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Ragu x Hot Ones Chile Inferno

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All Aboard Burgers And Ice Cream

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Sauce-A-Palooza

Central Missouri Mules at Missouri Southern Lions

Missouri Southern State University

I came back to Missouri Southern today for a football game, which is a sentence that sounds ordinary until I admit that I had not attended one here since middle school.

That seems almost impossible.

I spent six years of my life on this campus. My parents both attended here. My brother graduated from here. Years later, my brother and I returned to teach summer classes through Upward Bound. Missouri Southern has been present at so many stages of my life that I sometimes forget to notice it. It has become less a destination than part of the landscape.

Maybe that is what foundations are supposed to do. Once the building is standing, nobody spends much time looking at the concrete beneath it.

Walking the campus again today, however, I found myself thinking about just how much of my life rests here.

Missouri Southern began long before it became my university. In 1937, it opened as Joplin Junior College, a small institution created through the local public school system. There were only 114 students in the first class and nine faculty members. It was a modest beginning, but the underlying idea was ambitious: people in this part of Missouri should have access to higher education without having to leave the region to find it.

That idea has always seemed particularly appropriate for Missouri Southern.

It was not founded as a distant academic enclave or as an institution intended primarily for people arriving from somewhere else. It grew out of Joplin and southwest Missouri. It belonged to the community before it belonged to the state.

By the 1960s, the little junior college had outgrown both its name and its ambitions. Jasper County voters created a college district in 1964, and the school acquired the Mission Hills property on the eastern edge of Joplin. The land had once been part of a private estate and dairy farm. Soon, classrooms, laboratories, a library, residence halls, and athletic facilities began replacing pasture.

Missouri Southern was learning to become something larger.

That process of becoming would continue for decades.

The institution developed into a four-year college. Enrollment grew. New programs appeared. Buildings multiplied across the old farm. By the time my parents arrived in the 1980s, Missouri Southern had become an established part of higher education in southwest Missouri, but it was still a relatively young institution.

My parents came here along two different paths.

My mother completed her degree in education. She became a teacher, and in doing so established a professional path that would eventually become part of my own life.

My father did not graduate.

He left school early because he had a young family to support and needed to work full time. That distinction matters to me. It would be easy to tell the family story entirely through diplomas: my mother graduated, I graduated, my brother graduated. But that would leave out one of the more important lessons contained in my father's experience.

Education exists within life, not outside of it.

People come to universities carrying obligations with them. Jobs, children, money, illness, family, and simple necessity all follow students into classrooms. Sometimes those obligations win. My father's education at Missouri Southern ended before he intended it to, but leaving college to support his family was not the absence of responsibility. It was responsibility taking another form.

So Missouri Southern entered my life before I ever became a student here.

It was part of my parents' story first.

I grew up knowing that my mother had gone to college and become a teacher. Higher education was therefore never entirely abstract to me. Neither was teaching. They were things adults I knew had actually done. A university was not simply a collection of buildings somewhere beyond childhood. It was part of the machinery by which people built lives.

Then, in 2001, Missouri Southern became mine.

I enrolled at Missouri Southern State College.

That word—College—matters because it would not remain there much longer.

When I arrived, Missouri Southern was once again in the middle of becoming something else. The institution had already developed a distinctive international mission and expanded far beyond the junior college it had once been. In 2003, while I was still a student, Missouri Southern State College became Missouri Southern State University.

I entered a college and graduated from a university.

At the time, I am not sure I understood how neatly that change would eventually fit into the story of my own life. Students are remarkably bad at recognizing historical moments while living through them. Institutional transformation is difficult to appreciate when you are more concerned with finding a parking space, making it to class, finishing an assignment, or calculating exactly how poorly you can perform on a final examination and still keep the grade you want.

The sign changed.

The name changed.

We kept going to class.

Only later did I begin to understand what the change represented. Missouri Southern was claiming a broader identity, and I was doing something similar.

I came here still largely formed by the world of my childhood. I left with a Bachelor of Science in Education and a minor in geography, prepared to begin the long process of discovering what being a teacher actually meant.

The education degree had an obvious influence. Teaching became my profession and eventually the central work of my adult life. What I did not fully understand at the time was how deeply geography would remain with me as well.

Geography taught me to care about place.

Not simply where something is, but why it is there. Why cities develop where they do. Why roads follow certain paths. Why boundaries matter. Why landscapes change. Why communities build particular institutions and what those institutions reveal about the people who created them.

I suspect that is part of the reason I travel the way I do now.

I cannot simply pass through a town without wondering how it came to exist. I cannot walk across a university campus without wanting to know why the buildings are arranged as they are. A stadium is never only a stadium. A highway is never only a highway. A museum, courthouse, neighborhood, bridge, or old railroad grade becomes an invitation to ask how people shaped a place and how the place, in turn, shaped them.

Some of that curiosity certainly existed before Missouri Southern.

But this is where it was given language.

This is where I learned to examine the world rather than simply move through it.

My brother followed me through Missouri Southern and graduated in 2009 with his own Bachelor of Science in Education.

By then, the connection between our family and the university had become difficult to ignore. Both of our parents had attended. My mother had earned her teaching degree here. I had earned mine. My brother earned his.

Three of us became teachers.

There are family traditions that announce themselves loudly. Others develop almost accidentally until, one day, you look backward and realize that a pattern has been forming for years.

Ours seems to have involved classrooms.

One of the great pleasures of my adult life came when my brother and I returned to Missouri Southern to teach for Upward Bound during the summer.

The geography of the campus had not changed much, but my place within it had.

I was no longer walking into a classroom wondering what someone intended to teach me. I was walking in responsible for teaching someone else.

That reversal remains one of my favorite parts of my relationship with Missouri Southern.

There is something wonderfully strange about returning to an institution that helped form you and discovering that you have been invited to participate in the forming of someone else. My brother and I, once students here ourselves, were now standing at the front of classrooms.

The school had become part of us, and for a little while we became part of the school.

That is why returning today feels different from visiting almost any other university.

I enjoy university campuses. I seek them out when I travel. They tell stories about communities, architecture, ambition, money, memory, and the peculiar human belief that if we put enough books and young people together in one place, something useful might happen.

But this campus does not require interpretation from a distance.

I know it too well.

Walking Missouri Southern means crossing several versions of my own life at once.

Somewhere here is the child who knew the school because his parents had attended.

Somewhere here is the eighteen-year-old who arrived in 2001 without any real understanding of how long six years could be.

Somewhere here is the education major preparing to become a teacher without yet knowing what teaching would ask of him.

Somewhere here is the geography student learning to pay closer attention to place.

Somewhere here is my brother making his own way through the same institution.

And somewhere here are the two of us, years later, returning as teachers.

Today there is another version: the alumnus returning for a football game after an absence much longer than he intended.

The football itself almost seems secondary.

What mattered was being here.

Universities inevitably change. Buildings appear. Departments move. Programs begin and end. Administrators come and go. Old spaces acquire new purposes. Students discover shortcuts across campus that earlier generations somehow failed to identify. Someone eventually renames something, which guarantees that alumni will stubbornly call it by the old name for another thirty years.

Missouri Southern has been especially good at changing names.

Joplin Junior College.

Missouri Southern State College.

Missouri Southern State University.

Each name marks a different stage in the life of the institution.

My own relationship with the place has accumulated names as well.

Son of former students.

Student.

Graduate.

Teacher.

Alumnus.

None entirely replaces the one before it.

That may be why I feel such affection for Missouri Southern. I do not remember it as one fixed place from one particular period of my life. It has accompanied my family across generations and accompanied me across identities.

My father's story here reminds me that education and life do not always follow the same timetable.

My mother's story reminds me that an education can become a vocation.

My brother's story reminds me that family traditions sometimes emerge without anyone formally declaring them.

And my own story reminds me how much can grow from a foundation laid quietly years before we understand what is being built upon it.

I went on from Missouri Southern to graduate school, eventually earning graduate degrees and a doctorate. Those institutions matter greatly to me. They sharpened my thinking, expanded my professional life, and opened possibilities I could not have imagined when I first arrived here.

But Missouri Southern is different.

This is where the foundation was poured.

Before the advanced degrees, before the professional titles, before nearly two decades in education, there was a young man walking this campus trying to learn how to become a teacher.

Before him, there was his mother doing much the same thing.

And beside that story was his father, who stepped away from college because a young family needed him more immediately than a degree did.

Perhaps that is why the history of Missouri Southern feels so intertwined with my own.

The institution began small and local. It grew. It changed. It took on new responsibilities. It became something larger without entirely abandoning what it had been.

So did we.

Today I came back for a football game.

I stayed, at least in my mind, for everything else.

For the college my parents knew.

For the university I watched emerge.

For the classrooms where I learned.

For the classrooms where I later taught.

And for the strange realization that so much of the life I eventually built began on an old dairy farm in Joplin, Missouri, at a school that was still learning, just as I was, what it intended to become.

Joplin Eagles at Carthage Tigers