The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

Dear Buffalo!

It has been a few months since I was in your midst, and longer still since I was a full flegded member of the obstinancy - which is what a group of buffalo is called according to wiki answers.  My departure, however, did not mean the end of my Johnston education.  My transfer to Stony Brook Southampton, a budding college devoted to environmentalism and sustainability, was timely.  My re-transition back into a "traditional" educational model drew out the concerns surrounding university education that I developed at Redlands.  Last year, I was busy being productive, "getting good grades", and observing the campus while I compared it to my experiences at Johnston.  By the end of the year, I was tired of "getting good grades", I was also tired of merely being productive according to the universitie's standards : a certain number of credits, workstudy, internship etc, and I had observed quite a bit to make me feel rightously indignant on behalf of myself, the students and the future of the campus.  I realized this semester was the moment when I was needed to push against what had and what was continuing to develop on campus when a class I had enrolled in was nothing that I had expected, and I learned the professor of the class had recieved her undergraduate degree from the New School, in Florida, a public school version of Johnston.  

Stony Brook Southampton presents itself as "a new kind of school" wheres "student life and learning are interconnected and characterized by common purpose" the common purpose is a commitment to sustainability.  SBS is dedicated to inter, multi, and cross disciplianry learning, and have articulated this in their educational model by removing departmens from their curriculum, which is an important first step that I am proud to shout from the rooftops.  I'm sure I don't need to get into a discussion of how departments and disciplines impress upon students the segmentation of ideas with this audience.  So while I am proud of Southampton for realizing the same thing and making a change, there are other dichotomies that need to be addressed in order to fully realize their goals.  

The first is that although presented as a new school dedicated to new solutions, solutions we don't even currently have, the school mostly still utilizes the banking method, particulary in the core classes of the majors.  The reasoning for this, I have been told, is that students need a basis of "knowledge" before they can critically engage in the ideas that are central to the upper division classes.  Now, maybe it's just having been at Johnston, but the idea that I need anything but the desire to learn to learn anything, and the idea of a "body of knowledge" pain me deep in my heart, but it also strikes me as contrary to Southampton's mission.  If Southampton is a space to empower us with the tools required to come up with new solutions, how can they presume to tell us the "know" anything, since the entire reason for the campus's existance is that we don't know the answers.  If as a grauduate I am expected to challenge the areas of the traditional structure that I find fault with, then as a student I should be expected to think about these ideas from the start. How can I be effective if I accept meekly the innondation of information and ideas?  This is a campus that has rejected departments but still subscripes to the ideas that support pre-requisites, the banking method and the passivity of students until they are "told" by their year (classes, professors, and administrators) to start to think critically. 

This contradiction only confuses the students, and is perpetuated spatially on campus.  The difference between academic buildings, and student life and residence building is clearly delineated. Thankfully, the dean of the campus, Mary Pearl is well aware of this dichotomy, and her vision for the college addresses it through "living/learning" buildings, as well as the clustering of buildings dedicated for different puposes around one quad, which is to be the entrance to campus.  I have told her about my experiences with at Johnston, having professor offices on the first floor of the dorms, and how Hold lobby is used for student recreation, community meetings, and as a meeting places for classes.  Since Southampton is bound to be so much larger than Jonston, and the pre-existing assumption that students need to know before they can think, I told her that she should ensure that the freshman dorms have faculty offices in them and shared spaces in order that new high school graduates can reformulate their relationship with education, educators and peers as soon as they arrive on campus.  Once that habit is established, I am sure that it will not be degraded by traditional dorm style living or off campus housing, both of which are inevitable.      

The other significant goal that I have for Southampton then  are grading alternatives. Some of the classes, such as Leadership, are so counter to hegemonic pedagolocial methods that I'm bambuzzaled that they are still being applied. I don't expect to be able to eliminate the A-B-C grading due to size of the campus, but I firmily belive that choice should be a fundamental part of our education. How else can we expect students to take responsibility for their education. I can see so well how apathetic the students are.  They see themselves as the gogs in the machine instead of the reason why the machine exists.  Trying to fulfill DECs, major and graduation requirements.  They are encouraged to take internships, not for the sake of learning, but for how it looks on their resume.  It saddens me that they don't feel empowered by their education.  I think this has a lot to do with the pre-existing Stony Brook buerocracy being applied to Southampton. What is needed for the management of 24,000 students is neither required nor helpful when dealing with a maximum of 3,000, and currently we have 400 living on campus plus commuters.

Of course, I can't tell the students that they need all of this, they need to believe it for themselves, and feel like they have the power to communicate with the administration and faculty and effect change.  There is too much top-down organizing that doesn't make it all the way down.  In order address my concerns, and empower the students, inform the about education, I am working on a newsletter, called Inquiry.  I'll write more about that next time, because this is already quite long for a blog post.  There is just so much potential at this school, and I hate, more than anything else, waste.

Please, I would love feedback from all of you. More than anyone else I know I can trust your ideas, guidance and criticisms to remind me of why I struggle and keep me grounded. Take a look at the website:  http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/southampton/index.shtml if you have the time and tell me what your impression is from it.  If it is not enough to comment, and you would like to have some back and forth with me, e-mail me at inquiry.sbs@gmail.com.