A Defense of General College - 2005

In 2005, the University of Minnesota administration attempted to close the General College. They failed. Another administration succeeded a few years later. I was engaged with this process because I knew people at GC, so I did some interviews to understand what was at stake. This statement summarized what I learned. It might be useful to look at events since 2005, to see how the gradual integration of the last vestiges of General College into the mainstream university have served the students  who were not destined for a university  education. I still think the notions I presented in this piece are the notions that need to be applied to evaluating  university conduct with respect to fragile students.

Most university education is destined, as learning to speak a language is destined. For kids with resources and good wiring, the question is just: where will they go to college? And it doesn't matter all that much. Most of what any given college or university does for undergrads can be done as well at 20 other places, locally.

But then there's the education that otherwise wouldn't happen, for students from families that don't support higher education, for students with no money, for kids with kids, for students with bad wiring. That's the education that begins a family tradition of higher ed, the education that sets an example a whole peer group, that makes lots of people with problems decide to try again, because Joe or Sally showed that -- even with all these deficits and problems -- it is possible to succeed at the U. This is education that changes the world.

Anybody who has ever tried to make anything happen that isn't destined, that isn't supposed to happen: quitting smoking, getting clean and sober, breaking a cycle of abusive relationships -- knows that that is hard work. Anybody who has ever tried to fight with destiny knows that those who undertake that fight fail and screw up culpably over and over and over again for years before they work their way out of their problems. It is useful to remember that the problems were forged over generations.

Anybody who has ever tried to fight with destiny knows that the only help that means anything is somebody's fierce allegiance to you personally and to your health and success. Not good intentions, not ideals -- fierce allegiance.

The reason I support maintaining the integrity of the General College at the University of Minnesota as an open admissions gateway is because students tell me that the College holds them very tight. That kind of communal ferocity for others comes from a tradition and from a culture that has been found out over many years, with boneheaded ideas and boneheaded staff discarded along the way. It cannot be transplanted or engineered or cloned.

In short, with respect to undergraduate education, the University of Minnesota has a choice: it can condemn itself to causal irrelevance, to doing more or less well what would be done anyway, somewhere, or it can maintain those cultures within its domain that wrestle with grim destiny and sometimes win.

You can't make a university rouser out of the words, "We do what everybody else does, pretty damn well."