I have been teaching human rights law and policy to college students for about 16 years: 10 years at Yale, four years at various universities in Switzerland and two years at Cornell. Something happened to college students between 2016, when I left the U.S., and 2022, when I returned. This something is a world-weariness: a baseline level of pessimism and despondency.
2015, the year before I left, was the year that two-year-old Alan Kurdi drowned in the Mediterranean. Michael Brown and Tamir Rice had been killed by the police the year before. In December 2012, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place, less than one hour away from our classroom. I remember that day in Connecticut: People on the streets and in the state Capitol walked around in silence.
Yet despite these, and many other, tragedies, my college students remained full of optimism. They wrote creative, visionary policy proposals. They seemed to take as a given that our society was moving toward a brighter future and that they would help propel us there.
A pandemic, domestic political turmoil and many wars later, my current students are noticeably less sanguine about the future. They are clearly worn down by the ugliness and pettiness that has taken over so much of our political discourse. Students’ comments in class suggesting a more equitable, efficient, research-driven and rational way of designing public policy are often followed by the caveat, “of course, that is not politically realistic.” Sometimes students skip the vision altogether and go directly to the “why it won’t work politically” part of the analysis.
From a purely intellectual perspective, the students I teach at Cornell are often dazzling — insightful, creative, analytically gifted and unafraid of hard work. So when I see these same students fall into cynicism and despair, I find it . . . well, crushing.
So what is the antidote?
Everyone has their own way of dealing with the sadness of the world. My method is simple: by staring directly at the darkness and tackling it head-on, concretely and in community, one step at a time.
My students in the State Policy Advocacy Clinic work with legislators, advocacy organizations, research faculty and community leaders with lived experience to design and advocate for legislative and administrative solutions to the most pressing human rights challenges in New York. We focus on evidence-based solutions to unnecessary suffering: opioid overdoses, people giving birth in prison, the detention of noncitizens, the vaping epidemic, dilapidated housing, lack of access to health care in rural areas, barriers to civic participation and the recent increase in xenophobia directed at the most vulnerable to name a few. We specialize in “low-hanging fruit” — moderate interventions at the margins that we think will have a disproportionately significant impact on the most marginalized in our society — but we do not shy away from the darkness.
Policy work and politics are a slog. As my students know, 50-state surveys can be tedious; trying to make sense of the budget is challenging and drafting statutory language is only fun for the first few hours. There are many late nights and so many emails. Politics is the art of conversation, but it takes a lot of time to talk one-on-one with researchers, community leaders, health providers, school officials, local government representatives and state legislators. It takes a lot of time to listen — really listen — to people with lived experiences, addressing the issues that matter most to them rather than the issues we think we can solve.
We don’t always agree with one another: Some of us lean center-right while some of us talk about what we will do “after the revolution” only slightly tongue-in-cheek. Some of us have roles in government; some of us spend our free time protesting government action. Some students excel at Excel; others excel at building connections. Our diversity sometimes makes internal negotiations more time-consuming and painful, but it is also what makes the community we have built together vibrant.
The clinic is just one small way for students to stay grounded. I have students who teach in prisons, provide interpretation for immigration cases at the law school, visit immigration detention centers, put together parole applications and accompany people to doctors’ appointments to interpret. Visiting someone in immigration detention will not stop them from getting deported and will not solve the threat of xenophobic violence. But it provides solace to another human being and strengthens one’s resolve in advocating for an end to unnecessary detention. Those two steps forward, however modest, are real.
So when my stomach drops at another horrific headline and I want to go curl up on the couch and binge Netflix, I remember what has worked in the past. I go back to my office and make one more phone call, send one more text, write one more memo. I checked in with my state legislator and thanked her for working so hard. I tell my students they are doing a good job and add three more things to their team’s “to do” list.
Reading the news without slogging is a direct path to burnout. Slogging alone is dispiriting and exhausting. But slogging together — it is the best antidote to world-weariness that I know.
Alexandra Dufresne is a Professor of the Practice and the Director of the State Policy Advocacy Clinic in the Brooks School of Public Policy. She can be reached at [email protected].
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