The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Jessica Riddell, a speaker, professor, and researcher who focuses on systems change in higher education. Jessica’s recent book, Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing, and her previous co-authored book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, cover various facets of educating and leading across the university. Jessica is a professor of early modern literature at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada, where she also holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. She is the founder of the think tank Hope Circuits Institute and sits on the board of directors for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. In all these roles, she participates in a wide range of conversations at national and international levels about how universities fulfill the social contract to our broader society.
Committed to cultivating hope in higher education, Jessica wrote Hope Circuits to challenge educators to reconsider the assumptions with which we operate. In it, she offers innovative tools that emerge out of the stories of luminaries she gathered for the project and helps us come to a clearer understanding of systems of governance, leadership, and institutional culture so that everyone in the university can flourish. But such flourishing isn’t limited to higher education, which she argues plays an important role in fostering creativity and democracy across sectors. “Higher education,” she says, “is the place where we keep democracy and ourselves alive and awake. And my goodness, we need to stay alive and awake at this moment.”
In this episode, Riddell describes her own process of discovery and exploration that makes the book both a “love letter” to higher education and a challenge to reimagine our callings to support necessary change. As she tells her own vocational story, she acknowledges that our systems of higher education were not built for so many of the people who currently work at and attend these institutions. As an advocate for justice and equity in this context, Jessica uses her own story to model how to work through and out of despair—“towards a world that could be better, more inclusive, equitable, and include flourishing for all of us.”
For Jessica, transformation is less about tearing down and destroying our current institutions and more about remaking them. Using the metaphor of rewiring, she compares this work to that of renovating an old house, in which “you’ve got to strip those walls to the studs. You’ve got to look inside.” She anchors this work in her engagement with her students, whom she (like many educators) sees as important truth tellers and challengers of the status quo. But even as she appreciates the intensity of their critique—noting that they sometimes “fall into the language” of “let’s burn it all down”—she works to help them see that without a much larger paradigm shift, such “creative destructionism” often only serves to re-create unjust structures from the past. She challenges them—and us—to “not just tear it all down, but to renovate these houses, to make space for the inhabitants who weren’t part of the original design.”
Her goal is to move us from “nope” to “hope,” and as she guides us through this process, she roots her work in her love for our institutions, even as she recognizes their brokenness. She argues that “higher education has an integrity problem between what we say and what we do”:
“We say a lot of beautiful things, and I fundamentally believe in all of them—that we are a rehearsal space for creative futures, that we are an incubator for a civic imagination, that we are the playground for courageous becoming, that we are training the next generation to go into the world and make it better, that we’re preserving knowledge and creating new knowledges … All of those things are true … But when we operationalize those [functions] in our systems, our structures—everything from hiring and promotion and evaluation to resource allocation—we are not matching what we say to what we do.”
As the rest of her interview unfolds, Jessica offers multiple ways to imagine and work towards addressing this integrity problem. From her reflections on Parker Palmer and alignment to Shakespeare and creative democracy, from Aristotle and human flourishing to the ten conceptual tools she champions from her research—through all these examples, she provides both theoretical and pragmatic ways to approach rebuilding our hope in higher education’s integrity and its potential to contribute to human flourishing.
Click hereto listen to the episode featuring Jessica Riddell, “Hope Circuits.”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.