Empathy with students is important – but it is very difficult

“Be careful of the students; they’ll try to change their timetables so all their classes are just on two days.”

So warned the dean during my first week at the American University of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. I understood. When I was a student, my course selections were consciously made to ensure a long weekend. At the time, I’d found it puzzling that some of my professors always taught on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, putting it down to a vengeful administration department. Only on becoming a lecturer, faced with a stack of papers to grade, did I realise the potential benefits of an unpopular class time.

So far, so familiar, then. But events quickly started to take unexpected turns. I’d been in Iraq for just two months when the outbreak of Covid-19 forced the university to close its campus. I returned to Switzerland and set about teaching remotely. However, when I tried to sympathise with my students about the inadequacies of online teaching, one of their responses surprised me: “I prefer it, actually, sir. It means we don’t have to pay for fuel to get to campus or buy expensive food from the canteen.”

This put the clamouring in certain quarters for a shorter week into a different perspective. I knew that our students come from a range of backgrounds, though I hadn’t realised the divide was so stark. I’d seen the richer ones speeding past in their new SUVs, but had been less conscious that there were also those for whom saving a couple of dollars on fuel made months in front of a screen tolerable.  

I felt ashamed of my lack of empathy – particularly because it is a virtue that I’d frequently preached in my writings as a core tenet of respect. It was another demonstration that it is one thing to recognise the importance of putting ourselves into the shoes of others and quite another to do so without simply projecting our own particular experiences and perspectives onto them. Attending university might give us all a shared experience of being a student, but that does not mean that our experiences are identical.

I fell into the same trap later in the semester, after inviting my class to apply to attend an online negotiation conference I was organising. Applications arrived, but one from my best student wasn’t among them. I concluded that she must have thought the conference would be “lame” or “boring”, the labels I applied to extracurricular activities as an undergraduate. Why bother with Model UN when it was “triples for singles” night at the Nag’s Head?

Nevertheless, I was eager to put the best team together, so I tried to sell the conference to her. “It should be really interesting,” I assured her. “The former prime minister of the Republic of Ireland will give a keynote address.”

Her response?

“I thought about applying, sir. I just wasn’t sure if I’d be good enough.”

She ended up being singled out by the instructors for her performance in the negotiation simulation on the final day of the conference – though not before she had sent me an email apologising for letting me down in it.

In a time of unprecedented stress, we are told that empathy is more important than ever, that as educators and good citizens, we should try to put ourselves in the place of our students. Yet how can we? Whether in northern Iraq, Zurich or York, we are confronted with a sea of faces when walking into a classroom or launching our webcams, each belonging to a unique individual with unique experiences, expectations, confidence levels and insecurities. Yet we often attribute their failures to engage, their non-attendance, their panicked emails to the worst impulses in ourselves.

What is the remedy? In course evaluations we don’t ask students to record their personal circumstances or insecurities – as if anyone would confess all to an anonymous form anyway. What I learned from my two students had nothing to do with course design, learning objectives or reading materials. Their reflections were highly personal and at the same time fairly common. Universities aren’t isolated from the problems of wider society wherever they are in the world. Nor can empathy detach itself from society’s structures. For even though empathy may feel like a solely individual act, institutions choose whose voices are taken into account when designing their rules and procedures.

Proposals for tackling racial discrimination within universities have highlighted the need to involve students in the structuring of complaints processes and for more data to quantify the scale of the problem. Both lessons are also apposite to effectively addressing challenges students face related to their mental health, gender or economic background. Nor should we limit these strategies to the internal structure of institutions. Engaging with outside stakeholders allows universities to understand the needs of the local communities where they are based and redefine the wider role of higher education in society.

But all this should not let individuals off the hook. Lecturers are crucial in shaping students’ experiences, pushing them to take on new challenges and acting as the first point of contact when they are struggling. As we explore possibilities for institutional change, we shouldn’t forget to informally reach out to them and listen to what they have to say.

Jack R. Williams is acting dean of the College of International Studies at the American University of Kurdistan in Iraq and president of the Global Negotiation Conference.