Humanities at the Airport

When I worked at an airport between 2001 and 2003, the airline that hired me gave out laudatory certificates to employees whenever passengers would report above-average customer service, or any other effort that had been noticed and appreciated. On the one hand, those medal-emblazoned posters were cheesy and brimmed with the type of hollow praise proffered to alienated workers. But on the other, they were well intentioned and meaningful: they reminded us that we were working together, with and for other human beings, on both sides of the counter (as well as above, at the corporate level).

I look at a couple of those certificates now, saved from many years ago, and I wonder if the airline still recognizes such little instances of harmony in the maelstrom of contemporary commercial flight. These days it can seem as though humanity has left the airport entirely, what with random fistfights breaking out, hapless passengers dragged off airplanes, racial epithets lobbed heatedly across seat backs, families humiliated for the most minor domestic incursions and so on. Our worst tendencies and habits come into full bloom during air travel. And people seem at once both surprised by and weirdly expectant of it. We roll our eyes at the latest viral video of violence in the aisles, and we turn the channel or swipe over to a new feed.

I’ve been trying for many years, and over the course of writing three books, to untangle the distinct knots of negativity that airports have become known for. Somehow, it is perfectly acceptable to hate airports, even as they are also supposed to represent the apex of modern progress and cosmopolitan coexistence. How did we get to this contradictory place? And what, if anything, can those of us in academe do to shed light on and possibly even improve matters?

While flying recently I flipped through the pages of Delta’s in-flight magazine, Sky, and I noticed an article called “Higher Education in the Fast Lane” (May 2017). The piece surveyed a range of colleges and universities with expedited degree programs: “helping students get into the work force more quickly and efficiently.” One ad for Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Building Construction showed a worker in a hard hat and caution vest, architectural plans rolled up under his arm and giant cranes in background. The picture is one of professionalism and focused labor, and serves as a synecdoche for orderly society at large. But if the building in the background happened to be an airport, then we would know that all this supposed orderliness would soon come to an end. Build a neat and tidy airport, and you invite pandemonium and civil breakdown.

When I tell people that I teach a college class about airports, they often assume I mean from a managerial or organizational standpoint: what makes them work and how they can be improved. Sometimes I get perplexed looks when I explain that my course is about representations of airports and how we communicate and think about airports. It’s as though it never occurred to these people that airports and airplanes could have any other meaning or existence other than the status they seem indelibly to have: abject, ugly and plainly understood.

This isn’t just a shortcoming on behalf of airports. It’s also about the role of thinking and imagination in our everyday lives, and about basic standards of human interaction, respect and decency. This latter stuff makes what I’m talking about sound snobbish and stuffy, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean it in the way that college instructors try, with great patience and care, to foster classroom environments of empathy, listening and dialogue. Seminars -- especially in the humanities -- have the ability to teach students to bracket initial judgments, appreciate differences and discuss complex, nuanced topics. They do precisely what we could use a lot more of these days, especially in airports and airliners.

But as evinced by the Sky magazine article, we’re increasingly skimping on college -- and particularly the humanities. Foreign-language programs get squeezed to the minimum or cut outright because they are seen as too time intensive for today’s overworked student. History, literature, philosophy, religious studies -- these disciplines are viewed as superfluous or get whittled down to some hotly debated, if barely accepted, “core curriculum.” It is now commonplace to refer to college as too expensive and out of touch with “the real world.” But are we really so proud of this real world we’ve devised as it comes through one of our proudest achievements -- air travel? Automobile prices go up and up, as do housing prices, not to mention medicine and health care -- and people complain about the cost of higher education?

In fact, not only air travel but also contemporary life at large need more, not fewer, people taking humanities courses -- adult learning that is dedicated to reflection, understanding across differences and respectful discourse. Of course, disagreement and disparities play out in college classrooms, too, thus inviting tensions between “safe spaces” and free speech, between self-certainty and the awareness of one’s own epistemological horizons. Yet the thoughtful exercise of these soft skills is exactly what is lacking in the day-to-day grind of flight. And corporate policy and lawmaking are not going to usher such things into bustling transit nodes. Only people can do that, of their own volition and out of a collective commitment to shared humanistic values.

Such values must also be open and flexible, and they must operate irrespective of narrower value systems encoded in family, nationality, religion and so forth. Not that those other values must be jettisoned, but the heterogeneous nature of airspace requires a relentless openness along with excessive patience on all sides. Those qualities, too, can be practiced and honed in the college classroom.

And so a simple plan: if we want to work toward more civil and humane modes of air travel, we should also be willing to invest -- time, money and thought -- in the humanities. I’ve been talking here about higher education specifically, mainly because the lack of faith in humanities at the college level strikes me as a relevant analogue to the dearth of civility in airports. College and air travel are two concentrated places where what happens cannot help but reflect and reinforce broader patterns and trends. We may wish for quicker paths to college degrees, as well as fast and cheap travel by air, but are we willing to accept the consequences -- the attendant pressurized spaces and times? If not, we may want to think about the relationships between these realms, and how they are inescapably entwined.