As our lives reflect the moment we enter history, the dominant generational style of our youth (the sound of its music, the look of its movies), so one's approach to education is a product largely of the decade of one's higher education. As someone who went through graduate school in the experimental 1960s, I came to UB in 1967 with big ideas about the possibilities for educational reform. And the atmosphere at UB during the height of the Vietnam War - open, dynamic, flexible - encouraged its mainly young, gifted, and newly recruited faculty to believe that we were going to become the Berkeley of the East or Oxford on Lake Erie. Whatever any of those terms might have meant, they meant, mainly, that we were going to become one of the best state universities in America. Like Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia. That hasn't come to pass - yet.
I won't rehearse my own efforts and experiments, but I'll say simply that I came to believe by the end of America's longest war (1975) that the multiversity, as universities such as UB sometimes were called in those days, is too complex an institution, with too many pressure points, budgetary claims, and competing interests, to be reformed from the top down by a uniform plan in any systematic way, as useful as such plans might be to get people thinking. Faculty may pay attention to these plans, but they will pursue, in the end, the writing and research that makes sense to fellow specialists and drives their fields. These are the pathways of funding, prestige, and job offers.
It would be nice to think that someone such as John Henry Newman with his unifying "The Idea of a University" or Ortega y Gasset with his humanistic "Mission of the University" could appear among us to make UB become the flagship of, in the recent words of SUNY Chancellor Robert King, "the premier comprehensive system of public higher education in the world." This lofty goal seems out of striking distance just now, but I have a simple, cost-free, and potentially transformative idea that might help bring his dream closer to reality: encourage all students each semester to speak once a week with some instructor in office hours for the duration of their undergraduate careers.
It probably would be a teacher in a current course (and, eventually, major), but it wouldn't have to be, and it wouldn't have to be the same professor each week. Students would be encouraged, in a Lincolnian letter sent to them on high-quality paper with an elegant font, to seek out instructors in what are already required office hours to discuss the material of a specific course; to find out who in the university has related interests; to raise questions about the nature of the instructor's field; to discuss general reading, the state of the culture, the future of the polity, geo-politics feelings of alienation and futility, sports - any of the things that a student might discuss with an individual tutor if the university could afford to assign an individual mentor for each student (and if one could get departments to back this kind of dialogue). Some instructors, who set office hours in the early morning, might find their tranquility slightly disturbed, but they would become, in time, less lonely people.
Imagine the changes that would take place: halls would become beehives of conversation; teachers who rarely see one another would bump into colleagues on their way to keeping office hours; students taking psychology courses would carry news of the latest cognitive theories, like amphoras of Hellenisitic honey, to their literature professors who would, in turn, outfit them with the latest notions of post-colonialism in Hardy's "Tess of the D' Urbervilles" which they then could transport to another port of academic call across the campus. Teachers who never have met, or even heard of one another, would become part of a network. It would be something like the old Aegean-Mediterranean trade in ideas as well as goods, or the Silk Road of knowledge. With the Internet serving as a caravansary for electronic camels, all sorts of journeys would become possible across the steppes of the two campuses.
Given the unique and typically unexplored interests of students (the particular shape of each mind which only can be tested through talk) and the latent interdisciplinary nature of all fields; given the opportunity to pursue real connections, given the lack of any consistent context or forum for the exchange of ideas across departmental boundaries of the university (its traditional and perhaps necessary structure) - given these factors and others, my Thoreau-like, No. 2 pencil of an idea for our university, if taken seriously and supported by upper administrators (who themselves might participate in these cross-campus conversations), could become, in time, a step towards the realization of the chancellor's visionary vision and what should be our highest aspiration: the sharing of knowledge in the most direct, efficient, and realistic way possible. And we could help Chancellor King save millions, perhaps billions, of dollars!
Professor Howard Wolf joined the English Department in 1967. His 11th and 12th books will be published during 2002-2003: Looking for America: Towards a Global Education (essays); Long Ago, Far-away (travel essays and short stories).
