Redundancy is Nature's Way even while EngTeachers Take Off Points

Hi-tech in the 50’s Pre CB, cell-phone,
e-mail, inter-net, Blackberry and I-stuff
and school was packaged into identical
containers called courses one after another
& MEDIA was not yet the Message, know
what I’m sayin’ & we typed memos and ideas,
fulminations & observations on our portable
Royals, delivered our theses in airport motels
& submitted our thoughts to the managers of
referred journals galore calling it professional
development. Faculty met as a whole once a
week and always opened the session with a
prayer—spiritual, not religious. .

Phil Otterness’s plea for a body-of-faculty that could
actually immediately respond to some dictate or event
or administrative decision so as to represent, as we say:

Now look here:
this is what we think about THAT

is already available on Faculty L
(or FacultyTalk) .

Doesn’t take a grant or a constitution to
sustain ongoing converse- action on all
issues that came up at retreat relating to
assessment and strategic planning and
vision and whether liberal education is
alive or dead or dying in the free world,
whether we’re a business or vocational,
esoteric & salvational or primarily career-
orientated & good-citizen generating etc.

I don’t know what it takes.

IT’s an environmental issue.

If the environment here is ever
such that ongoing converse-action
across the curriculum is not only a
given but a characteristic, one of our
unique qualities —as cherished as
free firewood, lovable as our 25
miles of trails, 3 dollar lunches,
opportunity to whack weeds & herd
cattle, world wide travel, service &
work relationships, dollar housing lots:
the kinds of qualities we brag on in
the Frank & Honest letters we send
back to candidates to give a sense of
our special approach to liberal art…

then it will become part of our nature
that we naturally nurture wise cracks
& insight, guesses & observations,
theories & expostulations, disciplinary
quirks & queries, trampling out the
grapes of wrath, stoking & sparking
our ongoing intellective & affective
fires of un-postponed joy .

An Environmental Issue

Not to be collapsed with
our various ongoing
“this’s” and “that’s”:
getRdone concerns,
satisfying accreditation
people and the need for
transparency and
accountability…

(What could be more transparent
& subject to accountability than
our e-lectic company converse-
action & collegiality across the
curriculum accessible 24/7/365--
can you hear me now? )