Resilience as Resistance: Defending Higher Education by Finding Ways to Remain

By Kristen D. Herring, Ph.D., School of Communication

As early career faculty, many academics build armor. We shield ourselves from attacks on our authority with memorized citations, ambitious research agendas, and cleverly thrifted blazers. The word resilience takes on an unnerving connotation among millennial audiences. We are a generation whose entire adult lives have been plagued with recessions, warfare and well . . . plagues. Many millennial faculty hear calls for resilience from institutions and powerful individuals as neoliberal hallucinations of a dream of equity long known to be little more than myth. Still, we have just finished our degrees. We remained committed to the idea of pursuing an academic career even after we realized such a life choice could never fully guarantee any great financial opportunity or job security. We are here, and if I may take the liberty to speak alongside my fellow junior faculty, we didn’t get this far just to quickly turn tail and run. From this perspective, resilience becomes a radical means for protesting the devaluing of higher education.

Those of us with the great privileges required to persevere in academics can trouble the particular publics, politicians, and business proprietors that have a vested interest in minimizing the value of higher education and thus minimizing our ability to offer learners the critical tools they need to sustain democracy. This persistent existence in the face of an aggressor declares the folly of campaigns against fact. By remaining resilient, we can pester the legislators and lobbyists that work to pull university funding. We can perform proof of the need for preserving the learning championed in the college setting by refusing to relent.

But it bears repeating that such relentlessness requires a great deal of privilege. Women, BIPOC, LGBTQ, differently abled folx and otherwise minoritized groups experience more systemic barriers to academic success than many of their cis gendered heteronormative white male counterparts who still occupy the highest paid and most esteemed positions in academia. Therefore, the tools we share to sustain ourselves are can be feminist, antiracist, queer-friendly, and otherwise well suited for the pursuit of social justice. In this light, I offer one of my own sources of sustenance in hopes it can nourish others.

As a new academic and juvenile educator, I found myself awash in lessons on the importance of one’s ‘teaching persona,’ and authority in the classroom. I found myself struggling to reconcile the person I was being asked to be in the front of students and the one I had hoped I had become over the last several decades. That internal struggle only added to the imposter syndrome, anxiety, and burnout common amongst graduate students. My teaching mentor reminded me of the sage advice we had read from Deanna Dannels. The labor I was putting toward concealing my identities from my classrooms were futile (Dannels, 2015).

This moment was a sea change. It gave me permission to stop wrestling my curiosity, generosity, and emotive passions into the dark corners of my identity performance and to bring them directly into the spotlight. I began to reveal my worries, my pride, and my uncertainty with my pupils. When I walked into a classroom fighting melancholy or agitation, I disclosed these feelings. I asked for forgiveness if my emotions impeded my ability to teach. To my surprise, my students offered their passions when mine were depleted. They queued into my personal interests in their assignments, extending them rather than rebuking them like I had first feared.

Now, I live by this notion of incorporating the self into one’s teaching persona. Being a female self- a queer self, in front of my classrooms is something I have been able to accomplish in part because of my racial, sexual, and ability-based privileges. Revealing these selves has also given the feminine, queer, and working poor parts of myself a moment of rest. Such rest, I argue, is the key to radical resilience.

References

Dannels, D. P. (2015). 8 essential questions teachers ask: A guidebook for communicating with students. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kristen D. Herring, Ph.D., is an instructor of rhetoric at Oregon State University. She studies feminist rhetorical theories, musical rhetorics, and rhetorical field methods.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of guest posts about teaching strategies by members of the Fall ’23 Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community facilitated by CTL and UIT-Academic Technologies. The opinions expressed in guest posts are solely those of the authors.