From Rachel Toor
In a recent New York Times interview, Rebecca Solnit said, “One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort.”
Where do we find collective effort in higher ed these days? Where, indeed, do we find hope for our country? For many of us, it’s in the people in Minnesota who came together with plucky humor and creative efforts to foil the dastardly ICE villains, including using their home-grown product: ice. Slip ’N Slides for thugs!
From afar, it felt good watching the resistance happening in the Twin Cities, though I also heard directly from people who lived there that it was 10 times worse than what was being reported. ICE agents swarming Uber lots at the airport; cars abandoned on the street with doors open after people had been dragged out and taken away.
Perhaps even more essential than being a walking lapel pin for their institution, the most important part of a president’s job is to keep their community safe. For ten weeks, the presidents who sit in the middle of the broken heart of our country—six years after the murder of George Floyd—once again had to face something that taxes most of our imaginations.
On Thursday I flew to MSP and visited a campus. With the long-serving president, I went to daily chapel and then we ate lunch in the cafeteria, where I interrogated had a delightful conversation with two Muslim students, vibrant and confident young women who overflowed with enthusiasm about the institution and their futures.
That night, my usual fears about how presidents often fail to get real in front of their peers vanished. At a Sandbox dinner hosted by a local college president with a half dozen other leaders, we talked about serious stuff, heard about dope innovations, and laughed really hard. The bonds formed by shared trauma are intense and beautiful.
Most can sympathize, but perhaps only those who have felt life-threatening fear understand the ways in which that experience is going to have lingering effects.
While the feds are trying to gut the gains we’ve made in access to all levels of education and leadership, those who have had the steepest climbs are perhaps the people we should be paying special attention to.
Note to friends: Instead of letting former presidents bash those still in the job by spouting off about all the problems in higher ed, it’s more useful, I think, to put the old dudes to work. If you want to enlist the help of my Odd Couple counterpart, Gordon Gee, let me know and we’ll set up a Zoom. We are a lot of fun individually, but together we are a hoot.
