So-Called ‘Professional Students’ Seek to Bring Respect Back to the Quest for Scholarship

While many of Cal Poly’s soon-to-be-graduates are gleefully envisioning a future devoid of syllabi, extended library visits, and all-night cram sessions, some of their classmates will be preparing for more study. They will be looking forward to new research. They will be imagining future degrees.

But don’t call them professional students. This is not merely mental masturbation, as the pursuit of multiple degrees has been described by those who view it as a frivolous endeavor. These graduates, by and large, are unafraid to enter the "real" working world. They have been there before, and they have enough degrees to land them in any number of jobs.

Rather, they’ve chosen to make a life out of academia, to pursue the path of the scholar because it is here, among the dimly lit, dusty bookshelves of the library and in the intellectual debates of the classroom, that they feel the most challenged and alive. It is here that they have embarked on the search for scholarship.

"I remember a librarian once said to me, ‘Do you realize you have 59 books out?’" says 30-year-old Sally Blanton, owner of a joint bachelor’s degree in English and psychology with a minor in women’s studies from Indiana University, a master's in counselor education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and, most recently, a master’s in English from Cal Poly.

"I looked at her," Blanton recalls. "And I just said, ‘Well, none of the books are overdue, are they?’"

Last year Blanton won Cal Poly’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and at UNC she was awarded the Outstanding Master’s Student certificate. Her resume reads like that of a gray-haired professor emeritus who has spent a lifetime in the university. Blanton has served on the Faculty Fellows Planning Committee, chaired the Center for Women and Ethnic Issues Advisory Board, and participated in the search committees for housing and orientation services positions.

She has temporarily put her dreams for a doctorate in English on hold, discouraged by stories of how competitive and theoretical many of the programs are.

"It’s not in my plans now," says Blanton on a foggy Thursday morning as she sits on a cement garden ledge outside the campus market at Cal Poly. "I just want to be intellectually challenged now. There is prestige that comes with having a Ph.D. after your name, and once that was important to me," she says and adds, smiling slyly, "Although it does still tickle the back of my mind."

Blanton is a small woman with short blond hair whose face takes on a distant, serious expression when she talks about her multiple degrees and the path that brought her to Cal Poly.

For her first master’s degree Blanton chose a professional field of study–counselor education. Her mother was a high school guidance counselor, and it was a subject that Blanton had always been interested in, although she could never imagine herself working at a high school. She worked in the career counseling center as an undergraduate and knew that she wanted to focus on the college population.

There is something about those years, that sense of untested possibility and the opportunity to completely immerse yourself in a miniature world of intellectual idealism. It drives some people crazy because it doesn’t seem real, and it endears others because it reminds them of what they once thought the world could be.

"People grow so much as individuals during that time and in that space," says Blanton. "I was so excited by college students trying to figure out what the heck they wanted to do. They have the whole world open to them."

Blanton was also attracted by the sense of community exchange that takes place on college campuses–in the dining halls, at parties, and even in the most mundane of settings, sitting atop a washing machine, watching a pair of socks spin through the drier in the laundry room.

While studying counselor education, she focused on student affairs and, in the spring of her second year, applied for a position with student housing at Cal Poly.

For three years, Blanton supervised 600 students in Sierra Madre Hall. She handled roommate problems and fights, emotional outbursts and suicides.

"There are a lot of p.c. terms for what I did, but really it was a lot of discipline and it was very stressful," she says. "Still, for the first year, I thought I had the most wonderful job in the world. The second year I thought it was good. The third year I began to miss studying literature."

Although Blanton had no trouble deciding to return to school for her master's, the contrast between the academic life and her previous three years at first troubled her.

"I remember one day reading the literature of Italian Renaissance philosophers in the library, and I was feeling this sense of joy that was unmatched. But I also thought, ‘This isn’t useful,’" says Blanton. "I loved what I was doing, but I felt that it was of no use to the world, especially when compared with my past work, which often involved trying to save someone’s life."

Blanton went to one of her professors, Mike Wenzl, who gave her the sage advice she was looking for. Wenzl told her, "Doctors make you well. Farmers give you food. Engineers build communities. Then what?"

"For him the ‘then what?’ was English," says Blanton. "For me it was also."

Blanton took three years to complete her master's program.

"It was the first time I didn’t push through school in the shortest time possible," she says. "I just reveled in academia. I was digging into a world of knowledge that I’d never experienced before. It was the first time in my life that I really felt like a scholar."

Blanton believes that becoming a scholar involves abandoning the notion of being a true expert in any area.

"There will always be someone who knows more than you," she says. "The more you learn, the more you realize that."

There comes a point in many people’s educations, especially if they are not studying a preprofessional subject, when they feel they can learn on their own. They can be self-taught scholars, structuring their own syllabi and compiling their own reading lists.

"Sometimes I look at people who are entrepreneurs, and I think how they started with nothing and they created a whole vision from that," says Blanton. "But I’ve discovered that I am motivated somewhat by trails that have already been blazed. There’s just something about going into a class where a professor has laid out all these books for you like Christmas presents under a tree that works better for me than trying to buy the presents myself. Now, though, I get to deliver presents, too."

Since graduating last year, Blanton has been teaching at Cuesta, assigning her students "Hamlet" and pieces by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Miller. She works part time in the public affairs office for Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, and she says she doesn’t feel the urge to return to school yet.

"Teaching is still new and challenging for me," she says. "The [academia] bug did hit me this spring and I thought about taking some classes at Poly. I really wanted to take a film course on Russian realism, but I just didn’t have the time."

Even though she’s temporarily replaced her doctorate with teaching, Blanton is keeping up her scholastic prowess by working on a research paper for an academic book on Louisiana writers.

"It feels like school again," she says. "Doing this article is going to change the look of my summer. I’m not getting paid for it, and sometimes I wonder why I’m doing it."

But really, she knows. It is to continue on the path of the scholar, to keep her mind engaged.

"It’s a good mental exercise. And I guess," she says, "I’m still jumping on every scholastic opportunity that comes up."

In 1780, in John Adams’ now-famous letter to his wife, Abigail, he wrote, "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks, Philosophy, Geography, Natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine."

Degrees such as Blanton’s master's in English have often been viewed as important luxuries, but luxuries nonetheless.

Cal Poly mathematics professor George Lewis, who has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, worries that the pendulum has been swinging back in that direction in recent years.

"In public education today there’s this pressure to major in subjects that are very narrow, like recreational administration or criminal justice," says Lewis. "They’re what I call ‘white collar’ degrees."

Lewis is currently working to get an interdisciplinary minor in classical studies approved in the hopes that he can encourage students early on to pursue diverse fields of study.

"You reach a point where all areas of knowledge are connected," he says.

Aeronautical engineering professor Russ Cummings exemplifies that philosophy, just having completed his second bachelor’s and fifth overall degree.

Cummings says he’s interested in Lewis’ proposed minor, but at the moment he’s feeling a bit worn out.

Early on a rainy morning before his engineering class, Cummings sits in his office surrounded by posters of slick spacecraft and diving airplanes. Classical music is playing from a stereo tucked away somewhere, and Cummings, whose engineering specialty is computational fluid dynamics, is reminiscing about the past seven years he has spent working part time toward his music degree.

"I’ll miss the faculty and the students, but I won’t miss studying for midterms or writing papers," he says. "I’m definitely having senioritis."

At age 35 Cummings received a tenure-track position at Cal Poly, his alma mater.

"I thought how I had obtained all the goals I’d had for myself," he says. "And I thought, what am I gonna do now?"

From kindergarten through high school, Cummings had played piano. He didn’t consider himself good enough to be a performer, but when Cal Poly’s bachelor's degree in music was approved soon after Cummings' tenure in 1991 he knew he had to pursue it.

"I was in the first group of students," he says. "It was a wonderful change of pace during the day. It was like there was this magical line between here and the Music Building. Here I was Dr. Cummings, and then I would walk for 10 minutes to the other end of campus and I became Russ the student."

The music program consisted of performances as well as music theory and history. It was during a sabbatical at Oxford when Cummings started exploring the university’s musical history that he started to feel a connection with the scholarly life in much the same way that Blanton had while researching Italian Renaissance philosophers at the Cal Poly library.

Cummings discovered that Haydn had written a piece called the Oxford Symphony, that Chopin played there, that several of Mozart’s compositions were stored there.

"I would go to the music room and show my library card and I could look at a Mozart piece with notes in his own handwriting on it," says Cummings. "It was so much fun, and I spent much more time there than I’d planned."

For his senior recital Cummings decided to re-create a concert that had been performed in Oxford’s Holywell Music Room, the first concert hall built in Europe. He searched through ancient compositions to find one that included a piano piece.

Back at Cal Poly, Cummings translated his selected composition into a modern score.

Always the professor, he gave an explanatory lecture with his senior recital, explaining the context of his piece.

"I was nervous," he says. "There were almost 100 people there, and I think it was the first recital where there were more faculty than students. My travel agent came. My sister volunteered at the reception. It started at 7:30, and at 10:30 there will still people hanging out."

For his next project, now that Cummings has completed his degree, he is considering working with some of the music faculty to write a journal article about his senior recital and this composition he resuscitated which had not been performed for more than 200 years.

"They [the faculty] all said that the research I’d done was more than a bachelor's project," says Cummings. "But that’s all they can give me now. But they did say that down the road they might start a master's in music, and I think I might be tempted then."

Cummings sighs, perhaps imagining the weight of that course load.

"Well," he says. "Maybe down the road sometime. Maybe in another 10 years or so."

New Times staff writer Lea Aschkenas left graduate school to work at New Times and pursue the path of a self-taught scholar.