Editor’s Note: Views expressed in guest columns and letters to the editor reflect the views of the author, not the views of The State News.
I often have been amused and mildly disturbed by the way The State News and MSU students close an academic year. On April 29, 2011, for instance, “A Year in Review” in The State News focused on the exhilarating football championship, disappointing basketball season and no classes due to snow. Except for the opening of the $90 million Secchia Center by the College of Human Medicine in Grand Rapids, no “memorable moments of the 2010-11 academic year” featured academics or teaching.
On April 27, 2012, The State News repeated that pattern.
Students, too, voiced the same thing. On April 28, 2011, a staff writer wrote: “I had a lot of great experiences throughout the past year.” He named the Big Ten football championship, the snow day and his last view of the MSC smokestack. A week earlier, a guest columnist wrote a poem to end his first year at college. Football, basketball, being a Spartan, himself and college knowledge took up lines.
“What I’ve learned here in a year adds up to more than four years at my high school.” But what did he learn? He said nothing about academic content.
“The concentration on historical facts, intellectual positions, scientific research and ample documentation,” I asserted, left “untouched the inner life of the student.” No one asked the big questions in life: Who am I? To whom and to what should I be committed? How should we live?
MSU
I quoted Henry Thoreau’s words, “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” I bungled my explanation of integrity. I spoke largely in sexist language. I ended with William Graham Cole’s metaphor about gratitude. No one is an island but rather a coral reef, each successive layer built upon the other.
At the end of this academic year, I am grateful for the following.
Telling introductions by students who proclaimed, “I am a Flint girl” or “I have achieved a victory, like David over Goliath, by giving this speech.”
Students who chose their own subjects to analyze: Steve Jobs’ commencement speech, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, “Major Dad” or parents who provided structured freedom for a mature teenager.
Research papers on lynching, discrimination against gays, lesbians, Mexicans and conscientious objectors during the 1930-40s.
Speeches impersonating Bonnie and Clyde, Rosie the Riveter and Lead Belly, acting out the debate within Robert Sherwood himself in his anti- and pro-war plays and sassily mocking ads in “Ladies’ Home Journal” in 1936, telling women how to attract a man, but not be muscular girls.
The public marathon reading of “Jane Eyre,” captured by Matt Miller in the Lansing State Journal.
The inspiring speeches on nonviolence by Diane Nash and Taylor Branch at the “Slavery to Freedom” series.
The sterling performances of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Appalachian Spring” and “Requiem” on MSU’s campus.
The moving documentary films, “Weapons of the Spirit” by Pierre Sauvage, and “Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald” by Steven Moskovic.
The lives of Doug Hoekstra, Don Treat, Ed Mather and Gene Huddleston — dear friends and professors who died in recent years.
A new daughter-in-law and two new grandchildren, especially the spunk and spirit of the two-year-old grandson fighting leukemia.
Such are the qualities of the mind and heart and soul that stay with me at the end of this academic year.
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Ron Dorr is a guest columnist at The State News and professor of rhetoric and humanities, James Madison College. Reach him at dorr@msu.edu.
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