Not feeling the maternal love for the Ol' Alma Mater. Me and The University of Wyoming

  Cowboy up! 🤠 I will always bleed brown & gold

Comment on a Facebook page. . . I don't feel that way.

In reaction to certain over sensitive, historically ignorant, politically correct faculty members having a snit about UW's new "The World needs more Cowboys" slogan, there is a Facebook thing going around right now where people post something along the lines of "proud to be a Cowboy", in UW colors, showing your support for the slogan, or perhaps more accurately against academic PC idiocy.

In the Governor's debate on Wyoming PBS, at least each of the first tier of candidates were all very careful to say "the World needs more Cowboys" and show where their feelings were in regards to this.  Of the second tier candidates, Foster Freiss called the marketing campaign a ridiculous expenditure, with which I must agree.

Good for all of them.

I graduated from the University of Wyoming twice.  Once in 1986 with a degree in Geology and once in 1990 with a Juris Doctorate.  I first attended UW, in a sense, in the Summer of 1983 when I took a field geomorphology class at UW's Casper extension, which in that case was indistinguishable from being at Casper College as the class was at Casper College and taught by one of my favorite Casper College geology professors.  At that time, however, I'd just graduated from Casper College and was admitted to UW, where I started attending full time in the fall semester that year.

 

Given that, you'd think that I'd be one of those folks with a brown and gold license plate and a member of the Cowboy Joe Club and all that.

I'm not.

It's hard to explain and it may be a mere personality quirk of mine but I've never really warmed up all that much to UW, in spite of spending six years of my life as one of its students, in spite of meeting some really good lifelong friends there, and in spite of sort of passing from very early adulthood to early adulthood, with all the attendant agony that entails, there.  And in spite of having a few really good professors there.

Nope.  It just didn't happen to me.

Now, let me admit this may just be, as already noted, a personality quirk of mine.  I'm not much of a joiner and there's a lot of things other people get really excited by, organization wise, that don't click for me.  For example, I've never become that much of a booster of my old high school even though my father went there, my wife went there, my kids went there, all my father's siblings went there, my wife's siblings went there, and my in laws went there.  Indeed, my family is so well represented there its not funny.  But I'm not really warm and fuzzy about it either (and I don't recall my father being either, for that matter).  Indeed, not until my kids went there did I really start to become that way a little.

But, oddly, I feel differently about Casper College.  I have always remained fond of it, and was while I was there.

 

T-rex at Casper College.  There's an older one at UW.

I also feel that way, perhaps oddly, about the Wyoming Army National Guard, or perhaps more accurately the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard.

And in recent years I've been fairly miffed and from time to time even disgusted with UW or certain branches of it.

But I'm not wholly sure why.

I suspect that it might date back to the 1970s when a push was on to make Casper College a four year university.  I've written on that before but UW successfully parried that with its outreach program, but its fight back, or rather that of its legislative backers, did leave a lot of wounded feelings here.  Most Natrona County residents felt pretty slighted by UW at the time and for those of us in school who were looking at going through university there the fact that UW was basically telling us that our only option was to go to Laramie at some point or to take a hike out of the state wasn't really received all that well.  I suspect feelings are different now, but for those of us who spent two years in Casper College's geology program, which was fully friendly with UW at all times, our transfer down to Laramie came with a feeling that on our part that we were sort of conscripts in a way, there because we were left with no other realistic in state choice.  Of course, some of us could have gone out of state, and in retrospect UW's geology department was excellent so we really didn't suffer by going there.  Frankly, while Casper College's geology department was great, those of us who did two years at CC and then transferred did have some ground to catch up both in terms of classes we now had to take and were not able to a bit earlier and in regard to catching up with an academic standard that was undoubtedly significantly higher than what we'd previously experienced.  Having said that, I am pretty convinced that if I'd gone straight to UW I would have dropped out after about one year (everyone who knows me really disputes this assertion) so I'm grateful for CC being there.

Maybe that's part of it, as even after two years at CC, UW was a bit of a shock that first semester but I managed to get up and rolling pretty quickly.  I had friends down there as it was, including a couple who had transferred down from CC, as well as those who had entered UW right out of high school, so I wasn't exactly an orphan in a strange land.  I really didn't like Laramie much at first, but I acclimated to it relatively quickly.  My experience as a geology student in that regard, I'll note, was much different than what it is for those in other majors as being a geology student at UW in the 1980s was to be a member of one of the first ranked programs in the nation which, accordingly, kept you buried in study all the time.  It was extremely rigorous and if we went out for a beer on a Friday we really thought that we were living it up.

Indeed, that last fact may have been a little of it as going into the UW geology program at that time, as a transfer student, had a real sink or swim feeling to it.  We hadn't been there from the beginning of our studies and even though there was no hostility to us at all, we were right at the point at which the geology department started weeding students out.  The community colleges didn't do that, but UW sure did.  That first semester I had mineralogy, a required course, which failed 50% of the class as part of its grade curve.  That fact was announced on the first day of class.  If you took the class twice and failed both times, you were out.  And a D, for that matter, was a bar to remaining in the program.  I passed the first time but it was nerve wracking to say the least, particularly as the class contained students who were on their second try who had to make it through or be dropped and, additionally, as the class contained graduate students who had not taken it in their out of state undergraduate programs (one of whom I became very good friends with from the class). 

After getting familiar with the area I came to really like the Laramie Plains, for which I owe a real debt to a close friend of mine from Casper College who is still a close friend of mine.  Later when we added a couple of other guys to our circle of friends we fished and hunted in a great area of the state which remains fond in my memories.  I know more about rural Albany County than I do about any other area of the state other than Natrona County, and its beautiful.  And I learned a fair amount about northern Colorado, and even Denver, in the same time frame.  I really didn't care much for Laramie the town during my undergraduate years as I was a tenant in a town that was expensive to live in, but when I was a graduate student that changed as the graduate students had a different relationship with the town than undergraduates and, by that time, some of them were property owners and somewhat a part of the town themselves.  Moreover, at that time, one of my law school friends was from Laramie and his very nice parents were professors there, which gave me a different impression of the town than I'd had before. By the time I graduated law school I'd come to like Laramie quite a bit and I still do.

Looking back, I enjoyed the geology department a lot more than I did the law school, although what I've said about my time as a geology student is at least partially true of my time as a law student.  I had good friends in law school and some of my geology friends were still there.  I didn't get out to hunt nearly as much as a law student, and in retrospect my slow conversion from an outdoor creature glad to be outdoors to an indoor creature wishing I was outdoors really started, and that has a sense of gloom associated with it.  With two really outstanding exceptions the nature of my friendships changed as well as my friends had always been aboriginal, like myself.  Having said that, two of my law school friends met that definition, one from Laramie and another from Texas, and they remain my good friends (at least one other common friend of ours has simply outright disappeared).  And law school featured intellectual studies of a type that I'd never experienced before in that degree and hugely enjoyed.

So I should be a huge UW fan.

But I'm not.

As I noted above, there's no doubt a variety of reasons for this.  For one thing, just because of the time period in which I went to UW, it was a hugely disorienting and not particularly wonderful period of my life, even though I didn't look on it that way at the time.  For the entire time I was going there my mother was getting increasingly severely ill and that meant my departure left my father to deal with it all on his own, which I felt guilty about.  The oilfield economy was collapsing, followed by a coal collapse (sound familiar?) which meant that what I was working on so hard as an  undergraduate was becoming increasingly a dead end that looked as if it might end up being a non profitable one at that.  Working through university meant that I was working toward a definitive end of my schooling and a definitive launch into the working world and as I was engaged in that my career goals were being hugely, indeed, completely redefined and plans I had, both vague and concrete, when I graduated from high school were evaporating and in fact completely altered.  The entire time there was absolutely nothing available to fall back on career wise whatsoever, except for the National Guard, the latter of which kept me keeping on to an extent, but which also meant that after five years of hard scientific study the only occupation that I found I was qualified to fill was that of an artillery sergeant.  By the time I figured out what I wanted to do I had fallen into the situation of it not really being an option and the immediate fall back didn't pan out either.  It wasn't great.

 

But that's only part of it.  I think the bigger part is that at UW I felt, and I still feel, that I never really belonged for some odd reason, some of which I noted above.

Part of that might be just size.  I've read quite a few times that combat soldiers identify with their small units, rather than their big ones.  When we read of wars, for example, and the views of average soldiers are looked at, it tends to be the case that soldiers think of themselves as belonging to "C Company" or "Headquarters Battery", or maybe as a member of "3d Battalion". Rarely, at the time, do they think of themselves as being part of the "2nd Infantry Division" or even less "The Sixth Army". To an extent they do, but in more immediate terms they don't.  That is, they know that their in the 2nd Infantry Division, but they more closely identify with their company, platoon and squad.

Something like that works with big organizations as well, at least for some people. And maybe that's why at the time I tended to think of myself as being a geology student, rather than a UW student.  Indeed, I spent a lot of time in the geology building as I tended to study there and I used it as a my default during the day study location when I was a geology student.  As a law student I very briefly did the same thing; used the geology department library as a study location, but only very briefly before I switched to the law library.

But most UW grads seem to identify with UW a lot more than I do, and I'm sure that most law school grads identify much more closely with the law school than I do.

Which is all probably due to a personality quirk of mine, mostly.

But jumping back up to it, at UW there was sort of a lost in the crowd feeling, even though a lot of excellent teachers from every department clearly had their students constantly in mind.  And part of that is likely because as a hopelessly rural character the college life, with its focus on the campus and football, etc., never appealed to me very much.

Or maybe its a UW is about UW feeling, which sort of leaves you a part of it, rather than it being a party of you.  It can do just as well without you, is sort of the feeling you get.

Anyhow, something about the University of Wyoming has always been sui generis.  And that I think started being pretty clear in law school.  In the geology department we were pretty tied to the state as geologist are an integral part of Wyoming's economy that's tied to the land itself, much like agriculture in a way.

At the law school it was clear right away that about half or more of the students were there planning on going elsewhere, and that's increased over time.  So the law school was focused on teaching a student body that really wasn't focused on the state. Since that time the law schools support of the Universal Bar Exam has hurt the state's lawyers, showing that it can in fact operate in a fashion that's opposed to the interest of its graduates who remained here while acting in favor of those who departed.  Beyond that, even while I was there, there was one professor who was involved in activities that operated directly against the state's mineral industry.  He's since left, but another professor is a dedicated radical opponent of agriculture.

The fact that the state retains and even supports a university that has individuals who hold some of its key industries in contempt shows how deep, and even blind, support for the University of Wyoming really is in the state.  I'm afraid that sort of thing has reduced my feelings towards it however.  And since that time we've seen other acts, such as disposing of the Y Cross Ranch and now outright contempt for "cowboys" on what amounts to a radical bigoted view of what the world is supposed to be like. . .and that view shares almost nothing in common with the views of almost all actual Wyomingites.

And maybe that gets to it.

A recent study of UW raised some questions about how well it was fulfilling its mission, in a way.   The Equality of Opportunity Project, which studies tax data and converts those into "Mobility Report Cards" shows that UW's students aren't really accomplishing that.  The study concluded:

The report card for University of Wyoming (UW) indicates the majority of students come from higher-income families, while around three percent come from low-income families. And the number of students from middle and low-income families has slowly declined. The report shows that only 16 percent of UW graduates made notable economic gains.

Now, the headline on that might not actually reveal that much in the context of the finding.   What this may simply reveal is that "higher-income families" send their kids to college and, in Wyoming, lower income families send their kids into the oil patch.  Indeed, having deposed a lot of career oilfield workers who didn't even complete high school but who had incomes as high or higher than I do, I can understand exactly why they do that.

Anyhow, this drew some attendion down at US in any event, and that'll tie back in to my comments here.

UW professor Scott Henkel studies higher education’s role in labor and democracy. He said addressing the issues raised by the report card should be top priority for UW because it’s a land grant institution.

It’s written in the DNA of a land-grant institution, the need to serve low-income, first-generation, working-class students,” said Henkel. “Do we always reach that ideal? No, course not. But there are people here working very hard in the service of those ideals.

Okay, I agree wit Henkel in part.

Or actually, I don't.

The point of a land grant college in fact was not to serve low income, first generation, working class students.  A state university should serve low income, first generation, working class students.  Of course, in order to do that, you have to not run around insulting them.  There are going to be very few low income, working class, first generation, students, who come from the real world, who are really going to fall over and feint at the thought of a motto that boosts cowboys, nor are then even going to immediately assume that cowboys are white and that's bad, as some UW profs do.  Indeed, the low income, first generation, working class students in Wyoming are actually made up of the very demographic that those UW professors find to be offensive hideous symbols of oppression.

Which does get back to the point.

Land grant colleges (and at the time, that also included land grant high schools) were supposed to take and educate the common population of a state in fields of education which served the state.  Most early land grant colleges had really strong focuses on agriculture and mining because they were in the Western United States where those were, and to a large degree still are, the major economic engines.  When those same universities branched out into more advanced degrees this was still the focus in a way.  The University of Wyoming College of Law, for example, was established in 1920 with the idea of providing lawyers for Wyoming. . . not for Colorado.

Over time, in almost every upper academic realm, this sort of focus has become really lost.  In the old Ivy League schools that makes sense, although ironically retain elements of their traditional focus.  American universities of the Harvard and Yale type were not ever really focused on graduating individuals for the economic benefit to heir students more than they were providing them with a certain liberal, Protestant, class based, education.*  Later private institutions were modeled on them even where they did not include the religious focus, although having said that a religious association with a four year institution was darned near the rule for most of American history.**  Anyhow, these institutions seem to become all about themselves.  The Ivy League law schools, for example, seem to have become separate institutions for the declaration of what an imaginary "progressive" constitution should hold.  According to one recent book by a recent graduate of an Ivy League school this very liberal focus and the elimination of the old patrician boundaries that applied to these schools has given us the social mess we currently have, although he's optimistic that its self correcting.  I'm much less so.

Indeed, the same evolution has occurred in universities where it never should have. Some large Catholic schools, for example Notre Dame, have become quite non Catholic in practical terms.  Some may wonder why that matters, but as a school founded by the church, it's focus is supposed to relate to that of the churches, or otherwise it has little reason to really exist.

This same thing is true of land grant universities, such as the University of Wyoming. Why is there one? So we can support a football team?  So that we can employ a collection of over sensitive pseudo intellectuals?  No.

It's to support the state.

If it doesn't do that, something is in error.

That doesn't mean slavishly following the political whims of the state.  Not by a long shot. But it does mean that it can't act like an isolated benighted intellectual institution existing on some other plain.  The point at which it becomes irrelevant to the state, and treats its charges that way, is the point at which, when appreciated, the real decline really begins.

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*Early on they also were religious schools and most of them retained a very strong Protestant focus up until the 1960s.

**Catholic universities like Notre Dame were actually formed as it was basically impossible for a Catholic to attend a private university and remain loyal to his or her faith.