They are spaces for students, she said, to explore ideas, discuss or argue them with others, and emerge with a better understanding of the issues, an understanding of their own beliefs.
Institutes of higher learning should not stay out of the political fray but in fact should serve as a crucible for the most intense of debates, Schleck said during the “Inquire” lecture series, as reported by Chris Dunker in the Lincoln Journal Star.
Schleck’s talk, which took on the question of higher education’s role in our society, was a timely reminder as UNL, and particularly its English Department faculty, in recent years have come under the scrutiny of some Nebraska state senators and other groups. The questions of the sacrifice of some academic freedoms, some constitutional free speech guarantees, are real.
Some state senators in the 1970s also found protests an afront. Madeline Brown recounted several years ago in a UNL publication The Historian Craft, how a frustration with the early ‘70s student rebellion began to grow in the Nebraska State Legislature.
“Since the University existed as a publicly funded institution, many senators questioned if taxpayer dollars should be going somewhere where students were seemingly in control. What resulted was a bitter battle between (UNL) and the Legislature. Students had a right to free speech, but would the Legislature allow it on the taxpayer dime?”
The Legislature, after all, holds the purse strings for a publicly funded university.
In my college experience, English professors made up most of the population of rogue educators who were willing to challenge students and the status quo, to mix things up, to conduct their classes a little (or a lot) differently.
Who else would have challenged me in my relative youth to read five Kurt Vonnegut novels and write a comparative essay? I’m sure it was woefully inadequate, but the reading of those novels was important enrichment to my education.
Those English professors, along with some political science professors, were major players in allowing their students to learn outside of class time, to march to the state Capitol in protest of the Vietnam war, participate in a campuswide moratorium and an occupation of the Military and Naval Science Building.
That occupation led to an academic freedom tumult when the Board of Regents singled out a political science professor, Stephen Rozman, for refusing to leave the M&N building and for not encouraging students to leave. He was fired from his faculty position for “inappropriate” antiwar activities for a teacher, an act a faculty senate committee warned raised “grave and substantial issues of academic freedom.”
A lot was going on during my college years: The draft was taking young men – many not old enough to order a beer or to vote – across the world and into an increasingly unpopular war. Discontent was erupting for so many – Blacks, women, young people – with the theme of fight authority, change the rules, change the world.
Those movements had a profound effect on the whole of campus life, on the way we were taught, the books we read, the classroom discussions. The university offered a class, Black Experience in America, and I quickly registered. Civil and women’s rights activist and lawyer Florynce Kennedy visited the campus at the time.
“I’m just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do, too,” she said, “but I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”
The allowance of university campuses as inherently political spaces is so important in this era of division and of politicians attempting to discredit news media and universities, both of which must be bulwarks for serious discussion of the issues that confront us.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln expanded my thinking. It gave me the basis for my career in journalism. Mostly, it set me on a path of lifelong learning, appreciation of disagreement and debate, and the ability to use reason to unravel the problems and dilemmas that come up in our complex lives.
I am proud that our children all received their university degrees and excited for our grandchildren to have their own higher learning opportunities, to see what moves them forward in their journeys of adulthood. I lean on the academic freedom of these places of learning and ask that politicians don’t stand in the way of their growth in knowledge and wisdom.
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Postscript for a queen … I want to add to the expression of sadness on the passing of the second Elizabethan age of Great Britain. Barring some unforeseen and strange happening, it will be decades upon decades before England, the world really, has a queen the likes of Elizabeth II.
She has exemplified the rich traditions of hard work, commitment, respect, quiet strength. She was not perfect; nor were the seven decades of British leadership she oversaw, which could be looked upon as sometimes quite messy. But there was still an endearing and enduring quality to her reign.
We, in this country, are still waiting for a woman to ascend to our own throne of president. When it happens, may she have those same qualities of hard work, commitment, respect and quiet strength. I am ready for it.
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Amen, amen, amen!
ReplyDeleteThank you.
ReplyDeleteJoAnne, the two best teachers I had in High School were my English teachers who had us read “controversial” books but then had a discuss the books at least, pointing out things we had missed, challenging us to deeper, more meaningful thoughts and discussion. They prepared us for discussion incollege classrooms. We may have moaned and groaned but I would tell you, without hesitation, everyone fortunate to bein those classrooms, remembers those discussions . My husband and I were both in those classes and 56 years later we still have conversations that involve both the books and discussions. Thank you, Mr. Dredla and Mr. Kaldahl (Bellevue East High School). We remember!
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