A therapist once told me that our lives follow a path that we think we can see stretching out before us, as far as the eye can see. When something changes—when the path takes a sharp left turn because of events we couldn’t or didn’t predict—we begin traveling in a new direction, but we can still see the other path we thought we were on. Grief is the space between the two paths, she said. It’s the gap between reality and desire; reality and our previously-rooted hopes.

It strikes me that there’s a lot of grief in higher ed right now, much of it going unnamed. Many of us joined our chosen profession thinking we were walking one path, and then found we were on another. Much of that grief isn’t new. Contingency, a shrinking job market, the interest rate on loans, the fractures caused by racism, misogyny, homophobia, classism, transphobia—the list goes on. And on top of all of this a global pandemic that demanded “emergency lifeboat learning” (in the words of Courtney Joseph), and the navigation of a rocky path to the kind of learning we’re facilitating now in a wholly new political moment. GenAI is firmly in the mix, too, a tool that complicates our practice without adding much (any?) value.

We can see the path we wanted to walk, whatever the details of that which are particular to us; age, discipline, ambition, dreams. And for the vast majority of us it’s not the path we’re on anymore. I see and hear a lot of anger, and a fair amount of hopelessness, derision, and maybe even bitterness too as I read blogs and socials across higher ed. Grief is often loud and ugly and born out of circumstances that are desperately unfair—it’s not that anyone’s “doing it wrong.”  It’s simply a place, a location, a period we have no choice but to move through, whatever responses we have.

There are no perfect steps to move through to process loss, and I have no prescription for healing what aches. I can offer only this: that it is absolutely legitimate to feel what we feel and that naming things brings clarity. But it’s also true that pre-emptively blaming students, en masse, for the sins of tech bros and standardized testing and the monopoly of The College Board is missing the mark, and that accepting that the road has forked is not the same as passivity, or resignation. It can be the locus of resistance, of rebuilding, and of reframing where we are to take into account the toll of loss.

We are, despite everything, still doing vital work. Our students need our imagination, creativity, and flexibility; more than that, our colleagues and we do too.

Mark the loss. Mourn what hasn’t turned out the way we hoped. And refuse the attempts by so many bad actors to take choices out of our hands.