On 20 September 2018, Shivani Seth’s “What’s Next in the Culture of Care” appeared on Rest for Resistance. In her article, Seth makes the case that self-care, rather than being the commercialized small respite it is often presented as being, is a mindful practice emerging from the recognition both of need and of the fact that having need is not wrong. She moves through a thought experiment into a proposal for a cultural shift into a greater valuation of individual happiness and mutual support, looking for examples at how elder- and child-care might be shifted to help address such valuation. She usefully notes that enacting such a shift will be no easy task, given personal demands, and acknowledges her own privilege in making the kinds of assertions she has made. Seth then moves on to note that collaborative care is necessary, that current self-care practices tend to be stop-gaps that do not address underlying problems, and that building greater, deeper communities enables us to be our better selves.

I have had the immense pleasure of working with Seth in other online communities I participate in; getting to do so has been gratifying, and her writing is a pleasure to read. I was therefore happy to hear that she had had a piece come out, and, even though there’s been some time since it has, I read it as soon as I could. And I think her core messages–self-care as typically depicted is a commercialized stopgap and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging and addressing need–are correct. Seth’s note that many prescriptions of self-care come from positions of privilege is one that resonates with me; I am one of the multiple-job workers she remarks upon, and I am not doing the work I do for my own health so much as to ensure that my wife and daughter have what they need. Extra sleep and time away and soothing baths are not things I can often afford, either in the money I’d need to spend on them or the time away from being a father, a husband, or a worker. And I fall victim to the socially ingrained push to deny that I have needs that I cannot meet through working harder and being more ascetic than I am (which, I will readily admit, is not terribly much). Too, I am aware of my own position of privilege; I know that things are easier for me than for many others because my skin color is what it is, my surname is what it is, my gender expression is what it is, my orientation is what it is, my accent is what it is, etc. I know many others have it far worse than I do. So Seth’s words resonate with me.

I do what I can, of course, to foster a community of care. I can hardly not, working the jobs I do. But there is far more to be done, and it won’t be accomplished by sweet-smelling soaps alone…

Care to contribute?

As I write this, the Hill Country town where I grew up and where I live again is in the midst of a long span of rain. We’ve had close to a week of it at this point, and we’re in for at least a few days more–and while a good rain is always welcome, it’d be nice to get a few things to dry out just a bit. As it is, mowing my yard’s going to be a two-and-a-half-hour job, and I’m far enough out of shape that I’ll not be good for much else on the day I do it. (That is my problem, though, not the rain’s.) More rain’s going to make it more of an annoyance, even if we still need it to replenish the aquifer and clean out the rivers and creeks around here.

Rain here is a strange thing. In the full summer–and what we tend to have in late July and through August is a different thing than in May and June or September and October, while even our “winters” tend to be like the springs and even summers of other places I have lived–when rain comes, it comes in a fury, dumping flooding waters for twenty minutes or so and then stopping dead, allowing the wet ground to dry and make the air moist and heavy, while not doing much to keep the temperatures low. (Indeed, days of 90°+ temperatures and 90%+ humidity are not uncommon here, though not as pervasive as in southwest Louisiana, to be sure.) The kind of rain we’ve been getting, mostly light but punctuated emphatically with shortish spans of torrent from the sky, is more like what we get in winter–though it is far warmer, leaving things feeling like nothing so much as a bathroom half an hour after a shower. Drivers are driving worse, and peoples’ spirits seem dampened along with their clothes and just about everything else.

For me, though, the rain is usually something different. I drive decently well in it–or I think so, anyway, as much as I ever do. And I tend to have an easier time writing when water is falling from the sky outside. Leaving aside horrible dirty jokes rooted in ideas of Ouranous and Gaea–how else is Mother Earth impregnated?–I am often better able to think when the sky is grey and clouds descend to the ground in small, small bits. I usually sleep better, too, though I am given to understand such is the case for a lot of people. I am, I suppose, supposed to be where there is rain–not because I am so lugubrious as that, and hopefully not because I somehow accept that my place in the world is being pissed upon or subjected to the assaults of other fluids.

Or something like that.

Help me stay afloat?

On 21 August 2018, Francesca Gino’s “Need More Self-Control? Try a Simple Ritual” appeared in the online Scientific American. Gino opens her piece by asserting a problem to address–lack of self-control, particularly as related to eating–and notes its persistent study by scholars and entrepreneurs. She then notes several previously attempted solutions to the problem and their deficiencies before pivoting to her central idea: ritual offers a path to self-control. The piece then offers a simple, working definition of ritual and references Gino’s previous work on rituals, explicating the methods and results of two studies she helped to conduct. A warning about over-reliance on ritual follows, succeeded by a brief explanation of how the observed effects may come to be. Gino’s piece concludes with connections to lived experience and a return to the chocolate cake mentioned in the piece’s opening, a closure that seems in good taste.

I forget how Gino’s piece came to my attention, although I am likely to put it forward to my students as a useful example of expository writing; it moves well and reads easily, and if the conventions of citation are not those I am obliged to require of my pupils, they are excellently done within the context of the piece’s presentation. Aside from such use, though, and from allowing a groaner of a joke in its summary, the article has strangely stuck in my head.

Ritual is commonly associated with religious practice and with group identity, as Gino motions toward near the end of her article. I am not a person of faith, as I have pointed out, and it has been some time since I was part of a group other than my family that has been around long enough for rituals to develop. (And I seem to set aside quite a few of those my family practices, as well, much to my parents’ consternation at holidays.) Yet I am also, in the event, somewhat superstitious–perhaps not in the ways enumerated by Stevie Wonder, but still beholden to practices that have little real effect. I will not leave a cup of coffee, once poured, undrunk, for example, and I always leave the porch-light on when someone–anyone–who belongs in my house is away from it. (Admittedly, that last is useful at night.) And I am always sure that the last thing I say to those I love is that I love them–not that it would help them or me not hurt were it the last thing they heard me say.

I do find myself nagged by unease when I neglect to do such things, so perhaps I would be the kind of person who would benefit from enacting some small ritual before I eat. To develop one ex nihilo seems somehow silly, though, so I am not sure what kind I would employ. I am already far sillier than I ought to be, and I do not think anyone is well served by my being sillier yet.

Giving makes for a good ritual!

On 5 June 2018, Adam Harris’s “Here’s How Higher Education Dies” appeared in the online version of The Atlantic. In the piece, Harris makes the case that higher education, as an industry, has passed its peak and appears to be on a slow decline. He grounds his assertion in Bryan Alexander’s 2013 work, noting that Alexander’s predictions appear to be coming true and discussing reasons they seem to be so. Harris then explicates the problems to colleges and universities of declining enrollment (mergers and closures of programs and schools, further increasing adjunctification), as well as possible remedies (outreach to non-traditional students). He also notes that while some schools will be relatively insulated from coming changes, others will have to adapt to survive. Harris ends with a small gesture towards hope, citing Alexander’s own ideas about institutional viability, and the putative irony of institutions of learning suffering amid a glut of available information.

It is true that Harris’s article took some time to find its way in front of me, and I accept that my comments about it will be affected by that delay. Too, they will be affected by my continuing disentanglement from academe–a process that is not complete (and will probably not be so long as I continue to benefit from my minimal engagement); I readily admit that my experience of higher education has left me with decided attitudes about the whole endeavor. But I do not think that higher education has reached its peak–perhaps a lesser peak on the way to its full summit. There is still too much reliance on the kind of credentialing higher education offers and too much resistance to that in enough areas that the kind of saturation “peak” seems to require when used in other arenas for it to apply, I think. And there is still more room for adjunctification, though I worry about pointing it out for fear of prompting it.

There is also still more understanding that there can be another way in education for it to be really “peak” (though I am not entirely happy about that phrasing, I’ll admit). Even in the online, “career-focused” class I am teaching now, with students who are explicitly and specifically working towards degrees so they meet requirements for jobs, I have students–and more than might be thought–who either know or are open to knowing the pleasure or learning for its own sake and of looking into areas of endeavor removed from their professional concerns. The adult and non-traditional students I teach, while knowing and acknowledging that some of what they are asked to do is asinine for any group of students or not appropriate for them as for 18-year-olds straight out of suburban secondary school, understand that what they study outside their majors is helpful for their lives outside their careers–whether as part of their putative civic engagement or their personal, non-remunerated enrichment. They still have some sense of education as an inherently worthy goal, whatever the grade in the course–at least some of them do.

Peak higher education is not a thing in itself, but a symptom of a greater disease, and that symptom has still not spread enough to kill the patient. Yet.

Help me get to my peak?