A handful of guys are climbing at the Maine Rock Gym – one is on the wall and six are watching from the picnic table in the middle of the room. The climber falls, steps back on the thick blue mats and looks up, slowly walking his hands through the moves in midair.
“Go for that one,” says one of the guys at the table, pointing toward a hold farther out to the left. “And look for the high foot.”
The climber puts each hand into his chalk bag, rolls his wrists in a stretch and gets back on the wall.
In climbing it’s hard to make it through a route without the advice of someone who’s done it before, or by collaborating with the other climbers who are stuck in the same spot.
The same, I’m discovering, is true just about everywhere else.
Last weekend, I went with eight of my Free Press staff to New York City for a college journalism conference.
There we were, in the midst of writers from the Times and ESPN, photographers from AP and editors from USA Today, as well as students from Missouri, Kentucky and the Carolinas who work on their school’s paper or website.
And like the best classes I’ve had at USM, the best workshops were the ones in which we interacted – where we weren’t just talked at, but were told to interview our neighbor or discuss the troubles each of our publications is facing.
I talked with the managing editor of the University of Washington’s The Daily about how to retain volunteer staff; I made friends with a sports feature writer from ESPN’s magazine, who I’ll be emailing for more advice as soon as this paper goes to print.
In working on a collaborative project like this paper, it’s the first lesson to learn: if I can’t do it, somebody can; if I don’t know how, somebody does; and that people, in general, are happy to share what they know and know how to do.
More than 30 people make this paper happen each week, from our section editors to their writers and photographers; our webmaster to our graphic designers; Josh who sells ads, Lucille who manages the books and even Dustin, whose new column draws more conversation around campus and letters to the editor than I’ve seen all year.
USM and its students, faculty and staff need to get better at collaborating.
In an ideal world, classrooms would be focal points for conversation – thoughts from Bill Gavin’s “Death and Dying” (PHI 291) would pop up in a nursing course; a fiction workshop would consist more of ideas for how to keep going than criticism on what you’ve already done right or wrong.
Outside the classroom, the Student Athlete Advisory Council could sponsor intramural leagues on the Portland campus; local businesses who can’t afford to put their names on buildings could put their names on classrooms, and help fix rooms like Luther Bonney’s 327.
Ideally, the entire community, rather than just a handful of offices, would throw around ideas on how to recruit and retain students, how to build an endowment and how to plan interesting events on each campus – because if those offices can’t do it, surely some of us can; if they don’t know how, some of us do; and there are plenty of people who would be willing to help, if only they were asked.
By himself, that climber would probably finish the route. It would take a while, and he’d wear himself out doing it, but he could probably do it.
By myself, I could.nope, you know what, by myself I could never put out this paper.
Sarah Trent
Executive Editor