Dan Lee: Reflecting on teaching 52 years at Augustana College

This past week marked the beginning of a new academic year at Augustana College. I continue to look forward to the beginning of a new academic year with eager anticipation, as I have for every one of the 52 years that I have been a member of the Augustana faculty. I cherish every minute of the time that it is my privilege to spend in the classroom with the wonderful students we have the good fortune to have here at Augustana. On numerous occasions, I have been asked what changes there have been at Augustana during the half-century that I have been here. There have been many. New buildings have been constructed. New programs of study have been added to the curriculum. And new technologies have been added that greatly facilitate the teaching-learning process. This is not to suggest that the college was totally devoid of technology when I started teaching here in 1974. On the small desk in the small office that I had the first year that I taught here, there was a telephone and a manual typewriter. (The secretaries had electric typewriters, but the faculty just had manual typewriters.) Today, we all have desktop computers, telephones that are far more sophisticated than the antique telephone that was on the small desk in my first office, and large-screen computers and state-of-the-art audiovisual aids in all our classrooms. And we have access to the internet from our office computers and to a wealth of resources that our excellent library makes available. There have been many other changes that have occurred, some of them relatively insignificant, others that are far more significant. Some of them fleeting, others that have been here to stay, adding significant new dimensions to campus life. There have been changes in the attire that students wear. Somehow it became fashionable to wear jeans with holes in them (which I found somewhat amusing since I grew up in a low-income farm family and wore jeans with holes in them because that was all that we had). One of my students a few years ago discovered a way to have jeans with holes in them without paying the premium price that retailers were charging for them. She took a cheese shredder and rubbed it against the places in her jeans where she wanted to have holes until the threads were loosened up. She then used tweezers to pull out the threads that were loosened up, and she had jeans with holes in them. There was also a time (though it didn't last long) when being stylish included wearing bib overalls with one of the straps unhooked. During the time that I have been at Augustana, there have been other changes that have been far more significant. One of these is a dramatic increase in the number of international students that we have here. When I joined the faculty in 1974, we had a handful of international students, most of them from Sweden. In this year's incoming class, there are 141 international students from 36 different countries with 27 different languages represented. The four countries with the greatest number of international students at Augustana are Nepal, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Morocco. There are students from all four of these countries in my classes, along with international students from several other countries, among them Mongolia, Ecuador and South Africa. The international students contribute significantly to the academic and social life at Augustana. For example, students from Nepal and India have organized an annual Diwali celebration open to everyone on campus, an event attended by several hundred students, faculty and staff. Diwali, also known as the Festival of Light, is a Hindu festival, which, like Christmas in the United States, is celebrated by most people in countries such as Nepal and India, including by people who are not Hindu. At a time when many colleges and universities are struggling to survive, Augustana has a bright future ahead of it. There are many reasons for this, among them alumni who donate significant amounts of money to the college, administrators who have been willing to make the difficult budget decisions necessary to keep the college on solid economic ground, recruiters who reach out to potential students (including internationally – the international students at Augustana did not happen to just show up), and many others. Augustana is a good place to be. A student who was in one of my classes twenty years ago stopped by my office on Homecoming weekend last fall and asked if I would still be teaching twenty years from now. I don't know if I will be doing anything twenty years from now. My age at that time will be in three-digit territory. But if I am still teaching twenty years down the road, it will be at Augustana, because this is where my heart is.