Preparing University Students for a mythical “Real World”?

A short rant on student supports at Canadian universities, motivated by a recent tour of some incredible facilities and support services for varsity athletes. No doubt the contrast is even more apparent in U.S. universities with successful (lucrative) athletics programmes, where resource differences are often stark, and bound up in (among a great many other things) state politics. But in Canada, at least, I’m pretty sure we could provide the same tailored support systems for all of our students.

For academics it’s tempting to condemn the treatment enjoyed by student athletes as yet another example of the long slow death of the university. That’s not my aim here: I think the student-athlete model (again, in Canada — in the U.S. it’s a different beast) is attractive as a way to think about continuing laudable trends toward better and more holistic student support systems.

Expensive? Yes, but so is highway construction and repair. That’s a series of political and cultural choices we can make. We have to reimagine how we live in our cities. So to we can reimagine our universities in terms of how we support our students.

Complicated, in terms of institutional designs and overlapping authorities? Yes, definitely, but we’re university faculty: we’re apparently pretty clever, what with all our PhDs and such. I bet we can figure it out.

The complaint that really bugs me, however, is one I hear too often from folks like me — that is, comfortably tenured faculty members, looking forward to a secure pension:

“we shouldn’t coddle our students! they have to grow up and face the real world!”

The real world.

That sort of missive might be convincing, if …

1. it wasn’t simply our laziness and complacency as educators, masquerading as principled ‘tough love’ (“no I’m not changing the deadline or reading an alternative assignment — you think you’ll get that kind of accommodation in … the real world?”).

2. it weren’t so comically hypocritical: tenured faculty, living a dream gig with astonishing flexibility and independence, often looking forward to gilded pensions, going off about some mythical “real world”.

(Relatedly, some of those ‘tough love’ tenured professors are the same folks who insist they “can’t afford to retire!” … often after decades of six-figure earnings, flexible work hours, enviable benefits, and a secure pension … now granted, sometimes there are life changes and personal tragedies that strike severe economic blows, and sometimes you find yourself facing down old age in ruthless housing markets like Toronto or Palo Alto … but those cases aside, if this you, dear reader, then you have no business admonishing your students about the harsh realities of this mythical real world!)

3. finally, most critically, I might buy the “don’t coddle the students, prepare them for the real world!” argument if we, collectively, hadn’t spent the past century or so stumbling sidelong into a pretty shitty version of “the real world”.