Don Quixote was all I could think about as the weather began to warm up. In a way, I'm envious of sports columnists reflecting on their past four years at Miami University as they compile their lists of the best and their favorite memories. It's harder when looking forward, especially when trying to distinguish the windmills from the dragons. While I wish the end was as easy as choosing the best restaurant in Oxford (Stella), it instead presents us with real concerns as this academic year draws to a close. When I first joined the editorial staff of The Miami Student, I outlined my direction as one-half of the Opinion page editing team ("Popping the bubble," Jan. 15, 2008); this vision for the newspaper rested on building a reciprocal relationship between newsmakers, reporters and the audience. Regardless of whether it's been by our own stunning heroism as journalists or the fog-of-war-esque confusion that's been surrounding the university's place in the global economic slowdown, we know there has been a renewed interest in The Student. After a year of budget cuts, worker layoffs, an Associated Student Government meltdown and a campus caught up in a presidential election, The Miami Student has (for better or for worse) given its audience glimpses into what has been occurring around the university with a vigor I don't think had been seen in recent years. However, glimpses are just glimpses. There are two broader issues students, faculty and administrators must continue to confront to more fully understand the situation in which we find ourselves. The first is the state of contradictions. How can we promote students for their accomplishments or deify them for things such as coming up with the bicentennial logo and trust them to run the Bicentennial Student Center (BSC) when in the same breath we criticize students for drinking too much or for not caring about their education or their university? Miami students run one of only three student-run credit unions in the United States, they go on to become successful alumni who are apparently worthy of being our bicentennial commencement speakers and they zip around the country to present at numerous conferences where (at least in my experience) we seem near-peerless in our undergraduate experiences and education. In a way I think it's discouraging when you hear students explain how they've succeeded at Miami in spite of the institutional obstacles they've encountered. Then again, maybe it's those experiences that have honed us into the battle-hardened individuals who are successful in the post-college environment.

And yet, despite 200 years of successful students, there seems to be a long-term vision intent on transforming the student body. The sophomore living requirement, in conjunction with the BSC, is meant to birth a new type of student. However, have we fully asked ourselves if this transformation is necessary? We want engaged learners, students who embody scholarship and help the community and the world, but what does that say about the students who are at Miami right now and have graduated from this university for centuries? While I'm sure it's not meant this way, at times it seems as if we do not truly build on the lessons of the past and on the history of student accomplishment at Miami. Engrained within the rhetoric of building and recruiting a new type of student is an element of rejecting the types of students we have now.

If we want to foster a new type of student, then we are fraught with questions of who to recruit and what to advertise, leading us to the second concern, the state of superficiality. This includes things such as promoting the variety and number of classes the university offers while the number of class sections declines. It encompasses retaining the ownership license for WMUB while losing student and university programming partnerships. And it definitely covers the departure of the policy debate team, where a parliamentary debate team will take its place so the university will still retain the right to say that we offer a debate team, regardless of the details. It's a fear of turning into a paper tiger while all the other changes at the university are taking place; the shell may be there, but where are the commitments to the guts? We know the sometimes laughable ways campus tours portray the university and its mythmaking when there are other areas - academic and experience areas - that should be prima facie attractions. As the counterarguments go, prospective students want the flashy and the spectacular so we need to meet those demands. But are those the type of students we want to attract - the type who choose a college based on the shell rather than the guts? With the cost of attending college being such an important issue in America right now, I think we can afford to lose some of the flash and re-focus on attracting the kinds of students who come here for the academics and who can work out a solution to the lack of study rooms in King Library without needing a whole new building.

But admission doesn't even seem to be the largest concern. We cannot afford to be trapped in a situation where we care more about how people outside the university see us than about how satisfactory the internal workings of Miami are. In the end, the question isn't really about how many people are in a class or how many classes a professor teaches, but of the open and honest discussion of values that lead us to those outputs. This requires real dedication to openness and information sharing within the university and, most of all, it requires trust between the students and administration. It seems everyone is left wondering why students don't give back to the university or why they aren't connected. Maybe it's simply because they've never felt their opinions or input has mattered. After all, why support the university after graduation when all your efforts proved ineffectual and the programs you once enjoyed (even whole colleges - sorry, Western) are no longer around? There are so many good people here at this university on all levels, but their efforts will all be for not if there is not real open dialogue and a willingness to examine our values and direction as an institution. Good luck, Miami. You're probably going to need it.