We were nearing the end of the semester at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. My students and I had planned to celebrate the final week of a tough term with a pizza-and-proofreading party on Monday, April 27. I volunteered to bring doughnuts.
That weekend, however, turned out to be life changing. At 2 a.m., April 25, my wife, Jessica, and I found out about the earthquake that had just struck our country, Nepal. We spent the next few hours glued to the Internet, horrified by the images and headlines unraveling at social-media speed. Endless attempts later, I managed to contact my older brother in Kathmandu. “Hello? Hello?” His voice was faint, drowned out in the buzz of wires. “We’re safe,” he said, raising his voice. Then the line went dead.
That instant relief turned into nagging helplessness as images kept pouring in on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The landmarks we’d grown up around, such as the old-brick temples in Durbar Square, had collapsed into rubble. Villages that dotted the hills had simply vanished. As aftershocks kept rupturing land and lives, Jessica was unable to contact her 80-year-old grandmother, who lives alone and is hard of hearing. We lay in bed, overcome with depression.
On my drive to work Monday morning, I took the longer route just to stay with NPR’s Morning Edition, which kept updating the rising death toll. When I finally reached the college, I realized I’d forgotten something: doughnuts. Class would start in half an hour. It was too late to send an email about forgoing the pizza party in light of the tragedy. I secretly hoped that my students had had a discussion to cancel the celebration out of courtesy.
I was wrong. I walked into the classroom greeted by stacks of pizza boxes, red cups, fizzy drinks, and assortments of cookies and brownies. The students, who had done an excellent job with the preparations, had perhaps forgotten that I was from Nepal, or maybe they hadn’t caught the news yet, or maybe they had, but they didn’t really care.
The United States is a country where uncomfortable and inconvenient histories are left at the door. But higher education here purports to emphasize critical thinking and global consciousness. At Westminster, these are revered learning goals. We have institutionalized on our campus walls the contemporary vocabulary of higher learning by enshrining words like “interconnectivity,” “global consciousness,” and “ethical awareness.” Each summer students take educational trips to Ireland, India, and Thailand and post pictures on social media, which the college proudly displays on its streaming web banner.
As a modern American college, we are lockstep with U.S. academic trends, reflecting what Jeremy Rifkin has called “new teaching models designed to transform education from a competitive contest to a collaborative and empathic learning experience.”
Inspired to turn a tragic event into a learning moment, I stood in front of my class, wondering how I should navigate the discussion. Should I enlighten my students about Nepal? Or should I start an invigorating conversation about social conscience and global citizenship?
“Sorry, I forgot the doughnuts,” I began. “Because of the earthquake.” Those who weren’t scrolling their phone screens stared back in silence. Did they know what I was talking about? “How many of you followed world news in the last two days?” I asked. A few hands went up.
“Did you read about the earthquake in Nepal?” I proceeded, putting on my cheerfully inquisitive smile. One student shook her head in sympathy. I latched on to that moment. “What did you think?” I asked. After a lazy shrug, she said, “Sorry, it’s Monday morning.”
When I was hired, my department was excited to have someone from Nepal on the faculty. “Do they teach Shakespeare in Nepal?” a colleague had asked me. At least he was curious, a trait that has been absent among my students. A part of me has found comfort in their easy acceptance, where my background hasn’t mattered.
Another part of me finds it disturbing that my background doesn’t matter. Isn’t probing our differences a legitimate start to embracing our diversities? We could diversify our curriculum and change our mission statements to celebrate global consciousness, but the absence of simple curiosities in each other makes empathy sound like an unattainable ideal, requiring a landslide shift in our moral compass.
The philosopher and cultural thinker Roman Krznaric says, “Empathy can create a revolution … a revolution of human relationships.” He cites empathy tents erected by the Occupy movements in the United States and Britain as emblematic of a seemingly rising trend in social activism. Self-help gurus recommend empathy workshops to help us channel our inherent fellow-feelings.
But when I stood before my class, as an awkward silence hovered between my students and me, I wasn’t even expecting empathy. I was simply expecting a question or a comment. I was prepared to be offended, even confronted. “We had no idea you came from such a third-world country” would have triggered a dialogue. But a dense swamp of apathy is hard to navigate. It coagulates upon us like a slow disease.
What could I have done to puncture that morass? Should I have shown videos of crumbling buildings on YouTube? Would pictures of babies buried in rubble evoke an emotion? Or, on a Monday morning, was it too much to expect from a group of mostly white students at a private college in Utah to respond to an earthquake in a country that no one cares about anyway?
“Oh, well,” I finally said. The warm smell of cheese and marinara sauce had found our nostrils. We dug into the pizza and commenced reviewing papers about legalizing marijuana and lowering the drinking age. The students sat in groups and exchanged their laptops. They did what dutiful students would do — read each other’s papers and engage in discussions about their topics. During a short break a student even offered to drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, where they now had glazed croissants.
In a way, the students were demonstrating their discipline to stick to the lesson plan. Part of me wanted to intervene and explore experiential, hands-on learning. “Let’s think about how many earthquake victims five large pizzas would feed.” Another part of me recognized that peer reviews have their own significance in instilling values of collaborative learning and critical thinking. I chose not to intervene. Instead, I gorged on pizza.
In doing that, a moment had been lost, because the next time Nepal will get any mention in the American media is when the next big calamity hits us. But this is not just about Nepal.
While recognizing that for each student the instigating moment of curiosity is different, we must recognize the empathy vacuum in our classrooms and, as an extension, in society. Just as doctors are trained to think like patients, students must be trained to think like non-Americans, even if only for one day. Empathy is as much about inquiring as it is about caring. It starts with two simple questions: “What?” and “Why?”
