Author: Angelo Bonadonna

Letter to Provost Othman

March 16, 2023

Below is the letter I wrote to Provost Othman following his meeting with the Department of Language and Literature on March 15, 2023. The meeting was the second one our department had with the provost. The first was near the start of the academic year on September 26, 2022. This second meeting was called suddenly during Spring Break (to take place the following Wednesday); it was called without any indication of topic or agenda. Both this meeting and the prior one in fall semester were tense and resulted in many followup discussions among colleagues about the challenges ahead of us in working productively with the administration.

Provost Othman did not respond to my email. I had not intended to post my letter to him at this blog. Given however, the fast pace of the provost’s plans to eliminate programs (with a planned Senate vote on April 11, 2023), and the special faculty meeting called on March 31, and the need I feel for a more or less complete record of our difficulties to plan curricula and programs, I am posting this entry on the morning of March 31, 2023–prior to our faculty meeting (but with a time stamp of its original deliver to the provost).

March 16, 2023

Dear Saib—It was good to meet with you yesterday, and to receive an invitation from you to have future conversations, perhaps with coffee. Such pleasantries—standing invitations for an open door and spontaneous conversations—can no longer be assumed at SXU; but we can work together to rebuild a campus atmosphere where we are all more connected.

I know your introduction to SXU has not been smooth. Such are the times we inhabit. Tension abounds for so many reasons—the pandemic, the changing culture of the institution, the changing administration, the changing faculty, the changing students. When you arrived, you were entering a traumatized community, and so I think you encountered a lot of skepticism and wariness. There were many causes, no doubt. Dr. Joyner’s leadership was a big one. Over the past six years, we have devolved, in my opinion, into a community of divisions and distrust. Morale is bad, to say the least. So many faculty and staff have left the institution, leaving gaping holes in needed structures and programs. Many—most, I would say—of those who remain are embittered, and for different, but related, reasons. Many faculty, not just a noisy few, feel that war has been declared on the faculty as a whole, and that communication has broken down, irreparably so. Many have given up, and most who remain active feel weighed down by hopelessness.

These negative effects cannot all be blamed on Dr. Joyner. But I would say that she has pursued an agenda that inevitably led to our current climate, or at least the climate you found upon entering the institution. Many, I realize, respect and praise Dr. Joyner for her effectiveness in cutting expenses, paying down bills, and generally improving the financial footing of the institution. And perhaps the skillset needed for accomplishments in this area requires the kind of steely resolve, parsimoniousness, and management style Dr. Joyner exemplified. I would argue, however, that she is leaving the institution in a state much more imperiled than what she found upon entering it. From my perspective, we currently lack the will and resources needed to rebound. Without hope, without talent, without a collective resolve, without a community, I and many colleagues feel that we are teetering on the brink. Until we are able to rebuild a climate of genuine respect (and doing so takes more than emphasizing at meetings that we need to have respectful discussion), we will lack the wherewithal and capacity to rebuild. 

I have said many of these things directly to Dr. Joyner, and I have written at length in my blog about all these thoughts—so there’s nothing new here, and nothing I feel uncomfortable sharing or having others share. What is new is your current role. As the highest-ranking administrator of the institution, you have an opportunity to turn things around, even if only slightly. As I wrote often to and of Dr. Joyner, I hope you succeed. Your success will raise up all of us. 

It’s clear you and I have very different views of what is needed for turning things around. Be it curriculum, or contemporary trends in education, or prognostications about the future, or ways to interpret data, or even just what we view as “good for students,” I think we have many points of contention. I don’t view that as a problem, and I don’t think you do either, as I do think you are committed to transparency and reasoned discussion. I don’t expect to achieve persuasion on many matters, but I do have hopes for the building of mutual respect and commitment to some shared understanding of working towards the common good, at least in its basic outlines.

At our meeting yesterday, I felt some doors were open to dialogue, or perhaps the conditions of dialogue. The past administration did not articulate its views for programs, or numbers of faculty, or for commitments of investment in faculty and academic processes. We were asked, essentially, “What are our plans—to do more, to do better?” Of course, those should be standing questions. But they shouldn’t be the only questions. Without being stated, the humanities and general education were being phased out. If they need to be phased out, let’s have an honest discussion about that process. The indirections used by the Joyner administration, in my view, were dishonest and obnoxious. Her techniques of micro-managing and employing good-cop/bad-cop dynamics didn’t help, and neither did her use of the Board to run roughshod over votes of both the faculty and Senate. But I digress. 

At our meeting yesterday, [one of our colleagues] did a good job identifying moments when some of us—you and I included—became very entrenched in presenting our positions, sometimes repetitively, sometimes with increasing volume. I have noticed this tendency in me, and yes, in you, too. In our defense, sometimes the repeated efforts to clarify are called for. And, just because we are committed to clear, transparent, possibly emphatic, explanations of positions that we hold, it does not mean we cannot change our positions. You said yesterday that [a colleague at the meeting] changed your mind on at least one matter. I don’t know if you and I will change each other’s minds—but I do hope we can enhance the contexts we draw upon and build in our discussions. I’m not a fan of the “agree to disagree” resignation (that has been a mantra of the Joyner administration), at least when it’s resorted to as a first option. The phrase does name a respectful recognition of difference, provided all the engagement leading to the statement is both honest and thorough. 

In writing frankly to you, I hope I am not closing a door to ongoing discussion. I hope I am sending a message of earnest commitment to the project ahead of us—fixing SXU. I also hope I am conveying that we’re at a point where unusual discussion like this is arising. We’re at a point where, at this very late point in my career, I have not much else to lose, so why not do my best to urge new collaborations, new paradigms, in as honest, and vulnerable, a voice as possible? Barring unforeseen developments, next year will likely be my final year at SXU, so I wish to do what I can to ensure the program I have helped to build will continue to exist—not merely for its own welfare, but for the good it is doing in high schools across the state and elsewhere. So many program-building faculty will soon be leaving SXU—this year and next, and many of us quite prematurely. The climate is so inhospitable, but perhaps, with some tweaks and new dynamics here and there, something can be started soon to energize new blood, in a new collective, with new commitments around our mission. 

Thanks again for meeting with us; I hope we can achieve a little more consensus—both on the programmatic issues and the larger agenda for the university. Be well—Angelo

The End of English Education (at SXU)?

March 15, 2023

Today we, our Department of Language and Literature, meet with the provost and interim dean. We were called into this meeting in a calendar appointment email, sent during Spring Break last week, without any agenda or topic or description for the meeting. Upon a request by our department chair we learned from the provost’s secretary that the purpose for the meeting was a discussion of the “evaluation and elimination of programs” in our department.

We shouldn’t read too much into the impersonal delivery or the laconic nature of the message; current technological tools and practices have a way of dictating much these days in the nature of our interactions and communications. So, the defects in the style and substance of the invitation may stem from the limitations of the scheduling software. But there have been breakdowns in our ways of relating at SXU, particularly between faculty and administrators. Arguably the mysteriousness, brusqueness, and emptiness of the invitation are symptomatic of deficiencies in our relationship.

Many in the department, and in other CAS departments, have anticipated that programs will be cut. There has been signaling of such moves. Talk of “data,” numbers of majors, national trends, student demand, and the like, has pushed a narrative and fanned fears that we are not meeting certain benchmarks.

Aside from the merits, the true or false bases of the facts and claims of such discussion, I lament the tension surrounding the whole dynamic here. I fear our discussion will trigger each of us involved in ways that will activate agendas and aggravate past grievances and new fears about current trajectories. Speeches will be made. We will be told about the need to take into account market forces and declines in the humanities—not only at SXU, but across the higher education landscape, as chronicled in the previous post on “The End of the English Major.” Defenses will be made; rabbit holes will be entered.

I want to argue for a win-win, a compromise that will bring in majors in multiple programs that synergistically support one another—English education, English, Spanish, and Spanish education with course listings that draw from all four groups, providing full and diverse classes economically.

I struggle to push the pragmatist line of thought, fearing that, as many have argued, the decision is in, fait accompli, don’t waste your breath. We do seem to have a large enough number of majors—nearly 100 between English and Spanish—certainly enough students to justify our continued existence, even if adjustments are needed. But if a closure decision is already settled upon, any number could be offset or recontextualized—explained away. Is any persuasion possible?

With the new provost and with the interim dean, who is our former colleague, there are minefields. How do we navigate? I want us to avail ourselves of our transitional moment. The departure of President Joyner opens the possibility of new modes of communicating and interacting. Will we turn the page? Will we be able to avoid the personal attacks and negativity—on both sides—that we seem inevitably drawn into in the climate that has festered under the departing president?

I have longed for a time when we all could be pulling together, in the same direction. What would proper program planning look like? I want to advise against facile citing of data tropes. The data are useless when they are employed casuistically, as many of us have judged to be the case. There are so many bases upon which competing courses of action may be advocated, defended, or torn down. ‘Twas always thus: it’s all arbitrary, the rationales and bases for them that we employ; “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Or data. We need some level of trust in order to get to that point where we realize, forgive, and step aside from the arbitrariness. 

As we look to the future, let us be cognizant of nuance—of trends that, were they given a critical component of support at the right time, could have developed, rather than fizzling out.

Our English Ed program has been growing the past few years, after sinking, post-2008, to its lowest ebb. It has been growing despite the institutional stress of the past 8 years; the loss of faculty; the institution’s precipitous disinvestment in its academic mission; and the near-complete neglect, by all, of program promotion, marketing, and recruitment. With a little vision and commitment, how far might all our programs—not only the education ones—grow and thrive?

I need to ask the provost: Is there room for discussion on program closure decisions? Is there a willingness to recalculate the data so as to envision new (or old) efficiencies? Or are we locked into a death march of program closures—whether that course be pursued for defensible reasons of market trends, performance, capacity, and mission, or for suspect reasons of bias, vengeance, and ignorance?

The End of the English Teacher?

March 4, 2023

The recent New Yorker article on “The End of the English Major” is grief-inducing for many reasons, one of which might be that perhaps President Joyner was right all along to pursue the ruinous path of program closure she put us on.

Side Point: I don’t really believe that, as Joyner’s canned administrator-speak about national trends, and the demographic cliff, and the SXU brand, and distinctive value, etc. did not take into account our local conditions, our demographics, our market, our traditions, and our record of success in a variety of areas that she chose to disregard.

Whatever. It’s time to move on from Joyner—more on this later. The English major and the humanities might be destined for death—but even if they are, it won’t be an immediate death—and, in the interval, we have an opportunity to reconnoiter with fellow humanists in order to package and promote new versions of our studies that achieve some of the objectives of interdisciplinarity and critical thinking and contextualization in traditions, and … well, all the stuff and values we preach (and truly believe in, and not without cause). The pendulum swing away from the traditional disciplinary categories might swing back leaving some new combinations of categories. We may well create the innovative programs that our administration (along with many other administrations across higher education) has been clamoring for, (despite neglecting to provide support for such developments). The larger forces of the pendulum swing may offer a needed catalyst. Suspicions may arise, perhaps, that, in our (over-)reactions and (over-)adjustments to the phone/social-media/Internet era of the early 21st century, the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.

In his New Yorker article, Nathan Heller describes the contemporary moment as a time when, “by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.” Perhaps the disruptive and seismic shifts in knowledge making and sharing brought on by the smart phone are temporary or transitional, and once we’ve survived the attendant growing pains, we will recover our collective recognition of the value of reading and theorizing about the past as a way of improving our understanding of the present.

The humanities may come back, since, clearly there is an interest in discourse on ethics and culture and art, and when there is an interest in such things, it stands to reason that there is a place for sophistication and beauty and rigor and context for such discussions and the methods of holding them. The pushing ever on in pursuit of a “perfection” is our compulsive nature as language-using humans, right? (I’m looking at you, Kenneth Burke, for flank support in this “perfection motive” argument—all such motivation deriving “naturally” from our condition of being language-using animals.)

But even if the humanities don’t come back, it’s going to take some years for English studies to evaporate at the high school level the way they have evaporated in higher education in the past ten years.

Here’s where I must pivot from the lofty and depressing concerns of the New Yorker article to the local and depressing concerns of restructuring at Saint Xavier University. The current move by our Administration—and by their collaborators in the university’s Department of Education—to relocate all secondary education programs into the Department of Education appears, on its surface to be a rational and defensible course of action, at least to judge by the sobering context of the New Yorker article. If the English major and humanities are dead, why not eliminate disciplinary content requirements for prospective teachers, and simply focus on skill development and pedagogical formation, with, as needed, some nods to subject area expertise?

But this is going too far. My complaint about President Joyner all along was that she exploited a rationale that had a basis in truth and good reasoning, but that she pushed things too far. She took a national trend in higher ed—she fomented attendant fears and insecurities—and, powered by a lot of gibberish and true-believing sycophants and opportunists, she ruthlessly ramrodded an agenda that was equally out of balance as it was self-serving. The bellwether was the elimination of the religious studies and philosophy programs. Prior to the closure of these programs, their faculty made compelling arguments for 1) the programs’ efficiencies in course hour generation; 2) the synergistic support between major and gen ed course offerings; and 3) the value added to brand and mission by supporting majors in areas that provided graduates roles in local, national, and international religious communities, as well as preparation for graduate studies in various humanistic areas. The arguments fell on deaf ears all around—except for Senate which voted down the program closures. Despite Senate’s objection, the Administration could claim, gaslight fashion, that the shared governance box was checked, and the programs were closed under proper authority of the Board of Trustees.

In general, Joyner encouraged an approach to program contraction or closure that resulted in cutting to and through the bone, while maintaining a veneer of compassion by not firing individuals or cutting specific positions (though she did do both). In the post-Joyner period, we can all agree that some contraction was called for—but not the wholesale starving of humanities programs that we have seen.

What I propose for the mid-term transition into whatever the future holds for higher ed, is for all secondary programs to lean into current disciplinary content standards as necessities for compliance with basic teacher preparation requirements. I have been shouting in a well, it seems, about the 2019 move by the State of Illinois to align secondary State standards to national standards. This recognition of professional disciplinary scholarly organizations may be, in the context of the New Yorker article, the last, best gasp of recognized valuation of humanistic knowledge and standards. But in any case, does anyone predict that, in the next generation or so, there will be an abandonment of the more or less traditional education required for teachers at the middle and high school levels? Will there not be a need for teachers—with some version of formation along the lines that we have always provided?

I’m not calling for teacher educators to dig in and insist on perpetuating a version of our studies as they have always existed. Rather, I’m saying there is a strong market and a growing market for secondary teachers in humanities-related disciplines who can adapt their skills-based, or content-based, or Internet-based approaches to the evolving and recurring needs of the teaching of language, culture, and rhetoric.

In preparing disciplinary experts, SXU could take the lead in helping to meet the urgent need for new teachers. The teacher shortage across the nation and in Illinois is reaching crisis status. Just yesterday (3/3/2023), Governor Pritzker announced the Teacher Pipeline Grant, a new package of financial incentives to recruit new teachers to address the chronic shortage that is predicted to worsen in upcoming years. Given the shortage, we may expect an eventual reduction of standards for teacher quality—all the more reason for an institution like SXU to brand itself as distinctive in offering programs that produce the highest quality teachers, who have mastered not only best practices in pedagogy, but also the rigorous standards for content knowledge required by the State and disciplinary professional experts.

At SXU we may not save the humanities across the board. But we have an obligation to preserve the humanities that are foundational to our secondary education programs. It’s not a total answer, and in doing so, we may be swimming against the current of gloomy trends outlined in the New Yorker article. 

But there are other trends: Our record of preparing effective teachers in secondary programs is strong. It will remain strong only if we lean in harder to our tradition of housing our programs in disciplinary areas—something the State of Illinois, finally, has codified in its move to accredit programs according to their alignment to national standards.

Restructuring Programs at SXU, 2023

February 15, 2023

From the failed initiatives of the Gilbert Campus and international students project in 2015, through the financially fragile years of Dr. Joyner’s presidency, up to our current proposed plans for restructuring, the recent history of SXU has been turbulent. The chaos of these past eight years, heightened by Dr. Joyner’s unexpected departure, calls for a turning of the page in our methods. The administration’s resolve for restructuring should come with a pledge for greater reflectiveness, community-wide dialogue, and a commitment to proper process. How do we decide collectively and optimistically to move forward as an institution?

Let’s consider fundamental questions, beginning with: what is the purpose of a college education? More pointedly to my concerns as a stakeholder: What role do the humanities, liberal arts, and general education play in a college degree? 

In a recent interview on her new appointment as president of St. Norbert College, Dr. Joyner affirmed key values of a traditional education, particularly one provided by a private, faith-based institution. She referenced three traditions that drew her to St. Norbert—its Catholic roots, its Norbertine values, and its deep commitment to the liberal arts. She spoke of the Norbertine concept of communio, which emphasizes mutual respect, esteem, and trust. Similarly, at SXU we often heard professions of Mercy values and commitment to mutual respect as foundational to our community.

Critics of Dr. Joyner, however, felt that such professions did not jibe with the actions that were pursued at SXU or the divisions that arose and were allowed to fester in our community. Under Dr. Joyner’s watch we saw a shrinking of general education requirements and offerings. We saw the closing of liberal arts programs—starting with mission-based programs in religious studies and philosophy. Many considered the hiring of an anti-union lawyer, the eventual breaking of the faculty union, and the defiance of various bylaws, to be breaches in shared governance and trust. The massive turnover of administration, faculty, and staff in recent years, and the expressed frustrations and sadness of many who have left the institution raise the question of role of esteem in community life at SXU.

Not all of the negative effects are attributable to the president. Change is always difficult, and inevitably meets with resistance and painful dynamics. But now we stand at a crossroads. As we move forward to a new structure, we need to be wary of words that sound good, but don’t always ring true.

As programs are considered for cancellation, as faculty lines are cut or expanded, as budgets are proposed, we need collaborative and informed discussions that take into account nuances that have not gotten the proper attention they require. We need stakeholders to be empowered to share their expertise, their perspectives, their visions, and their concerns. I’ll start with one example.

One of the restructuring plans proposes to move secondary education programs out of the disciplinary majors in which they have been housed at SXU. The proposal is to convert all teacher candidates from being majors in their respective areas to being majors in secondary education. By making this move, several current major programs—for instance in English, Spanish, history, music, art, and possibly more—will likely be closed since the discipline-based education majors often comprise the majority of majors in the department. The new education programs will feature pedagogical formation, along with some coursework in the disciplines, to the extent that the department of Education is able to persuade the State that it is meeting national standards (these are the standards developed by professional organizations in the disciplines, and they are quite rigorous). Even if our colleagues in Education are able to make this case to our accreditors, the bigger question remains: will this approach provide teacher candidates the necessary foundations for success in teaching in disciplinary areas?

While the new approach may appear to bring efficiency, it marks a departure from our tradition, one that placed a premium on content knowledge in disciplinary areas. SXU’s strength in this traditional approach has made its secondary programs distinctive in the past (with all programs earning national accreditation through NCATE and some programs earning exemplary status through the State of Illinois). More to the point, the move away from the disciplines in out of step with the State’s recent (2019) restructuring of secondary education accreditation in its adoption of national, discipline-based standards for secondary programs. Saint Xavier proposes to move away from discipline-based programs, just as the State has mandated a discipline-centered and structured approach to teacher education.

This example names but one of the areas that needs a full airing of all stakeholders. As we look towards the next version of SXU, let us all commit—students, faculty, staff, administrators—to a complete discussion—and one where we are not shy to call out inconsistencies and deviations from mission and values.

It Is Dark Inside the Wolf

February 10, 2023

How much of my preoccupation with the Woes of Saint Xavier is ego, how much is a need for justice, how much is simply a nagging thought that we’re close to a better way, and, with a little tweaking and compromise, we can find solutions that create a win-win? 

I need to be suspicious of the “ego” part. I suspect I can be vindictive and passive aggressive. I want satisfaction, and my appreciation of the intrigue of a long-game payback gives me pause. Nursing one’s wounds is necessary for recovery and survival. But watering and tending the garden of one’s grievances is the wrong path. It is self-destructive, at least in life, despite how satisfying it can be in stories and imagination.

This week’s reading in class of Margaret Atwood’s The Testatments is relevant here. The novel is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which was written a lifetime ago in the early 1980s. Atwood explains that she had no plans to write a sequel, but then 32 years later, propelled undoubtedly by developments in American politics and social movements, and The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, she found herself desirous of creating a sequel. The problem, she explained in “The Writing of The Testaments,” was that she had lost the narrative voice of the original. Always a student/teacher of creative processes, Atwood explains that there are ways of continuing the story in such a case—for example, by shifting the perspective or by starting in the middle. She uses “Little Red Riding Hood” as an illustration, which could have started, “It was dark inside the wolf.” And so, we’re on a different track, with different narrative possibilities.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the wolf was the repressive society of Gilead—and that story does in fact begin in medias res in that dark place. The Testaments, it turns out, also begins inside the wolf—but here the wolf is Aunt Lydia, one of the founders/collaborators/subversives of the repressive Gileadean society. Atwood’s novel takes us into and through the psychology and history of that wolf—and the story provides rich, detailed portraiture of the proverb, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” My satisfaction and sympathy with Atwood’s depiction of this very cold dish worries me a bit, as I feel stirrings for similar satisfactions in connection with the wrongs that have been done to me and mine.

Is SXU’s situation a problem of local significance—one employer’s bad behavior—or is it reflective of a larger, world turning moment? Grappling with that question is one of my challenges. As I look on in shock and horror, maybe I just need to take a breath and recognize: sic transit gloria mundi, don’t take it personally, ‘twas always thus, it’s bad all around, two steps forward, one step back, there’s still some hope…. But how much comfort and hope can there be in recognizing the scale of the problem is the whole world, rather than just the place where I work?

I’m trying to grow up a bit about my expectations. Here’s what I’ve recently discovered about how I’ve approached life through my youth and adulthood up until recently: I’ve been waiting for the “end of history”—in the sense that we will have arrived, through progressiveness, reform, and enlightenment, to a time beyond—not all human frailties—but some of the big ones, at least, like (extreme) racism, sexism, and bigotry (or at least the more obvious bigotries). Atwood’s essay cited above (“The Writing of The Testaments”) helped me perceive my bias. She said she was leery of the phrase “on the wrong side of history.” The phrase suggests that history pronounces judgment and advances on, in a more or less settled way, and posterity situates itself on the correct side. But in her explanation that “history is simply human beings doing stuff,” she spotlights how random and impermanent and potentially backsliding history can be. “It winds around, it reverses, very much depending on the circumstances.”

Enter Donald Trump. He unveiled to me (and others) just how so many “solved” problems of the past have not at all been solved, but still are there, lurking, seeking out their point of entry into the fray. With Trump, we’ve learned that the term “backsliding” is too much of an understatement. What would the term be for the dissolution of entities that we had, more or less, reified into existential absolutes—democracy as the American form of government, for instance?

At SXU, the reifications that have been dissolved for me are, in a nutshell, the values of higher education: the assumption that higher education is a worthy pursuit in and of itself; the view that higher education improves standards of living and the significance of living. All these things can go away. All these things are going away. The process of going away takes with it the hopes I had had in colleagues to stand up for education. Too many of us have been insecure about the value of higher education’s “product” in comparison to other products—be they technologies, skills, professional credentials, or new careers churned up by the market, or supposedly so, in programs deemed as “in demand.” Never mind that the criteria for measuring demand are specious, drawing on bad data, bad projections, bad assumptions.

Undeniably, what is happening at SXU is transpiring on a broader stage. Across the country and world, there are hard questions being asked about the value of a traditional education organized around foundations in the humanities and liberal arts. Mixed in with the elegiac reflections that arise in me are other considerations with their own disturbances—e.g., personal nostalgias that bespeak my privilege and perhaps invite harsher scrutiny. Part of my grief, I confess, involves the loss of ease that comes from a shared recognition of privilege and value—to titles (hearing “Dr. Bonadonna” still causes a flutter in my soul), to academic routines, to assumptions of authority and value. Nonetheless, a large part of the grief, undoubtedly, does stem from the ugliness of transformation in this specific institution.

I’ve seen friends make peace—through retirement, through job switching, through capitulation. It does seem that the administration’s strategy is to clean house of anyone with a memory or a grievance, the two go hand in hand. I suppose it’s possible that a new entire staff could adapt and progress more productively than aggrieved old timers—and so, maybe the intensity of what I’m feeling is just a case of “my ox is the one being gored”—and so that’s why I’m in such a state.

I walk through the halls, and I have brief and lament-filled conversations with each colleague I encounter. There’s the shaking of the head. I’m thanked for my efforts. We commiserate in our futility. In my office, I get the emails from any of several back-channel faculty groups—planning future actions, or offering new tidbits of offenses, or strategizing about next steps. I write in my blog about the depression that I feel; I hear professions of depression from others. It’s heartbreaking.

We seem to have gone to a place beyond “morale.” A few years ago, some of my most respected advisors told me to stop framing SXU’s challenges in terms of a morale problem. All agreed morale was bad, but my advisors preferred a different way of framing our needs and visions. Today, our morale has not improved, and that term continues to fail to describe our reality, but in a new way. Perhaps we are too depleted to have a morale problem. If morale falls in a forest and there’s no one there, does it make a sound? The absence of so many who have left, and the planned absence of so many who have informed us of their plans to leave, creates an emptiness and pain that might better be addressed as a form of grief. The climate is one of hopelessness and loneliness. There’s bitterness and anger and disbelief too. There are twinges of the old fight here and there, but most are putting their head down in whatever salvageable way they can, and trying to move forward, somehow, with a will to survive, or just persist, but in a short-term manner.

Through it all, the pragmatist in me maintains there’s another way, a middle ground. Maybe. I want to reach out to my adversaries and try rapprochement—if only for mutually self-serving goals and ends. But dialogue has failed in formal and informal ways, and the power of the adversaries has been consolidated. I and many others have become hardened in our perspective of the other side’s autocratic, power-oriented stance and modus operandi. I have trouble letting go of foregone conclusions and despair—though I’m not convinced I can’t, however dark it is inside this wolf.

The stories of some of the victims—faculty and staff who have been pushed out or mistreated through punitive and harsh economic measures—fill me with sadness. I think of a staff colleague, described recently on Facebook as “one in a million,” and I see the impacts and the heartlessness of this institution in simply stepping over her and ignoring her in the face of mistreatment.

I am in agony over the consequences of the inexorable march upon which SXU, in a kind of Menippean satire, has embarked. I can give to students, but only so much. Ultimately, it’s they who are mistreated, as it always comes down to the student experience. The deprivations of resources and care inevitably lead to disengagement and failure and loss—of them, and all of us.