Viking_Yearbook_71

Former Student I went to Portland State for five years. I still have eighty hours to complete for a degree. After more than eight years away from this place, I'm a kind of returning observer. It's interesting to see the small school that I started with now transformed into a sort of sprawling monster that doesn't seem to have any sort of real identity with itself or the people who are a part of it. The school has suddenly become departments and machines and long lines of rather blank faces . Sitting in the cafeteria today, I didn't see the liveliness that used to be there. One difference is that literary jokes have disappeared. The brand of humor that I picked up here-you could make a joke about Yeats, do a play of words on Shakespeare– people got it. Now if you joke like that people give you a blank look. Maybe it's just a little piece of esoterica involved with the school, but humor is a reflection of whether people are enjoy– ing themselves, a reflection of mental health. I don't hear the humor. I hear cynicism. The chuckle, I don 't hear it any more . The average student seems to think that he has to graduate in four years, that college is like high school. But the class load you must take in that time precludes actually learning any– thing. You must have pretty good recall, but not a good retention beyond the recall point. You learn what you must to pass the term. In another three months you have forgotten what you learned . I walk through and I see this sort of glassed -over look on students' faces. Everyone is trying to assimilate too much material too fast. Portland State was an enjoyable place eight years ago. It had a compactness. The classes were not too large. You could get to know your instructor. Why has this college spread hor izontally through the community when it was originally designed to go vertically? College Center was designed for nine or ten stories. Instead, PSU has built more buildings and moved people out of their homes. It's an urban college. An urban environment is physically a vertical environ- ment because there isn't the room to go horizontally. But there seems to be no single individual you can grab hold of and say "Hey, stop." The college is like a corporation where, if you try to get at its origins, its physical manifestations, it dissolves . No one is ever quite responsible for anything .... Senior This is my fifth year in college. Probably the biggest effect all my schooling has had on me is to make me wonder why I am here and what this education is really for. The radicals say it's just a training ground for putting people into jobs and there aren't that many positions left anymore. People are getting M.A.'s in psychology and sweeping floors in College Center. One of the reasons I have stayed in school is because I don't know what else to do. I don't want to work in an office from nine to five . I don't feel I am mature enough to do it all on my own-to learn stuff on my own and have the kind of social life that I need. So my parents pay $136 a term for me to have a social life and pick up a bit of information. What I'm going to get from it I don't know. When I first came to Portland State I hated it. It may have been because I started in the summer quarter. All my teachers were straight and uptight. Everybody had a briefcase, except me. Later, I made friends. I was very active in theatre arts . I met a lot of people. That made it better. I could walk through the halls and see these strange faces that looked scared. I could say, well, that's okay. I have my little bag. I have some friends. It's still rare when I see people in the halls who don't look like they are uptight. It's easy to say things like, we won't have classes, we will have parties and discussions out in the Park Blocks. But when people have been going to school for 12 to 1.6 years, have been forced to read books and write papers and regurgitate facts, usually it doesn't work out too well to have a free school like that. If anything, the thing that bothers me most is having really huge classes, and not having enough diversity in the course offerings. Faculty members seem more concerned with their prestige in a department, their relationships with other faculty members, and their tenure than with students. On the other hand, with classes as big as they are it's probably hard for them to be concerned with students. There is going to be a cutback in the faculty. So a lot of the profs are acting straight. I've just begun to be aware of the complex relationship between the administration, the department heads, the faculty, and how this relates to the student's education, which is not very nice. Things are quieter this year. Whatever happens, I don't think there will be a student strike this spring. People feel it didn't do any good. It's old. I have heard that the movement is ceasing to respond to the students. People feel frustrated and lost. I think there is a lot of untapped strength . If somebody could just bring everybody together, like Nixon says. 23