IUSA: Representing students?

The primary goal of education is "the removal of ignorance," wrote Jacques Barzun. He is greatly responsible for my education and yet, we have never met -- his influence having taken hold decades prior. Dismayed at the elective system replacing the classical curriculum, he wrote, "The college curriculum broke into fragments, and departments became small principalities competing for students and seeking prestige by specialism." In response, he forged a core curriculum, building a humanistic education in a controlled and rigorous way based on the humanities in arts, music and literature. For the American university today, there continues to be a struggle between the know-how of professional training and the cultivation of the mind afforded by excellence in liberal arts education. \nUnspoken in current student discourse is the effort to form an undergraduate curriculum that balances the cultivation of the mind and necessary know-how. Frankly, that such a thing is being developed at all is because of the IU trustees, including Sue Talbot and Casey Cox. In the near future, IU undergraduates will be indebted to our provost and the unsung faculty who spent this summer weaving together a core education curriculum threaded with important prescriptions to cultivate the mind.\nThe motive for the trustees is practical. While representing the interests of Indiana, they are building transferability into a state-wide system to adjust for the growth at the regional campuses and the explosive rise in community college enrollment. Bloomington's campus will become more research-focused, with undergraduates increasingly asked to excel in scholarship elsewhere and then transfer. \nIt is imperative that students take an interest in their education and review this new educational policy. Given the unneeded divisiveness your undergraduate student leaders have taken toward graduate students, they will be aghast to know the only students to attend these summer meetings were graduate and professional students. In their absence, I was called "starry-eyed" after responding to faculty that questioned the need for service-learning and civic engagement, when, in fact, I was livid. In their absence from the Bloomington Faculty Council in April, I intervened when faculty pursued the defense of their principalities rather than realize the time-savings this policy will have for undergraduate students who change programs. \nFor several years, often at horribly chosen moments, undergraduate student leaders have insultingly claimed to represent graduate and professional students. In last Tuesday's paper, they claimed that graduate and professional students are inadequate representatives of undergraduate students. And they are right, but continuing this quixotic nonsense makes a hypocrite. \nLast spring, the chancellor foretold the waning of the student voice. Now that it should be obvious to all students, their leaders need to comprehend the new world order where discretion and diplomacy are the needed instruments to success. There is a better path than to burn bridges. \nWe remain the only Big Ten university not providing dental insurance to graduate students; we pay a ridiculous $5 bicycle permit fee; the ugliness to the north of the auditorium remains after a commitment was made to remove it this summer; and student fees pay $10 per drunk bus rider in an awful contract with Bloomington Shuttle, a company that has doubled the round-trip cost from Bloomington to Indianapolis to $50. We need to work on these issues together, and we can only start by rebuilding the bridge to graduate and professional students.