The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. Happy New Year! This week I explore what the biennial firing of a kiln in rural Minnesota says about the connections between colleges and communities and between art and blue-collar work.

A Kind of Barn-Raising

For the first column of 2025, I am taking us back a few months to the third week of October, to a unique event at Saint John’s University showcasing the enduring role colleges can play as community connectors. About every two years at this Benedictine college in rural central Minnesota, the master potter Richard Bresnahan and the artists associated with him organize the firing of the Johanna Kiln, the largest wood-fired kiln in North America. In 2008, I first met Bresnahan, the university’s artist in residence, and attended the 10th firing, which I later wrote about for The Chronicle. I have attended all but one firing since.

It takes a crew of about 50 volunteers to feed wood into the kiln 24 hours a day over 10 days, plus additional people to cook food for the stokers, run errands, and document the event, which feels something like an artists’ salon mixed with a Midwestern family reunion. The 12,000 pieces of pottery within the kiln are only one element of the art created here. The other element is the gathering itself: Sitting by the fire between stokes, or around the irori in the pottery studio, the attending academics, potters, farmers, engineers, and other locals form bonds that cut across class lines and backgrounds — just as Bresnahan had intended. The firing is meant to be something like a community barn-raising for a society that has long given up raising barns together.

This gathering at Saint John’s has always been interesting to me, because it is one of those zones where cultural and academic ideas mesh beautifully with practical skills and handcraft. Over the years, I’ve argued that the work of head and hand — or as the Benedictines would put it, ora et labora — are not so distant. But in education, we often talk about these worlds separately, as in “career and technical education” versus “college for all.” The 87-foot-long Johanna Kiln — cobbled together in part from salvaged brick, stone, and metal — could never have been realized without a community of people with practical skills.

A ‘Dirty Trade’

On my first night on the fire team, I sat with Mike Guggenberger, whom I’ve gotten to know at the kiln firing over the years, talking about the gaps between the trades and college. Guggenberger, a stone mason who is himself built like a granite boulder, has long been helping Bresnahan realize some of his artistic endeavors. Guggenberger wasn’t the best high-school student, as he readily admits, but put a tool in his hands and he can do pretty much anything: pour concrete, nail framing, run plumbing, you name it. Guggenberger provided much of the technical advice and heavy equipment that allowed Bresnahan and a community of artists to create a sculpture called Kura: Prophetic Messenger, a seed vault that stands outside the university library as a statement about agriculture, community, climate change, and a human species heading toward planetary limits.

Now approaching retirement, Guggenberger recalls getting degrading comments for having grown up on a farm and choosing to go into blue-collar work, but he’s come to see it as a source of power. When Guggenberger’s grandson was 12, he gave the boy a 1988 pickup truck that had been hanging around and told him that they would tear it apart, bolt by bolt, and put it back together. They did just that for the next several years. “The day we fired it up, we both had tears in our eyes,” he said. “I was so happy that he had learned this process.”

Guggenberger had learned about engines the same way, starting at six years old, when his father wheeled the lawnmower out of the garage and said the two of them were going to fix it. Young Guggenberger complained that the mower worked perfectly fine. “Well, I anticipate that when we get done, it’ll be better,” Guggenberger recalls his father’s reply. “And yeah, we tore it down, put it back together, and it was better.”

Consider this: In the language of higher ed, people whose parents did not go to college are considered “first generation,” a label with some negative assumptions implied. But I don’t know of an analogous label for the kids of college-educated parents who are generations away from any knowledge about engines, carpentry, farming, or the other professional skills that make possible the essential activities of the economy and everyday life — or that could provide a head start on a possible career and add depth to an academic degree.

This isn’t just sentimentality about old-fashioned skills, but a hidden element of work-force training and the bedrock capabilities of the nation. During the week of the firing, Guggenberger and I met up with Michael Gohman, the third-generation president of a major Midwest construction firm, W. Gohman Construction. We had lunch at an upscale Southern-style restaurant in bustling downtown St. Joseph, across the street from the College of Saint Benedict. Gohman had acquired Guggenberger’s stone-masonry company, and his life story had similar beginnings: He’d started working with his grandfather when he was 12 years old, where he learned construction basics. After high school, he went to the University of Minnesota at Duluth, intending to major in pre-med, but he got tired of the science courses and switched to business. His academic training and his hands-on work — both before and after his time at college — helped prepare him to take over the company in 2006.

Gohman says that his company historically recruited farm kids, but as farm families have shrunk, “that doesn’t work as a feeder system anymore,” he says. Many of the applicants now are young men who took a run at college but hated it, racked up some debt, and want to work to pay it off — but have little intention of staying in construction long-term. Their lack of exposure to the hazards of tools and job sites means they’re more prone to accidents and injury, so the company needs to spend more time and resources training them.

Not only are there fewer people to recruit, says Gohman, but they also have “no pre-existing knowledge in terms of how to do the job, how to be safe, how to even work a job” — like, how to show up at the job site at 7 a.m., ready to go. Gohman evangelizes about the trades at Minnesota high schools as an alternative to college, but even with all the positive press for apprenticeships and blue-collar work, he still gets pushback from parents. “The parents are like, ‘No, I want you to go to college. You shouldn’t work in some dirty trade.’”

We stepped out onto the sidewalk after lunch, along a short main street lined with shops and restaurants, and Gohman and Guggenberger remarked that tiny St. Joseph is often busier at night than downtown St. Cloud, only eight miles away. Surely, that’s a result of the presence of the colleges, we pondered. But then we realized St. Cloud also has a state university, so the magic that draws people in has to be something else.

Artists as Bridge

In a college town in a rural area, town and gown can feel very separate sometimes, but a synergy can form around culture and art. Saint John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict were both established by the Order of Saint Benedict, which has a tradition of valuing both manual labor and handcraft, like woodworking, tapestries, architecture, stained glass, and more. Through their support for Bresnahan and others, the Benedictines helped develop a community of artists in the area, which includes a potty-mouthed printmaker in St. Joseph who got attention last month from the Star Tribune as that “small Minnesota town’s soul.” The presence of those artists contributes to the liveliness of the community that Gohman and Guggenberger have noticed.

In higher ed, engineering is one of the disciplines that spans the gap between academic and blue-collar worlds. But artists do, too. Artists often have to learn manual skills — not just to create their art but to create their lives. Bresnahan has taught his apprentices the value of building their own studios, kilns, and even homes from castoff and repurposed materials, to stay out of debt and allow them freedom to make art.

And compared to kids who go into the trades, students who choose art catch even more flak from family and friends — what are you going to do with that?

“Choosing art is about choosing a bigger life, saying I recognize values other than just fear and money, making space in your life almost as an act of defiance,” says Anne Meyer, who apprenticed with Bresnahan from 2004 to 2006, and now runs one of the shifts during the firing. She grew up on a farm in St. Joseph, went to college at the University of Minnesota at Morris, then returned to her family farm to establish a home and pottery studio. She is turning the property into a community art space, seeing the colleges as potential partners in that project. Much like her teacher Bresnahan, she created her own version of a barn-raising: She started a choir of local farmers and families, who can create the harmonies only when they come together.

“One of the reasons that I’m an artist is because artists have been allowed this flexibility to glide between worlds that have sometimes set themselves as opposed, such as the educated world and the blue-collar world,” she says. Artists, she says, are “interlopers” who are constantly “code switching” between the language of the blue collar and the academic, or white collar — bridging the two sides. Reaching over to the world of hands-on people is straightforward, she says: “You simply show up willing to do the work. And then in doing the work — or in showing what you can do, what skills you’ve earned by putting in the time yourself to earn them — then you’re almost allowed a seat at the table.”

In a college town, that’s where the resentments and gaps arise, says Meyer — because in the end, these divisions in human knowledge are really just about class. The academics are often cast as the “dreamers,” while the blue-collar “doers” are expected to realize the dream, without valued input.

“We do both sides a grave disservice,” she says. Of course, this arrangement denies the doers the opportunity to dream, but the dreamers also miss out on something Saint Benedict understood with his ora et labora, or prayer and work — that mind and muscle work together.

“The two are not separate at all — they interrelate,” Meyer says. Just ask any potter who has spent hours at a wheel, throwing identical cup after cup, how the creative part of the brain takes flight. “It probably has a corollary to why people meditate and the layers of our brains. When you spend enough time in that space occupying your hands or your body doing something productive, it can open a door to access a deeper layer of your mind.”

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Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at scott.carlson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. Follow me on LinkedIn.

My forthcoming book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), is available for pre-order.