Wang-chung "Hector" O'Leary couldn't wait for the weekend. The days had dragged along since Monday, when he had taken his first midterm for his Matrix 400 class, one of the core classes to his major, Predatory Profit, in the College of Business. It had involved more creative thought than he had planned on; just memorizing how to construct right angles and manipulate data on a two dimensional graph hadn't been enough. Instead, Hector had been asked to formulate ideas and assign them consistent Cartesian coordinates, then analyze the pattern distribution amongst a set of discrete points that had to include such facets as "ethics", "profitability", "accountability" and "accessibility." The resulting matrix Hector had created had been a disastrous mess of crooked arrows and misshapen curves. Luckily he had snagged the Professor (former HSS Dean Zingale, relegated to teaching after the merger (and disssolution) of his former college, who was still called "Dean-Z" (or "Deansie") after class and arranged for further conceptual help.
Dean-Z had proved more encouraging than Hector had anticipated. He explained the theoretical framework of matrices in a way that Hector had not been able to understand in class.
"Don't worry" said Z, "before long you won't even be able to see a matrix that you don't like. By the end of the semester you will be adept at coordinate disattribution and pattern obfuscation."
Hector had found that faculty had been more accessible and encouraging in the last couple years of his studies. His older brother, who had graduated over ten years earlier in 1998 had told all kinds of horror stories about faculty who never stooped to talk to students, or whose office hours were half-hour slots in obscure time periods. They had tended to be older white guys, who looked fondly at the "O'Leary" on his brother's surname when scanning the class roster for the first time, a legacy of his grandfather's Irish past, but who were apparently taken aback by the rough Chinese-Latino elements of the family heritage when face-to-face. There were still too many white faces on the faculty, but they were younger and an increasingly smaller percentage of the whole. Of course a lot of other things had changed since his brother had graduated, but Hector, in his third year at state, was immersed in both wrapping up his GE requirements and making some headway into his major.
Tuesday was his mandatory GE day, and he had spent 10 hours in core classes offered by the college of Sex, a merger of the colleges of HSS, Creative Arts & BSS. As rumor had had it, the writing requirements were not rigorous, but they sure provided some provocative excercises. Hector had learned more about sex in his one class than he could have envisioned even in his most formative and immaginative 14 year old mindset several years earlier. His workshops on tantric sex had had interesting lab hours, particularly since he had been able to coax his girlfriend Gladys into enrolling in the class with him.
GE had been rearranged just before Hector's arrival. In previous iterations students had had to complete three levels of GE, ranging from basic skills in Segment one, more involved subject specific courses in Segment two and then a wholly bizarre labyrinth in Segment three, where students were supposed to satisfy diversity, literacy, critical thinking and integrative requirements.
But the scene had totally changed, and Hector was not sure it was for the better. Now each student was supposed to chart a path towards what was called "total citizenship." Working with a faculty advisor, you had to design your own GE program -- identify goals, skills and knowledge you wanted to have before graduation and then figure out what courses of study it would take to get you there. These could include some of the same qualities built into the major, but always included components of community service, as well as life-long learning skills like information competence. You had to put together a portfolio of citizenly excellence. There were some basic requirements that had always been there -- tests in quantitative reasoning and a writing exam -- but much of the rest of the program was alarmingly self-directed. Hector had some ideas about life out beyond the university (since he worked 20 hrs a week at a small computer graphics business designing logos and business cards) but he found it impossible to imagine much beyond the next academic year. How were you supposed to know what you wanted to be like if the future was a vast confusing maze? Being thrown back against his own native cunning was unfamiliar in an intellectual context and Hector had had to do a good deal of painful soul-searching, wilthout a lot of concrete results to show for the effort.
The restructuring of GE was only one of a series of changes that had overtaken the university. Upon his accession to the throne in 2008, Provost Sheldon Axler had decided that each department and program needed to reinvigorate themselves and had issued a call for proposals and pilot projects.
Several departments had responded with creative ideas: Jules Tygiel of Baseball Studies had come up with the idea of faculty trading cards. Students began collecting faculty cards, which listed their degrees, SAT and GRE scores, short bios (Hector had overhead a classmate on Monday exclaim loudly over locating a rare rookie Pamela Vaughn card which he had hoped to trade for a current Frank Bayliss card with his outrageously high grant average.) The brilliant piece of the trading card idea was not the listing of information however, which did help to demystify the faculty and make their humanity more three dimensional, but what else was included besides the conventional. In addition to standard CV material. Faculty had to also list one or two major failures in their biographical sketches. Students could learn, for example, that Eric Solomon had been once fired from a library assistant position because he insisted on reading all the books before reshelving them at the university of Maine, a characteristic but singular act of defiance, but took that experience as a motivator for going onto graduate study. Faculty were urged to include failures of every description (low journal article acceptance rates, broken book contracts, failed marriages, most embarrassing public utterances, etc.) and the candor had done miracles to boost credibility. One professor, in her philosophy class had described the shift as the "culture of vulnerability." She mentioned Kierkegaard as saying that it was not possible to love without risk, and she had even taken the time to show the class the manuscript for her first book, which had come back from the publisher's copy editor with red marks and corrections all over it. It heartened the class to see that even a heavyweight published author got rough treatment from fussy grammatically obsessed types in places of power.
Other ideas had included a social ice-breaker dreamed up by the dept of biochemistry, which incorporated a version of what had been called the Dartmouth Model, basically a keg party. This idea had not sat well with various elements of the campus community, for a variety of reasons, although Hector had found time in his busy schedule to sample the fine macro-brewery offerings in the first and last attempt at testing the model.
By far the most intriguing idea came from the college of Mathematics, Science and Engineering. Here each faculty member had been asked, as part of their teaching load, to enroll in a course themselves in a different department on campus. They sat with other students, had the same assignments, and other than having been counseled against trying to dominate discussion, had no limits placed on their behavior. Some of the results had been eye-openers. An astrophysicist took a course in Mayan linguistics, and found the study of vowel shifts and phonological mutations had eerie parallels to her own work.
By playing "student" again, many faculty, especially those who were many years out of graduate school, discovered firsthand some of the same difficulties their students experienced -- foolish assignments, lack of guidelines given in syllabi or projects, disorganized lectures, and most alarming of all, an occasional but noticeable lack of passion on the part of the instructor. They found the experience made them better teachers themselves, as they watched successes and failures play out in the continuing day-to-day sagas of education.
Initial experience had heightened the campus' community's awareness of the importance of teaching, and there were initial steps taken to help nudge faculty, especially new ones, into thoughtful practical consideration of their own teaching effectiveness. Provost Axler had appointed Penny Saffold as Minister of Faculty Morale to try to mitigate some of the demoralizing influences so prevalent in both higher education in general and the CSU in particular. Why were some faculty so thoroughly engaged in their students' lives and others so disheartened? What kept some postdoctoral minds fresh and dynamic while others stagnated?
Another innovation that had helped campus culture was the appointment of Laurie-Zoloth from Jewish Studies as campus Minister of Hermeneutic Analysis. Her primary duty was to comb through all edicts that came out of the chancellor's office for translation and interpretation. Her many years of Talmudic training had proved remarkably useful in such an undertaking, and the creation of a special Thesaurus of Initiative Terms allowed even faculty and administrators of moderate interpretive capacity the ability to decipher strategic plans, and plot department movements accordingly. By staying ahead of the wave, so to speak, faculty had been able to concentrate more fully on teaching and their real interest, their students.
N.Fielden, 2002