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At my university, a second-floor staircase in the business building leads to a dead end. A perfectly functioning staircase with a door that is permanently bolted shut at the top. When I first arrived on the campus nearly a decade ago with my freshly minted Ph.D. in strategic management, I saw it as a weird and silly waste of resources. Why not utilize the space and materials in a better way?
Having moved to Nebraska with my wife and five children, I was eager to try to make my mark. Yet just three years later, I found myself crying in the very stairwell that I had mocked when I first arrived. Between classes, I didn’t have time to get back to my office, and holding my emotions together during those moments was impossible. I would quickly make my way to that private space to cry or just silently grieve, away from the bustle of students switching classes. In the fall of 2018, that stairway became a sacred space for me.
That was the year when my life was turned upside down—when we lost our 10-year-old daughter, Lydia, in an accident and when my marriage ended and my wife moved 900 miles away with our four remaining kids. The emotional energy required to teach and be social with students and other faculty members was nearly overwhelming. I could barely do it for 50 minutes at a time.
Yet during those days, the university was a place of tremendous support for me. I felt as if I were a caterpillar dissolving into chrysalis and the university was a cocoon. That support showed itself in my students, who were compassionate rather than hostile, such as when they went with the flow when I suddenly realized we had gone eight minutes beyond the end of class time.
And it showed itself in a group of colleagues in my department, who were able to listen to me pour out my fears and worries without getting fearful or worried themselves. They somehow knew when to sit and listen, when to offer advice and encouragement, and when to give me space to find my own way.
Slowly, I was able to develop new ways of being in the world. I was different, but I could operate again.
Recently, I reached out to an international advisee who was failing her classes. She came in to my office to see me, and we sat quietly across my desk from each other. I asked what was going on that led her to struggle in her classes. She said something bad had happened in her family in her home country, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She had gone to the counseling center, but she didn’t want to talk about it there, either. I tried to mask my panic, as I had no idea what to do.
As I paused and beseeched the universe to help us both through this awkward moment, I gathered the courage to tell her my story—this story. And about the dead-end staircase.
Her face was unreadable. I worried that I was doing it all wrong. When I was done, we sat in an awkward silence again for a few moments.
And then she asked, “How did you get out of bed?”
We now talk regularly, and she has found her way forward in her schooling.
For some reason, before the grief in my own life, I would start my class as I had seen my own professors start theirs: with blunt intensity. I would want to weed out students who should drop the course if they were looking for something easy.
Now, I see that so many of our students are facing real-life challenges: death, divorce, financial uncertainty, health challenges, crippling loneliness and anxiety, and the list goes on. Now, starting my classes has more meaning. These kids are going through a chrysalis time in their lives. Their brains are flooded with hormones, they are often away from family for the first time, they are in a new environment where their old maps are far less useful.
As professors and administrators, it is our opportunity and privilege to create a cocoon for this process. Outside our institutions, students are often told they are wasting money and precious time, learning irrelevant information, or being indoctrinated. It is vital that we allow the delicate process of growth to take place—to give them a space, tools and support to better appreciate the complexity of their world. To empower them to leave us with new capacity.
That is one of the beautiful things about institutions of higher education. Sometimes we complain that our university should be more efficient, more dynamic, more market-sensitive. I myself have said many of those things. But maybe right now we are exactly what we are supposed to be. We have people around us who share with us not only their strengths but also their broken and sorrowful parts. We may believe that moving higher education out of this period of uncertainty is best accomplished by optimizing operations; however, it might instead be the opportunity to lean into the charming inefficiencies and revisit the very meanings and purposes of our work.
At our best, we support each other through our heartbreaks, tragedies and transformations. In such times, in these quirky, imperfect spaces we jointly inhabit, our students and colleagues allow the chrysalis process to happen. They help us emerge anew.
