Five Ways to Tell Higher Education’s Real Story

As another new academic year is well underway, it occurs to me how much caricatures of higher education as a worthless, wasteful enterprise confound me. Lambasted as bureaucratic nightmares filled with professors J.D. Vance once labeled “enemies of the people,” one would think faculty like me enter our offices each day with a sense of dread and shame. The truth is that my department is a pretty productive, joyful place. Our interactions do not resemble passive, soulless meetings like those lampooned on The Office. My meetings with students and colleagues are active as we read each other’s work, give feedback, write collaboratively, and present in various forums with other people also trying to solve some of the most pressing problems of our time. 

The contrast between what I read on my screen and what I see in my hallway could not be sharper. There are many possible explanations, but one of the few over which I have some control is my own failure to tell higher education’s story intentionally and evocatively. Like many higher education insiders, I have taken for granted the idea that what I do is both widely understood and considered a force for good. And for many years, this was true as evidenced by opinion polls showing strong public support for universities. Higher education was largely spared the harsh criticism directed at K-12 schools, but this is no longer the case. Rising tuition, overpaid bureaucrats, and scandals are some of the sources of the criticism. Shining the light on problems when they occur is fair and not something to which we ought to object.

But while past views on higher education were perhaps distorted by rose-colored glasses, current ones seem obscured by mud-covered ones. It is strategically useful for the MAGA set to lambast universities since these entities promote critical thinking, media literacy, and diversity—all of which are antithetical to the goals of a population that can be easily manipulated into acting against its own best interests. Most thoughtful Democrats and Republicans see the value in institutions that produce graduates who have better health, employment, financial, and civic engagement outcomes than their counterparts who do not participate in postsecondary education. Pointing these things out, however, opens higher education up to accusations of elitism. Herein lies the problem.

Can you imagine any organization that is not allowed to promote itself for fear of looking snobby? For example, could Starbucks sell lattes if it couldn’t say that having one in its comfortable store delivered by a friendly barista would not make for a better morning? No one accuses Starbucks of devaluing non-Starbucks customers by pointing out the benefits of its products, yet higher education faces this conundrum and therefore finds itself unable to articulate its value. This image problem results in deep budget cuts threatening to decimate the enterprise entirely. 

Unfortunately, higher education’s strategy to this point has been primarily data collection. While some of this information may be useful, most of it is not worth the considerable time and energy it takes to collect it. For better or worse, the public does not seem to find these statistics compelling. Scrambling to make spreadsheets that sit on digital shelves is the worst sort of deck chair rearranging we could be doing at the moment. What the public does know is how the college their child attended treated them. Students tell their parents whether their classes were reasonably sized or whether they got lost in the shuffle, whether their professors knew their name or whether they swiped in with their ID, whether they could get an appointment with an academic advisor or whether they were given the runaround when they needed help. It is not difficult to deduce that people are more satisfied with universities whose stories fall more on the former rather than the latter of these options.

The solution to what ails higher education is simpler than it appears: tell the story of what happens when faculty and staff are freed from bureaucratic nonsense and able to invest in the human beings in front of them. As a professor at an access institution in the heart of Appalachia, I know countless stories of students whose lives were transformed by higher education. My department is a lively place where thoughtful professors help students identify and access their potential, then develop it so they can work at the frontiers of their abilities on the most important issues of the day. Like my colleagues, I would rather be doing the work than talking about it, but this is a luxury we can no longer afford at a time when the dominant discourse about higher education is so gravely negative. The time has come to accept communicating our value as part of our jobs if we are to preserve higher education for future generations. 

As if these reasons weren’t enough, our own mental health provides another incentive to push back on both the bureaucratic tasks and negativity bias that plague higher education. One of my former doctoral students, Dr. Tommy Raimondi, wrote a compelling dissertation about the ways faculty experience compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction. His main finding was that it’s not so much the emotional labor of helping students that causes compassion fatigue; in fact, being part of students’ journeys tends to produce compassion satisfaction. The primary culprit of compassion fatigue is all the minutiae that gets in the way of professors’ ability to nurture the kinds of relationships that are fulfilling to students and faculty alike.

So what can we do to mitigate the negative and create more opportunities for genuine connection and positive framing of our work? Here are five strategies to which I have committed this academic year:

1. Push back on mindless and unnecessary administrative duties. If the executive class can argue that artificial intelligence and outsourcing should be leveraged for greater efficiency in substantive tasks, then it stands to reason that much of the emailing, spreadsheet producing, etc. could be sent that way as well. 

2. Try to recognize the meaningful student connection moments when they’re happening. Too often, we blow past them on our way to meetings and other less edifying work. 

3. Tell success stories in the venues to which we have access. This piece, for example, is not something I would normally have thought of given the traditional emphasis on writing for peer-reviewed journals. The pressure to correct the dominant discourse is motivating me to try to communicate with a wider audience and my hope is that it will inspire others to tell their stories, too. 

4. Use social media to promote students’ positive higher education stories. It takes very little time to snap a photo and write a caption. Whatever our feelings might be about social media, this is our best chance to talk to students, parents, and the public at large so we can no longer afford to ignore it. 

5. Work toward becoming what Angel Jones calls a Street Scholar, a person whose “mission, movements, and motivation are rooted in the community.” If we want the public to support higher education, we cannot confine our work to scholarly journals and academic conferences that few can access. Relevance requires meeting people where they are, so we need to commit to sharing our work in open access formats through podcasts like Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s, Coffee and Books and other places beyond the Ivory Tower. 

I imagine many people reading this piece either openly or secretly like The Ivory Tower given that we chose to work here. I confess to feeling a bit of a sting when I opened a recent copy of Harper’s and read Pankaj Mishra’s words in his excellent and well-titled piece, Speaking Reassurance to Power, “…the liberal American intelligentsia seems to have relaxed too cozily into imperial cultures of exaggerated self-esteem and self-satisfaction.” The time for cozy relaxation has passed; we must engage, relate, and communicate more broadly if we are to change the narrative that threatens to destroy all that is good about higher education. 

 

References

Hill, M. L. (n.d.). Coffee and books. Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coffee-and-books/id1522592619 

Jones, A. (n.d.). Street scholar. Angel Jones, Ph.D. https://www.angeljonesphd.com/streetscholar

Mishra, P. (2025, August). Speaking reassurance to power. Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/speaking-reassurance-to-power-pankaj-mishra-easy-chair/ 

Raimondi, T. P. (2021). Faculty Experiences of Compassion Fatigue and Compassion Satisfaction. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Reichman, H. (2021, December 14). The professors are the enemy. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professors-are-the-enemy