Reflection: Inauguration and Evans Ch 1-2 Reading

Okay, so this might be a stretch from student development theory, but Obama’s inauguration speech got me thinking about the parallels between creating engaged college students and creating responsible citizens of our nation. Perhaps questions such as “How do you motivate a country?” are not so different from questions like “How do you increase student involvement?” Perhaps their answers can be found using similar means.

When talking with friends and hearing interviews on the radio (regarding Obama’s election and inauguration), I consistently hear people saying things like, “I feel proud to be an American” - that they feel a part of something. How did so many people come to feel part of something they hadn’t been part of for years? How did you come to this sense of pride? Before I discuss some reasons why I think many people now feel this way, I want to pose these questions: Why did we not feel this way before? Why were we not proud to be Americans?

I think there may be several answers to this question, but I will point to the administration at the time. Our nation’s leaders were making decisions and turning those decisions into actions that we found to be not only disgraceful, but at times, embarrassing. Whether we point to our absence at U.N. meetings, our role in the war abroad, the grammatically incorrect sentences uttered by our president, or the spoon-fed “terror,” we were embarrassed. It took time for all of this to sink in because it was fun to mock our president, and the scare tactics worked for awhile - but we did wake up. Unfortunately, as a nation, we were helpless. What could we do? On a national level, we were unchallenged after years of being herded – like sheep – by our nation’s leaders.

So how exactly did we rediscover this lost pride in our country? When I listened to Obama’s inauguration speech, I think what struck me most was that he challenged us and charged us with the notion that we, too, are responsible for this country. We were given a role, we were told that we were needed, that we matter. My friends have talked about actually feeling “the world’s eyes upon us.” We are beginning to take back our nation again as we feel a sense of hope in our nation world-wide. Other countries believe in us – now we can once again believe in ourselves.

Here, I am comparing and contrasting the style of our previous administration to Obama’s style (as seen thus far through the election and inauguration) in the terms of the student developmental theories put forth by Nevitt Sanford and Nancy Schlossberg. Sanford theorized that college students needed to have a combination of support and challenge to assist them in their growth and development. As a nation, I don’t think we’ve felt any type of support or challenge over the past 8 years, mainly because we didn’t feel that we were part of anything. Our voices weren’t heard, and when they were heard, they did not matter. This left us feeling powerless, lacking any type of power, and perhaps led to our apathy on a national level. Obama has given us a challenge of responsibility. Do we know yet how to fully engage in this responsibility? Does the new administration have ideas on how they will support us yet? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I think there is a difference because a seed of mattering and challenge has been planted – that we do have a role to play.

We are a nation in transition: from one president to another, from one administration to another, from one set of ideals to another. Schlossberg’s theory of marginality and mattering posits that marginality is a feeling of uneasiness that we do not fit in (usually at the point of transition) and mattering, a sense of belonging, helps us move out of marginality and helps us transition in a healthy way. Schlossberg’s aspects of mattering include: attention, importance, dependence, appreciation, and ego extension. While I am neither saying that our marginality is entirely the fault of the previous administration, nor am I saying that Obama has or will provide for us all these aspects of mattering, I argue that many people did feel marginalized under our previous administration. I also think that the message Obama is sending out is one that is inclusive, telling us that we are part of something, that we are indeed a “we,” and may be helping to return our collective identity as a nation and perhaps even our individual identities as American citizens.

I don’t know if the student developmental theories put forth by Sanford and Schlossberg can necessarily be prescribed as a national panacea to citizens full of mixed emotions – hope for change coupled with the vulnerability of fear that we cannot make this happen, skepticism, cynicism, and doubt – but I think it’s a good place to start. It is easy to be a skeptical citizen. It is easy to play the role of the sheep and point the blame at the shepherd when we aren’t where we should be. It is more difficult to take on the challenge and be willing to face a collective failure. It is my hope that this new administration will enable us to become more engaged through a combination of support and challenge and with a constant and consistent inspirational message that we matter and we have a responsibility to our society.

-Perhaps the steps towards engaging a nation aren't so different from the steps toward engaging a student body.