UAA a good investment in tight times

In 1985, we bought a house. We kept the condo we’d been living in, thinking that it would appreciate in value. We were wrong. While the recession raged, I had two children and opted out of practicing law to stay home with them. I took part-time writing jobs, happy to no longer be doing confrontational and stressful trial work. My husband, a solo practitioner, was just developing his mediation practice. We felt the pinch.

While raising children in a house that had lost a good percentage of its value, with a condo that had lost even more, I invested in myself and got a master’s degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage in creative nonfiction. I paid full freight for every upper division class, determined to earn a living by writing.

Twenty years earlier, that idea hadn’t seemed very pragmatic, which is how I ended up at law school trudging through classes in property and contract law. We weren’t wealthy, but my parents considered the degree an investment in my future happiness and ability to support myself. I paid for the degree that helped me figure out how best to use the law degree.

By the time my eldest child headed outside to college, I was in a good position to help support our family doing something I really enjoyed, writing. I’ve edited a monthly arts journal and the Alaska Justice Forum, directed communications for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, or ISER, and been communications director and chief of staff for two UAA chancellors. In 2017, the University of Alaska Press published my book, “The Biggest Damned Hat, Tales from Alaska’s Territorial Lawyers and Judges.”

When people plan for their future careers, it’s impossible to know how they will unfold. In Alaska, with its small population and limited opportunities, it’s even more unpredictable. UAA gave me time and support to develop new skills and then put them to use to help people. Though I worked in communications much of my time at UAA, I was often frustrated by the disconnect between the depth of contributions the university makes to our state and the perception of it as a “community college” or administration-heavy academic institution. People nod and are impressed when they hear statistics about providing a well-educated workforce, stories about student and faculty achievement, as well as incredible partnerships with the community, but still in the back of many minds is this idea that there isn’t a world-class university in Anchorage.

I’ve come to believe that UAA is like our state: hard to explain to people Outside. It’s in the middle of Anchorage on a campus that is beautiful, yet it’s not well-integrated into the city. When you visit, you see the classroom, the theater, the sports arena or the bridge crossing Providence Drive. Maybe you take a course, graduate with a degree, work in the mail room, adjunct teach or have friends who are faculty members. Still, it is impossible to comprehend the impact of this institution on our community, the impact that each professor has on each student, the research that guides and changes lives, or the incredibly hard work of governing an institution composed of highly educated and opinionated people.

Education is the way we improve our lives, how we step back and assess our next steps for future growth, then take them.

I’ve been incredibly lucky — I got to see UAA when it was still on the upswing. I hope that I’ll get to see that again in my lifetime.

Pamela Cravez is a writer and lawyer who received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts, one of the programs slated for deletion at UAA.

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