Caught "Between a rock and a hard place"
Or maybe a better adage right now for us here at the University of Alaska Anchorage would be, Bloom where you are planted, as we find ourselves caught up between that proverbial rock-and-a-hard-place that is more commonly known as a state-wide fiscal crisis. Funding cuts in the state legislature are trickling down into budget cuts and program terminations here at the University of Alaska Anchorage, just as they have done at universities and public schools across the United States for some time now. The arts, as always, seem the first to go. On our campus right now, many departments are being asked to justify their continued funding and their department's "relevance" in this educational system. Department administrative assistants are being asked, by email, "Do you volunteer to furlough yourself?" Department chairs and directors are warning faculty to take better job offers elsewhere if they have one. And we are not the only school - or program - being asked to "downsize."
Yet we recognize that, as writers, we have long been expected to exist (subsist) on little more than pencils, paper, and our own imaginations. Books - literature - have been our most faithful companions and our solace in dark times. And what we have come to know by now is this: if we can imagine a world, we can create it, with words and images. And so, despite the stony place in which we find ourselves at this particular moment in history, we choose to make of it what we can and to bloom anyway, believing that words still matter, that the truth can be made visible, and that we will not give over, to this particular moment of crisis, our better selves.
This blog, these pages, are our small way of saying that we believe in the value of words and how they affect the minds and lives of human beings and that, believing, we continue to see and to say and to act, to better ourselves through rigorous thinking and through creative expression and to do it to the best of our ability and with integrity.