Another Explore UT has come and gone.
I have written extensively, year after year, about not liking this event. This year, I fear was no different. The basic problem, I realize, is that I now have so much emotional baggage associated with it that there’s probably no way that I could ever actually enjoy the day (not that there’s much enjoyment to be had with 50,000 people invading campus).
Once upon a time, many years ago when I didn’t know better, my colleagues and I were dragged into a meeting with one of the staff people in the College of Liberal Arts. The Dean at the time (or so we were told) had decided that he wanted to have a special area of the university’s annual open house event just for children. And this staff person, knowing that we all do “outreach,” decided in her infinite and unquestionable — let me put that in Capitals to give them the appropriate weight — in her Infinite and Unquestionable Wisdom that “outreach” means “knows how to entertain small children.” And so we were given the Royal Decree: do this, and make your Dean happy.
For the record, “outreach” does not mean “knows how to entertain small children.” In our cases it means different things, but that’s really not one of them. So, we had to search for little activities to do that might have some educational value. Since we didn’t really want to be involved, we didn’t think too hard about it.
The year was something of a success. So much so that, barely a few months later, we were pulled into another meeting with the same staff person. “They really like the children’s fair,” she said. “So, we need you all to stay all day.”
“Um,” we asked, “Can you provide us with the manpower to make that happen?”
“No.”
“How about some money to hire people?”
“No.”
All righty then.
And so we went forth. We scrounged, threatened, pleaded, and, in some cases, bribed students to come and help us with the event, and thus did we entertain small children all day long.
A few months later, we were pulled into another meeting. “This year, we need you to add a second event. They want the fair bigger.”
“Um,” we said, “Can you provide us with some volunteers? We had trouble getting enough people to staff the activities we did this year.”
“No,” she said. “We don’t have any volunteers to spare for you. Also, we want you to arrange performances.”
“Can we give you their names and have you deal with the performers?”
“No,” she said. “You do it.”
And so … we went out for drinks, bitched a lot, and then went forth and somehow, by the skins of our teeth, managed to pull it off. Barely. Natalie nearly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the day, and I recall a lot of swearing coming out of my mouth (we’ll pretend that this is different from the norm somehow). I don’t even recall how the others fared because I never saw them during the course of the six hours that we were there.
So, when we were pulled into the meeting a few months later, we went in prepared to say, “We can’t do this much again on our own. If you’re going to want a bigger children’s fair, you either need to promise us enough volunteers to make it happen, or you need to involve other units. We’re tapped out. And you need to hand off the performance coordination to a single person in the College because this ‘everyone coordinates their own’ thing is a bunch of crap.”
However, barely had the conversation begun when Her face darkened, the brow furrowed, and her voice turned gravely and belied the presence of possibly several demons from Hell in her inner soul. “We … are … not … doing … LESS,” she hissed.
Dejected, we left, vowing some sort of awful revenge. We had been told of other departments not being invited back. What, we wondered collectively, would we have to do to not be invited back?
That year was probably the worst. We didn’t want to be there, we didn’t want to be doing as much as we were, and it was incredibly hot.
The next year, both the Dean and the staff person were gone, and we were able to restructure everything to our wants: a single event for each of us, one co-coordinated table with name writing in different languages, and the College runs the performances. For all the complaining and dread, the past couple of years have gone relatively well.
None of this is to say, however, that I’m any happier about doing it. For all that it’s gone relatively well, at some point during the annual push to do whatever we can do to increase attendance, just about all of the educational value has been lost. We spend the rest of our year designing high-impact programming that’s raved about. We’ve gotten a standing ovation at a national conference of our peers. People high in education around the state like us and what we do. But what we do the first Saturday in March reflects none of that.
In short, I’m not particularly proud of what we do year after year. And there seems to be no will to let us change it.
Last year, I finally had the bright idea to print out a little text box for the kids to glue to the back of their craft, explaining what it is and what it’s supposed to represent. This year, most of the kids actually took the time to glue one on (last year, there was a lot of, “Wow, that looks boring”). Do I think that, this morning, even half of them even remotely remember what they did or why? No, not really.
And there’s the rub.
Oh, well. Another year gone. I can focus on other things … right up until this time next year, when I get to do it all over again.
