To the Class of 2020

College graduations are always times of mixed emotions.  On one hand, there is the exultation of having completed a life goal.  On the other hand, graduation often means bidding farewell to friends who you may not see again, leaving behind a life filled with great memories, and, ultimately, facing the unknown on one’s own.  

This year marks the 50th anniversary of my own college graduation.  1970 was a year of tumult and early closures, as students protested the country’s war in Vietnam after National Guardsmen killed four and wounded nine protesting students at Kent State University.  At Penn State, the spring term ended early. We were all glad when graduation day came. 

This year, it was a very different kind of disruption. Graduation came in the midst of a global pandemic that has hit the United States harder than most other countries, cancelling face-to-face instruction and closing campuses across the nation.  Most U.S. colleges and universities cancelled the formal 2020 graduation ceremonies in favor of “virtual” commencements over Zoom or another streaming video service.  Penn State was no exception. Town has been unusually empty and quiet as a result.  However, this past week, we’ve noticed small groups of students, decked out in their graduation robes, posing for photos at the Nittany Lion Shrine, Old Main, the Penn State Arboretum, and other landmarks—finding a way to memoralize their college achievement and create new memories to share in the years to come in the midst of social distancing.  

In 2005, I had the honor of giving a graduation speech at Penn State-Shenango, where I began my college career in 1966.  The campus was celebrating its 40th anniversary, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with the graduating students.  I wanted to share my remarks from that day below as a way of wishing our 2020 grads all the best as they begin their careers in these very turbulent times.

Penn State Shenango Commencement Speech, May 2005

Thank you, Dr. Leeds.

First, let me say congratulations to the graduates who are here with us today.  I also want to recognize our graduates’ families, friends, and loved ones.  No one achieves a goal like this entirely on her own--you all deserve a share of the congratulations tonight.   

I also want to thank Dean Disney and Dr. Leeds for inviting me to be here.   I am especially proud to join you tonight for several reasons.  First, as a Penn State administrator.  Second, as a Penn State Shenango Alum.  Third, as a Shenango Valley native.   And fourth, this year Penn State Shenango is celebrating its 40th anniversary of service to the community here in Western Pennsylvania.   I am a member of the second class to go through the campus.  I graduated from Hickory High School in 1966.  I am a classic Penn State first-generation student.  When I was in high school, I had few prospects of ever attending college.  However, some of my teachers told my mother and me about this new campus that would allow me to attend Penn State without having to bear the expense of leaving home and that would allow me to continue to work part-time while I studied.   The campus was not yet at its current physical location—our classes were held at Kennedy Christian High School during my freshman year—but the very fact that Penn State was here in the Valley was a godsend to me back then and it has been the same for many other students as the campus has grown and become a part of downtown Sharon over the past four decades.   So, it is a distinct honor for me to be back with you this evening.

Back in those days, you could only complete the first two years of a baccalaureate degree at the campus.  I finished my undergraduate degree at University Park in 1970.    The following month, this book came out—Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.   It was, as the cover on the paperback edition said, “a runaway best seller.”  But more than that, it was a kind of social exclamation point that announced that something very big was happening in our world—it proclaimed the beginning of the Information Revolution.  It described the many changes that were beginning to take shape in our culture .  Especially explored a variety of changes—changes in science and technology, in organizations, in families, in education, in relationships—and the challenges facing us as individuals and as a society learned how to cope with increasingly rapid and radical change.   Most of us were only vaguely aware of all this in 1970, but it was not long before we all began to feel the impact and began to sense that things would never be quite the same.  

            

Well, we are now more than a full generation into the Information Revolution.  Most of you who are graduating today know no other world than a wired—and increasingly, wireless—world.  Most of the rest of us have trouble remembering what it was like in the “old days.”  (Notice that I did NOT say the “good old days”).   And yet we are still discovering the true dimensions of change that the Information Revolution has created—and is still creating.  We are, in a very real way, in the same situation that Penn State’s graduates of a century or more ago might have been:  they were a generation into the Industrial Revolution and I am sure most of them could not have envisioned what the 20th century would bring.  We look out today on the edge of the 21st century and only one thing is certain:  there is a lot more change to come.   Some of them will be what one author calls “predictable surprises.”  But some will be total surprises.   It’s going to be an exciting ride.  And it’s time for you to take your turn at the wheel.

One that is still unfolding but that has incredible potential for transforming how we will live in the world in the coming decades—is how the Internet and wireless communications are transforming the concept of “community” in our lives.  We all live in several different overlapping communities.  Our family and friends are a community that we take with us throughout our lives.  We also have our local, physical community—like the Shenango Valley itself—where we have many different kinds of associations and, often, where our cultural heritage rests.  And, as we move on in life, we develop communities that share professional interests and communities of interest around other dimensions of our lives.

            

Today, those communities are no longer as tied to local geography as they used to be.  A generation after Future Shock, we know from experience what Alvin Toffler was telling us:  that the Information Revolution was not about technology, but was about US.  I work with Penn State’s online courses.  My professional community is national and international.  Just in the last two weeks, I have interacted with colleagues in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, and Norway—all without leaving State College (a town that my graduation speaker in 1970 described as “equally inaccessible from anywhere in the world”).  Students in our online courses come from all 50 states and all 7 continents.  Their experience of a learning community is a bit different from mine 40 years ago.   

            

For me, at my age, all this is an adventure.  For you, well, it may be pretty normal.  But this idea of technology is changing how you will define your community in the years ahead is well worth thinking about.  All of you have the ability now to carry your communities with you wherever your life’s work will take you.  For some of you—and I hope this is true of a good many—it will allow you to stay right here in Western Pennsylvania and still be citizens of a rich community of colleagues and friends far from here.  Pennsylvania is facing a powerful challenge.  Many of our communities—and the Shenango Valley is a wonderful example—were shaped by the needs of the Industrial Revolution.  The challenge—and it is an immediate challenge for all of us—is to re-envision our communities for this new economy.  We’ll need your leadership here at home or wherever your careers take you, to make that happen.

            

Tonight, you have received your degrees from Penn State.  But I think it is important to note that you did not “receive” your education.  It hasn’t been handed down to you.  Instead, you MADE your education.  You had lots of help from faculty members and other students, but it is YOURS.   In the process, you’ve created a new capacity within yourself to face the changes ahead.  One thing we DO know about the world that the information revolution has created is that, for us—because the world continues to change rapidly—education doesn’t end tonight.  It is a lifelong process.  I wound up getting two more degrees from Penn State as an adult learner.  I hope that, as you move forward you will continue to turn to Penn State for renewal and to help you to reach new goals as you move ahead in your life.

For tonight, though--from one alum to another—congratulations and the very best wishes for the future.

Thank you.

America's Ragged Individualism

Our radical politics is not new. I’m reading the first volume Henry Adams’ History of the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson. Published in 1889, it begins with a look back at the realities of life and the nuances of American culture in 1800, the year Jefferson was elected as the third President of the United States. It includes an example of conservative versus liberal thinking that, if anything, is even more extreme today.  Adams—the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams—began his history with a wide, yet detailed look at American culture and the difficulties involved in travel at a time when the frontier was never far away. 

“If Americans agreed in any opinion,” he wrote, “they were united in wishing for roads; but even on that point whole communities showed an indifference, or hostility, that annoyed their contemporaries” (Adams, p. 46).

            As an example, Adams quotes Timothy Dwight, President of Yale from 1795 to 1817, on the Rhode Island state legislature’s refusal to fund the completion of an unfinished turnpike designed to cross the state:

“The principal reason for the refusal, as alleged by one of the members, it is said, was the following: that turnpikes and the establishment of religious worship had their origin in Great Britain, the government of which was a monarchy and the inhabitants slaves; that the people of Massachusetts and Connecticut were obliged by law to support ministers and pay the fare of turnpikes, and were therefore slaves also; that if they chose to be slaves they undoubtedly had a right to their choice, but that free-born Rhode Islanders ought never to submit to be priest-ridden, nor to pay for the privilege of travelling on the highway. This demonstrative reasoning prevailed, and the road continued in the state which I have mentioned until the year 1805. It was then completed, and free-born Rhode Islanders bowed their necks to the slavery of travelling on a good road” (ibid.).

This was, apparently, not an exception to the rule. As Adams noted, “So strong was the popular prejudice against paying for the privilege of travelling on a highway that in certain States, like Rhode Island and Georgia, turnpikes were long unknown, while in Virginia and North Carolina the roads were little better than where the prejudice was universal” (p. 47).

Flash forward a couple of centuries to 2020.  On May 3, Heather Cox Richardson wrote this in her Letters from an American blog:

Jeff Kowalsky’s photograph of the “American Patriot Rally” at the Michigan statehouse on April 30 shows a large, bearded man, leaning forward, mouth open, screaming. Positioned between two police officers who are staring blankly ahead above their masks, he is focused on something they are preventing him from reaching: the legislature. His fury is palpable.

The idea that such a man is an “American Patriot” is the perverted outcome of a generations of political rhetoric that has celebrated a cartoon version of “individualism.” That rhetoric has served a purpose: to convince voters that an active government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, and promotes infrastructure—things most Americans actually like—is socialism (para. 1-2).

            This kind of extreme individualism, which separates the individual from any responsibility to community, has been a force in American culture since the beginning. That said, this is not the spirit on which the nation—and the national culture—was built. For every radical individualist icon there are countless more Paul Reveres, Nathaniel Hales, Abraham Lincolns, Martin Luther Kings, and many others--whose identity is tied closely to their achievements and sacrifices on behalf of their community.

            In that sense, America is at its best when it functions as a community of individuals helping not only themselves but also their families, their neighbors, their communities. That has become so apparent during the current pandemic, whose real heroes are not politicians or corporate execs but doctors, nurses, technicians, janitors, food processors, truck drivers, mail deliverers, police—people who put their lives at risk to protect and serve their community.

            As for “socialism” versus “conservative” let me say this. In a democracy, government is not a separate monolith, but simply how we organize ourselves to protect and defend each other. We pay taxes to support the services we need, be it road-building or health care or protection against those who would abuse our community or cheat or take unreasonable advantage of us, and we elect fellow citizens to make sure that the work gets done.  The issue, ultimately, is to determine what kind and what amount of services and protection we, the citizens, need.  This is where politics must be focused and engaged.  Labels like socialism and conservatism separate people and make it that much harder to come together and solve problems.

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Adams, Henry. History of the United States 1801-09. New York: Literary Classics of the United States 1986.

Richardson, Heather Cox. Letters from an American. May 3, 2020. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-3-2020?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

Building New Alliances for Media-Supported K-12 Learning

As we enter the last weeks of the 2019-20 school year, it is becoming increasingly clear that many communities across the nation will not be ready to return students to physical attendance at their public schools.  Many schools have experimented with technology during the past six weeks. We have a brief summer to help schools prepare to build on their experiences with remote/distance/online instruction as they begin the 2020-21 school year in the fall.  Here are some suggestions for how higher education institutions involved in online learning can help their K-12 colleagues in this crisis.

1.         Build a national Open Educational Resources library for K-12.  Many institutions have begun to build libraries of open educational resources (OERs) to reduce cost and avoid duplication.  Community colleges have collaborated for several years to create a national collection of online texts, lectures, interviews with experts, laboratory experiments and other demonstrations, and a wide variety of other experiences. Other collaborative efforts are underway among public and land grant universities. Over the summer, institutions should work together to gather and collect OERs keyed to specific areas of the K-12 curriculum, creating a national library of free online materials, organized around K-12 grade levels and subject areas.  The goal would be to have at least one higher education institution in each state that would coordinate with the national network and with local schools to match OERs to the state’s curriculum and make them available to local teachers.

2.         Create a national catalog of online higher education courses that can be taken as dual enrollment courses.  Many lower-division college/university courses can be taken as “dual enrollment” courses that allow students to simultaneously earn credit toward high school graduation and college credit at the offering institution. The resulting credits are transferrable to other institutions.  Higher education institutions should work together to create a catalog of online higher education courses that qualify for dual enrollment.  Within each state, at least one community college and one public university should then promote the availability of these courses to high schools in the institution’s service area and offer to accept credit for those courses if taken successfully by a high school senior.  

3.         Universities that offer online webinars for teachers should collaborate to develop webinars and professional development courses to help prepare K-12 teachers in key disciplines (English, mathematics, the sciences, history, U.S. government, and social sciences) to make effective use of online content and methods.  Given the short time available to prepare for fall, this initiative might begin by universities working together to develop a series of webinars on effective online communication and teaching skills in the different disciplines.  Ideally, these would extend through the first six-weeks of K-12 instruction, so that teachers have a network through which they can learn, but also share successes and problems. In time, though, this could evolve into a collection of courses that teachers could use for advanced certification, as well as ongoing networks of K-12 teachers guided by experienced online university instructors in their disciplines. 

4.         Work with public media outlets to effectively extend K-3 programming to the schools.  Around the country, local Public Broadcasting Service stations were among the first educational media outlets to work with local school districts and state Departments of Education to match their daytime children’s programs with state curriculum standards in order to provide at-home learning opportunities for students in elementary and middle school grades.  Public broadcasters have a decades-long experience in serving local school curricular needs in their daytime broadcast schedules.  The next step in reviving this mission is for stations—through their state and regional networks and in close coordination with state Departments of Education—to identify unmet needs and then seek federal funds to produced new programs and OERs (along with necessary professional development resources) to meet those needs.  This is an opportunity to revive a program development relationship among colleges of education, discipline-based faculty, and public broadcasters to establish a new relationship with K-12 teachers and students. 

Collaboration as a Key

            This is an immediate problem that requires a quick, but comprehensive solution.  The key to success, I believe, is for higher education institutions to collaborate within the various families of institutions (community colleges, public/land grant universities, liberal arts colleges, etc.) to share the load and share the resulting professional development programs.  We have seen this kind of collaboration already in several aspects of the online movement.  The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER) is one example.  CourseShare, a collaboration among the land grant Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions, is another.  The key to quick success is to use these and other similar alliances to get a head start on creating a sustainable new environment that can support the curricula—and expand the capabilities--of local K-12 schools in the future.

            This, I believe, could be the hallmark achievement of the new decade, not only creating new content but encouraging new ways to engage students at all levels in learning across the curriculum in a maturing information society.