Post-Pandemic Classrooms

or the broken social. contract of higher education

This week, I heard that many of my colleagues, instructors and lecturers and professors have felt that the social contract of the classroom has been broken, especially with freshmen. Students are not doing the reading, they show up to class late. When they show up, they seem disengaged, they are barely present.

During the most serious months of lockdown, we were all trapped at home, cocooned or buried in rooms, apartments, houses, alive but unable to do the things we were used to being able to do, like go outside without feeling afraid.

The masks and the screens prevented us from really facing the difficulties presented by social life and social expectations. White collar workers could tune out during meetings. Students could pretend to listen to your lectures while being on TikTok or Instagram or whatever.

The pandemic gave everyone struggling financially a temporary reprieve from financial realities that are returning full force for working and middle class Americans: evictions, student loan payments, the end of the Child Tax Credit in the midst of out of control inflation.

Economic anxiety is back, full force, at least for the middle and working class students I teach in the UC. Rich students have anxiety too, but they’re not working three jobs or taking student loans so I am guessing their worries have more to do with prestige and conspicuous consumption to keep up with their friends.

When I talked to my students about the effects of the pandemic and the social contract of the classroom, they brought up the fact that financial worries weighed heavily on them and astonishingly, the pandemic taught them to prioritize — life and living and being alive. I’m not sure what that meant to this student, but I appreciated the comment.

Living is not a given. Living with fear and anxiety and depression can make you feel as if you are dead.

You have to fight to feel alive in our world: Chat GPT is just adding to the deadening, false environment that surrounds us. The homes we live in in Southern California could have been designed by Chat GPT to save money and maximize money for real estate builders. The language we use at work and with each other is full of fake hedges on real emotions.

Play, art, non-transactional spontaneous interactions, these are things that make us feel alive, but they are not givens, not in this world, not in this place.

The white noise of financial anxiety makes it hard to hear the music of the stars.

When I went back to New Haven last year and walked down Chapel Street, I felt a physical weight land on my shoulders, the weight of all the fear and anxiety I experienced as an undergraduate after the thrill of being admitted to Yale had worn off. I was worried about money, so worried about money and I was exhausted by pretending with my rich classmates that I was the same as they were. I wasn’t. I carried around a weight of shame and anxiety that I had no desire to revisit. Returning to that place almost forty years later, with money in my pocket made no difference to me at all.

I had a hard time focusing in class because I was worried about how I was going to pay the rent and eat and pay for the things I liked, like music and recreational drugs. I pretended to have swagger but I was exhausted and sad.

I feel for my students who don’t do the reading for class: I had a hard time doing the reading myself as an undergrad. I had a hard time focusing on academic work. Most people in my profession probably did all the assigned reading and went on vacations with their families at the proper times of the year.

I look at all the fast food franchises from Panda Express to Subway to Barnes and Noble bookstores who now populate all US. campuses and run their merchandise and their coursework orders. I look at the Blackstone owned American Campus Communities building dorms and cafeterias on campus. I look at these little robots that will deliver you food for $20 fee on top of your Starbucks order. I look at the undergraduates who are too worried about having friends, paying for the tuition bill, getting a job after graduation to be ‘engaged’ in class.

Time is something no one feels they have enough of. Time breathes down all our necks. Time is something none of us can save. During the pandemic, we were gifted a surfeit of time, we had to spend in virtually connected coffins. Now we realize, freed from our cocoons what time means and yet we don’t know quite what to do with our spatial freedom, because we don’t have enough time.

Humanities education and its priorities seem more and more removed from the concerns of ordinary people. This has to do with our social and political environment and the fact that there are no good jobs for people who want to think and read and make art. The University is a reputation washing opportunity for the billionaire criminal types like Henry Nichols and Jeffrey Epstein and a simple tax writeoff for less sociopathic billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Donald Bren of the Irvine Company.

The social contract of higher education is broken, but it’s not undergraduates who don’t do the reading who broke it.