A Note from the Editor

This past May, when I received news that my promotion to full professor had been granted, I was elated. Hadn't this been what I have been working for all these years? But along with pride and relief, I must admit that I also felt a tinge of trepidation. Quite frankly, it had been a difficult academic year, or more accurately a culmination of increasingly difficult years. My colleagues in my department and I had struggled with students' seeming lack of agency and their tendency to see things from an (overly) emotional and personal perspective. Students displayed a simultaneous desire to please authority, yet a constant frustration that we in loco parentis are not living up to their expectations—to protect them, to solve their problems, and to entertain them. Meanwhile, as theatre professors we felt pressure from above and outside to prove our worth with increased enrollments, learning outcomes, and career paths. More seriously, I worried about students who couldn't get their work done due to depression and became distraught over others who had been institutionalized or dropped out because they couldn't pay their bills. My colleagues and I have become actively involved in fundraising, marketing, and data collection; we have been trained in suicide prevention and active shooter drills. Nonetheless, whenever I discussed these matters with colleagues at other institutions—whether community colleges, state universities, private liberal-arts schools, or members of the Ivy League—I was struck by the prevalence of these circumstances.

In fact, recent research suggests that these experiences are not isolated, but may be related to larger shifts in higher education: "A 2018 World Health Organization survey of 14,000 students across the globe found that one in three college freshmen reported dealing with mental health disorders in the years leading up to college" (Lauriello). While such statistics may represent a (positive) cultural shift toward normalizing mental illness (and thus students' ability to speak up and seek help), "there is evidence of an actual increase in mental distress in college students as well," which may be "attributed to many cultural and economic changes between 2009 and 2018: the increased reliance on social media, which can be isolating and trigger self-esteem issues; frequent school shootings and the gun control debate fostering fear and panic; and the soaring price of education and worries about loan debt, to name a few" (ibid.; emphasis in original). Additionally, in 2019, after stories surfaced about parents bribing SAT proctors and paying off coaches to help admit their children into elite colleges, the New York Times began reporting about the phenomenon of "snowplow parenting," in which parents "are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child's path to success, so they don't have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities" (Miller and Bromwich). I have begun to question how my own behavior may contribute to this "snowplowing" culture, and how I might in turn teach my students to be more flexible, reflective, and accountable. I have also thought about the larger economic and political shifts that may be driving this snowplow effect. There is clearly much work needed to educate ourselves on how to best serve our student body given our current climate: How can we alter the atmosphere in our classrooms or rehearsal spaces in healthier ways for all involved?

The period 2018 to 2019 also reflects a rise in student activism. Starting in high school, students have been participants in, even organizers of, marches, protests, and campaigns for issues ranging from women's rights, gun violence, and climate change, among others. And so, I have also been wrestling with ways to respond to students' urgent desire for a better, more just world. In their keynote address to ATHE published in the March 2019 issue of Theatre Topics (vol. 29, no. 1), Quiara Alegría Hudes and Gabriela Serena Sanchez challenged educators to take a hard look at their seasons, syllabi, and curricula as to whether they "reinforce dominant cultural values" or provide "abundant opportunities for students to center themselves, and the department, in different values and aesthetic systems" (7...