Michael Lane just barely had a chance to say “hello” to this year’s seniors. Now it’s time for the Emporia State University president to say “goodbye.”
Saturday’s spring graduation ceremony will be the first for Lane since his inauguration on March 31. It comes just as he’s starting to recognize the cream of the crop, thanks to the parade of student award ceremonies that come in the last month of school.
“You see the same 50 students four or five times each over that month,” Lane said. “I’ve just gotten to know most of those students and 80 percent of them are going to walk across the stage and say goodbye. It’s an interesting thing to say ‘I almost got to know you.’”
It’s the nature of any school, of course — the students come and go but the faculty stay on. And this group of seniors had a more unique experience than most, Lane said. This is the class that got to see a new leader come in, without having to live through any of the effects of it.
That may also make this a challenging group of alumni to involve, he noted.
“For many of them, President (Kay) Schallenkamp was one of their primary connections to ESU and she’s not there anymore,” Lane said, referring to his predecessor.
Distance adds to the challenge. Twenty years ago, Lane noted, most ESU graduates would have ended up in either Emporia or one of the nearby big cities such as Wichita or Kansas City. Now there are even alumni in Beijing.
Some of those areas have pretty good alumni chapters, Lane said, although there is one curious exception. There doesn’t seem to be an ESU alumni chapter in Emporia itself.
“I think sometimes we take our local people for granted,” Lane said. “If they’re an alum of Emporia State University, they’re important.”
And while ESU has done its best to prepare those graduates, Lane still can’t begin to imagine what kind of world they’ll be stepping into. Things just change too quickly.
If that sounds familiar, it should — it was a major theme of his inauguration speech. But one statistic that didn’t make it into his speech seems relevant to Lane now. In 1860, he said, the average person consumed less information in a lifetime than a week’s worth of New York Times editions today.
“If you look out 40 years — the average work life — I have no idea what a high school English teacher is going to look like or might be doing, let alone someone working in technology,” Lane said.
That changing world has come into the university, too. The classroom that once held shelves and a chalkboard now has a virtual world available — and several virtual students, to boot. About 16 percent of ESU’s content hours are now offered online.
Never mind Beijing. The cyber-graduates may be the biggest recruiting challenge of all.
“How do we connect with them the day they log off the Blackboard site and walk away with a diploma?” Lane asked. “I don’t know yet.”
This last semester has been a learning experience for Lane as much as his students, though he joked that he’s learned “probably 10 percent of what I need to know.” But the most gratifying lesson has been to realize that ESU was for real.
“When Peggy and I interviewed here, it seemed committed to service for students,” Lane said. “But that was over 36 hours and it’s easy to fake over 36 hours. You always wonder what’s real and what’s for show. It’s a little bit satisfying to realize how much of it was real here.”