Brenna Clarke Grey ends her treatise on The University Cannot Love You: Gendered Labour, Burnout and the Covid-19 Pivot to Digital with these two sentences: “The university cannot love you. But it would be nice if it could see you.” With many academic institutions not having caregivers and care work valued at their center, nor the capacity to extend care or even reward, recognize or prioritize it within the pandemic scenarios—Grey feels that women, on the whole are left to make up the difference—affecting their professional and personal lives. And as some institutions continue to devalue care now when more is needed, the caregivers’ needs are minimized (at best) and ignored (at the worst).
Grey gets to the need for the institutional “see you” part by doing a fast walk through the cannot-love “larger ramifications” of care work that seems to fall more heavily on women scholars, and people grouped within what she termed the “racialized, queer, and disabled scholars.” When post-secondary education went online due to the pandemic, the burdens of care work women and marginalized communities had to bear were more emotionally and physically labor-intensive than what most members of the male populace absorbed. Women and marginalized others seemed to be left with care work that taxed their “sense of identity.”
Grey points to some token institutional additions of wellness classes during the pandemic (to help relive stress on care givers) and celebrations of faculty who are “caring” individuals, but otherwise disdains institutional efforts. She puts out the need of institutions to rethink and restructure their outlook of care and care workers. First, she suggests a place needs to be made for caring and care work at the institutional level. Next, care work needs to be valued. Grey concludes that she would like the institutions to at least “see” that there are many who are “marginalized within our universities while using [their] emotional labour to sustain the institution.” She said that this needed valuing “begins with institutions accepting responsibility and acknowledging harm.”
After reading this treatise, I remembered that the BYU Office of Belonging was created to address things such as Grey’s named issues for academic institutions to accept responsibility and acknowledge harm for not sooner seeing the importance of care giving or addressing the needs of marginalized groups who were inordinately burdened while still needing to maintain their jobs.
As I read further into the structure and mission of the BYU Office of Belonging, I discovered that this office works to not only “see” but to “love up” everyone as well, something that Grey thought was almost impossible in an academic setting. To prove that the “university can love you” or at least strive to do so, the BYU office was set up to help guarantee the “seeing” and the “loving” desired by Grey.
BYU Office of Belonging, in essence, states: “Our university loves you, and we’re trying to see you. That is why we set up this new entity.” The BYU Statement on Belonging lets the campus community and its extensions know that they “strive” to have the students, faculty and staff be in a community where “hearts are knit together in love.”
I think that Grey asks for the care workers to be recognized in their marginalized groups, whereas BYU asks its constituents to recognize everyone in a bigger, single group as children of God. This is perhaps why BYU can set themselves up as an academic institution that can “love” and “see” because it now publicly decries marginalization.
I, for one, hope that this office at BYU succeeds. I recognize, as does Grey, that many who are academics and caregivers may carry extra burdens during the pandemic (and at other times) and may sometimes feel ostracized because they are not “seen.” It’s great to see that the professional work, care work and caring within academia that hasn’t been “seen” in the past is beginning to be addressed at the institutional level at BYU and other universities—and thanks to Grey, her inside experience points the way.
REFERENCE
Gray, B. C. (2022). The University Cannot Love You: Gendered Labour, Burnout and the Covid-19 Pivot to Digital. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/open_scholar/university_cannot_love