Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with scattered showers and a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:29 and sunset is 8:14 for 14 hours 45 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of Monte Cassino ends in an Allied victory.
On Saturday, more than eighteen hundred students were graduated from UW-Whitewater. It was a pleasure to attend the afternoon ceremony. That ceremony was a heartfelt mixture of traditional and modern. Quite moving, from beginning to end. (Having attended many graduations over a lifetime, UW-Whitewater’s Saturday ceremony was easily among my favorites, including those in which I was graduated.)
The university has a marketing campaign, sensibly, promoting the success of its graduates in being hired before graduation. This libertarian blogger would never contend against participation in the marketplace, most broadly understood. It is within a broadly conceived marketplace that voluntary and productive relationships are formed. The success of the individual, and from her or him the community, comes through free and voluntary associations with other individuals.
Yet, while the university’s marketing campaign is sound both practically and in principle, there is another vital question to consider.
A second question presents itself to this community: not about the employment of these graduates before graduation, but instead about their lives after graduation.
This question is a Whitewater concern, a community concern. Look around, and one sees that despite ample land this community has not built, has not fostered, has not created for some of these graduates a lifelong role in the city. We’ve been quite good at building temporary (and sometimes dilapidated) private accommodations for those attending UW-Whitewater. A few private men have been enriched through their financial relationship to our public university.
Whitewater is more than a few private men. She is a city not of fifteen, but of fifteen thousand.
This beautiful city would be more so, far more so, if we would offer in the next generation more than we have done over the last two generations. If these graduates are talented (they are), and if these graduates are energetic (they are), then we have every reason to offer today’s graduates a place as lifelong residents.
If we do so, then Whitewater will have achieved the very best marketplace transaction, the most successful marketing and communications: lifelong membership of new graduates in a beautiful community that preserves its beauty and increases its prosperity through the participation of those very graduates.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
‘Smile’ spacecraft prepped for launch to study solar wind: