OCR Text |
Show OPINIONS VOLUME 1.11 ISSUE 28 APRIL 2, 2012 WWW.UVUREVIEW.COM Building tradition by blowing it up By JAROM MOORE Managing Editor It's an interesting situation when everyone agrees on something, yet no one can agree that they agree on it. At the most recent student elections debate a question came in from the crowd to Team Aspire's Cathy Lin about the traditions at UVU. She had a hard time answering it and I would have, too. There are certain members in school that believe we have some tradition at UVU. Some believe that we have nothing They are both right. What do we have? We have an incredibly strong tradition from our history as a trade school. We have the Bunnell Pioneer House as a reminder that we are built on the backs of pioneers. What do we not have? "School" traditions. I have been here for nearly six years and everything that is now "tradition" has basically been put into place in that time. We have a shopping cart parade to the "True Wolverine" that may or may not have been stolen from another school. We have been a university for four years. The traditions will not just pop up over night, and it would be crazy to think it would. However, we could build on what we do well instead of trying to replace it. First and foremost in this problem is that we are very literally going to watch the Bunnell Pioneer House get moved in order to create the new student center. Yes, we need the space, but it will certainly be a sad day when they attempt to pick it up and the rest of it falls apart. By "the rest of it," I mean that students can go look at chunks that have fallen from the foundation just from the ILLUSTRATION BY TARA MENDENHALL Out with the old and in with the new, seems to be the prevailing thought for UVU. few tests and time taking its course. Is this what the school is fine with? Just moving on? We left this building in place for 40-50 years of UVU's existence and now we are ready to just get rid of it. The second building block of our tradition is our trade schools. I have no problems in saying they are the best. We aren't MIT or anything like that when it comes to engineering or aerospace technology, but for the trades which we were founded for we are the best. From fixing cars to architectural design and drafting, they are great. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not, but you should. What do they get because of it? The same facility that has been here since the '60s. Meanwhile, the rest of the students are getting their second student center in 20 years. Our culinary arts program is near the top in the nation, every year. They are the best of the best. Do you know where they are on campus? The UCCU Events Center and at a building at 661 East Timpanogos Parkway in Orem, building L. Everyone has been there, right? As part of the program they even run a restaurant, so to speak. This year on Thursday and Friday from March 8 to April 20 the students have a menu and will prepare foods from around the world. It has been going on now for two weeks and it is the first I have heard of it this year. It has also been going on for at least the past few years, still the first I have heard of it. I will partially blame myself, but I look for things on campus pretty actively so if I don't know of it that would mean the average student would have no clue. We don't have great traditions when it comes to athletics, academics or school spirit - yet. Guess what? That's okay. We have only been a university for four years. We are growing in leaps and bounds and we need to accept that we can't build our traditions overnight. But if we aren't careful we could lose the ones we have overnight. If one thing goes wrong while they are moving the Bunnell Pioneer House it could be gone. The cracks are forming as we speak. The traditions that are building will need to be strong in the direction UVU wants to go. Build on greatness not on fun. Build on the past instead of watching it crumble as we move on. The business of education and other lies By ED FIRMAGE, JR. Guest Writer It's axiomatic today that organizations are best run like a business. In reality, however, it's because we've been running everything like a business that our civilization now faces a multitude of systemic, possibly fatal problems. Among these is the decline in the quality of education. Last week, I wrote about the compensation gap that separates full-time from adjunct faculty at UVU. The gap is a manifestation of what writer Wendell Berry calls the "divide and conquer strategy of industry," which destroys natural communities such as a faculty for the sake of shortterm efficiency and profit. This compensation gap is the result of the university's borrowing its operating paradigm from business. Full-time faculty salaries, especially in science and technology, are thus directly linked to those in industry. The trouble with this practice is that unlike industry, universities are not, and should not be, profit centers, the so-called "University" of CONTAC• Phoenix notwithstanding. To gave to Troy, is that they usukeep up with salaries in the ally come at the cost of our inprivate sector, universities dependence and indeed of our must therefore increase tu- lives. The danger that Energy ition and hold other salaries Solutions potentially poses to such as those of adjuncts to a Utahns scarcely needs elabominimum. Like all economies ration. Where in the local of scale, this is a false econo- community will we find inmy, for it hides the true cost of dependent experts able to obdoing business, the cost that jectively evaluate such risks if adjuncts feel when it comes not at our universities? How time to pay THEIR bills. objective can such people be The compensation gap, when they're beholden to the however, is but one symp- firms they're evaluating? tom of the false industrial Are my concerns overeconomy that now governs blown? Let's consider another academics. Other symptoms case from the U. An acquainare all around us. They in- tance of mine is a senior facclude the outright purchase of ulty member in the engineeracademic talent and good will ing department. Until a few by industry. years ago, he was an outspoAt the University of Utah, ken critic of fossil fuels. Then for example, Energy Solu- one day his dean called him tions, the nuclear waste com- in and warned him to soften pany, recently bought $1 mil- the criticism because it was lion of academic good will by putting corporate investment endowing a chair in nuclear in the department at risk. The engineering. Administrators dean even had the temerity to at the U. will probably dis- call my friend's wife, who is agree with my assessment also an outspoken critic, and of this gift as buying favor. lecture her. Since that time, They'll respond that Energy my friend has been noticeably Solutions is just doing the absent from public debate public-spirited thing by sup- about fossil fuels in Utah. Thankfully, his wife remains porting a local school. But the danger of such vocal. She does not draw a gifts, like those the Greeks paycheck from the U. Similar kinds of conflict of interest can be multiplied ad nauseam. But our universities are not paying heed to the ethical compromises they're making Indeed, universities are themselves actively commercializing their "intellectual property." And faculty themselves often lead dual lives of "academic" research and private business building. Students are inevitably drawn into this dynamic as research assistants and as captive audiences in the classroom. Even more worrying, though, is the way that this business-oriented approach has come to define the purpose of education in general. In the minds of most Americans today, education isn't about the refinement of the mind or the shaping of character but about job training. Students leave the university narrowly prepared for their chosen career--a career that will likely change three or four times during their life-but unprepared for almost everything else. They're especially unprepared to deal with the kinds of human issues for which corporate America has no time. Yet it is these human issues that are the decisive problems of our time. Preventing catastrophic climate change, for example, is not principally a challenge of science or technology. We actually have the science and the technology to solve this problem. Our failure to do so is not the result of inadequate technical knowhow but of inadequate imagination and will. It's a failure of ethics and spirituality. It's a failure of all those qualities of life that come under the rubric of the humanities, those increasingly marginalized subjects that people like me get paid a pittance to teach. Industry has infected academics, perhaps fatally, with the culture of artificial cheapness and the lure of profits. With the lure of profits, industry buys our finest minds. In so doing, its ultimate act of "divide and conquer" is to separate us from our own best interests, for profit-making in modern America almost always comes at the cost of general well-being. We've become blind to this fact thanks to another of industry's insidious influences: specialization. In OPINIONS EDITOR ASST. OPINIONS EDITOR OPINIONS DESIGNER jrboyce@gmail.com felicialartey@gmail.com tjmendenhall@q.com JOHN-ROSS BOYCE FELICIA JOY TARALYN MENDENHALL the compartmentalization of knowledge and action that now characterizes American university life, faculty and students can take refuge in the idea that the big problems that face us are outside their realm of expertise and therefore also outside their moral responsibility. Herein lies the greatest problem with running a university like a business: businesses answer principally to the bottom line. Their obligations to humanity are among the many externalized and quickly forgotten costs that are at the heart of our biggest problems. In reality, we have no environmental problems or educational problems or health care problems today; we have only ethical ones. ED FIRMAGE, JR. teach- es Latin and humanities at UVU. Trained in classics at Princeton, he holds an M.A. in ancient history from U. C. Berkeley, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. From 1986-1988, he was a Rotary Foundation Scholar at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. |