Who feels like they’re grieving their higher ed work right now?

Take a second before you answer that, because as strange as it sounds, I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious when we’re grieving something.

Work and life are often, maybe even usually, not significantly disrupted by grief. I recall nearly 20 years ago now when my father died and several days later, I was in front of four twice-weekly sections of technical writing at Clemson University doing everything I would do under normal circumstances. In her recently released memoir, Memorial Days, the novelist Geraldine Brooks writes about how in the aftermath of the sudden death of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, she went back to work writing and then promoting her novel Horse, without really pausing to actively grieve until years later, a period she explores in Memorial Days.

But of course, Brooks and I were both grieving at those times of regular productivity. I had moments in the midst of my teaching where my consciousness had split, and a second self was observing that instructor in front of the room and wondering how he was able to do that given the recent run of his life.

This kind of compartmentalization is common, even necessary. Most lives do not allow the time and space for us to become unmoored by grief. All things considered, and knocking on wood, I know that my experience of grief is no more than average for someone my age and station.

I’ve experienced much less intense forms of grief when other things have happened, like having a book entirely stiff sales-wise, or when I was not chosen as a finalist for a tenure-track job at the institution where I’d been visiting for six years.

The common thread in each case is that something has been lost and it will never return. Nothing can change this reality, and this is painful to realize.

I’m guessing that lots of folks working in higher ed contexts right now are experiencing grief. Where they sit on the Kübler-Ross model likely varies. My guess is that the Trump administration attacks on higher ed have put many on a speed run through denial straight into anger. Some upper administrators may have hopscotched anger and landed on bargaining, but I’m with Wesleyan president Michael Roth, who says there’s no chance for higher ed leaders or institutions to sit this one out.

What I wish for people, and what I think is in the best interests of both individuals working in higher ed and the higher ed institutions themselves, is to achieve acceptance as quickly as possible. One of the reasons I’ve been insisting that a capacious vision for higher education is in the rearview mirror—a vision that higher ed’s purpose is to help make people “greater versions of themselves” while also “discovering new knowledge” in order to “make the world better,” in the words of former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust—is because that era is over.

I believe it was over before the second Trump presidency. Elon Musk and his minions are now salting the earth.

I want to be clear that acceptance does not mean for a second that anyone or any entity should stop fighting to maintain access to things like NIH or NSF funding, or initiatives that make the opportunity of education more available for those who have been traditionally excluded.

As I’ve also previously written, we will always have the work, and the work needs doing no matter what, as both the example of Geraldine Brooks and myself illustrate.

Acceptance is not giving up or giving in. It is the opposite. It is moving on in a way that acknowledges the reality of the loss, while also holding the loss in a permanent but nondistorting place. I can still be visited by grief over my losses, but the grief is a reminder of the importance of what was lost.

Whenever I achieve a milestone like publishing a new book, one of my first thoughts is of my father and how much he would’ve gotten a kick out of what I was doing. This recognition makes me a little sad, but this sadness is infused with gratitude, as I’ve conjured his spirit for a brief moment.

That spirit is sustaining, and we must hold on to it even as we recognize the loss is real and permanent.

What comes next is different, but it also not inevitably worse or diminished in all senses, and there is nothing stopping us from pursuing the values that drove us prior to the loss. Being pushed out of the classroom by the dead end of a teaching career separated me from my favorite work of all time but has also allowed me to become a more prominent and impactful voice about the values I brought to my teaching.

Having already accepted the end of higher education as I previously conceived it, I’ve had a head start on this journey, and I’ve found myself quite energized and engaged by the present challenge. I’m fortunate to have some outlets for this energy—this space, the book, my work as a fellow with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom—and I’m here to testify from the other side of acceptance that there is a far greater sense of resolve than defeat.

Of course, while I wish acceptance for everyone as quickly as possible, grieving is not something that can be rushed, and achieving acceptance requires one to experience the earlier stages.

But please know, there’s lots of worthwhile work on the other side, the same work you’re already doing, just a little different in order to make room for what’s been lost.