Make College Contemplative Again
We must help our students build habits of contemplation
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With the 2024-25 academic year in the rear-view mirror, one thing is clear. We're very busy.
In a 2021 New Yorker essay, which contained the seeds that eventually grew into his 2024 book Slow Productivity, Cal Newport grapples with this same realization. He even gets quantitative about it. Newport argues that many of us end up working at about 20% above our healthy capacities. It's a load high enough that we feel constantly stressed out, but not so unmanageable that we immediately flame out. Instead, the stress slowly accumulates. We often don't even realize it until a particular project or season (like a semester) ends.
This is also a problem for college students. College may not be the place where these habits start, but it doesn’t seem to be a place where they improve. With the normal caveats that specific anecdotes from my context at Harvey Mudd may not generalize, I see almost all of my students cramming their schedules with classes, trying to take as many as they can. Outside of the classroom, they're involved in a wide array of clubs and student organizations, not to mention other jobs on and off campus as graders, tutors, or in residential life roles.
In recent years, the faculty has been trying to do what we can to address this challenge. The first target is always the curriculum and credit requirements. We've made various modifications to the college core curriculum, trimming the courses that all students are required to take. We've also continued to work on streamlining major requirements to make more space for students there as well.
But in many ways, this is the right solution to the wrong problem. For many students, the number of required courses is not the driving factor. Most are not packing their schedules because they have to. No, they're filling their days from dawn till dusk because they want to.
It’s fruitless to try and treat the symptom without addressing the root cause. This problem cannot be solved by curricular changes alone. To be sure, we should be taking a close look at our course requirements and asking whether what we are asking of students is appropriate and reasonable. By default, courses tend to grow, not shrink, and the amount of work expected of students scales accordingly. But before we spend too much time trying to trim the curriculum, we had better take a hard look at the cultural and societal pressures that are also driving the way students approach college
Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about the increasingly transactional way that students are seeing school. This is particularly acute in fields like engineering, where one can calculate a high number for the ratio of potential career earnings per dollar spent on tuition. This gets at the core of the question that all of us connected to the higher education enterprise—students, parents, faculty, staff, and administration—must answer. Why exactly are we here? What is college really about after all?
If we are here to maximize the number of courses on our transcripts and the number of items we can list on our resume, then perhaps the current strategy to cram as much in as possible is optimal. But if we are actually here to do those things that we can uniquely do during college—to have the space to learn and digest information, to build relationships with peers and mentors, to read and reflect with great thinkers and writers—these kind of things require us to let go of a mentality where we are trying to squeeze every moment for all that it is worth.
We must realize that the most fruitful way is rarely the most frantic way. That the way that leads to our flourishing and growth requires rhythms of rest and space where we give ourselves the freedom to just be and not to do.
Patterns to Prototype
I write all of this not just because this is what I want for my students, but because this is what I want for myself, too. This is the kind of life I want to live as an educator—one where I find the patterns of work and rhythms of being that enable me to avoid the 20% overload that will tax the system and slowly but surely burn me out.
If we want to address these challenges effectively, we'll need to approach the problem not just by reducing the courses we require students to take. We'll need to help students build the capacity to understand themselves and pay attention to their own pace. Just like elite runners are in tune with their bodies as they are running to know what pace feels sustainable, we need to build the muscles to attend to our own cognitive muscles.
There's a lot that could be done, but here are a few ideas that I feel are worth prototyping with this fall:
Write a College View: One of the simplest and most important things you can do is to sit down and draft a document that answers the big questions about why you are in college and what you want out of it. This was one of the most helpful exercises that I did as part of the Life Design course I took from the Stanford Life Design Lab a few years ago. This webpage has some more information about it and a few prompts to consider.
Track Your Time: Every few months, you should track your time for a week. When I've done this, it's done wonders to help me diagnose where my energy is going and build realistic expectations for how much time certain tasks actually take. One of my first posts on this blog was about this practice. It's time for me to go back and do it again.
Adopt a Kanban Approach: The Kanban method has many similarities to the suggestions that Newport offers in his book for combating our tendency to overwhelm ourselves. What Kanban does is enable you to see the entirety of your work more clearly and build a more realistic picture of what you need to do and embrace a limit on how much you are able to accomplish. By putting a limit on the number of items that can be in the "in progress" pile, you can help to manage the never-ending list of to-dos. In the same vein, it's worth reading a book like David Allen's Getting Things Done, which friend of the blog
is always strongly advocating for.Block Your Time: Time blocking is another strategy that I learned from Cal Newport. Where tracking your time is a reflective exercise, blocking your time is a proactive one. You can learn more about it from Cal here. It's been a while since I really used it consistently, but it's time for me to get back on the wagon.
Make More Time for Intellectus
In a recent post,
draws the distinction between two different types of thought: ratio and intellectus. The former refers to effortful reasoning, moving from item to item in series, whereas the latter is simply the realization of truths that are, as Mary puts it, "simply there." Our effortful reasoning bears analogy to computing, where we take the inputs and turn the crank to generate the outputs. The intuitive insight of intellectus is dismissed (and often disdained) by our society that idolizes the grind.As we consider the purpose of college, it's worth thinking about the balance between these two. Perhaps one of the most valuable things we can do is create space to have these sorts of insights; insights that come almost exclusively by creating the time and space for contemplation and reflection.
Got a thought? Leave a comment below.
Reading Recommendations
Great stuff from
this week on the tension between AI tools and learning.Generative AI enables students to produce the product without doing the work. Rather than reading and making sense of difficult source texts, they can ask a chatbot to gin up simplified summaries. Rather than synthesizing various ideas and perspectives through concerted thinking, they can ask the chatbot for a generic synthesis. And rather than expressing (and refining) their thoughts through the composition of sentences and paragraphs, they can get the bot to spit out a first draft or even a final one. The paper a student hands in no longer provides evidence of the work of learning its creation entailed. It is a substitute for the work.
The Book Nook
Still chipping away at The Devil and the Dark Water. My before-bed reading habit is slowly coming back to life after a crazy few months!
The Professor Is In
At the end of last week, my students and I attended the Global Followership Conference, which was hosted in our backyard at Claremont McKenna this year. We had a great time and learned a lot about the importance of both leaders and followers in building effective teams. We especially enjoyed the LEGO Serious Play session on Thursday morning!
Leisure Line
Here are a few more photos of some of the sets we made during the LEGO session.
Still Life
After eleven years of service, the beloved 2002 Tracker is moving on to another home. In the summer of 2014, the newlywed Mrs. and I packed all we could fit in the back and drove it across the country from Connecticut to California. It was a reliable car for that cross-country trip and many commutes down the 210 freeway from Pasadena to Claremont since.
Josh, I recall reading "The idea of a Christian college" (the classic by Arthur Holmes) where he argues that college is for developing habits and virtues of thought and character, and asking "wait, where in the modern college experience are students getting to do this? What needs to go so we can make this happen?" (A fellow faculty member said to me, "do you think the administration actually believes this??" - of course implying that the current trend of higher education is pretty antithetical to this idea.) I do think we need to have a view - even from the top - of avoiding scope creep and "filling" of students' days.
However, my experience (as, it sounds like, is yours) is that students come to college already having the desire and the mindset to fill every moment. Is it the college prep mentality of "well-rounded" and lots of extracurriculars? Is it the fact that we even take our phones to the bathroom, lest we have a moment of boredom? Is it the redesign of the high school curriculum, or the de-valuing of education except as a means for employment? Probably all of these, but that just means it sometimes feels like a losing battle to remind students to resist this tendency.
I'm so thankful that you end with some practical ideas. I am teaching a 55+ student Intro to Psychology class this fall that will have predominantly college freshmen. I'm planning to rewrite my assignments to include several that you mention and orient the class towards preparing them for college success. It may not make a big dent in the "cram every moment" mentality, but then again - it might!
Good stuff Josh. Another thing to think about here is the role of advising in all this. This is top of mind for me as I teach a six-week asynchronous online course (we're in week 5) and I know several of the students are taking three of these courses right now, on top of working 40+ hours a week. The math just doesn't work -- each of these courses, being 3 credits on a 6-week schedule, is a roughly 20 hour per week commitment, at minimum, and there are immutably only 168 hours in a week. So these students have no margins whatsoever and a lot of them are currently coming unglued.
And somewhere upstream from this, nobody was there looking at their schedules and telling them that this was not OK, or in fact they had people telling them it was perfectly normal. The default goal for much academic advising seems to be to maximize throughput -- take as many classes as possible to make the path the graduation as short as possible -- and possibly to maximize university revenue. I don't think a single one of my students had an advisor saying something like "You CAN take on that kind of workload, but you SHOULDN'T because it's not good for you."