A Load of Links Related to the UND Budget Crisis Class in 2018

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper for a volume on campus crises. This week, the volume feels all the more relevant (if not, to use everyone’s favorite academic term “urgent”).

I’m putting the final touches on the first draft of my chapter which will focus on how the budget 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND shaped what I did in the classroom. Here’s the rough outline of my paper:

Introduction
Teaching as Activism (here, here)
The Anatomy of the UND Budget Crisis
Teaching a Class on the University Budget
The Wesley College Documentation Project
Conclusion

With any luck, the conclusion will be done by the end of the week!

I came to realize that my writing about the UND budget crisis drew upon on a pretty interesting group of documents that my classes both produced and used upon. I know that I’ve shared a few of them here in the past, but now seems to be an appropriate time to share all of them.

First, here is the syllabus for my class on the UND Budget. 

History of North Dakota: Women’s Hockey, Higher Ed & the UND Budget

That class and the gradate reading seminar that I ran in the Fall of 2017 produced a pair of short, free, downloadable books:

Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto

 

Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota

The class relied upon a document reader that was the product of a small graduate seminar. Joe Kalka, who was a student in that seminar (and the course that produced produced it. It remains a useful archival record of the budget situation on UND’s campus. We tried to stabilize the hyperlinks using the Internet Archive, but a number of the links don’t work. It nevertheless provides a basic survey of the sources that students in the UND budget class could use to  

Higher Education and Budgets Course Document Reader

We shared the first chapter of Andrew Larson’s thesis with the class as a general survey of the recent history of higher education grounded in some of the classic works on the field, but with an  

Andrew F. Larson, “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970.” Unpublished D.A. Thesis, University of North Dakota, 2020. 

We also benefited from a couple of other documents:

William Caraher, “History at the University of North Dakota 1885-1970,” Unpublished 2009.

Louis G. Geiger, University of the Northern Plains: a History of the University of North Dakota, 1883-1958. UND Press, 1958

Of course, there have been several publications, both formal and more casual, out of our broader work on the UND budget:

Letters of Edward Robertson President Emeritus, Wesley College, From 1935.

Wyatt Atchley, “Images of Austerity,” NDQ 85 (2018), 124-125.

Melissa Gjellstad and Ryan Zerr, “Faculty Navigating the Age of Austerity: Affirming Roles and Renewing Alliances,” NDQ 85 (2018), 162-180.

William Caraher, “Humanities in the Age of Austerity: A Case Study from the University of North Dakota,” NDQ 85 (2018), 208-221.

William Caraher , Michael Wittgraf , Wyatt Atchley, “Hearing Corwin Hall: The Archaeology of Anxiety on an American University Campus,” Epoiesen (2021).

Wyatt Atchley, “Wesley College: Progressive Era Education in North Dakota.” Unpublished MA Thesis, NDSU, 2023.

William Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter,” in Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. Gabe Moshenska ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. (You can download a pre-print of this article here).

Still More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a bit on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited volume. This paper will focus on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. 

You can read more about it here or here or  here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The final section that I had to draft was a description of the actual crisis itself. I have to admit that time had dulled my memory of the budgetary causes of the crisis while preserving intact my memory of the anguish that the the budget cuts caused. This is my first effort to narrate, in a concise way, the confluence of events and individuals that caused such campus wide anxiety and inflicted such a deep wound on campus morale. 

As I tried to do this, I came back around to a sense that I had at the time. It wasn’t so much at our campus had a budget crisis, it was how various parts of campus responded to it. In particular, I was struck by how quickly and decisively the spirit of collaboration and shared governance dissipated. Perhaps administrators suppressed it by design and it reflects the idea that crisis management tends to be top down. Maybe it was 

In any event, my text here tried to capture some of the vectors which converged to cause the crisis:

The Anatomy of a Campus Crisis

The context for UND’s budget crisis was both unique and familiar. On the one hand, the university had largely avoided the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” owing to tax revenues generated by the opening phase of the Bakken oil boom. The earliest phase of the oil boom came on the heals of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 and the larger economic downturn that it triggered. On the other hand, the University of North Dakota, like many mid-sized, public institutions, remains dependent on the state for a portion of its operating budget. When the state of North Dakota experienced a $1 billion budget shortfall in 2015, owing to the drop in oil prices, a particularly dry harvest, and an aggressive tax cut to companies and individuals, the state cut appropriations to UND as well as elsewhere on the basis of a budgetary formula. Another series of budget cuts occurred in 2018. UND like many state institutions had limited options when it came to increasing revenue as legislation limited the institution’s ability to raise tuition or increase fees. As a result, the only real solution to budget shortfalls on the state and institutional level was to reduce funding across campus largely through retrenching positions, but also through eliminating programs.

Like many institutions, the University of North Dakota is a tight knit community. Relative stability in leadership positions, a close relationship with the town and alumni—partly attributed to a successful and popular hockey program—and committed faculty and staff endowed the university with generally decent morale, a sense of purpose, and a collaborative spirit. In fact, the shared commitments of the extended UND community had helped it navigate a controversial change in nicknames that culminated in 2015 with the Fighting Hawks replacing the Fighting Sioux. The retirement of President Robert Kelley in 2016 and the naming of former governor Ed Shaffer as acting President of the institution came at the moment where the first round of budget cuts impacted campus. His brief term which saw a round of staff and faculty layoffs, ended with the naming of Mark Kennedy president. Unlike Shaffer who garnered respect across the region from his time as governor and his North Dakota roots, Kennedy was unpopular, inexperienced, and came across as aloof and unsympathetic. Shaffer and Kennedy relied on Provost Tom DiLorenzo to implement painful budget cuts and DiLorenzo’s sometimes awkward personal style further contributed to the unpopularity of the administration. Faculty had viewed DiLorenzo with suspicion after an abortive effort at “program prioritization” on campus in 2014 and his role in implementing a new MIRA (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation) budget model for the university at the same time. This model, which was complex and poorly understood by faculty and staff, seemed to harden barriers between colleges and foster competition for resources based on what appeared to be an impersonal and inflexible formula. Administrative, procedural, and leadership changes exacerbated the impact of the state level budget cuts by creating a sense of alienation from the institution.

Efforts by the administration to explain the challenging situation through a series of town hall style meetings led to emotional outbursts especially as staff who had worked at the university for decades were laid off in an effort to balance unit budgets. Administrators who had fostered innovation, program development, and collegiality, found themselves quickly transformed into hardened budget warriors tasked with cutting costs and tempering faculty ambitions. Across the entire institution, an aloof and unpopular president, the poorly understood MIRA budget model, and its chief advocate, the provost, became scapegoats for financial challenges that went far beyond MIRA’s scope or interpersonal conflicts. Deans and associate deans shared this burden as faculty sought to both understand and mitigate the budgetary changes taking place across campus. In many cases, the lack of familiarity with the mechanisms, processes, and procedures (as well as the details of the budget cuts themselves) impaired the community’s ability to present viable solutions.  

Since the 1970s, UND had followed national trends and developed its administrative bureaucracy to accommodate federal regulations, an increasingly competitive funding environment caused by the reduction in state funds, and the needs of its growing student body (for a general history of the early phase of these changes see Robinson 1971). These changes had accompanied a gradual increase in professionalization in the administrative ranks. New positions with narrower responsibilities served the specialized needs of funding agencies, new students, and programs with increasingly elaborate accreditation requirements. While some faculty and students recognized these slow changes, the budget crisis of 2016 brought their sense of alienation from the inner workings of the university to the fore. The sense of alienation among faculty and students came to the fore with cuts to two high profile and outwardly successful programs—Women’s Hockey and music therapy—which galvanized student and faculty frustration as the authors of these cuts appeared to both take responsibility for their decisions and explain them as part of necessary budgetary calculations. This both personalized animosities and further alienated faculty and students as the processes and decision making appeared opaque and misguided.

The Music of Merrifield Hall

I was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation.

We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall prior to it undergoing a massive renovation. To mark this transformation of a key building on campus, we published a book edited  by Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar called Campus Building which you can download here.

Mike added video effects to the audio recordings which capture in his inimitable way the acoustic character of the building and use it as a foundation for a deeper exploration of campus change.

These videos are in some way a sequel to Mike’s earlier work “Hearing Corwin Hall,” which we published with some exegesis at Epoiesen in 2021. They represent and manifest the complex changing taking place on campus and the tensions between looking forward toward the future and recognizing the importance of continuity, history, and tradition in the past. They also communicate the anxieties inherent in these transitions.

Writing Wednesday: The Crisis Classroom

I’m posting late today because I took some time this morning to prepare an article proposal to accompany a rather rambling abstract that I wrote last week. It is for a proposed  volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. Today’s post will make more sense if you go back and read my post from last week.

The paper doesn’t have a title yet, but I envision it being some combination of words like “empowered,” “crisis,” “classroom,” and “engaged.” I enjoy alliteration whenever possible and once proudly published a book without a subtitle.

Paper Argument and Organization 

The thesis for my contribution is that teaching classes focused on both the long term sense of structural crisis in higher education and immediate crises as they arise provides students with the technical knowledge to participate more fully in conversations with various stakeholders of their institution.

The article will have six sections and be approximately 6000 words (with citations).

I. Introduction (500 words)

This frames the current sense of crisis in higher education as part of a complex network of political, economic, ideological, demographic, and health trends amplified by a bewildering (and continuous) stream of scholarly, technocratic, and popular literature. Engaging critically with both the myriad of particularly crises and more pervasive sense of crisis could easily represent a full time job (or even a career). Faculty and students alike rarely have the luxury or even desire for this kind of sustained engagement even at their own institution and in many cases we remain satisfied with “shooting the wolf closest to the sled.” This chapter reflects on an effort to create a structured opportunity for informed conversations about one particular crisis and how it succeeded and failed at creating a greater sense of empowerment. My hope is that this case study offers an adaptable model for teaching about a campus crisis during a campus crisis and finds a fit within a robust campus toolkit for informed and engaged campus debate.     

II. Teaching as Activism (1000 words)

This chapter will situate the class in relation to the long tradition of activist approaches to teaching with particular attention to work that recognized teaching itself as a form of empowerment, as the basis for liberation, and as broadly counter hegemonic practice. These techniques are not foreign to university teaching and formed the basis for the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, community and public outreach programs, and innumerable quieter projects that leverage the massive university undercommons (sensu Moten and Harney 2013). 

Some related verbiage:

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that the test was unfair, and Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stoped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement with crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.   

III. Background to the UND Budget Crisis (700 words)

This section provides a brief history of the institution and its 2018 budget crisis both to support the contention that there was indeed a sense of crisis at the University and to explain how this crisis took on a particular technocratic character. This technocratic character, in turn, reinforced the growing alienation of faculty and students from the workings of the university. 

IV. The UND Budget Class (1600 words)

This section will provide an overview of the class with an explanation of how we worked together both to close the technical gap between administrative (and at times faculty rhetoric) during the crisis and student concerns. It will also survey the final project produced by the class and explore where the class collectively succeeded and failed to gain a sufficient foundation for informed critique. 

V. The Wesley College Documentation Project (1400 words)

This section will consider the link between the class on the UND budget and its companion course that focused on the documentation of two recently abandoned historic buildings on campus slated for demolition. While a more detailed assessment of this class emphasizing its “mildly anarchic” character has already appeared, this project drew many students from the budget class and gave them another way to engage with and challenge the barriers between students, staff, and faculty. The final projects of this class, were more diverse than the focused work of the budget class, but continued the spirit of critical engagement in response to crisis.   

VI. Conclusion (500 words)

The conclusion will focus on the potential and pitfalls of using a class as a way to engage with a campus crisis. It will stress that this class didn’t solve the university’s budget problem nor did it set out to offer a “solutionalist” approach to the crisis. Instead, it showed how the crisis created opportunities for greater student engagement and empowerment in the spirit of Ira Shor’s formulation of empowered education.

Teaching Thursday: The Crisis Classroom

A colleague sent along a call for papers for a volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. I tried to ignore it, but after a bit of treadmill time (metaphorically and literally), I started to think about maybe submitting an abstract to the book that deals with the class that I taught on the UND Budget in 2018. I feel like I still have things to say about that class and my contribution could fit into the the editors’ goal of a publication that contributions “should map out the essay’s topic, context, arguments, and how it could assist faculty, staff, and/or students at institutions where similar issues/crises are in play.”

My argument would be as follows (I think):

Over the past century, higher education in the United States has become increasingly professionalized. On the one hand, this trend has undoubtedly improved the quality of instruction, the efficiency of campus operations, and opportunities for historically underrepresented groups. On the other hand, the professionalization of the college campus has contributed to faculty and students harboring a growing sense of alienation from the internal working of the university administration. During ordinary operations, the benefits of professionalization appear to outweigh the drawbacks, but crises tends to increase the sense of alienation on campus and the needs of the moment can lead to a hardening of boundaries between faculty, students, and administrators. When the crisis is financial, budgets and budgeting become uneven terrain for various stakeholders who often have unequal access to the complex language and processes essential for modern institutional budgeting. It is hardly surprising that the growing sense of permanent crisis at universities and colleges has corresponded with an increase in formula based budgeting models which further obscure financial decisions beneath layer of math, technical terminology, and seemingly automatic allocations. 

In 2018, the University of North Dakota labored under a painful series of budget cuts triggered by state financial shortfalls. These cuts extended across campus and made national headlines with the termination of the university’s high visibility women’s hockey program and successful music therapy degree. These cuts and the largely negative publicity that they generated bewildered and angered students and faculty alike. It stoked a sense of outrage which had been smoldering since the 2016 presidential elections, the nearby protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline, the naming of an awkward and unpopular figure, Mark Kennedy, as university president, and the implementation of a new MIRA-type budgeting process (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation). In the Department of History (now the Department of History and American Indian Studies) cuts and changes to budget across campus rubbed salt in the wound of losing our small, but successful graduate program. Elsewhere in the humanities, faculty struggled to preserve the century-old little magazine North Dakota Quarterly and its small, but dedicated staff.

In response to the sense of crisis, I decided to offer a class on the University of North Dakota Budget. The class was offered as a honor’s section of our department’s venerable History of North Dakota class and at the intermediate level. It was open to both honors and non-honors students and quickly enrolled close to 20 students. The class situated the contemporary budget crisis on the UND campus in both a national and historical context and took advantage of the timely appearance of a series of incisive books that sought to frame the national sense of crisis in higher education in historical, administrative, and ideological terms. Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) served as our textbooks. 

The class itself sought to bridge the technical gap between increasingly alienated faculty and students and administrative control over the budget. As part of this effort, the campus budget manager, a panel of department chairs, the university provost, a college dean, the vice president of research, a university system vice chancellor, and a state legislator visited the class and discussed the various levels of budgeting from the state and system wide allocations to the campus, college, and department. The students listened critically, asked challenging questions, and worked to situate the rhetoric, strategies, and trajectories presented by these speakers in a historical and ideological context. They also learned how and where to request data and information  These efforts informed the production of a small book titled Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget which they circulated to their friends, parents, and to the university administrators who contributed to the class. The book is a series of broad essays informed by local case studies. 

The goal of the class and the book was to develop a foundation for informed activism that transgressed the increasingly formal boundaries between the administration, students, and faculty. Indeed, some of the folks who learned of this course considered it risky challenge to existing realms of expertise on campus. The steepest curve in preparing the course was becoming familiar with the technical language associated with the budgeting process and the “byzantine” network of committees, offices, and formula that dictated the distribution of resources across campus. Students proved agile, however, and as their confidence with the terms and processes grew, so did their capacity for critique. 

Midway through the semester, we offered an additional one-credit course that focused on two venerable campus buildings slated for demolition at the end of the academic year. These buildings had suffered from “deferred maintenance” for many years, and preserved the scars of nearly a century of adaptive reuse. While this course embraced an anarchist praxis (as is documented elsewhere), it remained very much connected to the course on the UND budget. If the course on the UND Budget served a transgressive function by giving students access to administrators, processes and terminology used to manage the complexities of the university budget, this course gave students to a range of spaces that policy and practices usually restricted to faculty and staff. Thus students could explore (former) faculty offices, laboratory spaces, and maintenance and infrastructure areas in the two empty and abandoned buildings. Ultimately the destruction of these two campus buildings, whatever the financial and practical realities that guided their demise, offered a material analogy for the transformation of the institution. 

Providing a handful of students with the tools, language, and experience necessary to critique an on-campus crisis did not change the outcome of events. It did, however, demonstrate the viability of teaching about (and with) the university as a critical practice. Indeed, administrators who read the book that the students produced expressed some discomfort at the assertiveness of the student-authors, suggesting that content of the book caught them off-guard and defied their efforts to retain control of the narrative during their classroom visits. The book and their response alone suggests that this method of contextualizing on-campus crises had the potential to bridge the professional barriers that exist on campus and perhaps encourage (or at least support) a more expansive view of university governance. 

Teaching Tuesday: Thinking about Cornerstones

This week, I plan to attend the second breakfast meeting to listen to a team of faculty who are working to secure (or maybe they have secured) a Cornerstone grant from the Teagle Foundation. In short, the Cornerstone program is a 15-credit certificate or minor in the liberal arts designed for students in STEM program. Evidently the program’s goals is to provide students with a deeper, coherent, more personal experience with education that has the promise of producing better citizens (and, just maybe a more fulfilling life) especially among first generation college students or students from underrepresented groups.

In preparation for our breakfast meeting this week, the Cornerstone team asked us to read three articles that diagnosed the problem in higher education which Cornerstone could solve: Melinda S. Zook’s “Gen Z Is Ready to Talk. Are Professors Ready to Listen?” from Chronicle of Higher Education, Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein’s “By Abandoning Civics, Colleges Helped Create the Culture Wars,” from the New York Times, and Andrew Debanco’s “Great Books Can Heal Our Divided Campuses” from the Wall Street Journal.

The articles are of a type. They identify a crisis: the divided campus, the culture wars, or even the COVID-inflected character of Gen-Z. Often institutions (of learning) are the cause of these crises. Fortunately, these same institutions can solve these problems typically through the development of a particular curriculum which is either innovative or returns to some putative Golden Age standard of what higher education should be like. To be clear, I like to both innovate (e.g. flipped classrooms, anarchism, et c.) and to think about how long abandoned standards (e.g. teaching languages, a tutorial system, et c.) could change student learning in the 21st century. The Cornerstone curriculum involves both a return to a system to teaching and learning centered on the careful reading and discussion of texts. More than that, it imagines the development of a new canon of sorts that helps students to establish a sense of an integrated community of readers centered on a common body of texts and a common approach to reading. In effect, Cornerstone is seeking to return to the idea of General Education and transforming it from the desiccated box ticking exercise that it has become in the 21st century academia. What’s not to love?

There are four things that are bothering me right now about the articles that the Cornerstone team asked us to read. This isn’t to say that Cornerstone isn’t a cool program or to suggest that I’m not interested in supporting my colleagues, but I wish we had selected a slightly different group of readings. Here’s what’s frosting my iceberg this morning:

First, I find myself increasingly annoyed by “solutionism” in higher education. While it comes in many forms (including the insipidly neoliberal flavor of “techno solutionism”), at its most generic it sees higher education as the solution for the problems in society and if it can’t solve these problems, it is essentially a failure (or at very least a problem requiring some kind of solution).

Of course, I understand that as a modern institution, states and communities created the university to help navigate the challenges facing contemporary society and to navigate the course toward perfection (or a kind of social equality). Somewhere along the way, however, most people gave up this view and instead saw the modern university not as the exclusive agent of some kind of common good (e.g. democracy, capitalism, modernity and so on), but also the agent of individual good. The latter could be as relatively simple and measurable as employment or even wealth, but in most cases has become something far less clearly definable: personal satisfaction, confidence, capacity, or even happiness. In this way the university has shifted from solving a problem — the challenges of the emergent modern world — to providing a pathway to a more fulfilling life. This approach rejects the idea that lives outside higher education are somehow not fulfilling or failures or otherwise inadequate, and, instead sees higher education as a pathway among many in a woods that exist not as a problem to be overcome, but as the setting for our shared journey through the world.

It would seem that Herman Melville understood this and his quote appears, paradoxically, in support of Debanco’s otherwise paradigmatic solutionist essay: “a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”       

Second, even if we recognize that solutionism is a viable or maybe essential part of any rhetorical strategy designed to promote institutional change, one wonders whether the problems articulated by these Cornerstone advocates are the right ones. Is the problem the rise of STEM and its corresponding lack of sensitivity to such profound issues as diversity, equality, or our shared burden of the human condition?

If so, how do we square this with Melville’s observation that he gained the experiences he needed to understand the world with such unique compassion through his time on a whale ship?

I tend to suspect that Melville was onto something and any efforts to blame the institution for the institution’s problems is likely to fall flat. After all, one has to only look at the faculty in the STEM fields on our (and most other) campuses to see that they tend to be far more ethnically and racially diverse than humanities faculty and more in line with the “miscellaneous metropolitan society” that Melville encountered on his ship. Even if we see the (largely white) humanities (faculty) as solution to this problem, we’re the only one proposing solutions: STEM fields, of course, are aware of the need for diversity. 

Third, Cornerstone is not just about introducing students to a common “core” (don’t call it a canon) of reading, but about an overarching approach to engaging with texts, but at the same time, it seems like the rationale of Cornerstone is inseparable about the formation of a new common corpus of texts at the center of this shared experience. 

As someone who has increasingly been nibbling around the edge of the traditional canon for my entire professional career, I’ve come to the unremarkable conclusion that there are no great books, just little readers. In other words, almost any text becomes great and meaningful if we approach it with sincere humility. I wonder whether the cultivation of humility in the face of the world’s challenges is something that the humanities should encourage. After all, this way of thinking mitigates against the crassest form of “solutionism” and encourages us to spend our lives trying to understand rather than to solve problems. The bigger question, though, is whether this is possible within a Cornerstone system that already presumes to offer a solution to problem. 

Finally, a few years ago, I came to recognize how tired my students were — maybe not Melville on a whaling ship tired, but tired nonetheless. If we embrace the Cornerstone supposition that there is a problem with our institutions and humanities can solve this problem, perhaps we need to get down to brass tacks here.

Our courses meet for 150 minutes per semester and I was told years ago that students should expect two hours of out of class preparation for each hour in class. So each week, each class would represent a 7.5 investment of student time (i.e. 2.5 hours of class time plus 3-4 hours work outside of class). In a humanities class this might be 50-70 pages of reading or a 3-5 page (approximately 1000 word) paper per week. Let’s say that a typical 5-course semester would then be a 35 hour work load for students. 

This feels reasonable to me, but it probably doesn’t reflect student life very well. First off, students often take more than 15 credits or have requirements such as flight time for airplane flying majors which adds to this total. We also know that many of our students work and even on-campus jobs can add up to 20 hours to their 35 hour full time learning gig.

We also know the despite the old axiom, “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” we know this isn’t the case. Students have complicated lives with relationships, families, and a kind of fragility to their time and schedules. An illness, a family situation, a problem with roommates, a car, or food insecurity, or even a relationship going south can blow up even the most finely organized schedules. In short, working 50-60 hours a week is bad and even worse for students who are still negotiating the challenges of adulthood. When I listen to my students, as Melinda Zook recommends, this is what I hear. 

It’s unsurprising that our students struggle, of course:  any number of studies have suggested that 50-60 hour workloads are bad: bad for productivity, bad for our health, and probably bad for society.

No amount of common reading, listening, curriculum reform, or academic solutionism is likely to change these realities. We might do something to mitigate the damage, of course, and this might start by acknowledging the limits to what we can do to make an impact on student life if we don’t adapt what we do inside the academy to the realities imposed by forces largely outside of the institution. Cornerstone, as articulated by these readings, emerges not as a life-line to Gen Z, but as a solutionist approach to a problem articulated in 20th century ways of thinking about universities.

This isn’t to say that Cornerstone can’t do good things and is a bad idea. Hecks, I’m going to enjoy my free breakfast and support my colleagues even if I don’t fully agree with the undertaking. If nothing else, my humanities education has encouraged me to approach problems and solutions with humility and trust (but verify) the other whalers on the ship. 

Teaching Thursday: Wisdoming and Class Attendance

I generally try to avoid offering wisdom to my students. This is largely because I don’t think wisdom is something that one can learn from another person. Wisdom is the fruit of experience. At the same time, as I stare down my 20th year at UND and my 30th year in the college classroom, I’ve come to imagine that I’m the exception. Somehow I have wisdom that I can and MUST share.

I realize that this is ridiculous, and to keep me from being one of the “Those Guys,” I limit my proffering of wisdom to the first day of class. And I limit my wisdom to five points:

1. Come to class.
2. Pay attention.
3. Write things down.
4. Don’t procrastinate.
5. Remember that an “A” in an easy class is worth the same for your GPA as an “A” in a hard class.

That’s it. 

I’ve recently read some studies on grades and class attendance which suggest that attending class has a strong relationship to grades. What’s more interesting is that the authors of a 2010 study discerned that mandatory attendance policies do not have as strong an influence over grades. In fact, they suggest that mandatory attendance policies might only have some small effect on the grades of students who would otherwise fail the class.

This story got me wondering about the impact of telling students to attend class and whether it has an impact similar to a mandatory attendance policy or not. As readers of this blog know, I’ve long held a theory that students are prone to resist authority in the classroom, and while sometimes I’ve argued that students follow a “Johnny Theory” of resistance (“What are you rebelling against? What do ya got?”), I have increasingly come to believe that students resist strategically. In particular, their resistance strategies target policies, recommendations, and arguments that they feel are unsound, unfair, or unjust. This form of resistance tends to coalesce around recommendations of the kind that I’ve made above, particularly regarding class attendance. In other words, the act of recommending that students attend class serves as a point around which student resistance can form. It may be that mandatory attendance policies (or other punitive strategies designed to enforce attendance) represents a tacit acknowledgement that recommending attendance without visible and regular consequences (say, pop quizzes, or structured grade reduction for missing class) is doomed to fail. 

This, in turn, validates my generally feeling that most people don’t acquire wisdom from others (even when they acknowledge that the other individual has some authority or particular competence). The desire to resistance explicit statements reflects a deep skepticism toward institutional manifestation of authority that is longstanding, but particularly valorized in the contemporary political scheme.

In short, my offer of wisdom is unlikely to move the needle and may actually do more harm than good especially in the current political landscape.    

On Al Berger

Last Friday, I learned that Al Berger had passed. He was a long time colleague in the history department at the University of North Dakota where he taught and researched 20th century US history and modern military history. He retired a few years ago and the department is only now working to fill the gap that he left in our curriculum.

When I started at UND, Al was a larger than life character. His reputation for being combative, opinionated, and obstinate had proceeded him, and I was as intimidated by that reputation as I was by his sometimes gruff demeanor. I’m not sure that he ever warmed to me, but after more than a decade together in the same department, we had more than a few cordial interactions.

When I invited him to present to a graduate methods course on doing research in archives, he not only offered sage advice to the class, but also fascinating insights into his work in private archives associated with the Rockefeller family. In front of the classroom, he came alive lacing the nuts-and-bolts of archival work with personalities, witty aside, and a little well-crafted sarcasm. I also enjoyed his lectures on using pop and rock music as a source for social history. While these were mostly directed toward undergraduates who he expected to be skeptical of the value of such “low brow” sources, he talked about the messages of folk-rock artists from the 1970s with disarming sincerity. He came alive during these lectures and was entertaining, humane, and compelling. 

His cynicism toward the university as an institution was legendary. He periodically upbraided us (especially in department meetings) for not doing enough to stick up for history as a discipline and as a department. In dealings with deans and “the powers-that-be,” we rarely managed to live up to his expectations. In hindsight, he was probably right to urge us to be more pro-active. His combativeness with the administration occasionally took on an ugly turn — such as the time that he exploded at a unsympathetic dean — but despite being scandalized at the time, I’m reluctant to say it wasn’t justified. The changing culture of the institution and discipline fueled his frustration with the university. My sense is that he did not benefit from the “old boys club” that dominated the department when he was hired and felt increasingly alienated form a 21st-century faculty who had different values, habits, and goals. I wish that I had talked to him a bit more when I was writing my history of the department. Maybe I would have understood his cynicism better and been more sympathetic. 

I recognize that I had the benefit of getting to know Al when some of the more bitter and divisive conflicts in our department’s history has settled to a low simmer. There were moments when they raised their head. He once attempted to recuse a colleague from a committee meeting, which was both ungrammatical and unfortunate. There were more times, however, when he seemed (to me) to take on a conciliatory tone as a way to preserve the peace and move forward.

More formal obituaries will enumerate his scholarly and professional accomplishments: his contributions to the ND State Historical Society, the loyalty of his former students, and his serious works of scholarship. I do recall him telling me once that a peer reviewed article was “the kind of article that I no longer write.” He took incessant pride in his efforts to make both his research and our discipline more accessible to a wider audience through public lectures, appearances in documentaries (or at least a documentary), and a willingness to offer perspectives from the past to anyone who was willing to listen patiently. 

Al’s presence in our department made my first job feel like a proper academic position where institutional memory (and trauma) mattered, personalities existed behind (and sometimes in front of!) different perspectives, and folks like Al Berger contributed to the range of professional practices present in my discipline. He was a character.

In fact, he left such an impression on me that I invoked his famously combative attitude in a faculty meeting the very week that he passed. I had long imagined that it would be possible to call Al back from retirement and launch him forth into some breach on campus. I think that Al would have appreciated this offer, but still tell us that we too needed to “stand like greyhounds in the slips.” 

New Book Day: Campus Building

It’s NEW BOOK DAY at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. 

I am very excited to announce the publication of Campus Building, a reflective celebration on Merrifield Hall on the campus of the University of North Dakota edited by Shilo Virginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar.

This book brings together archival research, creative writing, interviews, and stunning photographs to tell the story of Merrifield Hall from the perspectives of students and faculty who spent so many hours learning, teaching, and experiencing the building over the years. These reflections and research are timely as Merrifield Hall is currently undergoing a massive overhaul which is forever change the character of its space. 

This book is fantastic. For folks who have followed The Digital Press for years, you’ll see that this book marks a return to the press’s origins in “punk archaeology”. From it’s eclectic formatting to its square page size, diverse perspectives, and (sometimes) raucous tone, this book feels like the best way to remember, reflect upon, and celebrate one of the great old buildings on UND’s campus. 

Even if you’ve never been to UND, don’t think much about campus buildings, and don’t know or care what a Merrifield is, it’s worth downloading a free copy of this book and giving it a look. And if you like, it consider grabbing a paper copy to help support future publications from The Digital Press.

Grab a free copy here or splurge on a paper copy. 

Press release is below the fold.

For Immediate Release

Campus Building

A New Book Celebrating Merrifield Hall on the
Campus of the University of North Dakota

 

Campus Building, from the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, celebrates the experience of teaching and learning in the historic Merrifield Hall. For almost a century, Merrifield Hall has played a formative role both in “campus building” and in the education of thousands of students. This book offers a reflection on is history, its space, and its people as it embodies the dual role of Merrifield Hall both in campus building and as a campus building.

 

This publication is the product of an English graduate seminar on “things” in which Doctoral and Masters’ students explored how we experienced Merrifield Hall as “a thing.” The course included both creative writers and students of literature, and their exploration of the building became an exercise in thinking about Merrifield Hall from a range of theoretic perspectives, traditions, methods, and practices.

 

The book itself came about in the building that it both describes and celebrates. As Shilo Previti who edited the volume remarked: “On a typical day in Merrifield Hall, my work was habitually interrupted by a pastiche of the building’s past, present, and immortal future: beautiful wooden bannisters and amazing long oak tables; clanging pipes screaming through a lecture; a colleague of advanced experience chortling a wacky and somewhat confounding story; trick locks rendering some doors a lost cause while others open and close on their own; hours lost staring down at a strangely beautiful floor or other hidden artwork, including a particular sculpture on my ceiling; a cockroach big enough to (as our office manager says) “steal your lunch money”—Merrifield Hall had it all.”

 

Further informing the book’s character was the imminent overhaul of Merrifield Hall. The reconstruction of this campus building will fundamentally change its shape and historic character. As a result, the contributors to this volume recognized that it was both the end of one era and the beginning of something new. Writing from moment of change offered new perspectives on the building:

 

Grant McMillan one of the book’s editors noted that building’s future shaped his experience: “I’d like to spend a day inside every building about to be torn down; there’s an uncanny freedom to be found in these spaces. On the precipice of being remade, their formalities and policies and protocols briefly relax, and the whole structure exhales.”

 

Samuel Amendolar, who has spent nearly his entire academic career in Merrifield Hall, offers this view: “Campus Building provides a unique interrogation of Merrifield Hall, UND’s architectural gem, not only as a space of higher education, but also an object which has facilitated inquisitive minds across the northern plains for nearly a century. The ongoing renovation of Merrifield Hall, while exciting and refreshing, has inadvertently highlighted the structure’s transient nature; if Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias tells us anything, while the structure may eventually succumb to natural forces, the permanence facilitated by the words of our contributors succeeds in preserving Merrifield Hall throughout this renovation process and beyond.”

 

Bill Caraher, who published the book, concludes: “This project is a great example of how our experiences in a place shape how we think, not only about the place, but also about our world. As UND’s campus undergoes exciting changes, it’s important both to remember how campus buildings once were, and to imagine how new buildings will contribute to life on campus in the future.”

 

The book is available now as a free digital download and as a high-quality color paperback: https://thedigitalpress.org/campusbuilding/.

 

Book By Its Cover: Campus Building

This week is turning out to be a busy one, but I continue to work away at several projects for The Digital Press and this weekend is poised by a great flurry of publishing activity.

The good news is that I have some momentum toward finishing up some of these projects. 

For example, here’s the final cover for a book that should come out at the beginning of October. Titled Campus Building, the book was designed by graduate students from a seminar on “things” that I taught. The book celebrates Merrifield Hall on UND’s campus which is currently undergoing some vigorous renovation and brings together archival material, fiction, poetry, photographs, and scholarly reflections. It also very much celebrates the diversity of voices present in the contemporary discussion of things as well as in our seminar. I can’t wait for it to be available to the world.

The cover photos are by Grant McMillian.

Stay tuned for more.