With less than a month to go before the post-9/11 Montgomery G.I. Bill signed into law last year comes into effect, schools are bracing themselves for the rush of new Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that will soon become members of academic communities across the country. In fact, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that the number of veterans enrolled will jump 25% to 460,000, up from 354,000 last year. While the bill grants an unprecedented number of benefits to modern-era veterans, some have been concerned about those veterans’, many of whom who’ve experienced months of combat, ability to cope in the relatively low-stress environment of the university.
Enter John Schupp, an ambitious chemistry professor at Cleveland State University. Schupp was able to identify a recurring problem amongst his veteran students; a number of the veterans that chose to use their G.I. Bill benefits had difficulty fitting in and adjusting to their new lives on college campuses:
Many of them will encounter a classroom culture shock that can leave them agitated.
Ask Colin Closs, a former Fort Campbell soldier studying at Cleveland State University in Ohio, what bothers him most about how veterans are treated on campus and he lists strange and sometimes rude questions people have asked.
“Was it hot?”
“Were you always in a tent?”
“Did you ever kill anybody?”
Closs benefited this past school year from a program at Cleveland State started in 2007 by chemistry professor John Schupp to form some freshman-level classes with all veterans. Schupp’s idea is to keep the military men and women together as a unit so they can support and motivate each other.
The University of Arizona adopted his program last year and schools in at least a dozen states are working on programs modeled on Cleveland State.
Closs said after leaving the military, he had trouble interacting with people who don’t understand his wartime experiences. But when he takes classes with other veterans, they can talk about problems they may have, whether its educational or personal.
“It’s like the VFW hall without the alcohol,” Closs said.
The particularities of the program aren’t complicated. Veterans take history, math, biology and chemistry classes together during their Freshman year, helping them establish a social network that potentially making adaption on campus and eventually graduating much easier.
Admittedly, Schupp had an uphill battle to get the program, called SERV, or Supportive Education for the Returning Veteran, off the ground. The few classes he was able to initially get together were poorly attended, creating somewhat of a financial liability for the school. But officials bit on the proposal, and it eventually became successful enough that it’s now it’s being adopted all over the country.
I personally think this is a great idea. And it’s not without precedent either. Organizations like The Posse Foundation have successfully taken students from similar, albeit diverse, backgrounds, nurtured their leadership and organizational skills, and sent them together to schools across the country, helping fulfill their academic and social potential.
Even our leaders are starting to catch on. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown first introduced the idea to capitalize on the program in the last Congress, but it gained little traction. But recently, in the House, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) has proposed SERV Act legislation which would provide grants to schools that implemented programs like this.
Hopefully this legislation will be able to ride the wave of pro-veteran sentiment that Congress has taken a liking to lately. I mean, it took them long enough to update the G.I. Bill in the first place, but I digress.
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