Come Let Us Cut the Budget And Build Skyboxes

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

This year at our small university on the plains of Nebraska some of our administrators are all abubble because of the new building for the College of Education and the addition to the Student Union. The first was paid for by the taxpayers of Nebraska, the second by tacking a fee of $50 a semester on our students for the next twenty years. Both buildings are heralded as “state of the art.” This translates, in the first, to truckloads of computers and distance learning pods for the teachers willing to transmit education to the hinterland, and, in the second, to a new “food court” complete with a snack shop, Starbucks coffee shop, Shear Madness Salon, Taco Bell Express, computer store, student government offices, and a variety of meeting rooms, the quintessential of which is located on the “skinny” third floor of the new addition.

Upon entering the two meeting rooms, which comprise the entire third floor, you will notice that the windows start at the floor. Now walk over to the windows while focusing on the floor. When you are approximately two feet from the windows, stop. Look up. What do you see? Lo and behold, the meeting rooms look directly over the football field.

(Regrettably, due to lower than expected tax revenues, the dean of Fine Arts and Humanities suggested we cut the German professor, which means our Modern Language Department would be down to two languages: French and Spanish. Fortunately, the Chancellor, because of support around the campus for German, did not accept the dean’s proposal, and German is safe until next year when the next round of budget cuts get under way.)

Does anyone suppose the meeting rooms, to which students have access throughout the week, will be accessible to the students for home games when these rooms are-SHAZAM!-transformed into skyboxes (for which students will be paying for twenty years)? Want to bet the skyboxes will be reserved for our university patricians, who will feast on a variety of finger foods, assorted drinks (liquor if the chancellor is present), all in climate-controlled boxes at the Circus Maximus Kearnicus?

Anyway, some of our administrators become downright effervescent when explaining the impact these building are going to have on recruiting students. Never mind the fact that during the last ten years, which saw the building of dormitories, dining halls, a coliseum, food courts, renovating the entire west end of campus and Bruner Hall of Science, our enrollment has continued to decline.

(If our administrators were serious about attracting students with buildings, they ought to consider transforming the skyboxes into a student health club. Place elliptical exercise machines, stationary bikes and stair steppers in front of those windows; fill the middle of the room with weight machines and line the walls with free weights, and turn one of the rooms into an aerobic workout room, and then just stand back to watch it fill up.)

It is a mushy-minded materialist who thinks that because the state is spending tax dollars and student fees on buildings, students will be attracted and will stay at this university. Buildings do not command or hold a student’s attention enough to keep him from transferring or dropping out of college any more than the size and decor of his parents’ home will keep him at home.

The people who are drawn into transforming the campus into a country club are probably the same people who live in 4,000-plus square foot houses and think people admire them because of the size of their abodes, big screen televisions, and luxury cars.

Well-educated people have always known there is more to a university than its square footage and buildings crowned with satellite dishes. Thomas Carlyle reminds us of this in his advice to students when he was installed as the Rector of the University of Edinburgh, April 2, 1866:

[T]hat the main use of Universities in the present age is that, after you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What the Universities can mainly do for you-what I have found the University did for me, is, that it taught me to read, in various languages, in various sciences; so that I could go into the books which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suited me . . . . The clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading. Learn to be good readers-which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinde of things which you have a real interest in, a real not an imaginary, and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great deal of the reading incumbent on you, you must be guided by the books recommended by your Professors for assistance towards the effect of their prelections. And then, when you leave the University, and go into studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have chosen a field, some province specially suited to you, in which you can study and work. The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind, honest work, which you intend getting done.

There you have it! The main use of Universities is not in entertaining the eyes with buildings, of which a far grander scale exists in other locales, (nor in accommodating administrators and faculty in the lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed); nor in students feasting on junk food or in meeting rooms overlooking the football field. A student will discover the main use of his university when he is finished with his classes and has gone to his library to study and read and “penetrate into any department [he] wants to make [himself] master of.”

The mark of a good university is built in the souls of her students who have been taught to “read in several languages, in various sciences,” and 5, 10, 20, 40, 60 years after walking out of our classrooms, have a library of good books to which students refer for their own improvement. Sounds simple? Thomas Carlyle knows learning to read is “a more difficult thing than you imagine” because he can read several language and various sciences and has accumulated a library of his own. But he also knows the student will come to find himself throughout his studies, in “some province specially suited for [him].”

Conversely, the mark of a bad university is in the weakening of the souls of her students who have not been taught to “read in several languages, in various sciences” and who in the 5, 10, 20, 40 and 60 years after walking out of our classes, do not have a library of books to which they can refer for their improvement nor a purpose beyond the training they received.

The best way for a student to select his classes is by walking through the bookstore and finding out which books are being read in each class. Avoid classes which substitute textbooks for primary sources. You do not want to read about anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, philosophy and literature. You want to read anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, philosophy and literature.

We have all suffered teachers who distill lectures from textbooks, passing information like gas that dissipates outside the classroom. It is an old adage: give a man food and he is dependent upon you for life; teach a man to farm and you have seen the last of him. The student who is taught to read in various languages and sciences has a mind that is freed to explore the depths of his soul in literature, philosophy, and poetry, and the worlds of biology, chemistry, astronomy, as well as mathematics. Train a student to sit through lectures and parrot the information he has absorbed and you have a slave who being denied a liberal education, is only fit to be a clerk.

There is more to a university than spending wads of money on buildings and the latest technology. We now have “smart classrooms” which may work for people who need to click pictures and charts upon the screen but are simply inconsequential to understanding a sentence of Darwin, Rousseau, or Max Weber.

Last Friday I was in a smart classroom in which there was also a discarded overhead projector and a television on a cart with a VCR in the corner. I was standing behind a computer on the only table in the room which really wasn’t a table but a cabinet housing a VCR, DVD player, CD player, “Elmo,” and various amplifiers, and a switch-box which looked to be for the projector hanging by metal straps from the ceiling. We were reading Descartes in a technological museum. The overhead projector against the wall is twenty years old, the television and VCR are ten years old and every bit of the gadgetry in the cabinet will have to be replaced in four years. The “smart classroom” of today will be antiquated in five years and obsolete in ten. The writing of Aristotle, Marx, Machievelli, Einstein, Dante, Darwin, Jung, Freud, Jefferson, Chaucer, Descartes, Rousseau, Hamilton, Newton, Weber, Bacon, Voltaire, and even Hitler will be new to the students, who if liberally educated, will see them for the first time.

In closing, a “smart classroom” is a misleading metaphor. An inanimate object is not smart. What we need are not “smart classrooms” but professors smart enough to start a student collecting his library.

However, with the cost of replacing technology and maintaining buildings constantly on the rise, what almost happened to the German professor at our small university on the Plains will happen to the French, philosophy, English and art professors (unless they use computers), as we continue our spiral into a tech school producing unreflective graduates ready to do the work some corporation or some government agency has cut out for him.

And so it goes.