The Kind Academic

I’ve been wrestling with a provocative idea lately that’s turned my understanding of academic kindness upside down. Reading Noel Cazenave’s Kindness Wars: The History and Political Economy of Human Caring (2023), I found myself stunned by his critique of individual acts of kindness:

While such individual acts of kindness are both commonplace and important, they do not change the larger societal ideologies, institutions, policies and practices that routinely result in the unkind treatment of many millions of people.

Cazenave argues that in individualistic societies, these acts can actually become “a key ideological building block in the ideational foundations of unkind societies.”

Ouch. Have my efforts to be a “kind academic” merely been plasters on a broken system? Worse still, have they actually helped perpetuate it?

The kindness paradox

I’ve spent years encouraging small acts of kindness in my teaching: flexible deadlines, compassionate feedback, checking in with struggling students. But Cazenave’s critique forces me to confront an uncomfortable truth: these individual kindnesses, while meaningful to their recipients, may simultaneously function as what he calls an “ideological building block” in maintaining fundamentally unkind academic structures.

When I extend a deadline for a student struggling with mental health issues, am I actually reinforcing a system that expects impossible productivity and penalises vulnerability? When I pride myself on being the “nice lecturer,” am I implicitly accepting that academia should otherwise be competitive and harsh?

Kindness as alibi

Perhaps most troubling is Cazenave’s suggestion that individual kindness can serve as an “alibi” for supporting systems of oppression. Here I think of faculty who pride themselves on being kind to students while voting against policies that would support vulnerable colleagues. Or university systems that claim to care about staff wellbeing while increasing workloads.

Uncomfortably, I can see this in my own teaching too. It’s easy to feel virtuous about small gestures while avoiding harder questions about my complicity in maintaining institutional barriers.

From individual to structural kindness

So where does this leave us? Should we abandon smaller efforts as meaningless or counterproductive? I don’t think so. But Cazenave challenges us to expand our understanding of what true kindness requires.

What might a structurally kind academia look like? Perhaps:

• Tenure/promotion criteria that value care work and mentorship alongside traditional metrics
• Admissions and hiring practices that actively dismantle historical exclusions
• Pedagogies built from the beginning for diverse student bodies

The challenge is connecting our individual kindnesses to these structural transformations, rather than allowing them to become substitutes.

Both/and, not either/or

The more I sit with Cazenave’s critique, the more I believe we need both individual and structural approaches. Individual acts matter deeply to their recipients in the here and now. A student in crisis doesn’t benefit from knowing their lecturer is working on systemic change if that lecturer isn’t also responding compassionately to their immediate needs.

But those individual acts must connect to a larger vision. For me, this might look like:

• Being explicit with students about when I’m bending rules that should be changed
• Ensuring my kindness extends to my influence in departmental roles
• Questioning whether practices presented as “kind” actually address root causes

An invitation to reflect

I’m still wrestling with Cazenave’s challenge. Have you experienced moments where individual kindness obscured structural unkindness? How do you connect personal care to systemic change?

Perhaps the most radical kindness refuses the false choice between caring for individuals and transforming systems, insisting instead that true care requires both.