Picture a day when you’ve gathered your faculty together to have a substantive conversation about some pressing issue facing the institution. You explain the situation using terms such as revenue, the business of education, efficiencies, degree production, throughput, and the like. This may seem sensible given that, in part, universities function like businesses. As with our counterparts in the for-profit corporate world, we in education experience the reality of balancing budgets and making tough choices about how to steward limited financial resources.
As educators, we often take for granted the level of personal information we ask students to share with us. In my own experience as an academic advisor, my meetings with students often touch upon the personal, even when on the surface they may seem academic in nature. Yet, although we ask students to share these personal aspects of their lives with us, we rarely share the details of our lives with them. In some professional settings, such as higher education, it can be a challenging experience to straddle the line between being professional and allowing ourselves to be human. However, I believe that it is possible for us to share parts of ourselves, our stories, and our experiences with our students without overstepping boundaries, and in doing so develop trust and meaningful bonds.
