On Our Responsibilities to Our Students in Difficult Times

Now that I am a rank-and-file full professor and not an administrator, academic leadership is starting to look a bit different. I no longer am invited to the meetings at which deans and central administrators discuss policy possibilities or campus responses to external events. (And I seem to be smiling and laughing a whole lot more as a result.) Now the people I interact with most often on campus are my students, and I find myself thinking about how I can model leadership and responsibility to them while simultaneously keeping our focus firmly on our course material: English and American literature. Given the political turmoil of the current moment, keeping students grounded in their studies and in responsible civic engagement is both crucial and challenging. While we can spout platitudes about critical thinking, checking sources, and rejecting misinformation, we have all heard these things so often that they hardly make an impact on any of us, at least not when we are faced with a bit of information we really want to be true. (I confess I didn’t fact-check the post claiming Steve Martin was going to do Tim Walz on Saturday Night Live this fall—I so wanted that to be true.) So what can we do for our students that will help them learn, provide them with models of responsible engaged citizenship, and strengthen our campuses?