Episode 129: Stopping the Loneliness on Campus

Anna Mae Duane is the director of the UConn Humanities Institute and is currently coordinating a year-long series of events to address the feeling of loneliness that some college students have. Anna was inspired to do this when she received a letter from a UConn student who had given up on companionship. Anna talks about events that happened in the fall semester and some that are planned for the spring. Listeners can email her at uchi@uconn.edu to find out more about the program. Anna also explains what parents can do for their younger children to fight loneliness, the role of the Humanities Institute on campus, and the value of a humanities degree to both a student and potential employers.

Listen to Episode 129 at Podbean

Mike: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to the UConn 360 podcast and happy 2025.

Izzy: I can’t believe we’re already here.

Mike: How does that sound, Izzy?

Izzy: Just a little bit different than last year.

Mike: A little bit different. Did you make any New Year’s resolutions?

Izzy: Oh, did I make any New Year’s resolutions? I think I want to eat less box mac and cheese and start making my own.

Mike: So, same amount of mac and cheese, it’s just not going to be boxed?

Izzy: Yep, just me making it. Well, that’s a good resolution.

Mike: Right, right. Yeah, okay. I’m not going to say if I’ve made any or not. We’ll see at the end of the year if I stuck to them.

Izzy: Oh, that’s cheating. Or the end of January.

Mike: Well, it’s cheating, but…

Izzy: If you were smart, you could have started your New Year’s resolution in December. Could have. And gotten a kickstart.

Mike: Could have, but why, you know, that would not make December a fun month.

Izzy: I guess it depends on your perspective.

Mike: Absolutely. Anyway, welcome to all our listeners. Hope you all had a great holiday season. Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. So we start 2025 on a very important subject here at UConn. Our guest is Anna Mae Dwayne. She’s the director of the Humanities Institute here at UConn and a professor of English.

Mike: She teaches and writes in the fields of American studies, African American literature, and the medical humanities. And through the Humanities Institute, she is leading a yearlong focus on loneliness and social isolation, which as we start the new year is an important topic to tackle. She started this in the fall semester. There was a workshop, an election-related event took place, and more events are coming in the spring semester, and we look forward to hearing about that. So, Anna Mae, welcome to the podcast.

Anna: Hi, thank you for having me.

Mike: Thank you for coming. Tell us, for folks that aren’t knowledgeable, what the Humanities Institute is at UConn. That might not be something everybody knows about.

Anna: Right. We are in the fourth floor of the library, which is like a personal goal for me as an English major—I get to live in the library now. The way I describe the Humanities Institute is really a lab for the humanities. In many ways we do lots of things, but one of our main activities is providing space and structure for people who are doing research in the humanities.

We define the humanities really broadly, so it also includes the social sciences that have a humanistic focus. Every year, between six and eight of our top faculty apply for and win fellowships to spend a year studying their topics, as well as dissertation students. And in the past two years, we have four fellows who are undergraduates who have topics of research in the humanities, anything from writing a play to investigating social movements to exploring rituals of medicine in other countries.

What’s really exciting about it is that everyone shares their work with each other. Every Wednesday, pretty much at 3:30, one of our fellows gives a 20–30 minute talk on their research. And what’s really great is to say, for example, we had someone who was a poet doing really beautiful work exploring the translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” and her own experience as a parent of a child with a chronic illness—and how that feels like Purgatory. It was just beautiful in its own right, but then we had philosophers and historians and translators in the audience giving her feedback and talking her through. So it’s a really collaborative model. That’s why I think it’s a lab—because in the humanities our collaboration often involves looking at each other, talking, really thinking through the things we find beautiful or perplexing or infuriating.

Some of the other aspects of what we do is try to make the case that the humanities are vital, and are essential for solving the problems we face, from everything from the environment to economic problems to social problems to—what we’ve been thinking about lately—how we walk through the world and engage with each other. The humanities—and again, if we’re thinking of philosophy and art and literature—this is where centuries of scholars, poets, some of our greatest thinkers, have asked: what makes life meaningful, how should we engage with one another, what do we want and what do we value?

Those are always important aspects of what education should be, but I think they’re more important than ever right now, thinking about what we value and what actions we have to take to enact those values.

Izzy: I saw in one of your publications that loneliness and social isolation can be as taxing on the body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. As we mentioned earlier, you’re leading a yearlong focus on loneliness and social isolation. It sounds like you were inspired to do so by a message you received from a UConn student. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Anna: Yes, and the 15 cigarettes a day—that’s not my study, I’m an English major—that’s from the Surgeon General of the United States. I remember seeing his report, and he’s the person who declared this an epidemic, I think in 2023. But that’s something I was thinking about when I wrote a piece, initially from the artificial intelligence point of view, which is another topic we’re exploring at the Humanities Institute.

I wrote a piece saying, from my perspective, it seems like a bad idea to try to replace friends wholesale with AI chatbots for lots of reasons. My point was that you don’t want friends who can’t ever say no to you, because that’s not a friend, right? They have names for what that is, and it’s not friendship. UConn Today was kind enough to republish it, and I got a nice response, but I received an email from a UConn student. This is where my perspective shifted a bit.

This student, who I corresponded with via email and then spoke with face to face—smart, bright, engaging—said, “I agree that chatbots can’t really serve as friends, but I understand the impulse, because it’s just impossible to make friends.” This was a first-year student. When I asked why, there were a few reasons. One was that the student was a STEM student—giant classes, heads down, you don’t look at other students. There was also a sense of pressure that all your time should be spent getting ahead and hustling and working, so taking the time to engage other students or go to a social event seemed not worth it.

I thought to myself, well, this isn’t sustainable. There’s something we need to do as educators, and as people who care about each other and our students, to change this structure. Then, in talking to other students—this is informal, and I’ll be asking students and faculty to email me and tell me their perspectives—it keeps getting echoed that there aren’t spaces to gather, and there’s a sense of, “I don’t know what to do if I go in that space and gather, because it’s so uncomfortable that it’s not worth it.”

It’s like pulling teeth. One of the things I said in the UConn Today piece is that we all know we should do these things. I know I should have had something besides black coffee for breakfast this morning, but we fall in ruts and we don’t do it. So part of what we’re exploring or wanting to do is to figure out how we can create structures and skills that facilitate social engagement, but also to find out from students and faculty, what are the obstacles they’re seeing? Because we all know the advice and what we should do, but we’re not doing it. So I really want to hear from students why.

Mike: If you’re a parent of a high school or elementary school student, this sounds a little scary. What is your advice? What can parents do to help their children at the current time, but also prepare them for the future? Especially for those times in elementary school when parents often set up their children’s friendships. What can parents do to get their children ready for life in college, or whatever they decide to do after they leave the nest?

Anna: Right. I’ve heard from a lot of parents about this, and as a parent myself, I know it’s incredibly uncomfortable to see your children experience what feels like rejection. It’s painful. In terms of advice for preparing students, that’s part of what we’re trying to figure out. But one thing I would say from my reading and studies so far is that it’s not—one of the things that can feed the cycle is the belief that there’s something wrong with you or your child, a deficit that needs to be fixed.

Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone—20 or 30 years ago—famously pointed out that, as a country, we don’t go bowling anymore. We don’t go to the Elks Club. We don’t do the same things every Tuesday night with friends. He made the case that not only does it increase loneliness, hurting our physical and mental health, but it’s also bad for democracy, because if we can’t talk to each other and don’t feel we belong, we get polarization. But even he said he doesn’t go bowling himself, and that people are convinced by his argument, but we haven’t shifted things. So it’s a structural issue as well, rather than thinking, “Oh my gosh, it’s me or my child, or I’m a bad parent, I’m a bad mother.” (That’s a song that’s in my head all the time.)

In general, so much of loneliness or isolation is about worrying how other people are reacting to you. Of course, that can become a vicious circle: you interpret someone as looking at you strangely, and you withdraw even more. It can help to imagine how anxious or lonely or isolated other people are, and see yourself as extending your friendship to them—positioning yourself to help others. That can be easier said than done, but that shift—knowing that people aren’t focusing on you as much as you might think, and that what they want is the same as what you want, to be seen as interesting and likable—can at least ease some of the tension.

It’s being called an epidemic, so there are small things we can do, and there are big things we can do. Education is a big part of that, advocating for social skills and social training. In the classroom, certainly in higher education, there’s a trend of replacing people with technology, and that’s also happening in elementary schools. But it comes down to practice: we’re good at talking to people when we talk to people. That’s a long answer, but some of it is internal, and some of it is about looking around and saying, “Okay, we need to change some structural things here.”

Izzy: It sounds like a lot of these things are easier said than done, and I know that you’re advocating for the humanities here at UConn. What are some of the events you hosted in the fall, and are there any upcoming events in the spring?

Anna: Yes, in the fall we had a couple of events. One was in partnership with a local nonprofit in Connecticut called For All Ages, which is working statewide to counter the loneliness epidemic. They largely focus on the older population, but they do a lot of cross-generational work. I recommend everyone go to their website—they were really great to work with. They came, and we had current students, former students, faculty—basically sharing their stories of not just how they coped with loneliness, but how they found social connection.

We had two students from the Humanities Institute who told incredible stories of finding what they cared about. One student, Krista Mitchell, spoke about feeling isolated in her hometown, and how it was through photography—looking at her hometown through art and her interpretation of its beauty—that she both made peace with her small-town experience and realized that her people here at UConn were artists.

Another student, Brianna, really struggled with stories of racial violence, particularly against women, and felt isolated by how little attention it was getting. She came here to UConn, was one of our fellows at the Humanities Institute, and created an incredible project dedicated not just to addressing that problem, but bringing people together to solve it. She’s brilliant, and she also worked with a digital media artist to put together a website. So it wasn’t as depressing as you might think—this “panel on loneliness.” It was really about what works on the ground, and we found that it was art, conversation, and debate.

We also had an event the day after the election, which I was initially skeptical of. My team was excited about it. We worked with the Wellbeing Collective, which is an incredible group on campus—faculty, staff, students—focused on these issues. The event was called “Pick Up the Thread.” I was thinking, “I don’t know how I’ll feel the day after the election. Maybe I’ll just want to stay in bed!” But they said, “No, we need a space to gather.” It didn’t have to be political, no matter how you felt. And it turned out to be a beautiful day outside. We had fiber arts, and students making art with string, making zines, faculty on hand to answer questions about election mechanics if needed—but really, everyone was just hanging out and talking. Jonathan the Husky showed up, too, so it was a great day. That was less of a formal event for advice-giving and more about creating a space for conversation.

So that’s what we’ve done in the fall, plus some smaller events. In the spring, we’re excited about a project called Story Slam. This came from a podcast that Heather Cassano, the assistant director at UCHI, discovered—sort of like The Moth or StoryCorps—but it started at Olin College, an engineering school, and it’s run by Jonathan Adler, a psychologist who’s at the forefront of researching how personal narratives affect mental health. He’s worked with people with disabilities and trauma survivors, looking at the stories we tell ourselves about what happened and who we are because of it—and how rewriting our narratives can rewrite the possibilities we see for ourselves.

He works with an English professor, Jillian, and together they guide students in developing personal stories. Students come with a story they want to tell; he’s a psychologist, she’s an English professor, and they both have theater backgrounds. Over the course of a semester, they help students figure out how they want to tell that story publicly and how to perform it. On March 27 at 3:30, we’ll hold a public Story Slam at the Ballard (in the back of the UConn Bookstore).

Meanwhile, we’ll do some events to meet students where they are. For example, I found out this semester there’s a vibrant horticulture club with about 100 members, and when we hold events, it can be hard to get 20 people. So we thought maybe in February, when it’s cold and dark and everyone’s miserable, we’d do something in the greenhouse, exploring plants and nature. We’re not sure exactly what yet, but that’s in the works. We’ll also work with students—both those in the Story Slam and any others who reach out—maybe doing a podcast or a panel focusing on students’ stories throughout the semester.

Mike: Back in December, you had a great piece in The Conversation called “How Humanities Classes Benefit Students in the Workplace and Combat Loneliness.” What’s your elevator pitch to a student who wants to major in the humanities, but hears from friends or parents that they’ll never get a job, or asks how they’ll pay rent or afford food? Why should a student consider the humanities?

Anna: Right, the old “You’re a philosopher—do you want fries with that?” joke. Well, the first thing is that that stereotype has been disproven over and over again. Yes, it’s not necessarily like a nursing or comp sci degree with a direct line to a particular job, but our humanities students get hired at similar rates to students in STEM. After a few years, their salaries are often in the same range. That’s part of the pitch—maybe to reassure anxious parents or students.

But in that Conversation piece, I wrote a bit about how employers are increasingly concerned about this loneliness epidemic, this struggle to connect and collaborate and belong. It hurts workplaces, because most jobs now require team-based work and good interpersonal skills. We know that people who feel they have friends at work tend to be happier, show up more, and perform better. So being able to think empathetically, work collaboratively, and have deep or sometimes uncomfortable conversations—those are actual skills.

One mistake we’ve made, especially in our excitement about STEM and AI (and those are great, I’m not knocking them), is that in our rush to emphasize these new tools and innovations in our students’ schedules from K–12 on up, we’ve often lost the time we used to spend reading about other people’s experiences and reflecting on our own, or reading about people from different economic or historical contexts and asking, “Why did they make those choices?” That’s empathy training. In a writing-intensive class I teach on disability, for example, pre-med students often say they’d never really thought about what a cancer patient experiences when a doctor is in the room for all of 20 seconds, because they’ve been taught to focus only on the math and the medicine. Both are crucial, but study after study shows that if a clinician, nurse, or psychologist develops the skill to read and empathize with another person’s experience, they’ll be more successful at their job.

And the humanities part of me wants to emphasize that there’s more to life than your job. You’ll be better able to connect and reflect on your place in the world, and that makes life more meaningful. That’s as valid a reason to choose a major as any other.

Izzy: Anna, another quote from your UConn Today article that I found really interesting is about how friendships have become transactional. It’s not necessarily about just having a friend anymore, but, “If I do something for you, can you do something for me?” What is one piece of advice you can give people to ease the problem of loneliness on a day-to-day basis, both for themselves and for others?

Anna: Right. The transactional piece has come up a lot in conversations with students and parents, because it’s a big hurdle. We can be victims of our own success in stressing the need to network. That is important, but it can’t be the only way we socialize. If everything is about your career, and the only reason to attend a social event is to get a referral or a contact, that’s just a miserable way to live. You can feel it when someone sees you only for what you can provide.

Seeing a person as valuable in themselves is the only way to form real connections. Yes, we all want to succeed in our careers, but if you approach someone with a genuine sense of curiosity and interest, you’ll probably end up helping each other in many ways. The irony is that if you genuinely like someone, they’re more likely to help you in return. But if you treat them as a stepping stone, that’s not really a friendship. Part of the responsibility lies with educators, and part of it is society at large—recognizing that people shouldn’t just be someone who looks good on your Instagram or who can give you a reference. They have value because they are who they are. Practicing that mindset takes time. Studying the ideas, thoughts, and art of other people is one way to develop it.

Mike: Well, Anna, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. This is such important information, and as we head into the new year, we’re all trying to improve ourselves. Thank you for your time.

Anna: Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks so much.

Mike: And thanks everybody for listening. Izzy, Happy New Year again.

Anna: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: We’ll catch everybody on the next UConn 360 podcast.