Education good enough for the proudest and open to the poorest

The University of Wyoming’s policies for serving its students are in the spotlight, as they should be. An institution that serves the public should be transparent to the public.

Opinion

I am grateful for that fact — it helps the university to listen to all its constituents, not just a few people who bluster and blow. As someone who does the actual work of the university, teaching students in my classroom, I am grateful that, for all the turbulence about the university’s mistakes, there is excitement and joy on campus right now, during the first week of classes.

I feel that excitement now as a faculty member, and I remember it from my time as a student. Neither of my parents had a college degree. My mother was a school bus driver and my dad was a factory worker. They knew many things about how the world works, that it isn’t always fair, and that it is almost always hard for people who work for a living, but they had no experience at a university, so they helped me in the ways they could. I didn’t know half of the things I should have known when I went to school. I did know, however, that it was exciting to be on campus at the start of a new semester. It felt like I had a future.

What I did not know then, but know in my bones now, is that land grant universities like the University of Wyoming are special because their mission is to serve the public, not just a privileged few. When institutions remember their mission and stick to it, they can earn the respect of students, parents, and the public that they serve.

The land grant universities were founded in the 19th century specifically as an alternative to elitist models of higher education. Even well into the 20th century, most prestigious colleges and universities excluded students based on factors that students cannot control, like their class, color or gender. Founding the land grant universities sometimes created additional problems, too, especially when they were built on stolen land , and when they bowed to pressure from outside to ignore their mission. But striving is the nature of mission-based work: perhaps especially when we don’t live up to its ideals, that mission is still a North Star, shining even if we don’t look at it.

Now, our university is responding to the Legislature’s defunding of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. I hope that the people who supported this move will see that UW’s administration is not only following the law, but going over and above those directives, hoping that going the extra mile will placate its critics. We will see whether that strategy succeeds.

My worry is that doing so will further erode the university’s dedication to its mission. When people ask me what a land grant university does, what makes it special, I tell them that a land grant university should provide an education good enough for the proudest and open to the poorest.

In my view, that is the best spirit of the land grant university’s mission: to strive both for the highest quality of ideas and the greatest commitment to opportunity and equality, for all of the public. That’s a mission I can support as a faculty member and it’s a mission that helped me, a working-class kid, to achieve the future that I wanted and that my parents wanted for me.

It is popular now to think that freedom means tearing down anything in your path that you don’t like. That may be true sometimes, but not all the time, and what may be popular is not always wise. Free people need tools in order to exercise their freedom — tools like the ballot and a high-quality, universally accessible education.

The first week of classes at the university is an exciting time, but now is also an uncertain time, depending on how the university reorganizes itself in response to the Legislature’s directives. A mission, like a code or character, is a thing that can keep a person or an institution on the path, even when the wind blows or when critics would like us to forget it.

Whatever the university becomes, it will likely succeed or stumble based on the ways it remembers or ignores its mission.

The post Education good enough for the proudest and open to the poorest appeared first on WyoFile .