What does it mean to be a university student?

"Neither my undergraduate nor my Master's experiences imprinted themselves on my heart and in my life . . . . I wasn't heavily involved in anything and I feel no special connection to either of my alma maters.  And I don't feel like a bad person and I don't feel regretful for having walked a different path."

A reader made the above comment in response to a recent blog post by John Gardner (John is the senior fellow for the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and blogs about issues relating to undergraduate education and the first-year experience).  

The poster goes on to make the point that, as educators, we have to be careful not to project our own experiences or aspirations onto the students we associate with (e.g. assume that because our undergraduate experience played out in a particular way, that all the students we work with should have the very same type of experience).  This is an important caution because I see colleagues making this kind of assumption (and catch myself as well) quite frequently.  We are not in the business of cloning ourselves or dictating that all students approach their education in the same way we did.  But, there is a troubling tone to the comment and it seems to suggest that students have the right to be invisible members of a campus and make no real contribution to what takes place there.

A university is, by definition, a community. Accordingly, when a student makes a choice to enroll at a particular institution, they are not just agreeing to take classes and complete assignments.  More importantly, they are making a commitment to become a member of the university community by participating in its practices and upholding its ideals. Universities always have (and I hope always will)  be gathering places where scholars can come together to both learn from and teach one another. 

Although students will sometimes choose to be "uninvolved and uncommitted," it seems slightly selfish to do nothing more than attend class lectures, complete assignments, and then get out without making any attempt to invest in or contribute to the community of which they are a part. And, it runs counter to the commitment they made when they decided to "matriculate" at the university.

I'm not saying that every student needs to be in a campus club or go to the football games. What I am saying is that there are diverse ways to become involved on a campus, from service-learning, to studying with classmates, to working in the on-campus burger joint. And, one of our roles as educators is to encourage and facilitate participation by all students in our campus communities. That may be particularly true of those students who come onto campus with an initial tendency towards being "uninvolved" and "uncommitted." The key, and maybe this is what the poster was getting at, is in extending those invitations in skillful, compassionate, and respectful ways. 

As an aside, it would also help if we stopped "recruiting" students in the traditional ways (e.g. "look at our nice dorms," "we'll give you a laptop," "we have great tailgates") and did a better job of helping them understand what kind of commitment they are making when they make the choice to come to our campuses. "Recruiting" needs to be balanced with a healthy dose of "educating," before they've even stepped on campus or registered for their first class.

Dilemmas and the difficulty of being wise

A few months ago I blogged about the concept of "practical wisdom" and linked to a TED talk by Barry Schwartz in which he describes this idea.

I started reading Schwartz' book earlier this week and have enjoyed it thus far.  One of the arguments made by Schwartz and co-author Ken Sharpe is that the rules we make to "simplify" or systematize decisions or actions will often fail us.  It was an idea that made perfect sense to me and, at least once, I had the thought "People (not me) are stupid.  Why can't they be more wise and stop holding on to their rules so rigidly."  Then, today, I had an experience that reminded me how hard it is to be wise.  

Each year at this time, my department interviews and hires a large number of undergraduate peer mentors to work with freshmen students during the coming academic year.  Like most departments, we have a formal application process and have developed policies to help us make decisions about who to hire (e.g. minimum GPA of 3.4, completed core first-year requirements, not a felon, etc.).  Most of the time the system we have put in place is actually quite helpful in (1) winnowing the list and (2) making distinctions between applicants.  One of the "requirements" that we have held to in the past is that anyone we hire must be able to attend our "mandatory" week-long training workshop held a few weeks before the fall semester begins.  We do this because we believe that the training we provide is beneficial for the students we hire and (I think) that a student's attendance at five days of eight hour training is a sign that they are committed to our program.  Anecdotally, I can say that the things peer mentors learn during this week and the social connections they forge with their peers and supervisors are critical to their success and the overall success of our program.  So, in general, it is a pretty good policy to require peer mentors to attend.

Well, about an hour ago we interviewed a candidate who I feel comfortable saying is the strongest applicant we have had among nearly 100 that we have interviewed.  He is a deep learner.  He is personable and has an almost unmatched social ease.  He has remarkably pure intentions for wanting to work for us.  And, his father is a faculty member here who has been a friend of our department for years.  The problem--he is getting married on August 12th and will be away from campus until August 20th, and our "mandatory" training begins on August 17th.  

So, my colleagues on the selection committee have a couple of choices:  (a) We stick to our guns and let him know that, because he cannot attend the training, we can't offer him a position; or (b) We make an exception to the policy and hire him.

I'm torn.  I actually knew before he interviewed this afternoon, that he had a conflict with the training.  I hoped that the interview would be lousy and it would be an easy decision for us.  We weren't that lucky.  What complicates things even more is the fact that we have told other applicants with similar conflicts  (far less prepared, impressive, and qualified applicants mind you) that we couldn't hire them.  We even told another student, who was a peer mentor for the last year, that because she wouldn't be back from her study abroad trip until after training was over, that she couldn't come back and work for us.

So, now that I'm facing a situation that requires the type of "practical wisdom" Schwartz calls for, I'm realizing that it's not just stupid people that struggle with these things, it's all of us.  I really have no idea what we're going to do, but here are some things that I think will guide us.

1.  Past experience.  There was a time when we didn't have a hard and fast "you can't miss training" policy.  It would be instructive for us to think about students who missed training and then look at how effective they were in their role as peer mentors.  If, in the past, we've gotten burned then we might take that as fair warning.  If, on the other hand, there have been highly effective peer mentors that missed all or part of training, maybe we need to rethink our policy (and design better training).

2.  Empathy & perspective.  Seeing the situation from a variety of vantage points (the student we interviewed, the student on study abroad that we decided not to take back for next year, the loyal faculty member father) will help us create a clearer picture of the nuances of the situation.  And, it will likely help us be more "human" in our decision.  For example, how would we feel if we were "punished" for getting married and taking a honeymoon (which is a particularly interesting question for us to ask given the emphasis our university's sponsoring institution places on marriage and family).  How would we feel if we were a peer mentor who had cancelled a family vacation or ended an internship early in order to attend training, only to find out that one of our peers was given the luxury of coming three days late?

3.  Thinking outside of the box.  It's very possible that we are thinking about this in overly black-and-white terms.  It may not be an issue of hire him or don't hire him.  Rather, there are probably a lot of ways that he could become involved with our department, without being hired as a peer mentor (the policy only applies to peer mentors).  For example, he could work in a volunteer capacity, could work in a specialized role under the direction of a staff member (he brings a great deal of media and technology experience with him that we could likely use), he could work as a research assistant for a semester and then become a peer mentor.

So, for the four people that actually read this blog (and that might be generous), what would you do?  Are there other guiding principles we could use to help us in our decision?

The University of Utah: From athletic rags to riches

Earlier this week the PAC 12 Conference announced a multi-billion dollar TV deal with ESPN and Fox.  The deal stands as the richest and most lucrative network tv contract a college athletic conference has ever struck and will bring member insitutions better than $20 million annually.  The news was particularly exciting for fans of the University of Utah because "the U." will become a member of the PAC 12 this fall.  Although Utah won't receive their full share of the tv earnings for a few more years, it is a big victory for their athletic department, not only because of the money that it will bring in, but for the exposure it will give the department and the university.

This week's announcement is just another part of the broader story of Utah's rise from a relatively unknown and uncelebrated athletics program (they were part of the unheralded Western Athletic Conference until about a decade ago when they moved to the equally mediocre Mountain West Conference) to the upper echelons of college athletics.  It's the sort of story every athletics program wishes they could tell and what drives the "athletics arms race" described by Murray Sperber in his book Beer and Circus.  So, why do some schools make it while others plod along year after year, barely keeping their heads above water?  Why was Utah different?

1.  Great Leadership:  Utah's department of athletics is led by one of the very best athletic administrators in the country, Chris Hill.  Not only is Hill a smart and hard worker, he understands the landscape of college athletics and academia having worked in a number of capacities at the University across the last 25 years, both inside and outside of the athletics department.

2.  Patience:  Utah's rise didn't happen overnight.  Hill has been at the helm for the last 24 years and it's taken that long to build the sort of program that exists at the U.  Plenty of other programs have had successful years and high-profile athletes, but Hill's teams have been consistently competitive over a long period of time and built a solid base of success and stability.

3.  Luck:  Utah owes a lot of its success to the instability among athletic conferences over the last few years.  Because of the amount of movement and shuffling over the last few years, conferences were looking to expand and bring in new members, so "mid-majors" like Utah were actually part of the conversation.  Without that kind environment, teams like Utah would never have been asked to sit at the table.

4.  Stability:  While the men's basketball team at Utah has been in turmoil for the last 7 years or so, the rest of the department has been pretty stable.  The wildly successful gymnastics team has been led by the same coach for the last 36 years (the only coach the program has ever had), the women's soccer coach is in his 10th year, the current football coach has been part of the program for nearly 20 years, and the women's basketball staff has been stable for the last decade.  That kind of consistency translates into success--success that big-time conferences notice and want to be associated with.

5.  The right market: Other than the Utah Jazz (who aren't likely to be fan favorites in the near future because of the rebuilding they are undergoing), University of Utah athletics are the biggest thing in sports for residents of Salt Lake City and the state as a whole.  So, the amount of fan support is where it needs to be and the U. isn't splitting crowds with major league franchises or other large educational institutions.

Of course, it's possible that the best idea in this post is #3 above and that Utah's ascendency has been due to nothing more than luck and timing.  I'm willing to admit that, but it's worth looking at their story to see what might be learned.