Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin'

Colleges fail.  They close.  "On average, five private 4-year non-profit colleges and universities have closed per year over the last ten years, with as many as 9 institutions closing in 2009" (Digest of Education Statistics, 2013).  They close because of low enrollment, small endowments, high debt, and deferred maintenance.  Among twenty indicators listed by Martin and Samel in their 2009 book, Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence, a college risks closure when:

o   its enrollment is below 1000 students.

o   it depends on tuition for more than 85% of its operating budget.

o   more than 10% of its annual operating budget goes to servicing debt.

o   the average annual alumni gift is less than $75.

o   it can't develop an online program.

o   it hasn't developed a new degree program for at least two years.

o   the institution is on probation, warning, or financial watch with a regional accreditor.

Colleges close for reasons only tangentially related to leadership style, communication transparency, instructional quality, distinctive facilities, faculty commitment, student loyalty, or alumni nostalgia.  While those factors feel most central to institutional identity and constituent experience, none have the power to keep a failing college above water.

Furthermore (and perhaps harder to accept), loving Jesus exempts no business from the market forces that closed Circuit City, Borders, Woolworth, and Blockbuster.  In an April 2013 New York Times article, Jeffrey Selingo soberly quantifies the likelihood of institutional persistence.  "Only 500 or so of the 4,000-plus colleges and universities in the United States seem to have stable enough finances to be truly safe.  The remaining colleges… can no longer hold off the technological, demographic and economic forces quickly bearing down on them."

Idyllic Montreat College

Some vocal alums imagine they're owed transparent communication, that they merit a voice in a conversation of decision-makers.  But Montreat grads are a strange bunch.  Yes, survivors of the residential tradition return to the Barn for homecoming square dances, but so few of us offer the school our financial support that the low percentage of alumni donors recently threatened Montreat's bid for re-accreditation.  We don't give to the school.  And we rarely send our children.

Part of that is Montreat's own fault.  As one example, the school's recruitment strategy has historically privileged men's baseball over women's soccer.  To be blunt, baseball players often require significant tuition discounts.  Women's soccer players, by contrast, tend to come from the lucrative demographic of families able to pay the full cost of college.

Additionally, the school's selection of majors has long dumped graduates into low-earning professions. Degrees in Music, Religion, and Outdoor Education infrequently predict high-dollar philanthropy.  The satisfying but intangible nobility of those majors doesn't endow chairs or renovate dorms.

Yes, other college alumni typically have a place at the table.  They help to steer the legacy of their respective institutions.  But they pay for the privilege.

We might prefer that Montreat's leadership team explain the college ledger, line by gruesome line, to those who imagine themselves stakeholders.  But if the board is trying to secure a merger, a savior-donor, a new president, or even a larger student body, that's probably not the wisest public relations maneuver.  I'm not defending silence or obfuscation – of which there has been much.  But if I were desperately attempting to increase the college's curb appeal, I wouldn't simultaneously broadcast its every fiscal liability.

Instead, I'd play my financial cards close to my chest, publicly committing to no one option, yet investigating them all.  Yep. That's what I'd do if I held a hundred families in my palm.  That's what I'd do if a word from me could close a retirement account or end health coverage or send a sophomore scrambling to continue her education elsewhere. I wouldn't lie, but neither would I add to the fire of speculation.  I wouldn't injure or unduly panic any of my friends until no option remained.

That's how I'd play it if I feared Montreat would soon appear on a list of 130-odd closed or merged North Carolina colleges. That's what I'd do if I owned the school.  But I don't.  The trustees do.  As much as we may wish they were beholden to stock owners, they are not.  They are proprietors of a privately held business obliged to balance the books within the constraints of the law.  They are Ernst & Young, Publix Super Markets, Pilot Gas Stations.

I understand the instinctive need to embrace dear memories, to defend precious ideals.  I, too, wooed a sweetheart on the shores of Lake Susan. I cheered teams to victory from the bleachers of McAlister Gym.  I slept through French classes in Gaither Hall.  I cried at the funeral of Professor Bonnie Lundblad.  And I surrender not one of these memories to inflexible economic realities.  I begrudge no man his conscience.  I encourage no one to abandon the struggle to keep Montreat alive and kicking (though panic in the game's final seconds seems insincere when the need for a new and winning strategy has been evident since halftime).

Things end.  Often without dignity.  Seldom timed to our liking.  Many endings owe nothing to the Fall's corrosive influence.  They simply occur because God ordained time to work as a one-way, forward flow from one event to another.

Things end because the God of kindergarten is also the God of graduation.  The God of happy birthdays is the God of old age.  The God of flight is the God of gravity.  The God of rainbows is the God of rain.  Through starting pistols and finish lines alike, our God speaks his will into the world.  Selective proof-texting too often confines God to the cage of Alpha.  We should not forget he also merits worship for being, gloriously and authoritatively, the Omega.

UFVA 2012

Chicago Stillness

Though the spacing of Columbia College's buildings isn't exactly what I'd call "chummy," my semi-sequestered week in Chicago at the annual conference of the University Film and Video Association was not entirely the fault of an urban campus.  Last year, my named peppered the Boston program:  a film screening; a panel presentation; a peer response.  This year – depleted by two overloaded semesters and the (as-yet fruitless) job search for a teaching partner – I brought nothing.  I was quiet.  I was still.  I was an observer.  An audience member, not a performer.

I felt guilty.  A transplanted Southerner, I have recently contracted the Midwestern work ethic.  Apparently these Scando-Germanic folk fear being caught idle by the returning Christ.  Even Sabbath here is understood as a time – not of rest – but of scheduled leisure activities.  “Play as hard as you work,” I’ve been told.  So to sit, and to listen, and to watch – can be hard.

The Price and History of Guilt

I came to Calvin from one of the many Christian colleges that teeter on solvency’s brink.   There, research and networking were decried as a dean’s “fetish.”  There, any member of the faculty fortunate enough to attend even a regional conference might well “waste” 10% of the school’s entire professional development budget in a single weekend.  Devaluing the collegiality of professional scholars fomented an atmosphere of miserly resentment or listless despair.  Why bother applying for limited funds to attend a conference – only to be told “no”?  Why does that department – and not mine – merit travel money again this year?

But if professors there were denied the means to share their scholarship and improve their pedagogy, they were not exempted from the demands of peer review.  The college’s external accrediting agency – not to mention its internal mechanism for granting promotion and tenure – expected evidence of scholarship: publications, gallery showings, presentations, membership in professional organizations.  Administrators wanted proof that the wheels of intellect still turned in the mind of its professorate, but wouldn’t (couldn’t?) support it with travel funds, release time, or grant-writing assistance.

The vicious vise amounted to an unfunded mandate.  If scholarship was to be done, it was to be done on a teacher’s own time.  If scholarship was to be presented, it was to be presented on a teacher’s own dime.  Perhaps that would have been an acceptable bargain had salaries been atypically high.  But I taught there for a dozen years and never grossed as much as $40K.

Despite appearances, I’m not really ragging on that school.  There are too many like it.  And professors at them are often quite willing to sigh and endure, having accepted appointments that are, in their minds, the equivalent of postings to the mission field.  Indeed, they may interpret (or court) privation as evidence of a faithful life.  I know I did.

A World Without Academic Conferences

I was a newly minted scholar.  I believed what senior faculty and administrators around me taught me about academia.  I believed it was normal to teach 21½ hours in a single semester (yes, you read that right).  Why wouldn’t I believe those things?  There were no counter-examples in my life.  I was the school’s lone Communication professor.  And I never set foot off the island to compare my life with others in the discipline.

I appropriated without question that college’s definition of “scholar,” partly because I was trained in false pride.  “We are a teaching college, not a research institution,” we beamed in unison.  We cast a superior sneer toward other schools that had “sold out.” They valued the cool steel and glass of new microscopes, the omniversity’s icy ivory spires, the tainted influence of sports club boosters.  We – lovers of Jesus all – we valued accredited hours of "seat-time," undergraduates taught by tenure-track faculty members (not graduate assistants or adjuncts), and mentoring relationships with our students.

And I believed it.  I swallowed it whole.  As if friend-making and pedagogical idea-swapping within the broader Academy ever detracted from the classroom experience.  As if broadening my own mind and influence ever equipped me with less to share with others.  As if reflecting deeply about my motives or skills or aspirations or interests as a communicator ever made it more difficult to articulate those things as a teacher.

What a Calvinist Deserves

Thus loudly sings the voice of guilt:  I do not deserve lonely Chicago.  I cannot justify my presence here.  I must not enjoy hors d'oeuvres at a new media reception, a picnic on Northerly Island, a banquet at Adler Planetarium.  I cannot endure the extravagance of traveling to hear how others structure curricula or replace obsolete technology.  Working harder, I can improve the student experience of group learning on my own – without spending Calvin's money on Amtrak fares from Grand Rapids. I can watch a documentary about the history of the banjo on YouTube from home – without hearing the director speak in person about production decisions that shaped the film.

I should be in the office.  I should be writing syllabi.  I should be in the classroom.  I should be teaching.  Always teaching.  Shouldn’t I?

No.  I will be in the office next week.  Not now.  I will teach in September.  I will bring Chicago to my students.

Daniel, My Brother

For seven years, my teaching partner Daniel Garcia gave our students chiaroscuro splashes of light, lyrical camera movement, languid story structures. From me, they got disk management strategies, the rule of thirds, equipment calibration procedures. And students benefitted. Our stylistic divergence prepared them for multiple workplaces, modeled for them distinct creative styles.

Daniel’s departure this month leaves me looking for a partner. Not merely someone who will cover the classes Daniel once taught, but another mule to share my yoke. Enough like me to pull in basically the same direction, different enough from me to teach students what I cannot.

One of my fondest memories of Daniel is an argument we had in Chicago. Eating dinner in the city’s theater district, we had a knock-down-drag-out brawl over the potential for creativity in independent and Hollywood cinema. For maybe an hour, we slammed each other with escalating arguments of emotion and logic, anecdote and hyperbole. And it was wonderful. We laughed as hard as we fought. Never once in that whole wrestling match was our friendship threatened. We were undoubtedly impassioned but ultimately safe in our brotherhood.

Neither of us was tenured. One had no power over the other. I was not currying his favorable recommendation. He did not fear my damning vote in some administrative Star Chamber. We were truly peers. Thus the mix of poet and mechanic was more or less equal as we fashioned the Media Production major.

But I hope to be awarded tenure this year. Can Daniel’s replacement possibly tell me the same [sometimes brutal] truth that Daniel was able to?

Size Matters, Punk (B+)

These days, anything short of a Baz Luhrmann seizure constitutes a slow editing pace. I thought that’s why Dirty Harry (1971) seemed so sluggish when I watched it a couple of years ago with the kids on the 9’ screen in our basement. Clint Eastwood was, of course, imposing and iconic, but the film as a whole felt like an overwrought Quinn Martin production. The dated Lalo Schifrin score didn’t help.

Sunday the kids took me to a revival house screening of Harry. It played on a 40’ screen (as surely God intended). It was a completely different experience. More screen real estate translated into more places for the Scorpio killer to hide. The audience spent long seconds between cuts tensely searching for bad guys in the blackness made possible by the seventies’ faster film stocks.

Once again I learn what I should already know: size matters. iPhones, laptops, and cinema screens each have their own dynamics of composition and pacing. Those dynamics aren’t interchangeable.

Did I mention the kids chose Dirty Harry tickets as a Father’s Day present? It seems that more than once during their childhood, as one or the other of them teetered on the brink of mischief, they each remembered looking my way, daredevil eyes glinting. They recalled (as I did not) the threat of discipline in my standard response: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well… do ya, punk?”

Clash of the Titans (C-)

In its initial theatrical release, Clash of the Titans took a deserved drubbing from critics, who often pointed to it as an object lesson in post-production 3D conversion. The 2010 iteration was also swimming upstream against reviewers’ nostalgia for Ray Harryhausen’s quaint, 1980s-era stop-motion.

Does director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) deserve a 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating? The answer is probably a function of ticket price. I bought a used DVD for $5, saw it in 2D on a 9’ screen with my 14-year-old son, and didn’t regret its 106-minute running time.

Some viewers were troubled by what they considered inaccuracies or continuity gaffes. Their complaint was often that scriptwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi strayed too far from Edith Hamilton. Considering these are among mankind’s oldest characters and narratives, I think perhaps we’ll have to relax our grip on 11th-grade classroom memories. Surely no one invested in this film hoped for Bullfinch’s Mythology.

I have an opposing conviction: that this script hews too closely to the source material – at least in structure. Tales of Perseus and the Argonaut Jason are linear quests. Adventurers wallop a beastie in the forest, then survive a magical firefight on the beach, then behead a stony serpentine seductress in her lair -- connecting the dots from A to B to C. But modern audiences prefer to juggle multiple threats (even multiple timelines) simultaneously. Without more “meanwhile-back-at-Argos” cutaways one frequently forgets that the clock is ticking on the noble, would-be sacrifice Andromeda. Even when she does get screen time, she really doesn’t seem all that upset about her impending death. The stakes of Perseus’s failure thus seem pretty low.

X-Men: First Class (B+)

The film is strongest when it confines itself to moments of discovery between only two or three characters. By contrast, it's weakened by overblown CGI spectacle (as in the finale). Its hip production design (indebted to Connery's Bond era) and a setting during the Cuban Missile Crisis suggest a faux-gravitas that will be lost on many of this summer's popcorn munchers.

Many will remember the adoption of X-Men: The Last Stand as a metaphor for the gay community. That film asked "Is mutation illness or identity, sickness or signature?" Should the franchise continue on course as 1960s historical fiction, I'd expect future installments to similarly address themes of the Civil Rights Movement.

Thor (B--)

Fans of the Marvel comic reckoned Shakespeare vet Kenneth Branagh a natural fit for a King James-era script. And true to his Hamlet, scenes of royal intrigue were among the film’s most intense. More tepid was the chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman. Were these lovers truly destined to bridge the gulf of taboo between heaven and earth? Probably not. At least they managed to [barely] avoid some obvious fish-out-of-water yucks when the thunder god was banished to earth.

Back on Asgard, director Branagh was – as filmmakers have been for years – on the brink (not the bull’s eye) of telling tales believably set in other worlds. Some might argue that George Lucas told audiences such stories two decades ago. But, in general terms, our own laws of physics and weather hold on Tattooine and Naboo. Asgard (and Oa in the forthcoming Green Lantern flick) grasp at more, however. While Thor was admittedly a little better than good, man’s reach still exceeds his grasp.