Two Sides of the House – Our University

In different settings people use the phrase “two sides of the house”. 

 

When you hear this relative to a university the subject is the idea that there are academic issues, and everything else is “the other side of the house”.  Academics and finance, administration, student affairs, development, maintenance, athletics, clerical and technical staff, and in general the human and physical infrastructure that keeps the university moving.

 

There is one house from my perspective, and everyone in it toils to the same end, academic excellence.  I have the privilege of working with a group of faculty and staff and find very few who don’t recognize that there is one house with one purpose, and no sides. 

 

In a former life there was an administrative assistant, if that was the correct title I am not sure, but she happened to run a department of over 800 students and fifty faculty members, even though people thought the chair did.  I will call her Jane Doe.  She worked with students, faculty, the central administration, the building service workers, the grounds workers who tended the building and everyone and everything that had to do with keeping the place afloat. 

 

There was only one small problem with Jane…she was from the “other side of the house”.  The people who would raise this point were not the sharpest of the lot, rather they were the title driven ones who felt special not by ability or opportunity, but by degree or position.  These are always the ones that like to talk about the “other side of the house”.  They used it to devalue her opinion when their intellect and ability fell short, and did it with such skill and acumen that only a pro would know.   

 

Thankfully these home splitters are few and far between, but they are there and they diminish the purpose of our university.

 

I bumped into a student at a professional meeting about 15 years after he graduated.  He was an excellent student, had a mind like a steel trap, a high GPA an excellent record in graduate school, and was in the middle of a highly successful career as an architect, a leader in the state and accomplished in his firms work. 

 

He didn’t ask me about any of the design faculty who had helped him become a first rate designer, and he knew they did as he was an excellent student that appreciated the faculty.  He did not ask me about the department chair at the time and whether he was still there.  He did not ask me about any of his classmates, many who were achieving similar levels of success in the paths of labor they chose. 

 

He asked me about Mrs. Doe.  Is she still there? He inquired.  How was she doing?  Did she still help the AIAS, the student chapter of the American institute of Architects?  Did she still assist in organizing events in the department?  Was she able to continue to keep Bill in line, a professor who at times was tough to deal with? And on he went. 

 

This fellow knew there was a house with one purpose, not two sides, and Mrs. Doe, regardless of her position was right in the middle of the house, and its purpose.

 

I am thankful to work at Our University where over 5,000 people, many Jane and John Does’, working every day to support academic excellence.

Our University – Our Spiritual Lives

I am not going to proselytize anyone in what follows. 

 

I will not try to force my views of the world we live in, or the one I think I will occupy for eternity.  I will not insist any current state of affairs be viewed through the lens of my experience.  Rather, I would like to make an argument that the diminishment of a persons faith on major research university campuses has created a vacuum that presents itself every day as morality and ethics in decision making are absent the acknowledgment of the perspectives of faith that drive them.

 

A higher form of dishonesty in modern social organizations cannot be found. 

 

I am not arguing for a study of faith.  Universities do that.  I am arguing for the personal exercise thereof.

 

Some scholars contest that morality and ethics can be divorced from world view.  When a person makes a decision of any kind that has moral and ethical implications, they do it from a world view from which no disconnection of faith is possible.  There is no other way.  Not my faith, not your faith, but a faith possessed attaches a person to the greater social order giving dimension and direction.

 

We strive to be sensitive when we present our views about ideas such as who we are, what we believe, why we believe it, and how our beliefs impact our day to day lives.  This is appropriate. 

 

However, sensitivities unintentionally cut off and nearly eliminate any personal discourse regarding faith, and divorce it from intellectual pursuits in a way that is unhealthy for all.  To deny personal beliefs, even when they may be difficult to articulate on the one hand, or a challenge to accept on the other, is to deny the essence of how we think. 

 

A Confucian, an Atheist and a Christian think differently, and different thought patterns impact intellectual perspectives.  To deny that is to deny all of recorded history.  No place should be better suited to the open sharing of faith, and its impact on thought, than a university campus.  Yet we have relegated such discourse to the mistakes of history as being narrow minded, closed, discriminatory, uniformed, anti-intellectual, and generally not worth any time in an intellectual, reasoned, detached, logical environment, such as a university. 

 

None of this is to suggest that the university should take a particular posture on a particular faith, but rather university leaders should welcome such discourse at every level as a “working out” of a persons world view as they become an educated human being.  The institutional posture should be that such discourse, with all its contention and difficulty, sloppiness and potential for misrepresentation and broken understanding, is part of life, and the university is part of life, and therefore the two should not be divorced.

 

But they are.

 

The idea that no perspective on faith can or should be taken by the university has devolved into the notion that no one should take such a perspective based on a faith view anywhere on a campus. This in and of itself is an exercise of faith in human wisdom and insight that is possibly misguided and wrong, but doubtlessly and with great assurance is, narrow and limited.  But there is a more compelling argument from the standpoint of the modern research university.

 

It is illiberal.

 

Martin Luther says it clearly, and for the ages: “Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see”. This, coupled with all of the rational evidence of one thing or another, should be part of life at our university.

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.