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Making a Difference–Or, Falling Forward
By Charles Peek
Pretty much, alumni organizations exist to tap graduates who’ve gone on to financial success for possible contributions to the university’s sports and academic programs. There’s some fun along the way, there are some memories shared, there are contacts made in college continued into the world of work. But mostly it’s about raising dollars.
There’s not much wrong with this. It depends to some degree on feeling your school was special, and it probably just seemed special to you. There aren’t many really special colleges and odds are you didn’t go to one. But there’s no reason to object to the feelings that prompt this special sentiment.
At Kearney’s last Band Day, I felt a certain pride in the local high school band. Such pride has no reason except for the “special” school or band or club or dog being “ours”. Still, it’s been my experience that, for most people, if you can’t feel anything special about your school, your nutty uncle, your mom’s pie, your pair of blue jeans, well you are not likely to ever move on to feel any empathy for other’s pride in their school, their uncle, their mom, their attire—or their country or religion.
The genius of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is the ending he struggled to write…the final emblem of love expanding beyond kith and kin, how suffering can transform what began at home into something greater, more encompassing. As G. K. Chesterton noted, “Thou shalt not kill” did not begin in a social contract, real or hypothesized; it began at the holy place and grew outward, encompassed what was outside the holy place. Or, if you will, grew to see the holiness of other places.
So, I’m not writing with any ax to grind against rah-rah. It’s fine in its place. But I noted something else in reading the last issue of UNK Today, the magazine of the alumni association of the school where I taught the longest. Its purpose may be to curry donations from wealthier alums, but its pages are full of the accomplishments of those who make the university worth giving to—those who went on to be artists or writers, to run down-ticket political campaigns, to be the unheard prophets in their own country.
Even when the university is not very true to its central mission—a focus most schools lack today—it can’t quite get away from what makes the institution worthwhile. The boy who won the writing contest won’t get half the attention of the kid who came in sixth in the relay. The girl who learned how the political system really works won’t receive any of the accolades of the girl who went off to a lucrative job with a financial institution. But they are the ones that even alumni magazines end up highlighting because they are the ones who embody what a university is supposed to be about.
I’ve taken my bruises in the fights with those who think a university should be just one thing. A university by definition is many things. But if it is a little universe of its own there must be something central to it that holds the many other things together.
I was glad my high school taught drivers’ education, but no one I think would argue that turning out drivers is the purpose of a secondary school. In a very small way, I helped many career programs receive their accreditation. That does not mean I think a university exists to turn out business managers or school administrators. (Among whose ranks, in any event, the “product” is sometimes nothing to shout about! I’m thankful to be friends with or related to some of the really exceptional superintendents and business managers, but their excellence simply highlights how seldom excellence seems to visit those fields.)
So, the university’s real business is to teach X…we always want to supply our pet noun as the object of the verb. But we would be better stopping short. The university’s real business is to teach! As Chaucer put it, to gladly teach and gladly learn!
But what does teaching mean? It is not simply presenting facts about something—about anything. About how many lines are in a sonnet or what items should appear on a business ledger or what number an element occupies on the atomic chart. If you don’t know how to put the concept of “accounts receivable” together with the concepts “asset” and “liability” then you aren’t teaching or learning in that field. If you don’t know how form affects substance, it will soon be apparent you neither taught nor learned writing or any other art. If you mastered all the supposed age-appropriate learning stages but don’t know anything about how schools work, then you didn’t teach or learn how to be an educator.
In other words, teaching and learning are complex arts. In my experience, they involve radical changes in mind and heart that produce clear thinking and passionate engagement… it is clear thinking and passionate engagement that constitute a valuable education whether you encounter them in physics or sociology or library science or industrial technology or medieval history…and most students don’t come to school with clear thinking and passionate engagement already mature and happily married.
Among those who embodied the worth of a college education, at least so far as one could learn from the latest issue of the alumni magazine, there were these notables:
Jillian Tangeman Wenburg, touted for her completion of an interdisciplinary degree in English and History.
Elaine Marie Nelson Blansett, teaching nearby in college programs focused on the west, natives, and gender issues.
Jessica Haverman Witte, for a massive art project “Seed the Change” which is part of the first public works project funded by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts.
Kirk Ramsey, who just received a $5,000 Dinsdale Excellence in Teaching award
Jay Dostal, former UNK football player, now award-winning principal of Kearney High School
Virginia “Bunny” Wattles, one of whose paintings graces the cover of the magazine.
The late Don Welch, “poet, friend, philosopher,” for the lasting impression of his poetry and teaching
All these in just one issue!
There are certainly many others the issue notes, among them the professionals and entrepreneurs who have found financial success, and good for them. But the names I list here are among those I either knew or taught and whose work and life exemplify one of the great enterprises of the ages: teaching and learning. That is the heart of the difference college should make.
(This may or may not be why ‘making a difference’ is the school’s new motto. In any event, despite its hubris, it is a significant improvement over the old motto, based on our antelope mascot: ‘join the herd’!)
No one begrudges anyone who seems to find a straight career path to success…if it is really successful at the end…if it doesn’t end in the angst or cynicism of people who have had too much at the expense of people who have had too little.
Gladly teaching and learning, clear thinking and passionate engagement—these are the marks of—well, call it what you will: knowledge, wisdom, intellect, smarts. As Isaac Asimov somewhere noted, democracy is NOT the proposition that my ignorance is as good as your know-how! (Of course, Asimov is one of those elites that believe in books.)
But as any “smart” person knows, “success” in the arts of thinking and communicating, in the critical skills it takes to be creative, never comes in a straight path. If you want clear thinking and passionate engagement, your path will lead you to lots of stumbles, lots of steep climbs, lots of seeking new routes. Scholarship committees may seldom award those ups and downs, but wisdom recognizes them as her parents.
The difference between the thinker and learner and everyone else is not found in never falling. It is found in learning to fall forward!
Kearney, Nebraska
November 14, 2016
PS
If my theme here seems to hint at future blogs considering our current political terrain, I’ll just say now that this hint will probably come to fruition!
capeek 