March 22, 2017 – A day for Thomas Jefferson

          If you look at Jefferson’s architectural history of University of Virginia, the original plan was to bring in ten or so professional experts in various different academic areas to create an “academical village” around a central quad.  Each professorate was housed (with their families) in a pavilion with the downstairs set up as classroom and the upstairs as living quarters.  At the end of the quad was a large rotunda building that housed the original library.  Smaller shed row apartments that would house the students connected the pavilions and defined the wide-open square quad space in the center.               Today the professors use the shed row apartments as faculty offices.  Each office has a wood-burning fireplace for heat, and a wooden rocking chair tethered outside the door for students to wait in.  Still the design fits its purpose, which is to place knowledge with students on equal ground, quite literally in the form of an open lawn space.  Preservationists have reconstructed the apartment space of Edgar Allen Poe so you get a real feeling for what study life was like for him even though he was thrown out of the university after one year for not being able to paying his bills…             The reason I mention all this is because today clearly illustrated for me ideals and ideas put into physical action.  Looking back on the community colleges I have visited over the last few weeks, all of them had leaders, but in only a few of them could I see the ideals of those leaders being played out in living function.  And in some cases it was clear that the ideals of the Community College I visited were not the same as the ideals of a university system.  This is ponderous for me as one of our many missions is to help students transfer into a four-year environment, so you would think we at the community college level would (or should) be pretty versant on what type of environment we are creating for our students because we know where they are going next…

            If our goals are one-way transfer of knowledge than the cattle feed approach to education works.  Create a pathway, get them on the path and move them out the other side.  But if we are trying to help students find their voices and talk as well as listen, then we need to lighten up and honor the tangential spaces that form in between the classes.  I have seen lots of student centers with rec rooms and video games but I have yet to understand how this contributes to the ideals of the institution.  Is engaging in Halo between classes fostering a future ideal? 

At CCSF, I have lived under the top town rigidity of structure for a the past few years (and yes I still hold resentments for it, because it is antithetical to the university model I was educated in) but more important to me is that I want to understand the ideals of that model, or any model that we are using for education.  What are the principles of the two-year college system?  I can clearly see the mission statements that define our functions, and I oh so clearly see the politics that influence us, but what are the ideals to which we strive?

I spent the entire afternoon at Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello, which was thoroughly enlightening and educational.  The walking tour that focused on slavery history was particularly poignant.  The man was far from perfect but it was apparent he was always trying to apply his scientific skills to improvement, and he was thinking about what he was doing and building.