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Chancellor suggests revision of plan to overhaul MnSCU

Alex Friedrich October 4, 2013

(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.

I first left my hometown at 15 as a pariah, the cautionary tale of juvenile delinquency. I ended up graduating high school at the Red Wing “Boys Reformatory,” forever banished from the records of the Jackson High class of 1963.

With shame and defiance, I voluntarily emigrated from the soil of my ancestors and its offspring. I remember well fleeing in a battered, grey 1949 Plymouth. I immigrated to a foreign land—eventually becoming a citizen of a more cosmopolitan universe.

Nevertheless, my hometown remained the psychic map by which I sought to distance myself from the provincial culture and values of my youthful years of 1945 to 1960. I could never listen to the songs on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” without imagining that bend in the Des Moines River. In other words, you can take the boy out of Jackson County, but you can never take Jackson County out of the boy.

In 2010, a terminal cancer invaded both my body and my identity. Suddenly my story of dying went viral, appearing statewide in newspapers, on TV, radio, and the internet. Much to my astonishment, a number of former classmates reached out to me with compassion and affection. They had extended an invitation of reconciliation. Hesitantly, I reciprocated.

As a result, when an invitation arrived for our 50th class reunion, I decided to return for the first time as an honorary graduate. I drove southwest for 180 miles with considerable trepidation. Arriving at the last minute without benefit of a name tag with a picture, few recognized me. Of the 107 class members, 22 candles flickered for those who had passed, 53 of the remaining 85 attended—a remarkable percentage. Of the 53, 13 of us had become teachers. Perhaps there was something more than fluoride in that landmark water tower.

After an exhilarating two days, I drove for three hours home, luxuriating in my peers’ welcoming balm that heals the soul. I had not fully realized what a festering emotional wound this 50-year-long estrangement has been. It’s difficult making language express the depth of my gratitude.

It was a godsend for this prodigal son to see up close and personal how each of us have been participants in the same human comedy, sharing a plethora of trials and tribulations, triumphs and tragedies. Along this haphazard pilgrimage, all we really have is each other. To the members of the class of 1963, a heartfelt thank you for sharing the early morning and late evening of my brief, but eventful, sojourn on this earth.

Don’t be a stranger.

This an interview with public television on a series called “Honoring Choices.”

TPT interview on death and dying (33 minutes)

If it turns out that our innermost being does not dangle from the puppet strings of some hobgoblin of fate, but on the contrary that we are draped with a multitude of small haphazardly linked weights, then we ourselves can tip the scales.  Robert Musil

For most sociologists, the wisdom of Isaiah Berlin is unknown. If one knows anything about him, it is probably the title of his famous essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” The title comes from a fragment written by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus:

The fox knows many things,

But the hedgehog knows one big thing

For autobiographical reasons, one of my favorite Berlin essays is “Political Judgment.” My appreciation of Berlin came late in life, more as a confirmation of lessons learned than as new revelations. In 1967, I dropped out of the University of Minnesota and spent the next six years as itinerant movement activist. As an aspiring hedgehog, I wanted to know one big thing. The Sixties abruptly expired in 1973. I began a long, and often painful, apprenticeship as a grassroots organizer. I started to master my craft only after confronting the implications of what Max Weber called “inconvenient facts.” In spite of myself, I was becoming a fox.

“What is it to have good judgment in politics?” With that simple question, Berlin proceeds to elucidate the practices of a fox in public life. In addition, his analysis goes a long way toward explaining why the academic left is so ineffectual outside the ivory tower:

To seize a situation in this sense one needs to see, to be given a kind of direct, almost sensuous contact with the relevant data . . . Above all this is an acute sense of . . . what the result is likely to be in a concrete situation of the interplay of human beings and impersonal forces.

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. . . . A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
Wendell Berry

For those ordering and conducting investigations, it is all too easy to get caught up in the business-as-usual of policies and procedures. The self-justifying nature of bureaucracies sometimes blind us to the human dimensions of those processes. The Hunt is a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of even the best-intentioned policies and procedures.

This weekend I saw this highly acclaimed Danish film. I  recommend The Hunt for both its artistic pleasure and moral edification. Art and literature have a marvelous capacity of penetrating our taken-for-granted realities, allowing us to experience the shock of recognition.

Here’s a new premortem: the new tumors growing in my lungs are still precancerous; the skin cancer is not life-threatening; whatever is destroying my hard palate is not malignant; the emphysema remains moderately severe; the six stents in my heart continue to prevent another heart attack; the congestive heart failure is flaring up; the chronic kidney disease remains moderate; the peripheral neuropathy is like walking on Novocaine-injected feet. Nevertheless, as Tom Waits put it, I’m still the “last leaf on the tree.”

They say I got staying power

Here on the tree

But I’ve been here since Eisenhower

And I’ve out lived even he

I’m the last leaf on the tree 

The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me

I’m the last leaf on the tree

(Tom Waits)