Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Monday April 21 Minneapolis

Today’s itinerary, which thankfully did not start early so I could sleep in, was to explore Minneapolis and then go visit Augsburg University. We are staying in the theater district in downtown Minneapolis, which has a lot of cute buildings, but not a lot of people out and about. We walked a few blocks to the coffee shop my friend recommended, then to the water, and kept trying to figure out where all the people were. I showed Lucy how all the buildings downtown had bridges between them so that when it was very cold and snowy, you could get around without ever going outside. She was very skeptical about living in a place where you couldn’t go outside for a large portion of the year, and where even on a sunny Monday there were no people downtown. I remembered Minneapolis being a really cool city with a lot of people, and thought maybe I just wasn’t taking her to the right parts of Minneapolis. We looked up where the cool parts of Minneapolis were and the internet told us to go the Northeast Arts District, so we crossed a bridge to St. Paul and started heading that way. We came across a tea shop, and Lucy loves tea shops, so we stopped and had some tea. By the time we were done, we didn’t have time to go to the arts district, so we took the bus down to the University of Minnesota, which was on the way to to Augsburg, and where there was a Korean restaurant called Kimchi Tofu House, which was listed on some site with the best restaurants in Minneapolis. It was one of the most delicious meals we have ever had, and we decided that if nothing else, Minneapolis has great food. Then we took the bus to Augsburg.

What struck Lucy first at Augsburg is that the buildings are ugly. This is her first trip to Minneapolis, and she already dislikes the city, because all the trees are brown and dead, it is apparently so cold that the whole city is designed so you don’t have to go outside, and the architecture is ugly. Augsburg isn’t worse than the rest of Minneapolis, but it did fit her stereotype.

Augsburg University is not well known, and if you look it up you are more likely to find an unrelated university with the same name in Germany rather than the one in Minnesota. My friend from Minneapolis was very surprised that out of all the colleges in Minneapolis (and there are a lot of them), this is the one we decided to visit. I have only heard of it because I have a couple friends who work there, and did some research with one of them, Ben, on his class 15 years ago and got to interview his students and visit the school then. His students were incredible, and I loved the feeling of community and support in the department. It is a private school, but offers enough financial aid that it mostly caters to students from underprivileged backgrounds, and it is very diverse, which is something Lucy really values. My other friend who teaches there recently told me about how the whole university has a theme about food justice and the chemistry department has a kitchen that they use for classes on food chemistry but also classes in many other departments on food and religion and how food connects to many other topics, and they are always cooking foods from different cultures. That was the thing that made me think that Lucy would like Augsburg. And it’s a small college in a big city. In the afternoon we had meetings with individual professors, something we won’t do at other places, because I know two physics professors, and one of them offered to introduce us to a creative writing professor. All three of the faculty we met talked about how what they love about Augsburg is the community. We got a tour of the new science building, the chemistry kitchen, and the maker space, all of which seemed very cool. There was a student lounge for every department, and lots of little spaces for students to gather and study or hang out. The creative writing professor talked about the some of the classes they offer, and they sounded really cool.

We had a little bit of time between our meetings with professors and our evening info session and tour, but not enough time to go very far, so we decided to explore the neighborhood around Augsburg. I asked a couple people for advice about where to go, but nobody had any suggestions, so we headed south towards what looked like a park, and ended up walking under a freeway where they were doing construction with jackhammers, and through a neighborhood that had a lot of pawn shops and liquor stores. I felt like I was still failing at showing Lucy the nice parts of Minneapolis.

As we headed back through campus, we ran into some students making a fort out of branches that were lying around after the trees were trimmed. We stopped and talked to them, and they invited us to put a prayer or a wish on scrap of cloth and tie it to the fort, so we did.

At the info session, the director of admissions did a terrible job of selling the school and made Lucy skeptical of it, but then they had a panel of students and a communications professor who taught a mock class, and Lucy said the communications professor saved it and made her want to go there again and take her class. Then we had a tour.

One thing that stood out is that there are a lot of Muslim students at Augsburg, about 15% of students are Muslim, mostly East African immigrants. It is a Lutheran School, but not particularly religious. The donor for the new science building insisted that it have a chapel, but the chapel is mostly used by Muslim students for prayer. I have noticed a lot of visibly Muslim people throughout Minneapolis, as well as lots of immigrants from many places.

We had a lot of conversations about privilege during and after visiting Augsburg. It is not a prestigious university, and going there had a different feel than our visits to Barnard and Reed. The admissions director spent a lot of time reassuring the prospective students that they would be ok at college and people would be there to support them. Most of the students work while in college and only half live on campus, so it seemed like students were very busy and didn’t have as much time to just hang out. One person said that there wasn’t much student activism because students are too busy. Lucy felt guilty for wanting more of a campus feel where students live on campus and hang out, because she wants diversity of all kinds, including economic diversity, but she also wants the resources that come with more privilege. I talked about how there are standard rankings of how “good” colleges are, and many people are starting to question those rankings and say that they are mainly measuring the privilege of the students coming into the colleges, rather than the value the colleges themselves offer… Rich kids go to prestigious schools because they grew up with privileges that enable them to do the things that help you get into those schools, and they are successful in life because of those privileges, not because the prestigious schools actually add any value. A few years ago someone came up with a new metric for measuring how good a school is based on the value it adds - how much it is able to help students become better off than they were when they started. With this new metric, the ranking of schools is very different. The only prestigious school that still ranks high on the new ranking is Harvard, because they actually do a really good job of accepting a lot of students who don’t normally get into prestigious schools, and helping them succeed. I don’t know where Augsburg ranks on this metric, but I would guess it’s high. I’ve visited a lot of colleges because of my work, and what struck me about Augsburg is that it didn’t seem less resourced than more prestigious schools I’ve visited. The students came in with fewer resources, but the school had a beautiful new building filled with state of the art classrooms and equipment, and the professors seemed like some of the best professors I’ve met, much more so than professors at a lot of more prestigious schools that focus on research and not teaching.

The info session ended at 8pm, and we took the bus to what the map said was the Northeast Arts District, because we still needed dinner and we wanted to see a nice part of Minneapolis. It was dingy and dead and all the shops were closed at 9pm. We went to a Mexican restaurant because it was the only thing we could find that was open, and had a divine burrito and elote. Minneapolis has restaurants from so many different cultures because it has so many immigrants, and so far we are huge fans of the food.