BACK TO SCHOOL

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2023 September Blog                                              By Chuck Peek

Recently, Nancy and I had the pleasure of being present in the peanut gallery for the gathering of notables for the Groundbreaking ceremonies for the future Rural Health Education Building on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Kearney for the education of rural health care providers. That’s a lot of “for”s, and in that FOR-est, lots of trees can get lost. That’s why we might want to go “back to school.”

At the groundbreaking we were assured by the speakers that this was, indeed, an historical event, a project that will make a profound difference in our state, a unique cooperation of all the colleges at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and our campus, a life-changer for rural Nebraska for decades to come. We were promised by more than one speaker that 20 years from now we would still be remembering this occasion, and at nearly 81 years of age I was ready live out that promise.

It was a pleasure to be present because, in my judgment, all those things are true: it was an historic event and could have many benefits for our citizens and did come about as a result of a unique coalition of forces, all of which would, today, be rare for either state or nation.

The speaker who carried the most weight was Jeffrey Gold, Chancellor of the Medical Center. He spoke knowledgeably to the desperate need for rural health care professionals, and he was articulate in his promotion of the project the new building will house. Other speeches either followed suit, or were the kind of “thank you’s” that have to be made on such occasions, or were of the “aw shucks, ain’t this grand” variety.

One of the secrets to holding public office in Nebraska—or at least holding it for very long—is that you have to make a whole lot of folks accept you as their neighbor. All too often the neighborliness presumes some not very flattering stereotypes of what we rural Nebraskans are like.

There was, of course, a lot of self-congratulation. That doesn’t bother me much—most of the efforts that go into this kind of achievement are unsung, so if they can’t be sung a bit on this kind of occasion, they never will be sung. Fine, congratulations, even self-congratulatory speeches, those are to be expected. Most people don’t get very far beyond needing to be thanked, especially if they are putting up money.

Our Chancellor was neither articulate nor inarticulate—just a bit halting as he moved from script to impromptu comments, but he was passionate, he hit all the right notes, and he was a gracious host. On the whole, though, what disturbed the celebration was what was not said, or, in not being said, was covered up with statements that pretended things were so that simply aren’t. And those things not only need said, but the future fulfillment of the project’s promise may well depend on looking at what was overlooked or miscolored.

In one respect at least, rural Nebraska may not be so different from rural anywhere else or from urban anywhere for that matter. Under pretty much the same conditions, same pressures, same abundance or dearth of resources, some communities or regions flourish while others dwindle or perish. Case in point, some communities where there has been an influx of immigrants flourish while others, succumbing to unreasoned fears and antipathies, perish. One or two places of note met the influx head on, welcomed and accommodated their new neighbors, and moved on; equally one or two fought the new reality—and declined.

Similarly, almost the whole of rural Nebraska has suffered from a lack of adequate health care, be it physical, emotional, or mental. Some of the figures cited in the speeches spoke of this being the case in all but three of our rural counties. There is more than one cause for this, and in a gathering such as the groundbreaking I don’t expect speakers to target the political reasons. But political reasons there are aplenty!

Some of the decline in the availability of care came from our former governor at first refusing, and then when mandated, dragging his feet in expanding Medicaid, which cost our state millions and forced the closing of not a few facilities. Some of the decline came from causes not at all related to health care itself, causes such as anti-immigrant fervor as I just alluded to, fervor whipped up by some of those who supported this health care project. Some of it came from a greater interest in being able to carry a weapon than in assuring the safety of our kids. That’s politics, and you don’t expect it to come up at a celebration like this. Fine.

But one of the principle causes for decline has nothing to do with politics, at least not directly, and everything to do with what has happened to and is happening to education, something that might be germane on a university campus. That something has to do with our culture and what it values and what creates one kind of culture versus another; that is, it has to do with what fundamentals are so valued as to create a culture that cares, cares in this case about health and health care and so, necessarily, cares about the public good and civil behavior. And the very campus on which we met, as is also true of thousands of others across the United States, has often under-valued or even forsaken those fundamentals. (As a former department chair, I can tell you horror stories about the injustice of vertical cuts!)

Good questions improve the possibility of good answers. We might encourage asking just what qualities of heart and mind form a life-giving culture? The answer is not at all obscure: Critical Intelligence, Creative Imagination, and a feeling both for personal dignity and public good. Once those take hold, form the ethos of a people, then every other skill imaginable—from beekeeping to bookkeeping—can contribute, but no skill set is worth much or will last long without that embedding of cultural values, embedded not through brainwashing but through reasoned and spirited discussions informed by history, language, literature and other works of the imagination, and philosophy.

So where are those taught, where are they to be found and transmitted? One answer: anywhere! But that is not very helpful, for what can happen anywhere doesn’t usually happen just anywhere, certainly not among a larger number of people and over a greater amount of space. In those conditions, where is the somewhere?

Well, we know that civilizations have risen among oral cultures as well as, later, in literate cultures. Orality or literacy or, now, orality and literacy are the pre-condition of transmission of values. Speaking and listening, writing and reading, and because numbers are also a language, then calculating and measuring, and because no one can experience everything, then from the ability to discern, to imagine, from access to the past and vision for the future.

The old fashioned (and not quite comprehensive) catch-phrase was “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” It is valuable to know the temperature when things melt, but you can learn how to read and write without knowing that; you can’t know that without knowing how to read and write, speak and listen, calculate and measure, imagine and evaluate.

Where, then, in our world today, are those fundamentals taught? Granted that they aren’t taught at all where they are not well-taught, still the general truth is that students learn them by taking courses in them, often in departments like history and economics, art and literature, writing and debating. You put learners in choruses or on stages or at easels, in laboratories or on field trips or at telescopes. You acquaint them with what the world knows and how it came to know it. And you help them to understand that, if there is no trust in truth, beauty, and goodness, then the rest of knowledge can easily become destructive, pernicious, soul-sapping. Knowledge without values gives us the Nazi guard in the play who read Goethe as he processed prisoners through the gate to the lethal showers.

But for some time now, both in our colleges and in our pre-K to 12 schools, the insistence on and promotion of those skills and the places they are taught have received less honor, less support, less defense. Students have been discouraged from studying them (just as teachers have been discouraged from teaching them), and then the budgets for those areas get cut because, lo and behold, fewer students took the courses their culture told them were not worth taking. Go figure!

But to only look at the enrollments in arts and humanities classes means you will miss most of the picture. Just for instance, most of the singers in the chorus aren’t majoring in music. The chorus may well have brought them to campus, but once here they major in and enroll in courses all across the curriculum. Cut out the chorus, and everyone suffers.

School administrations, at all levels, have made costly decisions in favor of lopsided curricula or vocational education and at the expense of the foundations. The moment budgets are tight, the foundations are the first to suffer; the minute the school or school system must put its trust in values or in expediency, it opts for expediency. It houses a history department, but it doesn’t consult history; it houses an art department but it tells students that they should major in “what will make them a living.” And it blames the decline in the numbers of students resident at its ever-larger campus on everything but the cumulative effect of its own decisions.

To be fair, however, much of the blame for what is coming down right and left across the country lies with those who were supposed to be teaching all those foundational things. For nearly two generations now, many of the faculty in the humanities and fine arts adopted discipline-specific jargons and then mistook learning those jargons for learning to think, to feel, to function. Post-modernism often left students with the impression that no idea was superior or inferior to any other, that a phone book was as much literature as the Pardoner’s Tale, that they were consumers in a game where the customer is always right.

Now, these declines, these disasters, are not universal. While some universities have eliminated teaching almost everything foundational, in other universities foundational studies thrive. They are taught well and students flock to them because they are challenged to grow mentally and emotionally. Sadly, though, among the smaller, regional universities – or the pop-up universities that claimed the title just because they started teaching a lot of different disciplines—the foundational studies are more likely to decline (or be eliminated) rather than thrive.

Even those differences, however, point out that the declines are not the result of some immutable fate…they are chosen by the administrations and faculties of the schools themselves. And those choices stem from the toxic culture that grows where only power, prestige, privilege, and popularity are the reigning values. They stem from citizens who will give a half a billion dollars to renovate a stadium but not a tenth of that to fund the university system.

What was not said at the groundbreaking was that the university is undermining the potential success of the very programs it would like to promote. Specifically, its layoffs of faculty (based on enrollment declines it engineered) will make it less likely that its purpose, a major upgrade in rural health services, is likely to succeed, at least in part, possibly at all. Whose imagination will be captured by the chance to serve in dwindling rural environments if their own values are mostly those of the reigning culture of greed and ignorance?

Would fulfilling the purpose for the new programs training people to provide health care mean classes in specific areas? In, say, STEM? Of course. No one wants their diagnosis to depend on a medtech who has been poorly trained. But without the foundational studies that turn out students dedicated less to making a living and more to pursuing fruitful and useful lives, without graduates excited about shaping the society in terms of values rather than empty ideas of success and failure, all the specifics pertaining to, say, dental hygiene, will not produce the desired end. They are a necessary but not a sufficient cause of the desired result.

The Groundbreaking lauded a “Nebraska Way” that supports faculty and staff; and the very people lauding that are busily closing departments and firing faculty that aren’t protected by tenure. And here is the irony: while there is not as much dead wood as critics yammer about, there is always some deadwood among faculty, but the people fired will not likely be among them. We’ll be losing the young and their promise for the future, not those whose legacy is the past.

And I’ll bet this: we won’t be firing the host of assistant chancellors and assistant deans that have proliferated in our whole system for forty years or any of the top-heavy staff of a central administration of dubious value to any of the campuses and dubious commitment to our state and its educational system.  And we won’t sell off any university property where we could build yet more buildings rather than, not as a last but as the first resort firing the life-blood of a real educational experience that can conceive of, commit to, and pursue the public good. And we won’t take 10% off the stadium renovation to support the university it serves. And we won’t dare look at what kinds of courses continue to be taught when vital courses in the Liberal and Fine Arts fall by the wayside?

And, oh, by the way, the Admiral who sought to shape up the ship by strategic strikes that endanger the hull of the ship? He’s leaving for a bigger salary. I’d be careful if I were the university hiring him.

Kearney, Nebraska

September 29, 2023

Next blog: most likely the All Saints “In Memoriam” at the end of October…you know, Halloween! (If that is not frequent enough to suit you, go read Charles Pierce or catch George Ayoub’s weekly column in The Nebraska Examiner, or follow the “nitrates” story in Flatwater Press!)