I came across Frank Furedi‘s March 8 article “The Therapeutic University” via the Hannah Arendt Center‘s weekly newsletter. In this article, Furedi reflects on the increasing medicalization of trauma in university contexts. Furedi’s article is wide-reaching and provocative. Although I cannot take up all of his points, I would like to comment on a few ways in which feminist relational theory is relevant to his discussion, especially with respect to vulnerability.
The therapeutic turn in universities
Universities have a growing “therapy culture.” One feature of this culture, and of our broader social context, is a changing definition of wellness. Health and wellness are not discrete states, but occur along something like a spectrum. We can slide in and out of wellness and health, sickness and stress. In the university, health and wellness are things that require management, whether as a part of campus life or in the classroom. This management means that what was once private has become public and social. For example, Furedi claims:
Until recently, however, how students and faculty coped with their existential problems remained a personal matter. Today, the therapeutic outlook pervades campus culture so thoroughly that it influences how courses are taught, which topics are discussed, and how verbal exchanges are regulated. Teaching, some educators believe, can be trauma inducing, and so they have adopted an explicit “trauma-informed perspective.”
Something about teaching with a “trauma-informed perspective” seems right to me. Three reasons motivate my sympathy for a “trauma-informed perspective.” First, learning can be traumatic. I think of Bat-Ami Bar On’s article, “Teaching (About) Genocide.” She realized that students’ apparent boredom was actually a manifestation of trauma resulting from the intense, critical study of genocide. This trauma caused students to dissociate and become uncritical. In other words, trauma obstructed learning. Providing opportunities to address this trauma helped facilitate learning.
Second, we don’t shed our everyday lives when we come into the classroom or when we conduct research. Vinh Nguyen has written powerfully about how one’s personal life and research overlap. In “Me-search, Hauntings, and Critical Distance,” Nguyen reflects on what it means to do critical scholarship about Vietnamese refugees and the Vietnamese diaspora when one is a refugee and member of this diaspora. The critical dimension of scholarship changes (and I would say, is enriched) when you cannot approach your subject matter as a disembodied, unplaced, out-of-time researcher. This is hard work. This is the hard work we ask our students to do in classrooms.
Third, we cannot neatly place the university in the public realm and expect students to keep trauma private. Many students live and work on campus. The university encompasses both their public and private spheres.
I wonder if Furedi’s concern is more about biopolitics than wellness per se. I am skeptical of wellness talk if it becomes a mechanism to manage populations. Who is wellness talk serving? Are we checking our boxes or are we concerned with student learning?
Vulnerability and trauma
There is some slippage in Furedi’s article, and perhaps in this discourse, between “vulnerability” and “trauma.” The focus on trauma emerges from a recognition of vulnerability. Furedi notes the ambiguous ways that “trauma” and “vulnerability” manifest in university contexts.
Trauma is ambiguous because it seems unable to differentiate between degrees of vulnerability. Furedi states, “In universities, terms like ‘trauma’ are now used promiscuously to signify upset and distress.” This ambiguity speaks, I think, to a failure to understand what it really means when we suggest that students may experience trauma in an educational setting. Here, trauma and vulnerability need to be untangled. We may also need to discuss confronting one’s own privilege, but I put that topic aside for now.
Furedi seems to suggest that “vulnerability” loses its meaning when it captures everyone. He states, “The term is habitually used as if it is a permanent feature of a person’s biography. It is presented and experienced as a natural state of being that shapes human responses, and is now a label frequently used to describe entire groups in society.”
Well of course vulnerability is a permanent feature of our biographies. Being formed through and in relations with others is one of the main insights of feminist philosophy. The individual as an utterly self-sufficient agent is a myth. Further, trauma lives in the body. (It seems to be a happy accident for my thinking that the On Being podcast featured trauma scientist Bessel van der Kolk on embodied trauma this week).
Furedi’s main concern seems to be that “vulnerability” is used ambiguously when referring to the “vulnerable” student. I am more sympathetic to this claim. My reasons, however, differ from Furedi’s. To me, “the vulnerable student” treats vulnerability as a homogeneous quality applied to a singular group. Where is the context for vulnerability? In what way is the student vulnerable? Is the student vulnerable as a student, or as a member of an under-represented group in the academy, as a survivor of abuse, or as a person in a disabling academic setting?
A relational turn in the university
I think that the discourse around vulnerability in the university needs to take a relational turn. Furedi’s analysis links trauma and vulnerability with a lack of emotional and intellectual maturity. The vulnerable turn is dangerous, according to Furedi, because it indicates “that the 21st-century version of personhood communicates a narrative that continually raises doubts about people’s emotional capacity to deal with physical and emotional harms.” If Furedi is right, this is worrisome indeed. But this point also seems to ignore insights from feminist relational theory. Vulnerability shouldn’t be about powerlessness, but about solidarity.
In bell hooks‘s classic Teaching to Transgress, she argues that education can be a practice of freedom. It also contributes to well-being through self-actualization. hooks is careful to separate self-actualization from therapy. Self-actualization requires students to become agents of their own learning, but it also requires an attention to vulnerability and embodiment (by both students and teachers). I suspect that focusing on relational supports for self-actualization in education may provide a counter-discourse to the biopolitics of medicalizing trauma. It requires us to broaden our scope from focusing on individual students in need to thinking about how to promote a learning community where self-actualization is a goal of education.
An aside: The crisis in authority
This last point is tangential to my main discussion points in this post about how a relational turn might benefit the discourse around trauma and vulnerability in the university. According to Furedi, one problem with the therapeutic turn is authority. The crisis in authority is two-fold for him. First, parents focus more on instilling something like affirmation in children rather than values. Second, our shared cultural “webs of meaning” are being lost. Or rather, the “cultural elite” have abdicated responsibility for them. Putting to the side the complicated task of unpacking what Furedi means by the authority of the cultural elite, I want to think about educators’ authority. I draw on insights I gained from the conversation at a workshop on Pragmatism and Phenomenology at the University of Waterloo earlier this month.
In “The Crisis in Education” (published in 1954), Hannah Arendt suggests that the educational crisis in the US emerges from a tension between making education inclusive to marginalized groups and the authority of teachers. On Arendt’s view, education has become instrumentalized and thus loses its ability to prepare children for the world. Once upon a time, children were prepared for the world by being educated in Western intellectual thought. The Western intellectual tradition provided the foundation for democratic participation. The authority of this tradition is losing its grasp, which makes resolving the crisis in education challenging. Though Arendt rejects a nostalgic return to this tradition, one cannot help (with the aid of Kathryn T. Gines’ Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question and Rita A. Gardiner’s “Lasting Impressions: Hannah Arendt’s Educational Legacy“) read some nostalgia into her admiration for education grounded in the classics and history.
Diversifying the cannon in the liberal arts may be one way to provide a relational support for self-actualization. As a philosopher, I can provide guidance through great works that have been marginalized in the history of Western thought (or even, reflecting on my own teaching, in the history of white Western feminist thought). Opening up the cannon enables students to gain tools to help them make sense of the world, and in some cases their own experiences. Perhaps it enables them to confront existential crises in their own lives as well, as a counter to medicalized discourses.
Making sense of the world is also about making sense of ourselves. As Nguyen states, “Living has been an unending desire for meaning” (p. 471). In the university, we’re in the meaning-making business. But I think we forget that living, too, is about meaning-making. (An aside to the aside: Buffy and Spike’s duet from “Once More with Feeling” is echoing in my head.) Once students leave university, I want them to continue negotiating meaningfulness. One way, it seems to me, that we can support students in self-actualization is to show them the way that marginalized groups have contributed to the history of our traditions. We can show students the ways in which marginalized people have resisted and remade oppressive structures. Diversifying the cannon can help us cultivate those critical intellectual skills that Furedi thinks are diminishing.
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JJ Thompson via Unsplash