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Harvesting Life – Notes From a Provost of UIL (University of Integrative Learning)
by Renate Stendhal
My discovery of AIWP, a good dozen years ago, changed my life in un expected ways. I surrendered my MFCC therapy license and went on the spiritual path of counseling as a minister. A few years later I discovered UIL, also by chance – but was it by chance? Is it by chance that one brilliant man, Mel Suhd, created these two unique places of free, progressive thought and spiritual service? The moment I heard about a Ph.D. program that was not tailored according to some conventional Western canon, I pricked up my ears. A program that gives you credits, units, a degree... for reflecting on your life-long learning? An M.A. or Ph.D. that rewards your conscious awareness of your own path, of your personal choices? That rewards you for tayloring your essays and thesis to your own interests and passions?
In Europe, where I am from, nobody had ever heard of such a thing.
I had got a B.A. in literature in Germany and, in my forties, gone back to college in CA to earn an M.A. in psychology. I would never have wanted to get a traditional Ph.D. in psychology as I had no desire to be forced (and forcing myself) to learn something I did not want or need. Apart from being a minister, I am a writer and writing coach; I have always been an obsessive diary writer, in love with self-analysis: Mel Suhd must have had me in mind when he invented this university program!
I instantly enlisted and threw myself into the course work – writing essays. I had written many essays before, as a student, as a journalist, as a feminist commentator, but this was intrinsically different. I was looking back at my life in a way I had never looked before. The perspective opening up for me now was like a harvest - I was invited to walk through the garden of my life, to stop at particular trees I had planted, walk down this path (or impasse), gather fruit and flowers of insight into my basket and, proudly, bring it home.
In writing the thesis I made use of my learning to open a path into new terrain: I wrote about my work with lesbian couples, about my own 20-year-relationship, and forged a theory ( based on experience) about the compatibility of intimacy and sex. It’s hard to say which was the happier achievement: getting the work published as True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (North Atlantic Books), or seeing the letters behind my author’s name. The best part, however, was the lasting inspiration I felt being a student at UIL, talking to Mel, to the other Provosts, and deciding to become a Provost myself in order to help others find UIL and grasp the beautiful idea.
I now work with several Ph.D. students and relish the many colorful interconnections between my work as a counselor and writing coach and the tasks of “provosting.” Usually, counseling is not connected to writing; usually writing and editing are not so intensely connected to personal reflections on learning. UIL is the perfect connector, the hub of a wheel that ties together different disciplines in a oneness of purpose – integrating what we know from living our life.
As I am guiding students through the steps of their harvest I am surprised and touched by how different their approaches and movements are. While each of them is finding a unique way of thinking and writing about their lives, there is one thing they share: they still find it hard to believe that they will be officially rewarded with a degree for something that is so natural, so deeply personal, and so much fun.
I welcome new M.A. or Ph.D. students and offer help and inspiration as a writing coach.
UIL (University of Integrative Learning)(www.aiwp.org/university.asp)
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