Reopening: Not for Business but for Thinking, Blogging, and Sharing
Reopening: Not for Business but for Thinking, Blogging, and Sharing
I have been on a long break—since the summer of 2017—from “blogging” for the Gardner Institute blog—an earned, but uncompensated sabbatical of sorts. I had been a blogger, in my own way, about 375 posts, from 2009 to 2017. Decided I would give that a rest and then along came both the pandemic and the murder of Mr. George Floyd, a resident of Minneapolis, moving me in multiple ways. I suspect I have this in common with you, my reader.
What is it about this pandemic? A number of people have reported to me that they are associating the pandemic period with experiencing significantly heightened moments of reflection and atypically high levels of emotionality and intense feelings—even before the profoundly disturbing murder of George Floyd and ensuing protest and violence.
What’s going on? Well, for one thing, most of us are experiencing communal pain. We are all experiencing loss. One of us, Mr. George Floyd, lost his life and liberty. We are all confronted with these sudden “triggers” for unanticipated rushes of feeling, including rushes of anger that are now manifesting themselves in over 100 cities in the US.
Case in point: a friend of mine shared this photo with me earlier this week. One picture worth a thousand words---at least for me.
What is happening? These are undergraduate students photographed on May 11, 1970, engaged in civil protest and disobedience in what became known as a “riot” at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. You read and I wrote correctly: 1970 not 2020.
This event, like the pandemic, was unanticipated, disruptive, and in important ways, nothing has been quite the same since. Alas, the murder of Mr. Floyd was not unanticipated. Such atrocities have been leveled by us whites against our fellow citizens of other colors since the founding of European colonies in our hemisphere. Notice in this picture they are all white students (but in the larger event on the same day there definitely were African American students engaged with their white brothers and sisters).
One of the students is seen climbing up on a small roof of the portico entrance to the Osborne Administration Building at the University. It was as if he was going to climb right into the window of what became my office thirteen years later in 1983. For a period of that intervening time the grandson of the man for whom that building is named, a former Chair of the Board of Trustees, was my academic advisee. I remember him well. And on that day the Board was meeting inside as the students demonstrated outside.
This particular riot was like the pandemic: the University would never be quite the same again. Festering wounds were laid wide open and change had to and did take place. There was no going back to the old normal. And that was a good thing, just as I hope what is going on now will become a good thing.
Many of us are in reflection mode. Reflecting on: How has our country and our individual lives evolved?
In 1970, I was living in South Carolina where I had been involuntarily sent by the US Air Force but had voluntarily decided to stay to pursue a career of higher education missionary type work. South Carolina which, 100 years after the end of the Civil War, was still struggling to rejoin the Union. May 1970 was two years after I had finished my tour of duty, as a military psychiatric social worker, honorably discharged, and glad I had served my country in this manner. I was just leaving, involuntarily, my first full-time academic job, as an Instructor of History for what was then Winthrop College where I served 1968-70. While there I had been confronted as a young, white, veteran, professional with the question: what could I do to contribute to the Civil Rights movement? My answer(s) led to my being “non-renewed” (the academic euphemism for being fired) by Winthrop College. In retrospect, this was the best thing that ever happened to me for it led directly to my faculty appointment at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. The timing was perfect, I arrived on the faculty four months after the riot pictured here had taken place and developments were underway to transform the University and also, therefore, my life.
The storyline from this picture was all about a student protest riot, that turned violent after the students were tear-gassed by the SC National Guard. But at least the Guard didn’t shoot white students. The riot influenced the President, Thomas F. Jones, to appoint a faculty committee to study the causes of the student unrest and what could be appropriate responses by the University to these student grievances. Two years later, in the summer of 1972, as an outgrowth of this study and the President’s leadership in encouraging student-centered novel proposals, the faculty approved the launching of an experimental course. University 101: The Student in The University, a three-credit Pass/Fail was the result of these proposals. In 1974, I became the first faculty director of this course which, became the prototype of the now-ubiquitous “first-year seminar,” the “college success” course genre, and related “First-Year Experience” movement in the US and international higher education. This is a longer story than is appropriate for a blog posting/essay, but this is a worthy story of how positive social change can and did come about from the convergence of four related societal movements in the US: 1) the anti-war movement; 2) the Civil Rights movement; 3) the women’s rights movement, and 4) the student rights movement.
This picture is also about what became my story. We all have our own stories, both as individuals and as unique colleges and universities. This is a story about what mattered then and perhaps even more now. About how social protest is as American as apple pie and how it can unleash profound forces to improve our national, institutional, and individual ways of life.
What is this story about?
In addition to this picture being about an event that triggered a university to reengineer itself with a single course, it is also about:
*enduring societal improvement growing out of this turbulent period
*how to prevent student riots by teaching students to love the University
*how to prepare and develop faculty and staff to significantly improve their relationships with and teaching of students
*how great universities pursue the theme of social justice and stimulate and share innovation around the world
*how to improve the beginning college experience
*how to improve student learning for the sake of learning
*how to foster increased student retention and graduation rates
*how to improve equity of treatment for a discriminated against minority (first-year students)
*how to sustain educational innovation
*how to launch pioneering forms of assessment and put findings into practice for educational improvement
*how to integrate the different talents and knowledge of University faculty, student affairs/student success personnel and student leaders in powerful partnerships
*what a university can accomplish if it stays focused for half a century on the highest of aspirations and continually builds on, sustains, learns from its successes
What this story is NOT about:
*about one leader, innovator, sustainer
*an initiative du jour that passed on into the dustbins of university history
*an educational fad
*a student retention/student success silver bullet
What Has Been Accomplished?
From these inauspicious beginnings, what has been accomplished in 50 years from the above set of formative events?
1. The USC model for the so-called “first-year seminar,” a course type dating to 1882, contained something truly original: the combination of mandatory faculty development prior to teaching the course; the specific intent to use this course as a vehicle to promote a more humanizing, student-focused beginning collegiate experience, in what had become by 1972 a large, urban, racially integrated (accomplished peacefully), research university; a course to teach students “to love the University;” a course to improve student retention and graduation rates.
2. The course quickly because a model for the conduct in US higher education of what was not called until 1985 “assessment;” USC had been doing this assessment ever since 1974-75 to measure if and how the course was achieving its objectives, leading to the surprise finding of increasing student retention rates especially for less well prepared and minority students.
3. In part because of these assessment findings, as early as 5 years after its founding University 101 began to be replicated on other campuses in the US and ultimately beyond the US in Canada (dating from 1978 on). Soon the University 101 concept was enjoying very rapid replication on hundreds of other campuses.
4. This movement was spurred by the launching in 1982 of what became an annual series of national conferences known as “The First-Year Experience”, now averaging approximately 2000 attendees each year.
5. What started as a US domestic movement was exported beyond US borders in a series of “International Conferences on The First-Year Experience from 1986-2011
6. What had started as a course, also became a University national research and resource center beginning in 1987 and continuing to present day as the National Resource for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, a major convener of academic conferences and producer of scholarly research and publications on this focus of higher education.
7. What started as an improvement initiative focused on the first year of college grew to be inclusive of other student transitions during the collegiate years including the sophomore year, the transfer experience, and the senior year experience, with conferences and scholarly publications to support both USC’s and the larger higher education community’s related educational endeavors.
8. This became further institutionalized in the University’s adoption in 1998, of the University 401 course, The Senior Experience, now a popular elective for the University’s departing students helping them to make a successful transition to life after USC.
9. In turn, both these curricular structures have been further embedded in the University’s Quality Enhancement process, USC Connect, a vehicle for further sustainability and refinement.
10. The “founding years” between 1972-99 have been succeeded by many needed steps to institutionalize, refine, improve, redesign as appropriate, expand a wide range of activities and components of both the University 101 programs and the National Resource Center.
11. The period from 1999 to present has seen extraordinary refinements in the assessment practices applied to the courses, the development of all kinds of new instructional resources, and the creation of an extraordinary cadre of undergraduate and graduate “peer leaders” who co-teach every section of University 101.
12. In this second half of our history, we have also weathered the Great Recession of 2008 and most recently, we are experiencing the COVID 19 pandemic, economic depression, and social disruption -- all spurs to further innovation and support for students needing such support more than ever. These initiatives at the University of South Carolina have been blessed especially by having a succession of new leaders for these programs and university-wide stakeholders and participants who have moved the original course and Center to hitherto before unimaginable levels of educational impact in Columbia, the Palmetto College campuses, and around the globe.
Another outcome of this particular riot in 1970, which I will not pursue in this posting, was the founding in 1999 by two USC faculty and staff, of the other non-profit higher education organization devoted to the pursuit of a social justice mission to improve undergraduate education in the US, especially for low-income, minority students: the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education.
As I look at the social and political upheaval in the aftermath of the most recent illustration of oppressive and unjust use of police force against African-Americans, in May 2020, I am forcing myself to recall the history above and how the story of the US sometimes is the improvements that have resulted in our society as a result of social protest. Time and each of us will tell.