LITTLE ROCK — What a rarity: Elliott West is a great teacher who’s also a great scholar-and unpretentious about both callings. He teaches the history of the American West at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and now he’s one of three finalists for the coveted Robert Foster Cherry Award presented once every two years by Baylor University, along with a check for $215,000.
In the course of explaining why Professor West is a natural for the award, the chairman of the university’s history department, Linda Koon, let the cat out of the bag. She not only praised the professor but shed some light on why great teaching has become so rare at American universities: “He’s one of the most well-known historians of the American West, but he also loves to teach freshman survey courses. That’s very strange.”
Yes, that is very strange, more’s the pity. For at many American universities, entering students are handed off to the slave labor known as graduate assistants. Which is another reason higher education in thiscountry keeps getting lower.
One of the many assuring things about an Elliott West rising up on an American campus, like the Rockies out of the arid plains, is that, like all great teachers, he seems free of academic status-seeking. The man is a widely recognized scholar, not just another pretentious pedant. Or an ideologue pretending to be a teacher.
Imagine: He’ll teach freshmen!
That a professor willing to teach first-year college students should be considered strange-a wondrous sight on a college campus-is not a good sign for American education, or the continuity of civilized values.
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You’d think Lu Hardin would be a great act to follow at the University of Central Arkansas. UCA’s next president would be sure to look like a winner after the scandal-plagued Hardin Era.
But it isn’t turning out that way.
It seems Mr. Hardin’s major legacy is an unremitting suspicion of the administration on the part of faculty, staff and the press. Having been fooled once, all seem determined not to let the new president, Allen C.
Meadors, get away with anything-good, bad or in-between.
The man can’t even fix up the president’s house on campus without contention, long as it’s been neglected and much as it needs some maintenance and renovation.
UCA’s new chief does seem to understand what he’s inherited: a lack of trust. “When you’ve put your trust in somebody . . .” he noted the other day, “and then you find a lot of what was said wasn’t factual, you’re hurt.” And mighty suspicious, too.
So what should Allen Meadors do about it? Answer: The best he can. Only that way will he slowly, surely, patiently restore a trust that’s been not just eroded but just about destroyed. Or as he put it: “You can’t say to people, ‘Hey, I’m different, and now everything’s fine. You have to earn that [trust over] a year, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years.”
Dr. Meadors’ timetable sounds suspect itself. It can take a lifetime to build trust, maybe several in the case of institutions like a university.
Or a statewide newspaper. And when trust is betrayed, it doesn’t grow back in just a couple of years; it has to be re-earned. Persistently. Consciously.
By hard work and simple candor.
Day after day. Year after year.
Trust grows at Sequoia speed.
Like a great tree, it takes many seasons to develop, but only one irresponsible steward to poison it. It’s going take more than a year or two to restore a healthy trust on campus. Allen Meadors may be just the man to do it-if he doesn’t underestimate the challenge. Or how long it will take to meet it.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Perspective, Pages 80 on 12/20/2009