April 5, 2017 – Mott Community College

           This morning as I pulled out of the rain into a covered parking garage at Mott Community College in Flint Michigan I knew I was carrying similar prejudices with me to this college.  Since the water crisis in Flint, both CCSF and the City of Flint have shared some things in common.  Both the Flint and CCSF have had been run by appointed administrators who were brought in because of concerns for the bottom line.  Both relied heavily on consultants to help steer the pathway to fiscal solvency and, some would say both have suffered disastrous results that will take years to repair as a consequence.             But the Community College in Flint is not the City, so as I walked across the campus in the rain I tried hard not to prejudice my observations or read into anything too much.  Which was good because Mott College looks quite different once you spend some time on the inside.  The College, which was named after a Michigan axle manufacturer turned philanthropist, looks rather plain from the outside.  But the interior of the institutional cinderblock walls tells another story.  Like many of the other colleges I have visited, the students and people working there curate the interior spaces, especially in the Science Building.  The window displays, of aquaria, and human evolution mixed with students waiting for classes.  A particular jewel of this college is its Geology and Fossil Museum, which makes sense being in Michigan where the ground sometimes yields interesting stuff.  The museum contains an impressive collection of mammoth bones as well as a well-curated educational display of minerals of all sorts.

           How the museum came into being illustrates a theme in my college travels.  It was the passion of a previous instructor who has since retired and it carried on through the interest of current instructors.  The theme being: colleges are the products of the people who teach there and care about their field of study.  The best colleges I have seen (and Mott fits into this category) are alive because they just teach students.  They are alive because the teachers care about what they teach and they manifest that over time into exceptional institutional resources for their programs.  As a manager you can ask me what equipment I need to teach physiology and it would more than likely not include an actual gallstone, or a comparative set of vertebrate brains, but over time it is the collections that extend the lessons and make an institution unique.   This goes for content expertise as well.  Instructors like to teach, and are better at teaching what they are passionate about.  Good colleges support them in that.  The colleges I have been less impressed with are the ones where teachers are rotated on demand.  A teacher is a teacher right so why can’t all biology fields be taught by the same instructor?  Perhaps they can but if they are the college will never end up with a museum or extensive expertise or collection in any particular areas.   

           I’m hoping some of my CCSF colleagues are reading this because some of us like a challenge to teach new things, but I’m realizing there is a trade off to moving into other areas, it means we do not go as deep as an institution.  If we are content experts than it is up to us to advocate that the level of expertise to be maintained.  This is not easy given our administrators and our colleagues are not all experts in the fields and subtleties of what we teach.  

Back to talking about the weather:

            There were some cities and areas of the country that I did plan on seeing on my return trip westward, but given the cold rain today, I can tell the weather continues to be a drain on this trip.   For example I was hoping to spend some time In Chicago, a city I have never seen, but the forecast for tomorrow has a daytime high of 45degrees with large wind chill factor, on Thursday Chicago is expecting snow.  Feels like God is following me around on the map with a frozen pencil tip just trying to mess with me.  If the weather does not warm up, I will be using my remaining energy to just head straight west and try and get home ASAP.  That way perhaps I can spare some resources for further travels when things warm up over the summer.