RESONANCE

As the United States digests the results of our recent presidential election and all the down ballot races, I find myself reflecting on the power of public speech. I have always loved compelling speeches delivered by skilled speakers, where the alchemy of the soaring words and the speaker’s presence on the stage take an audience on a colorful journey and leave them with a clear call to action.

All this recent talk about bigly crowd sizes and celebrity endorsements has got me thinking about our own fan bases, the people surrounding us who have our backs, listen attentively to us, and offer us insight much richer than we can muster on our own.

Across thousands of college and university campuses in this country, the academic year has begun. On freshly mowed quads, harried students rush off to their 8:00 a.m. classes, wishing they were on Zoom and cursing the registrar for jolting them awake from their cozy dorm slumber.

As I stepped into the Mission Church at Santa Clara University a few months ago to honor the life of a popular, long-time campus leader who passed away recently, I found myself swept up in a vivid memory of this splendid Bay Area college campus, the oldest in California. 

Our cat, Dolly, sits peering through the window on a sunny day, tail wagging and eyes fixated on a particular spot outside. Dolly has something to look forward to. Do we?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the advantages of aging. Are we brighter, more self-aware, and more stoic as we age? And do we pick up more wisdom along the way that somehow infuses us with a sense of fulfillment?

Join me and host Bill Kirst for Episode 46 of Coffee and Change as we imagine what it has been like to circumnavigate three decades of change in the hallowed halls of colleges and universities as they face the biggest change in the history of education.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American college and university workforce has shrunk at least seven percent since the onslaught of Covid-19. And the 2020-21 academic year does not look any more promising.

I have a fixation with signs. You know, those placards, fliers, posters, banners, sandwich boards, and digital screens that present us with information we apparently need.

I write this just a week after I attended a very special virtual retirement gathering for a longtime friend and colleague, an award-winning professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. As we lifted our glasses, I found myself considering the importance of ritual.

How does this historic Covid-19 moment free us to reinvent while letting go of programs, procedures, and strategies that no longer add impact?

Academic and staff administrators surely value the narrative of community. Nothing beats the sense of place we feel when we stroll through a college campus.

Resilience: there is no better classroom than the one in which all of us are learning today — socially distanced, masked, and eager to shape a hopeful future.

You may experience the full spectrum of sensations, from a high of euphoric “what could be” to a low of problems that were not addressed before you arrived.