But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29 (NIV)

Recently I spent a week in small-town central Illinois, helping to support my mother and arrange her affairs after the accidental death of my stepfather, who raised Belgian draft horses that he sold to the Amish community. He, like most in the area, was a blue-collar man, working with his hands to create a life for himself and my mom in the challenging economic reality of the region to which they’d only recently relocated. Once, it was relatively simple for someone with a high school education to make a living in the factories and farms of downstate Illinois; those days have passed, their memory fading like the day’s last light over the prairie.

The cities of Decatur, Mattoon, and Charleston and the surrounding countryside are struggling to stay afloat economically, and it was impossible for me to shake the sense that rescue for them would be long in coming, if ever arriving at all. The industrial jobs that once supported the economy have been lost to globalization and outsourcing, large agribusiness corporations have swallowed up independent farms, setting prices and dictating what and how to plant and harvest, and the small businesses that supported and depended upon the larger economic engines have largely disappeared, leaving deserted storefronts and rundown homes behind. If the jobs that once supported the region are not coming back, what hope is there for the people that remain?

Education is the only hope. Only an educated people can grasp and make sense of the geopolitical and economic forces that have swept through their communities and mount informed responses to them. Only an educated populace will elect and hold accountable lawmakers that will act in the people’s best interest. Only an educated people will be able to effectively re-create their towns and develop strategies to attract and keep new industries and investment. Education alone may not be enough, but it’s the crucial foundation upon which any hopes for reinvention and revitalization are dependent.

And it will have to be online education. The need is so pervasive, the cost to travel to centers of higher education so prohibitive, and the resources so limited that classroom education cannot be the solution for adult students, who must balance dreams for a better life in the future with the pressing demands of the here and now. A single mother of three working long days for minimum wage doesn’t have the money or time to travel an hour each way to attend a night class. A farmer whose schedule is dictated by the whims of weather or interrupted by illness or injury of his livestock can’t be expected to show up every Wednesday night at six. Both, however, can learn online, asynchronously and at a distance. Up until now, I’ve been an advocate for online learning mostly on a theoretical basis; what I saw and heard downstate convinced me that what we do is essential and will only become more so as the economy worsens and global competition increases.

At the memorial service for my stepfather the pastor spoke about the nobility of hard, manual labor. I think there’s nobility too in empowering ourselves and others through education. At DePaul we talk a lot about using higher education to lift up the disadvantaged. I’ve usually thought of those unfortunates as residing in some shadowy elsewhere, but they’re all around us, sometimes just outside the reach of our vision.

But we can expand our horizons online. Online in distant, isolated, small towns and farms students log in and become our close neighbors and broaden our university’s reach and mission. While questions of how to attract and bring more of them into our community of learners and how to make our education affordable to them must be answered, my experiences of the past week have convinced me that our mission can and should embrace and uplift an ever more diverse group over an ever widening region. Just over the horizon the light has faded for many small Midwestern towns and cities, filled with people for whom online learning could bring a new dawn. It’s imperative that we work to bring about that brighter day.