Against Higher Ed’s Happy Talk

Recently, while rereading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), I had an awakening. Ehrenreich takes aim at “pastorpreneurs” like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, whose embrace of positive thinking has effectively flipped their church’s priorities: Instead of building a church upon a theological foundation, they survey their prospective parishioners and build a church that gives the people what they want. In other words, they treat their parishioners like customers. Swap out Warren and Osteen for university leaders, and Ehrenreich’s “pastorpreneurs” could easily become “presidentpreneurs.” Millions of dollars are spent every year on consulting advice based on the upside-down notion that students “hire” a university and that the institution therefore needs to be gutted and remodeled to attract these fresh-faced “employers.”

This consumer-based model finds its natural idiom in American-style positive thinking. In Ehrenreich’s account, bright-siding was the 19th-century remedy to Puritan soul-sickness (captured most vividly in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction) and the bourgeois variation of it known as neurasthenia. It is not to be confused with optimism; it is, as Ehrenreich explains, a “practice, or discipline, of trying to think in a positive way.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson offers an intellectualized form of bright-siding when he claims, in the final lines of “Self-Reliance,” that real freedom means authoring our own destiny, not allowing ourselves to be buffeted by good or bad fortune: “A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” In a more religious context, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science preached that disease was an illusion produced by a weak mind.

Flash forward a century and a half or so, and it’s no coincidence that Laurie Santos’s course “The Science of Well-Being,” is the most popular offering in the history of Yale University. Santos claims that students who complete her course become 17-percent happier as a result, and she has recently added a second class on happiness tailored to teens. The hype has left some students feeling disappointed, and Santos even admits to having struggled with burnout. But that has not prevented her from making bold claims about the power of her teaching to combat the mental-health crisis afflicting American youth.

If Santos shows the impact of positive thinking on curriculum, college administrators exhibit another form of it in strategic planning. Bold predictions allow college presidents, deans, and other senior leaders to burnish a personal brand in which they champion their “vision.” There is almost no incentive for a college leader to offer a measured view; if the reality fails to live up to a lofty vision, it can be blamed on uncooperative or insufficiently buoyant subordinates. The only real consequence might be a premature departure.

Those leading strategic planning are rarely the ones who will live with its aftermath, which is why the default faculty response to executive visions is either outright skepticism or “trust, but verify.” Such distrust is sensible. The average tenure of a college president a decade ago was about eight and a half years. Today it’s under six years, and deans last around five years. Similar patterns emerge in the business world. Ehrenreich notes that because senior managers enjoy stock options and often have golden parachutes built into their contracts, they can expect to strike it rich (by most Americans’ standards) no matter how market turmoil shakes out: “The combination of great danger and potentially dazzling rewards makes for a potent cocktail.”

Whereas corporate C.E.O.s once rose through the ranks of a company to senior leadership, many executives of the ‘90s and 2000s looked more like gurus or motivational speakers than seasoned businesspeople. The dark side of “charismatic visionaries,” management scholars Dennis Tourish and Ashly Pinnington argue in a 2002 article, is a “monomaniacal conviction that there is one right way of doing things.” Such leaders come to believe that “they possess an almost divine insight into reality.”

The most dramatic example might be Nido R. Qubein, president of High Point University, an institution known for its “customer is king” approach. The webpages devoted to the “Office of the President” include dazzling charts and graphics illustrating how Qubein has increased enrollment by 299 percent, grown faculty/staff positions by 420 percent, and expanded the campus footprint by 471 percent since his hiring in 2005. These are nearly superhuman achievements, a point that Qubein’s biography frequently emphasizes. Even during the Great Recession, even during a global pandemic, he was able to attract more students and donors, swelling the university’s coffers from a measly $56 million to nearly $1 billion.

By most conventional metrics, Qubein appears to be succeeding. But the relationship between the university and town has grown strained as the campus footprint has grown from 91 to more than 500 acres since 2005. Moreover, Qubein’s focus on growing revenue has meant a precipitous drop in financial aid — down 20 percent since 2005. As a result, High Point ranks among the worst universities for enrolling students from low-income households.

You also won’t find much evidence in Qubein’s biography of historical knowledge, cultural sophistication, or philosophical curiosity. He prefers slogans like “God. Family. Country.” to nuanced scholarship and has been known to overstate his already-substantial fundraising. Though he refers to himself as “Dr. Qubein,” his doctorate is an honorary one — his highest earned degree is an M.S. in business education. He is the author of books such as Stairway to Success (1996), How to Get Anything You Want (1998), and Attitude: The Remarkable Power of Optimism (2013) — all volumes that nakedly endorse a transactional view of education.

Qubein’s story is Icarus-like, which is why Carol Matlack, of Bloomberg, nicknamed High Point “Bubble U.” Exponential growth like that must end before it topples under its own weight. The same principle applies to executives who brand themselves as thought leaders. Earlier this spring, less than a year after calling for major disruption in academe and not two years into his presidency at Temple University, Jason Wingard resigned. Compared to Qubein’s sunny evangelism, Wingard’s warnings about the imminent collapse of higher ed might sound more like fire-and-brimstone preaching. But Wingard’s vision for Temple to become a leader in work-force training had deep affinities with High Point’s branding as the “Premier Life Skills University.” One could say that Qubein set the mark that Wingard was aiming at.

Safety concerns and a strike by the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association eroded student support for Wingard so thoroughly that he had a 92-percent disapproval rating at the time of his resignation. His credentials could scarcely be stronger, including degrees from Stanford, Emory, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. But it’s the dissonance between Wingard’s vision for radical change and the harsh realities that brought it down to earth that I want to emphasize.

Americans have heard this story before, in sunny promises like “Rain Follows the Plow,” which might have been rewritten a generation later as “Ruin Follows the Plow.” Even if a college leader offers a more modest vision for the future, scholars who study the rise and fall of empires are likely to wonder what the implicit tradeoffs might be in a new plan — whether disruptive change is necessary, or necessarily better than an imperfect status quo.

Anyone who questions the premises of institutional leaders’ new strategic plans must choose between outright defiance, unwilling participation, or passive disengagement. Take, for instance, the task my English department was once given of overhauling our mission statement and curriculum with an eye toward where we wanted to be in 10 years. We were told to prepare ourselves for recruiting and retaining present-day third graders when they reached college age.

My eldest daughter was a third grader at the time, and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could anticipate what her interests or learning needs might be in a decade, much less what imperatives current events might impose on our curriculum. It wasn’t obstinacy that made me question the premise; it was intellectual humility. Instead of trying to anticipate the whims of young people, why not double down on what we know has served generations before? I helped my department write a new mission statement and update learning outcomes for the English major, but I had little faith that we were really positioning ourselves more strategically than we had been before.

As it happens, my daughter (now a fifth grader) loves Greek mythology and musical theatre every bit as much as she loves biology. After reading the juvenile forms of mythology popularized by Rick Riordan, she recently scoured my office for a dog-eared copy of Edith Hamilton’s tales of ancient gods and heroes because, in her words, it was the “real thing.” I would not be surprised if one day I discovered that she had absconded with my copy of The Golden Bough. During a recent hike, she regaled me with an unabridged version of Perseus and Medusa, and as much as I enjoyed it, I could not beat back intrusive thoughts about university leaders systematically gutting the very departments that would allow my daughter to flourish. I do not hear my daughter represented by the thought leaders in higher education preaching transformation, branding, and market-based skills. How can I trust that strategic planners who take these ideas as gospel are truly building the brightest future for today’s children?

Is “positive thinking” compatible with the intellectual mission of the university? Negative thinking is an indispensable tool in seeking truth. Socratic dialogues are not liturgies or creeds, chanted in unison. This is why another word for scholarship is “criticism.”

At their best, churches and universities have shared a certain humility in the pursuit of truth, emphasizing mystery over dogma. Good teaching is more akin to a faith journey than to continuous improvement in business. Many people of faith would recoil from a service where the congregation gathered to conduct self-evaluation of the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes, guided by a consultant who was not even a believer but had been hired by the congregation to hasten its piecemeal progress toward righteousness. If the consultant’s advice were extended to the sacred texts, the parables attributed to Christ might be excised for lack of clarity. And forget about the Book of Revelation. The result of such a narrow approach to faith or teaching is whitewashed sepulchres. Or so one might think.

But Ehrenreich shows that pastorpreneurs have been doing exactly that: surveying prospective parishioners and building churches to match their fantasies: “Hard pews were replaced with comfortable theater seats, sermons were interspersed with music, organs were replaced with guitars. And in a remarkable concession to the tastes of the unchurched … the megachurches by and large scuttled all the icons and symbols of conventional churches — crosses, steeples, and images of Jesus.” Why would they do that? To avoid scaring people off. The whole idea was, in the words of Frances FitzGerald, to “lower the threshold between the church and the secular world.” Perhaps devotees of Warren’s and Osteen’s megachurches would disagree, but the goal of religious entrepreneurs seems quite simple: maximizing revenue.

I don’t need to belabor the parallels to higher education. Business schools boom while liberal-arts programs are slashed, grades are inflated, and climbing walls, lazy rivers, and luxury dorms are constructed. Maybe what today’s third graders are going to want when they reach college age is cute cafés, retro arcades, and easy A’s.

There is another possibility: Students (like my fifth grader) really might prefer substance over shinola. And just as bright-siding in business forces everyone to wear a fake smile, sometimes with disastrous results, so also do university leaders’ visions of disruption pose real danger to people who have devoted their lives to a discipline — and to the disciplines themselves.

When Ehrenreich was first diagnosed with cancer, she bristled at those who insisted that she see it as a chance to emerge stronger, improved by the experience. Sometimes resilience means taking stock of our injuries, recognizing that even if something didn’t kill us, it has weakened us in ways that will require a long rehabilitation. What we want in times like these is durability, not rapid transformation. If I were a university president, I would replace the pep talks with this gem from Ehrenreich: “A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible.”