During a prolonged faculty and graduate-student strike this year at York University, in Toronto, employees received a missive from the university health-and-wellness officer on the “Importance of self-care during this time of labor disruption.” Picketing in circles for 15 weeks in weather conditions ranging from freezing rain to blistering heat, confronted by the university’s refusal to meet the union at the bargaining table, employees were reminded to practice “patience,” take “deep breaths,” and “stay active and stretch.” The university, faced with the demands of organized labor, offered only therapy. The much-discussed corporatization of higher education has led not only to an obsession with efficiency, performance, and competitive achievement, but also to corporate strategies for managing liability and diffusing dissent.
Self-help was envisioned by its 19th-century inventors as a means of counteracting the university’s failures, but it has become a tool for perpetuating them. It utterly permeates the modern university, not only in predictable campus outlets like the Center for Wellness, but in such unlikely spaces as creative-writing workshops, course catalogs, seminars in expository writing and religious studies, office hours, well-being newsletters, and new faculty training and development. Universities need to respond to the mental-health crisis afflicting academe and society at large. But where does mental-health provision end and therapeutic depoliticization begin?
Self-help is notoriously difficult to define because it encompasses both utilitarian and therapeutic ideals.
When an undergraduate scrolls through her morning social-media feed, she will see tweets from her university recommending mindfulness techniques and health-and-happiness strategies. On the way to breakfast, she can’t miss the fliers advertising wellness workshops and success seminars. The dining-hall place mat she views as she consumes her morning cereal depicts a pie chart of self-care produced by the Office of Student Affairs. After breakfast, she heads off to one of the university’s popular courses on “The Science of Happiness” or “The Meaning of Life.”
While the student polishes off her Cheerios, her professor might be scrambling to complete a slide show for her afternoon lecture, which, due to the rising prominence of student evaluations and active-learning workshops, increasingly approximates the smooth, anecdotal flow of a TED talk. Or the professor might spend her morning attending a new faculty seminar on “how to survive the tenure track,” which recommends, adorably, “the art of saying no.” The university’s complex advice networks strive to mitigate the effects of deeper systemic problems: intensifying competition, a fractured tenure system, racial inequity, and ever-expanding job precarity.
But is it fair to group a mindfulness poster and a happiness course, the success ethic of the business school and the campus “well-being” officer, together under the banner of self-help? Self-help is notoriously difficult to define because it encompasses both utilitarian and therapeutic ideals — the aspirational mentality of professional-managerial culture and the softer discourses of well-being and self-care. In reality, as Micki McGee has demonstrated in Self Help Inc., her important study of the industry, these two sides of self-help are mutually reinforcing. Therapeutic self-realization exercises offer temporary compensation for the pressures of hypercompetition. Such therapeutic measures are better than nothing, perhaps, but they also allow the more competitive form of self-help to persist by patching over its most pernicious effects.
Another challenge in tracking and assessing self-help’s institutional influence is the fact that it is no longer confined to the printed book, but now infiltrates almost all facets of contemporary experience. “Self-help books are featured in the newspapers and magazines we read, the talk shows and situation comedies we watch on TV, and even the films we view,” argues the sociologist Patricia Neville. “As a consequence it is fair to assert that self-help books have become integrated into our daily lives, whether we purposely seek these products or not.” From social-media memes to institutional infrastructure, self-help’s tentacles are everywhere.
The absorption of self-help by the academy has been facilitated by its resemblance to the tradition of Arnoldian self-culture that defined the university in the years leading up to the First World War. As the president of Colorado College put it in 1891, “A college training aims to develop man’s self-making power … which, other things being equal, is the key to success.” “At its most inspired,” Laurence Veysey says in The Emergence of the American University, “the quest for personal fulfillment might be the high-minded struggle of a William James; at the opposite extreme it could already assume a tone not unlike that of Dale Carnegie.” In some respects, then, self-help has always been part of American higher education, and its resurgence represents a counterfactual university in which the generalizing tendencies of the liberal arts never went out of style.
Despite their resemblance and overlap, however, academic and popular approaches to self-cultivation have long been characterized by a dynamic of mutual contempt. Some National Endowment for the Humanities grant applications include the stipulation that funds may not be used for “the writing of guide books, how-to books, and self-help books.” But with the rise of academic trade books and crossover publishing, it has become ever more difficult to tell these genres apart. Bolstered by his academic credentials, the troubling self-help guru Jordan Peterson embodies the merger of the university’s therapeutic and educational missions even as he exploits popular impatience with the tenets of academic practice.
As the example of Peterson suggests, self-help both draws on and repudiates the traditions of the university. Self-help’s use of the university as a foil has a long history. In Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus (1833-34), the phrase “self-help” makes one of its first appearances in a chapter called, tellingly, “Pedagogy,” which includes an invective against the pieties of the “rational university.” After the main character has “expectorated his antipedagogic spleen,” he discovers “the highest of all possessions, that of Self-help.” In his seminal 1859 Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, the first advice book to popularize the phrase, Samuel Smiles likewise expressed deep suspicion of institutional education, hailing working-class groups or what he called “People’s Colleges” as the greatest hope for social progress. Smiles railed against the ill effects of excessive study and competitive examinations and declared, “It is not governments, then, but THE PEOPLE who must educate the people.” For these early proponents, self-help was entangled with the adult-education movement’s efforts to foster the self-sufficiency of the laboring classes.
Self-help has always been at once pseudo-academic and counter-academic.
The autodidact premise of self-help gained urgency and momentum from class- and race-based inequities in institutional access. The 1895 American guide The College of Life, for instance, which describes itself as “a Manual of Self-Improvement for the Colored Race,” attempts to give an uplifting spin to African-Americans’ exclusion from institutions of higher learning; its 700 encyclopedic pages strive to encompass everything one needs to know to prosper in America, from a list of “important facts” such as the “greatest known depth of the ocean” to instructions on the “care of birds and other pets.” As a vehicle of racial uplift, self-help resembles both the accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington and the grass-roots activism of Marcus Garvey. The problem of the proper ratio of coping to reform continues to define debates over self-help’s social effectiveness.
Even amid the early-20th-century rise of the academic popularizer, self-help’s university forays were met with derision. In 1912, a 24-year-old Dale Carnegie offered his services as an extension-school teacher to both NYU and Columbia. When these universities rebuffed him, he settled on the Harlem YMCA for his public-speaking course, which contained the nucleus of his 1936 best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People, initially intended as a take-home souvenir for class participants. Carnegie’s incredulity at academe’s indifference made it into his book’s opening pages. The “ability to deal with people,” Carnegie says, is a valuable commodity just like “sugar or coffee.” “Wouldn’t you suppose that every college in the land would conduct courses to develop the highest-priced ability under the sun?” Carnegie claims to have been unable to find a single “practical textbook” on the subject. How to Win Friends was intended to fill that gap.
Self-help has continued to offer an alternative to the academy. Its cultural classifications and reading methods unsettle the specialization promoted by the modern research university. As the folklorist Sandra Dolby observes, “Readers of self-help books are active learners” who “create their own curricula and course designs.” This conceit informs manuals like Og Mandino’s 1980 The University of Success, which approvingly cites Carlyle’s description of books as “the true university” as the inspiration for its title and method. The chapters of Mandino’s guide present themselves as “semesters” and “lessons” on topics such as “how to separate the possible from the impossible” and “how to use life’s options wisely.” The appendix lists “faculty” and “source material.”
Self-help has always been at once pseudo-academic and counter-academic, tendencies which persist to this day, for instance in the polemics of Alain de Botton, the front-runner for the new wave of what journalists are calling “intelligent self-help.” At his School of Life in London, you can take courses on subjects like “How to Be Confident” and “How to Find Love.” De Botton asserts that “the modern university … remains wholly uninterested in training students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom.” The School of Life is meant to redress this lack; its location just next door to University College London dramatizes the contrast with academe that has informed self-help from Carlyle onward.
In de Botton’s latest venture, written with John Armstrong, his anti-academicism is rendered even more explicit. Art as Therapy argues that we need to reorganize museums according to therapeutic, rather than historical, categories. It goes so far as to reprint the course description for “Italian Renaissance Art” from Yale’s art-history department catalog and offer a disapproving appraisal: “The course is deliberately impersonal. It carefully avoids asking ‘what do these works mean to me?’ Or, ‘what problems and issues might I have in common with a painter or sculptor from 1300 to 1500?’” While scholars in disciplines such as English literature are increasingly questioning the dominance of impersonal historicism, self-help is a field where the value of the historical period as organizing construct has long been energetically contested.
In fact, de Botton’s oppositional stance masks the extent to which self-help has started to migrate to the center of the official academic curriculum. A watershed moment was the emergence of Harvard’s most popular course of all time: Tal Ben-Shahar’s 2006 “Positive Psychology” course, PSY1504, based on his best-selling self-help manual Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. The book’s introduction proposes “to bridge the ivory tower and Main Street, the rigor of academe and the fun of the self-help movement.” The exchange between Ben-Shahar’s self-help and classroom practice flowed both ways. His follow-up book, Even Happier, incorporates activities tested in the classroom. In short, a great deal has changed since Dale Carnegie was booted off of the Columbia campus.
The popularity of Ben-Shahar’s course has spawned many emulators: Yale’s most popular course in its 316-year history was Laurie Santos’s Psych 157, “Psychology and the Good Life,” offered just this year, whose final assignment, “The Hack Yo’Self Project,” is an exercise in personal improvement. Nor is this phenomenon confined to the Ivy League; in 2007, a New York Times article noted the ironic fact that George Mason University, once considered by the Princeton Review to be one of the unhappiest campuses in America, was home to a tremendously popular course on happiness and well-being. At Alamo College a controversy erupted when a dean attempted to replace a humanities general-education requirement with a course based entirely on Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. When the public caught on and complained, the district was forced to unload the 2,500 copies of Covey’s guide it had purchased, and to defend its accreditation, which came under attack.
To be sure, the vocational bent of Alamo’s Covey course differs from the therapeutic orientation of Yale’s Santos sensation in a way that reflects the different circumstances of the respective student populations. But taken together, such examples suggest the broad spectrum of pedagogic experience that attends the rise of the “neoliberal university,” premised on the belief that well-being and entrepreneurialism can happily coexist. The ubiquity among all kinds of universities of an economistic emphasis on productivity and “deliverables,” to use an unfortunate corporate neologism that has migrated into university life, has led to a resurgence of academic counter-self-help that strives to mitigate the effects of the efficiency ethic.
Consider Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, which offers itself as “a self-help book for academics.” Seeber and Berg align themselves with the self-help industry’s softer, therapeutic investments as against the managerial culture of the modern university. Likewise, some universities are taking steps to offset an ascendant entrepreneurialism; Harvard’s Transcript Project, for instance, is a creative initiative that urges students to use their transcripts to reflect on the value of their college experience beyond grades and pre-professionalization — a kind of Arnoldian self-culture shored against rampant competitive self-improvement. Such initiatives cannot in themselves solve the problem of the university’s corporatization, but they do strive to offset the commodification of value and wisdom.
There are many historical examples of self-help’s emulative spirit vis-à-vis academe: Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books of the 1920s, dubbed “A University in Print,” Mortimer Adler’s midcentury DIY guides to the Great Books, and, more recently, Tony Robbins’s “Mastery University” retreats. Even more than emulation, though, self-help’s engagement with academe may be most accurately described as caricature, another genre that has been historically maligned by academe, as Charles Baudelaire complained in his 1857 essay on the topic. Indeed, the common critique of self-help polemicists is that they present a caricature of humanist practice, using academe as a scapegoat for their populist counter-message. Caricature, says Werner Hofman in his study of the form, “binds itself to the model it is dethroning, and is sustained by the system it attacks.”
In this sense, self-help is a shadow university, not just opposed to academe but also profoundly attached. Defending caricature against the derision of the “pedantic corpses” of the French academy, Baudelaire applauds its ability to find the element of beauty in the spectacle of moral and physical ugliness. We might say that the distorted mirror of self-help amplifies not just the university’s failings but also its strengths: the belief in mentorship, in pedagogic community, in trying to come up with a curriculum for survival.
Beth Blum is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University.
