When I began life as an undergrad in the Sri Lankan state university system, our fellowship was invited to look at some of the lesser acknowledged verses in Jeremiah 29 which addressed the exiled population with a surprising message. God’s words encouraged them to “[b]uild houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce” (Jer. 29:5) in the hated country/city of their exile – Babylon. Perhaps the hardest thing to swallow was this exhortation: “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7). Regardless of whether one should be likening the state university experience to exile or not, the call to actively pray for the prosperity of those who are seen to be in opposition to you is a tough pill to swallow.
Now, I have found myself revisiting these words with a whole different perspective of what it means to seek the peace, the prosperity, and the well-being of the community into which I have been sent. In this short reflective piece, I’d like to look at how I understand the idea of seeking the peace and prosperity[1] of the community within which I live and work. The situations I want to discuss might be very specific to a young academic in the system, but I think they all illustrate the problem of how we are to seek the peace and prosperity of our workplaces. My attempts at understanding and responding to these situations are only the beginning of a journey in seeking the prosperity of my workplace.
Understanding the Call to Prosper
It is significant that this call to seek the well-being of a foreign space recognises firstly that the individual and the collective cannot be conflated. There is an invitation for individuals and their families to plant and build and grow in order to meet their own needs and this is seen as part of the larger plan of seeking the well-being of the city itself. However, the well-being of the city is not simply a sum of its citizens doing well individually. In fact, the prophet suggests that personal prosperity is contingent on collective prosperity (Jer. 29:7b), and not just that of the exiled community. The exiles are actually called on to pray for Babylon’s prosperity.
It’s worth pausing to unravel the significance of this call to “pray” for the city’s prosperity. It is to be seen as a call to actively seek the prosperity of the city, challenging our modern understanding of prayer as absolution from all involvement in a situation. I don’t mean to undermine the importance of genuine prayer, but the Bible is quite clear that prayer is also a commitment to a change in lifestyle: in this instance, the exiles are clearly expected to do[2] things that will maintain the peace and prosperity of the city. How should we ‘pray’, then?
The Problem of Escapist Individualism
The model of our modern universities comes to us filtered through a more individualistic ‘Western’ lens, where the individual’s contribution and well-being is prized[3], perhaps at the cost of collective identity. So maybe it isn’t entirely surprising that individualism is prized in our system too. On the one hand, it is of paramount importance to recognise the individual’s contribution while holding them accountable within a system that is easily exploited by those who can find loopholes. However, this approach is often adopted in a sink-or-swim kind of way, with young academics rarely supported or directed meaningfully into the expectations of what a good academic career looks like. If lucky, you will have a role model whom you can follow – provided you are interested and intelligent enough to extrapolate the most important principles of surviving academia. If you demonstrate initiative, you may even go so far as to request guidance on academic life. However, the pressure of meeting performance indicators without guidance into a nuanced understanding of academia often ends in a frantic and superficial meeting of needs rather than a holistic understanding of the system and the larger discipline. This haphazard nature is often seen in our narrow frameworks for research and its link to classroom teaching.
While acknowledging that autonomy and creativity are essential to a system with a history of stifling innovation, I see the problem in viewing these two traits as solely individual ones. For the majority, discussion hones ideas. And if academic spaces meant to stimulate groups (i.e., conferences, research projects) are also increasingly becoming spaces to showcase individual competitiveness, then the message to young academics is painfully clear: climb the ladder at all costs and do it alone so that the competition can’t cut you down[4].
If collectiveness is seen at all, it is a paradoxical collectiveness that stems from individualism rather than an innate sense of building communal well-being. Often, a simple question will surface our own motives: why am I part of this group? Narrowly defining collectiveness as group loyalty[5] threatens the flourishing of the system, seen primarily in our inability to draw links between departments, faculties, and even across institutions. Often, this leads to what I like to think of as ‘escapist individualism’ – the need to ensure that the concerns of yours and your own remain unthreatened by too much involvement with ‘external’ concerns. Jeremiah’s exhortation, however, implies that simply looking out for your own doesn’t count as seeking the prosperity of the collective. The call is to “increase … not decrease” (Jer. 29.6b) in number, but the caveat “also”, which follows with the command to “seek” and “pray”, now puts a larger perspective on this call to flourish. Therefore, in situations where academia overemphasises the individual, how do we work towards instituting the value for collective growth? Might we be called to systematically institute different expectations – those of collaboration rather than competition – between young peers entering the workplace?
Most senior academics will also push junior academics to commit to post-graduate studies sooner rather than later. But I often wonder how much that encourages junior academics to really explore the expanse of a field’s promise. Given that over-specialisation has led to increasingly detached units, might it be necessary to encourage slower over faster progress for the good of the collective?
The Negotiation of Competence
The second thing that I noticed is not something new to anyone in academia but is something that disturbs me deeply. One expects to have differences in capacities and dispositions in a workplace, but how should we approach the problem of incompetence? I admit this sounds downright arrogant: to posit oneself as being ‘better’ or ‘more capable’ than someone else is probably unacceptable today. But part of this exercise is also to bluntly admit the struggles I face, so do hear me out.
Over the years of working in my discipline, I have noticed vastly varying capacities among the staff I have worked with. I am not going to go into how they ended up in the system in the first place – that is a pointless exercise in hashing out exactly how damaged our recruitment process is. My concern lies more in how to associate with and see these individuals as also belonging in the community to which we are called.
Competence not only impacts the day-to-day teaching, research, and administration but also affects a person’s capacity to see the larger narrative to which we belong. This is not always correlative of course: brilliant thinkers in their fields are often painfully unaware of peripheral implications that are also linked to understanding their discipline through a wider lens, ultimately stunting their ability to think institutionally rather than individualistically. However, the problem is exacerbated if even the most basic expectations in the job are not met regularly. In the context of miserably failing accountability mechanisms, how should one respond to those who either struggle with demonstrating competence or those who simply do not care about it?
I will freely admit, in the spirit of honesty, that I usually avoid any association with these individuals. I have additionally ensured that they do not have any direct access to the work I do but I have increasingly come to recognise that I am very ‘exile-like’ in my thinking. It is certainly futile to claim that I am invested in my workplace when my efforts to look for the prosperity of my discipline are undermined by my inability to acknowledge that my less competent colleagues are very much part of the system in which I work. In the eyes of God, each person is created in his image but is now tainted by the Fall – much like me. If so, how would seeking the prosperity of these individuals look like to me?
Although humility is a hard-to-find value, it is the starting point of every form of engagement that we attempt. Without true Christian humility, we become very much like our figurative ancestors, the Israelites, who assumed that being the people of God gave them the right to be cliquish. Jeremiah is quick to undercut this in his letter to the exiles when he calls on them to seek the well-being of everyone in the city/country of exile. I don’t have easy answers, but I do know that the first step is to recognise that the encounters that have shaped me so far have also been a privilege bestowed on me by God, and not because I have deserved them. This humility should then lead into an attempt to understand the other person as a holistic being. A chance to observe them closely might show us the things that fulfil or satisfy them, and this can become a way to engage more closely with the person.
Of course, it is important that we don’t just stop there. A flourishing of the person will also require growth in how they see the world and their work, and investing conversations and time in our colleagues is important. I believe we are called to engage the imaginations of even those who we deem unimaginative, so this is a lifelong commitment to casting a vision for others. I imagine it will be frustrating, but I also understand that I must truly engage all my colleagues if I am to genuinely desire the prosperity of my ‘city’.
The Nurturing of Whole Students
Little need be said in terms of introducing this final aspect of concern: it has been discussed at length by bigger and better minds, and all I will be attempting is to put this issue into the framework of seeking the collective prosperity of the university community. Debates around the functional nature of education have led to employability becoming the dominant trait for most degree programmes to be evaluated against. In this context, I would like to pose the question of how to seek the prosperity of our students through the work we do, and additionally ask what the objective of education would be in a system that seeks a student’s well-being.
I think we as academics really struggle to comprehend our students as whole beings. That they have families, interests, and their own skills often gets obfuscated by our narrowly defined curricula. Although the pandemic has unavoidably brought home to us that our students are emotional and psychological beings, it seems that we still struggle to accept this in our academic environments. In scenarios such as this, I am forced to ask myself what it is that will truly lead to the prosperity of my students.
Perhaps the more damaging trend that has dominated academia is our pretence that we can strip our disciplines of their moral value. Most times it is frowned upon to discuss what is right and wrong, or what might be acceptable and why. While some agendas are unquestioningly pushed, others are deemed as being too subjective and therefore not ‘academic’ enough. In a system that relegates some values as ‘personal’ and therefore outside the learning environment, could we really claim to be seeking the prosperity of our students and, by extension, the whole university community?
Concluding Thoughts
I have attempted to be as brutal as possible in the discussion of the concerns that I struggle with. I don’t know if there are easy answers to these struggles and I am quite certain the Bible doesn’t encourage a simplistic engagement either. I keep going back to the emotions the exiles must have felt upon receiving Jeremiah’s message: disbelief at the ludicrous nature of God’s expectations, that they would actually pray for and seek the prosperity of Babylon, their great enemy; anger at Jeremiah for warning them not to “listen to the dreams you encourage [the diviners and prophets among you] to have” (Jer. 29.8b) because they are false expectations; frustration at having additional burdens put on them; and sorrow that things would not be changing any time soon. I see myself in them; I recognise my own failings and biases; and I pray for change in my life just as I attempt to pray for change around me.
Questions for Reflection
- How has an extreme sense of individualism affected your own understanding of the balance between individual and collective prosperity? What are some points for gratitude when thinking of the prosperity of both the individual and the collective?
- How have you struggled with dealing with those who might be considered ‘incompetent’?
- What place does humility have within academia currently, if it has a place at all? How do you grapple with the need to balance confidence in your own abilities with the biblical approach of humility?
- How do your classrooms include or exclude your students’ emotional, psychological, and moral wellness? What might be some ideas for bettering our classroom experiences?
- Is there anything particular that has struck you as being detrimental to the flourishing of the university community? How might you pray about this? How might you build a lasting engagement with this?
[1] Without descending into a long theological explanation of what prosperity entails, I rely on the biblical idea of ‘shalom’ – a wholeness of relationships and connections – as the basis for my understanding of prosperity.
[2] (the words “seek” and “pray” occur alongside each other)
[3] In associating individualism with western civilization, I am holding to the generalization that prevails in seeing the East as being more founded on collective identities. Whether this is a valid way of seeing things is not of paramount importance to the greater point being argued here, so I choose not to explore this generalization further.
[4] Unfortunately, we seem to be passing this ineffective individualism on to our students too, going by the general hesitance I seem to observe among undergraduates who have been given group tasks.
[5] It is important to note that I am not only talking about group loyalty as something that forms to cover up weaknesses. Often, even the best minds in academia tend to form groups within which they are comfortable and will remain unchallenged, and this tendency is what I am attempting to question overall.
The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of FOCUS, Sri Lanka.