Kids Rule

Author Susan Engle recently wrote a column for the New York Times that she begins with the following observations: 

In a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. 

Sadly, armies of education "reformers" from across our country's ever-narrowing political spectrum (middle-right to far-right on education issues) fail to see the futility of anti-intellectual approaches to teaching. The high-stakes testing industry generates mediocrity and offers a remedy: more high-stakes testing.

Engle's essay -- Let Kids Rule the School -- describes an experiment in which eight public-school students in western Massachusetts were enabled to develop their own curriculum, in which their learning was directed toward questions. They had to figure out how to direct that learning, guided by teachers and advisors, but not spoon-fed answers.

Democracy and Higher Education

As part of the BSU Blogfest in the third week of March, I was among the campus bloggers who responded to a common set of questions throughout five days of blogging. In my responses to questions about leadership (Day 3) and the future of our university (Day 5), I expressed some concerns about the ability of a growing university to live up to rhetorical commitments we have made to meaningful social change.

Subsequently, I was encouraged by a few developments during the fourth week of March. The first of these was the initial meeting of the committee that will be implementing our university's commitment to becoming certified as a Fair Trade University. The committee is led by students and also includes some dedicated members of both the faculty and administration. We agreed not to rush into the effort but to use the process to ensure that the program goes beyond "mere" certification to ensure transformation. We achieved a number of important things for a one-hour meeting. For me the most exciting is that something I call "coffee melt" (an alleged coffee substance made from concentrated robusta) will be disappearing from our campus catering menus. More important than that single step is the sense of common purpose around not only meeting the requirements of certification but also beginning seriously to transform our practices around consumption as a campus.

Later on the day of that committee meeting was an annual event known as Arts for Advocacy, organized by our university's Social Justice League. Students and other members of the community share visual and performing arts that advocate for various dimensions of justice. The diversity issues was impressive, but the common thread was a depth of commitment to justice and -- here is the important part -- critical thinking. With students -- and other community members -- of this caliber, a bright future is within reach.

This brings me to the third major encounter of the week -- a day-long meeting about democratic civic engagement. I was able to attend only the opening session, led by Dr. John Saltmarsh. He posed the question of whether civic engagement is a movement that is transforming higher education or whether higher education is transforming the movement into something that merely perpetuates existing structures and priorities. In other words, are universities co-opting social movements whose aims are deep transformation? On one level, the question is discouraging, but I was delighted to know that I am not alone in my misgivings, and that others have already been articulating them -- far better than I have.

Dr. Saltmarsh advocates building on what has become known simply as "civic engagement" to something more transformative, which he and his colleagues call "democratic (civic) engagement." In fact, he has co-authored something called the Democratic Engagement White Paper, which describes where the movement has been and what democratization would entail as both an end and a means within education. As the report argues:

[Democratic engagement] has significant implications for transforming higher education such that democratic values are part of the leadership of administrators, the scholarly work of faculty, the educational work of staff, and the leadership development and learning outcomes of students. It has epistemological, curricular, pedagogical, research, policy, and cultural implications. It adheres to the shared understanding that the only way to learn the norms and develop the values of democracy is to practice democracy as part of one's education. (p. 6) 

and

Civic engagement in the democratic-centered paradigm is intentionally political in that students learn about democracy by acting democratically. (p. 11) 

These are radical notions in that they seek to transform the educational enterprise at its roots. The university becomes not a center of knowledge and learning, but part of an ecological system of knowledge and learning. This transformation requires a lot of self-confidence on the part of academic leaders -- be they in the classroom or in administrative roles -- as they (we) move from the front of the room to the middle and sides. As faculty members become less "sage on the stage" and more "coach" and ultimately "co-learner" we have to trust the process and the community of learners of which we are a part. The discourse around civic engagement has already been moving many faculty members in this direction. What is new in the discourse around democratic engagement -- as I understand it -- is that the institutions themselves are challenged to move in a similar direction.

Coffee Timing

One of the most exciting features of the new Science & Mathematics Center at Bridgewater State University will be the Science on a Sphere (SoS) display. SoS was developed by NOAA and is currently installed in 61 locations throughout the world. It is a large, blank sphere onto which any kind of digital map -- including animated maps -- can be projected.

Many maps have already been created by NOAA itself and the community of SoS institutions, but one of the most exciting prospects for SoS will be the ability to create and display our own globes. Among the first projects I hope to undertake -- with the help of geography students, of course -- is the creation of globes showing the global distribution of coffee production. Because the coffee season shifts from place to place throughout the year, we can develop a series of projected globes that show current distribution of coffee harvest locations each month.

We will draw on a number of resources in the creation of such maps, but for now the Sweet Maria's coffee calendar is the most convenient and complete resource for learning about the timing of the harvest.

The Art of Cultivation

Those who know me well know that I'm always thinking about the farmers. Over the past week, I have been doing even more thinking about farmers than usual. It began last Friday, when I had a group of students with me for an EarthView program, and decided to stop by our local CSA farm with them. At first they just politely got out of the van and followed me, but once we were on the farm itself, we were transformed as our connection to the earth -- which up until a few moments prior had been mediated through tires and roads and buildings -- became palpable. We enjoyed a brief chat with Connie, one of the farmers and a long-time friend. Of course, the connection was made even more enjoyable by the ornery goats and wicked cute new lambs at the farm!

I have also been thinking about Alfredo, one of my very favorite coffee farmers, whom I had invited to our campus this semester. Had it not been for bureaucratic hurdles, he would be arriving next week. I am starting to work on next year, when I will visit his farm in Nicaragua in January, and will prepare the visa materials even before that!

What really got me thinking, though, was an article in Costco Connections magazine about Howard Schultz, who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Starbucks and its recent financial recovery. I combed the article for any reference to farms or farmers. Images of coffee beans are spread over all four stylish pages of the spread, but coffee farmers are not mentioned. And just as a picture framer might try to take credit for an attractive painting, Schultz congratulates himself repeatedly for improving the business by several changes that are very late in the chain of events: changes in roasting, in brewing, in decor, in barista training. As with a good picture frame, all of these matter, certainly. But none of these matters as much as the bean itself, and good beans do not appear by magic. They come from farmers.

We watched a film about farmers this week in which Freddy Rodriguez delivers a beautiful paean to farmers. The film is Bottle Shock, in which Rodriguez plays Gustavo Brambila, one of several California grape growers who helped to put Napa on the proverbial map with respect to wine. In Brambila's character, he complains to his boss, a farmer he views as a latecomer who he believes does not take the work seriously enough:

You have to have it in your blood. You have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails and the smell of the grape in the air you breathe. The cultivation of the vine is an art form. The refinement of its juice is a religion that requires pain, and desire, and sacrifice.

All of these thoughts were brewing while I attended an event known as Arts for Advocacy on our campus last night. Nikki, a student who has worked in a coffee shop and taken both of my coffee classes, is a leader in the fair-trade movement on our campus. She had told me that she would be reading a poem called "Campesino." I knew it would be good, but I was not prepared for how perfectly she echoed my own feelings about the people who make coffee -- and everything else we eat and drink -- possible.

Afterwards, when I congratulated her on the poem, she simply said, "Thank the farmers!"

The most important coffee cup at
Casa Hayes-Boh, a planter
created by a local ceramic artist.

The Kids Are Outside

NPS.GOV/NeBe

To compensate for posting a rather dystopic video about the future of teaching a couple of weeks ago, I am sharing Get Outside and Move (below), which was co-produced by the National Park Service and Third Eye. I learned about the video from Jason, a Third Eye volunteer and recent BSU graduate who uses the arts to do  creative and important work with youth in New Bedford.

The video has gotten the attention of Michelle Obama's Let's Move program, which advocates fitness through better connections to food and exercise. The video has the added attraction of revealing the students' great sense of pride in their community -- from its history and architecture to the beautiful lands and waters that surround New Bedford.

Race Counts

As readers of this blog will know from some recent posts, the spring following a decade year is a great time for geographers, as a variety of stories begin to emerge as geographers, other social scientists, and journalists begin to study new data from the census. The timing has been perfect for the geographic analysis class I am teaching this year, in which students use state-level data to practice some basic mapping, graphing, and presentation skills.

In the context of discussing some of the emerging stories Monday, my students asked some very cogent questions about race in the census -- both how it gets defined and why it is a subject of inquiry in the first place. Today, Morning Edition included a segment about race in the census from an Hispanic perspective, in which the very same questions were raised, and some interesting answers posed. I am not quite ready to agree with those who say race no longer exists, but I do agree that -- at a minimum -- its status as an arbitrary and shifting designation reduces its analytic power.

Still, a number of the stories being published this season do reflect geographic processes that cannot be completely disregarded. The sampling I presented to my students include a story about the Hispanic population in the U.S. reaching 50 million,  the increase of the rural Hispanic population of North Carolina. Closer to home is a Boston Globe article about growing minority populations in Massachusetts. Of course, the always-problematic term "minority" is now becoming absolutely nonsensical in many instances, often replaced by the oxymoron "majority-minority."

Even more interesting to me has been an On Point radio episode about a general reversal in patterns of African-American migration, as many descendants of people who moved north in the Great Migration close to a century ago are now moving south, often to suburban areas. The guests and callers tell an evolving and complex story of demographic change and how it plays out at the personal level. About 15 years ago, I wrote an article about the original "great migration" for a history encyclopedia. A later edition is still available in some academic databases.

Hayes-Bohanan, James. "Great Northern Migration." Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1901-1940. Ed. Robert F. Gorman. 6 vols. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2007. 

Japan Global Links

(C) 2002 - NGM

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short article about Commodore Perry's 1853 mission to Japan, which ended a period of determined isolation under the Shogun rulers, and is eventually credited with the end of the Shogun era. Writing in National Geographic (October 2002), Scott Elder describes the events in Last Stand at Edo Bay. Ben Griffiths also describes the Perry expedition in some detail.

The East Asian Library at UC-Berkley provides online access to its vast collection of Japanese Historic Maps, including an 1853 detail map of the coast that appears to depict this encounter (see below) and several world maps depicting Japanese cartographic understanding of the world at the time. To me, the great accuracy of these maps -- such as one called "Chikyu Bankoku Hozu" -- helps to correct a mis-perception I had about Japan's isolation. The decision to remain isolated was carefully taken by Shoguns who understood far more about the rest of the world than I previously realized. Elder's article explains why Japan's leaders decided to accept the U.S. overture at the time they did.

East Asian Library - UCB

Scarcely a generation later, a Japanese student actually studied at Bridgewater Normal School, which eventually became BSU, where I now teach. After leaving Bridgewater in 1877, Shuji Isawa went on to become an important leader in Japanese education. He befriended the geographer Alexander Graham Bell and became the first person to speak Japanese through a telephone! In the nearly century and a half since he was here, scores of Japanese nationals have enriched our campus as they completed their undergraduate education here. In recent years, a growing number of Bridgewater students have had the opportunity to study in Japan on short- and long-term programs.

By the late 20th century, of course, connections between the Japan and the United States -- and indeed between Japan and the entire world -- became increasingly intertwined as manufacturing has become almost unbelievably globalized. Thanks to the digital descendants of Mr. Bell's telephone -- among other innovations -- it is now possible for manufacturers to compete not for the sale of products but for control of each step of a  product's manufacture. As reported in Foreign Policy (and hundreds of other outlets in recent weeks), the tragic earthquake of March 11, 2011 has highlighted just how interdependent the world space-economy has become, as Japan now occupies a central position in many global supply chains.

According to a story in USA Today, Ford Motor Company is advising dealers not to order certain vehicles in black. Aside from the ironic contrast to Henry Ford's old saw about Model T color choices, this story is interesting as an example of the extreme complexity of global supply chains. Ever-increasing sophistication in transportation and communication technologies allow for intricately specialized manufacturing with remarkably short lead times. In this case, Ford uses special paint that in turn relies on special pigments -- in a supply chain with minimal inventories and rapid connections that link a customer back to original pigments a half-planet away with lead time of only a few weeks. It allows for a remarkable array of features to be delivered, but with equally remarkable vulnerability to interruption.

As reported by the Financial Times, it seems that the unbridled pursuit of cost-cutting has come at the cost of increased vulnerability to disruptions in ever-longer supply chains. It is common for products to be put together through Just-in-Time systems. The current disruptions in the automotive and electronic sectors that are resulting from the tragedy in Japan are extreme examples of what is becoming quite common across many sectors. Even minor regional disruptions can now have global reach.

For more information about Japan, the earthquake, relief efforts, and BSU responses, see the Japan Earthquake MaxGuide, maintained by our BSU Maxwell Library.

Where and When

Today we stopped by one of our favorite farm stands -- actually, it may now be the only one remaining in our town. Recalling that our town's Easter "sunrise" service will be held at the farm, we contemplated walking there. The service is fairly early in the morning but not right at sunrise, and though it is often chilly, the walk might do us some good. The geographic question quickly occurred to us: what time will sunrise be on Easter this year? Easter is a "movable" feast, so the first step was to confirm that it is on April 24 this year. This is nearly as late as it can be, and the latest is has been since 1943. (See the intricate details at timeanddate.com.)

I found the timeanddate.com site while trying to address the specific question of sunrise on April 24. I was pleased to see that I could find the answer based on Brockton, Massachusetts, the nearest city and one that actually used to be part of Bridgewater. Of course location is relevant, because the tilt of the earth and its rotation on its axis mean that latitude and longitude determine the time of sunrise on any given date. In the scheme of things, a distance of a few miles will not make a substantial difference in the timing of sunrise. Today, for example, the solar day has been (I'm writing this right at sundown) only 12 seconds longer in Boston than in Brockton. On Easter, therefore, we can be fairly confident that the sunrise for the purpose of our walk to the morning service will be at 5:50 -- plenty of time for a 1.5-mile walk to celebrate Easter with our friends and neighbors (especially since we have walked there and back for ice cream!)

A geographer should understand calendars and clocks better than I do; in our house, I leave any complicated discussions of dates to my favorite librarian. But I love being able to play around with the interface between time and space, and was delighted to see that the same site that showed me the available walking time before the Easter service also has a fully customizable version of the classic Geochron that my department keeps in our hallway. The Day and Night page allows a user to choose a location and a local time and date at that location, in order to display the planet as it would appear (if it were rolled out like a pie crust) at that time. The circle of illumination is shown, with dark areas "lit" according to mosaics of nighttime satellite images and daylight areas shaded according to biomes. Unlike other maps of this kind I have seen, it even shows zones of twilight. At any given moment, particular band at the edge of the circle of illumination is experiencing sunrise or sunset; the closer to the equator, the less time a particular point will spend in that band. I first realized this ("the sun sets quickly in the tropics") on a sunset "booze cruise" deep in the Amazon, at 9 degrees south latitude.

Given the opportunity to see how the earth and sun and moon were aligned at any point in time, I of course chose the most significant moment -- and one whose hour and minute I could remember: the moment I became a father. In that moment, I was not thinking about the subsolar point, the position of the moon, or the proximity to twilight (still a couple hours off). But all of that can be discerned below. When our girl was born, moon was above Madagascar, the sun above Hawaii, and we were spinning toward our first night as parents.

BSU Blogfest -- Day 5

Through the course of this BSU Blogfest week, I believe I have pointed to all of the blogs to which I actively contribute: those of myself, my family, my department, and my community. I invite readers to “subscribe” to any of the blogs I mentioned over the course of the week, plus one I neglected to include: The Bridgewaters Project.

The Bridgewaters Project is a life-long blog on which my favorite librarian and I are documenting our explorations – literal and figurative – of every place in the world we can find that bears the name “Bridgewater.” So far, the journey has taken us from  a sleepy college town in Virginia to a microbrewery in Vermont, to one of the most important crime scenes in U.S. history (a mile from our house) and a pivotal location in the history of treating the criminally insane (four miles from our house).

I will finish the week by pointing out that a much larger body of online work has accumulated on my faculty web site – a sprawling entity of hundreds of pages that predates my service at Bridgewater. In the mid-1990s, I was teaching part time at a school known – really – as the University of Texas at Brownsville in Partnership with Texas Southmost College. (A few months ago I blogged about very disconcerting events at my former campus.)

Anyway, I had a day job in McAllen and taught one night each week at UTB-TSC to a group of about 70 students, many of whom walked to class from Mexico (hence the “southmost” designation). I noticed that a lot of my students struggled with the same issues related to writing. Since my home and my day job were about 50 miles away, I did not have a way of spending much time working on it with them. There was a new thing called the World Wide Web, however, and I was learning bare-bones HTML to create something called a web page.

I decided that providing writing tips for my students would be a good use, so I posted that, along with a few links related to the course subject – environmental geography. Eventually the writing tips grew into a whole section, and the links grew and grew. When I came to Bridgewater, I copied the pages to the new web server here, and they gradually grew. A year later, I finished my dissertation on the Brazilian state of Rondonia, and posted the whole thing on the web site. The writing tips grew into something I called the “Not the 13th Grade” pages, which continues to be read by students, parents, and educators throughout the world (120,000 hits and counting).  (And I learned that students everywhere – not just along the border – tend to struggle with a couple dozen common writing problems.)

In fact, because I was fairly early in creating an academic web site (getting a lot of my content online prior to the emergence of Google), searches for many of the key words in the previous paragraph still bring readers to my site, helping to connect with a lot of interesting people. I still maintain and develop the site – particularly the section of about two dozen pages related to coffee – but in many ways I have found blogging to be a better (and usually easier) way to share ideas with my students and broader audiences.

And now for the final question of the Blogfest week.  I thank Cindy Kane for her leadership in organizing this terrific experiment, and I invite readers to explore some of the other excellent blogs that have been part of it!
What do you think BSU will be like in 10 years? 25 years?

One thing I know is that these years will go by more quickly than I can imagine. In some ways, I feel like I just arrived, even though far more than half the faculty have arrived since I started almost 14 years ago! The first answer I have to these questions is that in 10 years I will almost definitely still be working here, though if I am working at BSU (or whatever it is called then) in 25 years, it will likely be on a part-time basis.

Name
I only thought of making a small joke about further possible name changes because of the ongoing attention to our name change last year, but the idea of future name changes actually suggests a serious question. Throughout the United States, public higher education receives an ever smaller proportion of its financial support from the public (that is: students pay more, even though faculty and staff do not make more). Even as politicians increase demands for “accountability,” they also reduce funding. (These are politicians of both major political parties, coast to coast. In fact, in “liberal” Massachusetts, support has been near the bottom and cuts continue apace.) If the political interference continues to increase and the financial support continues to decrease, a name change would eventually be called for, so that state colleges and universities can throw off the shackles of their overseers. In that case, a name like “The University at Bridgewater” would be appropriate, and all the regulatory ties could be cut. This has not yet been seriously proposed in New England yet, but many Midwestern universities are starting to explore such changes. It could happen here.

Languages
Back to something more concrete and realistic: In ten years, BSU will rejoin the ranks of respectable universities by requiring its students to complete at least two years of a foreign language. Our previous requirement of one year was not adequate, but rather than improve it, we eliminated it. By “we,” I refer to the faculty and administration working here at the time the new Core Curriculum (an otherwise excellent model for general education) was instituted. I do not, however, mean “we” in the sense of a change I supported. I was among a vociferous group of professors who tried in vain to combat the skullduggery that brought us to our current, untenable status: a global university that does not require a foreign language. I cannot imagine that this will remain in place for another 10 years. Because we do tremendous work in many languages throughout the world, it is only a matter of time before we restore our good name in terms of a language requirement.

Bureaucracy


On another front, I am not as optimistic, and it is here that I will finally reveal the connection to a Terry Gilliam film at which I have hinted for the past couple of days. The movie is the 1985 farce Brazil, in which the country of Brazil is never mentioned. It is a preposterous dystopia, in which the characters go to absurd lengths to cope with the implausibly picayune demands of a bloated bureaucracy. I had watched the movie a couple of times – searching in vain for some direct reference to Brazil: samba, Rio, anything – before I understood (I think) the point of the film. 

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was produced in 1985, the same year in which Brazil’s military dictatorship collapsed. What had begun as a more conventional military dictatorship in 1964 (which then “hardened” in 1967) eventually became a bureaucratic regime of ever-increasing complexity and – ultimately – paralysis. Whenever someone found a way around a rule, a new rule would be imposed. The result was bureaucratic authoritarianism – a particularly ossified form of bureaucracy. You can look it up – it is  a real, distinct organizational form first identified by Guillermo O’Donnell. Eventually the Brazilian people developed a way of coping. Whenever a rule prevented people from doing what needed to be done, they would find a “jeito” – a way around. The phrase emerged, “Sempre tem jeito” – there is always a way, by which well-intentioned people can agree to work around bureaucratic impediments to what they need to do.  For every jeito there would develop a new rule and for every new rule a new jeito.

As our campus has grown, I have witnessed a proliferation of procedures, each of which has a purpose and a history and a justification, but which collectively create a kind of paralysis. It is a problem that has been recognized, and I have been part of quite a few conversations – and even a task force – aimed at streamlining our procedures and relationships. Many claim that the problem is inevitable given our growing size, but I am too much an optimist to accept that.

I cannot predict the future, but I would suggest that in 10 years, we will either have figured out a cultural change that removes this burden, or we will have become completely paralyzed by a growing set of interlocking rules. Meanwhile, I take every opportunity I can to suggest that my colleagues watch Brazil! Eventually, the Brazilian people triumphed and now live in a vibrant, rapidly improving country, the envy of the world in many respects. We can do the same.

BSU Blogfest -- Day 4

Community Blogs

Earlier this week, I’ve shared academic blogs, family blogs, and commercial blogs to which I contribute. It is fitting that on this fourth day of BSU Blogfest, when the theme is community, that I should mention a couple of blogs I set up for my community – one for my church and one for the neighborhood in which I live. Both are 365-day-a-year communities that are distinct from my work at BSU, but both are also intertwined with BSU in various ways. I will mention a third community blog, linking BSU (BSC at the time) to Haiti.

First Parish

About a decade ago, I created a web site for my church – First Parish Church Unitarian-Universalist, Bridgewater. It worked pretty well, but as the church got busier, I found I was the bottleneck for any information going online, and as my responsibilities at the college grew, I neglected the church web site, until eventually a fellow parishioner took it over (for which I’m still grateful). The congregation is small but terribly busy, and eventually it became clear that a web site with a “web master” was not an effective way to keep information about the church and its doing up to date. Enter the blog: with the permission of our Parish Committee (essentially, our volunteer board), I staked out some space on Blogspot.  I invested some time up-front to overcome one of the major difficulties with this type of blog: if it does not have content, nobody will read it. But if nobody is reading it, the motivation to add content is reduced. So I took a leap of faith and posted a lot of articles for very few readers. The blog has not exactly “taken off” yet, but it does seem to have reached a critical mass. More important than the number of readers at this point is the number of blog authors – I still do more than half the posting, but other church leaders are starting to post as well, so I am confident this will become a solid forum for – and window into – our church community.

Bridgewater Center Neighborhood Association

I have the great privilege – more-than-occasional annoyance of living adjacent to the BSU campus. We chose this location quite deliberately, as we have almost always lived within a mile or two of work, and the ability for both adults in a family to walk to work is all-too rare in these days of sprawl. The benefits are many and the problems – in our opinion – are solvable if effective communication and cooperation strategies are used. Our blog – more active in warm seasons than cold – is a proverbial example of attempting to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  There is plenty of each to work on!

Help. Hope. Haiti.

I was in Nicaragua with students – including a Haitin-American student – when the horrors of Haiti’s earthquake became known last year. Other BSC/U students were in Belize, both groups on the other side of Haiti from our home base. Because of the amazing proliferation of internet and phone technologies, the two groups – each of which included students who had traveled on the other trip the previous year – started to hatch plans for doing something about the disaster.  When we got back to campus, the ideas and connections campus- and community-wide grew, leading to a blog that ended up being relatively short-lived in its active use. The Help. Hope. Haiti. project won an Impact Award last year, and more importantly raised thousands of dollars and educated hundreds of community members about the many realities of 2010 Haiti.

Readers who got here from a BSU Blogfest link might be seeing only this post. If so, please explore the archives of over 300 articles, most with photos, maps, and or links to still more information! Meanwhile, I invite readers to read my thoughts on today’s theme: the BSU community itself.
In what ways is BSU a community?  In what ways is our community strong and in what ways can it improve? What does “your BSU experience” mean to you?

When I was completing my Ph.D., I applied for very few academic positions. I had a private industry job that I did not consider permanent, but I enjoyed it very much, as my wife enjoyed her library job. Our intention was eventually to move in pursuit of a permanent academic position (or better yet, two such positions), but we were in no rush. I therefore only applied to schools where I could really envision myself working, and could not picture myself spending one extra minute in the cut-throat world of R-1 universities (where I was getting my degree), I mostly looked at smaller colleges. I had attended UMBC when it had about 8,000 students, so I could envision myself at both small and medium-sized schools up to that approximate size.

It may be a cliché to suggest that the relatively small size of the campus – particularly when we arrived in 1997 – contributed to a strong sense of community, but I will suggest it anyway. I felt welcomed and well-connected to various parts of the campus within a very short period of time. Since I began the job days after becoming a father (and months before my wife Pamela began her work on the campus), these connections were especially valuable and continue to be. During my service as department chair, I became even more deeply aware of a number of people on the campus I could count on in difficult situations.

It is also a cliché to suggest that the growth of a campus makes connections and community more difficult. I do not actually believe that, at least not in simple terms. Certainly, growing size means knowing relatively fewer colleagues or classmates well. What is more important is the sense of mission – of wanting to contribute. That is still quite strong here, perhaps even stronger than when I arrived, as being here is far less likely to occur by accident or default than it once was. BSU is populated mainly by people who want to be here, and who want to do the best learning they can. As with the Haiti example above, I am constantly impressed by – and energized by – most of our students.

Sadly, the word “most” is necessary – and this is the area for continued improvement. Most students, faculty, and staff members are at BSU because they have chosen to be, and it is reflected in the respect, commitment, and patience they exhibit.  For me, it remains difficult to understand what to do with the outliers – people who seem to have arrived by mistake. In some cases, these folks simply do not contribute much, but in others, they actually undermine the contributions of others.

As somebody who resides in the broader community just outside the campus, I see this as one of the biggest challenges we face. For many people in the town and region, the university is defined by the two percent or so who routinely disrespect the neighborhood in which the campus is situated. The importance of this is not entirely visible from within the campus community itself, but from the outside it is glaring. It is for that reason that much of my work involves making the residential community visible to students and making the positive contributions of students visible to the residential community. And fostering those connections is where I think my own most important contributions take place.

(Note: I had suggested to BSU Blogfest participants that today’s blog would explain why I think everyone should watch a particular Terry Gilliam movie. I was mistaken: today’s discussion is building toward that movie connection, but the full discussion will better fit the theme of Day 5: the future. All will be revealed then!)