March 11, 2013

University Life in the 21st Century

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Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a short essay about the relative advantages enjoyed by college students whose parents also went to college. I don’t have any special comment on his main point, but I was sort of fascinated by this:

To the extent that I’ve interacted with parents, I’m always fascinated by the contrast between the questions that they ask and my own inside perceptions of the system. My students’ parents went to school before computers were commonplace. Their parents attended college back when faculty could give out 1-page syllabi instead of long documents with disclaimers and policy reminders. Hell, even when I went to college, professors just said “Write an essay on this”, not “Here is a detailed grading rubric for the essay, which you will no doubt try to rules-lawyer me on, hence I had the rubric inspected by experts.”

I don’t have kids, but he’s basically talking about my generation. My professors did indeed hand out 1-page sylliabi and tell us to write essays of a certain length without much more guidance than that. But, um, I gather this is no longer true? Would any university professor types care to comment on this? I didn’t realize that this particular aspect of college life had changed so much.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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