From the unpublished files: "Declaring Independence"
Happy New Year!
The turn to 2024 has brought the awful slog of having to clean out my Google Drive. Google ended its free storage offering to universities and so now we’re on a 75 GB quota per faculty member (plot twist: I have 180 GB worth of files, probably 90% of it memes). So I’ve been spending the week getting things cleaned out. Never trust a tech giant to keep giving the store away!
One interesting thing that’s happened during the cleanup is stumbling across an old thing I’d forgotten about. Google Drive is like a time machine for me because I just put things in there and use the search function to find that thing later. I have, clearly, no idea what is taking all that space in my Drive. I just know I need everything there.
Today I’m publishing something I found this week, something I wrote in September 2020, put in my Drive and forgot about. It was written during what for me was probably the low point of the pandemic. Six months in and still no vaccine, remote classes for a year and society coming apart. I never published it anywhere.
Some context: I was part of a working group of eight faculty and staff charged with reimagining the future of the university. We were asked to dream big and consider what might be a good use of the uncertain moment. They were good discussions with some of my favorite people. We never published anything but a report made its way to the upper levels.
What I’ve written below was part of that exercise, to write an aspirational work of speculative fiction about a possible future. I’m struck as I re-read it today that even in the darkest of times I was doubling down on my ideals and hoping for a better tomorrow. Some of it even came true. Much of it did not. Some things we are doing better at. But that’s how progress works.
Anyhow I’m pushing this here because it might be of interest. It’s not the best vision of the university’s future, but it’s one I had in mind 3.5 years ago and to some degree still believe in.
“Declaring Independence” by Jeremy Littau
September 17, 2020
The events of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic disrupted the devotion to the daily grind and business-as-usual function of the university. The change was chaotic, and many tasks normally done were altered or left undone. It also created a moment of introspection about what the university had become since its founding in 1865, and where it was going.
The work undone gave us time to pause and reflect. Publications and manuscripts stalled or went unpublished due to the pandemic, and it made us realize how much we had outsourced our self-evaluation of our own prestige and worth to forces beyond our control. Closed offices, cafes, labs and centers forced us to rethink the work environment and the vulnerability our staff toiled in. The crippling budget losses from a closed campus exposed how sensitive we are to losses in tuition and housing fees due to aggressive expansion that created non-core priorities and forced tuition increases at unsustainable levels.
The reflection forced us to stop and consider how we got here, how our current state matched our ideals, and what we might need to do differently.
Asa Packer remarked that Lehigh was founded to serve the “intellectual and moral improvement” of young men in the Lehigh Valley. The statement offers a window on purpose even if its mission was limited by blindspots of the time. Lehigh would not admit women for the first time until 1971, a reflection of the difficulty changing a university charged with serving young men into something more broad and inclusive. Its progress on race is similarly difficult, with periods of slow and stalled work on racial equality and diversity in the student population, faculty, staff and leadership. But while hope for “intellectual and moral improvement” serves as a rubric to point out areas the university has fallen short, good symbols are good symbols. In this case, it offers a pathway for change.
To advocate that the university ought to be a beacon for improving people’s ability to both think and act morally is a profound statement of purpose. It acknowledges that intellectual pursuit is not enough, that the thinking must be grounded in moral urgency to change society for the better. But to change society, we must ourselves be introspective about our own shortcomings and fears that keep us from changing. The university is a conversation with itself, not a lecturer telling society how others ought to be. The messy, at-times rancorous conversation about issues of equality, justice, and a life worth pursuing is not an inconvenient part of university life. It is, at its core, what makes university life vital. And it ought to change us.
The introspection during a pandemic gave way to thinking about ways in which we had ceded our mission to others. In pursuit of prestige, we decided the industrial standards for publication and evaluation of our peers is how we should judge the quality of our education and our faculty. Our promotion materials spoke the language of distinction - our Founder’s Day video in 2013 lauded how Lehigh is “redefining what it means to lead” - but our decision-making processes have long been hampered by fear of risk for a better future at the expense of keeping our grip on a smaller space marked by diminishing returns. The university as an institution had become oriented to boasting of its distinctiveness even while it was doing the same things and following the same “best practices” as other places. We were measuring ourselves with someone else’s ruler. It was time to change, and that meant going back to the beginning and asking what it means to be a leader in the intellectual and moral improvement of others.
Everyone was charged to ask those questions of themselves and the different constituencies they worked in every day.
In many ways, the Board of Trustees’ decision to take no action on revoking President Trump’s honorary degree was more emblematic than problematic.1 The Board hid behind the language of the need for collegial discourse as a rationale, ignoring the moral components of the petitions that had been endorsed by both the student body and the faculty. The petitions weren’t merely about political differences, as the board tried to assert in its statement; they noted that Bill Cosby had been stripped of his degree for moral failing long before he had been convicted of sexual assault because the public evidence was overwhelming. The same circumstances around then-candidate Trump were no less overwhelming or damning. The decision about Trump was laden with political consequences, to be sure, but from a public-facing perspective the message was clear. A black man with no political power could have his degree taken away, but a white man with political power and a large following (particularly among many of our alumni) could not.
For a school with a checkered history on race, the non-decision was devastating. For a school dedicated to moral improvement, it was an abdication of responsibility, authority, and mission. In listening to the community and thinking about the university’s precarious place in a changing higher ed landscape, the Board came to realize that by trying to cautiously thread the needle, it was pleasing nobody and investing in a diminishing past at the expense of a better, more inclusive future. We were cowering before the wealth of our alumni who were so partisan that they would excuse moral failings not in line with the Lehigh we all want, and in doing so we were turning off progressive alumni whose devotion and donations represent our ability to thrive in the future.
Freed from the constraints of feeling like it had to make decisions from a defensive posture, the Board embraced thinking that took us on a more bold path when it came to letting our values drive our decisions. They opened up their own body to make it more inclusive, ensuring that there were different voices in the room from different stakeholder groups on campus. Wealth and status were not primary drivers that determined membership. A more inclusive board that honored all the different ways a Lehigh degree makes one successful - not merely material gain - inspired our alumni that had grown disenchanted with the plodding change of pace at the university. We found that diversity truly was our future, and we embraced it.
For their part, the faculty began to examine ways it too had gotten comfortable measuring itself against peer standards. The faculty rethought its standards for scholarly success in promotion and tenure. The faculty de-emphasized reliance on journal prestige as a marker of success by connecting our work with our mission. What does it mean to lead intellectually and morally. It meant valuing work that had public-facing purpose, seeing the ability to create conversation and dialogue in the public eye as valid and good. We rewarded those who did public scholarship; knowledge locked inside dusty old libraries or digital paywalls lost its central focus in how we evaluate the contribution to Lehigh’s scholarly vibrance.
Dedication to the intellectual and moral improvement of Lehigh students also meant making sure our faculty were actively thinking about education of the whole person. We broke down the walls between disciplines and honored interdisciplinary thinking as part of the teaching mission. We looked at curriculum requirements and saw too many boxes to check on the road to a degree. We considered our efforts a failure if students mostly studied in their interest areas. We cut, cut, cut requirements and created an education roadmap that offered more space to explore outside one’s field; majors were capped at 65 credits university-wide and required a second major or minor outside one’s discipline area. Scientists engaged with the humanities. Business students fell in love with the arts. Engineering students studied psychology. The Lehigh graduate of tomorrow finished their degree ready to think about their work in an ethical, holistic manner.
Advising the whole person became an active exercise. We wanted to create brilliant people and excellent citizens, ready to change society for the better with their work and engagement with their community. Finally, faculty surrendered their prestige in thinking of themselves as the only educational arm of the university. We embraced the role Student Affairs plays in developing our students into mature, thoughtful adults and engaged citizens. We realized education goes beyond the classroom. Teaching efforts that worked alongside the Student Affairs mission was encouraged and rewarded.
Finally, we realized that the breakneck pace we put younger faculty through was serving to perpetuate the idea that one's work should break the worker, that sacrifices of good things like family life were necessary to do brilliant work. We hired people because they were interested in things beyond their field, because they had ambitions beyond their own career arc, because they were interested in being whole people in service of educating the whole student. Families, hobbies, side interests and other extracurriculars were embraced. Faculty got off the treadmill to nowhere and a funny thing happened. Because they were engaged in their communities and families, they had skin in the game. Their work had renewed purpose and vitality. We published less, but our work mattered more.
We didn’t venture into this lightly. We knew there were risks, just as Asa Packer took a risk more than 150 years ago when he staked his own money on the creation of a university that would embody his vision. But we realized that not taking the leap of faith in ourselves and our founding purpose was more risky than jumping into the unknown. The demographic changes that hit higher education in the 2020s meant that pursuing distinction and differentiation was more important than doing what everyone else was doing. Prospective students toured the campus and saw something built differently than others. Many came for that purpose. Faculty and staff joined the community because they saw that purpose. And the people who weren’t on board with it, they left.
Note: Lehigh rescinded Trump’s honorary degree mere months later, in January 2021, after he incited the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.