From Nope to Hope

What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Over the past five years, I’ve asked thousands of people from across the higher education landscape these two questions through my Hope Circuits Institute, a think tank that works with colleges and universities to develop communities where people build meaningful relationships and can truly flourish. 

The answers to the first question vary widely: broken funding models, increased political polarization, a decline in the humanities, a crisis in leadership, a demographic cliff, the deterioration of public trust in colleges and universities, attacks on academic freedom, gaps in accessibility and equity for students. Over the past several months, respondents have expressed increasing anxiety over the Trump administration’s actions affecting higher education, including the cancellation of billions in research funding and efforts to dismantle the US Department of Education. Institutions are facing financial exigency, program cuts, and mass layoffs. Many of us have stopped reading higher education news because it brings us to tears. Map these 
education-specific issues onto broader social upheavals—the climate crisis, income inequality, partisanship, racism and other forms of intolerance—and the reasons for despair feel downright monolithic.

Despite the range of answers to my first question, when I ask people my second question about what gets them out of bed every morning, I receive a consistent response: because education matters, now more than ever. Indeed, many people in academia share a belief that higher education is the only professional sector whose ultimate purpose is hope. Colleges and universities have a mandate to engage in work that industry and government cannot: we are in the business of making the world better, more just, more humane through the preservation of knowledge, the sharing of it, and the creation of new ways of understanding each other and the world. As members of academe, we persevere despite funding declines, loss of public trust, increases to class sizes, and program cuts because the academic enterprise—through research, teaching, community engagement, and advocacy—has a mandate to “challenge the actual in the name of the possible” (my favorite definition of “hope” from literary theorist Ira Shor).

So, how do we metabolize this moment of extraordinary urgency—rife with uncertainty, disruption, and horror—to build mindsets that are hopeful enough to respond to sector-wide change, even collapse? We must engage in social movement building that unites us through shared purpose. And we need hope—now more than ever—to inspire universities to join with each other, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, international entities, and others to sustain and grow scientific and humanistic efforts. Hope can help us unite campuses, tap alumni and donors, and regain public trust as we serve as leaders in shaping a democratic society even as government actions work to control academic decisions and erode institutional autonomy.

How do we locate hope? We need to go back to fundamentals and remember the public purpose of our institutions. Indeed, the choices we make in the next few years will shape what a new paradigm of higher education will look like for generations to come.

As we reclaim hope, we must ask ourselves and one another:

• How do we resist dystopian despotism and build creative futures?
• How do we find hope in this time of despair, distrust, and depletion?,?li>
• How do we keep getting out of bed in the morning?

In June 2020, I started asking college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, staff, and students these questions. My motivation was born of a very personal need. Schools had closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so I was homeschooling my young children. At the same time, my workload as an administrator tripled overnight, and my husband was diagnosed with life-threatening lung cancer. Asking people where they located hope in their everyday lives was not merely a thought exercise; it was a lifeline.

Overwhelmed with COVID, childcare, caregiving, and cancer, I wanted to hide under the covers—and on many days I did. The only way I moved from despair and stagnation into hope and action was one conversation at a time. One conversation became three hundred interviews with people from across higher education. I heard stories of hope and despair, heartbreak and joy, rage and love. Many people I spoke with were flourishing despite, not because of, the systems they were working within, and almost everyone described using the same techniques to move from nope to hope. From these techniques, I developed ten conceptual tools that can help us all move from default responses—which humans developed to survive in broken systems—into learned responses that can offer creative structural alternatives to despair and center flourishing: 

Slow down and pause. This first conceptual tool is the most challenging for me because when faced with crisis, I speed up: I work longer, stay later, build coalitions, start taskforces, hustle harder. Yet living in permanent crisis mode leads to burnout, disengagement, and brokenness. As Nigerian scholar Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The times are urgent: let us slow down.”

Surface the systems. Once we slow down, we can start to see otherwise invisible structures and underlying systems that inform our behaviors, mindsets, and actions. 

Practice divergent thinking. Whether using new metaphors or weaving together interdisciplinary knowledges, practicing divergent thinking opens up possibilities and fosters creativity by encouraging multiple perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches that help us explore unconventional solutions to complex challenges. 

Commit to unlearning and relearning. “We’ve always done it that way” is no longer justifiable. This tool encourages us to let go of assumptions and beliefs that no longer serve us, and perhaps never served many, so we can make space for ways of thinking that are better aligned with our rapidly evolving world. 

Live in the questions. Embracing uncertainty and complexity, this tool invites us to sit with questions instead of seeking immediate answers, fostering deeper inquiry and growth.

Stay with the trouble. In a sector that sometimes falls into toxic positivity (we just need to keep going, hunker down, work harder), we need a dose of critical hope. By looking clear-eyed at the problems, we can reframe discomfort as a feature, not a flaw, of the learning process.

Reimagine authority and expertise. This tool challenges traditional hierarchies and invites more collaborative and inclusive approaches to decision making, recognizing that expertise exists in multiple forms and perspectives. We must embrace diverse lived experiences, intersectionality, and varying kinds of knowledges to glean insights about what is possible for building creative futures.

Take a systems-level approach. This tool empowers us to address root causes rather than symptoms, creating more sustainable and comprehensive solutions to problems. 

Change your language, change the world. Language shapes reality, and this tool emphasizes how shifting our language can influence how we think, relate to others, and create change in the world. 

Build intentional community. This tool fosters collective support and collaboration, recognizing the power of shared purpose and mutual care in creating resilient transformative networks that help us tackle challenges together. I use this set of conceptual tools every single day, whether during a difficult meeting, in response to a rude email, or when a project stalls. I carry with me a printout listing the tools because I need a daily reminder about how to metabolize moments of deep disruption. What gets me out of bed in the morning is the conviction that we can only do this hard hope work together. Join me. 

Illustration by Cornelia Li