|
We are on the
brink of a very good year. I know this because...
-
You are here
(to the students)
-
They are here
(to the faculty)
-
Staff have
been working all summer to prepare for you
-
The fall
sports teams have survived two-a-days
-
The choir has
already rehearsed for a wonderful presentation today,
-
A new Mexican
restaurant has opened here in town ... just for you!
One big change
from last spring is the Union. The Union project is going to affect
all of us this year. The entrance to the dining area is now
different. We have had to ask the Rotary, Kiwanis, and other
community groups to find other places to meet this year. It will be
a wonderful new Union, but right now, it is a real inconvenience.
One of my
students in a speech class gave a great speech about a disastrous
family vacation, one that was like the trips that Chevy Chase and
his family take. The mother turned onto a toll road entrance ramp in
a rain storm and they had to drive the wrong direction for 37 miles.
Her brother got poison ivy that seeped a lot. The Dad forgot to pack
his underwear. Their family adopted a new motto: Adventure is an
inconvenience rightly considered.
Adventure is an
inconvenience rightly considered. Our choices have a huge impact on
whether something becomes an inconvenience or an adventure. I want
to share some thoughts about making choices, and they apply to more
than our attitudes about the Union. Sprinkled among my reflections
today are introductions of people with whom you will work this year.
These are just some of the great people you who work here.
The first
suggestion for making this a good year comes from a wise man who
never had the opportunity to finish high school. He worked for 47
years on an assembly line at International Harvester. My husband’s
grandfather gave this advice to his grandkids: “If it’s not yours,
don’t touch it.” Think how different the world would be if everyone
followed that advice!
Think how much
easier it would be to adjust to roommates here at Manchester if you
knew they wouldn’t get into your stuff. Think how petty thefts and
shop-lifting would vanish. Think how the situations in Iraq,
Lebanon, Israel, and hundreds of other tension points might change.
If it’s not yours, don’t touch it. Construction zones like the Union
are tempting areas to enter, but serious injuries and death happen
there each year. Our actions don’t have to be against the law in
order to be bad choices. It’s not illegal to be rude, but it does
have consequences. If it’s not yours, don’t touch it.
Let me introduce
some people who are glad to be on the brink of a good year with
you. I invite Les, Abby, and Rusty to join me.
Les Gahl is
director of security and associate dean of student development. It
is easy to have stereotypes about security directors and law
enforcement officials, and you might be surprised to compare your
stereotypes to Les Gahl. He graduated from University of Southern
California with a master’s degree in public administration and
completed all the requirements except his dissertation for a Ph.D.
in government at Claremont Graduate School. He was a deputy sheriff
in Los Angeles and Orange counties in California. He served in the
U.S. Marines for nine years. He is married, has three daughters, and
collects rare books, does woodwork, and is a cyclist.
Abby Fuller teaches sociology and has a lifelong interest in peace
and justice. Her dissertation was about the radical movement in
sociology, and her Ph.D. is from the University of Colorado. She has
four sisters and was an EMT and ambulance driver while in high
school in Connecticut. She was also a high school cheerleader! Her
great uncle was governor of South Carolina, secretary of state under
President Truman, and a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. She and
her husband Neil Wollman met here at Manchester, and they have two
daughters – Scout and Leo. She has one other surprising claim to
fame. Her brother-in-law is one of the top poker players in the
world. His name is Erik Seidel; he’s been on TV lots. Dr. Fuller
does not even know how to play poker.
Rusty
Coulter-Kern is a co-author of a
paper on
service learning published this year in the Michigan Journal of
Community Service Learning and is currently working with a
senior psychology major, Kelly Picard, on a project that examines
students and service-learning projects. He is a licensed
psychologist and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Notre
Dame. Rusty is married to Dr. Marcie Coulter-Kern, who also teaches
here. Along with their two daughters, they built much of their own
home. You would never guess it, but this talented man canned 85
quarts of dill pickles this summer. He had plans to can another 20
quarts of pickled okra (a favorite in Oklahoma where Rusty grew up)
before school started today.
A second way that
we can transform frustration into a positive is to follow the advice
of Steven Covey, author of Seven Habits of Effective People.
Covey urges us to seek first to understand others before demanding
that they understand us. Try to understand other persons before we
jump to conclusions about them – or worse yet, before we criticize.
A key to understanding others is empathic listening, a concept you
will learn in several classes here in communication, psychology, and
social work. Most of us listen with the intent to reply: we’re
getting our rebuttals ready while they’re speaking. When someone
speaks, we are usually
·
ignoring altogether
·
pretending to listen
·
selective listening – listening to just the parts that we find
interesting
·
attentive listening – like you do in a class when you are paying
close attention
The most-focused and effective form of listening in our personal
relationships is empathic listening. Empathic listening tries to
hear both the words and the emotions of the speaker. It’s like the
advice to “walk in another person’s shoes” before being judgmental
of them. If you listen to someone empathically, you understand them
much better because you hear more than their words – you also hear
whether they are scared, worried, excited.
Covey believes
that many of us listen very superficially and judge people before we
understand them. Let me give two examples.
I was once in
line at a Meijer grocery store with a friend of mine, and we were in
a hurry, so we chose the express line. The line was long, moving
very, very slowly. Everyone in line was grumbling about the slow
pace – and in an express line of all places. When my friend and I
got to the checker, we were pretty exasperated. Then we saw the
checker, a short woman who was an amputee. She had just one arm that
worked and a stump of an arm that went almost to the length where
the elbow would have been. Not only did she have to work the cash
register, but she also had to bag the groceries into those clingy
plastic bags that are hard for anyone to open. We had been critical
without understanding. Seek first to understand.
A second example
affected almost every single student in this room. For years, the
College has had a policy that student accounts needed to be paid up
before students could enroll in the next semester. This year, we had
to enforce the policy. We want you to understand why. Over the
years, more and more families began to pay their bills late, and the
College was actually in a situation where so many students owed
balances that we could barely meet our payroll. We have an
obligation to pay our staff and faculty and to pay our utility
bills. Families that didn’t pay were using the College as a
short-term loan without even thinking of it that way. Long story
short, for us to pay our bills, we needed to enforce our policy.
That’s why we enforced the policy firmly this year, not to
inconvenience families or create hardship but to be able to pay our
own bills. You may not agree with that policy, but I hope you can
understand it.
One of the ways
to improve understanding of a person’s actions is to ask the
question: “what else do I need to know?” It’s one of the most
helpful questions in the world. Several years ago, a student
complained to me about a professor who did not include his home
phone number on his syllabus. The student was really angry: “I pay
all this money to be able to be in touch with faculty, and this guy
won’t even let us call him at home! How is that for being available
to students??” What the student didn’t know was that the professor
was the father of a recently born child, and that it was essential
to the baby’s health to have a quiet environment and good sleep.
Seek first to understand before jumping to conclusions and
criticisms.
So far, I’ve
shared two suggestions for making the year a good one. If it’s not
yours, don’t touch it. Seek first to understand and ask “what else
do I need to know about this situation?”
Before I move to
the third, I’d like to introduce three people who are great
colleagues – Jerry, Katherine, and Shanon.
Biology Professor
Jerry Sweeten earned his Ph.D. from Purdue University 10 years ago.
His research focuses on how mud in water affects little fish –
actually, it’s much more complex than that description. He and his
wife are caretakers at the College’s Koinonia Environmental Center.
They have three children – a son with a master’s degree in agronomy,
a daughter doing graduate work in Virginia and studying wood
turtles, and another daughter who is a sophomore here. He loves the
outdoors even though his dad dreamed that he would become an
electrical engineer. He absolutely loves fly fishing, birding,
camping, and working with students on research – almost all of which
is done outside – in fields, streams, ponds, mud, and forests.
Katherine
Tinsley, who teaches history, earned her doctorate from the
University of Wisconsin and is a social historian. Her recent
research has been on the 1918 influenza epidemic, and the changes
that occurred in Midwestern small towns after World War 2. She
earned her master's degree in London and also attended two different
summer seminars at Columbia University in New York City, one about
oral history and the second on American slavery. She and her
economics professor husband, Matt, love theatre. They spent their
honeymoon watching plays at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in
Ontario, and this summer celebrated their 25th anniversary with a
month in New York City, where they attended a wide variety of
performances.
Shanon Green is
the new director of student activities. She completed her master’s
in guidance and counseling at Bowling Green State University in
Ohio. Before coming here she worked at Huntington University and
University of Saint Francis. She is a runner and she is also the
mother of 9-year-old Tyler. She attends lots of his sporting events!
Third suggestion
... This year will be a good year if you persist even when things
get tough. Almost all college students have moments when they
question whether they should be in school. Are they capable of the
academic work? Will they find friends? Did they choose the right
major? You know the old phrase: When the going gets tough, the tough
get going. Stick with it, even when things are hard. You may have
trouble with a big spreadsheet assignment. Or you have a difficult
roommate. You may miss your boyfriend/girlfriend back home. You may
have a test with the hardest professor when you know you’ve not
studied enough. You may just be tired.
Faculty and staff
will work side by side with you. They want you to succeed. They
won‘t work harder than you (I hope), but they will stand by you as
you work through challenges. Coaches and RDs and food service folks
and professors and deans and custodians want you to do well. You
have friends who will stand beside you. These people will listen.
They will help you explore options. They will motivate and encourage
you.
Here are some
memories from last year:
-
Students and
faculty working on a Habitat build
-
Faculty
toddlers on the mall with their student babysitters
-
Professor
Deal cooking a gourmet chicken dinner with students
-
Brad Yoder
from sociology running with the cross country team
-
Students and
Dean Sweitzer-Riley and Professor Riley raking leaves together
-
Jan Fahs and
her sons and Julie Talz and her son at basketball games
-
Coach
Nadborne’s 2-year-old daughter Mia getting in the zone as she
watched her team play
-
Students
eating lunch with lots of different professors – McElwee,
Williams, Onyeji, Huntington
When things get
hard, ultimately you need to be the one who sticks with it. This
doesn’t mean that you always will get what you want because life
doesn’t go that way. But it does mean that you have people who will
stand by you as you explore a new major or develop a new habit. If
you want to see examples of persistence, watch Carl Strike and Dave
Good, who take care of our trees and lawns, in the eternal struggle
to mow faster than the grass can grow, to rake faster than the
leaves can accumulate, and to shovel faster than the snow can fall.
Watch coaches who help new teams learn how to play as teams. Watch
retired people from town who attend convo to keep learning. There
are examples of persistence all around you.
Everyone in this
auditorium is ready for a good year. The people whom I’ve introduced
are qualified for their jobs, and they are also real people with
real lives.
I can say the
same for you – students, faculty, staff, friends ... you are
well-qualified to be here, and you are people with real lives.
So, on behalf of
our faculty and staff, I welcome every single student to Manchester
College for this, our 118th academic year. Let’s learn a
lot, and let’s have fun together as we do it. |
