BY A UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN FLORIDA*

The Hungarian horntail dragon at Florida’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park. Photo by Craig Adderley from Pexels.

In one of my final classes in May, students started talking about how well J. K. Rowling described moments like the one we’re living through now, when young people worry about the great evil that hangs over them, and the adults in charge refuse to come out of denial. One thing I’ve always loved about the Harry Potter series is that the books present knowledge as a matter of life and death. At the last minute, it’s always Hermione who remembers something she learned in class, or read, and this bit of knowledge invariably saves the day. And now, like in Rowling’s books, the stakes are high and they are clear. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a dire need for structural changes from the ground up—and for permanent and reliable networks of care—that universities could play a big part in getting underway. But corporate priorities prevent us from even admitting the magnitude of the crisis.

It’s useful to remember that corporations came into being within violently extractive economies, often founded on slavery and genocide, and that these economies have led us to the ecological crisis that is at the root of the pandemic.

Wreaking havoc on people and life in general, corporations have nonetheless been excellent, historically, at appearing necessary and good. Likewise, universities, rightly celebrated for mobilizing during this pandemic, also hoard money in their endowments and dole out charity for good PR and tax benefits; the right hand creates vaccines and civic engagement courses, while the left lays off vulnerable workers and engages in corrupt admissions practices.

So what is the opposite of a corporate approach? What systems operate on principles contrary to scarcity and competition?

What about life itself? Not eat-or-be-eaten Darwinism, but life-giving, life-sustaining ecosystems. Study how they work, make them your metaphor, and shift to those models.

Shift now.

Make ecology central to everything we teach; splice it into administrative DNA. For every edict, ask, Does this lead merely to more revenue or to health and well-being?

Resuscitate. Restore. Replenish. Sustain. Get to work on that, with all our heart and soul and imagination and science and brilliance, as well as our considerable resources. Screw everything else. Corporations, after all, have vulnerabilities. If you run your university like a corporation, you will experience the same strains, the same race to please “stakeholders” who are not up close and intimate with education but are easily persuaded by big shiny toys—like enormous wellness centers, fancy dorms, winning football teams, and the new, Big Tech software solutions which, as Scott Galloway warns us (because he is busy creating them), loom on the horizon.

What gets lost in the corporate approach is an urgency that connects education to a healthy democracy.

What gets lost is the meaning of not-for-profit. (If not for profit, then for what? What? Can you still answer that?)

What gets lost is the profound sense of reciprocity with the communities in which we are embedded, the deep values and common goals that enable higher education institutions to serve the public good, like libraries or fire departments.

What gets lost is the fact that universities are the largest employers in many communities. When health care is linked to employment, we are responsible for people’s lives.

What gets lost, if it’s not already clear, is education itself—that empowering, wide-open inquiry into one’s place and purpose in the universe.

What would it look like to throw everything we’ve got at political and ecological crises, climate change, ballooning unemployment, income inequality, the pandemic, and all the inequities it has laid bare? We have real estate, infrastructure, libraries, the wisdom of the ages. We have think tanks, exquisite artists, policy experts, game theorists, laboratories. We’re not short of ideas or creativity. But we’re having small, stupid conversations about desk spacing and software options and how many bodies we can cajole back to campus. We are trying to figure out whom to preemptively lay off, rather than asking the big questions that this moment demands.

Contrast this to the youthful Sunrise Movement, dedicated to creating solutions to the climate crisis “at the scale of the crisis.” They represent a generation  also advocating loudly for prison reform and racial justice and leading the way against gun violence. For them, the apocalypse has always been now, and there is nothing more terrifying than the pre-COVID status quo: war, extreme weather, financial meltdown. Some say they are poised to be another Greatest Generation. I want to give everything left of myself to them. I want universities to give everything left of themselves to the people they are supposed to be serving. Be like artists in a pandemic. Give as much of yourself as possible for free. Create goodwill. Make everyone want to get on board and be part of a mission you have committed to with utter conviction.

This moment has been compared to our mobilization during World War II, but the metaphor is misleading. Rather, we’re in a crisis of caretaking. So care is the metaphor, the guiding principle of everything we do from this perilous moment on.

Ask: Do our actions lead to a competitive advantage or to care? Just so we’re clear.

The university is a corporation, a church, a hospital, an ecosystem. It’s a YA series with an existential threat. It’s a whole universe of administrators. It’s Hogwarts. No. Wait! I’m getting lost in the weeds here, but I think they are the right weeds. Come on in with me. I have quarantinis. The mud is rich; the weeds, medicinal. There might be a vaccine here, a cure or treatment or balm. There is hope here, joy, and so much already growing.

* This guest blogger, a lecturer at a university in Florida, prefers to remain anonymous for reasons of precarity.