SPOP
I have seen the future and it’s alive and well after all.
Actually, I can’t say that I’ve seen the actual future. I don’t know if there will be a baseball strike. I don’t know which one of America’s leading company’s will next be afflicted with a bad case of accountingitis. I don’t know if the Democrats will thump the Republicans in the off year elections (though I tend to think they will). And I don’t know what bit of nastiness the nasties of the world have in store for the rest of us. I didn’t see that kind of future.
But I did catch a glimpse of what will make the future in the form of a SPOP, and it gave me a confidence that I didn’t even know I was missing.
SPOP?
One of the gifts of advancing years is a certain perspective on life. You have more context than do the young. You have more experience. Hopefully you have a voice inside your head that’s telling you to do something meaningful and useful with all that good stuff you’ve learned as well.
One of the bad things that comes with experience is the fight to remember what it was like when you were young. I know if I work at it, I can remember thinking when I was 24 that I knew nearly everything worth knowing (which wasn’t even remotely true), but today I couldn’t tell you on a bet what any of my specific notions were. I’m certain I actually had a couple of good insights but they’re buried away right now. I also remember thinking just yesterday that after nearly 46 years, I know almost nothing worth knowing (probably not true either), but I digress.
When we experienced folks are at our crankiest, the failure to remember the glories of youth gets translated into a certain sourness about the generations that follow us. They’re too loud, too self-centered, and not at all like us. They’re not motivated, they’re not disciplined, and they have no sense of place or purpose. And they’re not like us. They listen to lousy music, engage in lewd and tasteless dancing, and pass their time playing incomprehensible games. And they’re not like us. Not like us now, and not like us then.
Each of those conclusions, of course, is the result of thinking and memories that are heavily filtered, skewed, revisionist, romanticized, and generally wrong. Not the part about the music—I don’t know of another era in history where the lyrics to popular music were laced with such violent and sexual imagery. But the rest of it is highly suspect, particularly the “not like us” part. We’re not that good, they’re not that bad, and the psychic makeup of the species hasn’t changed one jot. They’re our brothers and sisters; our children and grandchildren. In so many ways, they’re not like us, they are us.
This past weekend I had a lesson in this point, one that blew my perceptions of “today’s youth” to smithereens. In some ways that was an accomplishment because I don’t count myself as an active curmudgeon. I like to think that I think well of people. I have an eighteen year old daughter heading to college and am convinced that she and her younger brother are about the two coolest people I know. I was born into a liberal household. I participated in the great reverse open enrollment experiment of the 1960s. I’ve always thought I was even kind of “with it,” which dates me horribly, doesn’t it?
But lurking in the back of my mind is the same ill formed notion that young people, whoever they are, somehow lack the drive, conviction, and motivation necessary to make the world a better place. They’re just too frivolous. Or something like that.
After all, wasn’t it the nearly young and recently graduated that brought us the Internet, the dot.com craze, and the subsequent dot.com meltdown that wiped out all that phantom wealth? If you answer that question “yes,” I’ll remind you that the vast sums of money that fueled that bubble didn’t come from summer jobs cutting grass. It came by the shovel full from a lot of places, but mostly from people and institutions who are certainly older and more experienced, and at least in theory wiser. And we won’t spend any more time reflecting on the gray-haired/no-haired captains of industry who brought us Enron and WorldCom among others.
I’m not alone in this uneasy assessment of the young by the way. Just for one example, implicit in the title of Tom Brokaw’s wonderful book, The Greatest Generation, is that this generation, or any other to follow, isn’t or won’t be even greater. And in some ways, who’s to argue? It was a generation that grew up in the Great Depression, spent its formative years saving the world from Totalitarianism, and spent its adult years funding the rebuilding of Europe and Japan while building the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Those are accomplishments beyond any temporal measure I can come up with. By way of comparison, it’s easy to discount those who were born and raised in the comparative ease, safety, affluence, and small worldness of the current era.
But now I wonder if that thought process isn’t too simple minded. In many ways I don’t think we have any choice but to assume that the greatest generations are still to come. It may be ours. It may be the next. It may be five later than that. But I’m convinced that there is greatness on the rise, and it’s our duty to make sure it’s not delayed in reaching its full potential.
The cause of my new optimism was the Student Parent Orientation Program put on by The University of California at Irvine, the institute of higher learning that my daughter will attend as a freshmen in the fall of 2002. As you might guess, this is a program designed to ease both parents and new students into the transition from high school to college. Unlike the usual orientation week that starts a few days before classes in the fall, this event includes parents, is for a few hundred people versus a cast of thousands, and includes no all night binges (though there wasn’t a lot of sleeping), fraternity rushes, or wet T-shirt contests.
From a structural standpoint, there is nothing unique about the SPOP weekend. On Friday, the reluctant freshman-to-be show up, sign up, and take tests to help sort out what classes they should be taking. Later that night there is a keynote speech to the students and parents followed by a panel of professors who discuss some of the obvious issues like: how not to get lost at a big University, how not to freak out if you’re a parent, why teaching assistants aren’t bad, why it helps to actually go to class, and so on.
The next day, Saturday is largely devoted to exposing the students and parents to the particulars of what the University provides for, and in turn expects from, those intending to graduate. We looked at how the catalog works. We found out how to interpret the hieroglyphs, abbreviations, and alphanumeric sequences that constitute the class schedule. We learned about the “breadth” requirements—the areas of inquiry outside the major area of study that are designed to expose the student to the foundations of critical thinking. We found out that engineering students will have no life for the next four years.
We found out about campus safety, health care, and housing. We learned the secrets of logging into the University computer network (my guess is that a significant percentage of the male students were already working on how to hack the system). By mid afternoon, by daughter had even assembled a schedule of classes that had me wishing I could go back to school (college is so wasted on the young).
Saturday evening was devoted to fun. The staff put on a talent show. Later, we all danced to the tunes of the seventies and eighties. Soon enough the adults collapsed off to the side and then later into our beds so that our progeny, the lights of our lives and promise of the future, could dance and party the night away.
Sunday was the wrap up, and truth be told, we missed it. Somewhere along the way we didn’t get a clear picture of what the weekend was all about so we arranged to leave first thing Sunday morning, me on about six hours of sleep, my daughter on one.
And if the story stopped there you’d surely wonder why I wasted the space to tell it. It doesn’t.
The Amazing SPOPers
This was the part I didn’t expect. While the SPOP program is run by the Dean of Students, the wonder of it is the 80 or so second, third, fourth, and fifth year students who dedicate an entire summer—for no credit and no compensation I might add—to putting together an absolutely awesome program. It’s actually more than a summer, because they have to apply to be part of the program during the year and begin their training while still in school.
I met the first bunch of SPOP staffers when I found out I would be staying in a dorm . . . WITH A ROOMMATE! That’s actually not exactly correct. I found out the dorm and roommate part first, and then met the ten or so SPOP staffers who were billeted with us in our dorm shortly thereafter.
You had to be there. Here we were, a bunch of middle aged parents, many of whom spoke English as a second language, gathered in the living room of our new home for the weekend, staring at a group of young LUNATICS who had been charged with shepherding all of us through our SPOP experience, starting with the part about rooming with a complete stranger, and proceeding to the part that we were going to have to learn a dorm cheer. Like I said, you had to be there.
Most of us thought the whole proposition was this side of crazy. Where’s the room service? Why is there no TV? What’s up with this roommate thing? Why are these kids so happy? I’m exhausted just thinking about them. When do we get to go to bed?
But little by little the magic crept in. As our SPOP staffers introduced themselves, I couldn’t help but be impressed with what I heard and saw. This one was a double major in psychology and art. That one was majoring in interdisciplinary studies and minoring in business. This one was majoring in criminology and double minoring in computers and computer art. That one was an engineer. It went on and on. No doubt these kids were the best of the best, but so what? They were focused, driven, and out to accomplish big things. Why wasn’t I that driven in college I wondered?
Little by little, you could feel the adults letting their guard down. Our SPOP staffers weren’t just ambitious. They were funny, personable, and completely committed to making sure we got into the rhythm and fun of the program. Our dorm was called “Prado” and we were to be the Prado Pirates. Soon we had on eye patches and hats. We learned to sing our dorm song/cheer. We all snarled and grunted our best pirate “arrrrrrrrrrrrrrghs”. We called each other matey. We played stupid games and had fun. We stayed up late. We stayed up way too late. And we did everything our young SPOP staffers asked us to.
Our SPOPers were also diverse. Although I went to what we called an “inner city school” from sixth grade through high school where my white face made me an ethnic minority (or no better than a plurality), I was surprised that I noticed how diverse the student population was. Surprised and disappointed that I gave even a single thought to the fact that there were so many people who didn’t look like me. Like somehow I had forgotten that the rest of the world doesn’t look like the lily white suburb I live in.
That didn't feel good, but soon even the nascent ethnic awareness receded as well. These SPOPers were just too shiny with energy, enthusiasm, cheerfulness, and most of all, love. It just poured out of them. Love for each other. Love for their school. Love for us. Love of life. It was infectious. It was fun. It was healing. It gave me hope that indeed the greatest generations are not all in the past.
As the official agenda wound on, the SPOP staff was steadfast in its shininess and insistence that everyone get into the spirit of the adventure. We learned more chants and cheers. Every time the group entered an auditorium for another seminar, we all outdid each other in bellowing our dorm names, chanting our dorm cheers, and in our case, snarling our pirate arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghs. And any time one of our SPOP staffers said or did anything even remotely cool, we bellowed and cheered even louder.
The talent show Saturday night was a revelation. I’d pay money to see it again. They were funny. They were musical. And you should see them dance. Bob Fosse could take lessons from the stage show they put on. It was awesome. We shouted. We cheered. We clapped. These were our SPOPers by god!
Hope for the Future
Touching down at John Wayne airport on Friday morning, the first day of the SPOP weekend, we were met by two of the staff. During the short drive back to campus we engaged in idle chatter which led me to ask about why they had decided to be part of the SPOP program. This was before I knew anything about what was in store. It was before I had an inkling of the commitment these young people had made to be part of the program. Let’s face it: giving up an entire summer for no pay is no small thing. You try it if you think it’s easy. So I was just making conversation and they returned the favor by saying that they just felt like giving something back.
Giving something back. At Friday morning at 8:00 a.m., having risen at 3:45 to get there, the words “giving something back” sounded vaguely like a politically correct thing that a savvy 23 year old would say to an adult coming to visit the University. “That’s nice,” I thought. On Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m. as our plane was taking off, “giving something back” had taken on an entirely different meaning.
I found myself replaying big chunks of the weekend in my mind and thinking to myself, “I want my daughter to be just like those kids. I want my daughter to apply to the SPOP program. I want to apply for the SPOP program!” Towards the end of the day on Saturday I had expressed a related sentiment to one of the other dads.
“I wish that these kids’ potential employers could see them now. They’d hire them in a minute.” He was in complete agreement.
There is a lot wrong with our world. You don’t need me to tell you that. Customer service down at the local phone company is terrible. Sometimes my bank puts a hold on my checks. The paper boy threw my paper in a puddle the other day. You can no longer get metal knives in business class on airplanes anymore. Oh, and the economy is in the tank, corporate ethics have self-immolated, the food we eat is one gigantic genetic experiment, there’s a hole in the ozone layer, and too many people in the name of God want to do harm to those who don’t share the same beliefs, heritage, fears, geography, or whatever.
Back in the world of business, we too easily think that the current generation—I think we’re on generation Z—is in some fundamental way deficient in what it takes to make the world safe for business. We all want to sell to them, but we’re suspicious of anyone who learned about the facts of life, not from network television like we did, but from chat rooms, computer games, misappropriated MP3s, and whatever it is that’s showing on Fox, MTV, or WB.
Separately, there are those among us that worry that there are too many immigrants: here in the US, in Europe, in Australia, in a lot of places. Like somehow we will be less safe, less democratic, less who we are, less something because of the presence of people who were born somewhere else and who struggle to master the local dialect.
I’m no Pollyanna. There are plenty of reasons to fear plenty of things. Not every young person is the next Mother Theresa or Winston Churchill. Not everyone in my generation is an angel saint either. People are people. But I’ll tell you what: 80 SPOPers have turned me into a believer. If they represent any portion of our future, count me in.
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Last modified:
05/03/06