Higher Ed Musings 17. - by Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal)
The recent election has many, many people in higher education hanging by a thread, worried about their future: not only faculty and staff but also the thousands employed by the Department of Education, the National Endowment for Humanities, and many other organizations devoted to educational and humanistic missions. These many thousands have felt secure in their livelihood, that their work was aligned with the vision of the American public. Apparently not.
There is an argument to be made for the value of higher ed, for public investment in higher ed. But it needs to be made without politics and with humility.
But first, this post is a kind of sermon about the precarity that the working class is used to that the laptop class isn’t so used to. Maybe the thousands need to think differently about security. Is the better metaphor the Sword of Damocles or Jonathan Edwards’s image of a sinner hanging by a thread over hellfire? Or perhaps Melville’s “ Monkey Rope” from Moby-Dick?
Politics are one kind of risk for the laptop class. The weather is another. There are thousands of Americans who lost everything this past year in hurricanes, floods, and fires this summer. I have good friends (academics) still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
