Every summer I get lonely. Don’t get me wrong, I love the people I work with in Academic Affairs and in Founders Hall . . . probably more than they love me sometimes. But the campus just doesn’t feel right unless there is a certain level of manageable chaos, the ebb and flow of folks scurrying between buildings, and a little bit of nervous anticipation in the air. Believe it or not, I genuinely missed our student who sat in the trees and sang out across the quad all last year! Where are you, Ellis?!
For those of you who are new to Augustana, I write this column/blog every week to try to drop a little dose of positive restlessness into the campus ether. I first read the phrase “positive restlessness” in the seminal work by George Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, John Schuh, and Liz Whitt titled Student Success in College. This 2005 book describes the common threads the authors found among 20 colleges and universities that, no matter the profile of students they served or the amount of money squirreled away in their endowment portfolio, consistently outperformed similar institutions in retention and graduation rates.
More important than anything else, the authors found that the culture on each of these campuses seemed energized by a perpetual drive to improve. No matter if it was a massive undertaking or a tiny little tweak, the faculty, staff, and students at these schools seemed almost hungry to get just a little bit better at who they were and how they did what they do every day. This doesn’t mean that the folks on these campuses were some cultish consortium of maniacal change agents or evangelical sloganeers. But over and over it seemed that the culture at each of the schools featured in this study coalesced around a drive to do the best that they could with the resources that they had and to never let themselves rest on their laurels for too long.
What continues to strike me about this attribute is the degree to which it requires an optimistic willingness to wade into the unknown. If we were to wait until we figured out the failsafe answer to every conundrum, none of us would be where we are now and Augustana would have almost certainly gone under a long time ago. Especially when it comes to educating, there are no perfect pedagogies or guaranteed solutions. Instead, the best we can do is continually triangulate new information with our own experience to cultivate learning conditions that are best suited for our students. In essence, we are perpetually focused on the process in order to increase the likelihood that we can most effectively influence the product.
The goal of this blog is to present little bits of information that might combine with your expertise to fuel a sense of positive restlessness on our campus. Sometimes I point out something that we seem to be doing well. Other times I’ll highlight something that we might improve. Either way, I’ll try to present this information in way that points us forward with an optimism that we can always make Augustana just a little bit better.
By a lot of different measures, we are a pretty darn good school. And we have a healthy list of examples of ways in which we have embodied positive restlessness on this campus (if you doubt me, read the accreditation documents that we will be submitting to the Higher Learning Commission later this fall). We certainly aren’t perfect, but frankly that would be a fool’s errand because perfection is a static concept – and maintaining an effective learning environment across an entire college campus is by definition a perpetually evolving endeavor.
So I raise my coffee mug to all of you and to the deliciously ambiguous future that this academic year holds. Into the unknown we stride together.
Make it a good day!
Mark