Sunday, October 30, 2005

Pueblo and CSU-P: Some Suggestions

The local university seems to be having problems relating. Here’s some suggestions.

In Thursday’s Chieftain there was an article about Colorado State University-Pueblo and the Hispanic community. A consultant found that CSU-P did not communicate well with the Hispanic community.

On the other hand, I’ve heard faculty and administrators from CSU-P complain that they didn’t feel the school is “embraced” by Pueblo. (This was at a Neighborhood Partnership meeting.) So this problem is seemingly a two-way street. Let’s look at the problem objectively.

At the Pueblo Neighborhood Partnership meeting the CSU-P faculty seemed think that the way to get Pueblo to “embrace” the college was to send students out to “help” in the neighborhoods. I found this attitude rather condescending. So the first thing is for CSU-P, as an institution and as individuals, is to lose the preconceived attitudes that will interfere with open and healthy communications.

Next, if the university wants more acceptance and support from Pueblo then it has to start by offering an excellent education. To Puebloans this means that graduates will obtain a job in their field of study at a median or above salary within two months of graduation. Got that? An excellent education means the student got a good job upon graduation. It does not mean they had an “intellectually stimulating experience” or some other academic smoke for “we had a good time teaching your kids nothing of real world value.”

I’ll admit CSU-P has two problems it can’t do much about, but some creative tweaking would help a lot. First, the institution has changed its name about four times in the last 40 years. First, it was PCC, then it became Southern Colorado State College, then it was University of Southern Colorado, and now, Colorado State University-Pueblo. In business terms, this is trying to develop brand loyalty when you keep changing the brand name. It doesn’t work. With the name goes identity and Puebloans don’t know what to identify with. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands, of alumni here in town with diplomas from a school that doesn’t seem to exist any more. I can’t think of another school in the state that’s had this many name changes. And I don’t think this last change helped. “CSU-Pueblo,” when the original CSU has such a strong reputation, makes CSU-P (which I can’t help but pronounce “see-sup”) out to be the very junior partner in the alliance. It connotes second-rate. The non-inheriting second son.

CSU-P has a second problem in its location. Yes, it’s highly visible, but it’s also set apart from the rest of the city and has only one road in. And once you get there, all I remember seeing were a lot of threatening signs about where you can’t park. More welcoming signage, and better directional signs to those parts of the campus the public is likely to visit (library, concert hall, athletic fields) would help. (My parents went out for a 4th of July event, couldn’t figure out where to go or where to park, gave up and won’t go back.)

CSU-P needs better publicity and better use of its communications outlets. For example, I saw an ad in the Chieftain for a store that said it would be open during CSU-P’s Writing Marathon on Saturday. I didn’t remember seeing a story on this, so I went to CSU-P’s web site to find out what was going on. I checked the Events Calendar and didn’t see anything. Apparently the Events Calendar only covers events on campus, not events the university is sponsoring at other locations, which is stupid. I looked other places and finally did a search on “writing marathon.” The first two hits weren’t specific, but the third was a rather vague press release on the event. This was an event for the public, but finding information was a chore. It was also a chore when I went to the web site trying to figure out how to get a transcript for the one summer I went to school there. And when I first moved back here, I looked at the site for “concerts,” only to discover they were all listed under “performances” (or vice-versa). I finally saw an ad for this semester’s student music recitals, but it wasn’t very eye-catching.

Today the newspaper had an article about Day of the Dead activities, to which the public is invited, but it doesn’t tell the public where to park. Can they visit the activities without getting a visitor’s permit? Learn to provide complete information. C’mon, you’ve got a mass communications department and a business school that teaches marketing. You can do better than this.

And speaking of the Writing Marathon, I see you’ve got another scheduled for next April. Maybe you’d like to include clusters for people who want to write in Spanish? Just a thought.

If the folks at CSU-P want to understand Pueblo, they’ve got to understand that Pueblo is a unique place with a unique character. With it’s strong and varied ethnic mix, Pueblo is much more cosmopolitan than the average Western city. And, unlike most Western cities, it has a strong industrial, as opposed to agricultural, heritage. At the same time, because of the break-up geographically by the rivers, and the history of the city as being four towns originally, it has a small-town atmosphere. The best way to understand Pueblo is to be born and raised here.

However, most colleges and universities don’t like to hire their own graduates, so we’ll accept as a given that almost all of the faculty and administration of CSU-P are not Pueblo natives. Therefore, new faculty orientation should probably discuss Pueblo, its heritage, its culture, and how to pronounce names and words like Cvar, Vigil, Mihelich, Cuchiara and Raisch; tostado, potica and sopapailla. They should bluntly be told that just because they have a student who speaks English with an accent, it does not mean that that student grew up speaking Spanish at home. It means he or she grew up in a home where English was pronounced with a Spanish inflection. (Same goes for the students who speak English with a remnant of a Slovenian or Italian accent.)

Further, new faculty need to be told that just because Pueblo has fewer college degrees per capita than some other places, it does not mean that Puebloans are not intellectually inclined. Just look at the symphony orchestra, art studios, galleries, history museums, live theater and libraries Pueblo has.

And why is it so many faculty seem to live in the ‘Springs or elsewhere? Encourage them to live in Pueblo.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are hardly any job announcements in the local paper for CSU-P. Either it’s got extremely low turnover for an organization its size, or maybe local people aren’t welcome to apply? That’s the impression. Granted, CSU-P needs to do nation-wide searches for faculty, but there are plenty of support positions and where are the postings for those?

How come I don’t see notices of alumni meetings, booster clubs, cheap tickets for games?

This isn’t rocket science: do a good job educating students, welcome the community in, and when you go out to the community, make sure it’s well publicized and relevant.

Oh, and get yourself a winning football team.

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