Today the Great Desert University will confer degrees on an astonishing EIGHT THOUSAND students, enough men and women to populate a small town. GDU is a learning factory and most of these degrees rolled off the assembly line, one of the few remaining products stamped Made in America.
Even so, many of our finest faculty were not. Made in America, that is. Nor were quite a few of our students.
Many of today’s graduating seniors, master’s degree holders, and Ph.D.’s are first-generation college students, often children of immigrants-especially those who attend the westside campus, which serves a large working-class population. With just a slightly stronger recruitment effort and some credible support from the throne, the West campus could be a Hispanic-serving institution, a status that opens doors for grants, scholarships, internship, and employment opportunities for all its students. But Hispanics make up only one contributor to the cosmopolitan nature of the enormity that is the four combined campuses: walk across the main campus and you will hear languages from all around the globe.
It’s an exciting polyglot campus whose intellectual and cultural diversity build sophistication for every student who attends classes there. That’s quite a remarkable thing, considering that just a decade or two ago, the place was something of a backwater.
For a first-generation college student, graduation marks a truly huge milestone, not only for the individual but for her or his family. These young (and sometimes not-so-young) people, many of whom have worked their way through school, have achieved a tremendous accomplishment, often against tall odds.
When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to generalize from evidence of plagiarism and near-illiteracy that all U.S. college students are desperately wanting in every way and to conclude that the next generation is racing to Hell on a skateboard. That’s because the worst episodes and the most recalcitrant students take center stage in your consciousness. The ones who don’t give you trouble tend to fade into the background. But in contrast to the plagiarized paper and the incompetent efforts turned in this semester, I also saw one paper whose quality was on the professional level-a proposal that a charitable foundation support a program for blind children-and in fact, its authors intend to present it to the foundation’s board. Two or three other papers were excellent, and the rest were adequate.
No doubt among those 8,000 new graduates, the proportion of the competent and the truly excellent is the same as it is in any upper-division course.
There’s still hope for America.
1 Comment left at iWeb site
Yay, a hopeful post. 🙂 Sometimes the people who come to the library really get me down about the country. But many are reading and plenty are quite fun, so it’s not as bad as all that.
Thursday, May 8, 2008 – 11:36 AM