Later this afternoon, all over my small town, men and women will get dressed in black robes and silly hats and shoes that range from the sensible to absurd, walk across campus to the football stadium where they will wait through (hopefully short) speeches until the main event -- a parade of the youngest of the black crows walking across a stage to have their hands shaken and receive a cover for a piece of paper they will eventually receive in the post in a few weeks or a few months. The older members of the cloaked community (we called them bat robes at my university, a place where some undergraduates wore them every day, just for grins) will sit on uncomfortable folding chairs set too close together, and variously cheer, gossip with their neighbors, work on a crossword or read a book, or surf the internet on a conveniently-available cell phone.
If all are lucky, the rain will hold off until 6 pm, but the current forecast is not convincing. Graduation starts at 2, and often runs past 4; the rain chances rise between 2 and 3 pm, from 10% to 30%. If it does rain, there will be a problem of what to do with hundreds of people well away from any covered location. I expect graduation will be outside, but there will be a whole bunch of administrators hoping it doesn't come back to bite them, with a pop-up thunderstorm featuring high winds, lightning, and hail. But if they were to remove the graduation to an interior space and nothing happened, there would be a lot of anger and frustration on the part of students who are the reason for the occasion. I, too, hope there is no rain. Because I will be sitting in those uncomfortable chairs, clutching a plastic sack with six graduation cards for the graduating seniors who have completed our major this semester, talking with my friends and colleagues about events on campus, dozing, hoping I don't get a sunburn, and checking the program to see what students I know among the graduating class. You can recognize me. and my colleague who teaches the capstone class with me, because she is in bright blue and my sleeves are flame red. The joys of those foreign degrees. We stick out like sore thumbs.
Come with me to the casbah... (or below the orange fold)
Last week I wrote about what I hope my students get out university in the long run. This week the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow chose to focus on the importance of specific elements of the university experience, including nurturing, in the persistence of students to graduation and post-graduation success. He talked about other aspects as well, including involvement in extra-curricular activities, a major-related job or internship (this would include on-campus employment as well as an internship, and I would assume an archaeological excavation which is a learning application of the major I did at least!), and undergraduate research (well, a project that lasted a semester or more, which will often be undergraduate research). I did many of those myself, although not really the extra-curricular activities. I hung out with friends, which was the main extra-curricular experience I had, and it was an important one.
The comments on the article were a combination of testimonials about people's own undergrad experience and those of their children, well-deserved rants about how so many faculty members are adjuncts who cannot provide the mentoring that Blow spoke so highly of. I am sure someone else would read them and come away confirmed in what she already believes, but it would be something different from me. But of course I came away remembering the comments from people who said "How is a 750-person class a valid learning experience?" and "The whole point of this essay is to confirm that small classes and a low student-faculty ratio is the way to go, even if the university is not an Ivy League one." There were many other comments and I think that, if I were to quantify them, the majority were expressing concern with the reliance on adjuncts, particularly part-time ones. This is indeed a major issue, but it is not one with which I have much experience, as my university is so isolated that we have an incredibly small adjunct pool locally (i.e. within a two-hour drive each way) so we do not tend to have a very high percentage of part-timers teaching classes, and our full time temporary faculty are very involved in the university, teaching both intro and upper level classes. All faculty, with the exception of some of the professional programs for which the demand is so high they only teach in their majors, teach core curriculum classes on a regular basis, often with the core classes the majority of their teaching load. But I know from reading the comments of Facebook friends who are cobbling together part time teaching and full time other jobs how dispiriting it can be, and I am not sure what can be done to alleviate this problem.
One of the things would be to convince our state legislatures that tax cutting is less important than having a well educated work force for attracting businesses to the state (see: Kansas, Brownback). "We can't afford it" is the stupidest thing I think I have ever heard. "We choose not to afford it" is the way it should be phrased. And that, of course, is true for all levels of education and all other services that provide a social good. This is the elephant in the room in almost all of these discussions. The bloat is almost never at the instructional level in any school system but the bloat of high administrators' salaries (where it is an issue) is used to justify cutting payments overall and then you need more to pay an administrator because the job he or she is doing just got that much harder, and you have to bribe them to stay!
The other thing that was talked about in the column was the cause and effect issue. If we have good students coming in, we as faculty are more likely to see them in the office asking questions, pursuing research opportunities, etc. They are more likely to take on ambitious projects and be committed enough to seek out internships. Yes, this is true, and those students who come to us are a wonder to teach. But there are a lot more in the middle, not the ones who are angry that they are in university in the first place, but the ones who occasionally get enthusiastic about a book they have read, or a subject that is really intriguing. That moment of enthusiasm is the one that is important to recognize and nurture. That student can be lost to education if a professor shuts him or her down (as happened to some of the people who wrote to the NY Times). But that student also can be caught up by a professor's (teacher's) enthusiasm and if given some support of an emotional and/or intellectual nature, will benefit tremendously, thinking well of that professor, perhaps the school, and hopefully the whole concept of education for the rest of his or her life.
That is the experience we hope for all our students; that is the connection I will be celebrating this afternoon as I march across campus and sit on the uncomfortable folding chairs in the blazing sun, hoping that sun doesn't turn into hail with little warning.
Congratulations, graduates!
And comments, as always, are welcome below.