trusted myself. Greg did not. I was not ready to change my life, but meeting Greg made it possible for me to ask different questions. Who gets to decide what are the important parts of education? Who is allowed to judge when you have “arrived”? What are the “right” measures of learning?
Wandering Toward My Educated Self
That theme year ended, but the question lingered. My transcript reveals a student who did not yet know but was willing seek the answer in almost every corner of the curriculum (I was fairly sure it would not be found in math). In just over five years, I declared and changed majors multiple times, watched performances and ventured on stage, wandered galleries and created art, advised and sought advice, learned to use public transportation and library databases, battled mono and depression, danced and dined on Oreos. I found my singing voice and my writer’s voice. My provisional answer to what it is to be educated drew from student affairs as much as it did from academics. By finals, I often felt like a disembodied brain (with a few loose connections), but if college was a singular thing, for me it was discovery of a unified self. The experiences, the people, and the environment were conspiring to help create who I would become and at the same time discover whom I had always been.
Countless moments showed me that whatever it meant to be educated, it was more than the collection of information. I limped through multiple transfers and wore the wrong graduation gown to commencement. The rejection letter for the first job I applied for said the committee went with the more experienced candidate rather than the better writer. I was the better writer. When had that happened?
I wound my way through a master’s program in English, recommended because of its proximity to my home, and through my teaching assistantship I discovered I loved to teach. That revelation renewed my quest to understand what it means for someone to become educated. I was beginning to see myself as educated, but what magic had wrought this, and could I replicate it?
What is an educated person? Although the question lingered, I could feel and see the results of education in every corner of my life and knew education was transformation. And it was power. I found I could move and work in spaces that were not designed for me. At this point, my undercover work was terrifying. While I could pass as literate and even excel in English graduate study, I was one dry erase board activity from being discovered as dyslexic. Now, I relish the discomfort of folks as they try to square what they know to be true about “careless” people who spell poorly with whom I have become. Perhaps this confidence with the contradictions of me is part of what it means to be educated, but that part of my education was not accomplished in college. No, college helped me craft disguises to hide my disability, but if college was about a unified self, this part of who I am was asked to stay hidden a bit longer.
Melvin: Who Decides Who Deserves Education?
As I continued to understand what it meant to be educated, sometimes my students seemed more secure in their answers than I was in mine. Melvin, a homeless man, worked in a bakery from 3:00 am to noon, walked miles to the library, and declared studying was the best part of his day. He would do anything, he told me, to “get educated.”
While he was in my first-year writing course, we talked almost every week. The for-profit I worked at was experimenting with training faculty in pro-active advising. While I rolled my eyes at the thought of calling students to check on them, I soon discovered it was my favorite part of my job, and Melvin was one of my favorite folks to talk to. Someone had given him a pre-paid smart phone, and when the library was closed, he managed to produce nearly flawless APA papers on his phone.
He had a daughter in fifth grade, and they would study together every evening. At the beginning of the class, he would tell me how his daughter had helped him figure out something. By the end, he told me how he helped her do library research and revise a paper. The end of our class fell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an incredibly busy time for bakers. I wanted to give him an extension. He did not want to risk failing to finish. He was exhausted, but he wanted his daughter to see him complete what he started. He did, and as his daughter watched, he demonstrated a commitment to learning that was awe-inspiring. I saw it, too.
For-profits gave us a brief look at what education might look like if the fundamental function of maintaining social order was replaced with something else. In the case of for-profits, that “something else” was profit, and while that motive is deeply flawed, the crack it created revealed masses of learners who hungered to be educated people. While many for-profit organizations exploited students, it is interesting to me that our public response was to shut down for-profits rather than one-up them with publicly funded options that radically democratized education. We shut down the pathway because the students who were on it did not realize they did not belong.
But Melvin and other students like him did belong, and we could have made an educational home that better fit his life. Melvin invested time in formatting an APA paper on his pre-paid cell phone. While quite a feat, when it cost so much, his education must be more than a masterful demonstration of correctness.
COVID-19 and Questioning Higher Education
If for-profits revealed cracks in the educational façade, COVID-19 unleashed a seismic jolt. Like for-profits, our response to COVID-19 had the power to expose our assumptions about what it means to be educated, and these assumptions illuminate what and whom we value. While we were still trying to decide what to call this new virus, publications from The New Yorker and The Atlantic to USA Today and BuzzFeed presented images of what students would be missing during the pandemic that illustrated more about their social class than the typical experience of an American college student.
The distance between the educational “products” offered by elite schools and community colleges narrowed considerably in the Spring of 2020. Students, families, and others complained of the compromised nature of their educational experiences during the pandemic. Some declared that the educational product was not worthy of the privileged student’s time though there was literally nothing else to do. With that in mind, perhaps this is the moment to transform that product – what learning and education look like. Now is the time to make online learning engaging and productive and creative and to innovate our way into the future – not for the privileged, but for every future student whose only choice is online.
So, What is an Educated Person?
Perhaps there was a time where the homogeneity of privilege and power allowed for a single answer, but it turns out the speakers were right—it depends.
Education depends on finding ways for the Gregs of the world to declare they know what matters and are going to learn THAT, thank you very much. It depends on society accepting that the Melvins of the world know what it means to pursue an education because they belong, too. It depends on appreciating the community college students who transform their lives and communities without ever doing study away. And, maybe, it depends on the dyslexic who thinks she can write something about what it means to be educated.
As we struggle to adapt to the world that COVID-19 has wrought, higher education professionals are exhausted, often covering multiple jobs in departments with high turn-over. The prospect of musing on the nature of what it means to be educated feels like it belongs on another level of Maslow’s hierarchy or to a different moment in history. We are consumed with survival needs, and the heady self-actualization of asking what it means to be educated seems the province of a first-year theme, not part of the endless list of other duties as assigned for a busy professional.
However, exploring the nature of our work and articulating the value of what we do is both the ultimate survival need and an act of hope. This moment is critical, and we must actively engage in asking what it means to educated, or risk receiving answers from forces less invested in our work and our students. Our culture questions if what we do has value. We need to reclaim the questions and ask them on our own terms. There are cracks in what we thought we knew about education, and each one must be explored, widened to let new light in. As we rebuild, and we must rebuild, let’s commit to asking hard questions, to using new materials to co-construct, to continuing the fight for greater justice in a world we will help to craft.
About the Author
Anne A. Thurmer (she/her/hers) Anne teaches Student Affairs Administration at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.