This experience is made possible...

By Scott Stanfield, Professor of English

I occasionally feel that I should announce to my classes, "the equipment that we are using to watch this clip from Hamlet is available to us thanks to the generosity of..." or "the last five minutes of class time were made possible by a donation from...." This impulse arises not only because I feel that our donors deserve acknowledgement, but also because I want the students to understand that without such donors, a large part of what we do at Nebraska Wesleyan would be impossible.

They may already understand the role these gifts play in their education, but I suspect they do not, because when I was an undergraduate myself, I had next to no idea that the cost of the education I was receiving substantially exceeded what I was paying in tuition. After all, I was giving my college about $4,000 a year (this will give you some idea how long ago all this was), and I naively assumed that multiplying that figure times the number of students at my college would yield enough to pay for the books in the library, the professors' salaries, the upkeep of the buildings, the events we had on campus, the whole kit and kaboodle.

I could not have been more wrong, of course. And I should have known better. Every day I walked past little signs and plaques that told me that Mrs. Someone, class of '52 had paid for the renovation of a classroom, or that the tree under which I was reading was the gift of Dr. Someone Else from the class of '24. It was only later, when I came back to campus for reunions, and more particularly when I started teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan, that I realized how much of the education that opened the world for me I owed to the generosity of people who had never even met me.

A second realization hit not long after that one—that I should be doing my part to make sure that the kind of education that had changed my life would remain possible for young men and women that I myself would never even meet.

That is why my wife and I donate to Nebraska Wesleyan's annual Archway Fund. A liberal arts education—one that looks to the whole personhood of the students, and hopes to get them to make connections among many kinds of knowledge—creates the kind of people I hope to have as my co-workers, my neighbors, my fellow-citizens.

And liberal arts institutions, like a good many other excellent things, can only keep going if we help them keep going.