Upfront: Mentoring, Not Hi-Tech, Makes the MSU Experience
MENTORING, NOT HI-TECH, MAKES THE MSU EXPERIENCE
Jewett, a neurologist in Kalamazoo, articulates his personal vision of MSU's Guiding Principle No. 6--'People Matter.' Beware the wizard of classrooms without walls, long distance libraries, and lectures by Sony. Just put the freshmen on the ramp to the superhighway. The professionalization of the student is only a keyboard away, with a better bottom line as a bonus. Who will they become?
Such a short time, and we expect so much from Michigan State University. Somewhere on the road to commencement, I hope, this institution will assist our sons and daughters in seeing things as they might be, and empower them to effect change.
How does this University give its students more than traditional benchmarks of academic achievement? In the transition from the age of Aquarius to the age of Internet, they need safe harbor from the seduction of technology, and a life line to the heart of the University, the Faculty. Is it too ambitious to hope that students will see the possibility of a new order, to see relationships in a way that transcend the quotidian? How do we avoid this pedestrian destiny? To the rescue, faster than a budding bureaucracy, able to leap the tallest grant proposal, out of the halls of academe - it's mentor power, fostering the process of translating the wealth of experience among our faculty members to those students who are receptive.
For many of us, the difference at Michigan State was not so much the presence of lecture halls as the eloquence of a single individual who can stir the soul. Sometimes that occurred through an association with someone whose enthusiasm is genuinely contagious. Sometimes it was as grand as a feeling of partnership with a custodian of the truth. Often it was nothing more than a comment that is irresistibly sensible. But, always, it was personal. It is mentoring that closes the distance in the multi-media classroom and neutralizes the small college's numerical advantage. It provides the maturing student a reference in controversy and a confidence in adversity. Also, as Ursela Hegi wrote in Stones from the River, 'It has to do with what to embrace and what to relinquish.' The mentoring process has nothing to do with surrogate parenting. It is rather seeking out those who are not like us for the right reasons. It is a private audience. It is the understanding that a bridge exists between what our teachers teach and the politics of the real world. It is the sense that we can change that world if we have the will.
For some, the difference may not be appreciated or understood until many years after leaving MSU. In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy wrote: 'He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.' What stands between the acts and the ceremonies is ultimately why this university exists. It is the intangible element in the transition that our students will undergo in their years at MSU, the high touch in their high tech universe. It is the connection to the people of the university. It is what to embrace.
