From an email I received from a friend Monday evening:
There was a short report on KSTP TV news at 6 this evening about how the “outstate” U of Minn campuses were struggling with severe enrollment declines, and how “staff adjustments will have to be made,” but they didn’t elaborate. Didn’t sound rosy.
My response to him included:
Excess spending by the U of M has been an issue for a very long time. Remember how Ventura got so peeved with Yudof? With enrollment going down, push may come to shove. Our football team is in such a weak conference and has such a pathetic schedule, I don't know why people put up with it. We used to take pride in getting really good athletes here. Now we just try to have a weak schedule and pretend nothing is wrong.
More from my email:
I could never have predicted that UMM would go downhill so fast. I asked Janet Schrunk-Ericksen if there was any metric besides enrollment for judging UMM's performance, and she said NO. So that's that. I let (name withheld) know my feelings about the $10 charge for the Homecoming concert. He throws his weight around some.
I
go through the north end of the campus when I take my standard walks,
but outside of that I try to completely avoid the campus now. And
heavens, I certainly wouldn't go there after dark. I could get tackled
by campus security. It's a nervous place. When you are a male age 70 and
you are alone, people are suspicious of you.
A faux discipline?
There was once a fledgling branch of academia in which the practitioners described themselves as "futurists." Seemed intriguing to me. Much of my online writing has been devoted to cultural changes and trends, and how we might extrapolate into the future. For example, the early seeds of change planted with digital tech easily pointed the way for waves of change to come. It's just that we needed time to seize on all of this.
Futurists could envision all sorts of things. There seemed little doubt about their prescience.
The old ways were not going to give way immediately. Vested interests sought to cling to the old ways. But the really prescient people - the true futurists - could see easily, I felt, that the new influences could push past everything.
George Ure is an online writer who prophesied quite correctly about a decade ago. Many of us, Ure wrote, would like to stay in the comfort zone of doing things by old habits. Writing paper checks for monthly bills? Receiving paper checks for work done? We mastered such practices and thus got a sense of comfort from them. But the new ways were bound to bulldoze us over.
I nodded as I read such predictions as from Ure. Ure has his "Urban Survival" website. Perhaps misnamed. What's in a name in the online world? You've noticed the "handles" people go by when submitting comments on news items. The sheer randomness or silliness of these signatures.
All of what I'm writing here is a lead-in to my prime subject which is our University of Minnesota-Morris. Would Jack Imholte even recognize the place today? College campuses once had such a rarefied air of "academic rigor." Young people were made to suffer with thick textbooks - dry as hell also - and challenging exams for which they "crammed." A futurist would say the expression "cramming for finals" has been retired from our parlance.
OK what's going on? The salad days of the "boomers," my generation, is quite gone, hence colleges cannot count on all the young people just flooding their campuses like it was a rite of autumn. Man, I remember St. Cloud State.
Today there is far less of a "product" sought by colleges. They need students. That's their end of the bargain. The students are supposed to benefit, or else why are they there?
There was a time when students assumed they were going to have to suffer through college with difficult classes and instructors who weren't always very thoughtful in how they laid things out. Why would instructors be that way? OK here's the answer: they had a quota system for grades. They all knew that, would admit it if they had to.
High school teachers were much the same. If every student in your class had the ideal enthusiasm and maturity, and if all of them grasped the subject matter exactly the way you liked, well then what would you do? Because you could not give all of them an 'A' grade. Even if you'd prefer doing that, the system would not allow you. If you tried, your superiors would flag your work and you'd have some serious explaining to do.
You might have to do some remediation. Correct your work so you could cleverly (and cynically) orchestrate lessons in such a way to guarantee some students struggling. A speaker in the "TedX" series said this could be done by testing the kids with some questions on matters that were not covered in class. The very brightest students might be hip to answering these questions. Others would not, and these others would be left feeling deflated by the experience. They might "pass" but with their self-esteem shot down.
I don't think this approach is "cool" today. First and foremost, colleges have the most fundamental of instincts/motivation: survive.
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Jack Imholte
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Am I correct that the term "academia" isn't heard much anymore? It always had a rather odious sound to it, i.e. effete, elite. (Hey, that rhymes.) I think our former chancellor Jack Imholte here in Morris rather liked the days of effete academia. And if he did, he saw the attitude as one of promoting our interests, of projecting an air of superiority about UMM.
I have my own self-centered interests for having developed bitterness about it: I knew as a young person I could never "cut it" here. It was a mistake for me to ever put myself up against such a yardstick.
The solution would have been this: for yours truly to "talk up" UMM and everything it stood for, for years and years, as if I was totally invested in it; while at the same time, having nothing to do with it for my own life, my own goals, my own aspirations.
You might say I'd be living a lie. Well yes. I came from a UMM family and I was forced into thinking about this a lot. Obviously, too much for my own good.
I felt as though I had to at least pretend I could communicate with UMM people on their terms. Try to come across as erudite etc. But here's the deal: even though the people in this dinosaur called academia saw themselves as quite superior, the way to score points with them was not to try to be like them. They would not have even wanted that. A lot of their talk about being superior was rather like sheep-dip anyway. An act. Posturing.
If you really wanted to be accepted by UMM people, just fall into your own natural niche and do your own particular thing well. You don't need to use any 50-cent words. Let them do that as part of their identity.
I once had a friend who taught economics at Southwest State U (saxophone player BTW). He would sometimes smile and mock the pretense of academia by using "inundatious" as an all-purpose 50-cent word. I played trumpet. Speaking of which, there was an MAHS band concert Monday night. Ah, the night before Halloween. Fierce and cold wind blowing across the prairie all day.
A friend wondered why I did not attend. I am a 68-year-old male who happens to live his life alone most of the time. People might see me at public events and wonder why I'm there. I am not a parent. I don't have adult children or grandchildren I can pay attention to. I can attend church every Sunday because I'm not out traveling around to "visit grandchildren."
Do you ever wonder if some of these kids would just like to be left alone with their own parents? Churches need the presence and support of their older parishioners. But so many of these people want to stick like glue to their "grandchildren." Of course, what could be more precious than one's children and grandchildren, your flesh and blood after all?
I reminded my friend that when we were young, parents had the real fear of losing their sons in the Vietnam war. Why oh why did our nation put up with it? Our own parents had their lives affected by World War II. Maybe our grandparents were impacted by World War I. If you managed to survive those wars, you probably saw benefits coming to you like with the GI Bill.
In addition, WWII was seen as bringing America out of the Great Depression. Seems to me, WWII only called for the expenditure of tons of government money. So that's what did it? Well then let's just spend like crazy again.
The guys who survived the big wars could always talk like their experience was a badge of honor. Some could put on a funny hat and give a speech for Memorial Day. "Freedom isn't free."
Were we to talk with all the soldiers who were killed in wars, we might get a different take on the heroic nature of war.
Whither UMM? UMN?
How would a "futurist" assess where our UMM is likely headed now? Why the sharp headwinds for our school, why the dropoff in numbers? Cost? Student debt? I remember when Bill Clinton made statements about what government was doing to "help the parents of college students." And you know what that meant? Understand human nature much? Every time the government "did something" to help parents of college students with cost, the colleges merely responded by raising tuition.
A rabbit chasing the carrot on the stick. I may not have been smart enough to attend UMM, but I sure do understand this.
The U has had issues with leadership of late. Maybe the "regents" are overrated. We'll get a new permanent U president or at least a president who is not interim. How much pressure will this individual be under from the legislature to achieve accountability and performance? Are we in Morris wedded to the liberal arts? Maybe we should not be. I have been an outlier in our community for a long time broaching this. I assure you that if there is fundamental change and something new takes over, all the denizens of this place who have recited "liberal arts" as a mantra will forget about it.
I always try to speak the truth. That's another reason I am often an outlier.
Addendum: I can't help as I wrap up this piece thinking how certain holdovers from "academia" might respond to me, if they'd want to respond at all because they wouldn't want to acknowledge I have enough credibility to warrant a response. Perhaps I have a talent for "touching a nerve" with how I relate things. Because, some of the people I criticize can get so vicious and personal. They'll pick one little thing in my post today that may not conform to all the grammatical or stylistic rules. Or they will bristle at how I imply "futurists" never got traction in academia. Maybe they'd offer evidence to the effect that futurism is in fact viable. I just don't hear the term anymore.
But it wouldn't be enough for these people to just disagree with me. They'd make their point and then at the end refer to me as a
"dumb s--t." I have dealt with this for a long time. Like I said, I must be touching a nerve.
Addendum #2: Got prodded by nostalgia the other evening, listening to WDAY Radio out of Fargo as the guys discussed Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference (NSIC) football. Fewer of us in Morris remember when the Cougars were in with those teams. It was the "NIC" when I first did some coverage of the Cougars for the local media. And the Cougars were very strong in its ranks.
Then something changed of course. We slid downhill and this was not remedied for some time. Finally it was remedied with UMM shifting to a different conference.
The NSIC includes well-known schools. It's too bad we couldn't stay with them. A huge irony is that we have this classy artificial turf facility now, just beautiful, but we have to accept a lower caliber of competition. We play many no-name schools, schools you have to look up just to get a modicum of knowledge about them. They still seem shrouded in obscurity.
Oh to be in the same conference as Moorhead State and others with that stamp of legitimacy. I suppose we can "pretend" now that all is fine as we can win periodically. And if the public doesn't know the difference? Well, that's life. Or that's Morris. I sure wish I could have heard the WDAY panel mention Morris a couple times.
But can we even say "UMM" any more, or has that given way to this "UMN" thing in an official way? "UMN" simply means "University of Minnesota" and it does not point to location. When UMM first started, which I realize may seem like the Pleistocene Age to you, Dean Briggs thought it important to impress the name "Morris" on people. So my father incorporated that in the music he originally wrote for the school.
A few years later the philosophy did an about-face, as no longer were we really proud of "Morris," instead we just wanted to be known as a branch of the big 'U'. I may disagree but what does that mean? "Mongo just pawn in game of life."
Much is going to depend on the new long-term U president. Presumably more than three years, but who knows now? The U has been flailing. It is run with tax dollars.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
