Optimism and Truth-Telling in Higher Education

Langston Hughes's poem, Dream Deferred, asks a profoundly unsettling and evocative question about what happens to unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. The poem is set in the context of systemic racism and oppression affecting African-Americans in the US in the 1920s but has application beyond that moment in time because the 'dream' to which Hughes points is about human dignity and recognition. Dream, in this context, transcends the goal of an individual because it is about something profoundly human—to be seen, recognised, given access and opportunity, to claim space and exercise agency, to be a participant in and contributor to the human collective. Hughes (1992:14) writes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

??????Does it dry up

??????like a raisin in the sun?

??????Or fester like a sore—

??????And then run?

??????Does it stink like rotten meat?

??????Or crust and sugar over—

??????syrupy sweet?

??????Maybe it just sags

??????like a heavy load.

??????Or does it explode?

In these words, we find a deep resonance for our own moment in time. Post-apartheid South Africa dreamed about a version of higher education that it sought to capture in the White Paper on Education and Training (1995). The essential tenets of this dream envisioned a post-school education and training system that would:

1.???? Transform the higher education system to serve a new social order, meet pressing national needs, and respond to new realities and opportunities of the changing South African landscape by redressing past inequalities and laying the foundations for a learning society.

2.???? Develop a single, coordinated higher education system that is more equitable and has expanded and diverse opportunities.

3.???? Improve the quality, quantity and diversity of post-school education and training, with strong links with key roleplayers to ensure the employability of graduates.

4.???? Promote greater collaboration between higher education institutions and the skills system.

5.???? Improve the quality of distance education and increase enrolments in Masters and Doctoral programmes.

Like many dreams, what was envisioned was ambitious and glorious in what it imagined. Three decades later, asking what happened to the dream as we confront the sobering situation of a higher education system teetering on the edge leads us to conclude that the dream is not (fully) realised. It is a dream deferred.

Like most dreams, their realisation plays out in fits and starts, which is why Hughes's poem has us continuously looping back into the questions. Perhaps for each question, the answer at various points in our short history of democracy and the dream we have for higher education is yes; that dream has dried in the sun like a raisin. Yes, that dream is festering like a sore, pus oozing all over the place. Yes, that dream envisioned in the White Paper is stinking like rotten meat. Yes, that dream has crusted over with political manoeuvring and gerrymandering—syrupy, sickly, nauseatingly sweet. And, yes, it has been crushed under the heavy burden that it alone could never carry and has sagged low to the ground, unable to rise above.

But Hughes's poem holds out hope. Prophetic hope. The kind of hope that gives rise to an unflinching optimism that the dream for higher education—which is actually a dream for a transformed South Africa with (higher) education playing a pivotal role—while deferred, is realisable, not perhaps as originally imagined or conceived, but as something new.

As a prophetic hope, what was envisioned pointed to something for which policy alone could not be the catalyst. Instead, the dream invites the activation of (prophetic) imagination. As a prophetic imagination, the world it imagines is contingent on bold truth-telling of the kind that does not shy away from naming the obstacles and challenges what they are. Only rendering the critique, however, is an exercise in futility and quickly leads to despair if not accompanied by an energising and compelling vision of what could be. And imagining what could be is an exercise of the embodied imagination—a potent combination of truth-telling responsiveness to the crisis, sometimes even invoking the crisis, and energised praxis that leverages agency for change. Kevin Gannon (2020:151), speaking of the necessity to hold onto radical hope for higher education, notes that,

Our advocacy of a better future, as well as our mission of empowering our students to help create it, depends on praxis. Hope is aspirational, but also depends upon agency. For our students to see themselves as active, empowered learners—as people who can and should participate in the processes of knowledge creation and scholarly discourse—they need to work within learning spaces that cultivate that understanding. The work we should be about, then, is to create these spaces throughout whichever part of the higher educational landscape we find ourselves in.

Navigating our way to the realisation of the dream, reimagined as it should be, will remain a tricky endeavour with many failures along the way. And perhaps in this moment, we might ask different questions about that dream as we revise aspects of it, reshaping it into something that remains compelling and worthy of the blood, sweat, and tears it will take to achieve.

Confronting the truth of where we are as a country in our achievement of the higher education dream is critical. But naming the problems and identifying the causes is only one part of our commitment. The other part is to remain buoyant and optimistic that the goal is achievable and that the dream deferred will eventually explode.

I remain optimistic because I see higher education institutions taking up the dream and slowly making it their own, working towards its realisation, perhaps in small, seemingly insignificant ways, inspiring "hope for the efficacy of small generous acts" (Bowles, 2023:355). Every (generous) attempt is an act of prophetic imagination. Every institution committed to realising the dream becomes a signpost of hope, an agent of hope realised and the dream achieved. And just maybe, a hope deferred gives rise to a new dream, the kind captured here by Sharri Spelic (2023:88):

??Once upon a time, I was able to dream.

??????I said,

?????? “In my dreams my children and grandchildren will not go to college; they will give birth to one.”

??????I wonder now if I still mean it.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren will remain voracious learners, willing to share their curiosity and expertise generously and wholeheartedly.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren will recognise both a need to help and be helped; to build in community and develop a healthy capacity for solitude.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren will know love — how to give and receive it, how to spread and apply it, how to celebrate and rekindle it, how to mourn its loss and nurture its beginnings.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren understand freedom and responsibility and the tensions these produce; they can recognise themselves in society and its making.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren may or may not go to college.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren give birth to a fresh understanding.

??????In my dreams my children and grandchildren and their grandchildren have vision that extends beyond the known; imaginations that stretch the universe. They blossom with promise.

??????Still I dream.

References

Bowles, K. 2023. Vulnerability and generosity: The good future for Australian higher education. In L. Czerniewicz & C. Cronin (eds.), Higher education for good: Teaching and learning futures, Cambridge, Open Book Publishers.

Gannon, K.M., 2020, Radical hope: A teaching manifesto, West Virginia University Press, West Virginia.

Hughes, L., 1992, The panther and the lash: Poems of our times, Vintage, New York.

Spelic, S. 2023. Counters of despair. In L. Czerniewicz & C. Cronin (eds.), Higher education for good: Teaching and learning futures, Cambridge, Open Book Publishers.

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