Our Journey, Day 53
I received a couple of emails this week from students I haven't met. The first was from a senior at St. Scholastica College in Duluth. He is in the final stages of getting a BA in Global Sustainability and Justice, but a course he needs to graduate isn't available again until spring 2025. He was wondering whether he could take my American Environmental History course online this spring. The problem, of course, is that I'm currently teaching that course for the final time at Bemidji State. However, I have begun working on turning that into an online course for people who are not in an academic program and are just interested in the topic. Chances are, I could adjust that content a bit more and add back in some of the assessments I use to grade my students. I suggested he should have his faculty advisor get in touch with me.
The second email was from a Psychology major at BSU who was interested in getting the Equity Certificate along with her bachelors degree. This was an interdisciplinary program I designed a couple of years ago and implemented last year, where students could get a 15-credit certificate acknowledging they had explored issues of equity. The program was designed to be adjacent to their major field, and enhance their understanding using two courses I designed and taught as well as three existing courses from a list that included over fifty in a variety of disciplines. The idea was that a background in the complexities of these issues might allow students to avoid falling into ideological traps on either the left or the right.
It was a little tricky for me, especially when I was teaching the Introduction to Equity course that begins the program. Not so much because I'm a middle-aged white guy, I think. But because I wanted to suggest that the issues actually are complicated and that there's a difference between saying the right thing and doing the right thing. Most of the students who signed up for the class already had some strong ideas about the subject, so it was an interesting dynamic.
When I received a grant to explore zero-textbook-cost bachelors degrees at BSU, I told the administration I wouldn't be able to continue as Director of the program. After I stepped away from it, there had been some talk about appointing someone else. Or maybe creating a combined directorship that would handle both Equity and a Leadership certificate program that had been created a few years earlier but had no one running it.
With the retrenchment, there doesn't seem to be any attention left to direct at these types of programs. Even faculty whose jobs aren't yet affected are unwilling to take on something new. Not only because it requires a lot of work, but because anything that's at all uncertain of success is impossible. If everyone is going to be judged by how many "butts in seats" they can achieve in their regular classes, no one is going out on any limbs. Even if those limbs align with the "core values" and "strategic priorities" of the university.
Long story short, I had to respond to the student in the negative. There isn't currently an Equity Certificate program at BSU. There's no plan to put the Intro to Equity or the Capstone courses back into the catalog. It was a good idea, but it's over. An unfortunate outcome, because it was the only program of its kind in the system and if we had been able to get it off the ground, we were hoping to enroll students from all the other campuses until the idea caught on and people started to copy us. This illustrates the impact on enrollment growth, of cutting the people who are developing innovative new programs to meet current needs.