Episode 51 - Celebrating Our 50th Episode, Part Two

Season Two Episode 28 – Shakespeare and the Other

Bahr: Hamlet, when he’s trying to catch the conscience of the king when he’s trying to see whether or not his uncle is guilty or not, he says “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” But he also talks about holding the mirror up to nature so that we can actually see ourselves. And that, for me, is what…I mean, that’s the definition of theater. We’re seeing ourselves upon the stage and seeing us created there. So how wonderful that we get to have this conversation, not only about the Utah Shakespeare Festival, but about…

Wyatt: About some of the themes for the year.

Bahr: Yeah, yeah.

Wyatt: So, this is an interesting way to look at it—that a play holds a mirror up to us.

Bahr: Mhmm.

Wyatt: If it didn’t, it wouldn’t seem as relevant.

Bahr: Correct.

Wyatt: And if it didn’t, it wouldn’t last hundreds of years.

Bahr: We’re looking at plays that are 400 years old and are still relevant today. And that’s why we weep, it’s why we laugh, and we could just jump right into the plays that we’re doing this…I mean, this season in particular was intentionally designed to talk about tolerance, to talk about civility, how we relate to one another. I like to use the term, and we just had a scholar’s conference where this was the theme, and we called it, “Shakespeare and the Other.” How do we look at those that are different? Or when we are excluded within a group, and every single play—including our non-Shakespeare plays—had to do with that same type of theme.

Wyatt: It’s the same topic. And when we talk about tolerance, it’s more than just tolerating.

Bahr: [Laughs] Yeah.

Wyatt: And we use the word tolerance because it’s so much a part of our language.

Bahr: But I’m not sure that…do you like the word “tolerance”? Because it’s like rather than realizing that…let me use a play. So, you’ve got Merry Wives of Windsor, right? If you tolerate someone, they’re just kind of sitting there, as opposed to including…

Wyatt: Including.

Bahr: And you becoming bigger and better because of this person being in the room with you.

Wyatt: Yeah, and I’ve…these are not my words and they’re not the right words, but they’re close. I’m paraphrasing, of course. “Tolerance is like inviting somebody to the party…”

Bahr: Right.

Wyatt: “…And inclusion is asking them to dance.”

Bahr: [Laughs] That’s right.

Season Two Episode 40 – Student Scholarships

Kante: Yes. When I was first…when I was four years old, I left my family and go a part of Mali. I always wanted to go to school and learn different things and try different things and where my parents were, there was no school. I never see a person have a book or writing something. But, when I saw my dad paying somebody to…he sell the chicken. When I first saw him, you know, he told me to grab a chicken and he sell that chicken to pay somebody to write his letter and read it. And that moment, I thought, “My dad is uneducated. He didn’t go to school. But now, as his son, what I can do about that?”

Wyatt: So, how old were you when this happened?

Kante: I was four years old.

Wyatt: Four years old?

Kante: Yes.

Wyatt: Your dad has got a letter, he needs to read it, but he can’t read.

Kante: He cannot read.

Wyatt: And nobody will read it to him unless he pays them?

Kante: Yes.

Wyatt: So, he turns over a chicken, which is a pretty valuable thing.

Kante: Yes.

Wyatt: In order to get somebody to read for him. You’re watching this and saying, “I’m not going to be paying chickens for people to read to me.”

Kante: To read for me, yes.

Wyatt: So, you left home and stayed…who did you stay with?

Kante: I didn’t stay with anybody. I left home, I was around, you know, just lay down around next to a building or I would stay in the school.

Wyatt: You were homeless?

Kante: Yes, I was homeless at that time.

Wyatt: But you were going to school?

Kante: I was going to school.

Wyatt: How far away was this from your home?

Kante: It was 50 kilometers.

Wyatt: 50 kilometers from your village.

Kante: From my village. So, I didn’t get to see my parents that much and I didn’t have a phone or write them a letter because nobody could read that, and I was just completely disconnected with my family.

Wyatt: That’s a pretty heavy price to pay to go to school as a kid.

Kante: Yeah.

Wyatt: So, then after you’re in school for a while, how did you get connected with Wasatch Academy, which is a high school in Mt. Pleasant, Utah?

Kante: Yeah. So, while I was going to school in Ouelessebougou, I saw…I loved to walked around and I saw a guy who was a mayor and a guy, his master degree in BYU was from Ouelessebougou, and he was driving a car and he drove to his house and I saw him step out of the car and open the gate and then drive the car again and then it was wind blowing and then…you know, as soon as there’s nobody to hold the gate for him. And so, I saw that and so I ran into him and I put a rock into the gate so he could drive on his driveway at the house and then stop the car and asked me, “Hey, young man, where are you from? Who are you and why did you help me?” And I said, I told him where I’m from and what I’m doing here, and he asked me where I live. And I said, “I don’t have a home and I’m going to school” and he invited me to his house and I was living with him about two years. And I speak French and when his friends who come from France and America just do humanitarian projects in Mali and I would be their interpreter. And now I have a house, have a place to stay and I eat pretty well and I’m going to school, but at the same time I have a little job and just be an interpreter for those visitors. And I met a guy who really was just so touched by…he was impressed the way I greet people, the way I carry myself to do all little things to them. And he just decided…he asked me what are my goals and I said, “I just want to go to school. I want to keep learning.” And he said, “Would you like to come to America?” And I said, “What is America?” [All laugh]

Wyatt: What is America?

Kante: Yeah, and he said, “That’s where I am from.” And then he was able to reach out to Wasatch and they gave me a full-ride scholarship to come study there. So that’s how I got to Wasatch and Utah.

Season Two Episode 32 – Higher Education vs YouTube

Meredith: So, you and I went through this process of creating a new Master’s Degree in Music Technology, and that’s not the point of this podcast. Anyway, seriously, search “SUU music technology” and find our master’s degree. One of the things that you and I did from the very beginning is that we had the conversation of, “What do we want the curriculum to look like?” and “What are the hard questions that people are going to ask us?” And one of the questions that we came up with right off the bat that, ironically, no one ever did ask us as we were getting the degree approved and so forth, was this, “If a student were to present themselves to us and say, ‘Why should I pay you graduate tuition for three semesters when I could learn everything that you’re going to teach me on YouTube in a series of tutorials?’” We felt like we needed to have a ready answer for that, and I…one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show today was because of your background with me in that, but also of your background with Pluralsight, which is a for-pay commercial training organization. And how do we answer those questions in a world where people feel like they are one WebMD visit away from being a doctor or one YouTube tutorial away from being Frank Lloyd Wright, or whatever. What extra value does higher education add that you cannot get through a YouTube tutorial?

Anderegg: So, I will try and let you speak. I have so many thoughts. [Laughs] But I honestly, when I was contemplating this and contemplating my master’s, I realized that, yes, I was in a classroom, it was very practical project-based, we were writing music every single week, and somewhat in a group peer-reviewing ourselves and our peers, but I realized I thought, “OK, what about texts? What texts did we use?” And I realized that I…our texts were videos. They were YouTube videos in the classroom and other videos that were curated by a knowledgeable, experienced professor. And that’s part of why I thought, “Maybe my master’s was really unique” is that I will admit that there is a wealth of knowledge—whether it’s YouTube or a paid for service like Pluralsight or anywhere else, there’s so many places online you can find this information—whether it is paid for or not, there is a wealth of knowledge. and I could learn information—it’s just at my fingertips—about anything. I could learn quantum mechanics. Someone has put the information online. But, curating it, because there is so much of it, the quality of that needs to be curated by somebody who actually understands the subject, and then, beyond that, there’s a mentorship element to it that teaches you application. So, you know, I can read, if I want to learn photography, I can read and read and read all about lighting and how to use lighting and then go experiment with it, but who’s going to tell me who’s right or wrong in an environment that I’m going to learn it in a safe way? Unless they go out there and get a bunch of gigs and take people’s money and get the lighting really wrong and have a whole bunch of really mad customers, I’m going to learn from that, but it’s a really painful, painful time.

Meredith: And you probably are out of business before you get the lesson all the way learned.

Anderegg: Right, you know, word of mouth. There’s no way I’m going to get more clients in that city. So, I really feel like the benefit there is curating the right content. Finding the content that teaches the right thing without misinformation. There are a lot of people that put stuff online that have learned it themselves or learned it from another YouTube tutorial, and they may just not know a couple of pitfalls because they haven’t run into them yet. But a trusted mentor, who’s curated it, and guides you through the process of implementing it into your own art, or maybe you’re not doing art, is invaluable. Absolutely invaluable. And that is prolonged after you receive your actual degree piece of paper and walk away from school. I’m still in touch with professors who I worked with in higher ed, and like I said, our texts were watching clips of videos on YouTube and discussing them and critiquing them and rescoring them and I think that’s really the value and the difference between just hearing and knowing the information and really, truly implementing that into what I do.

Season 1 Podcast #16 – The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

Cook: President, I’ve heard you speak about this and I really like your thoughts on this as a philosopher but as a professional educator: when I ask the question, “What is the purpose of a higher education?” There are lots of answers to this. But it’s not only just about career and workforce development, it’s not only about personal enrichment, but there’s something bigger at stake too that relates to citizenry. What are your thoughts about the role that higher education plays in a healthy democracy?

Wyatt: Yeah, so if we go back to 1776 and sit in that world, those who founded this country were creating something that really had never happened before. It was the first time that a group of people had sat down and, through careful deliberation, created a form of democracy. And that was dependent upon the people be educated enough, engaged enough, thoughtful about other people enough that the people themselves could kind of be in charge. [It had] never been successful before and one of the fun pieces of this comes from the Massachusetts’ Constitution that John Adams wrote where he said that, “It shall be the duty of legislators in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences.” And he goes on to talk about natural history, to countenance in inculcate the principles of humanity, general benevolence—we’re going to teach general benevolence—public and private charity, industry, frugality, honesty—right there, one of our responsibilities according to John Adams is to teach honesty—good humor, social affections, generous sediments among the people…it’s a wonderful writing and a great description of what the founders of this country thought was so important for the people who would end up being those who governed. And I think that our job is as important to help people be financially independent, or I should say, it’s no more important to do that than it is for them to help maintain this great country and the governance of it. How do you know when you’re reading a newspaper whether you’re reading something you can believe or not? How do you communicate with people that have opinions that are far distant than yours? We struggle with this in this country today, and I don’t think there’s ever been a time where it was more important to teach these broad principles that bring us together, rather than push us apart. And the more narrowly focused that degree is, the more difficult it is for us to talk to people who have another narrowly focused world. [Laughs] The “T” part of your description, Brad, is what connects us to everyone else. Not just simply helps us have a broader capacity to be successful in the workforce, it’s what connects us to everyone else and without that connection to everyone else, a democracy cannot survive. It’s dependent on us caring about each other.

Cook: I think it’s particularly important now when we start seeing the atomization of the country around tribes of ideas, politically or socially, when we’re not talking to each other and we’re in our information bubbles. We’re believing only that information that appeals to our biases. This is not what an educated person does. An educated person is able to sort out and have some information literacy skill set to try and sort out falsity and truth and to have an open mind in the sense of being able to speak to others and listen thoughtfully. I worry about the decline and degeneration of civil discourse. I worry that, in the age of alternative facts, whether we’re going to have the proper informed convictions and inter-cultural literacy and then personal integrity that’s founded in good information. I think that’s what a higher education is about too. Really fulfilling these ideals that we’re talking about from the fathers and mothers about creating a healthy democracy. And a healthy democracy is good information and people having the critical skill set to be able to sort out what is true and what’s false. So, I think that there are larger stakes involved here.

Wyatt: Yeah, and you can be a conservative or a liberal politically and still benefit greatly by this liberal education. [Laughs] It’s one of our jobs. It’s one of our leading responsibilities. The founders of Southern Utah University were largely farmers, ranchers, and miners who were competing to build a branch campus of the University of Utah in a very small, rural community. And that branch campus’ focus had nothing to do with farming, ranching, or mining. It had everything to do with training teachers because they knew how important education was—in this red sand desert of Western America—that they had to have an educated people. And I think it is so interesting that a group of people whose occupational skills required farming, ranching, mining, those kinds of things, but this school didn’t offer—in its first year—didn’t offer any classes in those subjects. They were learning how to read, how to write, how to think. They were learning about music. They were learning about ideas.

Season Two Episode 21– Sounds of Nature

Wyatt: So, have you ever had a sound that just really was baffling?

Mace: We do, and we have one from the same site, the Wahweap Hoodoos. Let me provide you a little bit of context here. To get to the Wahweap Hoodoos, it’s about a five-mile hike one way, and this sound that we recorded is from 2:30 in the morning. You can hear how sensitive our microphones are from hearing that last clip, we can pick up visitors or hikers from a ways away, and in this clip, there is a whisper. It sounds like it’s faint, but it’s in the middle of a jet clip. You’ll hear a high-altitude jet overhead, but there’s also a whisper in here, and we don’t know what this is, and honestly, I don’t know if we want to. [All laugh]

[Plays audio clip]

Wyatt: I heard it.

Mace: You heard it?

Wyatt: There was a jet, and then there was some…

Meredith: It sounds like they said “blood.”

Mace: That’s exactly what it sounds like. My research assistant, Cesar, when he heard that, his face turned white.

Meredith: I bet.

Mace: Thought we had captured a ghost. No footsteps before or after. We scoured the recording looking for any other sign within that time period, and there’s nothing else there. So perhaps a puff of wind? Perhaps a ghost.

Meredith: Wow.

Wyatt: Well there’s nothing more popular than ghosts today. Every town that I visit, I can get a ghost tour. Not that I’ve done it, but I’ve noticed that there are ghost tours everywhere.

Meredith: Oh yeah.

Wyatt: We even have ghost tours at SUU.

Meredith: In the building where we work.

Wyatt: In the building where we work there are ghost stories. So, we probably should have you put some recording instruments outside of Old Main.

Mace: I’d be happy to.

Wyatt: To see if you could catch Virginia.

Mace: See if we can catch Virginia.

Wyatt: [Laughs] Wailing some late night.

Mace: I’ve heard there are other buildings on campus that might also have visitors. [All laugh]

Season One Episode 13 – Storytelling

Wyatt: Well, so let’s bring this to today and to Southern Utah University. And every single organization has or should have stories like this. But I think that Southern Utah University perhaps has one of the best stories.

Benson: I think we have the best founding story out there. Not that I’ve researched every institution, but we certainly have the grit and determination and everything that you need to make a story interesting.

Wyatt: So, you’ve been around Southern Utah University a lot longer than Steve or I…

Benson: Since I was born.

Wyatt: Since you were born, because your dad worked here.

Benson: My dad worked on campus, my grandma attended back in 1918…it’s been carried on as part of the generations. They were even part of the founding families.

Wyatt: When did the founding story of Southern Utah University become important?

Benson: I believe that it’s always been important to those who were there and those who lived it passed it on to their children. I don’t know that it became a shared identity until we had Gerry Sherratt, a former president who was an alumnus, bring it back up again because it was his relatives, again, who had been part of the founding. And he brought it up in the 70s, 80s. I remember my grandparents talking about it in the 70s, but Gerry did his dissertation on it and spent a lot of time bringing it back to the public view. And I think since the 80s, it’s really helped form who we are and shaped that identity.

Wyatt: So where does our story begin?

Benson: Back in 1897. Clear back then? Is that what you’re talking about?

Wyatt: [Laughs] That’s right. 1897, there is a contest because the University of Utah is going to create a branch campus somewhere in Southern Utah, and all of these small communities become competitors to win the right to have this school. And where does it go from there?

Benson: You’re a good storyteller, I was totally into it right there.

Wyatt: [Laughter] We can go back and forth a little bit on this story. It’s a great story, and it has different focus. I think that the story is generally accurate, but for different people who tell it, they focus on different pieces of the story depending on what moral they’re trying to tell or what image they’re trying to create. But this is a community of 1,200 farmers, ranchers, and miners and they’ve only been living here for a couple of decades. Cedar City was settled, what year Mindy? Do you remember?

Benson: Oh, I don’t know that off the top of my head. We could Google it—back to the facts.

Wyatt: They’ve only been here for a few decades, and it’s still a frontier town. They’re still focused on ranching, mining, farming, all those kinds of things.

Benson: Survival.

Wyatt: Survival, yeah. They’re still in the survival mode.

Benson: They were doing it to survive.

Wyatt: And when this contest comes up, they’re…the condition that was given was that the town had to donate land and build on that land a school, according to the exacting specifications of the State Legislature. But the people in Cedar City didn’t have money to build this and they didn’t have materials. This is still a frontier town and all of the materials had been used to build a church building called Ward Hall. And so, they made this assumption that, “You know, maybe they’ll let us just start school in Ward Hall, and then eventually, we’ll build a schoolhouse.” But on January 1, 1898, the city, the town, learns that if they don’t build the school according to the requirements by the time school starts that coming fall—eight months—that the school’s going to be taken away from them and given to another town. That their hope that this church house would work, didn’t. And so, they try to figure out what to do. And the difficulty is, they don’t have any materials, and they’ve got to start building this in the winter. And where do you get lumber? Where do you get bricks? Where do you get stones to build a foundation in the dead of winter?

Benson: They didn’t have any of that. It wasn’t easily attainable, they didn't have it in their backyards, and they were devastated, I believe.

Wyatt: So, they knew there was a sawmill up on the Mammoth, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, way up in the mountain, that had some lumber there, and they thought, “Well, maybe this is the way to get started. There wasn’t a fraction of the lumber they needed at the sawmill, but that’s something, you know? That’s something that they could do. And so, four days after learning about this problem, a group of eleven men and twenty-two horses, for the first time in their lives, head up the mountain in the winter. They had never been up there. So, they were ill prepared, they didn’t know what was going to befall them, and five days…that seems so long to me. Five days into this journey and they still haven’t accomplished their mission, and this snowstorm hits. And I…you know, all these stories that we have in Utah about the early settlers, they all seem to start the same way. “There was a century big storm.” [Laughter]

Benson: Yes. “Blizzard of the century.”

Wyatt: And we don’t know if this was the blizzard of the century, but that’s the way the story goes is that this was the storm of the century.

Benson: That’s part of what enhances it. If it wasn’t the truth, then that’s part of what enhances the story. But we know there was snow and that it was a blizzard.

Wyatt: Yeah, and as the way Gerry Sherratt, former President Sherratt, tells the story. There’s eleven horses…no, twenty-two horses, eleven men…twenty-two horses and of all the horses, when they get up on the top of the Mammoth, the horses can’t break through these massive snow drifts that have been formed in this blizzard. Except for one. And one horse, who they called Old Sorrel, an eight-year-old, 1,600-pound draft horse…

Benson: Massive horse.

Wyatt: Yeah…is able to break through the drifts. And the way Gerry used to tell the story, it was…the story focused on this horse and how amazing the horse was to be able to paw at the drifts and then sit down and pant and then paw some more and sit down and pant and just keep going. You grew up with horses Mindy, and anybody that knows horses knows they don’t like being in thick snow.

Benson: No, they don’t.

Wyatt: It’s just…it’s hard for them. It’s harder for horses probably in deep snow than it is for people. But they get through that, they find their way back to this little cabin and spend the night and they’ve got to figure out what to do, and during the night, four more people come up from town. So now there are fifteen. Fifteen in this little cabin and they’re tired, they’re hungry, they’re cold and they’re wet and they’re in this blizzard…

Benson: Frustrated…

Wyatt: Frustrated, yeah.

Benson: I think that’s probably where I would land is “frustrated.” And not sure how we were going to get out of that.

Wyatt: The whole town is depending on them, but as Gerry Sherratt tells the story, they barely escaped with their lives. And I don’t know if that’s an overstatement or not, but for a bunch of settlers that are unfamiliar with the mountains in the winter, never been up there before, it’s probably more accurate than sometimes we give it credit for.

Benson: And you know what I loved about it is each family who has passed it down has their own addition to it. They’re not embellishing, but they’ll talk about “their great-grandfather did this,” or “their great-grandfather did this while this was happening,” or “they survived with one match,” or “Old Sorrel, the only reason he was able to do that was he was lost as a young horse and had to climb out of a canyon to get himself free. And if you think about how all of that happened and if that happened if he was a young horse, would he have known how to get out of the snowdrift? Or would he have had the skills?” It’s just interesting how each family brings their own piece and how important this story is as a whole to the organization, but to each of the families that participated in it.

Wyatt: Yeah, and it is amazing that a horse was able to plow its way through…paw its way through these huge snow drifts and free a space that everybody could get through. I’ve spent a lot of time on mountains in the snow, and it’s…it can be a little nervous. And when I go up there, I have Gore-Tex and snowshoes and all this other kind of stuff.

Benson: Right.

Wyatt: These people didn’t have any of that.  

Benson: They don’t have any of that, and they weren’t prepared, as prepared as they should have been, and it’s almost a miracle…in fact, it is a miracle that they were able to get through. And it was the power of that horse, but we can’t forget the people.

Wyatt: Right, yeah. So now we’re what? Four or five days before they’re able to start up the mountain, and now we’re about six days into the mountain journey? And they’re in this little tiny cabin and it’s morning. [They’re] trying to decide what to do. They’ve escaped with their lives so far…something, the only thing to do is just get out while they can because the storm is not over. They’ve been scared, understandably. And they have this argument and a leader emerges. The leader is Neal Bladen. And Neal Bladen’s descendants and family members are still in town…

Benson: They are. And they’re very proud of what he did. I’ve always heard “Cornelius Bladen” and I’ve heard “Neal Bladen”, and I didn’t know they were the same person. [All laugh] It struck me when we were doing the documentary “Oh! Neal Bladen was Cornelius Bladen.” But Neal Bladen, Thomas Bladen, and the Bladen family is still here and their roots run deep.

Wyatt: Yeah. So that morning, they all get up, they’re talking about what to do, they know that this…there’s a few things they know. And one is that many people in the community have mortgaged their homes to pay for the teacher’s salaries.

Benson: Yes. Mortgaged their homes, ranches, sheep, everything they could to get this paid for.

Wyatt: But some of them thing that it’s impossible. And so, at the end of this discussion, they part ways. Five of them stay up on the mountain, the rest go down, and the five return back up to get the lumber. And that’s kind of where the story starts to slide from these people into the rest of the community. But Neal Bladen leads this small group, they go up, they get the lumber. Again, it’s an insignificant amount of lumber. This is one wagonload of lumber. But they haul it down into town and when they arrive with as few boards as they had, it ignited the community.

Benson: Jubilation. And I think it was the motivation that everyone needed that this was possible and that they could do it and that “the sacrifice was great, let’s not let the sacrifice to go waste.”

Wyatt: Yeah. So now we find ourselves with women and men digging clay out of the cold earth to form and fire bricks to build it. We’ve got people going up quarrying rocks for the foundation. That one load of lumber wasn’t nearly enough so the whole community is pulling together finding everything they can to fashion better sleds, better clothes. The image in my mind, Mindy, is this image of the entire town—1,200 people total, so that would be a small number of families actually—with everybody having some commitment in it. Leaving their farms, leaving their mines…whatever they’ve got going to pull this together because they’ve got a fuse.

Benson: They have to get it done. And Cedar City has always had that spirit. I think this exemplifies it more than any other story. Everyone pulled together and got it done. The women, the children, the men…everyone had something to do with it. I look at my great-grandfather and he owned the tack shop in town and made blankets. He and his family made blankets for the horses. And there are story after story of what everyone in the community contributed, and everyone played an important part of that. And that’s part of the culture that we pass on today.