Zack Stoycoff
Staff Reporter
CLAREMORE —
Rogers State University has been in the news a lot lately. New buildings. National honors. High-profile graduates.
And it’s only been 10 years — 10 years exactly, this month — since RSU began offering four-year degrees.
But the real RSU, the one responsible for it all, is hidden behind rows of roll-on grass, new walls and paint fumes.
It’s tucked between moving boxes and windows barely old enough to have seen a squirt of Windex. Behind unsorted pencils, books and folders. Stacks of papers yet to be filed.
In fact, you really have to scour the university’s new Baird Hall classroom building — fresh from its two-year reconstruction — before you find it.
I graduated from RSU in May with a Liberal Arts degree in spite of assurances that I could have made it in some bigger school with a degree more specific to my journalistic career goals.
Probably. Maybe. If I do say so myself.
But I lost that idea well before RSU earned its latest recognition — being named one of the best regional colleges in the west by U.S. News and World Report’s 2011 college guide.
That informal but fairly prestigious study rates colleges by a number of categories, including the average graduation rate, class sizes, the percentage of faculty with the highest degrees offered in their field, student reviews and alumni contribution rate.
Why does RSU excel in those categories?
Everyone knows Claremore is lucky enough to have the only place to get a traditional public college experience in the Tulsa area. And it seemed momentous enough when RSU became a four-year university in August 2000.
But now it’s taking the next step.
If you were to scour Baird Hall to find what’s behind it all, you might first bump into students with loftier goals for their education than Claremore’s small-fries college — like me of four years ago.
But students tend to forget that when professors stay after class to walk them through a low grade.
They lose that idea when every professor in the department asks by name how they’re doing during a casual meeting in the hallway. And when professors do so when they’re buried in the shadows of paperwork, committee meetings, class schedules and signing paychecks barely worth the value of one day of their graduate studies.
You get the idea.
Major employers across the state have been hiring RSU graduates for years, and the university’s academic standards have grown with its athletic programs and classroom space.
But the real RSU stands at classroom podiums, serves on more extracurricular committees than you can fit in a single breath and spends hours — and hours — of face-to-face time with students.
There’s nothing that contributes more to the quality of education at RSU than its professors.
That’s where RSU stands above every major university in the state, partly because professors at larger universities, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma included, double as researchers who bring money to the school and prestige to their résumés.
RSU professors are teachers first. After that, they’re cheerleaders. They’re the ones standing in the front of the line when students graduate, and the first ones celebrating when students land a job.
That’s the real RSU.
• Email Zack Stoycoff at zstoycoff@claremoreprogress.com
