- When Chancellor Robert Hemenway told us that a week's tour
of Kansas would change our lives, we smiled politely.
But three days into the trip, the 40 faculty and staff on the
fourth annual Wheat State Whirlwind faculty tour found the people
we'd met wonderfully memorable and many of the places we'd been
surprisingly scenic. By the fifth day, as we headed back to Lawrence,
many were thinking of ways to reconnect in the months ahead with
those we had met along the way and with each other.
Two or three of the faculty hoped to invite a labor leader from
Dodge City to lecture to their students in Lawrence. Others were
talking about linking research projects that might serve both
rural communities and educational communities within Lawrence.
(We also could say, "Niobara chalk, Ordovician limestone,
Dakota sandstone, Gorham oil field, fluvial deposits, incipient
sinkhole or evaporites" as if we knew what we were talking
about. We didn't have to ask, "Where's Waldo?" We knew
it was six miles east of Paradise30 miles north of I-70
for conventional Kansas travelers.)
As the tour progressed south to Chanute and Coffeyville and west
to Sedan, Arkansas City, Wichita, Medicine Lodge, Dodge City,
Garden City; north to Scott and Gove counties and Colby; then
east to Nicodemus, Logan, Palco, Hays, Lucas and Lindsborg, we
were charmed by local residents' stories of their communities,
their histories, their art, their work.
Wherever we stopped, we heard: "KU is far away. Thank you
for remembering us. Your visit is important to us."
 Carol Ann Carter, professor of
fine arts, captured many of our feelings about the tour in her
journal entry:
- Journal entry-Carol Ann Carter, art department
To my colleagues on the Wheat State Whirlwind Bus Tour
11:25 p.m. Thursday, May 25, 2000
Regardless of what you may think, I am shy, but I would like
to tell you a story. It won't be linear because I don't process
that wayso try to stay with me through the circles. This is a
travel story about our tour. It's called, "If the Truth
Were Told."
-
- I had considerable resistance to coming alongas an outsider
on several levels-an artist, non-native Kansan, non-scientist,
non-geologist(!), as a non-white and urban-oriented woman-the
experience of feeling my place here or our places on this
tour was daunting. It has been, however challenging, the perfect
thing for me to do.
-
- Monday was the hardest day . . . I stayed close to Maryemma
[Graham] because we were friends, and paid for a private room.
I gradually recognized that this is a public relations
tour. We are ambassadors, and for good reason. I listened politely
at times and at other times with great interest to the stories
of people who need to be heard.
-
- I listened, we listened, to Kansans or to the presentations
of Kansans that were passionate, realizing that the people
of this state are proud, surviving people tied to the land and
the environmental realities that impact their well-being, their
livelihoods.
-
- I felt our KU affiliations were suggestive of a kind of responsibility,
(the ability to respond) that bring us to a kind of mutual hope
or expectation; they hope to become visible to us-from
the survival cries and strides of Nicodemus, to the cultural-economic
balancing acts of Garden City. We also hope to become visible
to them; from creating new and sustaining friends like
Polly Bales in Logan to offering rural community colleges our
assistance with distance-learning models.
-
- This has been an awakening for me like no other. There was
shock to my protected "systems" that led to awakenings
that will inspire and direct future art/work and life. Conversations
with you have opened the possibility of cross-disciplinary projects-unlikely
prospects within one's own unit. You tease me for being an interviewer
or butterfly but I have felt safe here for the first time
in four and a half years. I laughed in Dodge City because
it was possible to so completely enjoy an activity I had never
previously considered open to me. It was also significant that
it was possible to laugh like that in western Kansas. It was
the night that I had fun.
-
- So we were good ambassadors-patient, sometimes nodding off,
sometimes a little too vocal-but we respectfully and enthusiastically
encountered citizens of this state and have made a difference.
We have also encountered each other-a significant achievement.
For all of these reasons, I am happy to have been a part of Wheat
State Whirlwind! I was not able to meet and talk to everyone,
and some of you, I will never see again, but I go back to Lawrence,
(the New York of Kansas) with a full heart and over 40 new colleagues!
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