The Wisconsin Idea-Part Two

I have to be careful how I write about our governor being a college drop-out. There are those who would brand me as a hypocrite for pointing this out because I too dropped out of college. However, the reasons that I dropped out were many and in my world view quite sound, whereas Governor Scott Walker, who now wants to be President of the United States of America was kicked out for cheating. In short, our reasons for not getting a degree could not be much more different. My moral stand against registration for the draft is what motivated me. Ronald Reagan, with a nod from Congress, made qualification for student financial aid dependent on registration for the draft. When I did my own due diligence, I found out that when the draft existed in the past, there was a special process for those that would be registered C.O. (or Conscientious Objector)The way the law was written in 1984, there was no such process and if I had registered for the draft, it would have meant that there would be no due process for changing my status to C.O. that could be completed before my being "called up" and once owned by6 the govie, there would be no time to pursue the people who would be needed to validate my status before my deployment. Morally, this was unacceptable to me. The only recourse that I could conceive was to opt out of the whole process.

I was too poor to continue, and instead of dropping out, I continued to attend. I went to classes for an entire year after my financial aid was cut off, supporting myself by working at several jobs and paying my own way through life, without paying tuition. I would make appointments to speak to each professor in person, explaining the changes that led to me not being officially enrolled. I also explained that learning, to me, is like air. that I need it to live and that I would like to attend their classes even if it meant that I would receive no credit for my efforts. All but one professor encouraged me to stick with it and finish my course of study, but they warned that without a piece of paper to validate the completion of my course of study, the costs of my decisions would affect me the rest of my life. I was an adult and felt that I knew what I was doing. Even after all of these years, I don't regret my decisions one bit. The education that I received just talking to a dozen professors about this issue were worth the price I paid for college. In my first three years, I ended up owing $1050 (one thousand five hundred dollars)Ironically, that is exactly the exact same amount of money that I was given by my family to start my new life as an educated adult.

The Wisconsin Idea was strong in my upbringing. In some ways you could call me a "freeloader", as only one of the dozen or so professors that I interviewed, did. he was adverse to my ideas from the start and threatened that if I showed to one of his classes, he would "call the police." What I saw, en masse, were souls, who may they be tortures firmly believed in the transfer of knowledge and our right to become informed. We are currently being led by the cadre who thought it was all about the paper, and when they were denied, for cheating in collegiate politics, the whole process of thinking about education turned into a vendetta.

Being an aware and intellectually adept youth, facile with language, whose mom was one of the bohemians "allowed" to go to college, first in her family to get a degree; I often would get what she called "mental health days", where she would take me to her classes instead of allowing public school to have me another day. I was always sure that I would be a teacher, because that is what everyone in my family had done, whether they had known it or not. My lessons would be of global scope, but informed by and stem from infinitesimally small, infinitely local awareness. Even at seven years of age, I was aware of the infinite Om, the lost chord so to speak.