Writings: Dr. William L. Fox
Pointing students on journey to success
I have customarily used the opening of the new academic year to reflect on the nature of Culver-Stockton College and its progress. I also have found it useful to set the college’s larger agenda upon a thematic framework for the new year. In preparation for that occasion, I began to explore the medium of "You Tube." What I found there provided a larger context for the mission of Culver-Stockton College, a global perspective to measure our work and map our direction. Here is a sample of the bird’s eye questions posed on a "You Tube" site called "Did You Know":
Did you know… that according to the U. S. Department of Labor, new college graduates will have 10 to 14 jobs by the time they are 38 years old?
Did you know… that China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world?
Did you know… that 100% of all college graduates in India speak English?
Did you know… that 50% of 21-year-old Americans have created content on the web?
Did you know… the name of the following country?
- Richest in the world
- Largest military
- Center of world finance and business
- Strongest education system
- World center of innovation and invention
- Currency that is the world’s standard of value
- Highest standard of living
Did you know… that all these features describe… England… in 1900?
Rhetorical questions purposefully and provocatively make a point; more than opening a quest for knowing, they express something already known that has punch. Their implicit argument can be extended to Culver-Stockton’s own setting.
The world is changing, and so must Culver-Stockton. The "did you know" questions are both relevant and critical to the three terms in the college’s mission statement that we are concentrating on this year: commitment (being part of something); learning (the greatest human activity outside of pleasures documented in the wedding section of your local newspaper); and community (defined by harmonious values, quality of place, and special rhythms).
Culver-Stockton’s commitment has not and will not change much at all, even in the face of shifting global forces. Our commitment is to change lives, one student at a time, not by the hundreds or hundreds of millions who may never distinguish mere training from an education. Helping individual students fathom and contend with the world of their lives is our commitment.
All of us on campus teach. Each of us have the potential to change lives through our contact with students whether we teach in a classroom or teach on the playing field or teach in a residence hall as a housekeeper or teach in an office conducting college business or teach from a ladder with a paint brush in hand, or teach from the parking lot when giving someone else the better space.
We also have a commitment to learning that is higher than any other of our many obligations. We must never forget that education sometimes can be messy; but that learning, even when we think the lights are dim, can happen anytime like a summer flash of lightning. Or it may not take full effect for many years, like haphazardly discovering that the old candle in kitchen drawer actually would take a match when the power failed. Learning takes time, takes what the Greek academies defined as leisure, a term that meant something very different from a lazy day. Rather, leisure meant being allowed sufficient time for deliberation.
The great teacher of classics at the University of Chicago, David Greene, recalls in his memoir a classmate in Ireland who worked all through college. He remembers with a scornful tone, "his heroic efforts had cut him out of all the more civilized ways of growing up that a proper academic education encouraged…[Instead he] matched time with such deadly economy against achievement, [that he] left nothing over for either thinking or enjoyment."
I find myself increasingly concerned about the climate of learning on campuses because of a prevailing impulse to get or give an education as fast and as cheaply as one can. I hope many others will join me in giving a constant piece of advice to our students, not to be in too big a hurry. Learning is more precious than diamonds; and the Culver-Stockton experience, the truly vivifying college experience, cannot and should not be sold as zircons.
The Culver-Stockton mission statement uses the word community. As a community, we must represent the qualities of the larger world, a microcosm of what young people will face in the issues of life. Difference among and about people should never shock a college community. Rather, we need to learn about difference, to understand it and defend it. There are some important questions about difference—race, religion, sexuality, nation, language, culture—that if not discussed in college may never again get addressed in a person’s lifetime.
My own experience with differences and diversity in a community has been to learn that by some vital paradox, a greater oneness emerges, encouraged by its intrinsic resonance and awakening. On the Culver-Stockton campus and in Canton this summer, a small group of Mexican immigrant workers briefly became a part of our community during their labors to complete the new surface of the track being built on campus. I witnessed what I hope every student at our college may also experience here—different birthplaces, customs, habits, languages, and foods can and will unite people in understanding and affection, if we are intentional about the effort. Let me simply say, it was a tearful good bye when their truck left our campus headed for the next job far away from home.
When Eric Severeid gave his last commentary on the CBS Evening News about 35 years ago, he expressed the belief that the greatest enemy of our society was boredom. He was perhaps right at the time, but I also think there is a new and more insidious threat to the world and to our community. It is provincialism.
Matthew Arnold gave a beginning definition of provincialism as "not knowing the standards by which your work will be judged." It is important for us to take seriously the standards by which our college community will be graded, which is why mere tolerance of difference, which is tacit silence, will not be good enough.
We need to make sure our world in the college has not become provincial, so that the world our students will traverse, even decades from now, will somehow seem familiar and not become a journey without maps.
Dr. William L. Fox
President, Culver-Stockton College, Canton, Mo.
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