The Real Work*

There's a lot of self-serving and specious bloviation originating from the gang of sharp characters that stole our college.

The notion, now that they have hi-jacked the college's good name and accreditation profile to deliver race-to-the-bottom online education, is that this is somehow better.

In particularly, they argue, mostly to potential students and their parents, but also to the governing board, that the college is now more accessible, with more students and more diverse students and that this is better.

Well, no. It's not. And it never will be.

What it is, is different, and it can't easily be compared in order to determine "better" or "worse." Apples to oranges. And it's obviously more commonplace and far less unique, a counterfactual to the nonsense emanating from the corner office, because, well, competition. 

How many online higher education programs will be needed once the Biden administration gets done with its plans to increase Pell Grant, zero out community college tuition, reform the student loan program for four-year schools, add several new avenues for student loan forgiveness, and execute a smart "about turn" on the Title IV "neg reg" that would otherwise have allowed Unity College Online to shop around for an easier accreditor, one that might more easily forgive its many transgressions?

This is a fairly elementary exercise in critical thinking, so much so that I can't believe that someone on the Board hasn't thought it. Probably several have thought it, but haven't said anything. The human being is a frail social animal. Peer pressure is real. Lots of people are not brave enough to actually carry out the responsibilities they sign up for. I expect most of them by now have sat through hours of self-aggrandizing air-time from the administration, Zoomed and PowerPointed to sleepy distraction, caffeinated but dozy, drifting off from time to time, on and on and on, blah, blah, blah, all to justify the abandonment of the mission, the campus, the faculty, the community, the students. 

Some skepticism must have been aroused. But not enough, apparently.

So we'll just have to do their job for them.

Critical Thinking 101. Description, then analysis. First description. Interrogate facts. Put them under a hot light and knock them around a bit. They're just facts. They can't hurt, right?

So, what exactly was the old college in attempted comparison to which the new one is so much "better."

It was lots of things, but most essentially the students. Earlier generations of the Board of Trustees knew this. Many had been such students themselves. I expect right now, anyone with fond memories of the old Quaker Hill is persona non-grata. 

That's a problem in itself, isn't it?

Unity College had a reputation for turning out self-reliant, plucky, feisty, and useful people that could get the job done. Ask any employer why they hired our kids. So how did this happen?

It came in the mix.

And it was a mix. 

(A disclaimer: The order in which our student categories appear is not hierarchical. Or indeed in any kind of structured order. This is just a list in the order in which I thought of it.)

First up, the Golden Girls and Boys. The old college, in any given intake of two-hundred or so mostly eighteen-year old "first-year, first time" college students, served a handful, only twenty or thirty, of gifted and talented environmental studies and environmental science students for whom we had to compete with their respective state flagship and second tier state colleges. Not with Harvard or Yale, for sure. They were gifted but not super-academic. And they didn't have the money or connections to get into the Ivy League. They mostly came from low- to middle-income families. They signed up for the more academic majors, EES, EPLS, SEM, SBE. Or they were the best students in the applied sciences. Even CLE, PFR, and Captive would attract one or two. The best CLE and PFR students were typically "Dudley do-right" Boy Scouts, and leaders of my SAR team. They are park rangers and game wardens now, having been the ones that won the particular game of "Survivor" that is entry to uniformed conservation employment. They are the ones that actually learned the very basic math behind the UTM coordinate system, or that took protection of civil rights to heart. The anti-Chauvins. 

The best Captivers were already mini-zookeepers, with their own menageries, often illegal ensconced in their dorm room. 

They were all truly great students who truly wanted to help save the planet and for the most part are doing so right now in their new careers.

They made my former professorial life wonderful. I mean that. It was full of wonder -- at them. These were the students I lived for. And they are no small legacy. 

After over thirty years in American higher education I'm now allowed to say this: Most professors live for their best learners, less so their middling ones, and certainly not their worst.

I have no fears for the earth, or even for my small daughter's future on it. You see, it wasn't just me doing this work. I had lots of help all over the country and the world. These students, and thousands or even hundreds of thousands like them that were trained up by the environmental movement in global higher education over the last few decades, they will sort it. I have faith in their integrity and capability.

You know who you are. Thank you for returning the faith we placed in you.

My daughter's life and happiness will be in your hands when Aimee and I are gone. But I expect she'll join you in the Real Work.

Next up, the Crusties. A very small minority, one or two of each class at the most, were returning students or older first-timers or veterans on the Post-911 GI bill. These were also great students, but came with more baggage. But they were often very rewarding in return. Having been around life's block a bit, they were happy to have some help in understanding how to go around again, only using a bit more reason this time. 

I could relate. I was twenty-eight when I began college, after seven years in the military and five and a half in military rescue.

Thank you, for all the hard talk and well-earned respect on both sides. Here's a salute from one veteran and non-traditional students to another.

Then the Great Mass, the lumpen proletariat, were b-minus and academically-disengaged students with outdoor or animal-interest lifestyles for whom college was always going to be a chore, who mostly hoped quite desperately to get into outdoor jobs like game warden or wildlife technician or zookeeper just so they could survive lifetime employment somehow. 

Unity offered them a way to survive college, get a degree, and get a shot at one of our trademark outdoor jobs. These students paid our bills. But they were work to teach. They often simply didn't want to learn, especially if it was economics or math or hard science or social studies. They were happy to identify mammals or fish, or go out in the woods on just about any excuse. But take them out of their outdoor identity, out of their comfort zone, and they would try to punish you in return. 

I tried to love them. I still do. I used humor, particularly my grumpy ex-British serviceman's humor, with a slight snark, but no small empathy for their predicament. 

It's hard, truly hard, isn't it, to want to get paid to go hunting or to pet fuzzy animals. That's the only thing you want out of life. That and a toke or a beer or a big truck and a hot boyfriend or girlfriend or all of these. I can empathize. 

But before you can even get a shot at the game warden exam or get that internship at the zoo, you have to pass economics? Do algebra? Learn climate change? Write a grammatically correct sentence?

I felt their pain. I still do. Poor kittens.

So, when so challenged, which was daily, I gave as good as I got. I did my job, taught them econ or climate or math or grammar, the hard way, often one on one, until they hated me more, until they gave up and realized there was only one way out, the honest work they didn't want to do in the first place at the beginning of the semester, and I took their money quite honestly, having earned it very well, with the sweat of my furrowed brow, and paid my bills and made my way, got married, bought a house, made a farm, had a kid. About half to two-thirds or more of these types became decent human beings of whom I am proud. 

And, I should say in their defense, an awful lot of these folks were interested in Hahnian Rescue Service and were on my SAR team or the fire department or ambulance.

Thank you, all the same. I still have hope that you'll see, one day, that climate change is real, that economics and politics are important, that your life won't get better until you decide to put your shoulder to the wheel of civilization like a real person and give it a push. But in the meantime, you helped keep me honest and straightforward and grumpy, and let me pay my way and raise our kid. So thanks for that. And the house and farm and kid, the light of my life. You made all that possible.

And keep up the good work. Even if you're still a climate denier, Rescue Service is important. We have that in common, still. 

Even if you still can't and won't learn how to parse the math in geographical coordinates. Honestly, how can you want to be a game warden and be unwilling to learn this? Really, dude? How do you think the computer search mapping system works? Magic?

And the Board? What, you didn't know that Kurt Hahn's principles included Rescue Service? What the fuck did you think I was doing, playing soldiers? Or Expeditions? Or Projects? Look it up, for chrissakes. Do your job.

Where's your Unity Fire Department, your Unity Ambulance, your SAR team now? Online?

Then the Specials. At the very bottom, academically-speaking, but often high in our esteem, were a category of students who had grave learning disabilities for whom very little worked except one-on-one attention. We teachers and academic staff poured our hearts and souls into some of these, and the more deserving cases kept us up nights with worry. We loved them all, but most of all we loved the ones who fought to overcome their difficulties.

I wonder how easy it is for them now, to get the attention they need from that overworked online adjunct.

Back to the mix. The Thugs: Some students, a small minority, became dishonest. They would lie, cheat and steal just to get out of an assignment and go hike or fish or hunt. Some, generally the same ones, were unpleasant and derisive. 

As Interim Provost for a couple years, I had to deal with these types in disciplinary cases. I once had to intervene with a huge hulk of a con law student who tried to bully a seventy-year old English Comp adjunct with a blue rinse into giving him a better grade for an assignment he'd "borrowed" from a friend. She ran out of the classroom in tears. I wanted to fire him, but the president intervened. But this was perhaps the worst of it. The thugs were few and far between. And I'm proud of everything we attempted to deter their behavior and teach them better ways. But you couldn't pay me enough to ever go back to this part of the job. I'm glad to be done with them.

So no thanks to you. Can't win 'em all. I hope you stay out of trouble and don't hurt anyone. But since I already saw you hurt people, with words or otherwise, I can't be sure of that. I tried to teach you otherwise. 

But hurters are going to hurt until they find a way to change. And real education is a contact sport, despite what the proponents of distance learning have to say about it. Really deep personal change doesn't come easily, or online. It comes from personal contact, social encounters with people of different viewpoints whose feed you can't power down just because it makes you uncomfortable.

I have the scars, mental and otherwise, to prove it.

Actually, it was Tim Peabody, former Colonel of the Maine Wardens Service and Unity College professor, who taught me this. 

Abusers keep abusing. they can't stop. Thugs keep thugging along.

Finally, the Weird Ones. And they won't be mad at me for calling them that. They wore their weirdness on their sleeves, a badge of honor. I am weird too, in some ways, so I could relate. 

But across the above board, there were an awful lot of kids for whom the college was simply a refuge to grow up and explore. Gay, lesbian and transgendered kids found a safe home there, as did a good few disabled kinds, although the able-bodied mainstream moved on as fast as ever in their outdoor lifestyles, sometimes including, sometimes not. A lot of teachable moments were developed helping the conforming and able to be tolerant and including of the nonconforming or disabled.

I could tell stories for hours about working with all these kinds of students.

The best way to teach all these, but especially the Great Mass, was experientially. We employed Kurt Hahn's expeditionary learning principles throughout the college in one form or another. The present establishment is wholly ignorant of this theory, a sad remark on their lack of professionalism. They thought we were the unprofessional ones because we wanted to teach experientially, which is of course sometimes expensive. I got very tired of being nickel-and-dimed by so-called professional administrators, mostly pointy-headed sycophants and yes-men and -women, who thought that classroom materials were optional expenses. In the end I just bought my own, to the tune of thousands of dollars. 

That shiny kit in the sustainability lab? I paid for much of that. 

But this was key to engagement. And we were the experts. I've been using Kurt Hahn's principles in education since 1980. Other UC faculty had even longer pedigrees in experiential environmental education. If you want evidence, just read through my blog, and look at all the projects we did together. 

This expertise was, of course threatening, and so to remove the threat the pointy-heads disavowed the theory, in most cases before they even bothered to examine it. On their meteoric rise up the academic career ladder, this was information they didn't want or need.

But it works. It's tested scientifically. Sometimes, as in the lumpen cases above, it's the only thing that works at all! The promise of experiential education in recruitment meant we could make a class. Using experiential education helped us deliver on that promise to help make the students into decent and useful people. Without it, all the pointy-heads and sycophants would have been out of a job.

So I'm proud of all the educating we did at the old Unity. It was a good way to spend twenty years of my life. I'm proud of every grumpy vet that graduated, proud of every game warden I taught to read maps or to think about civil rights, every mixed-up queer kid that cried in my office but eventually found a safe place to be and sort it out, every trans kid that found a place to change into their new life, every disabled kid that loves the woods, every one of you that tried to learn.

The bright kids, older students, and veterans were a particular joy to teach. I count it as one of the great honors of my life that the Student Veterans' Association chapter chose me to be their advisor. 

But by and large most, a very large majority of all the types of student we had made progress. They learned. They changed. Often they learned and changed a lot. There was a lot of value added.

So back to analysis. Critical Thinking 101. One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. A and B. OK?

A. More isn't better. Deeper is. You'll not save the planet with shallow change.

B. We were diverse. 

Got it? (Boy, that was hard!) 

Let's do B first: Diversity. We had kids from trailer parks and kids from mac-mansions, kids with rusty jalopies and kids with BMWs and Mercs, grumpy old vets with PTSD would sit next to radical lesbians and somehow, mostly, get on with them and even become friends in a grudging but real kind of way. The great majority of our students were the first in their families to go to college. We had black, brown, Asian, gay, and trans kids, and a heck of a lot of white kids who could barely afford to do college. Not enough kids of color, for sure, but they all came and learned and somehow found an on-ramp to a life working for the environment. We made an inclusive community of all these folks. 

I particularly knew all about the students who could only afford beater cars because I was the one that helped keep them on the road!

It was in the rubbing together of this community, where all the corners got scuffed, in Hahnian Expeditions, Projects, and Rescue Service, that the Real Work happened. The classroom time was just a backdrop. 

The real work requires real people who are willing to get real.

The new carpet-bagging administrators, the pointy-heads, didn't care much for this weird and wonderful community because, in their offices and meetings, on their phones, and in their shiny cars, they weren't part of it. And they couldn't analyze it on a cost basis to make it somehow more efficient. It was all a kind of mystery to them. They lacked a faculty to evaluate it, or even, in the worst cases, to even know it existed. So, they were often quite disparaging or discouraging of our efforts to make this community, and especially our requests for travel, tools, equipment, lab time, facilities, and, most of all, real leadership. It was all somehow too messy, too weird, too eccentric, too non-mainstream, too environmental, and, above all, too different for them. 

Eccentricity is not commonly encountered among those who wish to climb the ladder. A kind of bland inoffensiveness is required. Dress the dress, walk the walk, talk the talk. Bore the bore. Worry about the planet? Hope for social change? That's not my problem. I'm on my way up.

Until it is. Until what is needed is a different outlook, a willingness to commit, a new idea, something different...

A few memes: January 6th. Derek Chauvin. Climate change. The biodiversity crisis. On and on. 

I tend to think that convention and peer pressure and superficiality is pleasing to these kinds of people while the essential disorder that comes along with a teachable moment is not. 

They certainly didn't have the kids in and out of their offices all day with their worries and cares. No poverty-stricken or gay or trans kid was ever going to ask them how to grow up without dying. 

Yes, that's right, you bullshitting morons on the Board. It's life or death for weird kids. Haven't you heard about youth suicide? 

There were two youth suicides among the Unity College community under the recent administration? Did you know that? Was that ever the subject of a PowerPoint? How many do you think my colleagues and I helped avert, with our "unprofessional" empathy?

On dozens of occasions I had these kids in my office crying their eyes out and complaining of the treatment they were getting from the corner office that looks out on Quaker Hill. Every time a student stuck their head above the parapet and tried by themselves or in a group to make the college more sustainable, more progressive, more inclusive, they met with approbation from that corner.

That is perhaps the worst indictment of all. That when the students tried to actually live the mission, they were discouraged, or even, in the worst cases, formally disciplined.

Back to A. Depth is as important or more so than width. And real education is a contact sport. 

The students didn't always go along with our living learning Hahnian utopia, of course. But it was a safe place for a lot of people to learn.

So the notion that the current college is somehow better in comparison with the old because there are A) more students and B) more diverse students is simply not true. The new college is different. But not better. The old college was good, even very good: at teaching, at being a safe place to grow up in, at being a very diverse community. At using experiential learning. At being a real living-learning community. At training leaders to save the planet.

It was not just good, but unique.

The new college may have attracted larger numbers of quite diverse students to take a few credits each, all working in their very limited spare time from work or family, without experiential learning, without immersion, without having to rub up against their peers except in chat rooms that can easily be ignored or minimized without grade penalty, all taught by badly-paid, poorly qualified adjuncts working only over the computer and nary a project or field trip. 

But this isn't better. It's shallow. And I would guess that far fewer actual credit hours are taken per year by each student. Because the old community-based program went deeper and grew more change in individuals, there may even have been more education getting brewed up compared to the inches-deep mild mix they serve today.

And in teaching these larger numbers with so shallow a system, I'm afraid, the new college will have to compete with every other online program that does much the same.

Just because it has more faces of color doesn't make it more diverse, if those faces are more conforming, less challenging of authority, less likely to save the planet (even if just by sheer ornery-ness), less likely to fulfill the mission.

Less likely to save the planet.

And so, without that community, without really that mission, the college is no longer unique either. 

And the old campus, where all these lessons began in a safe beautiful place in the Maine woods with a view of the mountains, is now empty and sad and disused, when it should be getting cleaned and priced up and made ready for a new intake

So, tell me again how this is better.

Note: The title of this essay, "The Real Work," is a phrase coined by environmental poet Gary Snyder to describe the personal growth needed to successfully connect to the natural environment. 

By extension, it is the Work we need to do to save the planet. It encapsulates the mission of the old Unity College and my own continuing vocation.