Eastern's Adult Learners

[no dialogue]. I may be a logical person to talk about the topic of why a teacher enjoys teaching adults, since I've done it for 35 years and according to my estimate have had somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 adult graduates. The good part of that is I've had all that experience. The downside of that is it makes me very old [audience laughter]. But when I first came to Eastern in 1967, I found that we were a perfect fit. Eastern has a tradition of teaching. It started out as a Normal School--which only some of you who are fairly old will remember the two-year degree that allowed people to teach in the public schools--became Eastern Illinois Teachers College, and has always had the personality, and I do think schools have personalities, of a teaching institution. Even when Eastern stopped being exclusively a preparer of teachers and moved on to be a state college and later a state university with different schools and colleges well beyond just teaching, teaching was always still very important here. And I remember when I interviewed for a job many years ago, in 1967, it was made clear to me that if I wasn't committed to good teaching that I probably wouldn't be happy here. Well, I was and I have been. Eastern has, with its original Board of Governors Degree, one of the first really in the nation to take the mountain out to the people instead of taking the arrogant position that if you wanted an education you would need to come to the mountain three days a week for 50 minutes from 10:00 to 11:00 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And it turned out there were just a lot of people out there who couldn't do that. They had jobs, they had children to raise, they had obligations that were very, very serious in their lives and they just couldn't drive from Danville or Greenville or wherever they lived. And so Eastern was on the cutting edge of that, and I've been very, very proud to be a part of a school that is on the cutting edge of taking education to where people are. And we've done that, and we have satellite programs all over this part of the state. And we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of graduates that will testify to the success of those programs. My family is a kind of big ten family, I guess. I went to Iowa, my son went to Wisconsin and did his graduate work at Illinois, my daughter went to Northwestern. When my son was at Wisconsin he went there as a walk-on in basketball, and fairly early in the season was injured with an ACL strip, which some of you know if you're into sports, and he had surgery at the University of Wisconsin hospital. But he just couldn't handle the steep hill that is at Madison--if you've been to Wisconsin, a very steep hill--and he had a leg that was just virtually dead for 13 months until it was rehabilitated. And so he came home, and he spent a spring semester here with a full load and then a summer here with a full load and in the fall went back to Wisconsin. My daughter went to Northwestern and each summer came home and each summer took a full load here at Eastern. And they've gone on, they've done very well, and my wife and I are very, very proud of them. But to this day, having gone to those schools that are indeed fine schools, and schools that made them very happy, both of them will tell you as I have heard them tell many people and they certainly have made it very clear to me, that the best teaching they ever had in their undergraduate and graduate programs they got right here at Eastern. Many of the people that they studied with at those schools were somewhat like the one I studied with at Iowa, a very, very famous scholar, very happy to get into his class as a graduate student and thought that I was going to learn a great deal. The first day of class he told me that the books weren't in and we should come back in a month. So we came back in a month and he said the books are in and so read--and he gave us a list of half of the books--and come back in a month. And so we read the half--I presume the others did as I did--and in a month we came back and he said, now read the other half and do a ten-page paper on a particular topic that he gave us and come back at the end of the semester. So we did and his graduate assistant was there to take our papers and thank us, I guess, for taking the course, such as it had been. So I had had one of the most famous scholars in America and I had probably had something like 35 to 40 minutes with him in a semester. Now I would never suggest that this is typical of the University of Iowa. Some wonderful people have come out of there, some of my very good friends who had very good experiences. Mine were, the other experiences were not that bad but they were not particularly good, either. And I got a feeling for what my daughter and my son said when they went to schools that were famous schools and had famous scholars but whom they never saw because they were taught by graduate assistants mainly, never saw the people that were famous and made the school famous. And Eastern has just never taken that approach and I've always been proud of it for that. There was a time back in the 1970's when we sort of veered that way about publishing and making our efforts in that area and kind of reducing just a bit the emphasis on good teaching. But we passed through that and I'm very happy because there are all kinds of schools out there that can do that kind of thing and if a person needs to go to a school like that then I think they should go there and probably produce fine results. But if they want to teach people of all ages, in my particular case the most rewarding being adults, a place like Eastern is the place that you want to come. Its personality is a personality where teaching has always been the most respected characteristic of a faculty member. His name on ten books, if students never get to see him, doesn't really amount to much. And so I have been very proud to be here. I have found that Eastern's personality and our adult learners match almost perfectly. They are away from here. Many of them never see campus until they graduate or until they come to a ceremony like today's. But it doesn't matter because they are Eastern graduates, they had Eastern teachers. And I would have to agree with my children when they said their best teaching, they received here. The best teaching that I have seen in my life, having gone to three different universities in getting my degrees, the best teaching I have seen here is better than any I saw at any of those universities. And so it's been a proud trip for me, 35 years, and I have made a lot of friends. I hope that I have shown adults who already know a great deal, in many respects a great deal more than I, how you can put life experience together with intelligence and new knowledge, which we can provide, and become wiser people. Thomas Jefferson once asked John Adams, "What is your religion, "or maybe I should say, what is your philosophy about life?" And John Adams replied, "It's very simple, I can do it "in four words. Be just and good." And that always seemed pretty important to me, those were good characteristics. I would, I think, probably vary that a little bit if I were asked what guides my teaching. I really think that the...life experience that my students have had when blended...with the new knowledge that I try to give them...and which allows them to see more complete pictures of events in history, of situations in history, of people in history, I'd like to think that that makes them wiser. And I think once you understand people in history I believe that knowledge, and I truly do believe this, makes one a kinder person. And so I would never dare quarrel with someone of the stature of John Adams. Being just and good is certainly a wonderful thing to try to achieve. I guess what I try to teach and what I try to leave my students with as they go on down the road of their lives is to be wise, and to be kind. And I tell them when we part that if they are these things, wise and kind, as they go on down the roads of their lives, that they will be richer for it and they will be happier as their life continues. [no dialogue].