[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Richard Walton
Philosophy
UM-Missoula
At its spring meeting the journal's Board made several changes in staff, policy, and practices of The Montana Professor. Most of these are apparent in the masthead and submission information on the inside of this issue's covers.
We are sorry to report that Board member Jack Jelinski has retired from the MSU faculty and resigned his position on the Board. Jack served very ably on the Board almost from the journal's founding; readers will recall that he co-edited our special issue on 9/11. Our regret at Jack's departure is balanced by our delight in Colleen Elliott's acceptance of our invitation to join the Board. Colleen is a member of the Geology faculty at Montana Tech. Distribution Manager Steve Lockwood, MSU-Northern, is on leave this year. He will be replaced by Hayden Ausland, Classics, UM-Missoula. Hayden, an accomplished amateur photographer, will also serve as photo editor. Steve will continue to produce the journal's online edition, working from his temporary residence in Alaska.
We are very pleased to report that the law firm of Church, Harris, Johnson & Williams, P.C., has agreed to provide us legal counsel. The first fruit of this relationship is a change in the journal's copyright policy. Until this issue, the journal had left responsibility for asserting copyright in articles and reviews entirely with the authors. We now copyright our contents in the authors' behalf. Thus, our policy of allowing copyright to the articles and reviews we publish to remain with their authors has not changed; but the contents of the journal are protected by copyright upon publication.
The change most apparent to the journal's readers concerns our publication schedule. Previously, we have published three issues yearly, fall, winter and spring. This schedule was adopted when most of the units of The Montana University System were on the quarter calendar. We are now all on the semester system. Thus, the work of preparing the journal would accord with the editors' other duties better were we to publish but twice a year. This we will now do. However, as this issue shows, each issue will be larger than the issues under the old schedule. We will publish no fewer articles and reviews than we did before; in fact, we expect the journal to expand somewhat.
Last year we featured several articles on the financing of higher education in Montana. We begin this year's articles with a report from the Legislature by Paul Haber, lobbyist for the UM-Missoula University Faculty Association. We all now know the ultimate results of the Legislature's action on MUS funding. Haber gives us an account of that action from the inside, offering an explanation for the cost shifting described by George Dennison and Tom Mortenson last year. Gene Burns here follows up President Dennison and Gordon Brittan's discussions of privatization with a consideration of the broader phenomenon.
From time to time TMP has published pieces critical of intercollegiate athletic programs. We thought it fitting, therefore, to hear from the other side of the question. The result is Doug Fullerton's interesting defense of intercollegiate athletics, "The Value of Funding Athletics: Cost is Everything If Value is Nothing." We look forward to your responses to Commissioner Fullerton's arguments. Doug is very familiar with the programs at MSU and UM, having served as Athletic Director at MSU prior to accepting his present position.
Gary Funk's article on UM's Vienna Experience offers an insightful and cogent defense of another aspect of our activity which lies outside--or at the margin, at least--of what has come to be the core of our curricula. He speaks of the arts, and of music, in particular. Your Senior Editor confesses to having a special interest in the Vienna program. My youngest was a student in the program this spring, participating both as a singer and violinist, and we visited Vienna and observed the program in May.
Fred McGlynn, a long-time colleague highly regarded for his teaching, offers us interviews with two of UM-Missoula's recent winners of the Carnegie CASE Teacher of the Year awards. We expect articles by--or about--outstanding teachers on their teaching to appear regularly in the pages of TMP.
Finally, we open our regular feature on faculty hobbies with two short pieces by retired faculty members who share an interest in ham radio. Bob Leo and Wayne Van Meter are remarkable men whose perspectives on this hobby are quite different.
Speaking of avocations, at the close of last academic year I realized that I had been spending far too much time at my desk, and my physical condition was much poorer than a man of my age ought to permit himself. I resolved to begin an exercise program, electing to resume playing golf on the theory that it would be an interesting way to get in a few miles of walking each week. As it happened, I was soon reminded of Mark Twain's dictum: "Golf is a good walk spoiled."
I had not played golf at all for at least twenty years, and had not played regularly for thirty. In my absence from the links the game had changed. The first thing that I noticed was that walking the course had become somewhat the exception, rather than the rule. Most players now moved from tee to green in electric golf cars, irrespective of age or physical condition. For my first round the course master sent me out with two men in their early twenties: they were riding in a golf car. Throughout the summer I often had the feeling of being harried over the course by motorized players for whom pedestrians, like my companions and me, were mere hazards to be overcome. I have been told that there are now courses where walking is not even permitted. Against such progressive policies, and even a Supreme Court ruling, I remain obstinately convinced that walking is an essential part of the game for the able-bodied. It was for the walk, after all, that I was out there.
It was a good thing that was my motive, for the most significant change I experienced was that golf had become distinctly more difficult in the years since I had last played. I had learned the game while an undergraduate, and got to be good enough at it that it became one of the few sports in which I could keep up with my more athletically talented friends. Of course, I recognized that it would take some time for me to recover my old form, but I assumed that a month or so of regular play, with some practice thrown in, would surely suffice. It was not to be. The ball had become small and elusive, it seemed, prone to fly off the clubface at angles I thought impossible when the club was in my hands. Time had turned me into one of those players at whom my agile friends and I used to chuckle, those with awkward swings who bounced the ball off the tee box forty-five degrees away from the intended line of flight and into the brush. Toward summer's end it yet appeared that this malicious transmogrification would be permanent.
Fortunately, I found another source of redemption in this frustrating and humiliating attempt to get myself in better shape. Montana, I discovered, is now rich in golf courses--beautiful, inexpensive, uncrowded courses. My wife and I played no fewer than a dozen, all within at most a half-day's drive of Missoula, and we did not visit them all. The courses at Hamilton and Ronan are quite spectacular, their settings so beautiful that one can enjoy a round even when playing as badly as I was. But the course we came to appreciate the most we happened upon rather by accident. When smoke from nearby forest fires smothered Missoula in mid-August, weather reports indicated that the nearest clear air was in Lincoln County, so we packed up our clubs and camping gear and headed up to Libby. The Cabinet View Country Club is a nine-hole course nearly as beautiful in its setting as the courses at Hamilton and Ronan. The course is well designed and well maintained. As at many of the courses we played, one regularly observes deer and other common wildlife. Libby, in addition, has a resident flock of wild turkeys which has laid claim to the area of the fifth green and the sixth tee. They are very gracious, courteous turkeys, however; they always step aside and allow golfers to play through. In this regard these remarkable creatures are entirely typical of the regulars at Cabinet View. We experienced nothing but extraordinary courtesy and friendliness on this golf course and in the city. We were treated more like neighbors than strangers merely passing through.
Thus, did your editor step back into the traces at summer's end, chastened by a protracted confrontation with the depredations of age, yet heartened by a delightful discovery of still another aspect of the marvelous environment which, now more than ever, it seems, is an important part of what keeps us toiling away at Montana's insufficiently supported institutions of higher education.
[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]