As the years pass, I feel they go by faster and faster and seem to get closer and closer together. Most people my age and older seem to feel the same way.  Some who are younger do as well, but having watched grandchildren and listened to them, it’s clear that time often drags for them and that they want things to happen “faster.”  Those of us who are older want to say something to the effect of “Don’t ever wish for that; it will happen soon enough.”  Sometimes we actually voice that thought, and usually the young person looks at us as if we’re out of our minds.

Christmas tends to emphasize that difference in viewpoint.  For small children it seems as though Christmas Eve or Christmas day will never come.  For all too many adults, it seems as though there’s never enough time to get everything done before Christmas…

Whichever applies to you… Merry Christmas!

The university where my wife the professor teaches has just completed a search for a new president, necessary because his predecessor was hired by a much larger university for twice the salary he was paid here in Utah.  I’ve never met the new president, but I’m already worried. Why?  Because he was the president of a Utah junior college, and he’s a lawyer.

The junior college business concerns my wife especially, because, over twenty years, virtually every junior college transfer coming into the Music Department from anywhere has been below average, despite grades and test scores that would indicate otherwise, including all those from the institution that the new president headed.  Every single one has required remedial work or extensive individual coaching, if not more.  So have some transfers from other four year institutions, but certainly not 100% of them.  What makes this more telling is that S.U.U. is not an Ivy League college, nor even a research university, although it does have a very good music program.  While there may be, and doubtless are, junior colleges with high academic standards, I’m sorry, for the most part junior colleges don’t provide academic rigor.  So that’s one reason for concern.

The second one is the lawyer business.  As several commenters have noted, almost every institution of any size in the United States is already inundated in legalese.  Colleges and universities require more and more paper.  Course syllabi at S.U.U. – and probably everywhere – have more than quintupled in length over the past two decades as the legal types have turned what used to be a simple course guides and assignment sheets into massive legal documents, almost contracts.  Every year professors are briefed on all the things they cannot do, some because of federal law, and some because of the fear administrators have of litigation.  Unhappily, it’s a fear justified by the explosion of litigation in the United States. Given that my father was an attorney, as is a daughter and a son-in-law, and several cousins, I’m not unduly prejudiced against lawyers, but lawyers need to be reined in, especially in institutional settings.

And when existing university administrators are already coming up with more paperwork requirements for professors, requirements that do nothing to improve teaching, but only provide meaningless statistics to satisfy some vague idea of accountability, the last thing a university needs is more legalese… or a president more interested in legally covering the university’s collective rear end than in improving teaching and all that entails.

That’s why we’re worried… and hope we’ll be proved wrong.  But I’m not about to bet anything on that.

All too often I concentrate on talking about problems to be solved, but something occurred the other day that pointed out the value of a virtue too often ignored by students and others.  My wife the voice professor had a series of voice juries – the performing equivalent of a final examination – and one student didn’t make her jury.  That’s usually an automatic failure, but this student has always been intelligent, hard-working and so dependable that my wife’s immediate assumption was that something had happened.  And it had – a freak snowstorm south of us and just north of Las Vegas – had closed the interstate through the Virgin River Gorge for almost a day, trapping hundreds of motorists and trucks there, including the student – and, by the way, there’s no cell phone reception there. Obviously, this was something beyond the student’s control, but there was no doubt on my wife’s part, even before she knew the reason, that something out of the ordinary had happened to the student… and the jury was rescheduled.

There are other students who have an excuse for everything, and then when something truly exceptional happens, professors are dubious, to say the least, along the lines of the old fairy tale about the boy who cried “Wolf!” too often.

What tends not to be realized, particularly by young people, is that, in a very real sense, dependability/reliability is a form of personal insurance. If you’re always reliable and dependable, when something happens truly beyond your control, that dependability may just prove very useful… or at least mitigate the consequences.  Obviously, it won’t save you from the physical consequences of automobile accident, where someone else broadsides you, or from the physical results of the flu – but if you’re not one to take sick days at the drop of a hat, your employer or professor is going to be far more inclined to give you break.

The same thing is true in terms of work products.  We all screw up somewhere or some time.  But if you’re always conscientious and almost always turn in a good solid and workmanlike result, if once you don’t, you just might get some allowances, as opposed to the door.

And besides that, the more you concentrate on being dependable, the more you will be, and the less likely things are to go wrong… and that makes life easier and a lot more enjoyable.

There’s a huge difference between being able to decipher letters and grammatical structure and to recognize or say the words on the page and being able to truly read, that is, to understand what those words actually mean. I was reminded of this earlier in the week by events at the university.  Students in the music program cannot take their final performance jury [applied examination] until they have paid all their fees. Similar policies are in effect in other departments.  A number of students discovered when appearing for their juries that they would not be allowed to take the jury.  This practice is not arbitrary or capricious.  The Music Department discovered through bitter experience that, without this policy, a substantial number of students never paid those fees. As a result, course syllabi carry that warning; every applied music instructor is required to announce that policy; and signs are posted on the bulletin boards for the week before finals reminding students of the consequences.

Yet with each succeeding year, more and more students, primarily first year students, discover that the warnings are accurate. This suggests to me that we have a generation – or at least a portion of a generation – that either (1) does not truly comprehend written instructions, or  (2) feels that there is no responsibility to read such instructions, or (3) feels no compunction to follow such instructions, or (4) believes that no instruction applies unless it is specifically addressed verbally to them on repeated occasions, or (5) applies only to everyone else, or (6) possibly all of the above.  This phenomenon is not new.  There have always been individuals who have ignored warning signs, wet paint signs, and the like, but when a growing and significant percentage of college students protest “I didn’t know [whatever]” after being told at the beginning of the semester, reminded in their course syllabus, after being reminded in their last class, and having notices posted on the bulletin boards, then we as a society have a problem… and so do those students.

Part of the problem, frankly, lies in the secondary school system which has become so preoccupied with “student success,” i.e., getting students through, that far too many students enter college with no understanding that failure to do the work – all of the work and not just what they like – and to finish it in the time period required is not only necessary in college, but in the world beyond college. Each year college syllabi become longer and more detailed, partly because incoming college students also cannot or choose not to listen, possibly because it is difficult to hear when one spends most of one’s time with earbuds in both ears.  Now, it appears, many also do not respond to written communication, possibly because both eyes are so locked on  smartphones that nothing written registers, either.  Yet the education gurus respond to this by declaring that faculty need to use more interactive technology to reach students.

At what point will all the “reformers” realize that students have responsibilities… and not just faculty?

“Have It Your Way” was the central theme behind a series of Burger King commercials first aired in the early 1970s and then re-introduced and re-emphasized in the 2000s, and the idea has clearly a special resonance with Americans.  According to a Google search, there are over 80 million ads and approaches on the idea of doing it “your way.”  Then there’s the iconic song, “My Way,” written by Paul Anka and popularized by Frank Sinatra, which is one of the songs most recorded and performed by other artists. While Sinatra reportedly later stated that he hated the song and found it self-serving, it remains one of the most popular songs sung at funerals.

Although there is nothing wrong with wanting things to go our way, and trying our best to make them so, there’s a difference between aspirations or goals and expectations, and a generation or more of commercial enticements based on the theme that we “deserve” to have things our way seems to have created – or definitely boosted – the expectation that “things” ought to go our way.

In economic terms, American businesses, as I’ve discussed more than once, are concentrating almost exclusively on maximizing profits – having it their way, if you will – without regard to either employment wage levels of their employees.  Employees, those that can, are pressing more and more for jobs that are “meaningful” to them, often regardless of what business needs happen to be.  Increasing numbers of college students have begun to tell their professors what they think they should learn and how much work they should do, while state legislatures are telling state universities what percentage of students should graduate in how many years, without any consideration of the costs or the number of instructors or professors necessary to meet those goals.

The same expectations are revealed in national politics.  Eighty percent of Republicans believe President Obama lied to pass the Affordable Care Act, while seventy-five percent of Democrats believe he didn’t.  What makes these numbers interesting is that the majority of Republicans believe that the ACA will hurt them personally and financially, while the majority of Democrats feel that the ACA will benefit them.  In its latest issue, the Economist published graph illustrating how the legislative process has changed in the United States Senate drastically over the past thirty-five years, showing legislation that in the late 1980s the majority of legislation was passed by cooperative efforts of both parties and how that has changed over the years so that, by 2013, almost none was passed cooperatively.

I doubt if anyone can say which came first, the commercial emphasis on “having it your way” or the social change in attitude that found that message so appealing, but how it happened matters far less than the devastating effect that belief is having on American society and politics.

None of us can have everything all “our way” all the time, or even close to it, not if we want to have a working economy and an even halfway functional government in the years to come, and it’s past time that we not only came to grips with that, but started doing something about it.