SPENCER MYERS

Bowling Green, Ohio

It’s hard to imagine a university system that doesn’t want to provide career-readiness and success to its students. In their own words, the three priorities of the PASSHE redesign are “ensuring student success; leveraging the universities’ strengths; and transforming the System’s governance structure.” I would like to concentrate on those first two priorities.

My own career-readiness was provided to me by one central factor at Lock Haven University: Its small class sizes. A small class size lets you get to know your professor and lets your professor get to know you. Small class sizes are why I got a job as a tutor at the writing center. Small class sizes are why I started writing for the university paper. Small class sizes are why my professors felt comfortable writing me letters of recommendation, editing my sample writing for graduate admissions, and giving me encouragement to pursue the study of English writing and rhetoric as far as possible.

After graduating, I worked for three years in a job in my field before deciding to continue my education. Since I started writing poems when I was 12 years old I’ve wanted to be in this line of work and I don’t plan on ever leaving it and because of Lock Haven University there’s a good chance I won’t ever have to. That is the definition of career-readiness.

I was a freshman in 2011 — the same target year for class sizes that PASSHE is gearing to bring back. I took three large lecture courses: sociology, art appreciation, and music history. Those three professors did the best job they could, but I believe the class sizes seriously hindered them from tapping into the class’s potential. I don’t think it is reasonable to ask a music professor to teach thousands of years of music history within 15 weeks to 50+ students in a lecture hall. I do not think any meaningful connection will be made with the material. It is no coincidence that these three majors are on the chopping block. When you take away resources from a department, you can’t expect them to magically start doing a better job.

I lucked out as administrators have seemed to maintain a respect for composition and English courses needing smaller class sizes to work, but I can’t picture as nuanced a field as sociology being any different. You’d have a hard time convincing me that one professor lecturing to 65 students is a better learning environment than 15 students who have gotten comfortable with one another discussing the issues and lacunae of their field. Again, this is about career readiness. Simply passing a class is not what ensures a student is ready to enter their field.

Right next door to Lock Haven is Penn State University. That is where a student should go if they want big lecture classes. If the Chancellor’s intention is to in any way match Penn State’s business model, I believe he will fail miserably. Penn State is an R1 research university. Its set of strengths is far different from anything provided by PASSHE schools. I know at least one literature professor and a few history professors at LHU who would be able to talk to the Chancellor about how to win in an asymmetrical power struggle in case he needs a refresher. I at least know that the first rule is you absolutely do not try to win on their terms. Bringing bigger class sizes to PASSHE schools only brings the system closer to competing with Penn State on their terms.

None of the universities in the PASSHE system will ever be Penn State and that is a good thing. I never wanted to go to Penn State. Penn State would never have provided me the same career-readiness that LHU did. I got exactly what I wanted out of LHU. We cannot offer only one kind of college experience in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and expect students to thrive.

If PASSHE’s true aim is to ensure student success and leverage their university’s strengths, increasing class sizes would not be promoted as a positive. I empathize with the financial position the system has been put into, but it seems like reasonable solutions look more like pay cuts for top-earning administrators. You don’t take away a key aspect of your service in times of financial distress without at least taking responsibility and tightening your own belt first. I hope the Chancellor can see that more clearly before it is too late.

(Spencer Myers, an LHU graduate, is a graduate assistant pursuing a Ph.D. in rhetoric and writing at Bowling Green State University. All thoughts and opinions are his own.)