(This essay appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on 9/20/2013)

My university is in the midst of a public meltdown. We have been hammered with six negative news stories (type in Metropolitan State University) in the Pioneer Press in seven days.

As a union leader, I feel like my life has been nothing but crisis management 24/7 for the past week. Anger and tears are barely contained; I’m running on fumes. I awake exhausted and disheartened.

Then one morning this week a student email showed up in my inbox — and that was just the smelling salts I needed. The firmament works in mysterious ways, serendipitously presenting us with critical junctures that we ignore at our own peril.

The student was seeking answers to some leading questions she had posed that would have enabled her to avoid doing a daunting three-page essay the old fashioned way: With her own intellectual firepower. I stood my ground.

“Sorry, I do not answer these types of questions. The whole point of the assignment is for you to engage in higher-order thinking. This is not a course where the teacher implicitly provides the answer, and then the student goes home and writes the paper. That is not how I teach. In this course, students struggle all week to figure out a puzzle, and then we solve it together during the next class meeting.”

That interaction (and those that will follow throughout the semester) is why, well past the age of retirement, I still get up every morning, passionately ready for work. Even in the midst of this calamity, let me not forget why I practice this calling that I so love, at a university that I so cherish.

I later headed off for breakfast with a former student of mine of whom I am very proud, and pleased that she still enjoys our improvisational conversations about authors, living and dead.

When I told her of my earlier email exchange, she laughed aloud and said that she had tried the exact same thing with me and didn’t get away with it either. She then amazed me by quoting chapter and verse of remarks I had made in her class all those years ago. Sometimes tough love does pay dividends.

Crisis be damned, first things first. As Tom Waits put it,

Got to get behind the Mule

in the morning and plow

Got to get behind the Mule

in the morning and plow.

Monte Bute teaches sociology at Metropolitan State University and is action coordinator for the Inter Faculty Organization, the union for Minnesota state universities.