My father went to Texas Tech, and he was under a lot of pressure to be the next in the family to take up medicine. His grandfather had been an old time, horse and buggy, country doctor.
My dad grew up in the Depression in a family of hardscrabble cotton farmers, and the family wanted their oldest son as the one to continue a family legacy.
On the GI Bill my dad went to Texas Tech planning to be a doctor.
My dad didn’t want to be a doctor. His heart wasn’t into what he was studying, and his heart wasn’t into what his family was expecting him to do. But he graduated and returned to farming.
It was the little Dust Bowl of the 1950s. To pay the bills he took a job as a teacher in one of the small ranching communities around Lubbock. There was no turning back.
There is where he learned where his heart was. At that point, he decided he wanted to be a teacher. He returned to Tech for a master’s degree. He spent the rest of his life as an award-winning teacher, having an impact on the lives of children that no amount of money can buy.
I used to see students like my dad at Texas Tech. Parents, thinking what was best for their adult children, would insist on a major in business or engineering or a technological field that would provide a comfortable life. Sadly, too many students may have had different dreams. Like my dad.
There are many ways that higher education offers opportunities for careers that lead to a rich and rewarding life without going into a technical field in a large corporation. Be an archeologist, study the flute, read modern English literature, use knowledge from women’s studies to help battered women or be a teacher. To deny this will make our communities a boring and empty place.
My family didn’t grow up in a fancy house, but my dad’s teaching salary and my mother’s salary provided us with what we needed. Personally, I was just as proud of my father, or even more so, because he was a teacher. He was doing what he was good at. He was good at it because he was doing what he loved.
In a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, when asked why materials are being removed from course curricula, Chancellor Creighton told the interviewer that “It’s important to make sure that that time is well used and that we’re covering content that leads to the most marketable degree that any university could offer in America. That’s Texas Tech’s goal.”
Tech’s leaders are acting like the well-meaning, but misguided adults with limited vision of what their children’s future should be. Creighton reflects the concerns of these parents when he said, “The moms and dads out there considering sending their students to a taxpayer-funded university have great concerns about what is and is not
going to be the final product for the time spent and the money spent to acquire a degree.” This statement reflects a limited understanding of what higher education is supposed to achieve. Providing a strong education toward careers in science and industry is an important goal but is no justification for the removal of other course materials that are crucial to a successful career, and successful in life in 21st century America.
Job skills are not just how to calculate the production of an oil well or how to write a business plan for the next start up. And there are no textbooks that give step by step instructions on how to be a teacher. The “final product” for a teacher must include the ability to live and work in a diverse Texas. A teacher encounters children from many walks of life that the teacher does not experience. Without courses in gender and diversity, teachers’ education will not give them the skills to be successful in the classroom.
Texas Tech to my family has always been more than a “brand with degrees that have a high degree of value and marketability.”
Having a marketable degree, whatever that degree is in, is certainly a valued outcome.
But this ignores that higher education is also a place to learn skills we can use when we go home to our communities to be better citizens.
Higher education is a place to encounter people who are different than us, coming from different backgrounds and ways of life and different ideals so that careers can be successful in our diverse world.
I write this in his memory to preserve the Texas Tech that he was so proud to have graduated from. Proud of the brand that he carried.
Charlotte Dunham is a professor emeritus at Texas Tech University.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Dunham argues Texas Tech should offer more than ‘marketable’ degrees
Reporting by By Charlotte Dunham, special for the Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
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