Our University – Teaching and Research

 

Job prospects for graduating students are as challenging as anyone has seen in decades.  There is scarcely a bright light to be found.  In a rush to address this complex socioeconomic and political issue some universities might be led to rethink mission and worry more about job placement than education. 

 

Well intentioned but misguided.

 

Such a posture may work at a trade school or technical institute and many community colleges, and even some very limited mission universities, but should not be the case at a research university.  At institutions like ours, teaching students to think and solve problems, provides the framework for gainful employment. 

 

Last August I traveled to Viet Nam, where a lament from national leaders about the inability of Vietnamese students to be productive in the work place was heard over and over.  It was interesting that the students I met, considerable in number, were thoughtful, kind, respectful and deferential, and seemed dedicated and hardworking.

 

Officials in higher education, leaders at U.S. embassies, presidents of the best universities in this nation crying for new ideas to employ their people and make an economy work,  are concerned about the fact that the students are weak in the area of problem solving and critical thinking. 

 

Students can give back everything you give them but they don’t innovate.

 

I hear consternation at Wal-Mart, Denny’s, in the state house, and at times to my great discomfort even on our campus, about how too much emphasis is placed on research and not enough on teaching.  I think what my friends in all these places really want to say is too much emphasis on poor research and poor teaching.

 

Research, scholarly and creative activity in any manifestation, is the only way that teaching can ever really be excellent.  It can be good with limited intellectual curiosity but it will never be excellent.

 

When research and scholarship are driven by a passion to know, a desire to find a better way through something, a heart to develop a new way of seeing the world, or the beauty of a human voice, teaching can begin.

 

Until then, all you have is training or instruction; valuable in its own right, but not the mission of our university. Teaching not infused with new insights, the real by- product of research, is not teaching. 

 

Ask the people of Vietnam.

 

The first department chair I ever worked with at LSU was Fountain Tillman Smothers, an old fashioned Tennessean with character more unique than his name.  Professor Smothers was the genuine article. 

 

He believed distinctions between teaching and research were hollow and naive, and that teaching and research were connected like inhaling and exhaling….one without the other was of no use. He took a broad view of research, he was an aficionado of the arts and loved poetry, and could quote it like a Tennessee gentleman.

 

Fount knew that thinking people study, inquire and create.  They find solutions to problems.  They invent.  They create work for others.  And while he never said it to me directly, he knew that thinking people would be successful in the market place.

 

At our university, the desire to know should be an industriousness fueled by discovery and transferred from teacher to student.

 

Students so equipped find work, or work finds them. They are educated, not trained.

Our University – Reverse Transfer

 

Reverse transfer is the growing phenomenon of students leaving a four-year institution, like our university, and going to community colleges.  This is called reverse transfer because; when community colleges were initially established the purpose was for technical training, adult education, and preparation for universities, all at low cost and high efficiency. 

 

It is called reverse transfer because it is backwards.

 

There are many factors that encourage reverse transfer and they are described in a new study by Sara Goldrick-Rab in the Sociology of Education.  I believe the study is reliable, well executed and applicable to circumstances around our university and the students who study here.

 

The primary causes of reverse transfer, according to experts and university leaders, are financial problems usually associated with students from low income families. 

 

This study breaks that mold and even goes to a more fundamental issue than socio-economic status and lands in an odd place…the parents’ level of education and poor previous academic performance of the student.  And like it or not, the two are linked, not in particular by this study, but by common sense and experience. 

 

Students, who have not performed well in high school and somehow are enabled to attend a university through nearly open admissions, easy flowing financial aid, a desire on the part of the university to grow enrollment, or any of a multitude of factors that may not necessarily lead to academic excellence or success, are likely not to perform well there. 

 

First cause among a multitude of forces at work in the lives of some students is desire and commitment.  This dynamic duo grows in families and life experiences where students are encouraged to work hard and be responsible for their own successes and failures. 

 

These twins of motivation, desire and commitment, coupled with a modest measure of ability, will almost always lead to success for the student.  In defense of our university and others like it that want to serve people in their lifetime goals, desire and commitment are nearly impossible to predict except by actual performance.  And our compassion to give someone a chance to prove the rules wrong is nearly as powerful as the impact of the twins exercising their strength, always with that modest amount of ability.

 

We are not talking about rocket science or brain surgery, and I am not even sure either of those bastions of intelligence are all they are cracked up to be.

 

 

In the past I have heralded the value of the community college in providing students a chance to get started.  Some feel that universities are so much better to get started that they are willing to encourage attendance even when it is well known in advance that failure is likely.  Who is served?

 

This is not a cold or heartless perspective but one fueled by a student’s past performance.  

 

Rather it is the idea that a student who has not performed well, will likely not perform well in the future unless there is a change of heart about education, its opportunity and its purpose. 

 

I would postulate that all other things being equal, universities with high reverse transfer rates admit unprepared or unqualified students, a prognostication based on the facts of the Goldrick-Rab study.  Better to start at the community college, and make success a forward transfer.

Demosthenes said, “Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”

Our University – An Arm of the State

 

For all of the bad news about Illinois politicians and their appointees, pay for play, rigged bidding and contract decision making, favoritism, patronage, back room dealing, sinecure, influence peddling, and plain old back scratching, I have become very fond of Illinois: not cynical but ever hopeful about our future and thankful to be in its employ.  I have worked in different states and this one is an excellent employer.

 

The people are the state.

 

The people in Southern Illinois are hard working, truthful, committed, and desirous of a fair shot at things.  I don’t think anyone expects anything for nothing.  The people in Chicago are industrious, forward looking, mindful of the fact that they enjoy living in one of the finest cities of the world, home to exhibitions, parks, lakefront activities, clean streets, low crime rates, and a host of other amenities not shared by all large American cities. 

 

The hearty souls twixt the collar counties and the confluence of two great rivers, till some of the most productive soil on earth, and get corn and bean yields second to none.  Year in and year out they mortgage their future and bet on that dirt producing something of great value. They take considerable risk, and I admire them, while the nation and the world need them.

 

However, our great state is challenged. The budget particulars of the day are powerful, pervasive, and perplexing.  

 

Our university is an arm of the state.

 

The state, cities, counties, municipalities, school systems and other branches of government and service do not have the resources to grant cost of living pay increases, as much as it may be deserved and needed, yet they will be granted in all likelihood.  They should not.

 

This is a time when state employees should forgo the raises promised by contract and tradition.  Contracts should have protections in them for the times in which we find ourselves…protections that should apply equally to elected and appointed officials, executives, and working stiffs alike.

 

This is that time.

 

The idea of salary increases is a future burden that we and our children should not bear.  Our retirement programs are already broken…nearly beyond repair…and their solvency cannot be gifted to the next generation. At our university a tuition increase will barely cover pay increases like these.  Check the numbers.  The students are paying for all of us to get raises…the state can’t afford them… and we should not ask those in our charge to bear that burden.

 

Illinois is a great place to work but, as state employees, we need to appreciate that, and expect our leadership to neither give nor take salary increases in a time such as this.  Some faculty and excellent staff may leave the university if they cannot get increases, but this is a cost of a down economy. Maybe some elected officials will choose not to run again for the low compensation. 

 

Irresponsible borrowing to provide temporal gratification against an uncertain future may go beyond the pale of risk-taking in public sector leadership and management.

 

“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! / Sail on, O Union, strong and great! / Humanity with all its fears, / With all the hopes of future years, / Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Our university is married to the state of Illinois.

Our University – Struggle

 

The struggles of a university are not the subject of these thoughts. It is too easy. They are many, not unique, frequently self-inflicted, and responsive to environment. Universities are members of a family of similar institutions.  The nature of a family is in great measure determined by the character of the individuals that make it up. The branches may come from the same root; they will take on shape and character based on their relationship to the whole, orientation to the forces of nature, and other variables independent of the root but guided by it.

 

All universities are defined by struggle.

 

The greatest universities are those that address the struggle of ideas, science, technology, art, people, communities, and morality so that growth and adaptation are achieved by responding to the circumstances of learning and the diverse paths of study.

 

Universities provoke struggle in their members and simultaneously support them, not for any perverse pleasure that spectatorship of struggle provides but because out of the veins of struggle comes the most complete joy and benefit of learning.

 

Campuses are beginning to look like four star resorts.  Student housing photographs like a posh hotel, with swimming pools, climbing walls, running trails, horseback riding, barbecue terraces, outdoor gardens and dining areas and gourmet coffee. These amenities do not ensure excellent educational experiences.

 

Struggle alone guarantees educational excellence.   

 

The struggles of import to college students are battles of mind and heart as the intellect is tuned: of faith and its relationship to a way of seeing the world, of social issues and professional insight, of work and rest, right and wrong.  These are the struggles that mark the student, and set the cornerstone for a person’s life. 

 

Many dimensions of struggle are clarified in early adolescence to be sure, but others nag at us for all our days.  The university experience is the launching point for the balance of life. 

 

My friend reminded me the other day of the character of Sisyphus in Greek mythology that was doomed to repeat the same task over and over again.  He rolled a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down.  Endlessly this poor guy rolls the stone up and gravity brings it back down.  For Sisyphus, the repetitive work was punishment for a life poorly lived.

 

So many aspects of our emotional and intellectual lives are replays of precisely the same rock rolling that Sisyphus had to deal with, not punishment for anything other than the sin of ignorance, unthankfully a common ailment, thankfully a pardonable transgression.  

 

Correctly choreographed ignorance is the framework of discovery, and a significant portion of that exercise is rock rolling. 

 

Learning.

 

The distance from ignorance to discovery is a remarkably short trip, usually on a road traveled in pain from one perspective, and joy from the other, determined in whole by our view of struggle.    

 

And that is what the university is for.  To help people shape their own struggle.   In the midst of skill and technique, workplace productivity and job opportunity, big ideas and critical thought, eternal issues of life can be given lift between emotional adolescence and adulthood, through university experiences, which set a life trajectory.

 

At our university, when we roll that rock and help others learn to do it, we should count it all as joy. 

 

Healthy struggle is the guardian of accomplishment. 

Our University- Multiple Perspectives

 

Diversity is a strengthening catalyst for almost anything.  There is a great deal of discussion at our university, and on other campuses, about diversity and its import to the campus culture.  This dialog is usually viewed through the lens of ethnic, racial, and gender diversity.  Other manifestations of the human condition have value in providing multiple perspectives to be sure. 

 

Another dimension of diversity is derived solely from intellectual curiosity or stance rather than the legitimate desire for a university to reflect the population it aspires to serve.  Diversity of this dimension comes from holding a particular intellectual stance.   In contemporary society this is a chosen trait rather than a distinctiveness that we inherit or are born with, although birth and family, or residence in a particular locale, certainly impact thinking.

 

If any university was populated with people who come from within fifty miles of the campus, there would be a sameness of view and a parochialness that undermines strength.  This concept is independent of geographic location.  If everyone who taught at Columbia University came from metropolitan New York, it would make Columbia narrow-minded.  True for any university in any locale. 

 

Multiple perspectives, absent anything else, create learning opportunity.  That is why people travel.  Travel from the Middle English word travailen (“to toil”), from the Anglo-French word travailler (“travail”) means work.

 

Without multiple perspectives intellectual flatness leads to a featureless thought environment.   

 

The purpose of the university is to bring people from many perspectives together to generate new views that have value to a culture.  Environments that support intellectual nepotism will not reach their full learning potential.  Nepotism usually refers to active pursuit – hiring friend or family – rather than a passive one – hiring those who know a place because they happen to be available. Both are equally noxious to a good university.    

 

Nepotism of the kind that undermines academic excellence and inquisitiveness is not usually active, but passive.  Comfort with the challenge of varied perspectives is a mandate of the most basic function of a university.  Settling for the comfortable will lead to a false sense of security, but will eventually undercut the purpose of the university and its quality. 

 

As a society, we have come to categorize legitimate and healthy differences of view as narrow-minded in some cases, or so broad as to be boundless in others.

 

It seems fear and hatred reside at the end of both roads.

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This fear of expression has a chilling effect on diversity of thought and action equal to the chilling effects addressed in a number of Supreme Court cases beginning in the early fifties but given special attention by the late William Joseph Brennan, Jr., Associate Justice of the Court regarding the more general but related concept of free speech.

 

Many powerful ideas cause awkwardness in expression for fear of offense.  While such fear may be legitimate in some settings, it must be avoided at our university.  Not an intellectual free-for-all, but the notion that openness and variety of views creates strength, and most assuredly, a narrowness of view will create weakness in the same measure.

 

Walter Bagehot, the English social scientist, understood the challenge of different views and the true purpose of the university.   “One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.”

 

At our university we should shield no one from the process that births new ideas.