A Small Festschrift in a Big World (Chapter 1)

In this chapter, we provide our personal contexts for Balancing Care and Excellence in Higher Education: A Festschrift in Honor of Jeffrey Cornett. In so doing, we address the place of care and excellence in the 2020’s in our lives through a critical lens, and we examine the ways that these have led to this book. We also place this book in broader contexts to analyze the ways that care has been distorted and weaponized. Further, we examine how care is operationalized in higher education. Through all of this, we argue that each of us bears responsibility for reclaiming care. Finally, we explain why care is n ot enough – we connect care to excellence as we lay out our vision for this book.