This Could Be Us—Or Is It?

John N. Gardner
President

On a recent evening, March 14, I got home fairly late from a meeting and settled down with a glass of wine and that day’s New York Times which I have been reading faithfully every day since my first year of college. And on this particular evening I turned first to the Op-Ed page and my attention was immediately riveted by an extraordinary piece written by a 33 year old now resigned executive from the world’s premiere investment bank, Goldman Sachs, one Greg Smith. As I devoured this piece, I knew that I would be hearing about this column the very next day as a hard news story.

And I was right. The very next day The Times ran above the fold, on page 1, its lead piece “Public Rebuke of Culture at Goldman Opens Debate.”

I assume that most of my readers will have already been reading and hearing about this public resignation via op-ed column and all the varied opinions it has engendered. I read the piece and found myself immediately saying “this could be us”, the “us” being US higher education not-for-profit institutions. And then I found myself asking “Or is it?”

The basic theme of the original Times column was that this young man had discovered this world class company not to be what he had come to expect, even though the reader would assume the writer had personally reaped great financial gain—a company that had lost its original culture and vision, in effect, its soul. Instead of having the best interests of its clients as the foremost objective of all its business transactions, the only objective reported by this successful trader (not “traitor) was making extraordinary sums of money by taking advantage of your clients.

As I read this piece I found myself recalling the conversation themes emerging from a recurrent session that I co-facilitate under the leadership of my colleague at USC, Stuart Hunter, and my wife, Betsy Barefoot, at each of the conferences organized by USC’s National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. These sessions are entitled “Spirituality, Authenticity and Wholeness in Higher Education.” These are essentially facilitated discussion sessions around this theme, in which the concept of “spirituality” does not necessarily mean a conventional definition of that term, but rather more generically one’s ultimate and most important values. Participants, always a capacity crowd, are asked to reflect on to what extent are the practices of their particular college or university congruent with the most important values and beliefs of the employed educators in this discussion. And then to consider how do we respond and manage circumstances when our basic values are not congruent with the policies and practices of our institution? And this was exactly the situation that Mr. Smith at Goldman Sachs found himself in: how was he to act when his values were no longer consistent with the prevailing values’ culture at Goldman. When he realized he could no longer give the company line to college student intern candidates applying for coveted internships at Goldman it was a moment of truth for him. How do we deal with our inner selves, and our outer behaviors, if and when we are not congruent with the institutional party line of our employers? That is a question of relevance here.

As I read and thought about the original column further I couldn’t help but substituting the word “students” for the word “clients” in his piece. And I found myself recalling from these discussion sessions referenced above the deep concerns expressed as the dominant theme, namely, the academy has become all about money too. It has become corporatized. What matters now in many ways more than the students is money. And increasingly my friends and colleagues from the academy report the question is now what could we do to “save” money but to “make” money. Thus, very much like the airlines, basic parts of the experience for which we never charged before, have become monetized. I don’t even need to provide examples. My readers will immediately understand.

And, so, Mr. Smith has become an Everyman. I couldn’t help but note the coincidence of his column appearing during an election cycle when one of those who would be king has a value system very compatible with the one Mr. Smith has just rejected. My fellow citizens will get to choose in a few months. But for all of us in the academy in terms of our day to day work and inner thoughts and feelings about such work, it is not so easy. We don’t just vote on one day. We have to vote with our actions every day in terms of how we mesh those with the dominant values of our institutional culture. And this is why I rant so much about the prized outcome of my work, student “retention”, being a debased business model, that does not do complete justice of the intellects and souls (in the secular sense) of our students.

If you haven’t read Mr. Smith’s Op-Ed piece in its full text, you really should.

Let’s Hear It for Alma Mater

John Gardner
President

Surely some of my readers still have powerful or meaningful connections to their undergraduate alma mater. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way. My alma mater is a very special liberal arts college, Marietta College of Ohio. I had a “powerful and meaningful” connection for 12 years when I served on their Board of Trustees from 1993 to 2005. I think and hope I was helpful to them. I eventually realized about this kind of service:

1.  it is difficult to go back home again
2.  it is difficult to be a prophet in one’s own land
3.  a little bit of me goes a long way
4.  having me as a trustee is a good news/bad news story—good because I offer some good suggestions; bad because I know enough to make senior campus leaders occasionally uncomfortable
5.  that I had been on the board three times as long as I had been in college there as a student
6.  and had donated more money than it cost my family to send me in the 60’s.

But I love keeping up with alma mater. And I am very proud of them. And very grateful to them for making me what I am today. But I do want to finally get to the point of this blog—and that was I recently learned something neat that alma mater is attempting.

Last month, as my readers know, I attended the 31^st annual FYE conference. And there I had the opportunity to talk with several Marietta faculty and staff and learned this: Marietta has taken the idea of the first-year seminar and given it a unique Marietta twist. They have been offering various versions of this course genre since I started working with members of the faculty there in the late 1970’s to replicate an adapted version of my course at USC, University 101.

What I have learned is that the College has just started using mid term grade reports as a trigger for inviting first-year students in academic difficulty to enroll immediately in an optional, one hour credit, first-year seminar that begins immediately, right there at midterm. And I understand that demand for the course has greatly exceeded their initial predications and planning. Nice problem to have.

Long ago I learned from my student affairs colleagues about the concept of “developmental need to know.” This is really a very simple idea, namely, when students develop the need to know something that is the time to deliver to them what they now have realized they need to know. It is identical to just-in-time delivery in the manufacturing world.

Of course, when I learned of this innovation I was delighted and praised the Marietta folks responsible. And I told them that this should make for a most interesting controlled study to compare the academic performance and other measures differentiating the students who were in academic difficulty at midterms and who did chose to participate in the optional course versus those like qualified students who did not.  Stay tuned and I will report what I learn.

So Where Are The Men?

Last month while in San Antonio attending the 31^st annual Conference on The First-Year Experience, I was invited to join a conversation of the Alamo Community College District’s Minority Male Committee. This is a very progressive community college district and I was pleased to have this opportunity. I thought the conversation was courageous and promising. The underperformance of minority males, relative to other community college students, many of whom are not doing all that well either, is a source for great concern. Few colleges really zero in on this.

For several decades I have been noticing, as have been other observer and demographers, the larger problem of underperformance by men per se, in college. I remember visiting one of the CUNY colleges back in the 90’s and noting that in a large group of “student leaders” (students active in leading clubs, organizations, service projects, and student government) there were hardly any men present. So I threw out the obvious question to the group: “Where are the men?” The answer I had in the form of a flip, but intentionally candid quip from one of the women: “It’s all about sports, booze, and sex—that’s where they are.”

And now, every campus I visit the story is the same: men are less likely to go to college; less likely to stay when they do get there; less likely to be involved in campus leadership activities. But they still want to play football and basketball. And the historically male orientated culture still predominates at most campuses, especially those with intercollegiate revenue sports.

And just the other week, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that men were significantly less likely to participate in study abroad.

And the Census Bureau has reported that in the largest metropolitan areas of the country when comparing the salary/income levels of unmarried, college educated, 22-30 year old males vs. females,that women are now out-earning men.

There has been a great deal written now by way of attempting to explain these profound differences. I am just commenting here on what steps we might want to take about this.

First of all, I would like to see every coeducational college campus have some kind of standing task force undertake a study of male performance on that particular campus. So first of all, we need to know more about this problem on a campus by campus basis.

To do this would take a great deal of courage. Many men who run campuses are reluctant to admit we have a problem. And for some of them, there is good reason and not just denial: they may actually be pilloried for using this ostensibly well intentioned effort as one more strategy to insure male domination. I have the pleasure of living with a caring, very smart, higher education liberal like myself, but one who has no sympathy for this problem. She notes that we men are still running the country, predicts we will probably long continue to do so, and just doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. My point is that on some campuses even raising the question may be politically incorrect.

It is the case that men are underrepresented as participants in many of the co-curricular activities that we know are so valuable as developmental experiences for college students, for example, service learning. One way to address this would be to abandon our “optional” approach to so much about the collegiate experience and make certain activities mandatory. Just imagine what the effect on your campus might be if you instituted a campus service requirement for graduation.

We also know that men are much less likely to see assistance, particularly in the first year of college, when they are, not surprisingly, more likely to drop out or flunk out. This is why I have long been an advocate for requiring most college students to take a first-year seminar in which they will be made to use certain helping services and resources. To quote a phrase now making the rounds on many higher education circles: “students don’t do optional.”

If we were really serious about this problem, we would address it the way we address other topics we value highly: we would embed it in the curriculum. I realize this would be anathema at some places, encouraging more students to enroll in gender studies courses, let alone require them. But really, we have to get students together to rationally study, understand, and reflect on how we got to this state of affairs and what THEY might do about it.

But, for starters, a campus task force/committee on the question of male performance in higher education would be a good first step. We have to start somewhere. Most campuses haven’t started at all. And we have to look at all men, not exclusively minority males. They are members of a much larger and less exclusive club.

So where are the men? Well, they’re out there — but we’re just not talking about them. Maybe we don’t even notice what is right there before us to see: if only we would look, then talk, and then take some action.

What is the Role of the President/Chancellor in Improving the First Year?

John Gardner
President

For any readers who read one of my preceding posts, they will recall I had just returned from the 31^st annual Conference on The First-Year Experience.  A recurrent theme in almost every session I attended was the role of the President/Chancellor. There was unanimity that this person and role mattered greatly in the priority assigned on a particular campus to paying more attention to new students. There was also a tremendous range of views and opinions on how attendees’ leaders were using their influence with respect to improving the first year.

Let’s back up. I remember back in the US 2000 Presidential campaign that Ralph Nader argued that there were no real essential differences between the Republican and Democratic candidates and that if the citizenry wanted real change they needed to support him. But this left a profound question: what difference does the CEO make?

That’s the question I am writing to raise here. And this question is very much on my mind because the non-profit organization which I lead is hosting a brief “institute” this April for Presidents/Chancellors only. We haven’t done anything like this for over a decade so I am feeling a bit rusty at approaching this cohort on my favorite subject, the importance of the new and transfer student experiences. And just the thought of presenting anything to this elite leadership class is daunting as I know of no group which is more challenged in terms of managing attention deficit disorder as they are deluged with so many competing demands for their time and mental attention, especially during the spring legislative sessions when their principal funder may be hard at work reducing their appropriation.

Some years ago the book, In Search of Excellence, was on the college student best seller list, as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, for a long, long time. The authors, Peters and Waterman, argued that the most important role of the CEO was/is “to manage the values” of the organization.

I have always argued—and most recently again at the conference, that this work to improve the first year is “values based.” And historically, for much of the period post World War II until much, much later in the twentieth century, this work was undervalued, because the subjects to which the work was directed, namely, first-year students, were undervalued; In many places that has changed, but certainly not everywhere. And that is why I raise the question of the role of the CEO. It was clear to me at the just completed First-Year Experience conference that there are many campuses where faculty/staff do not believe their CEO places a premium value on the need to improve success of new students.

While I would be grateful if any of my readers were to offer to me any reasons why their presidents/chancellors matter, I assume that what would be more important for my readers would be to marshal their own arguments for why their leaders matter to improving the first year and how they could get those arguments in front of their president/chancellor. I think that is a very important item of business for institutionalizing the importance of first-year work on your campus. I think more leaders would be open to paying more attention if only they were approached about doing so. I hope you will push in that direction and not leave this to serendipity. There are so many campus conditions that matter – that must be in place for a stronger first year- and in my experience, the stance of the CEO is one of them. After our Presidents/Chancellors Institute in April, I will write again about what arguments we used to try to persuade them they should be actively engaged in this educational conversation.

Let’s Get Back to Basics: What is the Purpose of our Work?

John N. Gardner
President

I have had two mental occasions recently to remind me that those of us in the social justice business for undergraduate college students need to keep reminding ourselves of why we are in this work.

One occasion was sitting at a conference banquet function listening to an emissary of corporate America share her vision for our work. The other was reading a story about a courageous college graduate who gave her life to achieve the mission of her work which she was inspired to pursue as a result of her college experience.

Some context: we wouldn’t be involved in our collective work to accomplish “student success” were it not for the great strides made in “access” to college, made possible by the Higher Education Act of 1965 which was part of the larger “Great Society” legislative reform agenda to provide a more equitable America for all upwardly aspiring citizens. And even though I have been working on educational reform issues for decades now that go beyond simply providing “access”, it seems that the higher ed and political establishments have just discovered that “access” isn’t quite enough. No, besides “access” we need “success” and this has become defined and enshrined in public policy, campus based initiatives, and in all sorts of products for-profit America is selling the establishment by one word: “retention”.

Another way of defining this new found public discovery of “success” is with the phrase “getting through” as in “getting through” undergraduate education to degree attainment. Now, those of us working in the first-year experience vineyards since well before the first national conference on this topic in 1983, now we are joined, thank goodness, by many prominent foundations (such as Lumina and Gates), by national organizations or projects  such as Complete College America and Completion by Design and/or Achieving the Dream—and too the work of my non-profit organization—all working towards that common goal: attainment/completion, whatever the word/phrase du jour may be. This is a hugely important development. We need and our students need all the help they can get.

But I find myself continually wanting to return to the question(s): what is the purpose of all this? Is the purpose of the academy now to “retain” students, to “get them through”? So why do we want to “get them through”? What do we want them to do, to know, as a result of having “gotten them through”? Is completion per se the goal or a means to multiple goals? Are we unintentionally confusing means with ends?

Two recent perspectives for me on the purposes of getting students through follow below.

The first was at the just completed 31^st annual Conference on The First-Year Experience. At an occasion for a plenary gathering, to award and recognize what we call “Outstanding First-Year Advocates”, a senior official of a for-profit corporation that was sponsoring this awards ceremony told the several thousand educators in the room that she was confident we in the audience shared her company’s goal “of creating successful e-learners” and then she invited us all to come by her booth to show us how we could create this educational outcome. My immediate reaction was to ask myself have I labored for 45 years to create successful “e-learners”? Not on your life. This is just one more reason I don’t want the thinkers in corporate America defining for us the goals of higher education. Now if she had said “successful learners” I would not have had this reaction. Admit it John: you are an academic. You do believe in the value of the academy of espousing learning for the sake of learning. But narrowing all this down to “e-learning” seemed to me the grossest possible oversimplification. It also overlooks the fact that “e-learning” is only one of many ways to promote learning. Let us hope higher education will still promote other forms of learning, inside and outside the curriculum: experiential learning; learning in an auditory fashion from the wisdom of real time college teachers still in the traditional classroom; students learning from each other in real time discussion, in addition to on-line discussion; learning through service; and many other modalities. No, “e-learning” didn’t speak to me, most of all because it didn’t say anything about learning for what end(s).

Five days later, as I read a page one story in The New York Times about the death of a courageous journalist who died pursuing her outcome of higher education, a foreign war correspondent, I received a reminder of a purpose of higher education, one I found much more compelling than simply completing, attaining, being retained, or becoming a successful e-learner.

“Ghastly Images Flow From Shattered Syrian City” is the February 23, 2012 Times headline for this inspiring but sad story of Marie Colvin, who died (along with another journalist) in Homs, Syria, covering the tragic slaughter that has been occurring there, so that we on the outside free and not free world can know what the Syrian government does not want us to know. Ms Colvin, writing for The Times of London, was a 1978 graduate of Yale with a degree in anthropology. She had been a war correspondent for over 25 years, a highly dangerous but important career taking her to places as varied as the Balkans, the Middle East, Somalia, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Timor, and finally Syria. At 56, she had already paid a price for her cause, having been hit by shrapnel in 2001 in Sri Lanka, necessitating the wearing of an eye patch. On this particular assignment she had been hoping for an official visa to enter Syria but was not able to obtain one so she snuck across the border anyway, and met her end when the Syrian army shelled a building in which she had sought refuge.

As I read further about Marie Colvin in a separate New York Times interview with her mother, I learned that while an undergraduate at Yale she took a course from the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, John Hersey. According to her mother, Ms. Colvin also became a writer for the student newspaper, The Yale Daily News and “decided to become a journalist.”

Now when I think of the purposes of degree completion, this kind of impact is what moves me, motivates me. This is what our work is all about.  Certainly, in my case, not about creating successful “e-learners” and not just about retention, albeit recognizing that we do need to retain students in order to impact them. I would prefer to think that we retain students because we impact them. The life of  Marie Colvin reminds me that our cause –those of us higher educators striving for student success-must be about providing transformative educational experiences (such as being influenced by inspiring professors and having powerful developmental experiences on campus that link the co-curriculum and the curriculum) that changed our students’ lives forever, for the better, having moved them in totally new directions from the epiphany or epiphanies they have experienced while with us (probably not reading textbooks on line).

Reporting Live From the 31st Annual First-Year Experience Conference

John N. Gardner
President

The 31^st Annual First-Year Experience Conference has just concluded, either the largest or second largest in our history—the final tally has yet to be completed. There were nearly 2000 in attendance including 300 representatives from the host state of Texas and from over 600 institutions from nine countries—and this isn’t even marketed as an “international” conference!

The meeting was held in San Antonio, an ideal convention center unless you are a bar owner during the annual meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous which I learned from a taxi driver recently met there. The city’s convention center is the most attractive and comfortable I have ever seen.

In light of the fact that this was my 31^st annual meeting, the only person there for all 31, I found myself asking what is/was different about this one? What is perennial? What are the concerns and issues? What’s new?

From my perspective the most remarkable thing is the given: the FYE movement has become institutionalized. It is now the establishment. It has gone mainstream.

The meeting continues to draw at least half first-timers each year. This is a very healthy indicator. 

The meeting had over 60 for-profit exhibitors, which shows the alliance of shameless commerce with the academy these days. I would not have predicted or wanted this 32 years ago when I conceived the idea for the conference, but it is very apparent that the forces of capitalism have discovered there are many things we either don’t do well enough on our own or that we want to outsource to them. The driver for this, of course, is retention.

When we started what is now a “movement,” we found that the initial champions were our colleagues in Student Affairs. Now, they don’t need to be the champions.  That’s because the academic affairs folks are there, engaged, so much so there is much talk of formerly Student Affairs functions being reorganized into Academic Affairs reporting lines—true testimony to the quality of the job Student Affairs professionals have done in persuading the academy of the importance of their work to the academic success of college students.

For many years in the late 80’s and earlier 90’s, we worked very hard to recruit senior leaders: presidents/chancellors, vice presidents to these meetings. We even used to waive their registration fees if they would just come and bring a team of at least three others. In 2012, only a handful of them were in evidence. I think what this means is that they are already sold; they don’t need to be convinced. They get it.  But I still wish more of them were there.

The conference attendees seemed to me to be evenly divided between three constituencies: academic affairs administrators, student affairs administrators, and faculty. And we had students with us too. I so admire institutions that are willing to invest their precious travel monies to bring students.  I can only conclude that our original goal in 1981 to organize a conference to bring together those constituencies to rally around a common focus—the welfare of beginning college students, is still the dominant cultural characteristic of this meeting.

It was a consensus that this work was more needed than ever given the directions of American society towards ever-increasing levels of social and economic inequality. I was struck though with how few of the attendees seem to understand or realize the origins of the FYE movement being in the social justice movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I did my best to remind the multiple audiences I had of this important heritage and of the fact that the civil rights movement is definitely unfinished.

Many of the attendees still feel undervalued and unappreciated on their campuses because of the low status of new students, and hence those that work with those students. So the most important thing that happens for these attendees is affirmation, which they so deserve.

The FYE movement began as a reaction against the tenets of the academy that were denying dignity and resource commitment to new students. The importance of the first year is now well established and institutionalized at most campuses. Thus, the “revolution” has now become orthodox. As a recovering former historian, I know that the most threatening thing to the vitality of any revolution is for it to become the new orthodoxy. I was pleased to see that there were no evidences that this movement has yet to become staid and complacent.

I left the conference as I have for a number of years now feeling gratified and with the goal to keep coming until my fiftieth when I will be 87.  I hope our country will be more committed to social justice then than it is now. In contrast to my aspiration, just last Friday, February 17, a candidate for President stated very explicitly that he supported economic inequality*. The comment provided great timing to remind me that I have the opposite goal for the future of the FYE conference series. And, I am betting that more of the American people share my vision than this particular candidate’s vision for our collective future.

*:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/santorum-says-his-position-on-auto-bailout-more-consistent-than-romneys/2012/02/16/gIQADeiBIR_blog.html

Happy Birthday FYE

I can’t believe it. On February 17^th, something I started by flying by the seat of my pants back in 1981, with the assistance of one overworked administrative assistant, will become the 31^st offering of the Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience. I understand from my successors at the University of South Carolina that the event will draw over 1800 participants. That is a far cry from the 173 pioneers who joined us for the first one in February 1982.

We chose February originally because I thought holding a trial balloon conference would have a better chance of being viable if we held it dead in the middle of a beautiful South Carolina winter—that would guarantee a good showing of “Yankees” who would come down to see if we wore shoes in the winter.

We held the meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, until 2000 when we felt compelled to honor the NAACP national boycott against South Carolina for flying the Confederate battle flag, literally, at the foot of the steps to enter the South Carolina state Legislature. So since 2000 we have been moving the meeting around major US cities.

I have come to increasingly believe that the real “FYE” is in the highest enrollment, high failure rate courses—and that more than all other areas of possible focus, is where we most need to be directing our attention.

But I will soon see what higher education thinks we should be paying attention to this year.

This event is always like Christmas to me of sorts. So many gifts, from so many fine people—albeit educational gifts but still prized greatly.

A Day with Student Affairs Leaders

John N. Gardner
President

Recently I spent a day with about 40 senior student affairs officers of the great City University of New York system. It was a great day for me, surely more so for me than for them. I was reminded of all I don’t know about students and how much professors like me need to spend time with our student affairs colleagues.

The day also recalled for me the beginnings of my own journey of transformation as a faculty member. That began in 1972 when my President at the University of South Carolina invited me and 16 other faculty members to spend 45 hours over three weeks in workshop sessions with 8 student affairs officers. We had come together to design the University 101 course and to transform the beginning university experience: to do that we had to transform ourselves.

Prior to this workshop (when I was 28 years old and had been teaching in the academy for almost 6 years) I had never worked with student affairs professionals. I didn’t know who they were, what they did, how they became a member of their profession. I had gone to a small liberal arts college in the 60’s and that genre didn’t have student affairs professionals then. Thank goodness it does now (and I am in touch with those folks now at my alma mater).

So 40 years later, déjà vu, I got to spend a day with a group of contemporary student affairs officers. Unlike my original period of introduction to them, they aren’t under the radar any longer. They have been discovered and found to be incredibly important to our overall goals of increasing student success. But in that respect, they have also become victims of their own success. Now that they have been discovered many academics like me no longer understand or support the rationale of having student affairs professionals bureaucratically separated from academic affairs folks. Hence all over the country I am seeing these distinctions blur, become ambiguous and realigned, and I welcome this overdo direction because it bodes well for greater concentration on support for the preeminent institutional mission: academic success.

As I listened to these professionals who live and work in one of the most dynamic, high pressure, diverse, adversarial, confrontational cultures in the world, I marveled at how deeply and respectfully they understand their students and advocate for them. I listened to them talking about student conditions involving: courage, shame, struggles, homelessness, hunger, violence, ambition, hopes, dreams, fears, accomplishments and frustrations. I don’t know when I had mentally run such a gamut in such a short period of time. I couldn’t help but think that far more faculty needed to be in that room and in rooms like it. It is not that we don’t know our students. We do. And many of us do engage their lives outside the classrooms. But the academic world has changed. Now the distinction between learning inside and outside the classroom has been reduced to very little difference. We can only arbitrarily separate the two, and to promote student success we must not.

I offered these professional champions for student needs a number of strategies to enhance student affairs/academic affairs collaborations. I believe they are needed more than ever. This is because the overall goal of the student success movement, social justice, is more challenged than ever by the stratification system in America which produces greater and greater inequality rather than equality. What this means is that student success has become harder and harder to achieve. We have to achieve this together.

I hope more of my faculty colleagues will be able to spend time, even a limited amount, in rooms like I found myself in, just listening for insights and inspiration, as our student affairs colleagues talk with us about the students’ worlds as they see this in 2012.

What Would You Like Me to Blog About?

John Gardner
President

I am losing track of time on this but a few years ago, a former staff colleague of mine in our Institute, suggested for the first time that I do a blog. I tried ignoring her at first as in just laughing and saying “Me? You have to be kidding.” But she didn’t give up and finally I consented. OK, so now I have a blog. The challenge of course is to be disciplined about this and to keep at it. Usually, this is no challenge for me as I always have things I am thinking about and feel I can easily share. I have a task master in our Institute who posts my blogs and makes them look better than I would alone, and she keeps nudging me when I don’t have at least one waiting to be posted. Her goal for me is two a week. I don’t always make that.

At this moment I knew I should write something and as I thought about what I should write, the phrase “Well, let’s ask the customer.” came to mind. So I am asking: “What would my readers like me to write about?” I would look forward to hearing from you with suggestions of topics.

This challenge of what to write about reminds me of a technique I learned from a former colleague of mine at the University of South Carolina, Jerry Jewler. Jerry was a distinguished professor of advertising in our school of Journalism. And he directed with me the University 101 course, for six years from 1983-99. One of his strongest passions for what he believed students needed to do in our course was to develop thinking skills. And for Jerry, the best way to do that was to develop writing skills. He saw the teaching of writing as a way of teaching thinking skills. So he made a point of emphasis with our teaching faculty for the course to provide training for people who don’t teach writing to teach writing. And now a quarter of a century later I still believe that this is one of the most important purposes of any first-year course, but especially two: the first-year writing/composition course(s) and first-year seminar.

Jerry’s favorite process for teaching instructors and then ultimately students, was to use the pedagogy of a well known scholar and teacher of writing, Peter Elbow, and in particular, his strategy known as free writing. In our University 101 Teaching Experience Workshops Jerry would use the Elbow pedagogies. First we would just have the instructors practice pure “freewriting” in which they would be asked to write anything they were thinking. This would be a form of “private” writing, not to be shared with anyone in the group.

Then he would move them to “focused” freewriting by giving them a focus or topic to direct freewriting towards. And to get them started on the focused freewriting, he would give them “triggers” or phrases and ask them to write down anything that occurred to them in response to the trigger they had just heard. We believed that we could teach academics from a broad variety of disciplines who weren’t teachers of writing to become teachers of writing to become teachers of thinking.

As I started writing this blog, I already had a topic. The topic was to ask my readers what they would like me to write about. But that reminded me of another topic, of something I believe in, of a special memory and appreciation for a former very close working colleague. And this connects to my current work. I still think that first-year seminars need to be courses to teach students how to think in college, and that writing is a powerful pedagogy to achieve that end. And, yes, Jerry Jewler’s and Peter Elbow’s beliefs and pedagogies can still help at that.

Perhaps my thinking about this was stimulated by recent discussion of so many American school children no longer receiving instruction in cursive writing and all moving towards learning to write on IPads. And I am sure I am influenced by my daily distress in observing what’s happening to writing as practiced now on smart phones, and e-mail too. For any writer, myself included, there are so many powerful connections between our ideas, concerns, what we write, and for whom.

Do let me know if there are topics you want to hear from me about.

Thank you for reading and influencing my thinking, and then writing, I hope…