Persistence and Creativity at Loyola University

                        
                                                               Karl Wallace

                                      Persistence and Creativity at Loyola University




     Until two years after I quit college, my interest in an education had been contentedly asleep. But
surprisingly my mother and my brother- in-law, Miland Coburn DDS, who practiced dentistry in Payson,
Utah, stunned me when they told me the dental office takes in a hundred dollars a day. A hundred
dollars a day. Imagine that! At that time I had matriculated in accounting at the University of Utah. I was
in my second year of attendance at the “U,” as it was called by the locals. I dreaded the thought of
having to go back to school as I got low grades even though I would often study twelve hours a day. I
wasn't very smart. The registrar’s office sent me a letter stating that my grade point average of D would
have to be raised to a C- or better in order to continue attending the University, and all the dental
schools at that time required a 3.5 grade point averge. What a dilemma, there I am sitting with a 1.8
average.

     Additionally I was out of work and couldn’t find a job.

Being persistent, I enrolled the next fall quarter at the U , but enrolled for just two easy classes
plus a couple of classes for no credits. I thought the light a schedule would make it easy for me to raise
my average grades considerably. But, unfortunately, I ended up with a 2.4 average and only 8 credited
hours. That wasn’t going to cut it, at that rate I'd be an old man by the time I made 3.5 average. I was at
least smart enough to realize that.

     What to do?

     I decided to take a year off at the U and instead I entered a different university, BYU, as a freshman
and took a heavy class schedule, 21 credit hours for a full school year. Then I went back to the U of U
took the same classes, finally earning a 3.8 and was finally accepted at the age of twenty-six at Loyola
University of Chicago. I was the oldest applicant in my class.

     On the creative side of this story, I didn’t get close to the refrigerator, not even in my first year, I
mean the big one that many graduate students get locked into. I mean the brain-gang students that are
hopelessly educated to the point of becoming frozen intellectuals. Once frozen they never a thaw, they
just float around the Republic. I had no intention of being a brain-frozen ice cube floating through life’s
seas.

     Don’t get me wrong, I think being a brainy college graduate is great, they are well accepted in
society, but not always following the crowd is even better and more rewarding. I hope to be an
educated man, with a high grade point average, but at the same time not being in one of those GE
refrigerators; mortgaged body, mind and spirit, holding on tight to a frozen sheep skin for dear life, with
no plans to come busting out of the fridge door. Not being contented to be one of the sheep going over
the cliff with the herd. It’s been a cold year not good if you’re locked in.

     What’s changed in forty seven years since I graduated from Loyola?

Not much. At the graduating class in 2000, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION the commencement address was given by: Thomas J. Dart (JD’87), Cook County sheriff:

“Far too many times in our history, things were done because that’s the way they were always done. Or because that’s what someone was told to do. But what it that way is wrong---or causing an injustice? That’s when it’s up to someone to stand up and say, ‘Wait. This isn’t right.’ And as I look out into this audience today. I ask you: Which voice will you be?”

Amen.