Responsibility = Pro Sensibility, or Sobriety in Lips (those are anagrams, by the way)

While I’m sure an awful lot of folks’ reflections this week are going to be about the weather – Gustav, tornadoes, and the impending threat of Hanna, Ike, and Josephine – and as apt a metaphor it would be for me to compare the start of classes to a tempest, I’m going to resist that impulse. Instead, I’m going to vent a bit about campus security. And, okay, just a little bit about the weather.

Don’t get me wrong – I get on fine with all the security guys (which can’t be said, I’m afraid, for all of my colleagues). And I realize that they’re a common target among you students, so it’s probably a bit unfair for me to take potshots, too, but I’m going to anyway. There I was yesterday afternoon, plugging away on revising a couple of reading assignments for one of my classes, when the Severe Weather Alerts started flashing up on my e-mail. You know the ones: “TORNADO SPOTTED IN THE AREA PLEASE TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY” (punctuation, anyone?). I summarily ignored the alert, as I’m sure many of you did, also. It’s not that I don’t value my life, or that I’m a risk taker; rather, I had already checked three different radar sites while at my desk, and I felt reasonably certain that there was no direct threat to the campus.

But, of course, this wasn’t enough. After a few minutes, the warning siren started blaring, off toward the south. Again, checking weather.com, intellicast.com, and tuning the radio to PRM, I found out that the nearest danger was in Bolton. Not exactly in our backyard here at the college, I hope you’ll agree. After a few minutes of syllabus-updating, I heard one of our respectable and vigilant security personnel walking through the hall and reminding everyone to evacuate to the basement due to the threat of severe weather. I finished up what I was working on, and I abandoned my office to join the other disgruntled Jennings-dwellers downstairs.

Now, in terms of my own inconvenience, it’s a minor episode. But what surprised me was the fact that security also barged into one of Dr. Harding’s classes and commanded everyone to evacuate the room and head to the basement. That’s unheard of. In almost 10 years of teaching at the college, I’ve never known security to interrupt a class because of the weather. And it got me thinking. To what extent is this kind of episode a symptom of our society’s increasing reluctance to accept personal responsibility? So many things could be paralleled: the helicopter parents who hover over their 21-year-old, providing for her every need; the “harmful or fatal if swallowed” line on the Magnum 44 permanent marker (honestly, have you ever seen a Magnum 44 permanent marker? it’s the circumference of a cucumber); the ambulance-chasing lawyers promising big bucks to you, because – no matter the actual circumstances – the wreck was not your fault.

I guess it just struck me as odd that the college would see as its responsibility, the necessity of making sure that no-one got hurt in the storms. Sure, in the wake of Katrina and (more recently) the tornadoes up at Union University, all of us find ourselves on pins and needles occasionally, whenever bad weather is on the horizon. But, after all, isn’t this institution all about taking post-pubescent adolescents and transforming them into responsible, acclimated, socially mature adults? To what extent does forcing them to take shelter from a storm contribute to that goal? Of course, I realize that this opens up multiple cans of worms about the academic process – issues like the college-wide attendance policy, the “is-this-going-to-be-on-the-test” mentality among so many of our students, and the corresponding “just-let-me-teach-and-let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” mentality among so many of our faculty. Ultimately, though, I think all of these issues reflect on our unwillingness to accept the heavy responsibilities that accompany the freedom of education, the freedom of maturity, or the freedom of independence.

And as we talked about in class this week, your time at this college should be something that sets you free, something that liberates you to become that mature, independent, responsible person that the college wants to develop. Thoughts?