Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)
Author: Jason A. Mahn
Jason A. Mahn is Professor of Religion and Director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College in Illinois. He is the author of the essay, “The Conflict in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things,” which appeared in Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education, ed. David S. Cunningham (Oxford UP 2017). Jason recently authored Neighbor Love through Fearful Days: Finding Purpose and Meaning in a Time of Crisis (Fortress 2021), and co-edited So That All May Flourish: The Aims of Lutheran Higher Education (Fortress 2023).
In this post, Jason Mahn expresses feelings of frustration and burnout amid challenges in teaching, which include lack of student engagement, prison lockdowns disrupting classes, and international students facing visa issues. Drawing on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Mahn reflects on the gap between ideals and reality, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging despair while fostering hope.
My work as an educator has felt Sisyphean of late. Just this past week, I’ve experienced some acute frustration and setbacks, not to mention an overarching sense of fatigue, ineffectuality, and even cynicism.
Monday afternoon, I found myself walking up the stairwell toward my classroom remembering the apathy in the students’ faces the prior week. I was dreading another session during which I would try—too hard!—to be and sound excited and engaged. I stopped and mumbled aloud to myself: “I don’t want to be here.”
The certainty of death and taxes, famously noted by Benjamin Franklin, is challenged by modern realities. Wealth disparities skew tax compliance, while transhumanists envision overcoming mortality. Authors Burkeman and Beal argue that confronting our finitude enriches lives. Ultimately, recognizing life’s limits prompts meaningful existence and societal responsibility.
When Benjamin Franklin popularized this saying in 1789, he was referring to the new American Constitution, which he believed shouldn’t be considered certain or permanent, at least not without the active participation and vigilance of its citizens—a republic, he suggested, if we can keep it. Absolutely nothing is certain—not even the bedrock of our nation’s democracy—except for death and taxes.
The piece discusses the concerns of independent colleges regarding the new administration’s impact on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It critiques political leaders’ claims of divine sanction for their actions, drawing on Kierkegaard’s existentialist views which emphasize ambiguity in calling. The author advocates for humility and reflection in understanding vocation.
There are a number of reasons why those of us who educate for vocation at independent colleges and universities are acutely concerned about the start of the new administration. First and foremost, attacks on DEI are rattling those committed to making college education and purposeful work available to all. While private institutions arguably have more protection than public ones, they’re not immune from federal attacks or statewide measures that follow. The slipshod firing of federal workers also sends shivers among public servants, many of whom chose governmental work out of a sense of calling; that is, because they “want to serve the public” and are “motivated by their desire to make the world a better place.”
Equally troubling is the fact that so many government officials have ordained their own work in terms of a higher calling, or a mission sent by God, even as they disrupt the more modest callings of others. At both the state and federal levels, politicians have repeatedly interpreted their electoral victories (many of which have been quite narrow) as a clear mandate to slash jobs, overhaul governmental bureaucracy, and attack higher education. We should be skeptical about declarations that elected (or unelected) officials have been “saved by God” or are doing “God’s work.” Even without explicit self-ordinations, we should be critical—and resistant—anytime a leader or party enacts “creative destruction” with all the certainty, zeal, and sanction of the God-Chosen.
The term “voxistential” blends “existential” with “vocation,” highlighting the need for meaning-making in life. It critiques the oversimplification of both concepts in popular culture and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the dark sides of calling, exploring the interplay of hardship and authenticity within vocational reflection, as discussed by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore.
Yes, I’m trying to coin a new word. Googling “voxistential” will only take you to definitions of “existential” and maybe to a 2019 article from the magazine Vox about whether climate change is an existential threat. But I’m taking a cue from my oldest son who made up the word “crenescence” a couple years ago and used it casually around the high school lunch table just to see if it would catch on. (The word allegedly meant something like the opposite of irony, but not quite the same as coincidence. And no, it never caught on.)
By “voxistential” I mean to bring together “existential” and “vocation,” from vocare, “to call,” and the Latin root vōx, meaning “voice.” Traditionally, both words point to a similar idea—namely, that a person needs to find or make meaning and purpose, especially when life doesn’t hand them ready-made answers or pre-cut patterns. The meanings of the words have drifted apart in recent years, perhaps because we have overused each one. Recently, though, wise scholars like Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, author of Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, are reviving existential questions within vocational reflection.
To consider education as gift, above and beyond what one might pay for it, changes the way that we reflect on and carry out the work for which education prepares us.
When my oldest son was in elementary school, he would quite innocently announce that he was in the “gifted and talented” program at his school. His mom and I would wince. Would others take his proclamation to be the self-deserving swagger of a 10-year-old white kid? He is now on the college admissions circuit. Have we parents, teachers, coaches, and pastors enabled him to see and resist wielding his white, male privilege? And, if so, could he nonetheless hold onto his 10-year-old self-understanding that he (and you and I) are, indeed, gifted and talented—quite literally the recipients of gifts and the stewards of talents that we did not earn but that we are called to develop and use for the flourishing of whole communities?
My recent posts have circled around this notion of giftedness and being gifted. I’ve suggested that the circulation of gifts is a more helpful way to describe being educated for vocation than what often passes for purpose and meaning within higher education. This is largely because education, in both private and public settings, has been made into an investment seeking return and a product to be purchased. To consider education as gift, above and beyond what one might pay for it, changes the way that we reflect on and carry out the work for which education prepares us. I want to bring some of these musing together here and consider how understanding students as gifted and education as a gift economy can lead to restorative and regenerative work.
Could the “slow food” movement find its partner in holistic, liberal arts education—what we might properly call “slow school”?
When I was a freshman in college, my first-year seminar professor was Dr. Ann Brady, a former-nun-turned-English-professor, who had flowing red hair and oversized eyeglasses, and who often lamented about the phlegm she would find in the English building’s drinking fountain. I came to know her as a joyful person, but she was no-nonsense in the classroom. Faced with 18-year-olds slouching in their chairs, asking questions about what would be on the midterm, Dr. Brady insisted that we read literature more slowly and with fewer concerns about what we were supposed to be getting out of it. “These books will take time,” she said. “You’ve got to be willing to waste time with them.”
Meritocracy offers nothing and no one to thank or blame for one’s successes or failures other than oneself. Thus, we lose the ability to empathize with others, to be humbled by the natural talents and fortunate circumstances that we didn’t choose or earn, and to feel a debt of gratitude and respond generously for the good of the whole. We lose a sense of the common good.
A week ago, AMC released Lucky Hank, a new television series based on Richard Russo’s hilarious novel Straight Man. The novel and series tell the story of Hank Devereaux, Jr., an underachieving English professor at an underfunded Railton College.
The opening scene has Lucky Hank responding after a creative writing student who thinks he has great literary promise has read a particularly bad story aloud during a writing workshop. Devereaux criticizes the story’s “wandering point of view” and “distancing of the reader”—not to mention the theme of necrophilia. The sophomoric student contends that he may in fact be the next Chaucer, whereas the professor’s only published novel isn’t even available in the campus bookstore. Devereaux retorts by mounting his harshest critique of them all:
You’re here! You’re here! The fact that you’re here is evidence that you didn’t try hard in high school or show much promise. And even if your presence at this middling college in this sad forgotten town was some bizarre anomaly and you do have the promise of genius—which I’ll bet a kidney you don’t—it will never surface. I’m not a good enough writer or writing teacher to bring it out of you. And how do I know that? How? Because I, too, am here! At Railton College! Mediocracy’s capital!
What if we thought of education as a gift that is not contingent on the worthiness of its recipient yet that still inspires recipients to pay the gift forward with lives that serve the common good?
APEP faculty greeting student David Staples upon his release after serving 29 years for a crime he didn’t commit (Jason Mahn, center)
Three weeks ago, I submitted final grades for the January (J-Term) course that I taught at East Moline Correctional Center (EMCC) through the Augustana Prison Education Program (APEP). I created the course, “Redemption, Reconciliation, and Restorative Justice,” on the “inside-out” model of prison education. The plan was to shuttle traditional students each day to the local prison to learn beside their incarcerated classmates. Sadly, EMCC nixed that plan earlier in the fall, citing a shortage of security personnel. When Sharon Varallo, the executive director of APEP, asked me to choose whether to teach the course to free students or incarcerated students, I quickly chose the latter. I knew from some prior experiences that deep transformation of individuals and communities is more likely—or at least easier to notice—when teaching behind bars.
Jason Mahn (Augustana College, IL) interviews a former student in order to learn more about the callings to justice-work among students of color and how he and other white professors can better support them as they live out those callings.
A conversation with activist Dezi Gillon (Augustana College, ‘16).
Dezi Gillon
Dezi Gillon (they/them) is a teaching artist and healer living on occupied Potawatomi territory—what is known today as Rogers Park, Chicago. In 2016, they graduated from Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois) with Religion and Sociology majors, having participated in Interfaith Understanding, Black Student Union, AugiEquality, and Micah House, a residential intentional community. They went on to graduate from Union Theological Seminary (New York) with an MDiv in 2019 and are currently working with Alternatives Youth and Family Services as a restorative justice coach and educator. I interviewed my former student in order to learn more about the callings to justice-work among students of color and how I and other white professors can better support them as they live out those callings.
How can we better support the vocational discernment of students moving from advocacy to activism (described by Tim Clydesdale as the “rebels”)?
Soon after the murder of Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of George Zimmerman, and the rising prominence of Black Lives Matter in rallies and marches around the country, students from my institution planned their own protests. Dezi, a non-binary Black US American individual who graduated with Religion and Sociology majors five years ago, led the way. As they planned a “die in” to take place in Augustana’s campus coffee shop, Dezi wisely consulted with a number of faculty members. They conveyed their intention and their list of demands to Augustana, and asked us to help them refine their tactics and messaging. I was both honored and anxious to be among those informal consultants.
