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Alumni Life Cycle: Part I — Introduction

I begin this series of posts with a shout out of thanks to a former colleague, Rebekah Basinger, for a post on her blog Generous Matters  entitled 10 time-proven laws of fundraising. Rebekah’s post began with a statement that had a very familiar ring. “While cleaning out a file cabinet that hasn’t been touched for several years, I came across…” Within the past two years, I have had to pack up my library and 40 years of work files. As I carefully examined the books and files, “I came across” many books and files that I had not thought about for years. Although the ideas from these items were not at the front of my mind, nor on the tip of my tongue, they were not foreign to me. I had saved these books and files for a reason, and as I scanned them, those reasons came back to me.

Rebekah’s found treasure was an article dated 2003, entitled The Ten Immutable Laws of the (fundraising) Universe. She continued her post with a comment which constantly rings true in the academy: “I’m reminded that the more things change in our world, the more they stay the same.” Experience teaches us that the near future is closely tied to the immediate past. In an upcoming series of posts that I have tentatively entitled, “The Future of the Academy,” I will be playing off of that idea in discussions of the structure, form, purpose, economics and outcomes of higher education.

Rebekah’s post quotes Carl Richardson, the author of the original article, by suggesting that fundraising is “guided by certain provable statements.” Rebekah brings the topic up-to-date by observing that Richardson’s time-tested laws still determine the success of today’s fundraising efforts.

My initial reaction to the Ten Laws of Fundraising was that these ten principles were applicable to three other aspects of academic life. These laws could be applied directly to admissions, retention and alumni relations. As I thought about these three aspects of academic life, I was drawn to an analogy of the life stages of butterflies to the development of successful and engaged alumni. I then constructed my metaphor comparing prospective students, students, and alumni to caterpillars, pupa, and butterflies. These developmental levels represent the life stages of alumni and butterflies.

In order to keep each of my posts to a reasonable length which makes them easier to read on mobile devices, I have decided that I must extend this series of posts to at least 15 posts. The current plan is to have Part II as the development of the metaphor comparing alumni development to the life cycle of butterflies. Part III will be a synopsis of the ten laws of fund raising that sparked my original interest in this topic, with some comments reflecting my thoughts on fundraising.

In Parts IV through XIII, I will address each of the ten laws as it relates to the three groups of people of special interest to colleges.  For each of the laws, I will note similarities and differences in how colleges must interact with prospective students, students, and alumni.

In Parts XIV and XV, I plan to return to a discussion of how a college or university can implement a coordinated program to develop successful and engaged alumni. Since many of these posts are already written, I should be able to complete the publication of this series of posts within the next three weeks.

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They’re Baaaaack!

How many of you could identify the source of the title I selected for this post? If you said it is from the cult classic horror film Poltergiest II, you would have been correct. If you saw the movie, or even the ads or trailer, it was hard to forget the 8-year old child actress, Heather O’Rourke, holding a telephone receiver to her ear, and with a look of abject terror, screaming hysterically, “They’re baaaaack!”

Poltergiest in German mean “noisy ghost.” Traditionally, they are considered nuisance ghosts. They make strange noises and move things without really doing anything malevolent. They tended to concentrate their attacks on an individual instead of a location. In the three Poltergiest movies, the “they” were not the typical poltergiests. These poltergiests were malicious and viciously evil. However, they did seem to only concentrate their attacks on Carol Anne, the cute, young daughter of the Freeling family. Their presence in the first movie in the series, Poltergiest, was announced by Carol Anne with the equally well-used phrase, “They’re heeeere!” At the conclusion of the first movie, these evil ghosts were supposedly exercised from the lives of the Freeling family.

Anyone who follows the horror film genre knows that this pleasant thought was too good to be true. Horror film writers and directors can’t leave an innocent person or happy family alone. Most viewers easily identify with these type of characters. Thus, these victims make for a great story line and a successful film.

Early December, my poltergiests came “baaaack!” To revive another common phrase that I used in a previous post about a stubborn cat, “I thought they were gone, but they wouldn’t stay away.” My poltergiests are hallucinations and cross-sensory perceptions. For several years, I have fought with medical professionals about the term hallucinations.

Soon after my series of tonic-clonic seizures and the onset of my epilepsy, I started sensing things that I knew were not real. For example, even when I knew the wall opposite me was absolutely fixed in place, I occasionally “saw” it speeding toward me. I also knew that there was not a tiny igloo on the plain shower curtain in our bathroom. I definitely knew there was not a tiny Eskimo living in that igloo. In addition, I absolutely knew that the little Eskimo was not acting like the cuckoo of a cuckoo clock, popping in and out of the igloo regularly.

If I knew something wasn’t real, how could I label that a hallucination? However, to be able to communicate with medical professionals on their terms, I finally had to acquiesce and call my unusual perceptions hallucinations.

However, my cross-sensory perceptions are a horse-of-another color. My medical professionals do not know what to call them since they don’t fit the classical scientific definitions of dysaesthesia or synesthesia. With my cross-sensory perceptions, I am receiving sensory stimuli through the normal sensory receptors, but my brain is translating those signals into something else. For example,with musical instruments, I can hear wind instruments and horns normally. However, I do not hear string instruments. I either feel vibrations or I see images of oscilloscope waves or amplifier lights. Even though I don’t hear the music from the organ in our church, I can identify old familiar hymns from the vibrations or visual perceptions. In the past six months I have only “heard” the music from the organ once. That one occasion was the Sunday morning, the organist used a flute register to play one hymn. I believe I heard the organ that day because it sounded like a flute.

Eight months ago, my neurological and cardio-vascular medical teams got together to discuss changes in my medications that might possibly reduce my tremors, hallucinations and cross-sensory perceptions. The changes that they made seemed to have some positive effects through the late summer and early fall months.

However, Thanksgiving was a very stressful time in our family. The Saturday before Thanksgiving was the wedding of the youngest daughter of my wife’s deceased sister. The joy of the weekend was shattered when the wife of my wife’s younger brother died suddenly the day before the wedding. The funeral service for our sister-in-law was held the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Soon after Thanksgiving, the hallucinations started up again. In addition, the cross-sensory perceptions increased in frequency and diversity, and my tremors increased in frequency and intensity. I still didn’t want to call my unusual perceptions hallucinations because I knew they weren’t real, until…they progressed to teh point where I wasn’t sure whether they were real or not. I would see something on the desk or table and when I reached to pick it up, nothing was there. I would see an animal run across the road. When I asked my wife about it, she would say there was no animal. She would suggest that I probably saw a piece of paper or trash blowing across the road. I would see birds flying past the car. My wife would say that she only saw a leaf blowing in the wind.

One of the cross-sensory perceptions to which I had become accustomed was one in which, instead of smelling the odor of a skunk, I would see the image of a dead skunk along the side of some road, even when there was no dead skunk or road anywhere in sight. However, one time I actually did see a dead skunk before I had the vision of a dead skunk. When I saw the skunk, I started smelling the distinctive odor of a skunk. When I asked my wife if she smelled the skunk, she said, “No.” She saw the skunk also and was surprised that there was no odor coming from this dead skunk.

So now “They’re baaaaack!” and they really are hallucinations. In talking with my medical team, they are considering the possibility of making more changes in my medications. I suppose this is why they call it, “Practicing medicine.”

 

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Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph: Part II – Nicodemus and Joseph

This is a continuation of my previous post, Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph: Part I – Nicodemus. It refers to a lesson that I wrote and delivered at our church in Michigan before we moved to Pennsylvania. The inspiritation of the lesson was a small book of poetry by John Anderson Barbour entitled Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph. I finished the first post with the idea that Barbour’s poetry provides a window into the soul of Nicodemus and a mirror which reflects an image of our souls.

After Nicodemus met with Jesus in the upper room, Nicodemus is mentioned only twice more in scriptures. In John 7, there is an account of a dispute between the Pharisees and the Temple Guards. The Pharisees had ordered the Temple Guards to bring Jesus into court before the Pharisees to stand trial for blasphemy. When the Temple Guards didn’t follow this directive, the excuse they gave was “Never spake man like this” (v 46). The Pharisees quickly responded, “Are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?” (vs 47,48)  Apparently, Nicdoemus had kept quiet about his encounter with Jesus. However, he did choose at this moment to speak up. He stopped the proceedings and said, “Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?” (v 51) The Pharisees tired to shut Nicodemus down by pointing out that both he and Jesus were from Galilee. Then the Pharisees asked Nicodemus if any prophet ever came from Galilee.

Nicodemus again fades from view in scriptures until he and Joseph of Arimathea come together at Calvary. John’s account of this incident in verses 38 to 42 of Chapter 19, tells us that although Joseph was a believer, he was a silent believer because he was afraid of the Jews. However, with the crucifion everything changed. Nicodemus and Joseph both came out the shadows. They claimed Christ’s body in order to give it a proper Jewish burial.

This is where Barbour’s poem (of the same name as his book) Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph picks up the story:

How gaunt he looks
with outstretched arms
and bloody hands and side.

Let us be gentle, Joseph
as we take his body down
and bathe the ugly wounds
which hate has made.
Can it be that this is he
who said that star-illumined night
“Believe in me,
and you shall have life
which has no end”?
And yet he lies here dead
beneath our hand.
Let us lay him gently in the tomb.
and wait–
for surely the day will come.

For Nicodemus, Joseph, Mary, Peter, John, and the other disciples, the first day of resurrection did come quickly. Althought, it was only three days, I’m sure those three days felt like an eternity. We know that day did come. Now it is our turn to wait for a second day. However, because the first day came, we know “surely the [second] day will come.”

While we wait for it, we have two things to do: The first is to make sure others know of the first resurrection day. The second is to watch for the second day. We stand with John as he ended his Revelation: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”

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Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph: Part I – Nicodemus

 

This posting is excerpted from the last lesson I gave in our church in MIchigan in April 2012 prior to our move to Pennsylvania. It is a very different type of message from the ones that I normally delivered before the explosion in my head. My earlier lessons were built on what I believed to be a solid Biblical foundation constructed through an analytic study of scripture, bathed in prayer. After the study and prayer, with God’s help I would raise the framework of the sermon and then clad it with pictures and metaphors, supplied by God, illustrating my main points.

This message was put together in a very different way. It did not begin with an analytic foundation. It was inspired by a book of poetry that I have no idea how I came to possess. As I was cleaning up my library and preparing to pack some books, sell some, and give the rest away, I found a very small book of poetry hiding between two of my topical study books. I almost overlooked it, but it fell to the floor when I pulled two Warren Wiersbe books off the shelf. Picking up the little book. I was fascinated by its title, which was Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph: A Devotional Journey. I didn’t recognize the name of the author, John Anderson Barbour. I began reading it and soon found that I had read all 46 pages of the book while sitting on a box of books that I had just finished packing.

Since I didn’t know the author I tried looking for more information about him and the book. According to Amazon.com, the book is out of print. They only list three used copies available in the whole U. S., priced from $14.95 to $61.95. I’ve gone to several other sources, and the only other books written by Barbour since this 1973 publication were Bible story books for children. Barbour just seemed to disappear after 1978. Even the publisher, T. S. Denison & Company, Inc. of Minneapolis, seemed to vanish in 1986.

I am reprising my last message in our Michigan church for this post. In it, I am trying to give you some pictures of the gospel story that I never saw anywhere else. These stories are not meant to replace or displace the eloquent and forceful, straight forward truth of the gospel account from scripture.

In John, chapter 3 we are introduced to a Pharisee, named Nicodemus. This very familiar story is found in John 3:1-16. Knowing the hatred that many Pharisees had toward Christ, it is not hard to imagine why Nicodemus went to see Jesus under the cover of darkness. What is hard to understand is why Nicodemus wanted to talk to Christ in the first place.

Nicodemus opens the conversation by giving Jesus an honor rarely afforded by a Pharisee to someone other than another Pharisee. Nicodemus addresses him as “Rabbi” and “a teacher come from God” (v 2). Without really coming out and saying what was on his mind, he indicates that he recognizes that Jesus must have come from God because of the things that Jesus had done. These miracles could not have been the works of a mere mortal.

Since Jesus is God, Jesus knows what’s on Nicodemus’ heart and mind, and gets right to the point. “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (v 5). Without pausing, Christ continues by introducing a phrase that has characterized Christians ever since: “Ye must be born again” (v 7).

Nicodemus then asks the question that everyone who wants to come to God must consider, “How can these things be?” Christ chides Nicodemus a little by asking him, “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?” (v 10) Jesus then zeros in on the problem. Nicodemus is thinking in earthly terms and Jesus was speaking spiritual and heavenly truths.

Jesus gives Nicodemus one more metaphor tying a spiritual reality to an earthly object lesson. As a Pharisee, Nicodemus would have been very familiar with the story of Moses and the serpent lifted up in the wilderness which saved any Israelite who looked toward it. Something had to die so that man could live. This was the basis of the Jewish system of sacrifices for the atonement of sins.

At this point Jesus knows that Nicodemus is ready for the new gospel message. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (v 16).

At this point Nicodemus fades away and the Biblical account follows Jesus and his disciples to Judea, where they meet up with John the Baptist, who was preaching and baptizing people, proclaiming the imminent coming of the Messiah.

We are left wondering what happened to Nicodemus. Barbour’s poem Nicodemus gives us a picture of what might have occurred next.

You understand
it would not be discreet
for a person of some prominence
to be seen with him.
Some say he claims to be God’s son;
some that Caesar’s throne
is no in jeopardy;
and there are those who talk
with starry eyes
about the happiness he brings,
of stunted limbs
and scaly flesh made whole;
and so I climbed the stairs by night.

How will I tell the Council that I know
beyond a shadow of doubt
this son of man is love personified
and that because of him
I have been born again?

Barbour’s poem is not scripture and definitely not included in the official canon, but it paints a picture that resonates with me. It provides a window into the soul of Nicodemus and other humans. It also provides me a mirror which reflects an image of my soul. I can definitely see myself in it. I find myself in his words. “How will I tell [others] that I know beyond a shadow of doubt…that because of him I have been born again?”

This post is to be continued in Let Us Be Gentle, Joseph Part II – Nicodemus and Joseph.

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Christmases Past

My father was the youngest child in a fairly large family. He had five sisters and five brothers. The closest sister age-wise was 12 years older, while the closest brother was also almost 10 year older. Many times my father would tell me that he felt like he had six mothers. There is one advantage to this arrangement. You never go hungry. As my father’s only child and the youngest child of my generation, I was never beyond using that advantage to my benefit.

Since all the siblings lived within 20 miles of where they were born, holidays were family gatherings of monstrous proportions. Since my father was the last of his siblings to marry and start a family, holiday traditions had already been established. Christmas dinners were always served at the home of one particular aunt. New Year’s Dinner was served at the home of another aunt. Thanksgiving dinners and Easter dinners were held at the homes of a third and fourth aunt or uncle. July 4th was a picnic at the home of a fifth.

I remember all the holiday dinners but the Christmas dinners were always my favorite. My aunt’s small house wasn’t large enough to allow all 40-plus family members to eat at one time. Therefore, there were two shifts. As a tradition-bound family, certain aunts and uncles always came to the first sitting, while other aunts and uncles always came to the second sitting. Since my father was the family favorite, we were always at the first sitting. However everyone wanted to see and talk to him, so we would stay for round two. Not being a complainer, I cheerfully went along with this plan.

To spread the work load, every family (in the early 1950’s, translate that as “every wife”) had to bring something. However, these Christmas celebrations were not pot-luck dinners because in my father’s family, there were certain traditions. At the impressionable age of six, this was my introduction to the world of smorgasbords. I still carry the love of this style of a meal to this day.

The same two or three aunts always cooked the turkeys to a perfection. It was great. One aunt always made a corn bread stuffing. Another made a traditional rye and mushroom stuffing loaded with celery and onions. A third aunt always made a sausage and oyster stuffing. The only things that can top those three varieties of stuffing were three different kinds of turkey gravy, from the traditional yellow turkey gravy, to two brown turkey gravies, one laced with giblets, gizzards, and liver, and a second loaded with mushrooms.

To go along with the turkey and stuffing were, of course, the traditional white mashed potatoes with large globs of melting butter sitting in pools on top of the potatoes. Then, there were sweet potatoes served two ways. The first was a sweet, whipped imitation of traditional whipped white potatoes. The second was a casserole that was loaded with melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans.

For vegetables, there were always two varieties of coleslaw. The first was a creamy, sweet slaw, while the second was a vinegary, pickle slaw. There was always broccoli and cauliflower. Petite peas were served two ways. The first with was small button mushrooms and the second with small pearl onions in a cream sauce. You can’t have roast turkey without cranberry sauce, both the smooth jellied variety and the whole cranberry sauce.

My father was not only the youngest of his siblings, he was the last one to marry. In addition, my father was almost 20 years older than my mother. As a result, my mother was younger than some of my first cousins. Thus, my aunts let my mother off easy. She only had to bring the dinner rolls, while several of my aunts would bring four or five different kinds of homemade jellies, jams and butters.

Did I mention dessert? Of course there were pumpkin, pecan and apple pies served with real whipping cream or ice cream. What’s a kid to choose? Once in a while, I might have had small pieces of a couple different kinds of pies. However, there was always another dessert that I never refused…homemade, warm rice pudding with a touch of cold milk poured over it.

After the second sitting was completed and everyone had finished eating, there came the task of cleaning up. Even this had its own set of traditions. My uncles “retired” to the living room to talk, while my aunts congregated in the kitchen to talk while cleaning up the dishes and the utensils. The kids were relegated to the dining room after the table had been cleared to talk about what we got for Christmas and to play board games.

When the men were in the living room talking, the room was generally considered off limits to everyone else, especially kids, until the women were finished with the mess in the kitchen. When the women had divvied up the left overs, they would all go into the living room. This was the sign that it was okay for the kids to enter the room also. Everyone would say their goodbyes and leave for their own homes. Why did we do things this way? I am not sure anyone could tell you. That was the way it was done. It was just the tradition of the family.

I’m not sure why no one figured out that the second sitting was the best deal and try to swap around to get it. At the second sitting, you got left overs from the first sitting and the fresh food from the new crowd. You also got to take home leftovers of just about everything. Because this tradition was so strong, if the individual families wanted to do something special for Christmas that left Christmas Night or Christmas Eve.

My mother and father chose Christmas Eve as our special time. We would have our family Christmas meal and then decorate the tree. Our traditional Christmas meal consisted of huge butterfly-slit pork chops stuffed with an apricot, raisin and rye bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, a creamy pork gravy, succotash, and apple sauce.

Did I mention dessert? Dessert was always tapioca pudding with a touch of cream, chocolate chip cookies and Christmas cookies. By the time I was six I had figured out that Santa Claus didn’t come down our chimney. If he did, he would have ended up in our coal furnace in the basement. I remember telling my parents the Christmas Eve when I was in first grade that Santa Claus wasn’t real. He was just the spirit of Christmas. I also mentioned that I had found the presents that they had hid in the attic. After that year we always opened our presents Christmas Eve right after we had finished decorating the tree. That was our Christmas tradition.

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What Can the Academy Learn From Temple Grandin and Her Cattle Chute Designs?

Who is Temple Grandin? She is the author of Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, the subject of the HBO film “Temple Grandin”, and the designer of one-third of the livestock-handling facilities used in the United States today. According to the flyleaf of her book, Thinking in Pictures:
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who…also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.

So what? My question remains: “What can the academy learn from Temple Grandin and her cattle chute designs?” I am persuaded that we can learn much. However, I don’t believe I will be suggesting what you’re probably thinking right now. I am convinced that many people reading this are saying to themselves: “The obvious purpose of cattle chutes is to herd cattle in an inexpensive and efficient way into or out of holding pens, with the last set of chutes leading to the slaughter house.” The above analogy would suggest that students are cattle and that institutions of higher learning are either holding pens or slaughter houses. Although I have heard people seriously make those comparisons, I am not going there.
I want to focus on several ethical values, design principles and practices that Temple Grandin employed in her work that were highlighted in the book and movie. I originally picked up the book because of neurological changes in my life. Due to several traumatic brain episodes, I have found myself living in the land of metaphors instead of the land of words and analytic, quantitative and sequential thinking in which I grew up and resided for more than 40 years of work in the academy. As I read the book and watched the video, a number of images jumped out of the book and off the screen, and caught my attention. If we were to use Grandin’s values, principles and practices as we design and operate our institutions of higher learning, I believe that they would be more humane, inexpensive, efficient and more effective in producing the learning in our students that we all desire.

The principle that drove Temple’s designs was that form was to follow function. First we define what we want to do. Then we design our processes and instruments to achieve the desired end.
The first value to be emphasized was respect for life. Temple respected cattle and pushed cattle ranchers and meat packers to respect the cattle. By force of her will, she was able to demonstrate that respecting cattle produced better and more efficient results in moving cattle from one place to another, right up and through the point of slaughter. Our students are alive. Shouldn’t we respect them?
The first of Temple’s practices I want to emphasize is the practice of looking at the product or process through the eyes of the intended user. In designing her cattle chutes, she got down on her hands and knees and crawled through the operating chutes to see what the cattle saw and encountered. In this way, she was able to find the places where the cattle stumbled, where they were confused, where they balked, and where things went smoothly. How many of us have crawled through the obstacle courses that we run our students through? Do we know where the path is too dark to see the potholes? Do we know where outside light confuses our students?

The second of Temple’s practices involved changes that Temple made to the then prevalent chute design. Temple changed the design of her chutes from straight lines with right-angle turns to curved lines. How did she figure this out? She studied how cattle behaved. She noticed that they were calmer and more responsive when moving in arcs rather than straight lines. How many of us have studied our students’ behavior and changed our pedagogy to get more responses from our students?
A second change Temple made in chute design was to replace slatted sidewalls with solid side walls. Why? Because she noticed that the cattle were distracted by outside interference like uneven sunshine producing glares and shadows that the cattle didn’t understand or recognize. Temple was challenged on this change by the cattlemen because of costs (solid walls were more expensive to build) and the fact that the slatted walls gave the handlers the opportunity to prod the cattle along when they got all tangled up. Her response was measured. She pointed out that since the cattle liked the arc movement and solid walls, there would be far fewer roadblocks, meaning less work for the handlers and more contented cows which meant more and better beef.
So what can the academy learn from Temple Grandin’s design of cattle chutes? We can learn: 1) Respect for our students, 2) Define our desired outcome and design our forms to achieve the desired functions, 3) Study our students, and look at learning through their eyes. 4) Remove unnecessary obstacles to make not only their life easier, but ours also. 5) Contented students will produce more and better learning.