Qe
ia

yc INNOVATIC. 3 ABSTRACTS

 

 

- os ee ae a alae
|
|
|
|
|

IS

AICS

2G !

AULA Published by the National Institute for staff ana Organizational Deveiopit or
7% With support from the WK. Kellogg Foundation arc Sil VY. Richardson Fotis tats

 

 

 

[Editor’s Note: The following invitation—slightly edited and minus a response form—was extended to faculty
and staff at Richland College (Dallas, TX) by President Steve Mittelstet in 1983. Dr. Mittelstet reports that, at
present, three un-committees meet regularly, involving at least seventy individuals. Moreover, the frequent
increases in book orders and calls for un-committee information speak to the extraordinary success of this
innovation. |

THE UN-COMMITTEE

You are cordially invited to participate with me in what I believe at once can be a stimulating learning
experience for you, can serve as a sounding-board for ideas and proposals about integrated learning at Richland,
and can be a laboratory where we draw and act on each other's ideas about integrated learning. This group of
people will need to share a common commitment to the value of integrated learning as a "humanizing process."
The following excerpt from Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology reflects some of
the concern [ have for learning at Richland College:

Our educational system, whose facade is so impressive according to the number of students who
go to college, is unimpressive in quality. Generally speaking, education has deteriorated to a
tool for social advancement or, at best, into the use of knowledge for the practical application to
the arts . . . is dispersed in an alienated and cerebral form. No wonder that the best minds of
our college students are literally ‘fed up’ because they are fed, not stimulated. They are
dissatisfied with the intellectual fare they get in most instances... . The split between
emotional experience and thought [must be] replaced by a new unity of heart and mind. This is
not done by the method of reading the hundred great books—which is conventional and
unimaginative. It can only be accomplished if the teachers themselves cease being bureaucrats
hiding their own lack of aliveness behind their role of bureaucratic dispersers of knowledge; if
they become—in a word, by Tolstoy—'the codisciples of their students.’ If the student does not
become aware of the relevance of problems of philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, and
anthropology to his own personal life and the life of his society [and ] would add to that subject
list the sciences, technology/commerce, communications, and the fine arts], only the least gifted
ones will pay attention to their courses. The result is that the apparent richness of our
educational endeavor becomes an empty front which conceals a deep lack of response to the best
cultural achievements of civilized history . .. . If the educational bureaucracy does not
understand this message, it will lose the respect which it receives from students and eventually
that from the rest of the population. On the other hand, if it becomes . . . open and responsive
to the [needs of its students to become more fully human beings . . . to shift from the priorities of
things and death to the priorities of life and man], it will sense the satisfaction and joy which
meaningful activity carries with it as its reward.

Fromm’s description is clearly not universally applicable to Richland, but some of it rings uncomfortably true. I
do believe that we do a good job of addressing the basic "wants" of our students in terms of job training,
educational "certifications" of various sorts, and preparation for certain types of baccalaureate transfer
education, and it is important that we address these aspects of our community college mission well. We are ina
unique position to do much more! While addressing our students’ immediate desires (which are not always as
lofty as Fromm’s quotation might indicate), we can challenge these students to greater aspirations for themselves
as human beings, regardless of their chosen careers or occupations. To me, fhis is our greatest challenge—how
lo inspire students to greater self-expectations as human beings without diminishing our ability to provide
excellent job training or meeting basic educational certification needs.

{si Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712