Love Students: An Ethical Framework

Is it ethical to admit new students without high confidence that you can graduate them on time and with adequate resources?

Can you trade the well-being of future students (if you enroll them) with existing students?

Is it ethical to accept students who you believe would be better off — in all respects — going elsewhere?

Is it ethical not tell them something (true) which, if you told them, would have led them not to enroll?

What ethical frameworks could one use to balance the competing claims of staff, faculty, students (current and future), when trustees must make hard decisions? — Questions raised by John MacIntosh, who helps manage the Transformational Partnerships Fund, in a recent conversation

The most asinine exchange I can remember from a job interview went something like this: I was interviewing for a position as campus minister in a large, public, flagship, research institution. The board of the campus ministry organization, which was by-necessity independent from the university itself, included church leaders — lay and ordained — from the campus’ surrounding city. Early in the interview, I could tell that the search committee was nervous. Something was amiss in this ministry, and they weren’t sure whether or what to tell me about it.

Like many para-church organizations, the campus ministry center at this university relied on some soft money from some individual donors, but it mostly depended on mainline Christian denominations that were, without exception, struggling. When church attendance and membership decline, fewer dollars go into the offering plate. Fewer of those dollars then make their way to the regional support network for churches, and it’s those regional networks that pay for campus ministry in non-religious schools. That this campus ministry center was unsure about its financial future was unsurprising; in fact, what would have been surprising would have been a future secured. So why be secretive, I wondered?

Here’s how I asked the question of this skittish committee: “If you were me, how worried would you be in taking this job that it wouldn’t exist in three years?” Silence ensued. Then a member of the board said, “Well, I wouldn’t take this job, but I have three children.”

I found this response awful, and it’s taken me 20 years (not to mention becoming a parent — of one, not three, but still) to figure out why that response hit me so hard. This search committee member felt like her version of risk was more risky than mine, but she knew nothing about me except snippets of my family situation. She projected onto me a tolerance for uncertainty that she herself didn’t possess, which didn’t make me feel like she thought me brave, but rather made me feel she thought me unimportant.

In his classic Agape: An Ethical Analysis (Yale University Press, 1972), Gene Outka writes of love — specifically what Jesus taught: love for neighbor as ourselves — as a normative ethical principle. Relying on Kirkegaard, Outka makes the case for love as “equal regard,” a non-preferential love where everyone is our neighbor, and thus no one can be categorized as unimportant. As we think about instability in higher education, a love ethic of equal regard can help us consider the extent to which we can rightly impose risk on a person other than ourselves.

The questions above to which I respond share in common an embedded challenge: we want to tell our students, staff, and faculty the truth about our institution’s future, but we don’t necessarily know it. I think back to 2011 in my own institution, Andover Newton Theological School, now Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. We had just come off a series of failed partnership negotiations. I and other leaders knew that we were fragile. We knew that we were going to have to do… something.

We didn’t know what that “something” would be, however, and we didn’t want to telegraph our weakness in such a way that our concerns about future viability became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Does this mean we lied to entering students? New staff and faculty hires? Maybe some felt we had, but the fact is, we just didn’t know what the future would hold and were trying, in the moment, to be faithful.

There is a line, of course, between needing time to figure out a future model — and keeping deliberations over that model private until they are more than half-baked — and carrying out a bait-and-switch. Anyone with a decent liberal arts education could probably make an argument for why even the most advanced point in a transformational process is “too early to say,” however. Uncertainty doesn’t entirely free leaders from transparency’s obligations. “We admitted you for September. We closed your program in October, because how were we to have known?” I call B-S.

A better and more humane ethic is that of love. Boards and administrators must love their students with equal regard, as they love themselves. Across the nation, boards already express great concern about student safety regarding sexual violence and racism. The same concern must carry over to the student’s educational plans, with the guiding assumption that the student’s goals are important to them; no less or more important than the goals of individual higher education leaders, or the collective goals of an institution.

Where we find the ethical principle of love break down comes at the point of institutional parentification. Reinhold Niebuhr raised concern in the 1940s that people invest too much faith in institutions, as though institutions don’t have to deal with the same finitude as individuals and families. Outka writes that Niebuhr accepted that the achievement of equal regard would be, by necessity, fragmentary. “[H]orrendous mistakes have been made in the 20th Century, [Niebuhr] thinks, by expecting too much of our socio-political life and minimizing the worth of what is actually achievable” (Outka, p. 30). In other words, institutions can strive for the ideal of treating all parties with equal regard amidst tough decisions, but they’re never going to be able to please everyone and fix everything.

Parentification accounts for some of the overblown trust that people place in institutions. We all carry with us a vestigial desire, sometimes perceived as a need, to have someone take care of us. If we had secure childhoods, we want to recapture that feeling that someone else will make sure nothing bad ever happens to us. If we had insecure childhoods, we’re on a quest to repair that breach and find the elusive security that will fix us. Students look to their schools for it, trusting that their school would never allow real life to rain down upon them. That parentification is inherently dysfunctional.

Covid-19 has given us plentiful examples of the way in which institutions of higher learning are invested with a distorted sense of trust. “Trust?” you might say. “We’ve never been less trusted!” If that’s the case, why are students so disappointed with their colleges when those colleges don’t get a Covid-19 policy right on the first try? Students trust their colleges so much they think colleges must have secret, innate knowledge of how to handle a novel virus the world has never encountered! When leaders in higher education leaders literally don’t know what they are doing, even when such knowledge is not available to humanity, students are shocked. And not it’s not just students who succumb to parentification fantasies. Staff and faculty, too, find themselves heartbroken when more senior leaders fail to protect them, no matter how formidable the challenges their institution is up against.

Life involves a certain amount of risk. I have taken some big chances in my life and suspect those reading this article have as well. Because I was blessed with a supportive and loving family — still am — I always felt like I had a net under me. But the times when I’ve discovered and rediscovered that all nets are holey have thrown me. I’ve experienced deep grief upon seeing the emperor has no clothes that has, on occasion, driven me to despair. But as long as leaders are human, they are going to be occasionally disappointing. Christian concepts of salvation wouldn’t be interesting otherwise.

Some ethical principles, therefore, that can guide us amidst imperfect situations that call for tough choices:

1. Never, never, never lie. You don’t know what you don’t know, of course, but if you feel like you’re lying, you probably are.
2. Love students; not just the ones who enroll in our schools, but those who might choose not to in light of the truth about our institutions’ situations.
3. Do all we can to suspend self-interest and imagine our constituents as having the same desires and needs we do.
4. Recognize our limits as relates to (a) satisfying everyone and (b) knowing what the future holds.
5. Resist parentification and other dysfunctional projections that suggest that institutions can perfectly take care of people.
6. Make no assumptions about what risks others might be willing to tolerate that you yourself would not tolerate.

… Even if you have three kids.