O:JA&L Prose Discourse: Nonfiction
Contemporary Controversies
Personal Essay
Alice Hatcher
LET THEM EAT COOKIES:
SUGAR-COATING ANXIETY AT A CROSSROADS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
It now seems like a scene from a different era. I was sitting at a café in Tucson, when my good friend, a University of Arizona project manager wearing a t-shirt reading “I’m silently correcting your grammar,” muttered a string of obscenities and spun her laptop around to show me an invite to the summer 2024 Crossroads Conference, an annual professional development event organized by UA’s Staff Council. An experienced mediator accustomed to observing somatic expressions of anxiety, I felt my shoulders tense as I considered the red and blue letters spelling out the conference theme, “Finding U at UArizona”; the childishly rendered magnifying glasses substituted for i’s; the text speak U; and the descriptions of two-dozen workshops focused partly on topics like “Transaction Privileges and Use Tax,” but largely on meditation and other “ancient practices” for “cultivating workplace resilience, emotional self-regulation, and distress tolerance” during “uncertain” times.
“They’re insulting everyone’s intelligence,” my friend declared, twisting the cap off a bottle of nicotine lozenges. “It’s the most infantilizing thing I’ve ever seen.”
Viewed against Trump’s increasingly deranged posts on Truth Social since 2024, my friend’s comment now seems a touch histrionic. That said, the evite was, in fact, offensive. “Yes,” I conceded, tracking the warmth spreading down my neck. “It’s a crime against the Humanities.”
It’s possible that I, too, was getting histrionic, unbalanced by the weight of my own professional baggage. I was reacting as a former professor who spent years raging about the creep of text speak into student papers, and as a former UA staff member who spent years writing grants for an (in)humanities center mismanaged by a chronically inept sexist. I saw in the “U” and magnifying glasses, infantilizing flourishes that recalled Mother’s Day cards crafted by kindergarteners. The rhetorical equivalence of presumptive addressees with the “U” seemed to subsume, and diminish, workers’ personal identities within a dominant institution. Finally, the promotion of “ancient” spiritual practices as simple life hacks smacked of the cultural misappropriation now as common as paydirt in America’s corporate milieu.
To be fair, Siddhartha Gautama did instruct his followers to be lanterns unto themselves and avoid taking anything on his authority. In eschewing dogma, the historic Buddha sowed the seeds of a dynamic world religion. Still, how would he have viewed the twenty-first-century proliferation of mindfulness seminars in steel-and-glass towers and gated spas, where highly paid life coaches, wellness experts, and self-appointed gurus guide corporate execs toward superpowered productivity? Over the past ten years, corporate America’s embrace of mindfulness and other mind-enhancing practices has only intensified, compounded by the burgeoning interest in psychedelics among vulture capitalists touting the correlations between LSD, neuroplasticity, and quarterly profits. Mindful multi-millionaires and Silicon-Valley psychonauts are a dime-a-dozen, to the extent that one can imagine The American Enterprise Institute hosting an ayahuasca tea ceremony at the Watergate Hotel, or Lockheed Martin’s CFO assuming the lotus position and meditating on innovations in ballistics.
Going by the Crossroads program, the spirituality of corporate America, if nothing else, has trickled down to less affluent workers, including pink-collar workers at Arizona’s foundering flagship university. It isn’t clear if the slow drip has to do with the UA administration’s concerns with its employees’ mental health or with bottom-line metrics. The talks on tap at the conference weren’t advocating the kinds of life hacks launching young tech bros into the creative and financial stratosphere. They were focused on coping strategies for women stretched to their financial and emotional limits and struggling to manage problems supposedly originating in their wayward hearts and wandering minds.
The “uncertain” times euphemized in the program do not exist solely in anyone’s head. In late 2023, the UA announced a shortfall of at least $240 million in its projected 2024 annual budget of $2.49 billion dollars. (UA’s official statements and press releases about the shortfall were wildly inconsistent, citing conflicting figures ranging from $170 to $240 million.) In the months preceding the Crossroads Conference, external auditors identified the culprit of UA’s cash shortage: a “Strategic Initiative” by which the UA transferred 55 million dollars from the UA’s academic budget to the Athletics Department; adopted a McKinsey-crafted plan to elevate UA’s rankings by providing costly ‘merit’ scholarships to often wealthy out-of-state students; purchased Ashford University, a for-profit school under investigation for defrauding military veterans, to augment UA’s online Global Campus; and initiated a series of costly building projects that might, among cynics, raise questions about cronyism and kickbacks.
By January of 2024, UA’s President had instituted a hiring freeze across the entire university and ordered all units to slash their operating costs by 5 to 10%. With no new hires to offset staff retirements, members of UA’s pink-collar workforce often found themselves doing the jobs of two and three people. At the same time, the President did little to reduce a bloated upper administration that included over 100 vice presidents, each making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to micro-manage an increasingly hounded workforce, often by designing byzantine systems for ‘capturing’ data about faculty and staff productivity—systems based on metrics and benchmarks bearing little relation to the realities of the classroom or cubicle. As a result of staff shortages and the pile-up of digital ‘paperwork,’ stress levels among staffers skyrocketed. They never came down.
The physical manifestations of chronic stress endured by UA staff members are now so pronounced that, whenever I hang out with my friend and her colleagues, I feel like I’m socializing in the lobby of an urgent care clinic. The Business Administrator of my friend’s department, a woman who works non-stop with a skeleton crew to keep her unit afloat, recently developed hand tremors that make it difficult for her to hold a glass. The Program Coordinator has a badly hunched back from staring at her computer screen for ten hours a day, every day. Auto-immune and respiratory illnesses are rife among the staff members who work beside my friend. Many of my friend’s colleagues worry about a ‘sick building.’ Everyone worries about a sick university. I worry about a friend I love getting battered, daily, by work-related stress and uncertainty about her future.
Given that, it was hard not to feel angry about the repeated appearance, in the conference program, of “resilience”—a word commonly offered in praise of hard-working (overworked) women, especially women of color, seemingly undaunted by crushing workloads and able to ‘soldier on’ in oppressive circumstances. Celebrations of women’s resilience too often normalize a frighteningly low bar for mental health and establish benchmarks based on surviving rather than thriving. Employers who celebrate resilience too often reward women (with words, not raises) for adapting to new levels of suffering. Folded into conversations about “wellness” in the workplace, resilience training can become a form of gaslighting. It’s one thing if peers with comparable status and power celebrate each other’s resilience; it’s an entirely different matter when people inflicting hardship invoke their victims’ resilience to discount abuse, and to justify saying, “you can learn to handle more.”
The conference speakers seemed geared up to do the latter and, worse, present a version of mindfulness at odds with participants’ needs. Taught by skilled practitioners like Jon Kabat-Zinn, meditation generally involves keeping attention on the present moment—often by focusing on the breath—and letting mental chatter, rumination on the past, and speculation about the future fade into the background. It involves observing one’s thoughts and emotions with equanimity rather than reactivity. As the narratives that define a person’s sense of self become less consuming, meditators become more attuned to the interconnections between themselves and others. In somewhat of a paradox, then, meditation can be a powerful tool for getting out of one’s head. Taught as a means of emotional “self-regulation,” however, it can lead anxious people to turn inward, with a self-critical eye. At the conference, I feared, staffers would be told to self-regulate in steerage while the Titanic’s band played on.
Perhaps meditation hasn’t worked for me as much as I’d like to think. Ten years after resigning my position at the UA, I snuck into the conference many employees paid $100 to attend, just to pick an old scab. I dressed in my old work clothes: a cheap rayon skirt, a faded crew-neck shirt, and sensible sandals. Fortunately, I had allergy-induced hives on my neck and a stye beneath my left eye, and I was hungover from ingesting too much weed the night before. “I’ll definitely fit in,” I thought, slipping into the crowded lobby of the Student Union, a blocky concrete edifice home to a ballroom auditorium, numerous conference rooms, and a dingy food court. I quickly nabbed a blank name tag off a registration table, along with the official conference swag—an off-gassing tote containing a program, cheap plastic water bottle, ballpoint pen, a “Finding U at UArizona” sticker, and a raffle ticket—took a deep breath, and entered the Grand Ballroom at the tail end of the “networking breakfast.”
Deafened by the conversations of 400 registrants, I grabbed an apricot Danish from a buffet heaped with iced coffee cakes, chocolate muffins, and frosted pastries and sat down at a table surrounded by five women discussing their plans to attend “Desk Fit,” a session about core exercises that can be done sitting in a chair. Seconds later, a drawn-out “Goooood Morning” burst through a set of speakers, and the Staff Council Chair, a peppy middle-aged woman in a white button-up shirt, approached an onstage podium and welcomed “the people who get things done quietly, behind the scenes, to further the great project called the UA.” After providing a history of the Council, a body founded to “represent staff concerns to the people who make all the decisions at the UA,” she thanked her colleagues who had “worked overtime, as volunteers” to organize the conference and reminded everyone to stick around for the raffle at the day’s end, because “winners have to be present to win.”
To a burst of applause, she cleared the stage for the keynote speaker—one of 109 Vice Presidents bloating the UA’s top-heavy administration—a beaming woman perched on four-inch stiletto heels and sporting honey-blonde highlights. After delivering another drawn-out “Gooooood morning,” the VP noted it was an “interesting time for the institution,” urged attendees “not to believe rumors about the UA,” and launched into a forty-minute personal uplift story about growing up with a single mother in a small Arizona town and her journey, as a scholarship recipient, to the “big city” of Tucson in a Ford Tempo. She shook her head as she recalled navigating Tucson traffic in her “tiny little car,” as if the memory of the Tempo still tickled her—as if many UA staff members aren’t, in their forties and fifties, still driving shitcan cars twenty-thousand miles overdue for an oil change. After getting her B.A., she worked as an office assistant at UA, using employee tuition waivers to attend night school for an M.A. After twelve months, she made a “leap of faith’ and accepted a temporary position as the Interim Program Coordinator in an upper-level administrative unit. Her risk-taking paid off; “fortunately,” her boss “had a baby and had to leave her job,” and she had the “opportunity” to fill the vacated position. Sometimes, the VP said, “you need to recognize the opportunity right in front of you,” just as she recognized one two years later, when another boss “got sick” and she “took the next challenge”—i.e., his job.
At this point, she shared the personal mantra that still fuels her success: “Today is a good day for a good day.” It wasn’t for the guy who got sick, I was thinking, when she acknowledged that juggling family responsibilities and full-time work had been hard on her body. “My body started yelling at me,” she said, before describing headaches, indigestion, and idiopathic pains that made it impossible to put weight on her left foot. Her body “shut down a few times” before she “woke up” and realized “anxiety is simply a fear of failure in advance.” Forget that most staffers are less afraid of failing at their jobs than of being laid off despite satisfactory performance evaluations. The important thing, in the VP’s view, was that everyone build resilience, “the ability to recover from adversity, trauma, and stress.” The key to building resilience, the VP said, is “focusing on opportunities rather than challenges.” Shifting into a collective address, she declared, “Anything is possible, if we believe we can make it happen.”
As I imagined using voodoo dolls to make a boss sick, she insisted, “we can only control our own mindset,” and “whatever you might be hearing about the UA, perception is not reality.” In a Philosophy department, the latter claim might have embroiled her in a heated debate about epistemology. In the context of her address, it was a glib gaslighting comment followed by a call to “stay positive by working hard and playing hard.” Lest any staffer imagine sipping Cristal on the deck of a superyacht, she urged everyone to “put something fun to look forward to, however small, on their calendar at home” and read lyrics from Michael Franti’s song, Work Hard and Be Nice: “When it’s dark, look on the bright side…take all the hard lessons, add a little lovin’ and turn ‘em into blessings.” Then, after encouraging everyone to visit the registration area to “check out some local vendors,” including the Sands Club, a “private social venue offering UA employees a fabulous lunch in the football stadium annex,” she waved like a homecoming queen poised on the back of a convertible and left the stage.
My grandfather always said there’s no such thing as a free lunch. He was right. Past tables strewn with the brochures of twelve local businesses, including a cyber-security firm producing both “campus surveillance systems” and “software solutions for interactive classroom technologies,” I reached the Sands Club table, where a man resembling my high-school’s alcoholic gym teacher handed me a brochure featuring photos of tables set with gleaming silverware and cloth napkins. “Play Where You Work!” I read, before reviewing membership options ranging from a “Faculty & Staff” plan costing $456 per year plus a $150 initiation fee, to a “Football Gameday Executive XLife” plan, that, at $3,000, grants access to “a private space” in the stadium, a “premium buffet and drink service during Wildcat home games,” and “dining and golf benefits beyond the Club.” When my gym teacher’s doppelganger invited me to enter a raffle to win a free tour of the facility, I scrawled “Steve Bannon” on a ticket and headed to my first workshop, “Building Your Stress Management Toolbox.”
Led by a UA graduate with a B.A. in Journalism, the workshop had drawn thirty-two people interested in learning how to “mitigate stress responses in the body with techniques practical in a workplace.” The workshop leader didn’t inspire confidence in her mastery of stress mitigation. She demonstrated every “typical stress response” she described, perspiring heavily, trembling, and struggling to catch her breath as she mapped the correlations between chronic stress, increased belly fat, cardiac failure, and dementia; she raced through each comorbidity with a manic energy that seemed to set everyone on edge. Help, though, was on the way.
While the woman next to me furiously jotted notes, the speaker introduced her main topic, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a therapy developed in the 1970s to treat borderline personality disorder and other conditions associated with severe emotional dysregulation. In DBT, patients identify their triggers and acquire coping skills that help them avoid impulsive responses to unpleasant emotions. DBT emphasizes coping rather than recovery. DBT, after all, is recommended for patients suffering from intractable mood disorders with genetic components, and not for otherwise well-adjusted people facing acute stress. There wasn’t time during the workshop to consider (mis)applications of therapeutic modalities, though. We were there to practice coping skills most DBT patients take months to learn.
Over twenty minutes, we glossed the triggers faced by most pink-collar employees (overwork, harassment, and financial precarity) and sprinted through a course on coping skills, starting with “Box Breathing” exercises that involve inhaling, holding the breath, and exhaling in four-second intervals. Box breathers normally repeat the cycle at least three times to slow cortisol production. Due to time constraints, audience members completed one cycle. “It’s super important to carve out thirty seconds to reset the brain and body” at work, the speaker declared before turning, without a second’s pause, to “Distress Tolerance,” a way to “get grounded and distracted, so you can get bad news at 9 a.m. and still be productive for the rest of the day.” One “excellent way to bring a parasympathetic system down to baseline,” she said, was to “submerge your face in a bowl of ice water.” I was imagining someone face-down at their desk when she noted that a person could also “displace stress” by running up and down a flight of stairs or “tensing and releasing their leg muscles while picturing the word ‘relax.’”
After leading a one-minute calf exercise, she launched into her next subject, “Emotional Regulation,” presenting a segmented color wheel labeled with different emotions (anger in the red segment). “It’s ok to feel your feelings!” read a pink bubble-lettered caption beneath the wheel. In DBT, the speaker explained, developing sensitivity to physical cues—e.g., perspiration—is the first step on the road to self-control. Physical cues indicate when it’s time to do an “emotional check-in and consider the facts” of a situation, most usefully, to avoid impulsive reactions to “challenging encounters with supervisors.” Situational facts, in the speaker’s view, had little to do with workplace conditions and everything to do with the consequences of speaking out. “If something bad happens at work and you tell someone off, you might get in trouble with HR,” she said, nodding nervously, as though arguing, Gollum-like, with herself. Fair enough. No one wants a workplace scene, but she might as well have quoted some guy in a MAGA hat saying, “Suck it up, Snowflake” when she added, “As my grandmother used to say, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’”
Silence was hardly golden in the hypothetical scenario the speaker presented—one involving an employee’s request to work a forty-hour week—to illustrate how to conduct difficult conversations with supervisors. It’s always important, she said, to present facts, “mindfully, and without judgement.” Use “I statements” such as, “‘I feel bad I missed my son’s music recital because I worked late three nights this week.’” Avoid “accusations” (e.g., “I missed my son’s recital because you told me to stay late.”) that might “cause a supervisor to shut down,” she warned. Better to state, “I feel sad I haven’t seen my family all week” before making “one carefully framed request” that won’t “overwhelm” a supervisor. When she told everyone to “smile and say ‘thank you’” after any “positive interaction, and to “be careful to not cross your arms and glare,” she sounded like an abused woman telling a teenage girl how to approach her volatile alcoholic father to ask for new school shoes.
Most disturbing was her advice to anticipate supervisors’ moods. “If your supervisor narrows his eyes, he might not be amenable to your request,” she said, before urging her listeners to speak soothing words to (male) power. Sometimes, she said, a boss might ask an employee to miss a child’s recital because “he wants a favor at a busy time.” The employee, in that case, should “be willing to negotiate and agree to work overtime” with the promise of working a forty-hour week in the future. (Forget that forty-hour weeks are written into the contracts of most staffers.) The speaker then promised her predominantly female audience that the “negotiating techniques” she had described would not only prevent “unnecessary conflicts” at work, but “might convince a spouse to maybe help around the house.”
Anyone using her techniques should plan on folding laundry until Hell freezes over, I thought, leaving the session to grab lunch. In the Grand Ballroom, I joined hundreds of people lined up for lasagna, rubbery chicken, and plastic cups of pudding. A half-hour later, I grabbed a juice bottle from the cleaned-out buffet and sat down with six women from HR, the Financial Office, and IT—bullet-proof departments at a downsizing university dedicated to outsourcing teaching to online adjuncts, bean-counting, and processing layoffs. However insulated, the two women from the Financial Office seemed jittery after attending “Mindfulness at Work During Times of Uncertainty,” a session focused on “staying grounded in the body,” or, as one woman blurted, “learning how to breathe if you’re hyperventilating.” Her colleague added, without intonation, “they taught us how to recharge our batteries.” I might have been talking to a cyborg, but she was eating like an anxious human, with her shoulders drawn forward and stringy hair obscuring her eyes, while I stared at pudding with outsized feelings of envy and deprivation.
I was feeling cranky, I admit, when I stumbled into “Unlocking Your Potential: Reframing Challenges into Opportunities,” a session led by a middle-aged employee of UA’s Eller Center for (Business) Leadership Ethics, a woman slated to teach participants how to “discover the power of framing in shaping mindset and unleashing growth potential; embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment; and practice reframing fixed mindset thoughts into growth mindset perspectives.” It seemed like a tall order, but she had fueled up for her presentation. “I made some bad decisions and ate three puddings at lunch,” she said to warm up her audience of twenty-five women with desk jobs. Dietary indiscretions aside, she was “super excited” to get down to business.
Beneath a slide reading “Challenge Accepted,” she began her presentation by recalling dreaded childhood visits to her maternal grandmother, a sour woman who, for “every happy story, had a sad story, so that no one looked forward to going to her house.” The speaker never fully grasped the downsides of dealing with such a drag until she met her “fabulous husband’s” grandmother, a woman who “won people over with her lovely voice and positive attitude.” Smitten with her mother-in-law, the speaker told her husband, Mr. Fabulous, “Someday I’m going to be a grandma, just like your mother.” Perhaps Mr. Fabulous isn’t so fabulous because he replied, “you don’t have what my mother has.” After her husband’s “honesty sank in,” she declared, “Challenge Accepted.” Now, after thirty-years of practice, she said, “I can finally be positive, so people want to see me.” A woman in her fifties, she had certainly suffered the attentions of complete strangers telling her to smile, but she wasn’t leading a seminar on third-wave feminism. She was there to school us in marketing.
For five minutes, she referenced a slide of a half-full (half-empty?) water glass and explained how marketers can, yes, describe a glass as either half-full or half-empty to “establish a negative or positive cognitive bias.” She then offered prizes to anyone who could find creative ways to “positively frame and market” the glass of water (this, in the middle of a desert). “It’s 50% full,” a man shouted. “Perfect,” she declared, giving him a small foam “stress-relieving squeeze brain” stamped with the web address of her motivational speaking business. After handing various audience members brains for shouting things like “water is hydrating” and “the glass is clean,” she presented two unattributed quotes: “People wondering if the glass is half-empty miss the point. The glass is refillable” and “Dear Pessimists and Realists, While you were arguing about the glass of water, I drank it. Sincerely, the Opportunist.”
Either the chipper people at the Center for Leadership Ethics believe the world’s supply of natural resources is infinite, or they imagine themselves as leather-clad opportunists hoarding the water supply in some Mad Max future. My mind was reeling when the speaker presented a cartoon ant smiling above the caption: “Turn your ANTS (Automatic Negative Thoughts) into PETS (Positive Empowering Thoughts).” After defining automatic negative thoughts (hint: self-critical thoughts that arise unbidden), she reviewed strategies for “mindset resets,” so audience members could be “the happy grandma” instead of “the cranky grandma.” If she was playing on the insecurities of women who live in terror of becoming unlovable crones, there was no time to dwell on sexist or ageist language. Pink post-its were being passed around for an exercise requiring everyone to write down an ANT that plagued them at work, and a PET to counter it.
After two minutes, the speaker asked volunteers to share what they had written and tossed a foam brain to a woman who had penned the ANT “I can’t stand my job,” and the PET “my last job was the most miserable job I ever had, and this isn’t as bad.” To quiet applause, a succession of women read PETs like “This isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me” and “I’m lucky to have a job.” I was waiting for someone to say, “I haven’t been attacked with a machete at work,” when the speaker showed a cartoon of a man crossing a wooden bridge from a frowny face to a smiley face above the caption, “Change ‘Challenge’ to ‘Opportunity.’” Then she presented a series of negative statements—versions of “I can’t do this”—and asked everyone to imagine the word “yet” after each. Her message that we’re all works-in-progress verged on inspirational until she revealed she had recently given the “same exercise” to a kindergarten class and, in ‘babytalk,’ recalled something she told a six-year-old: “When you were a baby, you didn’t know your ABC’s, YET! and look at you now!”
“This is the most infantilizing thing I’ve ever experienced,” I thought, as she instructed everyone to write a PET on a post-it note to stick to their work computers. I was imagining “I Don’t Suck as Much as My Boss” taped to someone’s screen when someone shared, “I’m resilient under pressure.” After tossing a brain to the woman, the speaker gushed that the word “resilient” had given her chills and shared that she routinely slips affirmations like “You Got This!” into her son’s lunchbox. Having grown up with a father who dealt with his crippling anxiety by hoarding toothpaste, I began thinking my life would have been immeasurably easier if I’d had a parent like the speaker. My fuzzy frame fell apart when she concluded her talk by declaring the “challenge” of the Covid pandemic had given her an “opportunity” to learn new software like Zoom and Teams. Sometimes, she declared, “you just need to do a “mindset reset.” While I ruminated on the deaths of millions, she urged everyone to practice gratitude for the “privilege” of working at UA and having a “a half-full glass of water to quench their thirst.”
The temperature was creeping over 100 when I stepped onto a breezeway to decide which panel to attend next. I considered “Finding Meaning in Life: Working Smarter while being Present, Connected, and Fulfilled”; “Notice/Care/Help,” a workshop designed to teach people hired to manage Excel spreadsheets to conduct mental-health crisis interventions; and “Breathwork and Building Resilience,” a session focused on “ancient stress-mitigation techniques.” At ten after the hour, I randomly joined sixty people assembled for “Master Your Time: Hacks for Getting Stuff Done and Prioritizing Self-Care.”
The speaker was behind schedule, so I didn’t miss anything. She wasn’t running late, so much as caught up in conversation with two men sitting in the front row, laughing loudly at her bad jokes. Their laughter made sense once I discovered she was the Provost’s Director of Operations, a woman responsible for “leading teams to implement the Provost’s strategic initiatives”—an upper-middle manager paid twice as much as the average UA staffer to execute the downsizing plans making people sick with anxiety. Before talking about how she managed her time, she wasted a lot of ours, showing two dozen slides of herself at BTS concerts, happy hours, and tourist attractions around the globe—she was heading off to Bali the next morning—to illustrate how we could all “find the good life” if we “just learned to manage our time better.” As a challenge, she asked everyone to think about how they would spend their free time if they “didn’t work so many hours.” She wanted to know “what drove people to get things done ahead of schedule.” Given that few people can clock out if they finish a project early, it seemed like asking Charlie Bucket, pre-Wonka, to imagine what toppings he’d like on a hot fudge sundae.
While I drifted in and out of daydreams about beaches, she rushed through a discussion of time-management tools, starting with the Eisenhower Matrix, a four-square grid for triaging tasks based on urgency—something, she joked, we “might use to delegate chores to husbands.” She laughed adding, “good luck with that,” making comedic hay out women’s unpaid labor before launching into an overview of calendar apps we could use to “avoid procrastinating” and “take control of our time,” perhaps forgetting that capitalism is predicated on workers selling their time for someone else’s use. To demonstrate “efficiency in action,” she presented a slide of her weekly calendar, noting how every fifteen-minute increment had been designated for a specific professional or personal task. Conceding that “unforeseen demands” occasionally “force adjustments,” she said, “if your boss needs to meet with you, you sacrifice slush time”—the moments, presumably, workers spend with their heads submerged in ice water.
In crunch times, she said, it helps to listen to motivational music “like “Beyonce’s Unbreakable.” Beyonce, I hope, was on the playlist of “Christine,” the hypothetical employee featured in the speaker’s overview of the Kanban chart, a managerial tool recommended for the supervisors present. Comprising three columns labelled, left to right, “Assigned,” “In-Progress,” and “Completed,” Kanban charts are designed to manage workflow and promote “transparency.” Supervisors put employee’s names and tasks on color-coded cards moved rightward as tasks are completed. It’s not a “shame board,” the speaker said, winking, but rather a tool for “identifying high-achievers who can handle increased workloads.” About Christine, she said, “if she’s getting things done, she’s badass, and I can keep giving her more.” Work, in this Sisyphean case, was literally its own reward, with a small bonus. “Tell her, ‘amazing, you completed a lot of tasks,’” the Director said, “and give her cookies.” I wondered if I was hallucinating when she added, “some of my workers like hot sauce, so I give them that.” With Beyonce lyrics about hot sauce on my mind, it was hard not to imagine the speaker dog whistling an ugly tune about ‘Black jobs,’ especially after she turned directly from women of color to children. “If you have kids,” she said, “use Kanban to assign them to take out the garbage and give them a cookie, too.” Certain jokes, for certain people, never grow old. “Try Kanban on your husbands,” she said. “There will be a lot of stuff staying in the assigned column.” After sharing that inspiration, she announced she had “run out of time.”
I didn’t see the Director of Operations at the raffle. Maybe she was packing for Bali, or maybe she didn’t want the 50” TV sitting on the auditorium stage, draped in curlicue ribbons, or one of the cellophane-wrapped cookies on the buffet table. Hundreds of others, though, had gathered to mark the end of the conference. The atmosphere was festive, and the buzz of conversation was almost deafening when I took a seat. On stage, beneath a massive American flag, the Staff Council Chair was standing beside a raffle-ticket tumbler, talking about “the proud tradition of shared governance” at UA. No one paid her much attention until she asked if everyone was “ready for prizes.” To wild applause, she turned the tumbler’s crank, and, over the next half-hour, called out numbers and dispensed sweatshirts donated by various departments and gift certificates to local two-star restaurants and Tucson’s zoo.
Finally, it came time to give away three grand prizes: the TV, a facial valued at $165, and a $500 gift certificate for AVIS. The woman who claimed the TV looked concerned about its dimensions; maybe her living room wall wasn’t large enough to accommodate the screen. The woman who won the facial wasn’t wearing make-up and, from the deep worry lines on her face and her shortness of breath, I gathered she had more pressing concerns than seaweed-mud packs. The woman who collected the $500 gift certificate for AVIS, an acne-ridden millennial in a baggy dress, looked stricken as the Chair belted, “You’re going on vacation!” She was going to need to sleep in the car, since a motel probably wasn’t within her budget. She can just give the gift certificate to a friend, I was thinking, when I discovered why someone in her (worn) shoes might be unhappy with the Grand Prize. As she passed my table, the Chair’s assistant handed her an IRS form to complete. The value of every single prize handed out that afternoon counted as taxable income, and $500 was going to be added to the woman’s W-2.
I chose that moment to leave. I’d seen enough. UA employees in desperate need of job security had been given sops. They had been handed cookies and cups of pudding and told to turn their frowns upside-down. Maybe I was seeing the glass half-empty, I mused, stepping into the blazing sun. Maybe the conference had provided a few staffers at the UA—a university gutted for decades by far-right state legislators and now broken by inept administrators—a foundation for resilience, an attribute worthy of cultivation by anyone facing relentless stress. A person able to calm their mind in a difficult situation will be less reactive and scattered, and more attuned to their own agency. The problem was that the conference speakers had presented meditation as a quick panacea for institutional dysfunction. The speakers weren’t wrong to claim that positive attitudes can mitigate the effects of chronic stress. However, they placed the onus for transformative action on already overwhelmed people. They focused, not on human connections, but on hasty practices engaged in isolation. At a time when UA staffers already feel helpless and expendable, they sugar-coated inequality, institutional indifference, and injury.
Crossing campus, I paused beside the massive fountain in front of UA’s President’s Office to cool down in a fan of mist. Twenty minutes earlier, I thought, I’d been nearly deafened by the animated conversations of people enjoying a day away from their desks. Perhaps the 400 attendees had been sharing wisdom and insights that had eluded me. Perhaps the conference had fostered connections—solidarities—I couldn’t see. It doesn’t matter, now. The salad (pudding) days are over. In August of 2024, in an attempt to cut non-existent meat from a bare bone, the UA Provost’s Office introduced policies to curb the expense of “meals, light refreshments, and beverages” served at “employee recognition events.” Specifically, it limited the frequency of departmental employee “morale-building activities” to one per year and prohibited “farewell events for non-retirees” (i.e., redundancies). As my project-managing friend quipped, “we can always build morale with a modest coffee service. Cups are okay, but no stir sticks, because sugar and creamer are gilding the lily.” Apparently, the UA’s upper admin is expecting a mass exodus of “non-retirees,” and, as the Titanic goes down, all it can do is issue diktats against sheet cakes while a skeleton crew of staffers lower lifeboats for others, take their last box breaths, and repeat, as a mantra, the UA football team’s slogan, “Bear Down.”
My muttering at the Crossroads Conference now seems quaint. A conference like “Finding U” might never happen again. The sops offered to UA’s staffers last year will likely be swept from the buffet table by a U.S. President with a sociopathic agenda and an army of ayahuasca-sipping tech bros to burn institutions of higher learning to the ground. It’s hard to imagine UA handing out donuts and televisions, let alone cost of living adjustments, now that Trump is using DOGE and an avalanche of executive orders to eliminate financial aid programs that sustain university enrollments; withdraw federal funding from UA researchers investigating climate change, the collapse of bee colonies, and cutting-edge cancer treatments; and deny visas to foreign students who keep American universities afloat by paying full tuition.
UA’s mistake—its sin, if schools are temples—was to squander the chance to fortify the University against hard times before Trump returned to the White House with a copy of Project 2025 tucked under his arm. Instead of curbing their own excesses, UA’s presidents plundered the community chest to pay the wildly inflated salaries of 109 vice presidents and a failing football coach. Now, with Trump’s forces on the march, we can at least hope UA’s top administrators will recognize some common cause with their pink-collar employees and defend what remains of higher education, and, for that matter, mental health, in southern Arizona. Even the Provost’s Director of Operations, after all, won’t be insulated from harm if Trump has his way. The good news is that, if she loses her job, she’ll have all the time in the world to sip Bintang beer and savor Wonka’s chocolate-chip cookies with Charlie Bucket and the redundant workers who manage to manifest plane tickets to Bali. As the surrealism of Trump’s presidency demonstrates, anything really is possible.
About the writer:
Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc, 2018), which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Award. Hatcher’s stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, The Mississippi Review, Fourth Genre, and The Bellevue Literary Review. Hatcher is a teacher at the Tucson branch of the NYC-based creating writing school, The Writers Studio.
Image: Under the Bodhi Tree (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Controversies, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
Explore O:JA&L’s Buttonhook Press offerings on Amazon.
Subscribe to the O:JA&L YouTube channel.
Become an O:JA&L Member through Patreon.
Follow O:JA&L on Facebook.
Support Pamelyn Casto’s text for writers: Flash Fiction: Alive in the Flicker
Support O:JA&L’s free presses.
