(Preface) I set up Orient Lodge over ten years ago as a place where I could consolidate much of my writing. My writing has changed style from time to time, and currently, I’m writing in a more personal style.

This weekend, I attended my college thirty-fifth reunion. They’ve always been strange events for me, since I never graduated. The college required an ‘Independent study’ (IS) thesis. My thesis was not accepted and I was told if I wanted a degree, I could write a new thesis. Instead, I left, saying that I had come for an education, and not necessarily a degree, and I had gotten my education.

When people asked for details, I would talk about a great course I had been taking on Virginia Woolf and how I had gotten very interested in stream of consciousness writing. I wrote my thesis in a stream of consciousness manner maintaining we needed to view Socrates as an anarchist. Neither the style nor the content was deemed acceptable by my advisor.

Of course like any story, that’s just part of it, and another aspect became more obvious to me at the reunion as I listened to the college president talk about the reframing of IS.

To me, IS was a test, an ordeal. Yet the college is now reframing IS as ‘mentored undergraduate research’. If my advisor had been a mentor, instead of an adversary, which might have happened if the professor that led me to becoming a philosophy major hadn’t of been on sabbatical during my senior year, things might have been very different. If there had been courses on post-structuralism things might have been very different. But that’s not what happened.

Yet I still greatly value the education I received there and the friendships that were established there. My two older daughters have both received their undergraduate degrees. One has received a graduate degree and the other will soon be applying to a graduate program.

In this twenty-first century post-structuralist world, the nature of institutions, like those of high education and religion are being rethought. They are being challenged. Some of this comes from a materialism that values careers over a liberal education.

I’ve watched as the president and board of Sweet Briar College attempt to shut it down, and I hope those trying to save Sweet Briar are successful. I’ve been tempted to contribute to Saving Sweet Briar, but funds are tight. We still need to save for my youngest daughter’s college education, and, at least as far as I can remember, I never donated to my alma mater.

However, this year, my classmates who are very involved in the college urged everyone to donate. The percentage of alumni donating is an important statistic for those analyzing colleges. So, I made a small donation when I signed up for the reunion.

At the alumni association meeting, they talked about millennials being more involved in volunteer activities than their parents were at the same age, and I thought about fundraising for millennials. A popular idea is to ‘pay it forward’, and colleges seeking to attract young donors might find this an interesting approach. Instead of donating because of what you got out of college, donate to ‘pay it forward’ to future generations of incoming students. Pay it forward to help keep expenses down. Pay it forward to build up funds available for scholarships.

I doubt my youngest daughter will attend Wooster. She seems more interested in her mother’s alma mater. Yet if we were truly a pay it forward society, and money wasn’t so tight, instead of saving for my daughter’s education, I’d be paying it forward to my alma mater, to my wife’s alma mater, and, for that matter, to my elder daughter’s alma mater and to Sweet Briar.

It seems like the same could or should apply to churches, but that’s probably a different blog post.