Hard Work – Our University

 

Work is a four letter word.   Unfortunately.

 

 Our sons, while attending university worked long hours in various jobs, sometimes two or three simultaneously, to make it “on their own.’ It may have come from my constant talk about how hard I had it when I was a college student.  Mary and I fretted some times over their long hours of work, but generally concluded we would never see a headline in any local newspaper that reads “COLLEGE STUDENT DIES FROM HARD WORK.”

 

When universities in this nation where associated with a faith tradition, and almost every one of them initially was associated with or responded directly to, the teachings of one or more of the great faith movements on which the country was founded, there was a deep and abiding sense that hard work was part of university life. 

 

Hard work was a natural extension of a life of faith.  Not because of the Calvinist view that hard work earned an individual access to heaven or the Catholic view that good works are proofs of salvation.  Rather, hard work was part of university life because it was part of the fabric of our nation, like faith, and the weaving of hard work and success is the strongest manifestation of a free society.

 

The fabric may be torn. 

 

Universities should always find ways to model and measure for students hard work, and its’ firstborn, results.  We need to teach hard work as one discipline of becoming educated.  Taking courses only provides the opportunity to work with diligence and joy, it does not guarantee it.  Moreover, taking courses, even doing well in them, does not always require hard work.   And finally success in course work measured by simple grades will rarely guarantee achievement in the professions and pursuits of life.   On the other hand hard work almost always guarantees it, if not immediately, in the long run.

 

Success is a fleeting concept for all of us. 

 

People can gain success by claiming the work of others, by tomfoolery and trickery, but it is not the same thing as success achieved by hard work.  Say what you might about Tiger Woods, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rick Warren, my father, Jim the Building Service worker in Quigley Hall, Derek Bok, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dale Earnhardt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Janus Salk, John D. Rockefeller and anyone who toils tirelessly and gets results from the work of their hands and mind, hard work is always near the center of true success. 

 

We don’t teach work as well as we should.

 

We may be teaching a form of entitlement suggesting that passing through a series of traps, hurdles, or other challenges, will insure success.  It may, but there is no guarantee.  The glory of labor and its result, work of back or brain, when left out of the equation creates inconsequential success.

 

President Calvin Coolidge crystallized it:

 

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

 

Our university must always find ways to lift up student’s who work diligently, and couple with diligence determination, to do well.

 

Our University – Merit

When Mary and I go out to eat we always decide where we are going before we leave.  Sometimes we even talk about it on the phone before I get to the house.  In other words, this is not a last minute decision, or a snap judgment but a carefully considered and deliberate choice that we make.  On the way to the restaurant we invariably say, “Maybe we should go there?” You know the routine. 

 

I always want to stop at the place that has the most cars.  If I don’t see cars I get nervous.  People vote for restaurants by parking in the lot, like a continuous opinion poll.  They factor in cost too.  We conduct an analysis and make a decision based on a single indicator that combines cost and quality, or value.

 

Merit.

 

So it is with universities.  The principles of supply and demand are everywhere evident on university campuses, especially now as costs continue to increase at rates that exceed the consumer price index and because there is a growing set of choices for those interested in attending college. 

 

Just like restaurants. 

 

For-profit universities, public universities, private universities, faith based institutions, community colleges offering baccalaureate degrees, weekend programs, executive programs, night school, the traditional residential universities, commuter schools and every possible combination and permutation.

 

Many organizations rate universities.  No university, or any possible hybrid, will be near the top of any list if excellence is not recognized through merit recognition for faculty, staff and students.

 

If you want to know which restaurant has the best cooks, wait staff, janitors, and maintenance personnel just look at the parking lot.  It will be those eateries that recognize excellence in mission through merit: Merit pay for quality performance.

 

Just like universities.

 

You can have a pretty good one, eating house or school house, where merit is unrecognized but eventually the parking lot will empty because another more enterprising establishment will take what goes unrecognized.

 

Excellence.

 

Some people don’t like merit.  Disdain is a strong but appropriate word.  Some organizations want to treat everyone the same.  It is easy and completely unfair. The faculty member who goes into the classroom and spills her heart and empties her mind, is available, who studies and publishes ideas so that her teaching is fresh, who participates in the community through service and an open commitment to the mission of the place, and is treated just like her lackluster colleague next-door hates the absence of merit recognition, and I am not talking about trinkets or accolades.  I mean real money, dollars, that discriminate excellence from the run of the mill in a way that has a real impact.

 

So too the lackluster faulty or staff member who does the minimum and wants to be treated well even though their effort and results are poor hates merit because it is unfair.  It rewards his neighbor who is not better than he by his very own standards.

 

The arguments against merit are profoundly silly.  “We can’t do it now, the budgets are too tight.”  This is when it is needed most.  “You cannot judge merit fairly”; good-girlism, cronyism, favoritism and all kinds of other isms will enter the fray.  In well-run establishments this is not the case.

 

A good university will recognize quality through merit compensation, otherwise quality decreases, as surly as an empty parking lot is the first indicator of a weak restaurant. 

Our University – Calcification

 

Calcification is what happens to soft tissue when it is occupied by calcium.  It gets hard. It is no longer resilient.  It becomes immobile, and eventually, it cannot work or act the way it was intended to.  While I am not sure what brings calcification on in an organism, I know exactly what brings it on in an organization.  When we fail to change, we stagnate, and eventually calcify.

 

It is a sad, but I have seen people calcify, not literally of course, but spiritually, emotionally or intellectually.  I have seen families calcify and not show love one toward the other.  I have seen organizations calcify, when they lose the sense that their mission is high or important.

 

They stagnate.

 

You don’t have to be a plant expert to understand the importance, or centrality, of the xylem and phloem to a plant.  Just looking at old drawings in that botany or biology textbook will let you know these are important to the survival of the plant.

 

When you see these highways you sense their importance. You have some idea about how the plants woks.  They are what keep the plant living, supple.  You might say they represent the mission of the plant, for without them, the plant perishes. 

 

Ceaseless flow.  

 

And these parts of the plant are not new either.  They have been seen in fossilized remains of plants that are estimated to be 400 million years old. I grew tomatoes one time that looked like they were 400 million years old.  They even had the appearance of fossils, calcified, and unfortunately tasted like a fossil looks like it might taste. 

 

Mission is that idea or concept, or vision… the crux of what any organization is about.  When a mission has the importance to an organization that it should have, it will be evident in everything that happens, and expressed in any and every view of the organization.  It will nourish it, like xylem and phloem.

 

A ceaseless flow of people and ideas.

 

A university should be just like that.

 

In 1088 a university was founded in Bologna, Italy.  The University of Bologna, as it has been called for nearly 1,000 years is still in existence.  The oldest in the Western World.

 

Its business plan is remarkably unchanged.  Students come, tuition is paid, instruction provided, and degrees awarded upon the completion of a course of study.  And, faculty are appropriately skeptical of the administration as healthy skepticism provides a homeostatic environment.  A place of stability in a changing world. So the university can remain active, and achieve its mission, and not calcify.

 

For all the ups and downs,  nuances of political regimes,  changes in culture,  needs of students and families, explosion of knowledge, the printing press, and 1,000’s of other inventions, conveniences and contrivances, that university has been doing roughly the same thing for the past millennium. 

 

It has not changed much, yet it lives in a sea of change.

 

Why it that?

 

It is simply that Bologna’s mission was clear and evident, and it kept changing to sustain the mission in a liquid world.  So too must our university always be supple and resist clutching the past and indifference to new ideas that sustain mission.

 

Heraclitus knew it 1,500 years before the got it at Bologna.  He said “All is flux; nothing stays still.”

Our University – Purpose

 

 

St. Paul was a brave man.  He summed up the purpose of the Christian Church in ten words uttered to the Church at Corinth:

 

“Be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ.”

 

The simplicity of this idea is powerful. In the Greek, the word imitators actually flows from the word mimetos.  We say mimic.  All faiths have simplicity of purpose, whether or not they are believed or accepted by others not of like faith, which can be expressed in a few words. 

 

It is purpose.  Glue. 

 

I say St. Paul was brave because he told people to be like “me.”  I know very few thoughtful people who would admonish others to copy them.  I know too many of my own faults to suggest that anyone should copy me.  I believe this widely held realization gave birth to the famous adage, “Do as I say not as I do. “ Paul’s qualification to blatant, abject, shameless imitation was critical.  He directed the faithful to copy him only as he copied Christ.

 

The State University of New York has a motto as almost every university does.  Learning institutions define purpose simply so that all may know with clarity and conviction the point of the organization.  It says without qualification or apology,

 

“Let each become all he is capable of being.” 

 

Purpose is that idea or concept, that view or vision, the crux of what any organization is.  When purpose has the importance to an organization that it should it will be evident in everything that happens and expressed in any and every view of the organization.  Now I believe the State University of New York nailed it down very nicely.  These nine words on the one hand and ten on the other are about being or becoming. In both cases the ideas expressed as purpose resonate with a common theme of our day.

 

Change.

 

I have argued that the single purpose of the university is to help people change and become something they were not.

 

Universities are often at war with themselves because of the variety of changes demanded by the students who study there, faculty who teach there, and administrators who lead there.  All want to change yet no two want to change in exactly the same way.  The clarity provided by St. Paul is harder to find in the academy. 

 

The university must provide opportunity for all to change that is different for each. 

 

This should never be inferred to mean that a university “should be all things to all people.”  That will kill it with purposelessness.  As with the qualifier of Paul, “as I also am of Christ,” the qualifier for the university is “all to change.”  This may come as a shock but not all students, faculty and administrators want to change. Education may be unique that way – some people pay much and demand little.  

 

If the university is excellent that variety of opportunity for change must present itself in every aspect of university life.  At the library the strains of books must be many; in the classroom the variety of ideas ever present; at an athletic event the sense of engagement diverse; and in the people themselves the purpose always the same but never repeated; change.

 

In an excellent university this is they way it must be – and our university should strive to attain that purpose.

 

Our University – Trust

 

I shop at a local hardware store.  I have since the day I got into town.  Mary and I needed a washer and dryer for our new home and someone we met, our new friend, suggested we go to this particular store.  He said “See George”. 

 

We did and have bought the things we needed from him over and over again, barbecue grills, mailboxes, yard tools, propane, cleaning products, flags, snow shovels, nuts, bolts, nails, and screws. 

 

It happens to be close and convenient, but that is not why I go.  The prices are good but, from time to time, the “Big Box” stores beat them.  The people are courteous, the place is old though clean as a whistle, but it is not for any of these reasons that I go there. 

 

I have never found what someone told me there was not true. This is not to say that other places lie to you, I discovered on only the rarest occasions disingenuousness in Southern Illinois.  When they say, “If it does not work bring it back” they mean it.   But not in the same way the folks at this place mean it. 

 

I trust them. 

 

First I trusted George, and that trust infected my sense of the whole place.  It was verified over and over again.  The people that worked there trusted George.  They were infected too.

 

Trust makes any organization work, and the confounding thing is that as trust dissipates in an organization it never does so all at once, it is a slow relentless process, one incident after another.  One day it’s gone but you never saw it leave.

 

Trust takes a generation or two to build up, and about that long to lose, but you can give it away if you are not careful.  In no organization, save possibly a place of worship, is trust more important than a schoolhouse.  The product we seek there, the opportunity for change, is fleeting and as difficult to grasp as whispering smoke. 

 

When I go to get a carriage bolt, 5” by 3/8”, galvanized with a washer, and a square nut rather than a hex nut, I know it when I see it.  If for some reason it doesn’t work when I get I to the house, I can bring it back, and as a trusting place, they take it. 

 

 

When I sign up for a course at the university I am not sure what I am getting, but I will sign up over and over, eventually earning a degree, if I trust the place.  If I know they will give it their best shot.  I can’t bring it back, because I am not even sure what it is that I purchased.  The sense of trust that we are doing our best must be palpable.

 

Thick in the air. 

 

No nonsense and with bell ringing clarity, the place cares for me.  Looking at the university in search of trust always requires you to look in the mirror.  You have to be able to know that you are doing the right thing too… giving it your best shot.

 

Two way trust.   Like a marriage.

 

Our University will flourish as trust abounds.  It is the most basic component of human relationships, and without it you can’t begin to get or give an education.

 

Trust is the foundation of learning.