TLDR

(keep some Generative AI related carbon out of the atmosphere and just skim this section if your in a hurry)

• This post extends some thinking and justification for this blog’s existence beyond the inaugural post. Specifically, my desire to embrace a posture of sharing and reflecting as the two primary modes of digital existence.
• Many of the social platforms and digital media spaces that exist are designed to rob users of their agency and keep them coming back for more content/engagement–and this blog provides the infrastructure to resist those nudges.
• I compare my effort to reboot my online presence and digital engagement to curriculum design at colleges and universities, and observe that there is a dearth of reflection on the role of habitual practices in the student development process.

Sharing and Reflecting

Starting and opening a brand new blog/publishing project feels like inviting your friends into a home you’ve gutted down to the studs. You can enthusiastically show them around the joint and cast a vision of what its gonna look like once the work is done, but mostly they’re going to be avoiding the mud and worrying about stepping on a nail. So mind your step because I intend to share a little bit about how this project fits with a larger philosophy of digital presence.

The example I’m following comes from Alan Jacobs, an English Professor and academic administrator at Baylor who has cultivated an online presence I find aspirational. Alan makes it look easy, but of course he does, he’s got 20+ years of inertia behind him. He summarizes his online presence as cultivating digital space for the practices of sharing and reflecting. Sharing takes the practical form of micro-blogging while reflecting is done through his longform blog. In time, I’d like to consolidate my online presence into a similar framing - maintaining a digital space I can use for short-form sharing and a space for long(ish)-form reflective blogging.

Terminally Online

I happened upon a Tiktok/Reel I think about frequently that showed a long bank of slot machines with senior citizens dutifully tapping away at the controls, each with a vacuous and hypnotized look. We’re all living with little slot machines in our pockets though for most of us it’s not pennies but attention we’re repeatedly feeding into the machine.

This blog is part of a broader attempt to reset my relationship to my digital self. I came of age digitally in the era of MySpace and .edu-requiring Facebook. I remember fondly the curiosity and optimistic epoch of digital engagement that didn’t feel like I was having my attention milked like a horseshoe crab’s blood. While I encounter ideas worth pondering in some of the digital spaces I frequent, currently, most of my activity on the numerous social media sites I maintain is directionless. I’m simply riding the algorithmic currents, scrounging for a means to sustain a dopamine drip with little regard for actual intellectual edification, professional development, or cultural enrichment.

Curriculum Design and Personal Transformation

Can I relate this musing back to thinking about colleges and universities?

I believe that education is about more than just banking information,^[1] it’s a transformative process. Particularly with the way that the U.S. “does” college and university life, there is an understanding that the student experience should be considered holistically–that the educational process includes not only what happens in the classroom but also encompasses all the individual, and communal experiences that occur during the period of matriculation.^[2]

Beyond simply considering the institutional and communal ecosystem in which learning takes place, curricular practices matter as well–and it is here that I find overlap between my grasping for an alternative form of digital engagement and college and university dynamics. I find a lot of credence in the claim that our habits are as important–possibly more important–than the sequencing of activities, experiences, and content structured into a learning plan. ^[3]

My updated online presence and (hopefully over time) shifting social media habits are an effort to build appropriate boundaries around my media consumption in an anxious age. Over time I hope they will change the way I consciously and unconsciously respond to the specifically engineered means by which these platforms try to harness my attention and manipulate my endocrine system to keep me engaged. Similarly, colleges and universities should be a bulwark against a waning appetite for pluralism and intellectual curiosity. They should intentionally construct their built environment, social opportunities, curricular approach, and rituals for proactive civic engagement and democratic participation.

Hello there.

What

My name is Nicolas Babarskis and this site serves as a public journal of my thinking on colleges and universities. I have 14 years of experience working in postsecondary education settings, primarily in student support services, and for the last 3 years I have been pursuing a PhD in Higher Adult and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University.

Most of my writing topics of interest are associated with how bureaucracy, rationalization, and broader socio-political dynamics influence college or university behavior. So if you are a fan of social theory, education policy, and organizational behavior, this might be site worth following.

Why

Why keep a public journal? Accountability.

I find that I write more sharply and with more focus if I know that someone else may engage with it. As a doctoral student I spend large portions of my day in my own head and at some point I need to put those ideas to paper, whether for a class assignment or for the furtherance of research projects. Posting here is a means of transforming some of that head material into “paper” material.

How

I plan to post at least once a week on a postsecondary education topic. Sometimes it may be as simple as a quote from another author, or it could be a more extensive reflection on a particular theory, research method, or scholarly discourse I’m contending with.

So What

I’m a U.S. citizen and I believe our educational institutions are a major organ that sustains and promotes our liberal ideals of representative democracy. I think about colleges and universities because I also think a lot about the state of U.S. civic institutions and what their health might mean for civil rights and collective prosperity.

A pluralistic society is difficult to sustain without our diverse ecosystem of educational institutions. Colleges and universities also play an important role in the prosperity of our nation through the original research they provide. They contribute to our cultural landscape through the psychological and social development they cultivate in their participants. If you too think that colleges and universities are important on the national or global stage then this might be a place to think with me about how we ensure their health and flourishing.