On June 14, 2008, myself and nearly 2,000 others will sweat under the hot lights of the Rose Garden in goofy-looking black gowns, and then make the walk across the stage to symbolically celebrate our accomplishments with Portland State and the degree it will bestow upon us. Another 2,700 students won’t be walking that day but will also be graduating, hopefully celebrating their accomplishments via other methods. Like keg stands. So we’re done here at this establishment, this school, this university–one that gets a bad rap at times, and sometimes straight from students.
I Love PSU
On June 14, 2008, myself and nearly 2,000 others will sweat under the hot lights of the Rose Garden in goofy-looking black gowns, and then make the walk across the stage to symbolically celebrate our accomplishments with Portland State and the degree it will bestow upon us. Another 2,700 students won’t be walking that day but will also be graduating, hopefully celebrating their accomplishments via other methods. Like keg stands.
So we’re done here at this establishment, this school, this university–one that gets a bad rap at times, and sometimes straight from students. Fourth-tier ranking in the U.S. News & World Report college guide? Ouch. “The four-year community college,” I’ve heard fellow students say. Ouch again. Being in the literal middle of the private-school triangle of Reed, Lewis and Clark, and the University of Portland doesn’t always help the sense of academic esteem either.
There’s no doubt that this is a weird place to go to school. Your path to class changes daily with TriMet construction, homeless people can outnumber students in the student union and school spirit can be indicated by the “Go Ducks!” signs that adorn campus bars at times.
There are definitely things about our campus and our student body that aren’t too like other schools. This is a different place, where students snake through petition-wielding canvassers and hate-spouting preachers, trying to get from the Unitus Building to Epler Hall in less than 10 minutes. Where Food For Thought flourishes one floor under a Subway. Where the median age of this year’s graduating undergrads is 28, the youngest is 17 and the oldest is 65.
Where in a Jewish literature course I took last fall, two elderly auditors stood up quietly in class one day to tell their fellow students they were Holocaust survivors, and related their stories about how they had escaped the Nazis over 60 years ago.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen at every school.
“All the places I’ve taught at,” a professor of mine said last year as he extended the due date of a paper, “I’ve never been to a school where students have more outside commitments than Portland State.” And it’s true.
The vast majority of us work at least one part-time job. A lot of us transferred from somewhere else, or picked up school again after a break. Over 1,000 of us are parents. Most of us depend on financial aid of some form or another. For many of us, the flexible nature of PSU’s set-up allows us to get educated when it wouldn’t be possible at another school.
We range from community leaders to call center workers, from teachers to activists, from corporate workers to stoners. Our alumni list stretches from Barbara Roberts to Courtney Love. (Granted, she didn’t graduate. Granted, that’s unsurprising.)
There is no typical PSU student, and that has no small effect in a world where the ivory tower isn’t cutting it anymore. Spending four (or five, or six) years squirreled away in an idyllic college town with students who are all like you may sound like fun, but a bachelor’s degree sans time out in the “real world” doesn’t offer the pickings it used to (unless you have other abilities you can flaunt, like doing keg stands).
Not to say that our PSU degrees will propel us to the front of the job-hunting pack. But the opportunities and experience afforded by learning in an urban environment in one of the hotter cities in the country–from internships and Senior Capstones, to the simple connections made that go beyond the classroom–are no small things in 2008.
Those famed U.S. News & World Report school rankings also put us in the top institutions for Service Learning, Learning Communities and Senior Capstones, by the by. (We were ranked fourth, seventh and eighth, respectively.)
This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of really frustrating things about going to PSU, because damn if they don’t exist in spades. Navigating our bureaucracy is impossible, classrooms are overfilled and understaffed, our faculty’s pay barely ranks as a meager excuse and man, would it be nice to walk the length of the Park Blocks one day without being accosted by somebody.
But there are some wonderful things about this school–and its spirit–that don’t always get a lot of attention, from the classes taught by Vera Katz, to the overbooked blood drives when the Red Cross comes, to the 20-year-olds and 60-year-olds learning from each other in the same classroom, side by side.
In the stairwell of the PSU bookstore, there’s a series of picture collages from the university’s history. At the top of the stairs, in the frame with the most recent photos, stands a woman outside a classroom, cradling a baby in one arm and rummaging through her bag in another. Her face is calm and collected, but her mouth wears the hint of a smile that can only be described as, to borrow a phrase from the author Miriam Toews, “obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.”
I’ve spent time around most of the schools in Oregon, public and private, and I’m so glad that I ended up here. Good luck on finals, and congratulations graduates. Those who are walking, I’ll see you on June 14, and to those who aren’t, I hope you’re celebrating somehow. Even if it’s not with a keg stand.
