Mondays with Mike: It’s their world now, and that’s not a bad thing

A few years ago, an architect acquaintance and I were talking about the younger people in our lives. She described some interns she’d employed, their advanced knowledge of technological stuff she and I no longer cared about, and their youthful eccentricities. She wasn’t angry or put out, really, it was a pretty clinical description. And she ended with this simple phrase: “It’s their world now.”

I’ll always remember that. Neither she nor I have one foot in the grave. But we are, as a golfer would say, on the back nine. It’s not all bad being there. I don’t have the visceral desire to keep up with everything technological like I used to, and that’s fine. I’m not as twitchy. I do, however, still try to live up to my responsibility as a citizen—to stay informed, vote (and act if I can figure out a way to do so)—in the interest of what I judge to be in the interest of the nation.

That’s a Russian samovar, which is an ornate tea urn.

I think often about my father and his three brothers, who all served during WWII. They were not in unison in their political beliefs, but I’m afraid they are all rolling in their graves at what’s going on now. I think about my mother, a public school teacher who taught me about what “public” means. It means acknowledging common interests and doing something about it. And her father, a Pennsylvania coal miner who did his part to unionize. It was risky, but if he and others hadn’t, I might not be here right now. He ended up with black lung disease, but likely would have fared even worse without protections negotiated by his union and accompanying safety regulation.

And so, in what I consider to be a dark hour in our country’s history, those kids in Florida and across the country who have more sense than their elders are floating my boat.

So are some young’uns right here in Illinois. When I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), tuition was around $400 a semester. You could reasonably expect all expenses, including a triple dorm room and bad food, to cost you just over $10,000 a year.

Today, you can reasonably argue that UIUC (and many other state schools) are only nominally public institutions. State support has dwindled to less than 20 percent of expenses. Higher Ed inflation over the years is rivaled only by health care costs. There are a lot of reasons, but having been in and around a university for years, I agree with the premise of this Washington Monthly article titled “Administrators Ate My Tuition.”

That aside, my $400 a semester back in the late 1970s bought me a great education and a great time. It introduced me to lifelong friends from around Illinois and around the country. In my basic reporting class, I met this girl, Beth, who always looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. It introduced me to big ideas. I had some great tenured professors. But I also had graduate student teaching assistants who made an enormous impact.

One of those graduate students was my Russian teacher, Phil Cooper, who had been to the Soviet Union on multiple occasions—that was really exotic back then. He had stories—of trading Levis jeans for priceless samovars (I didn’t know what a samovar was until he showed it to me), of rural people who refused to have their photos taken because it would steal their souls, of being shadowed by security. It made the U.S.S.R real flesh and blood. And a woman named Carolyn Marvin who taught the ambitiously titled “History of Communications.” The course was a marvel, starting with cave paintings and tracing not just communications but also the intertwined business history. (Western Union didn’t believe the telephone would amount to much. Oops.) At the time, she alerted us that we were at the precipice of a great revolution, moving from an analog to digital world. This was 1978. I was still using a typewriter.

When Beth and I lived in Urbana as townies, not students, we befriended lots of folks who had come from New York, Virginia, California, Europe, South America, Asia—all over the world—to get their graduate degrees. They came because of the combination of academic quality and a good deal—their education was essentially free and they made a pittance if they agreed to teach all of the snot-nosed undergraduates.

It’s really easy to piss on educators, but I was raised by a public school teacher, so don’t do it around me. Teachers at all levels work hard. And they put up with and have to manage the full gamut of bad human behavior. Those teaching assistants have teenagers on one end, and grizzled university administrators on the other.

So, I’m proud of and fully support the graduate students at my alma mater who are on strike right now. They’re in their second week, and they show no signs of backing down. There are the usual number-based beefs—percentage increases, etc. But the crux is what has, in my mind, been the backbone of a vital system: that free ride in exchange for teaching. The University wants to have discretion about whether these grad students get that waiver.

I love Champaign-Urbana. I love the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with all its warts. To a great extent, the place and the institution made me me. But I can tell you, it wouldn’t be the rich, quirky place I grew to love without drawing fresh, ambitious minds from around the country and the world. And, sorry, but the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival isn’t enough to bring folks to the cornfields the way tuition waivers have.

So, you go all you high schoolers and University of Illinois Graduate Employees’ Union members.

It’s your world now, and from what I can tell, the world’s in good hands.