Care and Rigor in Higher Education

Resistance to social justice work in the university has for decades argued that care and rigor are incompatible and imbalanced mandates of the institution – an argument I refer to as the care/rigor dichotomy. Rigorous pursuit of truth, so these critiques go, has been abandoned in favor of a political commitment to care. These critiques elide much of the violence students face, as is seen in university justification of police violence to students, and they reframe as moralism the rigor inherent in many pedagogical care practices, particularly those that benefit marginalized students. The care/rigor dichotomy is undergirded by an anti-sentimentalist intellectualism that emerges with the rise of social Darwinist eugenics in the mid-19th century and builds momentum through the austerity politics in the neoliberal era. These political and intellectual movements situate the care/rigor dichotomy within the question of authority, reframing students, particularly marginalized or politically active students, as children in need of stern discipline. Drawing from queer, trans, and leftist frameworks of ethical authority, I argue for more deliberate acknowledgment and interweaving of care and rigor in university pedagogy. I build on my experience in composition pedagogy and teacher training, arguing that the practice of multicultural content scaffolding adheres to the care/rigor dichotomy and that we should instead foreground rigorous opacity in discussions of marginalized identity. I also highlight queer BDSM practices of consensual discomfort and street medic negotiations of hierarchical and horizontal teaching to argue for more nuanced approaches to classroom authority and responsibility