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.