Proprioception Problems
Proprioception, sometimes called the real sixth sense, is our body and minds’ capacity to know where we are in space. My husband is a not-willowy 6'6". Sometimes, he forgets his size. He’ll stand in a doorway, see I’m trying to get through it, and not realize immediately why I can’t pass by. He’ll bang his head on a low door frame in a house he’s visited a hundred times. These incidents and accidents aren’t related to his intelligence, which is massive, but his sense of size in a context.
American Universities’ size and context present them with similar challenges. Universities, especially the ones where student protests are wreaking havoc on educational operations, include as many constituents as cities. Their endowments are the size of a country’s GDP. The public listens to what university professors say on the professors’ areas of expertise and deem it truth. It’s no wonder, therefore, that universities lose track of what they are and have proprioception problems.
In the midst of a crisis, one of the first things to go out the window is role clarity. Upset people tend to over-function, taking over the roles of others because they are worried their needs won’t get met. When stressed, we forget ourselves and fall prey to role reversals. The adult child, unmoored by a parent’s illness, decides to take over as unauthorized head of the family and makes everybody around them angry. The second in-command to a quiet-quitting leader overfunctions to keep the institution afloat, and rather than getting thanked for stepping up, the overfunctioner alienates people or burns out.
The proprioception problems that result from crisis on an individual level have a communal counterpart. When the chips are down, institutions forget who they are on a grand scale, and when they forget, they make mistakes. Consider debates over abortion: elected officials create laws and policies. Doctors conduct medical procedures. Parents plan families. Debates about abortion laws and policies are particularly painful because so many actors are operating outside their roles. These actors ended up in the wrong lanes due to communal stress, and in that proprioceptive haze, they are inexpert and likely to make bad choices.
When I teach students about and help institutions with leadership challenges, one of the rules I iterate and reiterate is this: when in a crisis, redouble your efforts to maintain your role. Shore up your boundaries, even and especially when your emotions tell you to suspend them. The teen in trouble doesn’t need their parent to be their friend; they need the parent to be a parent. The leader of an institution shouldn’t expect those in their care to take care of them, even when that leader is on a particularly rough road. The unhappy leader has to find consolation elsewhere and ideally should have support networks in place before storms come.
Students on college campuses are protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. There’s nothing bad or wrong about students engaging in peaceful civil disobedience. Some would say doing so is good for everybody, as the kitten whose eyes are newly open has fresh perspective to offer the rest of us. What is wrong, however, stems from the multiple role reversals that look less like a kitten with open eyes and more like the yarn the kitten tangled.
Universities are not governments. The only entity that can stop sending US-owned weapons to Israel to use on Gaza is the United States government. If university endowments pay for weapons’ manufacture, it makes sense to protest those investments, but university endowment policy is many degrees removed from the actual decisions that cause US-made bombs to rain down in another part of the world.
University presidents are not moral arbiters. There might once have been a time when university presidents spoke with moral authority over the world for which they educated graduates. That model has long since given way to an academic technocracy, where presidents are selected based on their credibility as scholars (in who-cares-what-discipline) and their promise for raising money. The earliest college presidents were ministers, and now university chaplains work from a position many rungs down the ladder from deans of student affairs. In a crisis, society tries to wedge presidents back into a role they haven’t occupied in decades.
University police are supposed to protect students from harm, not protect campuses from students. Campus safety is a complicated business. When one student assaults another, they’re subject to school-based discipline. When one neighbor assaults another outside a campus context, they go to court and sometimes jail. The presence of university police in settings like a protest cause everyone confusion: whom are they there to protect from what? An alien from outer space might interpret university police actions as ones designed to protect exam preparation and end-of-year parties from students concerned about matters of life and death. As I watch the news about even my own campus, I feel like an alien from outer space.
Jesus worked overtime to teach his disciples about their roles during his ministry, as he knew they’d forget those roles, at least initially, when religious and governmental authorities clamped down. Because Jesus was of-God, and the disciples’ brains were — like ours — unable to grasp God’s realm, Jesus spoke in metaphors like this one from the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit… Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
God is the gardener, Jesus is the vine, the disciples are the branches, and the branches’ fruits are manifestations of God’s love. I can almost hear Jesus saying, “You get it, guys, right? Right?”
Given how complicated life in community can be, taking significant time to clarify roles is a worthwhile endeavor for leaders. A university cabinet meeting where all administrators must chant three times, “We are the educators; they are our students,” before deliberating over action plans would surely feel strange. And I bet it would help everyone.
It’s hard to stay hopeful that there’s a way out of the role confusion mess churning on campuses today. But just like all of our senses can grow in acuity when we pay attention to them, proprioception can become more refined. We can ask ourselves the question, “What’s my job, and what’s my role in this situation?” every day, or multiple times per day when we’re under pressure. We can think hard about our institution’s place in culture and refuse public pressure, and our own impulses, to become something we’re not. Maintaining our lane is not irresponsible. Losing track of our location, and swerving outside our lane, is dangerous for everybody.
