The Case for Uncertainty in Higher Ed

I think often of the opening lines of Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer,” a poem in which the speaker hears his daughter clacking away on a typewriter on the other side of her bedroom door, noting that,

It strikes me that this wish exists at the core of what it is we hope as educators—to wish our students a lucky passage, and to help them navigate the awaiting storms with courage, compassion and curiosity. An education worthy of its name prepares students not only to remain afloat but to thrive in a world that will challenge the buoyancy of their imagination.

“Wish” comes from the Old English wȳsċan, to feel intense longing or cherish a desire, and shares a Proto-Indo-European root with the Old English wēnan: to imagine or hope. This strange trifecta—to wish, to hope, to imagine—feels to me part of the fertile ground from which an honest education emerges. Such an education might grant students passage—not away from the world, but rather into a further embrace of it.

And yet, contemporary higher education increasingly organizes itself around a different ethic—one that privileges certainty, outcomes, efficiency, assessment, mastery. These aims prioritize stability in a volatile age. But they also expose a widening gap between what universities can measure and what students most need help learning how to do.

Students arrive in classrooms already living inside crisis—political, ecological, technological, intimate—while the structures meant to educate them often hasten past uncertainty rather than teaching them how to dwell within it. In doing so, higher education risks abandoning students at the very moment when they most need help learning how to remain awake to their own realities.

The poet John Keats offers us language for this capacity in his description of negative capability: when one is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The highest ideal in such an ethic is not mastery but curiosity. The admission of the words “I do not know” does not suggest failure but signifies a beginning, an entrance—a posture of humility without which genuine learning cannot occur.

The call feels simple: not to use imagination as a tool to turn away from the world—and so ourselves—but rather to turn toward it, to draw nearer, to apply ourselves to the innumerable crises of the world with new sight, which might be honed via our study of ancient questions: What is it to be good? What is it to be happy? What is the nature of the world, of ideas, of reality? Why evil, sorrow and pain? Why must I begin this work of ancient command, to know myself, and how do I begin?

These questions resist standardization. Higher education has become obsessed with certainty, mastery and assessment at the exact moment when students need uncertainty, humility and ethical attention in order to live—and survive—in a world defined by crises.

It was in such an occasion of crisis that I once encountered a student in my classroom. On a late winter morning, snow falling gently outside, she read out loud a passage that opens, “The human face is an icon before the face is painted.” She paused, then gestured to her own face, which that day was covered in deep purple and blue bruises. She explained that she would be having surgery that afternoon because her skull was broken. Her boyfriend had broken the circle of her face. She continued, saying that she couldn’t help but think of her own life as a circle from which she couldn’t escape, that it just kept circling in on itself.

Years later, the student wrote to me to say that reading that text helped create a tether to her life, helped her remain—reminding me that what we read in the classroom, and the quality of care we extend to one another, can be a matter of life or death, as we sometimes forget, and an honest education can not only be life-serving but also lifesaving.

These are the dimensions of education that elude our prevailing metrics. We test and assess even as we neglect attention. We ask for performance when what is often needed first is presence. We promise certainty when students may most urgently need help learning how to remain within uncertainty, without turning away from themselves or one another.

The task at hand is not to ignore our bruises or our fractures but to encounter one another in our shared fragility and to meet there with humanity. The humanities, from the Latin humanitas, invite us to study what it means to be human, which is to say what it means to be wounded, finite and bound in relation.

On this topic, I think to an essay written by poet Dan Beachy-Quick reflecting on Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The crux and crisis of his essay arrive when Philoctetes, abandoned for nine years to dwell within a wound that will not heal, cries out, “Do not go away from me!” Neoptolemus responds, “I have been in pain for you; I have been in sorrow for you.”

As Beachy-Quick writes:

This, too, is an educational ethic: not mastery, not closure, but relation. Not certainty, but attentive presence. This vision does not hurry students past uncertainty, but helps them cultivate the courage to remain within it, and to remain with one another.

The hope may be that when the scope of students’ sight is such that they feel unable to find a way forward—when their lives feel “to be a circle that keeps closing in on itself”—that they might reach toward their imagination and envision a wider circle, for as Ralph Waldo Emerson knows, “around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”