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Wednesday. August 20, 1975
University Dally Kansan
Continuing Ed means here today,here tomorrow
BySTANSTENERSEN
Kansas Staff Reporter
Sooner or later, in a moment of anger,
anxiety or frustration, this cry comes from
almost every student: "If I could just finish
up and get out of here!"
You may never make it, even if you leave. Oh. You may get a degree and find a job in Kansas City, Wichita, Hugot or some other place. You may think that your involvement with the University will be only to return to Lawrence for football games or reunions. But chances are increasing that you will return to the classroom as well.
MOST PEOPLE'S IMAGE of a university is a traditional one. They see a university as a place, a campus in a city. They see it attended by students who are about 18-26 and who are mid-way between high school and a career. The students and the career of their lives that stops with the presentation of a degree or the dropping-out without receiving one.
However, that traditional university is changing. The changes may not be highly predictable.
To many, the university is synonymous with a campus. Although KU's activities are centered on its Lawrence and Kansas City campus, the University is growing elsewhere as well.
PERHAPS THE MOST dramatic example occurred this summer, when the University of Kansas Endowment Association bought Linnwood School, a primary school in the Shawnee Mission district that had been closed by the school district.
This fall, the school is the Kansas City center of the KU Division of Continuing Education. The University plans to offer about 120 courses this year, and it will be offering these courses as an MBA program and a preschool for an MA program in child development.
The University operates other continuing education centers in Colby, Garden City, Leavenworth and Topeka. Last fall, about 1,000 students were taking classes through the centers. In the spring, the number grew to about 1,600.
THE CENTERS ARE part of the University's Outreach program, a program established one year ago to make the university available to the entire state.
Howard Walker, dean of continuing education, has said the centers were part of the dominant pattern of the University's future growth.
"Education begets education," he said. "The attitude towards offering more
courses to the community is changing. The more educational institutions you put into a market that isn't already saturated, the more you find people saying, "I think I will fail."
Continuing education centers fill a variety of needs, Walker said. They offer people opportunities to enhance promotion and advancement, and they provide junior-, senior- and graduate-level classes for students who can't afford or require them for full-time study at the Lawrence campus.
THE UNIVERSITY IS also trying to build a facility on the Lawrence campus that can be used as a temporary lodging place, cafeteria and meeting center for students who come for courses and seminars lasting several months. In addition, the University received word that it had awarded a federal grant of $86,400 to begin the planning of such a facility.
The facility is one of three across the country that will be constructed as part of a larger effort to improve education. The cost of the building, whose construction depends on federal funds not yet appropriated, may be about $7 million, but the hope it could be ready by 1978 or 1979.
IF THE CONCEPT OF a campus is
changing, so is the idea that a student is always a full-time, career-oriented person 10 to 26 years old. For example, in 1975 the number of part-time graduate students nationwide was greater than the number of full-time graduate students.
The change, said Walker, is part of a move towards a "learning society" in which students return to the university throughout their lives.
In the future, students will return in increasing numbers and for a variety of reasons, continuing education administrators predicted. Many return for additional or refresher work in their career fields, some return to establish new careers and others return to be paid to do technical work, returning include business executives, women trying to launch careers of their own, college dropouts and people who are just curious.
SUCH STUDENTS OFTEN have a harder time returning to school than does the traditional college student, according to Vivian McCoy, director of student services for the Division of Continuing Education. The course is designed to had job and family pressures and couldn't take unnecessary courses or even wade through the complexities of applying,
selecting a series of courses and enrolling in them.
"It's not a simple process to drop things and say, 'I'm going back to school Monday,'" she said. "And many of the people we have with us with 65 reasons why they can't do it."
TO HELP THESE students, the Division of Continuing Education offers academic and career counseling. Next year, the division hopes to expand its counseling efforts in the Kansas City area to help more people return to school.
The new expansion, called Project Reentry, was approved by the Kansas Board of Regents this summer. Money for the program, about $17,000, must still be approved by the Kansas legislature, however.
McCoy said there were about 100,000 people in the Kansas City area who had attended college but hadn't received a degree.
WALLACE MAY, DIRECTOR for instructional services for the division, said that an additional counselor hired under the would probably counsel 400 to 1,000 students during the first year of the program. The number of already grown from about 300 students in 1970 to about 2,500 students at present, he said, and the present staff can't handle a
large increase in the amount of one-to-one counseling.
If the project is successful, May said, the university may expand it to other universities.
The project isn't an attempt to compete with community colleges in the area. McCoy said, because most of the people who will use it have completed more than two years of college already. Of the students counselled last year, 29 per cent enrolled at the University, and another 21 per cent enrolled at other schools.
MCEOY AND MAY also said the program
want to simply animate it to find more
birds and insects, though.
"The reasons for the program aren't all altruistic." May said, "but the main thrust is that the University is taking a broader view of what a student is. All of the studies point to the part-time and off-campus student as the student of the future."
Walker, who has worked in continuing education for the past 50 years, agreed.
"I wouldn't be a party to the kind of thinking that says we're just fighting for the University's survival," he said. "The idea of commencement exercises are somehow a celebration in terms. The big picture includes part-time as much as full-time students."
Perspective needed for judgment
Editor's Note: James W. Henderson writes a column on the arts for the Saginaw (Mich.) News. This article is reprinted with the permission of that newspaper.
**BY JAMES W. HENNEDY**
For observation I mention a difficulty to most of us that I call "cyclical distortion." In simpler if more symbolic terms, the difficulty may be stated thus: "The wheel of life does not turn fast enough for individual evidence."
Let me try to illustrate from the field of theater reviewing. In 1965, say, you saw a production of a play we'll call "Drama-10." In 1975, you saw a different production of "Drama-10" by a different company. Try as you may, dig out the 1965 notes though you do, the two productions are too far apart in time for them to be performed. Are you sure you make any beneficial comparison?
OR CONSIDER IT IN A context much larger than theater: life itself. The human life-span at best is lamentably small in contrast to ongoing life as a whole. This makes possible at least two understandable but dangerous tendencies.
The first is the foreshorted perspective of the young, who simply haven't lived a life yet. The second is the wheel to command a valid observation of such things as progress or decay. The other
suspect tendency is the propensity of the elderly to allude to "the good old days" meaning their own youth. As with the theater reviewer, even though for the elderly the wheel may have made more than one full turn, any two eras are too far apart, distended by affinity, or scented by nostalgia to be quite valid.
IT IS UNDERSTANDABLE why the young think that color-TV, landings on the moon or computers are evidence of progress. For one thing, the scarcely available technology are not at all reluctant to claim such identity. And if you're young enough to accept such claims and can count no track time before these developments, you very easily believe that "Bliss it was in that era to be alive. But to be young was very heaven!"
On the other hand, even the longer perspective of advanced age can be mistaken. The causes aren't, of course, the same. The older individuals are old and are likely to elicit the wrong evidence.
There is no need to indulge in argument about whether "the good old days" ever existed or were that much better. If you contrast outdoor privates with Florentine villas, the latter are more colorful printing with Indian runners and smoke signals, or Dobbitb and a chance with
four-on-the-floor and steel-belted radials, the conclusion is predictable.
ON THE OTHER HAND, if you remember rural quiet, very low incidence of dementia, then today's claimant dignified pace, then today's clumsiness and law scorching may be too predominant to allow less than a wistful and tender grasp. In age even memory of ten over-enhances.
The reviewer's notes are a help, if they are kept and used; that is what in the slow turning of life is served by history and onetime events. But even in such cases, error is a liability.
The reviewer of a play and the observer of life ought but seldom seem to do is to assume that young people too long and individual lives are too brief to make motor cars, electronics, the latest social cause or even Women's Lib reliable during progress — or for that matter, of decay.
AS LONG AGO AS the 18th century—a rather significant length of perspective, please note—the historian Giorgio Vasari observed, "Once human affairs begin to deteriorate, no improvement is possible until the nadir has been reached."
The question for us to settle, it seems to me, is the truth or falsity of present events.
determine whether the lowest point has been reached—or whether we may expect it to stay there.
This is true in all aspects of life. If you are immature enough or susceptible enough to vaunting to think that Edward Abbey, Neil Simon or Alan Ackley acrobust are immiters, you risk getting stung by Shakespeare, Shaw or Barbie, then you will declare this moment very heaven. If you dismiss the degradations of the drug traffic, the corruption of high office or the profitable ruin of the land as no more than phases of human error which money, legislation and banner-waving clloses will permit, then we aren't in much trouble at all.
BUT THERE ARE VALUES, there are falculms and there are indices of Vasaril's "human affairs" which may have been lost, compromised and distorted. They have become the electronic communication or the balkyhoo of sodayshapers and false prophets.
They are well displayed in modern music, modern art and modern theater but so often the reviewer's notes are lost and we consult the most superficial evidence; the evidence of emotion, sentiment, comfort, feelings, and analysis with a personal gain at stake.
The last one at the nadir is a chump.
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