 |
 |
The original posting of this note elicited this well-intended suggestion:
"The statement ... is rife with issues that need discussion and, more importantly action. But it is too long, rambling in parts, and not well formatted ....
"To generate good discussion, someone needs to do a one-page, better yet half-a-page, bulleted summary.
"... let's face reality. To engender discussion, we have first got to get people to sit up, take notice, read, mull and reflect, and then respond, and then act... the document as it stands won't achieve these things."
Fair enough. We are all busy, too busy to read long texts, or so the argument goes (unless, of course, the long texts are those we are assigning our students to read or write). That this is so indicates a sickness in the scholarship of the academy, but I do not dispute that it is so nonetheless.
I offer the above, then, for those too busy to read or contemplate. I judge that this includes all of us most of the time. The image is from East Hall, which faces the quad. It is a picture of windows—dirty, peeling, rotting, and incapable of keeping winter cold or summer heat outside. The windows of URI's quad, and of too much of the campus, are old, not suited for contemporary notions of energy efficiency, not at all ready for the world of post-peak oil. Most of the windows facing the quad look like this, illustrating the state of the University as it prepares to graduate the class of 2007. I wonder how many graduates or members of their families will pause to reflect on the state of the Institution as reflected in these sorry windows that look down on their ceremony and joy.
My intent is not to deprecate the painters, nor their bosses, as I know both and hold all in high regard. But the picture clearly summarizes the results of an unacceptable neglect of its University by the State, which I take to mean all of us. We are not making the investment needed to prepare students for their future, and until we do, we are failing, as are too many of the public American universities today, to do the job that the future requires of us.
But these are not simple issues, and to attempt a discourse with a picture, even with a picture and these extra words, does the issue disservice. I recall, then, the words of Emerson, who wrote in The American Scholar,
"Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year."
We must all find a way to stop responding to the merely urgent, and to attend to the ultimately important. This takes time. Leadership can help, or by ignoring can hold us back. And leadership must begin with a new vision.