Our University and the Creation of a Middle Class

I recently had the opportunity to spend time in Vietnam.  For veterans who served “in country” Vietnam is a different place today.  It is teeming with free enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit, new business start-ups everywhere and a sense that the nothing is impossible.  It is the Jeffersonian dream at work - a powerful experience of the human spirit overcoming adversity to accomplish something better for society. 

 

We won… if not on the battlefield, at the bank.

 

The very freedoms at the center of that decade’s long war - a way of life, a chance for people to choose their work - are alive and well even under a one party system of government.  It seems effective from an economic standpoint, as it is in China.  However I am a university professor looking around, not an expert, just seeing what there is to see. 

 

My eyes got tired.

 

The economy is vigorous, after China the most vigorous in the world.  The skies in Hanoi and Saigon are filled with tower cranes.  The streets seething with Honda motor scooters carrying pigs, steel reinforcing for concrete, wedding cakes, eggs, live and cooked chickens, and families of four in a sway of enterprise, to and fro.

 

The commerce of freedom on wheels. 

 

I had a stiff neck from bending and twisting to see the raw materials and energy of an economy building in a fashion hard to imagine and impossible to describe. 

 

This strength of the will of an individual at work is very close to the goal of the university, and powers the interests of our best students and faculty. 

 

We want to build a middle class. 

 

The courts of public opinion, and the scholarship of the day to day, have rendered their decision, the middle class is not just a good idea, but the very essence of a free society.  Not royalty, not peasantry, not serfs and lords, but those in the middle. People who have skills, and ideas, and a determination and ability to make something better, always for themselves first, not in opposition to human nature, but in a concert with it, not fighting an incoming tide like a jetty, but riding the power if it like a surfer.  It looked like opportunity and its exercise in a ballet of trade and advancement, one Honda at a time, like cowboys on horseback, with cell phones rather than six shooters.

 

 “What does all this have to do with a university?” 

 

The purpose of the university is to heighten the intellectual aptitude and ability of people to make themselves, and therefore by extension their society, better.  To improve the greater good by improving the whole one person at a time.  By engaging and releasing the power to do something well. 

 

Entitlements won’t do this because entitlement will not load up a Honda with more than it should ever carry and send it on its’ way.  Raw opportunity does that.  Nothing else will.  It defies logic and it is unsafe, it is not completely thoughtful, but it is the exercise of a kind of freedom that no one person can give to another.  It has to be grasped when it is there, risk and all.

 

What I saw in Vietnam moved me deeply and I thought how fortunate to be part of a nation where strength is dependent on the extent this happens every day.  And my good fortune as a professor in a university, with my charge to provide the underpinning for this kind of social energy daily.

 

Our university should sense the power and burden of this responsibility, nurture it, and turn it loose.  

Our University - The Core Curriculum

Visiting with parents and prospective students always reinforces what is most important.  The Core Curriculum at our university is a very good one, and provides many options for students to experience a range of intellectual exposures in ideas and subjects basic to the human condition. 

Simultaneously, with the flexibility available, our Core Curriculum allows and encourages students to investigate specific areas of interest that may relate to their choices in career field and study options.  These are important aspects of university life, and beyond the student wanting to become a teacher, a chemist, an engineer, or a doctor, they are aimed at helping the student become what my father would have referred to as well educated, what I refer to as understanding the complexities of the human condition and our relationship to it through the things we know. 

This is all brought to mind after a few visits that I have had over recent weeks with students transferring from Community Colleges, or seniors in high school asking, “What courses should I be taking to prepare for my university program?”  Invariably I suggest to them additional courses in the basic arts and sciences. The discipline specific coursework that we provide is carefully considered and developed to provide the technical and specialized expertise necessary to become whatever it is they want to become. 

I have never, not once in 33 years of university life, told any student at any level, that they were too proficient at biology, or their understanding of the relationship between the industrialization of agriculture and its impact on American family life was unimportant, or those differential equations were interesting to look at, but not of much use, or how about this one, you write too well and your public speaking and presentation skills are far too polished.

Will not happen.

When I used to do my homework at the dining room table I would constantly say to my mother, who was usually in the living room reading something, “Mom, how do you spell this or that word?” She could have given me the answer to almost any word I would ask.  With a good high school education, put to use on a regular basis, she was articulate.  But she did not spell the word for me.

She got a dictionary and brought it to the table.  She said, “Look it up.”  And every time I did I got more than I bargained for.  I found out something about a word beyond its spelling.  She knew the value of a core curriculum. 

Mortimer Adler, a great American philosopher and one of the strongest proponents of the Core Curriculum helped build the Core at the University of Chicago.  Chicago’s core was long held to be the best in the nation.  Those days seem to have evaporated, too many arguments about what should be in it, and what value it added, and who determined why this course or subject area was of more import than that one. 

Frankly, my mother was right, learn to look, to analyze, to add and subtract, to read and write, to think, and build an educational experience not a training regimen. 

At Our University, Professor Jim Allen, Director of the Core Curriculum says it this way: “Courses in the Core introduce you to the traditional riches of western civilization as well as to the contemporary perspectives of interdisciplinary and multicultural studies.”

Our University - Dr. Seymour Bryson

 

Universities are affected by many forces at work in the environment.  Location, student population, faculty composition and a multitude of other factors shape what a university is. 

On occasion, an individual will come along and join a university, sometimes as a student, and possibly later as a faculty or staff member, and eventually become an institution-within-the-institution.  Dr. Seymour Bryson is such a person.  A rare individual of the highest quality.  By grace I had the privilege to work at his side.  He always told me what he thought about a situation, directly, without varnish, in a way that was easy to understand.  The message he sent was clear.

But more importantly, the message he sent was consistent.  This man is committed to the idea that the University should provide opportunity to young people to get a start in life - to better their own circumstance, to become something that might have been only a dream for a parent - more wholly than anyone I have ever met. 

He arrived on campus in 1955 to study, and play a little basketball, both of which he did with passion, determination and excellence.  He earned a PhD and still holds the career rebound record for our basketball program… and he finished playing nearly 50 years ago. When he got to Carbondale a black man couldn’t have lunch on the strip.  He could go to school here, but was not allowed to enter a restaurant. 

Dr. Bryson had two heroes that I know of, Dr. Morris and Dr. Boydston.  He is a man that admires leadership in others. 

Dr. Morris understood opportunity in a powerful way, with a clarity that is rare, and lives on in a few of his students.  Seymour was one of them.  Dr. Morris told those restaurateurs on the strip that if the black students could not eat in their place, than the white ones wouldn’t either.  This display of standing for what’s right has a powerful effect on me even today… courage and tenacity for deeply seated beliefs.
 
“Why can’t I do that?”   You can.   Seymour does.

Dr. Boydston helped recruit athletes here like Dr. Bryson, Harold Bardo, James Jim Battle, Paul Henry, Oscar Moore, Jim Rosser and Sam Silas.  This set an example of caring for people that Dr. Bryson continues to follow, and will as long as there is breath in the man.  It is who he is. 

He is an advocate, and while he could advocate for those, who by birth, citizenship or personal belief might have a door closed that should have been open but he also expected performance, respect, hard work, responsibility, and accountability.  Students know and respond, because their teacher lives these qualities. 

It is not always easy to stand for what you believe, to practice what you preach, to take the road less traveled, to cut across the grain.  Morris did, Boydston did, and Bryson does.  In his quiet persistence for what he believed right, and his dogged determination to see it through, he may embody very well the words of Martin Luther King Junior, “Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality”.

Our university is fortunate for the life of service of Dr. Seymour Bryson.

Our University and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

 

The idea of coupling military training and university education originated in 1783. New York Governor George Clinton proposed that civilian colleges, one in each state of the union, offer military training to students.  The construct is remarkably similar to what happens today at our nation’s colleges and universities.

 

In the early 1800’s universities established military units on campuses, and began to integrate the discipline of military training with the freedom of intellectual inquiry for the benefit of the nation.  The national military academies are important to the armed forces.  They produce a great number of officers for all branches of the military, however, they do not put as many men and women in uniform as do the civilian colleges of the nation.  This is the way it must be in a free society.

 

The work of the ROTC is central to the work of our nation.  Our armed services protect freedom and independence, and therefore the fundamental work of the university, the pursuit of truth unvarnished by politics, pressure from the church, the work of industry and other forces of the social milieu in which universities are embedded.  

 

Eight of the ten best universities in the world have opportunity for military training on campus according the Academic Ranking of World Universities.  And the same eight are located within the borders of the United States.  There is a basic relationship between a strong sense of freedom of expression - the hedges and guards that are required to sustain and preserve it - and what happens at the best academic institutions in the world.  The armed forces help provide an environment that nourishes this relationship. 

 

It is healthy and natural that the presence of the ROTC on university campuses is integral to the intellectual life of the university.  Lacking physical security and a sense of safety, intellectual freedom is nearly impossible to attain and when achieved it comes at great cost.   Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s life embodies the price of intellectual freedom in a nation with a military driven by its own engine, rather than civilian minds of men and women educated and trained to think of freedom, its benefit, and the burden of its absence.  This happens in great universities.

 

At our university ROTC programs affect the lives of many students, and provide opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.  They are educated in mind like all other students, and trained in the discipline to serve our nation through the military.  This powerful combination is good for the student, but beyond good, essential, for the nation in the preservation of a free society.  In a truly free and thoughtful society what benefits the individual sustains the state.

 

The genesis for this powerful combination of free inquiry and military training was established as canon when the Morrill Act of 1862 was signed by Abraham Lincoln.  Its’ conception can be traced to Illinois College and the work of Jonathan Baldwin Turner, a professor there, a full decade before its adoption. The Act stipulated in part that, 

 

… one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics…, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life

 

The Reserved Officers Training Corp is an integral part of Our University, for the benefit of individual and state. 

 

Our University - Lay Leadership

In places of worship we often think about the importance of lay leadership. No matter how powerful the spiritual leader, how driven by God, how adroit at understanding the business of the organization, how gifted in dealing with people helping them address the concerns of the day, lay leaders are an invaluable part of the enterprise.

No place of worship will be better than its lay leadership.

So too it is in the case of a public research university. The alumni association, the development foundation, the athletics boosters, and countless other groups of lay leaders and workers play a role in moving the institution forward and have a dramatic impact on what our university is, and what it can be.

On July 1, 2008 I marked my seventh year with Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Seven interesting years with just about every aspect of university mission and purpose under discussion and progress made and continuing to be made on many fronts, and many needs yet to address.

I recall the interview process and the importance of it. The first night in town I met board members - lay leaders - they talked about the importance of academic excellence. I met alumni association members - lay leaders - who talked about how powerful the institution was in their lives, and what it meant to so many graduates. I met development foundation board members – lay leaders - and talked about the rising costs of higher education and the value of private support in meeting the growing demands of a public university to provide excellence in opportunity to students.

Before I met anyone on the payroll I met lay leaders, people committed to Southern because they loved it, and they wanted to see it continue to flourish in the future.

I bump into these lay leaders around town and their desires do not change. Their aspirations for the university remain steadfastly the same. They want to see Southern prosper; they want to see it grow; they want to see it become better than it is.

In short, they hold high aspirations for it.

I tried, in my limited view of the world, to appreciate the kinds of organizations that have lay leadership. Can you imagine Exxon with lay leadership, or General Motors? Now someone could argue that the stockholders are lay leaders, after all they cast votes on corporate matters, they weigh-in, but I would not venture there.

The idea of voting for something, up or down, is not at all the same thing as participating in leadership. Vesting your energy in making the organization work rather than saying how you think it has worked or not worked through the casting of a vote. Even though capital is at stake stockholder voting is spectator sport… not leadership.

Lay leadership in a university is different. It demands an investment and consequently needs attention so that the whole will benefit from the leadership of the laity.

John Bartlett may have had it just right: “I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own”.

Maybe the most powerful leadership of our university lies in the hands of our lay leaders, deftly choreographed and bound together to best serve the needs of Southern.

Professional Education - Serving Two Masters

Educating professionals was not central to university life until the last part of the 19th century. It was, in a fashion, introduced through the Morrill Land Grant of 1863, and reinforced by Charles Eliot at Harvard as the 19th century turned to the 20th.

Professionals practicing a craft: teachers, physicians, nurses, attorneys, engineers, architects, and others in disciplines whose work is to some extent regulated by the state, have a special place in institutional life, and they create unique and welcome demands on the work of our university.

A person who studies literature has one set of constraints to which they respond: the demands of the discipline as promulgated and articulated by the people who profess and carry on the traditions of the field, usually university faculty and writers.

While there are many possible pains associated with the poor exercise of understanding early nineteenth century literature you will not get a ticket, or spend a night in jail, if you don’t. No one will sue you because you could not clarify the differences between the theism Herman Melville pronounced in Moby Dick, and the views expressed by John Stuart Mill in Nature and the Utility of Religion. Powerfully interesting works but ignorance of them is not punishable by anything other than ignorance, a crime thankfully not prosecutable in county court, and loss of pride - where knowledge of them would produce a sense of pride.

Here is the twist. Knowledge of Melville and Mill might create a better professional in any of field.

Those who aspire to professional practice serve the state through the regulated profession to which they belong. In addition, they must serve the greater social good through the application of knowledge and insight that is not regulated by the state, but may influence the successful execution of their craft. This produces pressure in those who practice and regulate practice of the trade, and those who aspire to its practice. Two masters.

Our responsibility to people who want to become architects requires that we train people to be able to make a building that will stand up, that will protect the health, safety and welfare of those in the extended community, as well as those for whom we design the edifice. Otherwise, the practitioner might go to jail, be sued, or lose the right to practice…the right to practice granted by the state for the benefit of the state.

However, how short we fall if we are producing professionals, again I use the case of the architect, who can make a building stand up, but who have so misunderstood the desires of people, who have so misjudged the impact of the building on the community, who have so inadequately applied understanding of the relationship of people to each other, that the building while it stands, prevents people from becoming all they can be. Pruitt-Igoe, the infamous housing project in St. Louis met every aspect of the regulation of the profession of architecture. Completed 1951 - dynamited 1972. It was uninhabitable. The structure was sound but the human condition unattended to.

In professional education we serve to masters. We must ask can we do it and should we do it? When we answer both correctly, our university is a better servant to those who aspire to the practice of any grand craft, and the state.

Our University and Social Purpose

I had occasion recently to reflect on the social purpose of a university. Actually, this reflection took place as I held my grandson and thought a bit about this little fellow’s future. My life’s work is the university so my thoughts turned to what kind of university he might attend.

If I was a farmer I might have thought about how agriculture would change in the next generation, what would mechanization do that it had not already done? Would weather change or its control, or genetic engineering; have an impact on production and yields? Would farmers, as a lot, still pray a great deal for the complexities and difficulties that they face everyday? For the so many things over which they have almost no control? You have it tough? Try scratching at the ground to feed a family and pay the bills.

What would the world have in store for this grandson when he graduated from high school if he wanted to attend a university? Even as an expounder of the benefits of higher education, I know there are many opportunities in life absent a university education. I hope that never changes. The power of a craftsman at work is a joy to watch, and from personal experience, provides an uncommon variety of satisfaction.

Fright describes my emotional response though to what universities might be like. I see many changes now that are powerful and important in higher education, and some that weaken its foundation. So I reflected on the social purpose of the organizations that I have been a part of for nearly all of my life.

If the purpose of a university is to develop human potential so that people can improve their lot in life by their intellect and resourcefulness, bring insight and wisdom to bear on complex problems, and in so doing, be employable in a job that compensates for those skills, I have no concern about the future. On the other hand if it is seen as a trade school I am frightened.

If the purpose of a university is to be an environment where students have to prove themselves, and work hard to be successful in their studies, if it is like molten gold to cook out dross , or a furnace where annealing takes place, I have no concern about the future. On the other hand, if it is seen as a property right, where you pay and you get, like buying soap or going for a physical examination, I am frightened.

If the purpose of the university is to help students become people with ideas who take different views of the world, or if it tries to engender in a person a world view that values good ideas that are individual actions of a free and disciplined mind, then I am not concerned. However, if its function is to create a club that requires like mindedness, or social status tied to credentials, I am fearful of the future.

John Henry Newman in “The Idea of a University”, says that with a university education, “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life.”

This is the social purpose of a university, it should be the purpose of our university, and it gives me some comfort for my grandson because I know this to be the case.

Our University - A Parents View

There are many perspectives that you can take of our university, ways to see it, ways to engage it, ways to experience it. I have had, over the years, a number of opportunities to talk with parents of students. They fall into many camps. Some of them have been wide eyed at what our university offers in the way of opportunity. For me this is always gratifying as I share a kind of wonder about how much is here.

For others, there is the continuation of a tradition. I was in Harrisburg one night talking with a group of people and a gentleman came up to me after my talk to point out that he was a third generation graduate of Southern, and in each succeeding generation of graduates the pride in the institution grew. Some have a tradition… not as deep… maybe they were a first generation student, but their view is very important as a first taste of university life that lingers into adulthood. They remember ideas introduced to them by teachers, and fellow students, a place of making new friends, parties, and sports, the student center, and for me, most importantly the library. Parents always remember the library.

Some parents remember the place, Southern Illinois. I laugh to myself when people from Chicago get down here and they have this “By golly, they even have running water down here” look on their faces. I have been around quite a bit but the view of those who visit Southern Illinois for the first time, especially when they are used to denser metropolitan areas, always surprises me a bit. I want to tell them to get out more.

Parents tend to be interested in the quality of living places on the campus, I can’t say much about the places off campus as I don’t engage in discussions with parents about them as frequently. They want to know if the dorms are safe and if they provide the opportunity for interaction and most importantly, quiet places to study and sleep. They are curious about the food. I always tell them the story of the fellow I saw one day in the dining hall with three plates of stuff piled high on a tray and how much some of the students eat - even though I am not a connoisseur - that says something to me about the quality.

Parents also want to know about teachers, are they good? Do they care about students? Are they available to meet and give advice and counsel? Are they understanding? I think to myself…too many questions and I don’t know all the answers and then realize, I am a parent, I had these same questions. I had them as a student although I expressed them a bit differently. I was probably more interested in the social life, but that was eventually overpowered by a concern for the intellectual life of the places I looked at, as both parent and student.

Addressing these views of our university is good medicine. They are common to university life in every place, at every time. When the answers are correct, meaning that the place is good for students, the result is always the same. The parents are pleased, and eventually, so too will be the student.

Our university needs to be a place that parents view positively.

Our University and the Idea of Accountability

In a great university… this could probably be said for any great organization… individuals must feel responsibility for the future and that it rests with and on them. This creates a powerful kind of accountability. A deep sense of purpose in an organization develops rather than a self serving approach to the work carried out. This is not the residual accountability garnered from politically appointed boards who oversee the activities of various organizations of the state. That accountability has value too but it is a different kind. It is accountability about rule following rather than feeling responsible for making something great and being a part of something that is bigger than you are.

A sense of urgency and mission produces the accountability our university needs.

The Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, was a large factory built by Western Electric after the turn of the 20th century, during the adolescence of the industrial revolution, when the mechanization of production processes was new and little was tested. Our nation was at the dawn of an age of precision and productivity. During its busiest production years, the Hawthorne Works employed nearly 50 thousand people before it closed in 1983.

Experiments dubbed the “Hawthorne Experiments” were carried out to see how various changes in working conditions, including special treatment and the sense that the tasks assigned where especially important to the future of the company. The validity of the original Hawthorne Experiments has been questioned for years, with findings subject to a wide range of interpretation and criticism depending on one’s point of view. However, a common occurrence no one argues is that changes in environmental conditions will lead to changes in human behavior.
The Hawthorne effect has come to mean that people’s behavior and performance change when the person is subject to new workplace change. The earliest experiments varied lighting levels and the number of parts produced during a given interval of time. The researchers concluded that the changes were made in response to the changed environmental conditions and were little impacted by the amount of change in lighting levels.
This was confirmed when essentially the same results followed when light levels were decreased. Change produces change and change was the constant in the experiments. The results of the experiments were expressed to mean that when people are noticed or appreciated, their performance will improve.
At the Hawthorne plant, and in subsequent replications and further studies of similar types, it was found that after the subjects adjusted to the new working conditions, productivity levels returned to the levels experienced prior to the changed environment. The university, when it is successfully led, produces positive, life-long change in graduates, their thinking, and their behavior, but in order for that to happen there must be internal accountability of people to each other and the greater organization. People must be held accountable for growth and change, as agents of change. Accountability can produce that in a healthy environment. In an unhealthy environment accountability produces fear and calcification. Our university must be different.
Change and accountability are fueled in successful organizations by the belief that what I do can make a difference. This is a powerful concept to carry to work every morning. It makes work a mission, not a job. That is the way our university should be.

Our University- Some Hints for Students

Recently I was asked to address honors students in Union County regarding their futures.  I am taking the liberty of sharing a condensed version of those comments as hints that might be of value to highschoolers who are about to graduate.  Here goes.

 

First - Whatever happens, in any setting, under any circumstances, in school, or at work, at home be true to who you are, and the principles that have been at the core of your educational experience.  I know the values of the people in Southern Illinois and appreciate their power and purpose in shaping a persons future. 

 

Second - As you think about college consider every available means for financial support, scholarships, financial aid and work study.  Don’t work too much, but studies indicate that moderate work 10 -15 hours actually increases academic performance and success.

 

Third - Focus on becoming a servant leader.  There are far too few leaders who genuinely serve others, and far too many who primarily serve themselves.  It is the bane of a free society, a school, or a business concern.   

 

Fourth -  If you begin college is at a community college, you will never have to apologize for that.  This was my experience as one of six children of working people, my Mom a cook in my high school cafeteria, my Dad, a janitor in the same school.  It was community college for me, an excellent way to get started, then on to other places, some of the best in the world. 

 

Fifth - If you are not sure what you want to study, or where your vision for your own life will lead, don’t fret over that, not until you’re forty anyway.

 

Sixth - Make sure you get involved with other students in healthy activities, activities related to your faith, or your career interests.  College campuses provide an excellent place for people to gather, from many places, and walks of life, glued together by faith, nationality, life experience, and other common experiences that build interpersonal relationships. 

 

Seventh - Read, read, and read some more.  However much you read you are not reading enough.  It is rare to find someone who spends too much time reading.  Get off the internet and go to the library. 

 

Eighth -   Meet your faculty.  If you have some that seem distant, or are distant, work to cultivate a relationship with them.  Find others through referral that will visit with you about  your ideas and worldview.   

 

Ninth -   Never be lulled into thinking your personal views are not part of your intellectual development.  Unfortunately this happens with people’s faith life… it may be detached from your intellectual life.  How you think is a direct reflection of what you believe.  At some universities it appears that we are trying to separate these aspects of our lives.  Don’t let that happen to you. 

 

Tenth - Keep your eye on the ball.  Look ahead as far as you can.  Have a dream and pursue it vigorously every day.  Treat it like a favorite picture.  Put it in your wallet and pull it out every now and then and see what makes you like it so much. 

 

Remember that being a good student makes you a leader, whether you want to be or not, and carries responsibilities.  Once you gain respect and trust, you must use it wisely.  If you want people to take you seriously, you must give them a reason to.

 

These attributes will prepare you well for Our University, and every university in the nation.