Proud to be a Bear!

I’ve just finished my first week teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, and I couldn’t be happier anywhere. This university is so fantastic that I’m glad I just found it—I wouldn’t have had enough sense to appreciate it twenty years ago. I share an office with another professor, but we’re on campus on different days, so even though it’s shared space, it’s not simultaneously occupied.

My new friend and colleague, Sarah, is a tiny bit envious—her shared office is pretty bare, but mine looks like this:

The rocks in the windowsill in the cover photo are mine, but everything else (except my bag and coffee cup) is my office mate’s. I can’t begin to put into words the joy that filled me when I opened the door for the first time. It was definitely a Beethoven’s Ninth situation.

In addition to the beautiful space I get to work in, this university is spectacular. The campus is beautiful—so many trees! If you know me, you know I love trees (and hate the Joyce Kilmer poem about them). The science department has an on-campus nature preserve that’s an outdoor classroom for field work.

When I walk around campus, in awe of the trees, something else stands out to me: the people. Everyone smiles in greeting in passing. Everyone. Like everyone is genuinely happy to be there because they are. I’ve been to churches that don’t have the sense of community Lenoir-Rhyne has.

This first week of fall semester is known as Welcome Week, and they’ve had events on campus for the students all week, from a barbecue at the president’s residence to a free stuff-a-plushie event in the student center, where the students made their own stuffed animals for free. In an assignment this week, one of my students wrote about that and said that she went to the event for the free stuffed animal but got so much more. She said she left feeling like people genuinely care about her and want her to be there.

Our season opening home football game is tonight, and tailgating in the stadium parking lot was in full swing when I got my faculty free Friday coffee in our campus coffee shop with Sarah. Administration also gives each faculty member a Lenoir-Rhyne t-shirt to wear on Fridays. I’ve never seen such school spirit—everyone was wearing a school shirt today.

Sarah and I also hit the campus bookstore today to check out the clearance rack. I scored a long-sleeved t-shirt, and we both got a $5 hat.

My students sit at tables of four in class (20 students per class), and they come to class on time, participate in discussion, and turn in their work on time. I’m only one week in, but teaching here is already a paradise I didn’t know existed.

I haven’t fully explored the campus yet, was planning to do that today, but a thunderstorm popped up with more coming behind it, so I came back down 321 to my home, skipping the football game that’s likely to get rained out. I’ll catch the next home game.

Next month, the Visiting Writer Series gets underway with Andrew McCarthy opening the series. I already have my (free) tickets. Sarah and I are already building two fourth hour applications around it. Fourth hour applications are assignments that require the students to go to an event outside the classroom and write a response to it.

I can’t adequately express how happy I am to be a part of this incredible university that implemented a tuition-free guarantee this year, providing grants and scholarships so that no students need to leave the university with student loan debt.

Go Bears!