A Spoonful Of Sugar: How Mary Poppins' Medicine Could Heal Higher Ed

Forbes

31-07-2025

Higher ed is under a lot of pressure right now. Public trust in our college and university system is extremely low. Questions about the value of a degree are creating financial strain for both institutions and students. Artificial intelligence threatens academic integrity. And faculty are feeling anxious and overwhelmed – nearly two thirds of faculty report feeling burnt out according to one recent survey.
This summer, while sitting through a theater production of Mary Poppins at the college I lead, I was struck by a strange but compelling thought: maybe all we need is a dose of Mary's medicine.
Helen Lyndon Goff was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, yet most people have never heard of her. That's because, at the age of 24, she left Australia for London and decided to change her name in the process. For her new first name she chose "Pamela," purely for the way it sounded. For her new last name, she chose "Travers," which had been the name of her father, who had died 16 years prior at the age of 44. Leaving her middle name unchanged, she thus became Pamela Lyndon Travers or P.L. Travers for short. It was under this pen name that she published a book in 1934 titled Mary Poppins.
According to Disney lore, it was Walt's daughters who first became attached to the book and made their father promise he would turn it into a movie. Walt, therefore, began trying to purchase the film rights in 1938. He did not succeed until 23 years later, in 1961, when he sealed the deal by granting Travers approval rights over the final script. The resulting movie, released in 1964, not only became top-grossing movie of the year but also ended up receiving the most Oscar nominations, a feat that has only been repeated a handful of times in the 97-year history of the Academy Awards.
So what made Mary Poppins so special? Various explanations have been offered– from the Sherman brothers' songs, to the groundbreaking combination of live-action and animation, to the chemistry between Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. But what Walt Disney himself knew well – evidenced by his decades-long crusade to obtain the film rights – was that the real magic lay in Travers' original source material. And Travers, in turn, knew the secret to her book's success. If you had asked Travers what made Mary Poppins so special, she would have likely answered, 'Why, Mary Poppins, of course.'
For Travers, Mary Poppins was a living person – every bit as living as Dumbledore is to J.K. Rowling. These authors did not invent these characters; they discovered them. They themselves were just as enchanted, surprised, and beguiled by their own characters as their readers would eventually become. Which is why Travers guarded Mary so closely – who else on earth could do her justice? How could anyone possibly capture the confounding complexity of this woman?
To say that Mary is a paradox would be a terrific understatement. She is rather a colossal bundle of outright contradictions: strict and lenient, vain and humble, following all rules while at the same time breaking them. She is serious and severe one moment, then silly and whimsical the next. Yet there is no hint of instability -- no capriciousness, nor randomness. Rather, she is always fully herself and always fully integrated. When she is strict and serious, her joy is somehow still detectable, without it making her any less formidable. When she is silly and whimsical, it is with the air of utmost dignity, as though Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious really is the most important word in the world.
In other words, she is practically perfect in every way. She is all things, to all people, not because she is a chameleon, but because she's just that big – big enough to give every person she touches exactly what they need, at exactly the moment they need it, in the only form they would ever be able to receive it. Say, for example, there were two small children who were both suffering from two serious maladies simultaneously. On the one hand, they were undisciplined and unruly. On the other hand, they were desperately lacking in childlike joy and wonder. Who else but Mary Poppins could have recognized that these seemingly-opposite problems would have to be addressed together, rather than separately?
The reason for this, of course, was that the two problems were actually one, and Mary alone could see the root cause. The children needed a father, just as Travers herself had needed one. Her own beloved father – first a bank manager, then demoted to bank clerk – had drunk himself to death when Travers was only eight years old. The question she was left with was a riddle, simple to ask but impossible to answer: Who, if anyone, could have saved him?
The answer finally came to her in a vision -- a woman carrying an umbrella, and riding on the wind. Mary was the only one who could have done it. Only Mary Poppins was shrewd enough to rescue a grown man while pretending to ignore him. Only Mary Poppins was brave enough to walk the tightrope between boldness and deference without falling off on either side. Only Mary Poppins was kind enough to say, 'Sometimes, a person we love, through no fault of his own, can't see past the end of his nose.'
Her assignment was as ancient and holy as they come: "to turn the heart of a father toward his children." And the day which she completed it was a holy day indeed. Or, if you prefer the modernized spelling, a holiday, and a jolly one at that. That was the effect she seemed to have on every day, and every person, proving once again that our well-established dichotomies are pure poppycock. There is no true holiness without merriment, and all true merriment is holy.
At a time when public trust in higher education is evaporating, faculty are stretched thin, and institutional missions are fraying under financial strain, the temptation is to become further entrenched in the status quo or surrender to inevitable decline.
But Mary Poppins reminds us that the path forward is not to collapse into cynicism or retreat into rigidity. It is to hold paradox with grace—to acknowledge pain while still singing, to uphold standards while still embracing whimsy, and to restore courage and joy to those entrusted with the work of transformation.
She healed the children. She healed the parents. Perhaps she could help heal the academy, too.
No wonder that it's Mary that we love.