Helen: Eli, what do students need to enjoy themselves at university?

Eli: Great question. That’s a question I wish I had thought about before I’d gone to university. Students should think about why they want to go to university. Think about what’s motivating them, what’s compelling them. They can ask themselves if their motivations are ones that they’ve chosen and justified for themselves or if they’re being driven by forces they don’t understand.

Helen: Can I ask you a question about the timings of everything? You suggested at the start of what you just said that you came to a new way of engaging with the idea of the university, of enjoying it, through the writing of your book Beyond Education (Meyerhoff 2019). But I know that you’re forty something and you published the book two years ago? I guess the book, maybe, took four years to write?

Eli: I started working on it in my dissertation in 2007. I finished my dissertation in 2013, so that was six years of working with my dissertation. And then it took me five more years of writing a book.

Helen: So, it was a long process. Before that process began – because that process sounds like the solution to a set of anomalies and crisis points, or you could almost call it a therapeutic response, perhaps? – you were possibly like me. Maybe that’s why we both have a similar interest in the areas that we’ve come to. You were, and this is a question: You were in existential trouble? You were in trouble vis-à-vis the forces that you speak of, of the world and how they create the desires that are perhaps not necessarily our own, for who we want to be and how we want to engage with the world? Could you tell students reading this book a bit about the trouble you were in?

Eli: Yeah. I felt like I was constantly trying to grapple with this kind of feeling of being stuck. I was stuck at a kind of impasse, working through some kind of trouble from feeling like the dominant world – in which I needed to survive – was messed up in a lot of ways: that it was causing harm, violence, pain to so many people, pain to myself and my friends. I felt like I wanted to do something. Something that could change that world, yet I felt I needed to get some kind of position to survive within that world at the same time. I guess the university – going to a higher level within the university – felt like a way to temporarily escape from having to make a decision about that. During my undergraduate years I started out as a chemical engineer. Then I escaped into philosophy, added a philosophy major. I worked as an engineer for a year after college, to make some money to pay off debts. Then I escaped that career path into graduate school, in philosophy. This gave a kind of space to try to grapple with that trouble as an impasse. To study it. Or to study the world more to try to figure out what to do about this kind of tense position of being critical of the world and trying to survive within it at the same time. I found that philosophy was too abstract, so I got into political theory. Political science, in fact, which was more practically focused in its use of theory, compared to the philosophy discipline. At the University of Minnesota, students and workers were organizing to improve their working, living and studying conditions. There was a clerical workers union that went on strike in 2007. I, as a graduate student, joined with some other students in supporting that strike. Some students organized a hunger strike in support of the workers’ strike. Through that experience I saw the university itself as part of the broader world. I couldn’t see it as a place to escape to anymore, because the violence of the broader world was part of the university itself. Questions about how to change the world could be applied to the university. That motivated me to focus my dissertation research on theorizing the political struggles at and around the university itself.

Helen: In that context of discovering that the university is part of – well, for the sake of this conversation, I’ll call it – ‘the drama of existence’ in this world – it’s not necessarily that the drama of existence would be the way it is in another world. It might be different. It might be better. It might be worse. But the specific drama of existence of this world that we have right now in 2020 or 2030 or whenever the moment is – this is what we deal with. This book talks about the university as being dramatic. I had this thesis that being at a university, students are encountering stress and personal drama, because existence is dramatic. But actually what I’ve discovered in the research for and writing of this book is that the university is itself a highly dramatic place. For various reasons to do with status, reputation, high stakes or so-called high stakes. Its position at the pinnacle, or the top of the Tree of Knowledge, as it pertains to the existence that we’re, in fact, both talking about. The way that the game is played in a university – it all makes the university highly dramatic. But in a drama triangle, negative sense. Not a fruitful drama, as such. There isn’t a drive in universities to defuse drama. Are they even riding it, for fun? So when an ordinary person – I mean otherwise undisturbed – I mean, they might be disturbed in one or two other areas, which is kind of normal, part of being a human being, being flawed, being in a flawed existence and so on – but then, when they enter into the university, those disturbances that they already inevitably had get added to, by the dramatic disturbing environment that we could say the university is as a personal experience. Thereby the university as dramatic makes the normal, existential personal drama of an ordinary person much more acute, much more pronounced. So it’s not that students in the university are stressed, or they’ve got mental health issues that are unresolvably heavy. I’m saying this in the context of reports that student stress and mental health is bad and getting worse (see, e.g. Mistler et al. 2012; Coughlan 2015; September 30, LeViness et al. 2019; Morrish 2019). It’s possibly that the university, the careless and care-less university, makes people more ill than they otherwise would be, because the university is ‘egotistically’ in love with its own drama and place in the drama of existence as great, high, a tower of excellence. This positions the student entering in without qualifications, seeking to be accredited as worthy by the university, as in a low place. Research tells us (e.g. Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) being low in a hierarchy is bad for your health. What do you think of this suggestion that the university, as full of drama, if at all you think it is, exacerbates student mental difficulties? That’s pretty controversial. Not what universities want to think or feel about themselves.

Eli: Definitely. For sure. I think schools generally, I mean lower education K–12 schools also, make people ill. I think here you make a really insightful point in thinking about the university as a kind of height of the pyramid of the knowledge institutions. Where there is a sense of being in a higher-stakes environment, which magnifies or amplifies the ill-making effects of educational institutions. The basic practices of grading and exams rely on making students feel anxious and fearful about avoiding shame. That kind of everyday anxiety is heightened in universities. Students feel like it’s even more high stakes for them, for their lives. The fear of becoming a dropout is also magnified in a university. You can imagine yourself as dropping from a higher height. The stigma of being a college dropout – you can imagine it as a very disgraceful kind of position in life. Mental illness in universities tends to be stigmatized. So it’s hard to articulate those kinds of feelings when you have them and are feeling anxious or depressed.

Helen: There’s a silence. That’s at the heart of why I wanted to write this book in the first place. This sort of anger at the cheekiness of a university. I don’t quite know how else to put it. Psychopathic? I think it’s too strong. I don’t think it’s meant deliberately. I think it’s just a blindness, an arrogance and an ignorance that they are behaving in a way which is a spiral of drama into which they draw people. They ask those people to pay an extortionate amount of money in order to get drawn into this drama triangle (see Karpman, 2014), where the student is instantly positioned as a victim of the system. The universities are persecutors. The students are paying for this. What kind of dynamic is that? They’re paying to be stressed and paying to be in a low position, at risk of stigma, as you put it. As I put it, at risk of increased vulnerability to existing, inevitable fault-lines, that in a healthy environment might heal well enough.

Eli: No.

Helen: OK, so if I just briefly explain. Then if you could respond on your own terms? The book is trying to shift students from the drama triangle situation that they are inherently in on account of how the university behaves and on account of how the university doesn’t take responsibility for the harm that it does. It would like to empower students to move into a position of winning. That’s why it is called Playing the University Game. The winners’ triangle position is that you state your vulnerability and take care of yourself. That would be to do a whole heap of self-care, on account of the stressful environment that one is picking up, whether you know it or not. Being compassionate to yourself as well, in this context of a situation where if you don’t step up and perform, you’re going to be a dropout or a failure or shameful. You need to find solutions to such positioning, not just accept it as a dynamic. That is possible to do. A winners’ triangle approach is along these lines then of: (1) state your vulnerability and accept responsibility for your own part in the drama triangle occurring, (2) take care of yourself and then (3) compassionately but assertively seek solutions. Using that three-point plan, so to speak, you can move away from the three dramatic positions of being victim, rescuer or persecutor. Now I’ve briefly explained, how do you see university students owning a winners’ triangle scenario in the context of a dramatic university?

Eli: Could you repeat that last part? Maybe I don’t see that right. What’s the triangle part of it?

Helen: Sorry, yes, I missed a step in explaining. You’ve got the three positions. First of the drama triangle. Then, hopefully of the winner’s triangle, to follow, after the drama triangle has either occurred and done its dastardly work or as a precaution to not getting into the...