Returning to university as a student after ten years away is a strange old experience. It's like returning to a past home and a past self; where you have to come face to face with the parts of you that you thought maybe you'd done the work on but that had actually just been hanging around in the corners for a while.  It's almost shocking how easily I've slipped back into both habits of studying and into habits of mind (read: anxieties) about studying. Let’s be clear, I’m having a lot of fun, and it’s great doing a degree when you know lots more about how you learn and what kind of things you care about and want to pursue than you did when you were twenty. At the same time, though, assumptions and concerns about what it means to do well, to be a good student, to be considered interesting and intelligent — and how much work behind the scenes it takes to perform in ways that pursue those ends — have still come flooding back. For all I that believe that academic achievement isn’t everything and do care more about how what I’m learning is going to shape how I am and what I do, it is oh-so-easy to get caught, once again, in a rising tide of need to succeed. Some days making choices about what I do feels like walking a tightrope while being tugged towards multiple pressures and expectations from different sources: some explicit, some internalised, and some — frankly — only in my head. 

I've spent much of my adult life learning about how systems reproduce and the ways that they enmesh people. I’ve spent much of the past ten years away from the university getting to grips with how many of the systems that my part of the world considers normal are broken and do damage to people every day. So it’s frustrating to find myself, on off-days, fretting about whether an academic system that I know full well is a hot mess in so many ways is going to validate me as a successful human. It turns out that ten years has helped me to understand many of the things I both love and hate about higher education and to recognise how I react to its various situations and pressures but hasn't helped me successfully fend off its snappy little pincers when they come at me snapping, ‘must do better’. Or, as Willie James Jennings puts it in his book After Whiteness, when I find myself, "being caught between isolating individualism and sick intellectual performativity."

I read Jennings' book over the Christmas break, and oh hai has it helped me identify some of the things that are going on in and around this war within myself as I make my way through a new educational experience. It has also, in its concern to think about developing an approach to (specifically theological) education, given me some things to think about and use for myself and if and as I want and am able to get involved in conversations about the state of the various systems I exist within. 

Jennings talks about the fragments out of which we construct ourselves, our knowledge and our modes of being, and identifies the ways in which religion, colonisation and colonialism, and commodification are at play here; about the things we should be aiming to design education for and how they've become warped through colonisation, commodification and the failure to understand the Christian religion as built out of fragments rather than a monolithic system; about the realities and costs and compromises of belonging to institutions, and the way that people move within all of this. His diagnosis of the mess and history of western education is sharp and his analysis rich and generative, but I think because of the way he writes it personally it resonates personally — and I want to pull out a few things that I found particularly helpful at this moment. Plenty of other people will find plenty of other things within it. 

Firstly, his identification of the way that western education, tied up with a desire to capture and control information and realities in a manner that is supposed to lead to security and wealth, has created an ideal that it is trying to form people into: the self-sufficient white man, self-directed, confident in the gifts that he believes God has given him, and is able to use his power in ways that a reasonable and for good. It is an ideal that can never be met, and yet it is still the ideal that we are supposed to aspire to, until our failure to become it haunts our nightmares. 

Secondly, his recognition that, "Colonialism made knowing a thing and owning a thing two sides of the same coin.... it has yielded tremendous knowledge of a vast number of things, but it has also formed isolating life through isolating ways of looking at life," lays bare the way that the western world has made information and knowledge into something to be captured and mastered so that we are able to be this self-sufficient, successful man. He looks at the practices and tools that education prioritises — solitude, reflection, self-examination — that might be helpful for us, but which, when combined with this drive for mastery and self-sufficiency, “Create a cruelty, like a biting dog that cannot be trained." 

For Jennings the rise of European, Christendom-centred colonialism is the event that causes this situation, because this is the foundation of the modern, western-centric world, in which the ‘whiteness’ of the coloniser is a categorisation of superiority that becomes a way of being (“civilised”) that is desired as the ideal. This is not to say that other imperial and colonial movements and moments do not also make similar moves, but that Jennings is concerned with this one because he is concerned about western academia and education. 

And this is where, I think, I find myself: formed over 30-odd years of education in a particular system, to master my subjects and disciplines, to be confident and self-sufficient — or, if I’m not, to fake it — and to use my power for good; which might mean for my own good, in ensuring my own health, wealth and happiness, or for the good of some cause, belief or ideology, or even “civilisation” as a whole (behind and beneath which may lie a multitude of assumptions and cruelties). I know in part instinctively and in part through reflection, that for all the ways this academic system has benefitted me it has created an equal number of stress fractures in me, and that when I am within it, it still holds me hostage to its demands. When I try to reach what it seems that the academy wants me to do and who it wants me to become, I find myself becoming competitive, not collaborative; isolating and hiding parts of myself from my peers; looking to perform from a place of fear and not genuine confidence. I dislike that I cannot reach this goal; I dislike that I so frequently want to; and I castigate myself for both. (It is among the lesser of the evils created by colonialism certainly, but nonetheless true that the colonisers are also damaged by the system they and their ancestors created and sustain). 

But the third thing that I found helpful about After Whiteness is the case Jennings makes that education (and not just theological education, though that’s where he starts), should be for communion, community and collaboration, more than it is for training leaders or equipping future employees, or even making good citizens. Formation for communion does not demand that everyone strives to be one kind of person, but that they get better at being their kind of person alongside other kinds of people. Everything else can be built upon and out of this. 

There is a mutuality at the centre of Jennings’ vision, in which the design of education encourages people to learn the art of attention — to ourselves, to others (including nature and creation), and to the interconnectedness between these things. It should be an attention that allows us self-reflection and examination in which we discern things about ourselves; strengths and weaknesses, desires, fears, needs; without the judgement and self-policing by self-surveillance and failure-awareness that the current system encourages. It is, of course, also an attention that is turned outwards to others, towards their ideas and concerns — again, in a way that eschews surveillance and judgement. It is an attention that goes hand-in-hand with and expands affection: helping us to develop and pursue new loves, to broaden our affections and sense of what should be loved. It also allows us to bring ourselves into the space, in the hope that others will attend to us as we attend to them, potentially allowing freedom to be ourselves with each other and to grow together. Jennings makes clear that this isn’t easy and tells many stories of times when it has fallen apart, because the move to share ourselves with others is always a risk — and is particularly a risk within the many power dynamics at play within the university and the world in which it exists. But still, he wants to look for ways to make it possible for us to find the friends and companions — peers and teachers — with whom we will discern and learn and build in together.

One of the things I find interesting and really helpful about Jennings is that he values orthodoxy in the Christian faith and conveys the sense that he does think there are boundaries and borders that it is valid to be alert to and maintain.  But he is aware of the tension that exists between designing for the transmission of orthodoxy or orthopraxis — be it in faith, or in the kind of things that a university might be accrediting — and designing for curiosity. It's not that he wants to create a space where 'anything goes' so much as one where anything can be asked and explored: where there is respect and challenge, and yes, even correction. He wants an expert in the room to be able to say, 'actually, no, that's considered heresy' but to do so in a way that doesn’t either make the student feel like they’re going to hell or ensure they never put themselves out there again. And he also wants the expert in the room to be open to the surprise of learning a new thing. 

All of this made me think about where I’ve had glimpses and moments of this kind of experience of communion in my own education and formation; inside the university and outside of it. Because I have had them. Who are the teachers and conversation partners and friends whose teaching and practices I’ve valued the most, and why? How have they helped me to negotiate the internal tensions I have around what it means to 'do well' and to learn, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by creating the spaces in which the interests and questions and concerns I have had aren’t dismissed, belittled, or flat-out laughed out of the room — and most importantly by generating trust rather than fear, in part by being open to the idea that I might also be bringing something to the table of value to them.  These are the people with whom asking questions has felt like curiosity, and where mutual learning and genuine collaboration have emerged and sometimes gone beyond us. These are also the people who have helped me in navigating my ways in relation to boundaries and borders, by flagging them, by being open to questions about them and curious about the things that matter most to me as I think about my relationships to them. 

Right now it feels as if identifying what was good and life-giving in those experiences might help me to express the ways in which I think the educational experience could be different and better, and also help me make those daily choices about what I do and how I respond to the pressures I feel. Jennings’ book has helped to provide articulation for some of the things that cause pain and the picture of a different kind of academic experience at which to aim. By prompting both thinking and feeling it’s also opened up some space inside me for movement forwards rather than in circles. It’s not that the tensions have disappeared, but that I feel a tiny bit better equipped to navigate them and maybe eventually to start to shift them, and ever more determined to find the people that I’m going to do that with.