Too busy to act ethically
If your Google Calendar is anything like mine, it probably looks like a game of Tetris on the brink of disaster. Lately when I ask my friends how things are going, the answer is almost always some version of “good, but busy.” It’s a response that says less about emotion than about bandwidth, a sign that most people are moving through their days with attention narrowed to the next immediate task.
The effects of constant busyness run deeper than stress. They shape how we treat each other. If we want to act ethically in higher education, we need to collectively slow down.
In 1973, Princeton psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson ran an experiment that explains why slowing down is essential to acting ethically.
Darley and Batson asked 67 seminary students, all preparing to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, to walk between two buildings. On the way, each student passed a man slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning. Some students had been told they were running late. Others were told they had time to spare.
The students with time stopped to help 63% of the time. The students in a hurry stopped just 10% of the time.
Several of these seminary students literally stepped over the man on their way to deliver a sermon about stopping to help strangers.
The study’s conclusion has been stuck in my head since I read it: “It is difficult not to conclude from this that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”
It is a finding that should prompt serious structural questions. Instead, it tends to prompt advice. Slow down. Be more present.
Last year, I argued that the college grindset was a cultural problem, one rooted in centuries of religious and economic thought. I was right about the roots, but I treated it as something individuals could escape by reclaiming rest and leisure. The problem cannot be solved by any individual alone. It is structural, and it is baked into how higher education sorts us.
Higher education operates like an arms race. Nobody wants to escalate, but nobody can afford to be the only one who stops. Not because anyone is hungry for extra obligations, but because graduate programs and internships reward the student who did the most, not the student who thrived. Nobody gets into medical school by demonstrating they had a healthy work-life balance.
Some will argue that the pace of student life is necessary, that additional responsibilities are what distinguish applicants in competitive fields. But that argument quietly assumes that busyness is a meaningful measure of merit. It is not. It is a measure of who has the time, resources and stability to accumulate obligations without breaking. A system that sorts students by who can endure the most pressure is not identifying the most capable. It is identifying the most insulated.
The people most structurally forced to rush are, consistently, the people with the least margin. A first-generation student working 20 hours a week cannot compete in the arms race of extracurriculars and volunteer hours, but opting out is not an option either. The system was not built for them, but it will judge them by the same rules.
As long as graduate programs and employers continue to sort applicants by volume of obligations, students have no rational choice but to keep accumulating them. The arms race will not slow down until the institutions driving it agree to change what they reward. But we can start by asking whether our own institutions are living out what they claim to believe.
Augustana's core values are Christian, Liberal Arts, Excellence, Community, and Service. The arms race has no trouble producing Excellence. But Community calls students to respond to needs, and Service calls them to accept the call to servanthood. Both require something the current pace does not leave much of: the time space to show up for the people around you.
The seminarians did not step over that man because they lacked values. They stepped over him because they were busy.
