 Well, good afternoon. It's such a lovely day to be outside. I'm pleased that we get so many people that have come on inside for this. I'm Bob Wilhelm. I'm the Vice Chancellor for Research in Economic Development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And I'm really pleased to welcome many of you back to campus for the reunion, for the Centennial College reunion. I think this lecture we really hope that it will give you an additional point of connection to the Centennial Education Program that was created to celebrate the University's Centennial in 1969. So here we are, 50 years later. It's with another celebration this year. The Centennial Education Program was surely a very forward-thinking program that brought together all aspects of university life, both educational, residential, social. And I'm pleased to be here with you today to honor this chapter in UNL's history. As part of the university's 150th celebration this year, so 50 more years, UNL has been focusing what is generally a two lecture series a year, the Nebraska lecture series. We've been focusing on the university's history and impact on the state, and we've been in it every month. So we have one a month, and we're really pleased that we could have one that was focused on the Centennial College. These lectures are aimed at uniting the university community with a greater community in Lincoln and beyond to celebrate intellectual life at UNL and also to highlight excellence in research and creative activity. The lecture series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council, which is a very significant enterprise for faculty, but also in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the Research and Economic Development, and also the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute that we all know is ALI. And I don't know, do we have some people from ALI here today? All right, well here we go. I'll give a little handout for them. We're also recording this, and we're live streaming, we likely have some people who are joining us on the live web stream and also through Facebook Live, so we're happy that they're here with us today. So as well, we've had a number of very significant sponsors to make this, this 12 lecture series for the year. The Humanities Nebraska and its executive director, Chris Sumerick, have sponsored this year's lectures, as they often do. And we also are very appreciative of the National Endowment of the Humanities, who has provided additional funding, which has allowed us to both expand this lecture series, but also to capture these in podcasts or video casts, which are available for people to see later. And we think this is going to be very interesting both in terms of serving more people, but also from a historical standpoint, people will be able to look back on this in years beyond. I especially want to recognize the University's Research Council. I talked about this a little bit before, but we have faculty from across the campus from many different disciplines that work with us, and they select the Nebraska lecture series speakers. And it's one of the most, it's the highest recognition that the council bestows on faculty. So we're really pleased that they can work with us on this. After the lecture today, we're going to have some time for question and answer. And Rodrigo Franco Cruz here, associate professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences will be moderating a question and answer session. So we'll have plenty of time to discuss and to hear more from the panel as we go along. But I also want to tell you, I know, I expect all of you are going to be here for the whole thing here today, but still, in case you're wondering, there's a prize at the end. So you really want to hang on for the prize. We're going to be doing a random selection for the audience members to receive a copy of the book that we published this year to celebrate the 150 years of University of Nebraska, Dear Old Nebraska U. So you have to be here to win. And so I'll be here at the end to work on that. So now with covering all of the different details here today and all. Again, I'm really pleased that you're with us here. I want to turn the presentation over to Allie Moller, a UNL faculty member who taught at the Centennial College and she's going to introduce the panel. So join me in welcoming Allie. I just remembered it's been 50 years. I just want you to know I was a teenager at the time. I have the distinct honor today of introducing three individuals, icons really, not only in the institution of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, but people that have left indelible imprints on our minds and on our hearts. I'd like to begin with Professor Barbara Lee Smith. She was a faculty member in political science here and was also on the faculty in Centennial College 1976-77 and became a senior fellow from 1977 to 1979. She's also a member of the faculty and native cases project director at Evergreen State College where she was the provost as well. Next to her is Professor Paul Olson. He was a fellow from 77-79. Actually, he joined Centennial College at the request of Nelson Potter, who was really worried about Centennial's longevity. And he taught groups of groups working on black roots, Jewish and Christian versions of Genesis and how to work on social change. Next to me is Professor Ned Hedges. Ned is a native of Nebraska Central. He wanted me to mention that he's from Central City High School. And he is a professor in the English department where his specialization was children's literature. At the time of Centennial College, he was an administrator, assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs. One of the proudest moments he states that he had was that he received the Sorenson Distinguished Teaching Award as well as the James A. Lake Academic Freedom Award. These three individuals have three very different experiences with Centennial College and represent aspects from the administrative side, the academic side, and from the side of looking at from the outside as well. We're tying this particular panel entitled Navigating Change, Creativity and Community to the N-150 project. As you heard yesterday with the wonderful talk by Elizabeth Knowle and then followed up by Anna Helzer, who conducted research last summer looking at the really researching Centennial College through the archives and interviewing 14 individuals about their experience and then comparing that to the aspirations of N-150. And what she found essentially was a 100% overlap in their missions and their goals. And I think we're going to hear more about that. So I'm going to begin with asking Paul to talk a little bit about Robert Knowle's dream to create a community of scholars, as he called it, a community of an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty that is not limited to a specific curriculum, but rather more interdisciplinary in nature. So Paul, you want to start us off? Yeah. Okay. Well, I remember in 1967 we were celebrating some anniversary of the university's existence about two years before Centennial was founded and we had some national people come in and talk about what a good university would be like. And I remember Robert getting up and being very upset about what the university was doing in terms of its failure to address the contemporary situation. Vietnam was in full gear then and the women's movement was in full gear as was Black Rebellion. And he was saying nothing that the university is doing has relevance to the most urgent issues of time or to our students' most urgent issues. And I knew, I had known Robert since 1951. He was my mentor, master student here at Nebraska. And I knew that he had an interest in residential learning, community learning. And somehow across the year from 67 to 69 he put together the resources with the help of Ned and the help of other people within the university and willing faculty members of the Centennial College vision. The Centennial College was founded as I understood it to study at least in its first years social change, to study and act on social change. And I came into Centennial College almost 10 years after it was founded. And I came from a commission that I had headed for the federal government on exactly that theme. A commission on undergraduate education and the education of teachers that looked at institutions nationwide and how they could produce teachers that would respond to and develop constructive social change. And so I was happy to accept the appointment to the Centennial College. So I was busy with the Great Plains Center and lots of other things. I wasn't very focused. But I was grateful for the honor. And when I got to the Centennial College what I realized that Centennial College in 1977 had ceased to be a major agent of social change. At least I thought that. I tried to teach small group sessions on strategies that one might use to foment social change. And I got two students out of the several dozen students that existed there. And one of them was Kent Waldemuth who writes the movie Reviews for the Journal Star. And one another one was a young student who wanted to work on hydroponic agriculture concerning which I knew nothing. And he didn't know anything either pretty obviously. So I've learned today that there are many other aspects of social change and these are both social change that were being developed even then in 1977-1979 and Barbara can probably talk about these. There were people that were working on Indian issues, people that were working on black issues, people that were working on special education and the mainstreaming issues, etc. I'm sure there was a lot going on that I didn't recognize. But so far as I could understand there was not much and the college as a whole did not sense its unity around trying to change the world of our country or of our state. And I think partly that has to do with what had happened with the Kent State uprising. Centennial college more than any other sector of the university was blamed by the populace at large I think but blamed for the occupation of the Rotsy building and the demonstrations that took place after that connected with rebellion against the murders at Kent State and the repression that accompanied the Vietnam War. Now we should have been proud of that. We should have been proud of what happened in the occupation of the Rotsy building. Students putting into action their insights with respect to how social change takes place and what it takes to change the cultural country. But ahead of an institution had been fired, faculty members had been pushed out, faculty members had been fired and we were playing in a minor key by 1977 to 1979. Now this is not to say that important things weren't going on but I think this illustrates what I've been talking about, illustrates we're talking about what should happen in the future. It illustrates that the university if it undertakes seriously to ask people to do what the N150 document does. That is to learn to carry what they learn into action within the community to develop a community of learning that acts on the culture. That's a very dangerous vocation for a university and it has to recognize that vocation and the danger that are implicit in it and has to develop documents and codiciles that suggest both what faculty responsibilities are and what their limits are in those situations and what student responsibilities and limits are. Otherwise it's just going to be a nominal gesture or otherwise it's going to lead to chaos within the faculty and within the student body. I think there are important changes having to do with social responsibility and social change that could be undertaken in the future. I think climate change, climate disruption is one of those. I think another one of those is the growth of populism and the development of dictatorial regimes around the world including in this country and finally the growth and lack of control over the nuclear industry in this country and around the world. I think those are at least three themes that I can think of but I think that the university in the N150 document is undertaking a charge that is far more far more dynamite than it recognizes and I hope it does recognize that and undertakes to develop the tools to handle but it says it wants to swallow. I think Paul really hit upon one of the big aims of Centennial College which was really to bring education into the community to connect the college to the community and one of the examples that we talked about yesterday was the example with our former mayor Don Wesley who with a research team decided to investigate whether a second nuclear plant was going to be necessary to put it for Calhoun. Some of you may remember that. There was one already. So they spent what a good part of a year really doing the research, putting a research report together to the legislature and that research was followed and there was not a second nuclear plant installed. So it's that kind of substantial change that happens by making learning authentic and real and extending it into the community. So Barbara your existence and beyond Centennial College was really focused on community based education. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Okay. I came to Centennial without much background and alternative education but I learned a lot from being here and went on to other institutions where that was a central agenda. So I'm very thankful for my two years here in terms of the learning that went on. So one of the things that I'm most proud of that we did when I was senior fellow is we got funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do an Artists in Residence program and the idea there was to actually make that a partnership with the community and we tried to make those projects projects about social change and underrepresented populations. So that was very successful. We had a mime who was an artist they lived in the dorm as well with the students. We had a classical guitar expert and Ned was one of the few people who came to that performance which was in an enormous auditorium. Do you remember that? Two of the most popular artists in residence were a painter, a landscape painter. We've got some of his work on pictures that I think maybe are available here. And the most revolutionary of them actually was a mural artist from Chicago Mark Rogovan and he studied under the great Mexican mural artists and he involved the students in creating four mural projects in the community. One was at the maximum security prison where the inmates created a very large mural. I think it was four or five panels like as long as that whole wall of their life. And the first couple weeks of that were very rough. The guards heckled them. They said they never finished projects. They're just not going to do anything. But the inmates persevered and they produced an amazing mural that was on portable panels and toward the state the next year. They also produced a mural in a nursing home that was a shadow mural where the people in the nursing home in their wheelchairs or with their walkers or standing were against a wall with the lights dimmed and shadows cast on the wall and then the painting is done around the image. They did a mural shadow mural of the Centennial students as well. And they did another one in an elementary school which was in a neighborhood that was mainly Hispanic at the time and I still remember going there and watching them doing it and it was a generational thing. There were young artists budding artists and there was their grandparents and they had a really lively debate about whether Cesar Chavez or the Virgin Mary should be bigger. So that project showed me a whole bunch of things about how you can raise money around innovative projects. About how you can actually build partnerships fairly easily. We had five community partners for that project. They eagerly embraced us reaching out to them and helped fund it and support it. And just the value of students working with communities. And I think community based learning is a really needed direction probably at UNL as well as most other places and some of the most interesting schools actually now make that almost a requirement of their graduates. This happens in lots of departments like journalism kind of as a part of the instruction. But that isn't true across the board and I think that's an untapped opportunity that isn't very expensive and is rich in learning. So I guess the other thing I want to say about what was going on in higher ed at that time nationally. The period from 68 till about 75 was a decade of turmoil, growth, change and centennial in the University of Nebraska were not alone in what was going on. A recent report that I saw said that there were 50 centennial experiments around the United States. Mostly at research universities and some of them are in the NOL report. And within four years about half were gone. These are hard things to keep going at research universities but they used a common format and they had a huge impact. And we can see that on you. I mean the people in the audience who went through this, it was life changing. For 2,000 students that lasted 12 years that's a long time. We think it could last longer though and you can build on that. This was also a time of great success in expanding the higher ed system. This was when the community college system doubled and it was building on the baby boom and the expansion of the system as a whole. And there's huge untapped resources around partnerships between institutions, between campuses and online options that can happen. It takes more effort to do that. But in my state, Washington, half the population now starts in a community college. So if you really want to get to anywhere near 100% of the population you've got to have partnerships. And we also have a program called Running Start that combines this junior and senior year in high school with the first 2 years of college which lowers the cost of education 50%. So there's some really interesting things out there I think that can be done and so it's a fabulous time to open your minds and really look at the landscape as an institutional system. Thank you Barbara. Centennial College really had an impact on all of you, on me, on a lot of the faculty as well as the students. But it also had a share of challenges which eventually then of course led to what we would call its demise. And so Ned is going to address that for us and talk a little bit about his role as an administrator. He was of course as you all know a big supporter of Centennial College and had the honor, non-honor of having to make the decision to really let Centennial College go its own way. Thank you Allie. I was never in Centennial. I was only around Centennial. I helped Robert start the whole thing in a very simple kind of way. I had been a director of freshman English. We had had some classes in dormitories. We had had some experience with residential education. I learned all about how to deal with residence halls and how to deal with registrars and how to deal with curriculum committees and how to deal with all of that other stuff. In other words I was very good at administrative and Robert was not. Robert had no interest in it and so I was able to help him deal with a whole bunch of that kind of stuff that it's necessary to get something like this going. And then I became assistant director of, or assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs and in those days the directors of various things like the director of Athletics of the Museum and the Art Gallery and the Centennial Senior Fellow reported to the assistant vice chancellor and the deans reported to the vice chancellor. And so I was the direct administrative supervisor of the Centennial program in the early days. And then I became vice chancellor and at that time then I was one place separated from it but as Ali said I also had the the darkest day of my administration was when I got stand before the Board of Regents and recommend the dissolution of the Centennial education program and I'll explain how that occurred in a few minutes. But the Centennial program was you know it was a dream. It was a dream to create a community of scholars and Robert Knoll was the person who was able to get that all done but of course it was not done in a vacuum. There were people within the institution particularly in the English department particularly people like Dudley Bailey and Paul Olson who had had visions of changing the entire pedagogical structure of higher education. When I was a beginning graduate student almost all education in those days was the professor Reind the students sat and listened the students responded by regurgitating material in papers and examinations. And it wasn't until about this time when this due generation of Turks came along who began to engage students in discussion and listened to students and it was that germ of what was going on that created the Centennial program and I listened to people the last couple of days in this reunion and it's pretty clear that the most effective part of the Centennial program was the combination of the residential focus of having people living together so that education continued outside of the walls of the classroom in interpersonal relationships forever and the association with faculty members and the students together as a community. Daniel Brooks said yesterday that when he came to the university as a freshman student in the Centennial program it didn't really change him so much in terms of causing changes in his attitudes toward society and social change and social structure. The most important thing for him was it gave him permission to talk with faculty member and I've heard that the last couple of days over and over again from these people who came back the big difference for them in the Centennial program is to be associated with faculty members on an individual and continuing basis to have their ideas challenged Robert used to talk about the purpose of education was to tease the students out of thought and the unexamined life is not worth living and I'll never I'll always remember last night Elizabeth talking about the family dinner in those days when Robert was some stress and in her teenage revolutionary stage said one evening do we always have to talk about bread as being interesting and I thought probably responding and saying the unexamined bread is not worth eating I've heard his expressions repeated from you all so many times the first few years of the Centennial program were an explosion of creativity and excitement on the campus it is testimony to those first few years of Centennial living up to its expectation that most of the people here at this reunion are from those first two or three years of the Centennial program there was an excitement there was the excitement of creativity among the faculty members as well as the students and it gradually I think faded my own opinion this may not be true my own opinion is the biggest change that occurred over the years was the gradual reduction of the residential feature of the program and more and more and more of the students did not live there they just came on a part time basis they did not experience that full out of classroom experience now I want to talk a little bit about the closing of the program there seems to be a perception at times that the administration of the university discontinued the Centennial program because it was too liberal and it was not rigorous it was too liberal it was a political embarrassment to the institution and the Board of Regents and the legislature and the administration and all these people decided that it should go away but I have to tell you I was never at one time as by Sanser approached by anybody from the Board of Regents or the legislature or the public at large or the administration to tell me you got to get rid of those commies out of the institution the problems we were having all during that period of time from my first meeting as assistant vice censor when I discovered that we were faced with a $927,000 shortfall in tuition income and what to do about it I told my wife when I went home that day I wasn't used to those kinds of numbers I said I felt so bad if I had a million dollars I would have given it to them but we went through a ten year period of continually dealing with those kinds of things and so we had to figure out ways to reallocate resources within the institution to try to find resources that we could provide for those areas that needed the most to be built up to areas of excellence by taking it away from programs that already existed if it was possible and so we created a very elaborate system through our bylaws insisting upon primary faculty participation in program evaluation and development through a committee called the academic planning committee to make decisions about these sorts of things and so in 1981 the final the final process our academic planning committee determined that among those things that we could cut from the university that would at least negatively affect the basic core of the institution among those was the Centennial Education Program we wouldn't have to fire any faculty members it was a sort of appendage of the institution that could be eliminated but the only reason to do that was so that we could take the resources that were freed up to use those resources to reallocate to some other part of the institution it was not a matter of saying the Centennial Program is bad let's get rid of it the issue was can we more profitably use those resources for other purposes we've heard a lot about what Centennial College was basically one of the big things was to counter student isolation because in a large research one institution which is also we have a bifurcation of mission it's also land grant institution 25 to 26,000 students and the freshman experience typically is having lectures of 100 to 200 students can be very isolating especially when we draw a population from a large rural area in Nebraska and I had the occasion recently to meet with a group of freshmen to interview them just as a preparation for this panel to say so what was your experience thus far and I had six of them in a kind of a focus group arena and asked them exactly what are the things that they're really learning what are the things that are going to make them come back and I was interrupted right away by two students who said why I'm not coming back and I said why is that he said well I don't know anyone on this campus I don't know my peers I'm in classes with over 100 students I don't know how to approach any of my faculty and I think what you've heard here is exactly those things that ability to take that risk to speak to a professor takes a lot of confidence that our typical freshmen do not have and so what are some of the things the university is doing now to overcome that we're doing a lot of communities learning communities where folks are living together and by discipline at times and other times interdisciplinary focus we have a variety of outlets for kids to try to do that but of course we can do more and the idea behind this panel too is to take a look at the research that Anna Helzer did on her UCARE grant this summer take a look at her questions where what are the lessons that we can learn from Centennial education that can inform UNL and most certainly the N-150 report because as I mentioned earlier the aspirations exactly paralleled what the aims were of Centennial College so I'm going to ask the panel to address that topic what are some of those things that you think needed to happen that really worked well for Centennial and some suggestions that you might have for UNL to learn from our experience at Centennial College me first okay well my observation over the years of things that really really happened that made a difference in terms of instruction particularly of undergraduate students from individual people Bob Fuller from the Department of Physics well first I guess I should start out with the we had a faculty club a faculty club was the place where faculty met for lunch basically at round tables and so you were eating lunch with people from other disciplines you met people that you did not know and you encountered problems between physics and English and art and so on and it was a wonderful wonderful experience it was a great great way to develop relationships if you will a community of scholars within the university Verne Williams was a young man who was an educational psychology professor and he had thought that we needed to do something to improve the instruction for freshman students improve the freshman experience and so he gathered together a group of us I was the director of freshman English Bob Fuller was in charge of the freshman program in physics Mel Thornton was in charge of the freshman program in mathematics Walt Bruning was in charge of the freshman program in chemistry who there were a couple of other people and we met every Friday at the faculty club primarily because they had very very good clam chowder on Fridays and so we organized ourselves and we called ourselves the Chowder and Harpsichord Marching Band Society and our purpose was to pool our ideas among us about how to improve the freshman experience at the University of Nebraska and that was a long time ago that was even before the Centennial program and so and Bob Fuller ended up some of you may know as one of the great great innovators of the improvement of education at this university for many many years and Mel Thornton and the other guys were very active in these sorts of things that produced things like the Centennial program and so my advice to the university for the next 50 years is to find those people it's not the programs that you have to develop what you have to do is find and identify those people who are going to develop those programs you have to find the Robert Knowles the Paul Olsons the Bob Fullers perhaps the Ned Hedges I don't know there might be an administrator somewhere among them encourage them develop them and reward them for those kinds of developments rather than simply research that's my and I know that those people I don't know who they are but I know they exist they are here they are on this campus right now find them encourage them develop them I think we need to recognize what's happened to the university I first came to the university Nebraska in 1949 as a summer school student and I was here as a master from 51 to 53 and came back and was continuously a faculty member from 57 when I first came to the university I had 5100 students when we had the Montgomery Lectures practically every faculty member would come to the Montgomery Lectures and the topic of discussion for the next several days among most faculty members would be the content of the Montgomery Lectures and the faculty club we had there were numerous arenas through which the faculty spoke to one another and also some arenas through which the students spoke to each other what's happened to higher education is that it's no longer in any serious sense a community of learners it's a community of publishers publication becomes a career like the career of okay both would be impossible he was the first locked lecturer at Oxford and probably one of those half dozen most distinguished philosophers that the United States has produced he didn't publish anything until he was damn near 60 years old and his first book was published after about the time he retired from the university yet he produced he had surrounding him a discursive community of people who were committed to the kind of philosophy he was doing and he didn't care about publication he didn't care about anything but finding the truth finding meaning for his own life and until we see that education is not a means but an end when we begin to relate to our students as in our relationship rather than I at relationship we're not going to be a good university the creation of the genius of Centennial was the creation of a community by the time I had come to Centennial that community factor had declined somewhat because the students weren't living together but I think higher education and not just higher education in this country I have two sons who are professors and they both complain about the anonymity of the students the reliance on externalized majoring tools the character of the learning that takes place and the meaningless of the learning that's undertaken and I think until we begin to address those problems nothing else will matter I think find the faculty is a good place to start and I don't think it would be that hard to do it because you've got spies in other words you've got people in all the different places the library, the departments they know who the fabulous teachers are you already give awards to great teachers do you use them that's what I that's what I think is really wrong is that we aren't locating the arenas where the people are and creating arenas to leverage their excellence and their mentoring to other people and they had a center for instructional development research sometimes called the teaching and learning center but it was called the center for instructional development of research because it's a research university way up on the top this was where TAs were taught to teach really aggressive innovative departments like like English and sociology develop their own teaching centers and protocols and training programs for their TAs and that produces the next generation of fantastic teachers now you use the old doogies like this guy to help you run those things not do the grunt work but share the practice and they feel honored at the same time so I think you've got to invest in faculty development and faculty arenas of change and reeducation and you're not going to get the people that are die hard I don't want to do that because sometimes they're just too shy actually to even admit that but you will get a whole lot of people I think who are hungry for intellectual discussion for mentorship for friendship can be very alienating especially as newcomers so a really solid new faculty orientation program needs to be put in place too that's at least a year long that gives people a buddy system that radiates the message that you're a teacher too and there's really fabulous ways to become a better teacher so I think that's one thing you can do for me University of Washington and one of its budget cutting enterprises got rid of CIDR the Center for Instructional Development and Research really stupid in my opinion that's really under investing in your future and in the health of your community there have been several paradigm shifts that have really occurred as we look back at the last 50 years one of which is not looking at the whole person developing the more personal the more personal socialization of the individual but the emphasis has been more on job skills and college is being seen more as a place where we want to prepare someone to make lots of money and as you can see that with the enrollment if you look at arts and science remember at commencement when arts and science had the main floor of the Coliseum well it's now the business college and those kinds of shifts have happened another shift that has really happened is there's a book Bowling Alone I don't know how many of you have read it but there's been a shift no one wants to be bowling in a league and commit to a Tuesday night they want to bowl alone and when that happens according to the author he begins to suffer because when you do things solo you lose the community and he talks about the Italian city states for example that had choirs that had soccer teams they maintained the democracy but those that did not they began to dissipate from within so the whole theme really of relationships building community having a sense of connection belonging how do we bring that back and I think we've tried Vice Chancellor Wilhelm is sponsors a faculty what do we call it a faculty forum it's a there we go a faculty connector which is we meet twice a month at the mill for a socialization there are attempts being made but I think there's been a shift in faculty people working at home they're not coming to the office I can okay here we go this is a old curmudgeon if you go outside right now and watch the students walking down the sidewalk around the cabinet every one of them is walking along looking at a cell phone it's like this they are not talking to one another this summer I was out in Colorado one of my grandsons a new musician he's the bad leader for Casey Musgraves if you've ever heard of Casey Musgraves and we were out there to go to a concert at Red Rocks and we were sitting at a sort of almost hippie like bar having lunch and we noticed a couple sitting at a table a few tables away young people a couple boy and girl and they were sitting there and they were both looking at their telephones and I said to Kyle I said who are they talking to and he said probably each other and I said really he said now watch the young man would sit there and his thumbs were going like that he was going to stop and then their girl would be looking at her thumbs and going like this and then pretty soon the boy would her thumbs they obviously were talking to one another on their telephones rather than and now that is a challenge within the university in the future that people are going to have to figure out how to deal with people simply do not communicate in the same way that doesn't mean they don't communicate it's not in the same way and that's going to be that's something you know all these people with all there's lots and lots of intelligence and creativity in a university they can figure it out but it's a problem Kyle? I have a story that I was told a couple weeks ago and I think it's germane to our discussion both Simone de Beauvoir the great feminist and Simone Vile the great Jewish Christian thinker were students together at the normal school in Paris and someone came up to the two of them I guess as they were walking together and said which would be the more terrible to be hungry or to have no sense of meaning in your life and Simone de Beauvoir said right away we'll live a meaningless life and Simone Vile said well you obviously have never been hungry now I think there's a profound truth there that is that and it's a truth that the universities are responding to that is that we may not live by bread alone but we start with bread and the fact that we start with bread has meant that the only thing we care about is bread that is we don't ask the question what are you living for Walden begins where I live and what I live for and one of the significant sentences in that chapter is most of mankind live lives of quiet desperation I think that most of our students either live lives of quiet desperation or are so numb by the bureaucratic procedures through which they're going that they don't even recognize their desperation and I think we have to ask in communities the question of what is the meaning of your life and why are you living and what are you trying to get done until that question is asked education is altogether meaningless slight change of direction here I mean what I do now as I start to ask well 150 group looked actually at enrollment data and retention data the national dropout rate in the first year of college is 43% if you move that even 5% that solves your tuition problem and it isn't that the students are just you know maladroits that can't cut it a lot of it is what happens in the first two weeks and a lot of it is about smaller classes so I like the way that some universities are using learning communities to change the factual structure of the courses to build smaller classes and more contact so they do it by linking two classes so co-enroll they just have taken all the classes off the general ed list which is way too long to process anyway so a small class a skill class usually the English classes everyone knows those can be smaller to a slightly bigger class and so if it's polypsi with an enrollment of 50 and the English is 25 half of the ones in the polypsi class are also in the English the English draws on the content for the essays the polypsi class so those students get a double dose of each other they're together twice as long and you can do that with speech and you can do it with diversity classes or you can do it with a whole bunch of stuff that actually relates to each other and when it's really successful the teachers are starting to actually talk together but you can do it without even talking together so that's a really inexpensive way to do it at the University of Oregon where this started they're called FIGS freshman interest groups they linked half of their Gen Ed freshman classes to another course and some are major kind of things it's like you ask the health department or the different specialties what's a good link and they usually pick English because it's required or speech or something like that or they're a thematic thing like the nature of human nature UW did the same thing and they mainstreamed their tech courses when that first got going that way and community based learning courses so there's really good ways to do this inexpensively but it takes some organizing you know to make that happen so I really think you need not just a bunch of fabulous teachers together but a brain trust for people who can think that way and look around you around the country at what's happening and track that freshman rate and you'll see it go down because you can change it you really can Barbara I remember you telling me about Portland State and they have a contract I believe an ongoing contract with ten organizations in the community they have a community community based learning requirement for all students and it's a course that's four credits plus an internship and they have a bunch of internships that change time to time and then they have ongoing contracts with a few organizations where they funnel cohorts of students to the state historical society is one of those that they have an ongoing relationship with and that really serves that organization very very well and Michael Farrell was telling me this morning that he had that kind of a cooperation with the School of Journalism and NET where they took ten interns there who actually got hands on kind of experience there and that went on for ten years and again one of the problems then became the change in administration right that's another issue that of course is one that can't be ignored one of the things that I heard this morning that really impacted me was what Fran K said about the difference between credentialing and teaching and one of the things that we found through the research that we did this summer is that students really welcomed the opportunity to learn from failure and to face ambiguity without fear and I think that kind of speaks to what Fran was talking about as well I mean for me it would seem like in the freshman experience there would be an opportunity where they maybe take something past fail for six hours where they can explore things that she called were way be she said it radically meaning everyone should try to get a D in something I'm not sure I'm in favor of that particularly but the opportunity to take a course that challenges you that's not going to kill your GPA that really allows you to stretch and I remember I didn't even know what philosophy was when I started as a freshman I that's not something we did at Central High School in Omaha, Nebraska and I remember thinking all these apps I was a concrete pre-med kind of person I couldn't really fathom what this was and I ended up majoring in it because it was beyond me okay but the philosophy professor realized this is someone who has zero knowledge about what philosophy is and took some time to give me some special readings I think we need to encourage our students to take that risk to jump off and give have the opportunity to really be able to take something beyond their ability I couldn't agree with you more and I in connection with credentialism if you look at the requirements that is the course requirements or the testing requirements for most professions professional law teachers et cetera et cetera there is zero validation for those tests that is there's zero correlation between the tests and performance within the vocation so students are being directed to acquire skills that have no relationship to the vocations into which they're going there are numerous lawsuits that have established that this is the case the second thing is that's also true at least I don't know I haven't studied the data within the last two or three years but the ACT and the SAT were not predictive of student performance in higher education so that this kind of empty test empty hurdles meaningless hurdles I should say in position of meaningless hurdles as the meaning that students are supposed to take away from their from their school and higher education experience that imposition is an imposition which is socially ordained and absolutely destructive I think you do need teachers who you can talk to about it and you need to have facilities on campus where they can go learn more about I didn't even know anything after graduating from a liberal arts college about the future when I was a senior so I applied to law school to the foreign service and to graduate school and an insurance company and I almost did a random choice about which of those I did now I think many colleges have more support services for that and they also need a lot more guidance through financial opportunities because they just don't know but I think it's partly a political issue I mean we have one former Catholic college Heritage University that's what used to be run by the nuns and is now a private college but they kept their enrollment tuition price at a third of what the state public are charging and our new online system Washington Governor's University which is actually very good did the same thing so price matters in this state there is one other cluster college program in this state that my husband taught in at UNO a good rich program established at the same time it's thriving still but you know why permanent faculty permanent leadership it's focused on African Americans a real population with documented needs for your scholarships permanent budget I can't I only wanted to make a comment that I can't outcome relate to that experience I was born in 1933 there were very few people born in 1933 if people knew how to prevent it we were in the depths of depression you couldn't afford kids I was in the smallest high school class in history in my school all of my life every place I have gone every step of my career there is a tremendous shortage of people so I had every opportunity when I got my Ph.D we sat down my wife and I sat down with a map of the United States where do you think we would like to live and I wrote letters of application for jobs to send my resume to 20 schools I got 19 positive responses 13 job offers today students send out 200 applications they get no responses and the one response I got was the best I've ever received from anybody he wasn't young he was a friend of mine he was the chair of the department of English at the University of Oregon his name was Kester Spinson and the response I got was the one sentence response so dear Mr. Hedges I'm sorry to tell you that we do not have a position available for a person with your qualifications and you could take it either way you want to I think we're going to go ahead and move to the question and answer period here and Professor Cruz let's thank our panelists for the nice presentation we have already transitioned to the question and answer please use the microphone just to remind that we are live streaming this today's talk any questions from the audience raise your hand thank you in our preparation of thinking about this in the first panel this morning we talked about some of the innovative programs that are addressing issues and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to what's there to build upon because I know Dr. Molar you've been thinking about this and some of the ways that you can bring back the spirit of Centennial thanks one of the ways that I've talked to the Patrice McMahon who is now the new director of the Honors College and I brought back I taught a course called improving children's life chances for the Honors College where I put students, honors students into the community at centers like Wix and Friendship Home and the very lowest income elementary schools to really see a side of life that they hadn't necessarily experienced and it was a hit it was always the most early subscribed seminar so I called her up and I said I made Centennial so great it made learning real we were out in the schools it's like learning a language learning it in the classroom is stilted communicating with someone and exchanging ideas is real when you meet them in a real situation so she said I'm excited about this so she and I are going to meet and she's already done quite a bit of this community based research so we're planning to expand this I'm very excited I'm going to take an active role in that to expand learning for students in the Honors College to work in the community to really connect learning to an authentic setting so that's exciting some of that's already being done obviously but we're going to make that a priority for the Honors College I've heard so many really useful insights into what prompted the Centennial College what made it work especially in the early days surely the insights that we've heard should be made available to a much larger audience so I'm wondering could you could you somehow pull this together and perhaps bring in thoughts from educators from across the country to kind of put forward a Centennial statement something that would say here's our problem here's how we looked at it in 1969 here's what we did that seemed to work here were things that confused it conflicted with it challenged it but here are the enduring values that we think we need to put forward people living together people studying together community of scholars faculty partnering with students in the scholarship process community involvement those are the themes that I've heard and I would I can't imagine that it would not be a very powerful published piece and I think it would help the rest of us as we go forward in our own domains to say oh I see faculty leaders right but nevertheless there are approachable people like Bob Noel I think we'd learn from that experience and it would go beyond it would help propagate the Centennial message to a much larger audience I would really challenge you to do that actually we're in process of doing exactly that Anna this was Anna's project that she did with the U care so she and I thought thought about writing an article and I've been giving that some thoughts since yesterday since I heard all these inspiring testimonials and I think what would really be good is for me to reach out together with Anna to some of these folks that have spoken and to put a piece into Change Magazine which is a journal that really speaks to leaders in the field business education so that's one of the plans so if you hear from me don't say no other questions here I'm not going to question but I've got some thoughts to throw out and see if you think these are bad ideas or good ideas one this question of students being fearful when they come in I've experienced that with the teaching that I've been doing the past few years and I've had kids come out in my classes I've had kids tell me that they're thinking about suicide I've had kids that express a tremendous degree of self-doubt and this seems to be a growing phenomenon and I've also noticed that the university tends to want to push its older faculty to the side and I'm wondering if there is not some way that you can take the older generation who are the people that some of the people that Ned Hedges is talking about here that you need to find to make something happen and find ways to couple them with the students who are maybe in the most need of having some kind of friendship beyond a peer group that text each other across the table instead of gazing into each other's eyes which is what we did when I was a kid so that's one thought another thought is this is something we've been trying to put together in our time lapse project I would like to create a fund to do what I call apprenticeships and this is on the order of the old renaissance at a idea that you come in as a low class sketcher and then eventually on canvas and then eventually become a master or whatever the apprentice would be someone who has finished their undergraduate degree but doesn't know what they want to do next for sure or finish their graduate program and is not ready to move on to a doctorate program and would like some real world experience and is there a way that we can find funding to create opportunities to work in the real world as a bridge between either one academic experience in another or one academic experience and a full fledged job and there's a way you can do that at the university if you hire people as part timers you can keep them on for two years without having to advertise the job so there's ways to make this work economically by twisting the system up and using it for other purposes than other which it was designed and so it would solve a couple of problems it helps the students figure out what's next and it keeps them in the state long enough that maybe we can get a little salt on their tails and they won't leave because one of the questions that people in the state have is why am I paying all this tax money when you're educating students that want to move to Chicago or Los Angeles or New York is my tax money being used outside of the state after these kids get educated so those are a few things to think about. Do you have a question? Okay I have another question it's not particularly related to that we see I think at economy now math and sciences and business and then the arts and sciences and there's almost a divide in between that the one doesn't think that the other is necessary and I see that in the high schools and middle schools as well and yet anybody doing research needs to write it up anybody doing math needs to be able to communicate that math and so how do we bridge that gap how can we find a way and this is directed to the panel how can we find a way for something like Centennial to bridge the gap between because we see this I see a huge divide I think it's there I don't have any real answers I like your ideas by the way I think they're good but I'd have to ask you back where do you take these ideas there needs to be some administrative place that can lead fundraising idea gathering idea deciding so you've got a vice chancellor for research maybe that's where it is vice chancellor for innovation I was a vice president but I think deans do more work actually so it might be better to have a find a dean to do that I'm sorry I served two terms on the faculty senate I was on the APC for two terms I brought these ideas up before but you're right if you don't have an administrator who embraces that sort of thing they just say thank you that was a great idea and it doesn't happen my for a time I was head of the career education program for the US office of education that is the external have these external task force and during that time I argued intensely for the creation of apprenticeships and internships as the tool that would transition from higher education to a job or from high school to a job for the people who didn't do advanced degree degrees and the people I was pushed out of that job I didn't care I put everything I had into it but I wasn't abashed when I was removed but the lobby that prevented that and the lobby that I think prevents it in this country is the counselor's lobby the counselors give tests that tell people what they can do and the idea that you only learn what you can do by virtue of experiential hands on contact with a job with a job learning context is a myth that pervades higher education and the schools both and I think it's a pernicious one the second idea having to do with older and younger faculty I think that's wonderful now you talk about our old people being shunted aside it's not only that but you find large numbers of faculty who are either drug addicted or alcoholics by the time they're about 40 or 50 because they haven't received the Nobel Prize yet and they need to find something that will give their their lives some purpose some interpersonal interactions that meant something and I think that would be one thing that might do that I'm going to address Laura's question about STEM and STEM put the A in STEM for the arts and actually our vice chancellor standing right here next to us has really been doing a series of they're not round tables exactly but meetings where we've been invited I know he's invited me about eight times and I haven't been able to make it because I've been working there's yeah I figured there was I've been busy with Centennial College here quite a bit actually to build interdisciplinary teams really out of the box thinking I have to be very candid about that so he's bringing together scientists and graphic designers and nutrition folks in ways to look at research because this is where it is in the future we can no longer be we have to go back to the renaissance folks right there's so much knowledge now we have to figure out where are the connections to get us to the next level I think we're we're on the road there's another question over there or not no any other questions from the audience probably have time for one more it's not a question it's more of a comment but I think Paul just mentioned outside funding sources I know that internal funding is difficult to find often but you mentioned Robert Fuller as a whiz on this campus Bob was a great teacher and he was a great motivator of people here but he was also a conjurer of grants and some people have that skill I mean he used the Exxon Educational Foundation and NSF and if you can find there are ideas like that that people with money would love to fund but you have to find the one dude to get that outside money to bring it in and once you demonstrate that it's successful maybe you'll find some local funding as well but that's somebody ought to be involved with investigating pursuing you want to comment on that last comment I could just say I've been running a self supporting project for the last 15 years on Native American education it was really easy actually to raise money but it wasn't it was even easier back there in the centennial days because the foundations were interested in improving teaching they funded thousands of writing across the curriculum projects across the United States and that's gone and I found even with my current funders that they like to do startups that don't fund ongoing things so that is a challenge but I think you could get help you must have a good research department grants and research that can help coach people and look it's not difficult to do even if you're not an expert NSF is a really good source but it's got to have some science we even got some funding from the legislature now it's true that you have to find people like Bob Fuller and so on the centennial project actually was funded initially by a grant from the Woods Foundation which came sort of after the idea but at least it was helpful to provide the impetus for the program but the reason we got money from the legislature was Doug B. Ryder who was a member of the appropriations committee his favorite professor at the university was Adam Wreckenrich who at that time was the acting vice chancellor or chancellor we had a period of time in my time when people asked me when I was vice chancellor when I was such and such there was a 10 year period I was in the office acting vice chancellor chancellor or whatever with a whole group of other people because we had so much change but we got that money because Adam Wreckenrich persuaded Doug B. Ryder that we needed a special fund we needed some special funding to improve undergraduate education and so the B. Ryder amendment it was called it was added to the appropriations committee of the legislature and we got some money and I got to administer it and we got Jim O'Handan to come over from teachers college and figure out how to do it and the first thing he did was establish the teaching learning center which for a long period of time was a very good thing so yeah it takes money but the money comes from individuals who have either the ability or who know people who can get it funded I think it comes down to the individual person who can get the job done and an administrator who will support it we have time for one last question you raised a very important question Elizabeth how do people deal with fear and demystifying fear I think is what we have to teach people about that is there probably are some fearless people and I wouldn't trust them very much but learning that fear doesn't need not be paralytic that most people who do anything that's hard to do do it in spite of their fear that the fear is there and it's real but any kind of change really depends upon being able to have the bravery to act in spite of the fear and modeling that and demystifying it not granting the illusion that well it was easy I just went ahead and did it is very important but that's the element that does not get communicated all of these people know something about fear and yet have acted in spite of it and I think that's terribly important parents model that too with that I think it's time to wrap this up thank you all for coming and there will be a reception afterwards and so you have to turn the microphone back to both well this has really certainly generated a lot of different ideas and thoughts and I know that we're gonna have some time for some more discussion after the formal program here so I'll look forward to that I want to recognize all of the panelists and to thank you for being part of this I know that you've been part of the reunion and things that we've been doing through the week but particularly to recognize your work with the panel we have a special gift for you this year we published the dear old Nebraska volume and I have one for each and I think if you look in the front you'll also see that these are signed by Ronnie Green so Chancellor Green is very pleased that you've been able to be with us for this and thank you for being part of our Nebraska lecture series and also the Centennial reunion this week so let's give a hand for the panelists