By: Dennis Gilbert, Free Press Advisor
Post-secondary study at its best provides the opportunities and means for students to exercise creative control over their education. This is particularly true in the Liberal Arts, where foraging and feasting beyond the major is actively encouraged. In some programs, fully a third of credit hour requirements for the Bachelor of Arts falls under the designation of university electives. It’s a simple, ingenious design that offers alternative disciplinary frameworks – clusters, minors, double majors – and fundamentally different kinds of learning experiences: internships, service learning, independent study.
Beyond this customizable formal schema, many students supplement a primary course of study with non-credit-bearing activities, grounded in areas of personal interest, that typically grow into co-curricular communities of like-minded, similarly motivated, mutually-supportive investigators of new territories, out there on the margins of the curriculum.
It’s difficult to imagine a more supercharged co-curricular learning activity than putting out a college newspaper. The ongoing process of assembling an accurate, fair and comprehensive picture of a university, its membership, and the events, persons and trends that define its operational life presents a major-scale level of complexity. More often than not, the weekly publication cycle engages the staff with virtually all the foundational standards – cultural interpretation, socio-cultural analysis, and so on – of the Core. And the continuing discourse driving the process turns on questions of ethics, First Amendment rights, and the philosophical debate about what a college newspaper is, what its responsibilities and privileges are, who it serves.
In very real terms, getting the paper out offers the students who do it a way of enacting their education. It’s an exciting, arduous, dependably challenging, sometimes humbling and often transformative experience: there’s nothing like a deadline to put you in touch with the true you.
Facilitating this learning process – in real terms – is what makes being Free Press Faculty Advisor one of the highlights of my thirty-five years as a member of the USM faculty. It’s education at its best.
If you are reading this, you’re obviously interested in what’s going on at this university. If you are currently enrolled at USM, you probably have more than a passing interest in tracking the issues, events and policies that affect your life as a student. If you are an inquisitive, motivated and ambitious individual eager to exploit the full range of available learning opportunities – curricular and co-curricular; if you like writing, taking photographs, documenting the world at close range, asking questions and getting to the bottom of things; if you thrive on working with a team of creative, achievement-oriented kindred spirits, you might find that joining the Free Press is an excellent option for setting your academic interests in motion now, rather than later. Contact the Free Press to explore the options.