I first heard about the Master of Liberal Studies program at NAU not long after I moved to Flagstaff, in the person of a woman whom I would eventually marry. Well, that sounds interesting, I thought, adding it to the list of things I found interesting about her. The program was focused on good and sustainable communities, she said. As a writer I loved the combination of adjectives—not just the word sustainable, which even back then sounded well-intentioned but also a bit technocratic, bloodless, but the word good, which rang with depth, emotion, history. With heart.
It was the beginning of a long dalliance—and here I mean, with the academic program. Within another year or two I was working at the university, an unplanned move but one that made sense given that I’d come to love both the woman and the community. Where I’d been itinerant before, experimenting with places to live as if idly trying on shoes for a good fit, I sensed that something longer-term was going on for me here in Flagstaff.
Within another couple of years things went deeper still. There was a wedding, for one thing, and then a child on the way, and an old house to fix up. And at the university a trickle of students began showing up at my door, some even before I was any kind of official teacher. They were looking for a writer to serve on their thesis committees. I think what brought them to me was that they sought to write not in the sometimes-perjorative “academic” sense, but more in the engaged vein of creative nonfiction. Kate wrote about the transformative effects of working on the trail crew in Grand Canyon; Nancy about the transformative effects of beauty; Gina about the yes, transformative effects of spending time with beloved dogs. Transformation. Looking back twenty years in the rearview mirror, it seems almost quaint to remember the Oughts as pointing up reasons for deep-rooted change—but yes, the need was there, and these students were looking at it with clear eyes, open hearts, eager pens.
I’d never planned to be much of an educator myself, but before too long my friend and neighbor Annette McGivney recruited me to teach a journalism class, and the MLS program director Sandra Lubarsky recruited me to develop and co-teach a class on oral history interviewing, and one thing led to another, and soon enough I was a bonafide professor, teaching undergraduates how to write and edit journalism.
Fortunately, the graduate students kept coming by, their passion and their willingness to work hard, to question assumptions, a needed antidote to the sometime frustrations of 100- and 200-level classes. Justin: the spirit of the Mogollon Rim. Angela: small-scale farmers and the future of agriculture. Jon: how environmental journalists were dealing with climate change. Katherine: Why place-based education matters. Each thesis committee was a class in itself—for me, that is—because I had to learn enough about the topic to be appropriately critical, and helpful, in assessing and shaping and polishing the student’s work. This, I thought each time, was what university was supposed to be, a tangled web of two-way streets in which faculty and students teach one another and jointly explore new perspectives, expanded vistas. And a web, too, in that students were asked to, wanted to, engage with communities, climb down out of the ivory tower and walk the neighborhoods, or sometimes the wild ecosystems, in which they studied and worked.
Years passed. The program’s name changed from Liberal Studies to Sustainable Communities. There were crises: a recession, a reshuffling of the boxes that academic programs get put in. Sandra passed the leadership torch to Luis Fernandez, who in turn passed it to me. More students, more stories, ultimately: Coreen told a hands-on narrative of ecological restoration volunteers. Robert explored why worker-owned co-ops might point toward a more equitable future. Emily plumbed the virtues of voluntary simplicity. Darren asked: What are people really talking about when they’re talking about local food?
A pandemic arrived. So did some challenging elections. The sustainability of our political system, perhaps even our socioeconomic system, came to seem more in doubt than ever before—to say nothing of the stability of the global climate. A few years ago, Nora Timmerman took over directing the program. And now I look around in a too-early spring in Flagstaff and realize, wow, I’ve been a fulltime teacher for twenty years, and the program itself has been around for thirty.
Which might be a good time to ask, are we closer to sustainable than we were back then? Not at a global scale. But when I look at what the program’s graduates are doing, either locally in Flagstaff or in other places around the world, I see undeniable impacts. I see tighter-knit communities whose members are helping one another prepare for an unpredictable future.
How about closer to good? That’s an easier one. The good is in all those teachable moments, all those instances of human discovery. Of growth. Like the renewal that comes in spring, good grows on itself, gets stronger the more connections get made. And that’s something worth celebrating.
