Whither Compassion?

Abstract

This column piece reflects on the seeming lack of public compassion responses to the refugee crisis, and what our role as professionals in higher education can be in addressing this.

Forced migration and refugee crises seem like common features in a global world where unrest and uncertainty are on the increase. Yet the general preparedness to respond with generosity and compassion, to those forced to flee their homes due to political upheaval, or war or starvation, seems to be at a particularly low point.

It can be argued, I suppose, that the financial crisis of 2008 saw in a period of economic stringency, which made the tightening of the purse strings mandatory, and therefore the welcoming of “outsiders” less desirable. But can this really ethically and morally account for the hardening of attitudes toward refugees in dire straits? Isn’t it also possible that greater awareness of groups in desperate need (as we now have with increasing media coverage and new numerous different ways of communicating through social media) should make us more open to taking on global solutions, rather than making us close our hearts and borders? Yet recent events, such as the election of Trump and his subsequent antimigrant activities, and the vote to exit the UK from the European Union (EU) (founded on a strong argument against migration), suggest that populist thinking is moving against more compassionate stances.

Certain media coverage in the UK can be said to fuel such thinking. For example, there was a huge furore when the offer was made to allow some child refugees to enter the UK—much was made of the need to establish their “true” age through medical and dental investigation. More recently, the well-known ex-footballer and media personality, Gary Linekar, reportedly received “hate” messages after tweeting his support for refugee children. On the other hand, it was the image of the deceased refugee child’s body washed up on a beach which also sparked a wave of compassion from concerned citizens in the UK. So media depictions of the refugee plight can swing public opinion either way.

So what factors contribute to the stances we take, both in our attitudes toward refugees? If opinions can be swayed either way, is it possible to sway them more toward more compassionate stances? We can also ask these questions about the attitudes we hold toward people who hold antimigration stances? When I say “we” here, I am speaking about professionals and academics in higher education who profess to hold more progressive stances themselves. On one level, it is all too easy to distance ourselves from the populist majority. Certainly, I and my like-minded colleagues are still bemoaning the existence of the other 51% of referendum voters who seemingly want a more separatist, less inclusive population in the UK. We have taken for granted a Britain which is part of Europe and which includes people from a wide diversity of backgrounds, and we are shocked that there is apparently a small majority of our country which does not see the value of this mix or enjoy the social and cultural benefits this brings.

It is important to reflect on how and why we hold such beliefs, what responsibility we take for holding them, and for addressing what we believe to be problematic attitudes toward our fellow human beings who are in life threatening circumstances.

I often hear, from some of my higher education colleagues (many outside social work), that you can’t teach empathy or compassion. Perhaps as social workers, and social work educators, we do not necessarily believe this so strongly. Yet I am aware we often take issue with students who do not share what we believe to be a desirable set of social work–related values and that we may believe that the only recourse with such students is that they fail a social work program. I wonder what this says about how much we believe that the right values can be taught? Because, if you can’t teach this most fundamental aspect of being human, compassion, I wonder what it is we are trying to do, ultimately, in higher education? And I wonder why it is that some of us believe that values like compassion can’t be taught in higher education.

The current higher education policy context in many countries is geared toward training students for employability: a fine objective of course. The danger is that such a policy overemphasizes the learning of skills and underplays the importance of how and why the skills will be used. These bigger questions of what we think is important about being human and the sorts of societies and relations we want easily fall off the agenda, and the focus moves to whether graduates get jobs and whether employers want to employ them. Ironically, often the question is not even asked about whether the right jobs and numbers of them exist to give employment to the types of graduates which are being produced. This is a type of “blame the victim” stance—in this case, it individualizes students (as individual people who simply need to learn how to get a job and demonstrate the relevant skills) and ignores the social, economic, and global context which actually determines which jobs will be available, where and for whom. It also individualizes and blames each higher education institution for not educating in the right way, by introducing measures of the employability of each institutions’ graduates (as with the new Teaching Excellence Framework being introduced in the UK). This tendency to worship employability as the main objective of higher education really loses the plot I think and is a symptom of the type of thinking which not only devalues learning how to be compassionate, but doesn’t even put it on the agenda.

So those of us who do participate in educating and socializing graduates have some responsibility for maintaining a higher education system, and an approach to teaching and learning in higher education, which may in fact not address the bigger issues of being compassionate human beings and striving to create a compassionate society.

On reflection, I think some of our problematic assumptions which contribute to us believing that we can’t teach empathy and compassion are also to do with our assumptions about the nature of learning in higher education. Perhaps we have ideas about higher education which are too restricted, confined to the formalized learning which takes place primarily through the official curriculum and practices in the classroom and formal assessment of placement activity. Yet if we see higher education institutions as contexts which also mediate all the learning which takes place in a person’s full experience inside and outside formal learning environments (including past and current personal and professional experience), then there is much broader scope for influencing how and what people learn in higher education. In this sense, higher education institutions provide places and processes for people to learn how to learn. This gives a bigger remit for higher education to work with the values which need to inform this stance.

This is where the value of teaching ourselves and our students how to critically reflect becomes relevant. If we understand reflection to be about learning how to learn from our own experience, this has transformative potential when the learning is deep and leads to a reworking of fundamental values and guidelines for living. Socrates articulated the connection between reflection and developing compassion with his quote about “the examined life for ethical and compassionate engagement with the world and its dilemmas” (quoted in Nussbaum, 1997).

My challenge to us all who have a role in teaching and learning with professionals in higher education is to ask ourselves how we create an environment which models and supports compassionate thinking and actions, and do we engage in critical reflection on our own work and behavior to ensure that we continue to create compassionate environments which instill a sense of compassion in those who interact within them? A continued commitment to critical self-examination may lead to developing more complex and nuanced ways of creating compassionate environments in higher education and more compassionate citizens as a result.