New Hampshire: Liberal Arts in a Conservative State

Surfers' Cove Rye New Hampshire--Obadiah Youngblood

Mad Dog has been trying to wrap his mind around the experience of New Hampshire. A great deal of it has to do with ideas that coalesce around three observations:
1. Many people here grew up in families with more than four children. For them, there was never the prospect, the ambition of going to college as a pathway into the future.
2. For many living in the Seacoast now, their jobs, their livelihoods do not seem to have been dependent on what the college experience offered: They are, whether they are producing things or selling things, simply managing information, using computers. And what they know about computers they did not learn in any sort of school, public or private.
3. Those who are struggling, working two jobs, living paycheck to pay check do not blame anyone or anything beyond themselves for their tough lives, but when they do, they blame some amorphous Big Brother government, which, somehow seems to them to be at the root of all evil.

Mad Dog spent most of his life in the Washington, DC area, a city surrounded by close in suburbs in Maryland in Virginia where almost everyone went to college, most had graduate degrees, and all hoped and expected to send their children to college, and not to just to college but to "elite" colleges, where, they believed, their children's future and fortunes would be made by what they learned there and who they met there.

For the most part, Mad Dog has come to believe, both groups, the blue collar New Hampshire Yankees who cynically dismiss the value of college, or of any organized, meaning public education and the white collar Washingtonians, who worship at the alter of the Ivy League--are fundamentally wrong.

The college crowd seems unfazed by the realization that the economy they graduated into and the future for which college prepared them was fundamentally the wrong one. Few, if any, colleges prepared students for the revolution which was fomented by people who either never went to college (Steve Jobs), or who looked around Harvard and concluded the faculties were clueless and left (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.) College was then and still is a place to get your ticket punched, but the actual experience, until recently at least, did little to really prepare students for life, because the faculties were simply not competent or connected enough to see what life outside the academy held.

On the other hand, the blue collar crowd never learned to question, one of the things which might occur in college.  The blue collar crowd listens to Rush Limbaugh, watches Fox News, listens to the men down at the barber shop or the hardware store and cannot think to challenge the stuff they hear. And for some reason, they do not watch Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart.

One thing Mad Dog realizes is he is out of touch with what UNH has to offer and he will attempt to remedy this by surfing the UNH website. He has been impressed by the credentials of the faculty--state college jobs must be good jobs, judging by the numbers of UNH faculty who hail from brand name schools, bringing their high priced merit badges to the Granite State.

But what are the citizens of New Hampshire getting for this investment?
Can graduates of UNH cut through the choppy waters they face, downstream?

White Water--Obadiah Youngblood