BY A LECTURER IN THE SOUTHEAST

As my students and I worked on a collaborative document projected overhead, my inbox appeared on the screen. Whoops.

Front and center, there was an email from Parking Services:

PARKING TICKET NOTIFICATION

Startled, I shut down the projection. As I glanced over my shoulder, I witnessed eye rolls and sympathetic sighs.

“You saw that?”

Heads nod.

“I guess you have experience with parking tickets on this campus?”

Grunts of frustration. Pffts of dismissal.

They knew.

I returned home that evening and submitted an appeal, which read in part:

I would like to appeal this ticket on the grounds that I have renewed my parking sticker and that I simply—in the midst of COVID chaos and limited trips to campus—forgot to adhere the new decal to the windshield.

Thank you for your consideration.

Forty-eight hours later, another citation. This time, however, the ticket of shame was pinned to another’s windshield, a windshield that also bore the expired faculty and staff decal. As I drove out of the parking lot, I stopped short. “Wait, what?”

Displayed next to the expired decal on the windshield was a second, larger sticker which simply read: “Uber.” Uber.

Many may be wondering where I’m going with this account of the parking tickets, and it is here: James Ryan, in his now famous commencement address to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2016 contends that asking questions, good questions, moves us beyond knee-jerk reactions, driving our focus toward the “difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes, the painful.” His five essential questions appear throughout this blog post highlighted in bold. Although perhaps not a perfect contextual fit, Ryan’s framework may challenge us to examine our communication patterns as we approach a full return to campus in the fall amid arguably one of the most tumultuous years of economic and societal divestment from higher education.

As we consider the past year and the future of our institutions, with 22 percent fewer students headed directly to college last fall—a drop of approximately 560,000 undergraduates—and the loss of 650,000 jobs in higher education, taking a moment to assess how well we convey our commitment to our constituencies may be in order.

Another of Ryan’s essential questions seeks to position the questioner in a realm of curiosity about one’s world in order to anticipate ways to improve it: I wonder if . . . I wonder why? In that vein, I had to wonder as I drove out of the parking lot that day whether the Uber driver (whom I do not know) had neglected to renew the faculty sticker or merely replace it, like me. Regardless, the irony stood firm: issuing parking tickets on a nearly vacant campus telegraphs a value system.

To put an even finer point on it, how much of that Uber driver’s earnings and tips from the second job were forfeited to the fine imposed by the first?

Couldn’t we at least—for a moment—put aside the executive committees, the advisory panels, the strategic pillars, the 30,000-foot view of the university’s goals? Instead, let us begin at the ground level by placing ourselves in the shoes of those who seek to exemplify values envisioned and promulgated by administrators. Continually asking others “how can I help?” with a spirit of humility and a sincere desire to alleviate burdens demonstrates how to foster student success and to advance engagement amid a spirit of reciprocity.

Ryan further challenged his audience to employ the metric what truly matters when evaluating the essence of their convictions and goals. I did so when I received a response to my appeal:

Based on the information you provided and parking code polices your appeal is denied. A unanimous vote is required for the committee to reach this agreement. The decisions of the Appeals Committee are final. (emphasis mine)

The symbolic value of the parking ticket is not lost on readers. Denied. Final. My thoughts, however, ran toward our most marginalized constituencies who receive notices just like mine and how—without years of experience and association—they might interpret those unmitigated words, denied and final.

The context surrounding that ticket, be it an Uber sticker denoting financial hardship or an empty parking lot signifying alternative work arrangements, defines one’s interpretation of it, as any semiotician would argue. Meaning imbued in that citation therefore exists not in its materiality but in the “signs” that animate it, the campus culture and institutional history—the power and ideology that inform it. In this case, and to my mind, the message seems clear: policy for policy’s sake.

On the other hand, higher education leaders who advocate commitment to real service and real learning could discover much if they were to participate in the campus quotidian. Recently, one college president did just that by moving into a dorm. What if higher education leaders concretized values through an occasional common experience—call it experiential learning—laboring for a moment with overworked staff or even chatting with a student about a parking ticket?

Could leaders begin to transform how they communicate ethical and political worth on their respective campuses, particularly amid those likely to feel most alienated from their institutions?

I like to imagine so. In fact, I like to imagine a new sensibility that began with a simple parking ticket.

The author, who prefers to remain anonymous, is a lecturer at a regional public institution in the Southeast.