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Theodora J. Kalikow 12/20/2007

In the midst of my master's studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a lot of enthusiasm and twice as much ignorance, I made all the classic first-time teacher mistakes. The first day I ran out of my lecture notes about half-way through the class and had no idea what to do next. When everybody bombed the first test, I had to re-think what I was doing. Finding my office was like threading a maze, and I had to learn 100 new names per semester.

But along about October, when I was no longer afraid before every single class period, I started to wonder who these students of mine were.

They were named Rezendes, Moniz, Vieira; Levesque, Montigny, Parenteau; Cohen, Callahan and Carter. They were all colors, all ages, gay, straight, single moms and dads, the first of the Vietnam vets.

They had in common the conviction that college was their chance to make it into the mainstream of American life and to go further than their parents -- Cape Verdean fishermen, French-Canadian mill workers, farmers and small business employees. They sure did not look like the MIT or Wellesley or Columbia students I was used to. They had jobs and came to class tired a lot of the time.

They may not all have been great writers when they started, and for many of them, English was not their first language. But they were smart, and they were determined. My engineering students in history of science made me all the beautifully crafted teaching models I needed -- Stonehenge, the solar system, DNA. I used them in classes for years afterward. My philosophy students had screaming fights about the death of Socrates. Was he right to stay to be executed, or should he have escaped? What was he, a dope or a martyr?

Today these students are successful business people, scientists, engineers, nurses, teachers, college professors, lawyers, elected officials. They have won awards and prizes. They have partners and spouses, children and grandchildren. By now, some of them are even retired! Because that university had been put in the middle of a cornfield in North Dartmouth, Mass., they all achieved beyond anything they could have aspired to, for themselves and their own lives and for their communities.

My students also taught me what my career path would be.

They did not know they were teaching me, and at first, I didn't know it either. But as I saw how they worked, what they achieved in their own careers, and what they gave back to their communities, I knew that educating the people was what I wanted to do. Educating people who were place-bound. People who were the first in their families to go to college. People who didn't have the means or even the world view to aspire to the Ivy League, but who deserved equally good (maybe even better) educational experiences. People who turned out to be the mainstays of their communities.

I finished my master's degree, got my Ph.D., and taught at UMass-Dartmouth until 1980 or so, when I was asked by the president to become his assistant and thus began a new career as a public college administrator.

That path eventually led me to the University of Maine at Farmington, where I found the same kinds of students, the same kinds of dedicated faculty and staff and the same aspirations to excellence and the public good, building successive generations of community leaders.

This is part of the good legacy of the 1960s, a time in America when government was expected to be a positive foundation for the good of the community. There were large public investments in building colleges and universities, the interstate highway system, Medicare and Medicaid, the Apollo program, the Peace Corps, the National Science Foundation. The sun had not yet risen on the conservative revolution, and we were still living out the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It wasn't perfect by any means -- as just one of many examples, there was that war.

Those foundational initiatives still serve our country today. Indeed, as the role and conception of what government should support has changed, we are still living off those investments that were made in the 1960s, 40-plus years ago.

If you want to know why public investments in higher education are important, look around you.

They say that the fish doesn't sense the water that keeps it alive -- but like the water for the fish, graduates of public higher education are key figures in all facets of our lives.

They are your financial adviser, your child's teacher, your health-care provider. They run the bank and the town office and the service clubs. They even may be you!

As we approach the holiday season, let's all remember, or learn, about a time not so long ago in America when there was a real expectation that government would, and could, do well for our civil society and the individuals who live within it, sustaining our country for future generations.

Let us keep this in mind as we make our New Year's resolutions and follow presidential elections and state politics.

As the Jewish sages tell us, we cannot make the world perfect, but in spite of knowing this, we have to attempt the task. We can't go back in time, but we can breathe new life into some of the values that have served our citizens and our country well.

Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at kalikow@maine.edu.

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