Words matter. They frame our thinking about choices, acceptable behavior, and ultimately the care we extend. Market rhetoric and metaphors pervade thinking about higher education to the detriment of our institutions, communities, and even ourselves.

This session reflects on the terms and metaphors that guide our thinking about higher education and how that impacts care. Using metaphors elicited from educators and participants in advance and during the session, we’ll compare how the words we use subtly direct our thinking toward one of two different models or conceptions of education.

In one model, higher education has been driven by market and hierarchical thinking. This has adverse effects on care. Universities and professors are often described as “knowledge producers” implying students are consumers and education is a product. Using market semantics, knowledge is commodified outside the knower and the valued activity is production, not learning. Open education practitioners object to this marketization of education. Market thinking focuses our attention on objects that can be exchanged, and subordinates humans to those transactions. Care becomes a luxury or afterthought.

In contrast, Hess and Ostrom (2007) used “knowledge commons” to describe the work of scholars and educators. A commons is a system of norms, values, governance, and communications by which a community deals with challenges of collective action (Ostrom, 2005). Connell (2019) observes both research and teaching are collective activities. Success depends on our collective choices of how our time is spent. Yet individually we can only choose how to spend our own time. Viewed this way, our collective action problem is a kind of “professor’s dilemma”.

Market terms and metaphors encourage professors to spend their scarce and limited time being “productive”. We are encouraged to choose those activities that will most clearly benefit the individual. In effect, we are encouraged to free-ride on the care and work of others. By contrast, in commons terms sharing, care, cooperation, and community are optimal and in the long-run sustainable.

Our rhetoric affects our responses to the professor’s dilemma. By consciously using commons/community oriented metaphors and language, we center relationships and sharing.

In the pandemic everything takes more time. Faculty in our domains project responded with actions that appeared antithetical in market-thinking terms but made sense in commons-thinking. Their actions and sites promoted a tighter community and extended care.

What metaphors do we need to eschew and which ones do need to promote?