To future academics: We need you to revive democracy

Dear future profs,

We need you.

Life as a faculty member has never been easy. Add a global pandemic, racial and social unrest and threats to core democratic values from political leaders in the United States and other nations. You might be wondering if this is the right time to join the faculty.

You’ll be entering the academy at a time when faculty report being overwhelmed, stressed and anxious.

Faculty are also learning and using technology in new ways, teaching courses and advising online, supporting students who are experiencing stress, experiencing limitations on research and professional travel, all while also home-schooling children, caring for loved ones and dealing with health and other direct effects of COVID-19.

You’re likely thinking we’re not doing a good job on selling you on an academic career.

Here’s the deal: The United States and other nations can’t move forward without a realistic assessment of how we arrived at recent events or how we can address the deep, complex underlying issues and problems. In states and nations across the globe, dialogue is in short supply and retribution is all the rage. That’s why we need you, future faculty.

We understand calls for retribution. What do any of us have to say to individuals who invaded the US Capitol Building, the heart of democracy? Is it really possible to engage in dialogue with arsonists?

Think, however, about the courage and empathy that Abraham Lincoln showed when he said in his second inaugural address: “With malice toward none and sympathy for all.” He looked toward the closure of a war that tore the United States apart and tried to envision how to help the country heal.

One hundred and fifty years later, echoing Lincoln, relatives of the Charleston church shooting victims remarkably addressed the murderer of their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, and said: “We forgive you.”

How to revive democracy

Democracy is at a crossroads. Our democratic vital signs are not good. Yet higher education is the heart of the democratic body. The search for truth, the ability to argue and understand different points of view, and critical engagement with one another defines academic life. We need you to point us toward what this means in the 21st century.

In a talk to teachers, James Baldwin once famously said: “To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way [a person] achieves [their] own identity.” That is the essence of academic life and the key to reviving democracy.

If higher education is not merely to survive but to fulfil its role and responsibility in advancing the public good, we need new eyes to think about academic life and the role of the academic. We came of age when the norm was to tell assistant professors to sit in their offices and publish articles and just shush on outreach to communities or engagement with academic policies.

That model may once have served academe well. It is also an artefact of America’s past that kept women as second-class citizens, gays in the closets, African Americans and Latinx on the margins and people with disabilities off campus.

Colleges and universities have made stutter-steps at reform. More women are in campus leadership positions. Most universities have non-discrimination clauses so that LGBTQ students, faculty and staff cannot be openly discriminated against. Numerically, there are more BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of colour) students, faculty and staff than when we entered academe, and people with disabilities have rights of redress when their concerns are ignored or go unresolved.

Yet we are nowhere near where we need to be – and we need you to help us get there.

Move the nation forward

What do we ask of you?

• Ask important questions. Learn the questions that need to be addressed whether you’re in neuroscience or sociology.

• Use theoretically grounded and methodologically appropriate methods to address questions and challenge norms.

• Focus on the quality and contributions of the work, not the simple number of publications.

• Connect with people outside the academy about your work and get out of the academic cocoon. Teach students how to critically evaluate evidence and engage in constructive dialogue with others. Talk with policy-makers, practitioners, journalists and the public about what we know from data and research.

• Take risks. Academic life, at its best, enables us to take intellectual risks in pursuit of our work. Don’t do what’s safe.

Too many of us have been socialised to keep our collective heads low, do our research, teach our classes and stay away from controversy. The world is facing important problems. Democracy is at stake and higher education has a critical role to play. We need you, future faculty, to move the nation forward.

That’s all fine and good, you say, but what assurances can we give you? We can promise no massive monetary reward or cosy sinecures divorced from the challenges everyone faces now.

But Baldwin, and Lincoln before him, framed how we think about society and the academy. “To ask questions of the universe” is not a task for everyone. Academic life is a calling. Academic life, as we have lived it, and as we envision it for you, is about challenging norms and creating a society that foments democracy.

Laura W Perna is vice provost for faculty and GSE centennial presidential professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, and editor of Taking it to the Streets: The role of scholarship in advocacy and advocacy in scholarship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). William G Tierney is university professor emeritus at the University of Southern California in the US, and author of Get Real: 49 challenges confronting higher education (SUNY Press, 2020).