Going Off Your Rocker As A Rational Choice

This is a sequel to my Simon Says - Malaise post.  I actually tried to write a different sequel first, about the next steps in fully engaging in the virtual civil war with the Republicans, for which I sketched some preliminary ideas in that Simon Says post. But I found myself with a full case of writer's block.  I questioned whether I had sufficient expertise to write such a post in a convincing way.  The last time I taught, fall 2019, I supposedly did have some expertise in college teaching, I found my ability to influence student learning quite limited.  Consequently, it seemed pure hubris on my part to expect stronger results in another domain where the expertise is lacking. Certainly, I have many speculations about the topic, each of which make sense to me.  But to persuade others you need more than speculation. So, for now I'm putting that post aside.

Instead, I'm going to focus on the other option in the earlier post, complete disengagement from politics and the news.  Do you really need to go off your rocker to completely disengage?  While I don't want to give my punchline just yet, I can provide a partial answer here.  For certain types of people this is how it's done.  I'm one of those.  For others who aren't one of these types, tuning out in this way may be much harder.  If so, there is less to commend it as a course of action.  The kibitzing about the politics has become a form of social interaction.  In this age of Covid, maybe it is a necessary way to interact with friends.  To the extent that somebody needs to feel socially connected as a way of being whole, tuning out then comes at too high a price to the psyche.

What I intend to do here is to bring in a set of disparate sources and then try to make sense of them when taken together.  Let me begin with this opinion piece, Taking the Magic Out of Magic Mushrooms.  The piece is about using what we used to call hallucinogenic drugs, or their synthetic substitutes, to combat depression.  It's an interesting read. 

While reading this piece, I asked myself whether I would like to take some magic mushrooms now, if I were provided the opportunity to do so.  At this time, I'm undecided on the answer to that question.  Certainly, there is curiosity about what would happen.  But with the various aches and pains I have now as well as my concerns about U.S. politics and Covid, my personal equilibrium is more fragile than I would like and I'm wary of upsetting it.   The piece did cause me to reflect about depression, as I've had prior experience with it during adolescence, once in high school, then again in college.

Indeed, over the years I've written several posts about depression, some which might still be worth reading.  This one, written soon after Robin Williams committed suicide, got some appreciative comments from Facebook friends, Depression in Performing Artists as a Reflection on Ourselves.  In my experience there clearly was a linkage between depression and "environmental factors", with depression resulting from feeling trapped with no way out. The question then is how to prevent this from happening, if at all possible or to find a way out, however unlikely.  This next one was written after having a bad experience in teaching during fall 2016, where I also had a bad experience the previous fall. (I was only teaching one course a year in retirement.)  It was beginning to look like the new normal and that was getting me down, as I put a lot of energy and attention into the teaching.  While ultimately I didn't fall into depression, and I taught again in fall 2017 and fall 2019, I needed to get my head oriented to something entirely different - Putting My Brain In Mothballs.  This last one I wrote in spring 2020, so after the pandemic had started and after reading many pieces about it causing anxiety and depression in students.  I had actually seen that in my students during fall 2019.  The situation was bad ahead of time.  Clearly the pandemic made it much worse.  I thought that people with more experience who had depression in the past and learned coping skills to ward it off should make those overt to current students.  So I wrote,  Fending Off Depression - My Take.

Now I want to move on and consider when the environmental factors are mainly one's own health, but for the moment not consider prior mental health illness.  I will do that below.  Our healthcare system seems to provide at least some monitoring of a patient's potential depression, while being treated for chronic illness and/or after the patient has reached a certain age.  The image below is taken from the healthcare portal my provider uses, under the tab labelled Preventative Care.  

I find it reassuring to see the flu vaccine there.  Some preventative care is pretty ordinary stuff.  I'm not sure what the Annual Fall Assessment is supposed to be.  I do have an annual checkup with my primary care physician, usually around my birthday in January, though as of late he has been hard to schedule and it has been later than that.  I was surprised when I saw the Annual Depression Screening, the first time I saw it.  When I clicked it to find out about the previously done dates, I learned that those were visits to my oncologist.  I received radiation treatment for prostate cancer in 2018.  Since then we have been in monitoring mode, to make sure the cancer is not returning.  At first, the visits were every three months.  I have since "graduated" to a visit every six months.  I have such a visit next week.

During treatment, which was daily on weekdays, for a total of 44 treatments, I would see the doctor on Wednesday after the treatment was over.  Between those a nurse would do a quick examination of vitals and related matters. As part of the examination I would be asked - are you depressed?  I came up with this pat response.  Of course I'm depressed.  Everybody in America is depressed, but it's politics that's the cause not the cancer.  Sometimes the techs who would administer the radiation treatment would ask me the question as we walked from the waiting room to the room that had the Tomography machine.  Over time they learned that I was a Yankees fan.  After the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs, I said I was really depressed.  Everybody got a good laugh.  

Prostate cancer itself, especially when it has been detected early, should not be a cause of depression.  It is eminently treatable, with a high likelihood of remission. And the symptoms are comparatively mild - fatigue during the day that is remedied with a nap and having to go to the bathroom more frequently to pee. The latter persists after treatment and as getting up at night to go to the bathroom becomes routine, a sound sleep is harder to come by so the fatigue persists as well for that reason.  But an MRI done prior to treatment suggested there might be other cancer spots outside of the prostate. That the cancer might have spread to nearby bone did a number on my head.  For the first time in my life, I seriously contemplated my own mortality and there is no doubt I became very anxious about my health.   Coupled with that was the insurance company refusing to pay for more sophisticated testing that would diagnose what was really going on.  I became frustrated by that as the doctor seemed frustrated as well.  

Ultimately, it was the right decision for the insurance company to turn down these advanced tests. It encouraged my doctor to consult with a different radiologist than the one who had initially read the MRI.  Apparently, a spot with arthritis can show up in an MRI and look much like a spot with cancer, especially to the untutored eye. One has to take a more holistic view of the patient's health to get an accurate reading. In my case what the MRI and a subsequent bone scan showed is that I am riddled with arthritis in a variety of locations in my body, but the cancer itself was contained within the prostate. The awareness of the true situation prevented depression from ensuing, even if from time to time when the arthritis is bad I start to feel sorry for myself and then can be self-indulgent.  When the more severe pain passes, I go back to being me as I ordinarily am.

Let me turn to prior mental health issues as a potential cause of depression, and with that offer up a warning both about labels with mental illness and with causality.  (Does mental illness cause depression or does depression cause mental illness?)  Perhaps the most famous such case is that of Vincent Van Gogh.  I found the Irving Stone book, Lust for Life, a good read.  Though it is historical fiction, it is based on the letters Vincent wrote to his brother Theo.  The movie based on the book is also not bad.  When I was a kid I liked Kirk Douglas as an actor.  As an adult I grew into thinking of the Douglas approach as over-acting.  In the role of Vincent Van Gogh, however, the Douglas style works as it helps to convey the intensity in Van Gogh's personality, even prior to any of his manic episodes. Van Gogh was said to have epilepsy, though in doing a Google search I saw that view contested, with his behavior better explained by chronic malnutrition and excessive drinking.  Who knows?  Van Gogh ultimately committed suicide. Before that, he surely was experiencing some kind of mental pain. 

Another famous case is that of John Nash.  Sylvia Nasar's book, A Beautiful Mind, is worthwhile reading and I believe gives a good picture of what Nash was really like. In contrast, the movie version while entertaining seemed entirely other than the book, in part because it got caught up in finding a way to externalize Nash's hallucinations.  Nash had schizophrenia.  The book talks about linkages between schizophrenia and creativity, particularly among mathematicians.  When I was a graduate student at Northwestern in economics, I remember a presentation by the game theorist Lloyd Shapley, not for the content of the talk but because his physical presence struck me as that of somebody who was truly crazy.  Maybe he didn't get much sleep the night before or perhaps there was some other benign explanation for what I saw.  I know nothing of Shapley's personal life, so can't really comment about the cause here.  Nonetheless, this sense of linkage between extreme creativity and mental illness survives in present day thinking and should be noted. Getting back to Nash, after his schizophrenia diagnosis, Nash was put on medication that held the disease in check.  But the meds also suppressed his creativity, which gave him a reason for not taking the pills.  Was this tension between creativity and living with a sense of normalcy a source of depression?  Perhaps it was.  Nash died in a car accident, where he was a passenger. There is no information about his mental state in that cause of death. 

There is some history of mental illness in my family on my mother's side.  In the early 1930s, my grandfather jumped out of the window of their apartment in Berlin, an attempted suicide.  He survived this.  (He and my grandmother later died in a concentration camp.)  To explain why he did this, my mother said he had a premonition that Hitler was coming.  Whether this premonition itself was due entirely to external causes or, instead, if my grandfather was "crazy" in some way is impossible to know now. 

My mother herself had a very strong personality.  I described her as something of a bulldozer in this post. Growing up, I attributed much of how she went about things to having been an adolescent in Nazi Germany.  It didn't occur to me at the time that there might be genetic explanations for her behavior.  Sometime later, when our younger son was in daycare, he got tested and then diagnosed with a mild form of autism, Asperger's Syndrome if you will. When I read up a little on that, particularly the controlling behaviors that results from an inability to adjust to changing environments, I thought it described my mom quite well.  That felt like a revelation.  Further, though I don't believe I'm controlling in this same way, I did exhibit some of the symptoms as a teen.  When I received counseling for my depression in tenth grade, much time was spent on getting me to make good eye contact with the counselor. Beforehand, I would shy away from that, particularly when with authority figures I didn't otherwise know. It was noticeable.  My brother reported remembering me doing that in a recent family Zoom call.  The counseling was effective that way.  Whether it also helped me inwardly with the causes for the behavior I'm still unsure of that, 50+ years later.  Nonetheless, I'm fairly certain that I still have Autism Spectrum Disorder, though perhaps a high functioning variety. 

While it might not be as highly regarded among research psychologists, Myers-Briggs typing remains popular among management consultants and those who have received such consultation.  I was tested back in 2003 prior to attending the Frye Leadership Institute and learned that my type is INTP.   Is there some correlation between being this type and having Asperger's?  I would guess there is, though perhaps it would be better to have all the NT types aggregated before considering this correlation.  The following is from a post called Going Against Type:

Sir Ken Robinson in this delightful and provocative Ted Talk called Do schools kill creativity? says that professors are unlike their students in that the professors live in their minds while their students live in the real world.  (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?)  Professors tend to teach the subject matter and not individualize their content depending on the student's personality type.  In so doing, are they actually targeting their own personality type (which is very likely to be NT)?  If so, what of the poor students who are unlucky enough to take the course though they are SFs? 

A bit earlier I wrote a post call The Professor Mind, which aimed at giving more flesh to Ken Robinson's description of the professor.  Some of the post is taken up with the nature of intellectual inquiry and then getting stuck in the process.  Getting stuck is a normal thing.  So, one who lives the life of the mind needs to develop methods for getting unstuck.  There is a wonderful book, though I found it hard to penetrate initially, called On Not Being Able to Paint.  The author, Marion Milner, makes the argument (perhaps only implicitly) that we rely too much on our rational selves in our thinking.  We need our subconscious selves to be active to release our creativity.  The rational self often blocks that out. This is why sleeping on a problem where you are stuck can possibly reveal new and better approaches to problem solving after you awaken.  The dreaming attacks the problem in ways that can't be done while awake.  Milner doesn't talk about drugs inducing this dream state, but if the reader goes back to consider the Magic Mushrooms piece, perhaps the good consequences about curing depression result from this release of the subconscious self.  Alternatively, perhaps it is possible that those who live the life of the mind become depressed when working on a problem they find important only to get stuck and then finding no way to get unstuck.  The simple answer - work on some other problem - has then become unacceptable because the problem itself is too compelling.

I want to make the argument personal again.  I'll do this by juxtaposing the consequences of aging on the professor mind.  At the time I attended the Frye Institute I was 48, a good deal older than many of the others, who were in their early to mid 30's.  It was noticeable to me how much mentally quicker they were. Though I was their age in a pre-Internet world, so didn't have all the varied information sources coming at me in way where I needed to make sense of it all, I did recall to an even earlier time in life - high school - where I surely was mentally quick.  This sort of slowing down over time is likely inevitable.  Nonetheless, I found it worrisome when at Frye, then somewhat humbling after that.  Some years later, I can't remember how many now, the senior moments started to happen.  It is frustrating to feel that you know something, but can't recall the name or the face, or whatever else you are trying to remember.  What comes next in this dimension?

My mother had Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia.  That last five years of her life, she couldn't recognize me when I went to visit her in Boca Raton.  I later learned from my brother, who is an MD, that she actually showed signs of dementia more than 10 years earlier, but perhaps her doctors couldn't separate out the consequences of that versus her reaction to the strong medication she was on.  Since my prostate cancer, I've feared that I would get an early onset of dementia. Recently, I did some Google searching to learn there is a positive correlation between autism and dementia.  Likewise, I'd suspect such a correlation between the professor mind and dementia.

Back in the 1980s when I was doing economic theory full time, there was a tee shirt that graduate students studying economic theory would wear - Do You Live In Your Model?  The insight in that question is that you needed to mentally occupy your model for a sustained period of time, perhaps several months, before fully understanding the implications of the model and then being able to write up the results from that.  Of course, even with living in your model there still was the practical reality of day-to-day life.  For that you needed to live in the real world.  So it was necessary to be able to mentally transition between the two.  Time of day was largely the determinant of which world you'd occupy, though there are certain real-world tasks, washing the dishes is my canonical example, that may be done autonomously in which case that is time that can be devoted to living in your model. 

When in the mid 1990s I gradually switched careers, ultimately to become an administrator for online learning on campus, there was some change in the living-in-the-model notion but maybe not as much as one might guess.  To the extent that much of the job was talking one-on-one with other people on campus who were engaged with online learning in some capacity, it was a delightful alternative to pondering deeply (or otherwise) while sitting in my office.  Much less satisfying were the various committee meetings or staff meetings that I had to attend and ditto for the myriad meetings with vendors. Given this, it is perhaps surprising that I flourished in group interaction online, which was opt in by the participants, who had a substantial prior interest in online learning.  (Further, it was purely asynchronous and completely text-based, so unlike much group interaction now.) It seemed I was a natural for this sort of communication.  Indeed, I probably got invited to work in SCALE by how others perceived my participation in the discussion group held in FirstClass. At the time, with very young kids at home, this activity also served as a proxy for a social life with adult interaction. 

While this paper was written before all of us were using the Internet, I've found that Kenneth Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" very useful in categorizing the relationship between thinking and communication.  It is helpful to consider it all as conversation. Reflective thinking is then internalized conversation while writing is externalized conversation.  And there is an interplay between the pieces so that all the pieces become part of one larger conversation. In this way, instead of living in my model, what I did when producing research in economic theory, as a writer I am trying to produce a coherent narrative for a blog post such as this one, with most of the work done in what Donald Murray called prewriting.  

Yet as I've gotten older this has become more difficult for me.  Either my skills have deteriorated with age, or I choose topics that are too ambitious for me to make an interesting contribution, or some combination of the two.  As of late, I find I get more satisfaction from reading fiction.  There is a narrative that plays out.  While the true creator is the writer, the reader can be thought of as a co-creator.  There is no coherent narrative unless the reader makes sense of it all.   Most recently I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I found on my son's bookshelf.  (He must have taken a course in Russian literature to fulfill a gen ed requirement.)  This was a paperback version that I could read while sitting away from the computer.  I've been making a conscious effort to spend more of my day offline, if I can.  The time spent doing that is enjoyable.

* * * * *

With all of this as background, I'm now ready to discuss the issue to which going off your rocker might provide the solution, at least for people with Asperger's or like descriptors that I considered above. The issue is how our national politics is impacting my mental health. Several times a day I find myself in what I'd call a daydream rage.  Instead of the charm of a Walter Mitty, I find my mental projection wanting to take a baseball bat and swatting the head of certain Supreme Court Justices and Members of Congress. I have other manifestations of this sort, there is no need to elaborate about them here, that together occur several times a day.  If I could willfully block them out, say by reading good fiction, there wouldn't be a problem. I could control the matter in that way.  

But I found that even when in the midst of reading The Master and Margarita these rages would occur.  Part of this is that my arthritis requires me to change my sitting position now and then and in the interlude there is time for other thoughts outside of the reading.  The other part is that after years of sitting in front of a computer screen for many hours a day, my ability to focus on one source of information and not search for other bits - check Facebook or email, etc. - is not nearly as strong as it used to be.  Maybe I can train myself to concentrate better.  But perhaps not.  And if not, these recurrent rages could become a long-term issue for me. 

I want to note that normal daydreams are essential and part of the productive process in generating a piece of writing or in any other creative activity. So, a daydream rage conceivably could be productive as well, as prelude to the Darwinian fight response.  But if repeatedly there is no actual fighting, only expressions of rage, and no apparent way to stop those expressions, then there would seem to be cause to fall into a deep depression. It is fear of that possibility that makes me want to look for other alternatives.  

The news I get comes from multiple sources.  I have an online subscription to the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Sometimes I hear what's on MSNBC as my wife is watching it in the other room.  And then I will scan what friends in Facebook have posted about what's happening, sometimes following the links they've included.  There is also national news, on occasion, in The Chronicle for Higher Education and Insider Higher Ed.  I want to observe that these sources frequently express the anger of others about the news, which sometimes stokes my own anger and at other times confirms that my anger is not an isolated case.  But it doesn't help to calm me down. Ask yourself, what would do that?  If you have similar multiple sources of news, could you go cold turkey on all of them? What then would take their place in filling out your day?

If I could create a narrative that I find completely absorbing, but keep it entirely in my head and/or make it up as I go along, with no requirement to make it coherent for others to understand, this might do the trick in warding off each daydream rage and keep me totally divorced from sources of news that might rekindle this internal desire to express intense anger. 

Is it possible to find such a narrative or is thinking it can be done merely self-delusion? And, if it were possible, would the process be irreversible? (A fantasy one might entertain is to be in some reverie which acts like suspended animation where the person can return to normal if and when our politics has returned from the abyss and functions more normally.)  Posing these questions is not difficult.  Answering them, however, is beyond me.  Instead, I will offer some conjectures.  

I would try two paths to be attempted alternatively.  Make a lot of progress with one and I can suspend trying the other path for as long as that progress lasts.  If only modest progress is being made, then switching to the alternative path would be to see if better progress can be made that way.  With either path I want to note that my mental model is to imitate how dementia develops in a patient.  Assuming that it happens gradually, with less and less outward orientation over time, as a result of the compelling nature of the inward orientation and the decline in ability in dealing with outward things that happens over time, which presumably accelerates with less practice of this sort. 

The first path I will term the productive path - working on creating a lifework that should be useful to others, Lanny Arvan's opus, so to speak.  The second path will be the drug-induced path - whether it's becoming a pothead or taking magic mushrooms on a repeated basis or some other such drug would, of course, matter a lot in implementation, but for this discussion it matters not much at all.  The underlying question that might drive pursuit along the second path is whether at this late age there are still important parts of my personality that have been underdeveloped and lack expression.  Can the drugs bring those out so they flourish fully?  And in the case of both paths, it's critical that the end not be visible from the start, so that it is unknown how long it will take to traverse the entire path. With that it is possible to imagine being fully occupied for an extended time while traversing the path.

I actually have a candidate for the productive path, based on some online learning ideas I wrote about years ago in a piece called Dialogic Learning Objects.  I have made some of these using Excel for teaching microeconomics.  A first step would be to develop a full curriculum this way, place them in some open repository for others to use, and keep on experimenting with form, function, and subject matter to engage me as the author.  This would require energy that I don't now seem to possess, but perhaps with some discipline I could learn to put in a full workday making these, while otherwise isolating myself from the rest of the world.   Prior to writing this piece I had the thought that others (mainly current college students with a nose for the subject matter) would be making these things and all my job would be is to get their attention for such a project.  Based on some recent experience I now think that alternative will be more difficult to achieve.  So why not do it all myself, instead?

Would going down the first path count as going off your rocker?  The isolating part might.  And if the objects produced ultimately get no other use, then continuing to produce them might seem at least a little bit nuts.  This gets to where the enjoyment in the creation lies.  Is it with knowing there will be ultimate use or does it simply mean pleasing oneself as the author?  That question itself might engage me for quite some time.

More people would probably agree that going down the second path does count as going off your rocker.  I will note, however, that pot was pretty ubiquitous when I was in college and LSD was rarer but not all that scarce.  My experience with these, mainly in college, also some in graduate school, is that I never lost my sense of self or my ability to think rationally and I never had a hallucination - seeing something that wasn't there at all.  In other words, it was still me, whether on drugs or not, though some of the senses were amplified.  But then it might be that the dosage or frequency of use determined this.  Would the second path require more intensive usage?  I don't know.  I know that it's been a long time for me not having done any of these drugs.  (More recently I have had Vicodin, for example when I had a kidney stone that wouldn't pass.  My recollection is that it mainly impacted my dreams but didn't do so much for when I was awake.  Also, it made me constipated.) 

The second path might entail a variety of health risks.  Those need to be compared to the risks of the onset of depression as a result of these rather frequent bouts of anger.  When I say rational choice in my title, I mean that such a cost-benefit analysis has been done and, at least in some cases, the second path will be preferable to doing nothing, which then might enable the depression.  The first path may seem safer, though shutting down communication with friends when you are otherwise not evidently needing to do so might entail its own risks.

At present the entire analysis is hypothetical.  I have not decided whether to do this.  My personal inertia is fairly great.  Doing nothing is still the likely outcome for me.  But I think it useful to work through this alternative.  And now, having written this piece, maybe I'll feel ready to write the other piece, about fully waging this virtual civil war.  In the next week or two I'll see if I'm up to writing that post as well.

When Those On A Crusade Finally Wake Up

When you're sure you're right but you aren't
The results can be truly abhorrent
Though now non compos mentis
When you come to your senses
There will be tears that are more like a torrent.
#UntilThenItWillBeANightmare

When Plagiarism Is Good

Writing to which people will abscond
Might still make the author rather fond
For better the insight
Than to get into a fight
Then watch from above and beyond.
#CopyAndPasteWithNoLinkToTheSource

What to Eat and What to Wear

The sneakers were chatting with the socks
How about some bagels and lox?
But the socks were none to keen
They wanted their wearer to be lean.

The sneakers agreed with that
Though thought that if their owner were fat
That then they would hardly be used
And their lining would not be abused.

The conversation continued like that
With each tit followed by a tat
Then finally they each could root
On giving their wearer the boot.
#MuchAdoAboutTheShoe

To Accompany That Cup Of Coffee

Starting the day with a treat
One that is moderately sweet
Makes an inner smile
That will last a while
And helps make the rest of the day replete.
#ALittleCheatThatTastesGoodToEat

When Our Institutions Fail

Pushing on a string
Has become the new thing
Where we need cessation
It's a path to frustration.
#WhereWhatUsedToMakeSenseNoLongerDoes

Mental Blocks

When it's your intention
To engage in an invention
But you're experiencing a lull
And feeling rather dull

Either conclude that you're a fake
Or give yourself a break
For the crux of the matter
Is to not become a mad hatter.

After that is done
Then go back to square one
And give it another try
Though you might just wonder why.

When you're feeling fresh
Your ideas tend to mesh
Onward and upward you go
Even if the pace is slow.
#AsTheNewsDoesNotAmuseYouShouldChooseToSingTheBlues

The Necessity of Failing Anew

Building from scratch
When there isn't an itch
Is hardly a natch
Yet needs more than a twitch.

Wandering in the desert
Or so it would seem
Really must come first
On the road to redeem.

In the meantime we chronicle
All that is broken
It might appear comical
As if someone has misspoken.

Yet wanting an answer
Before knowing which problem to solve
Is a form of mental cancer
And things will continue to devolve.
#WhenItIsBrokeARealFixWillBeSlowInComing

How to Explain the Food Chain

The relationship between predator and prey
Remains remarkably true to this day
The prey keeps out of sight
So the predator can't take a bite.
#ForestallingTheInevitable

Playthings

The little boy
Inside the old man
Wanted a new toy
Catch as catch can.

A paper airplane
Or a spinning top
Simple joy
Goody goody gumdrop.
#ChildhoodDelights

Merrily Merrily

As in the gentle stream
Life is but a dream
The only way to go
Is to take your oars and row.
#ToStayAfloatRemainInTheBoat

What's Cooking?

The sweet potato
And the green tomato
Were looking to spice things up.

They spied an old mutt
Near the pitch and putt
But they were hoping to find a pup.
#ItWasADoggoneShame

Grumpty Trumpty

Grumpty Trumpty seemed to have it all
Then Grumpty Trumpty had a precipitous fall
All the sycophants and all the henchmen
Couldn't get Grumpty Trumpty to simply say when.
#HoistWithHisOwnPetard

Simon Says - Malaise

We seem to be living a dual existence.  One part is normalcy, whatever that means.  There is worry about the pandemic, the economy, Ukraine, and other concerns as well.  But these things weren't going to disappear from our awareness just because we wanted them to. There are always some worries.  Day to day existence for most folks hasn't changed that much, say since January 1. This is what I mean by normalcy.  The other part, however, is quite different, at least in the United States.  We seem to be in a virtual civil war, but Democrats are only waking up to that now.  Take this line seriously - all is fair in love and war.  Consider Republicans in Congress as virtual soldiers in that civil war.  Putting two and two together gives a way to make sense of their behavior.  Ditto for the talk show folks, who act as provocateurs and rabble-rousers rather than as analysts of what is going on in our politics for viewers to get a better understanding.  

If this description of a dual existence is reasonably correct, then many questions follow for ordinary Democrats, who are now seeing the situation for what it is. And here let me bring in some bits from higher education, particularly about the mental health crisis for students, which predates the pandemic.  There will be parallel mental health issues for ordinary Democrats, who will see this virtual civil war as the system failing...big time.  One possible way to manage one's own mental well being is to withdraw from the politics and live a heads down existence.  Obviously, this is far from perfect.  But it does allow one to not be constantly consumed with anger.  The opposite would be to fully engage in virtual civil war activities.  If most family, friends, and work colleagues are not yet doing that it could be a very lonely undertaking, at least initially.  It may make you appear fringe to others who know you.   The malaise I'm referring to in the post title comes from being unsure of which of these paths to follow or if there is yet another way that combines a sense of agency about this virtual civil war with a calm rather than angry presence.  Searching for that elusive third path can contribute to the delay in making a choice and makes the malaise that much greater.  

Before I get to what fully engaged in virtual civil war activities might mean, I want to take a step into the past, about a post I wrote back in late September 2020.  At the time of the post the NY Times had recently uncovered Trump's tax returns and the take away from that was startling.  In particular, Trump held a massive amount of debt and being President helped him service that debt and in the future might help him roll it over. I wish Democrats kept up hammering on Trump being so financially in the hole from then to now, because it is a big deal and the public needs a constant reminder of it.  Yet, as with much that is Trump, the latest news seems to crowd out past transgressions.  As far as I know, the connection between Stop the Steal and Trump's tax returns hasn't been made in the NY Times or elsewhere.  It needs to become a commonly discussed matter, perhaps the center of attention.  

The other big thing at that time was that Amy Coney Barrett had been nominated to the Supreme Court, but the vote on her approval had not yet taken place in the Senate.  This was less than six weeks before the coming Presidential election.  The post I wrote was called Honor Among Thieves And Among Supreme Court Justices.  The post discusses the following question.  If Supreme Court candidates nominated by Trump were aware of his financial indiscretions as well as his obstruction of justice during the Mueller investigation (and how could they not be so aware) what is their subsequent responsibility regarding accepting the nomination and then making rulings on the court?  This is the penultimate paragraph from that post. 

However, I know many people who feel now that America is going to hell in a hand basket. Trump has dramatically accelerated this decline.  Creating real surprise by going against the forecast in a way that is personally costly but also evidently aimed at respecting the rule of law, might be a way for America to get past this dreadful moment.  For that to happen, Trump needs to lose this election and the Supreme Court needs to certify that.  Sacrificing the national well being so as to get rid of the Roe v. Wade decision, also can't happen.  It's clear that has been motivating the recent rapid pace of Federal judicial appointments.  But it is equally clear that the myopic focus on this objective is bringing the country down.

That was then.  This is now.  The country has been brought down, way down.  One further observation needs to be made.  The system provides instruments to discipline those in government who have violated their oath of office.  But clearly the system is broken now and we simply can't expect it to fix itself.  In particular, impeachment can't work in a country where the President, Members of Congress, and Justices of the Supreme Court put politics before country.  So, other forms of punishment are needed if there is to be a credible deterrent to future egregious violations.  These other forms would amount to ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands.  Under normal circumstances, that is to be avoided.  The Ox-Bow Incident, a book and movie from long ago, offers a grim reminder of the terrible things that can happen.  One need not focus exclusively on the events of January 6, 2021 to consider this issue.  But if we are truly in a virtual civil war, these other forms of punishment will become necessary as a way to operate, because nothing else will work as credible deterrent.  

* * * * *

Democrats are playing a game of catch-up in prosecuting this virtual civil war.  Further, since ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands will be illegal much of the time, it can't be the Democratic Party itself that sanctions these activities, at least not initially.  So I am going to imagine a not-yet-formed parallel organization whose purpose is to wage this virtual civil war on the part of Democratic voters and those who care  about particular issues, notably abortion, without otherwise being affiliated with a party.  It might be useful to name this organization so people can more readily identify it.  I am not great at coming up with names, but I will offer this one up as a placeholder - the Minute Women. 

Some of the goals I'll suggest for the Minute Women are as follows:

• To get the three Supreme Court Justices appointed while Trump was President off the Court, either voluntarily or otherwise.
• To get the Republicans in Congress who openly or tacitly endorsed Stop the Steal to confess their wrongdoing and then accept punishment for it, either by paying a hefty fine or by serving time in jail. 
• To have Congress pass new legislation that embraces the precepts of Roe and to have the newly constituted Supreme Court find that law Constitutional. 
• Likewise, Congress needs new legislation to undo the Citizens United decision as well as the Shelby County vs. Holder decision on the use of the Voting Rights Act.  That act needs to be used vigorously in all states that have recently passed voter restriction legislation.  
• Ultimately to create child organizations in each state to fight the right-wing agenda at the state level.

This list could be made longer, but it suffices for the sake of illustration. The question then is how the Minute Women should act in ways to realize these goals.   I will get to that in the next paragraph.  First I want to make the following assumption, which I think is reasonable.  While the Republicans in high political office have found it acceptable to wage a virtual civil war, they do not want it to escalate into a real civil war.  They will lose if this happens, on a personal level because there are many perqs of office that would no longer be forthcoming, and on a national level because they are really the minority party, as the popular vote in recent Presidential elections demonstrate.  This is not to say there is no risk of escalation into an actual civil war.  Both sides have incentive to push as hard as they can, as long as it remains a virtual civil war.  So, there are elements of a game of chicken here.

The Minute Women will actually be two distinct units.  The first, the overt arm, will make the case as publicly as possible that it's not just Trump who is a criminal.  The Republicans in Congress who embraced Stop the Steal are co-conspirators, lending a cover off legitimacy where there shouldn't be any.  And the Supreme Court appointees made under Trump are tainted, remarkably so.  The honorable thing for them to do is to step down on their own accord.  Right wing media can also be part of this case, as they've shielded their followers from the illegality of what has been done. 

The second, the covert arm, will act to terrorize a small number of these Republicans, to pressure them to step down, in the case of the Supreme Court Justices, or to admit their culpability, in the case of Members of Congress.  Further, they will make it evident that the terrorism will persist until the goals, as articulated by the overt arm, have been met.  The hope would be that once that threat is evident, many Republicans will become compliant and/or quit, to avoid themselves becoming victims.

For this to work, there must be highly skilled professionals in each arm, fully versed in the mission, with a skill set that is capable of achieving the goals.  And the overt arm must have at most tacit knowledge of the covert arm's existence, so it is not legally responsible for the actions taken by the covert arm.  The details on how to do this are well beyond my knowledge.  But I trust that it is doable.  The issue is whether there is the will to go this route.  

* * * * *

Maureen Dowd's most recent column, The Radical Reign of Clarence Thomas, is disturbing in highlighting the role that Joe Biden played in Thomas' confirmation, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, ultimately discounting the testimony of Anita Hill in the process.  In the present circumstances, it seems that Biden is a liability as President.  Ultimately, he too may have to step down, for the work of the Minute Women to succeed and ultimately the Democratic Party will have to embrace the tenets that the Minute Women put forward.  

What would an ordinary person like you or me do in service for the Minute Women.  I am not sure but I can say this, based on the small sample of friends I have in Facebook who have commented about the recent political events, invariably expressing their dismay and frustration.  Those feelings don't translate immediately into an endorsement for the Minute Women as a concept.  But, I think, people would be open to arguing the point.  When I say people here, I mean already friends in the Facebook sense.  I, for one, don't want to have such arguments on the open Internet with people I don't already know a little.  But maybe I can encourage others, who are younger than I am and have more energy than I have, to do just that.  I also expect there to be a fundraising aspect to this, though exactly how that would work I don't know.  And then somehow, there would need to a feedback loop created onto the usual Democratic politics.  

Would I feel in over my head if I did this?  Maybe I would.  The malaise I feel is real enough and there are reasons for that.  But, now that I've gotten this post out of my system, I do feel a little bit better.

The Intense T-Storm

Seeing lightning
With closed eyes
The thunder frightening
Mother Nature cries.

Emerging from a dream
With nowhere to hide
Thankfully the stream
Remained outside.
#YetSomehowTheBirdsAreStillChirpingThisMorning

Will We Begin To Hear Mea Culpa?

In a morality play
You've got to pay
When the piper eventually comes.

Yet it's hard to count
The precise amount
Since it's herculean sums.
#OrIsThisOnlyWishfulThinkingByDemocrats

Prevarication By Another Name

The non-denial denial
Is back on trial
Providing much to revile
We'll be at it for a while.
#ThenYouDiscoverWeMightNotRecover

If Only Wishing Would Change The Past

While living inside your head
Memories get retread
Mistakes you made
Are then replayed
Upon reflection you come out ahead.
#TooBadYouCantGoBackInTimeAndDoItOver

A Hype Dream

Innovation and its subsequent diffusion
First a sensation then confusion
For what is it that is truly new
And about it why make such a big to-do?
#FocusOnTheCleverAdaptationOfTheEarlyAdopter

The Uncle Joe Model

When moving slow
Is as fast as you go

And you may hardly care
About getting there

Yet merely in moving
One can be grooving

Then one finds that motion
Is its own magic potion.
#WalkingTheWalkWhileTheMindIsTalkingTheTalk

The Best Location For Textual Creation

The place where you do your writing
Should be boring rather than exciting
Though to be fair
A comfortable chair
Prevents the prose from becoming overly biting.
#AndTheKeyboardShouldBeProppedUpAboveTheLevelOfTheDesk

Timing Is Everything

Sometimes it's good to take a chance
With setting the publishing date in advance
Then when you're on the road
If your laptop is a load
Leave it at home and at your phone only glance.
#BloggerHasThisFeatureWhyDoesntFacebook

Crying For Attention

When your favorite flowers are forget-me-nots
And your loyal blog readers prove to be bots
Then it's unclear how you should behave
For it's a real audience that you crave.
#GiveUpTheGhostOrMakeARaucousPost

Taking Our Cues From Mollusks and Reptiles

The snail and the tortoise
Don't have rigor mortis
They just move kind of slow
These days it's the way to go.
#AndTheyRemainInTheirShells

The Duchy of Grand Fenwick Is Back on the Map

The mouse that unexpectedly roared
Tried hard after that to remain ignored
Yet it was getting more and more attention
The bulk of which were favorable mentions.
#WhenLosingWinsAndOtherCreativeSpins

Playing It Forward Through Backward Induction

This post is about thinking through the possible consequences of the hearing by the House Committee on the January 6, 2021 events.  My premonitions about this have caused me considerable anxiety. I'm going to try to put those aside in this post and do the type of analysis that blends knowledge about how people learn, on the one hand, with economics/game theory, on the other.  

The first speaks to the question of how Trump supporters will react to the evidence that is provided during the hearings (and the evidence that has already been provided).  Yesterday, while overhearing what was being aired on MSNBC while my wife was watching TV, the following argument was made more than once.  In a situation where people hear evidence that counters their prior held view, who the messenger is matters.  The House Committee has been careful to present the evidence from Republicans in Trump's corner.  Specifically, much was made of the testimony given by former Attorney General William Barr.  If this argument holds sway, then by the time the hearings have concluded most Americans will conclude that the election wasn't stolen and that claiming otherwise was a diversion created by President Trump for his own personal and political benefit. 

But there is a quite different possibility entirely.  The following paragraph is taken from a post I wrote about a decade ago called: Is reasoning taking a beating?  I think the entire post is relevant for understanding our current politics, but the particular paragraph is especially relevant while not being about politics at all. 

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

This paragraph suggests that people might very well retain their prior world view in spite of evidence to the contrary.  Further, in regard to the events of January 6, 2021, there is obviously a question of whether people watch the hearings directly and in full or if, instead, they watch the hearings as they've been filtered through their favorite news outlet, which cherry picks segments and excludes much of the rest.  There is no doubt that viewers of Fox News are getting a different story than viewers of MSNBC. 

Thus, it seems more than possible that one of two different scenarios will prevail.   In the first scenario, the vast majority of Americans converge in the belief that the 2020 election was not stolen.  There may still be substantial disagreement about how to manage the situation given such beliefs, which I would summarize as either punish severely or largely forgive and forget.  But in this first scenario we'd be coming at these managing-the-situation questions with a general consensus of what had occurred.  In the second scenario, there is no such consensus.  We remain a divided nation about whether the 2020 election was stolen.  And members of each side in this hold contempt for members of the other side. 

Now, let's complicate this admittedly simple characterization some.  This is about the intensity of the belief as measured by the perceived consequences assuming the belief is true.  For Democrats, especially the ones who are regular watchers of MSNBC, the nation is in crisis and is under grave risk that we will become a fascist state.  But, for example, consider those swing voters who voted for Obama but then switched to vote for Trump.  Many of them may be upset at the Democrats now because of the high inflation they are seeing as well as the shortages of goods (notably baby formula).  These voters may vote Republican in November, even if they believe the election was not stolen in 2020.  

Thus, we now have two dimensions to consider.  The first is whether the hearings are persuasive in convincing Americans that there was no steal.  The second is in regards to which party controls the House after the elections in November.   To this one might further complicate things by considering the behavior of Congressional Republicans between now and the November elections.  Will the House Republicans led by Kevin McCarthy stick with their current line, that the hearings are a sham?  Or, in the event that the hearings do appear to be broadly persuasive, might these House Republicans change their tune and then help to achieve consensus?   And, surely, there can be further dimensions to complicate the picture even more.  But I see no reason in doing so now for the purpose of the analysis. 

We've reached the point where we can perform the backward induction.  In the economics/game theory approach, one solves for the equilibrium in the future first, or solves for all the possible equilibria in the future when the future is not uniquely determined, and then, given that future to fix expectations, one solves for equilibrium (or equilibria) in the present.  What seems evident now is that the January 6, 2021 House Committee members have a strong preference for the outcome where the hearings are broadly persuasive, while the House Republicans under McCarthy have the opposite preference.  If most Americans now line up with one side or the other at present, what will they do if their side wins and what will they do if their side loses?

Those questions seem straightforward enough and yet they are too difficult for me to respond to with straightforward answers.  Instead, I will give some unknowns for me.  Are the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers far out there and thus unlike most Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen?  Or is there a continuum of sorts here?  In other words, I would certainly predict there would be more violence in the event that the hearings are broadly persuasive, more so if the Democrats retain the House, but it's very hard to have a sense of the scale of that violence.  Would it be a fringe activity or the beginning of a civil war?  A further unknown is how the police, in particular, but really all law enforcement, respond to the threat of such violence.  And here the complications may be more obvious.  If these fringe Trump supporters are in possession of large amount of assault weapons, as seems likely to me, law enforcement and warfare will seem to blend.  Will the police get strong support from the rest of America, even if events in the last couple of years have challenged such support?  

Now lets consider the other possibility, where the hearings are only mildly persuasive to those who supported Trump and there remains a large following of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen, even after the hearings conclude.  How will Democrats react in this case?  I will answer this one from my own perspective.  There seems to be way too much trust in the system to warrant it and I have concluded some time ago that the system is broken and requires a strong response.  Jamelle Bouie's column today asserts that this is a generational thing, where younger Democrats agree that the system is broken but older ones cling to current beliefs as if it were the past where the system did function reasonably well (the Vietnam War and Watergate notwithstanding).  If the system is broken and your side seems to be losing in the current political conflict, what then?  Is there a sensible alternative to resorting to violence at this point?  Or, if we would be heading to fascism under this scenario, would any non-violent alternative amount to appeasement?

Suppose you answered yes to that last question, but you recognized that Democrats, who are largely anti gun, are terribly unprepared for a violent alternative that might escalate into a civil war.  What would you do then?  On a personal note, I get a large number of solicitations from Democrats for funding their campaigns, both by email and by snail mail.  I have donated in the past on occasion.  This, I suppose, is how the system works now.  But I have not received any communications about preparing for the possible contingency that is described in the first sentence of this paragraph.  Indeed, I don't think that elected officials of either party want to openly talk about a broken system.  If that's right, leadership on this will have to come from elsewhere.  I would like to see evidence of such leadership.  I would then give my support to their effort. 

These days I write a piece like this essay largely to get the ideas out of my system, if I can.  In the past I've found that when I put in the effort to write up my ideas, I can move onto something else in my thinking.  If I don't write in this way, I'll just keep stewing about it over and over again   I'm hoping to get past my fixation with this piece.  

I learned when I was a campus administrator that while writing this blog and discussing controversial issues I should put forward arguments which were less advocacy for a particular approach and more inquiry into the issues at hand.  Style-wise, that's what I've tried for in this piece.  If you are one of the rare few who have reached this point in the reading, I hope it has piqued your interest in getting at answers to these questions, and thanks for your attention.

When You Don't Have It Made In The Shade

There’s farmer Lan
Now sporting a tan
Not part of the plan
But you do what you can.
#ANewGeezerCrazeCatchingSomeRays

Very Hot Indeed

So the heatwave begins
Atonement for our sins
Of which there have been many
And good deeds, have there been any?
#TheSummerOfOurDiscontentAlasItWillNotRelent

How Do Each Of Us React To The Recent News?

Trying to understand
The attraction of the sand
And if there is something instead
Of merely burying my head.
#NotCopingSoMopingThoughItSeemsToBlockHoping

It's No Longer Couth To Utter The Truth

From Liberal bias in the press
Murdoch made a great big mess
So now we have different versions of news
Not to elucidate, mainly to confuse.
#WhenTheFourthEstateIsInclinedToPrate

How do you persuade somebody that they've been brainwashed?

I have been spending much of the day trying to reconcile last night's hearing with this long opinion piece from the NY Times, particularly this paragraph.  

The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.

The core question is this: how will the M.A.Rs react to the House Committee investigation of the events on January 6, 2021.  Will they treat it as a witch hunt and nothing more? They surely will be getting a filtered version of the hearings and what was said and shown there.  Somewhere, I can't remember the source now, I heard that Fox Business aired the hearings but Fox News did not.  Do M.A.Rs rely primarily and perhaps exclusively on Fox News for staying up to date?  If you presume that's true and you presume as well that Fox News will treat the investigation as part of the new culture war, then there would seem to be no way for the American people as a whole to reach the same conclusion about the events on January 6, 2021.  What would be the consequences of that?

It seems to me then the election in November can't work with the vast majority of people accepting the results, but now we're talking about elections on a state level and a Congressional district level.  There will be chaos.  Can such chaos resolve itself in short order?  I don't see how it can.  

If the election is left unresolved, the instability will lead to violence.  Indeed, there may be threatened violence to intimidate voters on Election Day.  There could very well be a tit-for-tat that would then escalate.  That's my fear. 

Those who are trusting of the normal electoral process, more Democrats then Republicans at this point, probably expect that the police and possibly the military would be brought in to squelch the violence.  So, part of what I've been scratching my head about is this.  If you did a political polling of the police and the military, what fraction of them are M.A.Rs?  Would those who are take sides in the aftermath of the election rather than perform their duty?

There is too much I don't know here to think this through fully.  But it certainly has me worried. 

The Chips Are In

Chocolate chocolate chip
Or regular chocolate chip?

I would gladly play hookie
To have a good cookie.
#AtBreakfastASnackIsBetterThanAWisecrack

It's All A Blur

Thinking while your glasses are smudged
There's a tendency for your ideas to fudge
In your mind you see
With uncertainty
Finding your way takes quite a long trudge.
#ItSeemsTheDustInTheHouseHasSpecialAffinityForMyGlasses

Say It Five Times Fast

Twisting your tongue
Among the young
Is a form of play

But when adults misspeak
More than once a week
We question what they say.
#UniqueNewYork

Packaging Versus What's In The Box

When the title is compelling
But the column is boring
We're done in by the selling
Which we should be ignoring.
#ExcessPromotionCreatesACommotion

The Innocence of Youth

When a little boy stomps in a puddle
There is no accompanying intellectual muddle
It's just the thing to do
With his foot in his shoe
Later in bed his Teddy he will cuddle.
#ChildhoodForAWhileMischiefWithoutGuile

Right As Rain

The recent weather forecasts have been off
But who am I to scoff
For when economists predict
It is surely an edict
That some doubting Thomas will cough.
#SkepticismHealthyAndOtherwise

Take A Deep Breath

When plan A has gone off the rails
And all else that's been tried also fails
Then it's time for a smile
And to wait a good while
Reconsidering goals helps to exhale.
#ModestAspirationLimitsPerspiration

The French Open

Tennis when played on clay
Groundstrokes should win the day
But there are always curves
Which amount to nerves
And determination will have its say.
#ItDontMeanAThingIfYouAintGotThatSwing

Oh What A Beautiful Morning

Conjuring up the powers to beguile
With the simple aim to make you smile
As the day begins it's very sunny
That should be paired with a bit of funny.
#TheDispositionProposition

The Kids Do Grow Up.....Eventually

When the children become adults
The thing about the results
They want happy p's
So aim to please
And even enjoy the technology consults!
#AcrossTheGenerationsAffectionAndLiberation

We Are Descending Beyond A Happy Ending

When the Beast
Has lost his yeast
And Beauty is no more

Then the game
Becomes assigning blame
And pining for Elsinore.
#DealingWithNowEvenJeanCocteauWouldntKnowHow

Junk Food Makes ForJunk Ideas

The irrelevant elephant
Made an argument
That was elegant

While the bandito mosquito
Made a chomp
With a Cheeto.
#FoodForThoughtIsWhatYouOught

Related and Obligated

The siblings
Began their quibbling
Because there was no appetizer for nibbling.

While the cousins
Of whom there were dozens
Hope the long email simply wasn't.

#ADifferentTheoryOfRelativity

A Simple Way To Enjoy The Day

Starting the day with a treat
A way to keep the disposition sweet
Then a bad joke or two
Before bidding adieu
And you too will feel complete.
#BeforeTheNewspaperOrTVNewsShow

Our Fallibility In The Simple Puzzles We Play

In wordplay taking a tumble
So cheating while doing the Jumble
What a relief
To end the grief
Next time on the theme you won't fumble.
#UnlikeTheRangeSometimesThereIsADiscouragingScrambledWord

The Long Term Consequences Of Sustained Isolation

Slithering into madness
After a prolonged sadness
It would seem
A frightening dream
Repeatedly making a bad mess.
#DescendingIntoTheAbyssCanBeHardToResist

When The Road Not Taken Turns Into The Beaten Path

Drained by repeated convention
So looking for personal reinvention
Then trying something new
With which to make a to-do
Yet wanting early success defeated the intention.
#AimingForASplashLeadsToACrash

With Apologies To The Doors

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Practicing their form
Becoming the new norm
We feel so all alone
Weird skills we do hone
Riders on the storm.

#TheyAreTheBellwetherForRepeatedNastyWeather

Our National Politics in Metaphor

The Congressional Republicans are Jabez Stone.  Who will be their Dan'l Webster?
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602901h.html

It occurs to me that we can't talk rationally across party lines, but metaphors such as this might still be possible topics of conversation that can be batted around.  The original story by Stephen Vincent Benet is definitely worth the read, in its own right.  And as a metaphor for now, I think it illuminates as well.

Civil War Seems The Inevitable Conclusion

Connecting the past to the present
The conclusion is rather unpleasant
Hoping appeasement
Will provide an easement
Simply enables the torment to ferment.
#TheRoadToFascism

When People Are Perceived As Things

When someone always speaks in the first person
Anyone else then becomes an object
After that the situation will worsen
Lacking kindness and showing no sense of respect.
#WeMighEvenDiscardThoseWeDisregard

The Dwarfs After Snow White Married The Prince

When Grumpy felt frumpy
He would chat with Doc
Who said Sleepy was creepy
And that's no crock.

Since it was Happy who took a nappy
To counter the shock
While Dopey was mopey
As his timepiece went tick-tock.
#WhatAboutSneezyAndBashful

Nathaniel Hawthorne Junior High

Like their older siblings who came before
They too attended seventy-four
Where you had to take shop

And homeroom was a prop
To park your coat, then offer so much more.
#7thGradeWasNotQuiteAnEscapade

This One Is More Than 280 Characters

The nestling became stuck in the tree
Where no other birds could be found
The nestling struggled to be set free
To be able to walk on the ground.

Taking it all in was the giraffe
Who said to herself - what the heck?
She had to suppress an inner laugh
But then decided to stick out her neck.
#AFriendIndeedWhenSomeoneIsInNeed

College Kids On The Skids

Bring back Spanky and Alfalfa
Who really liked playing hookie
It's not a matter of nostalgia
But how 'bout a chocolate chip cookie?
#YouCantHaveFunWhenUnderTheGun

The Last Place You Look

Putting dishes away in the wrong place
Will that lead to you losing face?
Some cooking stuff
Seems exotic fluff
Knowing where it goes your memory will erase.
#WhenASenseOfResponsibilityAndAnInstinctForSlothAreOpposed

Will-O'-The-Wisp

An idea comes as a flicker
You'll lose it if you aren't quicker
Then with some dismay
You find that you will say
It won't reappear and that's the kicker.
#TheSubconsciousTeasesUsWithItsMysteries

When Monopoly Was A Good Thing

If you take a ride on the Reading Railroad
And do not pass Go
Your stash of cash may implode
Depending on who owns it, you know.
#TheRollOfTheDiceGaveTheGameSpice

Dissonance - Cognitive and Otherwise

I want to contrast the day to day life I lead - too much time sitting in front of the computer, wisecracking with friends and family during the occasional Zoom call, complaining about the various aches and pains mostly which are due to arthritis, on a daily basis doing some short form writing while much less less frequently writing something long form such as this post, worrying about what we should have for dinner, tracking how the Yankees are doing now that it's baseball season, and a host of other behaviors that I would describe as normal, even if they are not completely routine.  Our downstairs furnace/AC has not been functioning and today the guy from Lanz is here to do repairs and the semi-annual maintenance.  It turns out that the thermostat had gone bad (no idea why) and was just replaced.  So the unit is functioning now.  Hurray!!  Day to day existence does provide its little victories now and then.  And it provides its little pleasures too.  Yesterday to celebrate Mother's day we went to Sun Singer for happy hour.  We had a glass of wine (better quality than the normal fare we have at home) and a margherita flatbread which was very tasty.   We sat outside for that.  If the weather remains mild, we'll be doing that more frequently.  I wear a mask when going shopping, which now seems to be the new normal, but I don't wear one at home, even when the repairman is here to visit.  Not perfectly consistent, I will admit.  But it seems normal to me.

There is a non-normal part of my day that I will describe below.  But first I want to contrast my usual home life with what seems to be our disastrous national politics.  Here I will list and give brief descriptions about what bugs me that I'm not seeing discussed much at all. 

• The decline in manufacturing, which probably goes back to the 1980s but manifest for real in 1990s, coupled with the decline in unions (remember that Reagan busted PATCO, which was the start of the whole thing), was a complete disaster for White male blue collar types.  They couldn't or wouldn't adjust to service sector employment (at lower wages than they had been earning previously).  This is the fundamental source of anger among Trump's base. 
• The second war in Iraq, the one that followed U.S. involvement in Afghanistan after 9/11, was another complete disaster.  There weren't any WMDs.  The Iraqi people didn't want Americans there.  Many vets after returning home committed suicide.  Since the military is all volunteer, one wonders how many of these people enlisted in the first place because of poor economic prospects at home.  If that was typical, the Iraq war was rubbing salt into the wound.
• People who are not healthy from an economic perspective often become unhealthy in a way where they need to see a medical doctor.  The opioid epidemic was largely concentrated in these blue collar types and, in a downward spiral, made them unemployable thereafter.  Life became hopeless for them. 
• If the regular labor market wasn't going to solve this issue, then perhaps government spending in the form of massive infrastructure investment would provide a sufficient number of decent blue collar jobs.  Further, America's infrastructure has been declining at least since Reagan, so this would be killing two birds with one stone. This piece by Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich to establish a national infrastructure bank came out prior to the 2008 election.  That never got done.  You might argue that if the Democrats had fought off the Tea Party challenge in 2010 and retained control of the House, it would have gotten done then.  Alternatively, you might argue that this should have preceded the fight for Obamacare, since the case for doing something big about infrastructure should have had cross-party appeal and there would have been a better chance for the Democrats to maintain control of the House that way.

In sum, we don't connect our present social ailments to our history in a very good way.  This has let Trump own the MAGA types by feeding them red meat - xenophobia and racism - without doing anything of note to help them economically.  We know from history that movements toward fascism are prefaced by economic dislocation of the masses.  This gives a strong reason to connect to our history.  Nonetheless, we don't seem to do it.

Let me turn to the next set of issues which can be summed up with two points:

• Democrats are too reactive.  We knew that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe ever since Amy Coney Barrett was appointed an Associate Justice.  Why else was there a rush to get that appointment in while Trump was still President?  How come it takes Alito's leaked draft to elicit such a strong response?  Why wasn't a well planned strong response contemplated and articulated much earlier?
• Democrats put too much faith in the system and that it will correct itself.  There is ample evidence that the system has been manipulated by the Republicans in a way that is horrible for democracy.  Why should anyone trust the system now?  And if that's the right way to consider things, why not work through outside-the-system approaches that can be effective?  

Then there is the flip side of this.  In a recent opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie called Why Republicans Are So Angry About the Supreme Court Leak, he argues that:

When McConnell led the Senate Republican caucus in a blockade of President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016 and then killed what remained of the judicial filibuster the next year to place Neil Gorsuch in the seat instead, they diminished the legitimacy of the court. When those same Republicans looked past a credible accusation of sexual assault to confirm Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, they again diminished the legitimacy of the court. And when, with weeks left before the 2020 presidential election, Republicans ignored their own rule from four years earlier — that an election-year vacancy “should not be filled until we have a new president” — to place Amy Coney Barrett on the bench in a rushed, slapdash process, they once more diminished the legitimacy of the court.

I would add to this McConnell's blockade of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland had a significant influence on the 2016 election as it strongly encouraged those who wanted to get rid of Roe to vote, with that having an immediate impact given the open seat on the Court.  Further, the Senate's perfunctory dismissal of the charges in the two impeachment trials let a criminal President off the hook.  The outcome of the first trial allowed Trump to nominate Amy Coney Barrett, even though she must have been well aware of his criminal acts. This followed William Barr's perfunctory dismissal of the Mueller Report. In our country's move toward fascism, there have been many steps taken.  The enablers are first McConnell, then Barr, and then other Republicans in Congress.  Their lack of spine in dealing with these dismal realities offers another reason to work outside the system to stop this descent into societal madness. 

We seem headed for Civil War.  How much of that will be violence versus information warfare of some kind or still some other form of warfare I cannot say.  But there doesn't seem to me to be a path that gets everyone back to a normally functioning society without such a civil war happening first.  I can't be the only one who thinks and feels this way.  

Now let me try to bring this back to me personally and how it impacts my day to day existence.  At home, my wife and I often do separate things.  She will watch TV - often gardening shows, or shows about house fixer uppers, some light comedy too, but then a good dose of MSNBC.  I'm sitting at my computer, which is in a different room, but when I don't use earbuds I can hear the TV.  And once in a while it sparks a rage in me.  Sometimes it's reading something online that sparks the rage. I don't do anything about it, but I do think about it.  I know from when I was working full time that anger is not a good emotion for me.  I lose my rationality when I'm angry and I get even more single-minded than I usually am.  I'm okay with getting angry when the ref makes a bad call in a basketball game I'm watching.  But that's about the only situation where I think my anger is okay.  Otherwise, I'm afraid that my anger will take me down a bad path.

I have thought for a while that high-level Democrats should model voters like me after the Walter White character in Breaking Bad.  In addition to the anger, there is substantial intelligence coupled with a demoralizing sense of impotence.  And some of this anger is directed at Democrats because they seem not to get this - they are still trusting the process implicitly.  

I hope they'll figure it out before it's too late.

Varying Points of View

The ineffectual intellectual
Advanced the proposition
That knowledge is contextual.

While the uncouth youth
Who grew up in Duluth
Went in search of absolute truth.
#ADifferenceInPerspectiveCanEvokeAnInvective

Mouthing Off

Function and Dys
Along with their sis
On treats they were nibbling
Each and every sibling.
#ThoughElatedTheyWerOrallyFixated

The Spirit of Norman Rockwell

The husbands are left to their own devices
As the wives converse about gardens and spices
In the suburban life we're getting to know
Everyone is your neighbor and taking it slow.
#TheSunIsShiningSoItIsTimeToMakeHay

 

The Winning Streak Is Over

All good things come to an end
We hope another one can extend
The Yankees hold on first place
Well positioned for the pennant race.
#ItAintOverTilItsOver

The Vicious Cycle

The overly frustrated
Are readily manipulated
By obtuse views
Supported by fake news
Then our politics becomes completely castrated.
#HistoryRepeatsButTheInternetGivesItANovelSpin

Twas Brillig

The Jabberwocky
Played knock hockey
But didn't use a stick.

He bumped into Puck
Then ran out of luck
As the board became too slick.

#WhatDoWeRememberFromEnglishClassInHighSchool

No Intents Offended

A social goof
During an innocent spoof
May inadvertently rile
The frown replaces the smile.

Then it depends
On making amends
In a way that's real
With touch and feel.

#SteppingIntoPooWhatNextShouldYouDo

Severe Storms And Changing Norms

When the lightning strikes close
And you wonder if you'll be toast
Then it's worth taking note
Of those Mother Nature hadn't smote.
#ForABriefTimeItWasVeryScaryLastNight

A Stroll Toward Droll

Trying to be funny
Usually becomes about money

While deliberately being odd
Ends up turning into sod

The ordinary transaction
May be replete

And ready for extraction
With bits that are offbeat.

#YouWillFindItInTheLastPlaceYouLook

Perception

With clarity of thought
But dirty eyeglasses
WYSIWYG becomes naught
Imagination then surpasses.

#LookWithinToOvercomeChagrin

Making Hay

When Groucho
Met a gaucho
Of course
The horse
Was of a different color.

And when Huntley
Uttered bluntly
Then Brinkley
Responded distinctly
Though quite a bit duller.

#GiantsFromOurYouthNowPastLongInTheTooth

When Not To Take Advantage Of The Situation

Though he was a handsome devil
He decided to keep things level
And not let his good looks
Allow him to cook the books
So his firm wouldn't fully dishevel.
#OneNeedNotAtoneIfOneHasAnEthicalBone

To Weet His Own

I'm not bitter
About leaving Twitter
Just something new
For me to do.
#WhenTheWorldIsTryingThenTrySomethingElse

Temporary Home After Leaving Twitter

I would like to leave my old Tweets up for a while but I intend now to leave Twitter and find a new host for my rhymes.  Once upon a time, I wrote longer rhymes and posted them to this blog.  You can find them under the label, Searching for the 3-L lllama.  But I received some constructive criticism about my meter being off.  The word limit in Twitter actually helped with that - I couldn't go so far astray.  Plus, perhaps it gave me a somewhat different audience. 

So while I don't think this will be the long term solution, for now it should be an okay substitute.  I've made a new label, Temporary Twitter Replacement.  Then I can take my time in finding a new alternative.  I've also thought about republishing some of the old Tweets, but in different form.  That would keep me busy.  

Our Ideals and the Difficulty in Their Implementation

This post is another one where I try to make sense of a bunch things I've been reading and viewing.  Let me start with this piece from the New-Gazette, which tickled my funny bone but in an odd way: UI adds diversity, equity, inclusion statement to faculty-promotion process. Indeed in this post I want to give my thinking on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion even though, in case it's not fully evident, as a long-time retiree I now operate totally outside the conversations that are happening on campus. This ignorance about what is going on might disqualify me, in advance, from rendering an intelligent opinion on these matters.  If so, the benefit to the post will be for me only, to get the thoughts out of my system.  Otherwise, since very few people read my blog these days, it will mostly be no harm - no foul.  

But there may be reasons why someone outside the campus conversation, yet with some knowledge of campus history, might offer up something useful.  Part of this, for me, is that going back 25 years or so I had the job of encouraging diffusion of educational technology on campus and taking the metaphor of diffusion of innovation, there might be some parallels to be drawn between the ed tech effort then and the diversity, equity, and inclusion effort now.  Then, too, I tend to be very idealistic in my thinking now, where 25 years ago I was much more low to the ground and focused on what was do-able.  It might be useful to consider what pushing beyond the envelope would be like.  Also, I have some indirect experience with the subject matter as the mentor and ghostwriter for a human rights organization in Uganda called Universal Love Alliance, which has as part of its mission to make Uganda a more inclusive society. That experience might be relevant to the current topic.  Then too, I will air what might be considered "dirty laundry" about the campus that I think is relevant.  Conceivably that would be useful if the need to make the public discussion of these issues positive and upbeat, such as in the 2022 Conversation with Senior Leadership, sweeps those parts that are dirty laundry to the side and perhaps ignores them entirely. I do think these less discussed issues should get an airing now, even if doing so ruffles some feathers.

Let me also mention this post from about a year and a half ago: Repricing - in Higher Education and in the Economy as a Whole, which was about reducing the excessive income inequality in society.   As an economist, I view extreme income inequality as the fundamental social ill that is undermining our country. The post is in the idealistic vein mentioned above.  One lesson from it, which I think is worth keeping in mind here, is that the changes have to happen across higher education if they are to work.  One campus operating alone while trying to implement these changes will be shooting itself in the foot.  (If you do make an attempt to read that post, note that it got very long and probably reads more like a white paper than a blog post.  So I made a Google Docs version, which might be easier to get through.  Also note that the pandemic was well underway at the time of the post but vaccines had yet to appear.  Consequently, some statements about the then current labor market are no longer correct today.)  I'm on less terra firma writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but my goal in this post is to provide a similar analysis to what I gave in the Repricing piece.

Let me get to the punchline and then return to the discussion.  With income inequality it is useful to refer to the haves and the have-nots.   Those labels may continue to be useful when discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion.  It seems to me that the bulk of the campus efforts to date have been about making the university affordable for the have-nots.  While this obviously matters, there has been little to no discussion about raising awareness among the the haves and quite possibly providing a solution where they have less. That's what we'll be considering here.

Returning to the discussion, consider these conundrums.  The U of I is highly selective regarding undergraduate admissions and some colleges within the U of I are more selective than others.  How does one reconcile selectivity with inclusion?  Further, some colleges have college-specific surcharges while others do not.  If instructional quality is positively correlated with the surcharges, as one might expect it should be, how does one reconcile the presence of these surcharges with equity?  Then, bringing this a bit lower to the ground, we have the fairly recent, pre-pandemic experience of having a large number of Chinese students on campus, as described in this piece from Inside Higher Ed.  And I know from an informal discussion group I had with three such students in spring 2015 who took a course from me the prior semester that many of these Chinese students came to the U.S. at least in part for cultural reasons, hoping for intensive interactions with American students so they could learn about the American way of life.  But the reality was that outside of classroom the vast majority of their interactions were with other Chinese students.  How does one reconcile this experience with diversity?

On the first of these conundrums, I wrote a post almost two years ago called Rethinking Elitism in Public Education that describes a hypothetical solution. I'm not holding my breath on having the ideas there see the light of day, for it seems that the pressing issue for campus leadership is finding new sources of revenue and sustaining elitism appears to be a necessary precondition for that.  On the surcharges, one can imagine providing data on expenditure per student by major, with separate results for freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  This would tie into the transfer pricing that is used by which tuition revenue gets allocated to academic departments.  I am not current on this, but I believe there was an adjustment in those formulas not that long ago, with a much greater share of tuition revenue being transferred out of the Provost's office into the colleges.  But I also believe that Deans retained discretion on how tuition income would then be allocated to the individual departments.  LAS is a monster in size, compared to the other colleges, and for this purpose perhaps it should be broken up into three units - STEM, Social Sciences, and Humanities.  This would highlight the problem of the decline of the Humanities major, with the size of Humanities departments determined by historical enrollment patterns, not just the recent past. So there is an imbalance here.  How it is addressed matters.  On the diversity issues and students getting outside their comfort zone in interacting with other students, I would hate for the answer to be that student out-of-class time must be programmed to ensure such interactions.  I think students need plenty of their own time for reflection, socializing, and doing schoolwork. But I don't see another real solution to the issue.  I will note that the informal discussion group I had was advertised to the entire class near the end of the semester. None of the other students in the class indicated an interest in it.  It's a very small sample to generalize from, but I doubt getting faculty more directly involved in some way to generate these type of interactions will produce the requisite diversity.  (I have tried recruiting for such a discussion group in previous years and in subsequent years as well.  This was the only time where I got more than one student to participate.)

Let me briefly take up the new requirement for assistant professors who are up for promotion and tenure, to produce a statement about their own activities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.  My immediate reaction was about what we know and what we don't know regarding the mental health of assistant professors in this situation.  The campus has made a point of talking about the mental health of undergraduates; indeed all of higher ed is talking about this. It was a very big issue even before the pandemic.  It's certainly a larger issue now.  And in this recent opinion piece by Charles Blow, he characterized all of America as having PTSD, perhaps a reasonable first pass at describing the mental outlook of most folks.  Assistant professors who are up for tenure are understood to be under a lot of stress as a consequence, apart from the pandemic.  Does adding this additional requirement for the promotion package make sense under the circumstances?

Pushing this further in my own thinking, I wondered if there are plans underway to have similar requirements for specialized faculty (who teach but are not on the tenure track) as well as for graduate student teaching assistants.  Both the specialized faculty and the graduates students have union representation.  I can envision a discussion between the union representatives and the campus on this matter along the following lines: "We'd be happy to help with the diversity, equity, and inclusion effort as long as you increase our pay for doing this additional work."  Is that in the cards?  Conversely, will highly individualized acts of this sort actually be effective or will this prove to be an albatross that in aggregate does very little of real benefit?  

Getting back to the mental health issues that many students face, this was addressed by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Danita Young Brown in the campus leadership video linked above.  She mentioned that the campus is trying to hire 5 new mental health counselors to be in place for the start of the fall semester. Students have requested greater access to such counselors, so this seems a sensible move. Yet I wonder why the campus doesn't consider the problem in fundamentally other ways as well.  (Elsewhere I've characterized this as treating the symptoms but not the cause.)  In particular, do we know whether certain campus programs or the behavior of other students contributes to student mental health issues?  If we don't know, are we doing some inquiry to find out?  And if we do know, are we taking steps to make the environment less toxic? In any event, why aren't we talking more about this?

Now I'll speculate a little to show what I have in mind.  In 2017 an internal memo to Google, since known as Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, became publicly available and, indeed, went viral. The memo was written by James Damore who did his undergraduate work at the U of I, I believe in quantitative biology.  The publicity around that memo created an interest in the brogrammer culture, which many women in the tech world find alienating.  At the same time that Damore was an undergraduate on campus, I taught a CHP class on Designing for Effective Change.  There was a student in ACM (a woman) who described the in-your-face style of the interactions that the students had - I thought of it as trash talking between geeks. Was that sort of behavior encouraged explicitly or condoned by faculty and staff in computing disciplines?  Were there any steps taken to limit the behavior?  I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think they are the sort of questions that should be asked and answered.

In fall 2017 and again in fall 2019 I taught an upper level economics class as a retiree.  The class was on The Economics of Organizations.  Because I had students do weekly blogging to connect their experiences to course topics, I learned a little bit about them and their history on campus.  A bit less than a third of the clas had transferred out of the College of Engineering.   Essentially all these students were either women or minority students.  I believe that most if not all of them wanted to be in the College of Business, but they didn't have a good enough GPA to achieve that.  Majoring in Economics was the next best option and several of these students also did the Business Minor.  These students were somewhat emotionally damaged by the process, as became painfully evident to me on more than one occasion.  Again I must bring up the caveat that this is a small sample from which to draw a conclusion.  Yet it is suggestive and it seems possible to get more data to determine whether this is a correct or misleading picture.

Engineering education has a reputation for being brutal to the students, going back at least since I was an undergraduate in the mid 1970s and likely well before that.  But this brutal approach is deleterious to student mental health, including those students who do get through, and it clearly is not inclusive.  When I first took over the SCALE project, I did a study on retention rates at the course level (final course enrollment divided by 10-day course enrollment).  This was background on learning whether online course components could improve retention.  What I found is that in most courses the retention rate was so high already that online couldn't improve it.  Engineering courses were different.  They had a much lower retention rate. Soon thereafter I became aware that Engineering deliberately pursued a "weed out" policy.  Some years later the U of I started to admit many more students from community colleges. The business model for Engineering adjusted to include admitting many community college students to fill the seats left vacant by those other students who had transferred out.   

Is the brutal approach that features a weed out process necessary for engineering education?  If at Illinois we tried a more accommodating approach (most likely against the preferences of the majority of College of Engineering faculty) would we start to lose students to other top engineering schools and possibly lose some faculty as well?  If so, we could only do this if those other schools also did it.  Is that possible?  I don't know.  This framing of the issues shows the dilemma we face.

* * * * *

But I don't mean to single out Engineering.  I think the issue is much broader, though measuring the deficiencies of the education may be a harder task.  According to a former student who emailed me recently, 

"Amongst my generation, education is transactional, perhaps as a byproduct of the cost of a degree."

This transactional approach might show up in how focused students seem to be about their GPA, which motivates how they go about school, and how little they seem to care about innate interest in the subject matter or, for that matter, in a deep level of self-understanding.  It is surely exacerbated by carrying a large amount of student loan debt, but is likely also there for many students from financially comfortable families, where the parents pay the student's tuition, room and board, and give additional funds for the student's recreational use. College has become a way for such parents to fulfill the bequest motive, well before their own end of life.  As such, the students have been groomed for this from quite an early age, perhaps as far back as primary school.  That so conditions their approach - to college and to life.

An alternative approach wss given by Harry Boyte, who gave a lecture about this on campus back in March 2016.  I refer to Boyte's approach as the good citizenship model of education.  

Boyte argues that college education should be primarily about making students good citizens.  Such citizenship is exercised mainly not at the ballot box but rather at the place of work.  Good citizens do whatever is necessary to make the workplace highly functional and socially responsible.  Good citizens have agency, an expression Boyte used over and over again.  This means they can size up the situation to see what is required to make matters better.  Then they can act in a way that does improve things.

One might reasonably conjecture that if students were good citizens in this way, and faculty and staff were also good citizens, then diversity, equity, and inclusion would emerge de facto on campus.  I want to complicate this picture some because I believe that members of the campus community would resist a characterization that they are not good citizens though some students, in particular, would own up to the lack of their own agency.  The complication is this.  Most people will draw a circle of those others where they'd want to act as good citizens.  With respect to people outside the circle, however, they will act selfishly.  The issue then is not whether the person is a good citizen, it is how large a circle the person draws and how large a circle we outsiders think the person should draw.  Then, to complicate matters further, it may be that there are several circles nested within each other, with the strongest form of good citizenship applying to the innermost circle only and the intensity of good citizenship weakening as one moves to the outer circles.  After all, the campus is huge and one can become completely overwhelmed by serving on too many committees, reading the papers of too many colleagues and/or students, and hosting too many visitors.  So there is an earnest question about what is the right size for the innermost circle and whether the outer circles are sufficient to support diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus.  

Nevertheless, it may be that for many good citizenship does not offer an appropriate framing for how they go about things.  So, one wonders whether such people can be educated to become good citizens and, if so, what effective education of this sort looks like.  It is here that my relationship with ULA may be useful and, in particular, this document called Universal Love Alliance and Dialogue.  It is a comparatively short document (at least by my standards) and I think is well worth the read.  I encourage the campus to develop some expertise in dialogue facilitation and then experiment with small numbers of students who go through a training workshop that features dialogue.  I want to note that ULA has conducted successful workshops of this sort with faith leaders who beforehand where homophobic.  These faith leaders are brought together in a cloistered setting, for their own safety and the workshops are typically multi-day affairs.  So this is much more in the vein of adult education than it is typical undergraduate education and surely some reasons for the effectiveness of the training are the intensity of the effort and the cathartic nature of the experience.  

Whether it is possible to do something similar on campus, I don't know.  I should also note that facilitated dialogue with students, where the facilitators are either faculty or staff members, may face the barrier that the facilitators don't really understand the prior student mindset.  In contrast, Turinawe Samson, who is the Executive Director of ULA, trained to be a Pentecostal minister and did such work until he was kicked out of the church as a dangerous person.  His background enables him to empathize completely with the faith leaders who attend the ULA workshops.  Perhaps, ultimately, the campus will develop training for student facilitators, so they can be the ones who provide the workshop training.  But even then, will students from households that are comfortable financially have the right sort of empathy for other students who come from households of modest means?  If not, what can be done to transcend these differences in family background?

We learned in the campus leadership video from Sean Garrick, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that there already is a small grant program in place to encourage individual efforts in this domain from students, faculty, and staff.  I believe the grants are $1,000 a piece for one year, but I may be a bit off on that detail.  I found this encouraging as grant programs are inherently opt in so unlike the new requirements to be put in place for assistant professors on the tenure track.  Early on, I believe opt in is the way to go as it will attract the innovators and early adopters to experiment with approaches.  Subsequently, as the effort scales up, some coercion may be necessary for the majority adopters to embrace the ideas. 

Yet I thought the campus grants that Vice Chancellor Garrick mentioned very modest in size, quite possibly insufficient to jump start the effort.  My thought is that a campus effort of this sort will require much more funding as well as a plan to scale up from the experimental stage, if the work done at that stage proves successful.  And the need for such funding suggests a like need for grants from foundations or wealthy individuals. But many, if not most, of the other major universities are likewise making their own efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion.  They too will be competing for such grants.  How then can the U of I obtain its fair share of this soft money?

A sober analysis needs to be done about whether the U of I has a real and durable advantage over peers, which should then be made overt to potential funders.  Back in the mid 1990s the U of I did have such an advantage, having previously been home to the Plato Project, which meant there was already a lot of embedded knowledge on effective use of educational technology.  For many on campus, the goal was to enable Plato-like functionality over the Web; the applications CyberProf and Mallard were conceived this way.  The campus was also clear innovative in IT with Mosaic, the first graphical browser, coming out of NCSA and Eudora, a then state of the art email program coming out of the campus computing organization.  

These advantages notwithstanding, Burks Oakley, who secured the initial SCALE grant felt a need to over promise to the Sloan Foundation what would be delivered, by claiming that ALN (what we called online learning at the time) would lower the cost of instruction.  The SCALE evaluation wasn't finding this, however.  One of the reasons I was brought in to run SCALE was to make some headway on this promise.  I bring up this little bit of history because the incentive to over promise to potential grant funders is large, as a way to secure the funds, though there will be a reckoning down the road. 

When I eventually took over for Burks in running SCALE, there were three separate programs that funded ed tech activity on campus.  One was through the campus Ed Tech Board, which gave out grants of roughly $6,000 per grantee for one year, with a total funding of about $200,000 per year.  This was funded by campus.  SCALE had its own grant program. The average size of the a grant was about $20,000 per year.  Just as important from my point of view is that as the person running SCALE I would get preliminary proposals from faculty and on the basis of this understand where they were coming from and possibly negotiate in a friendly way to a modified proposal that would get the approval of our review committee.  Indeed, in this manner I could shape much of the important ed tech activity on campus.  Eventually, when we did The SCALE Efficiency Projects to meet Sloan's concern about ed tech reducing the cost of instruction, I believe I was the first mover in shaping what the internal grants would be like, so had even more control of the process.  SCALE was generously funded with $2.1M from the Sloan Foundation and $700K of matching funds from the Swanlund Gift Fund, I believe the first campus use of that particular gift.   Apart from being an internal grant provider, SCALE was also a back end supporter of ed tech.  For the life of me I now can't remember the division in funding for grants versus for back end support and administrative overhead.  But I'm sure that SCALE allocated a great deal more money to grants than did the ETB.

The third source of funds was at the University level, in a program called ALTHE which was then under the leadership of Sylvia Manning, Vice President for Academic Affairs.  Burks had been a faculty fellow in Sylvia's office the year before I came into SCALE and eventually Burks made the jump from the campus to the university.  Though the ALTHE program was really intended for the Chicago and Springfield campuses, to get them up to speed with ed tech so they could develop online programs, the plurality of the considerable funding went to Urbana, as that was where most of the then current innovative activity was happening.  The overall impact of these three programs on faculty at the Urbana campus was to give a feel of the Wild West, which the early days of the Internet contributed to.  Within the administration, it was evident there was a rivalry between the campus and the university and the lack of coordination between the two produced substantial tension.  

I was heads down with my economics research before SCALE, so have no sense whether these same politics existed when President Ikenberry was running things.  But the politics persisted even after President Stukel, Ikenberry's successor, stepped down.   The underlying problem, as I see it from my perch, is that the position of University President sounds like the top banana of the whole thing.  Yet the reality is that the Chancellor of the Urbana campus holds more real power. So the President is apt to be "creative" in order to transfer some of that power to his office.  I would hope that this is no longer an issue.  But I'm afraid it still might be.  

The last two years that the ETB had a grant program, 1999 and 2000, the grants were targeted at majority faculty who would attend a 3-day summer workshop run by the then new Center for Educational Technologies and the faculty would receive a stipend after the workshop concluded to help them get started with their own ed tech projects.  CET was the successor to SCALE (they overlapped for one year) and I became the Director of CET.  This approach with workshops made sense to me as a way to move along the diffusion curve. But CET was horribly underfunded from the get go.  SCALE funds bolstered it during that first year.  After that there was a big hole in the budget.  To fill that hole, the ETB grant funds were transferred to CET and became part of its core budget.   

I will also note that there was a change in campus leadership at the Provost level around then.  Sloan had somewhat shifted its orientation and wanted to focus on totally online programs.  While Sloan gave SCALE a renewal grant in 1998, based on the success of the SCALE Efficiency Projects, they indicated they wouldn't be giving SCALE a second renewal, even though they were happy with our work, because for the most part we weren't supporting totally online courses.  However, they did arrange for the Mellon Foundation to take over the SCALE grant and Mellon was very interested in doing so.  Yet this required getting a campus match to the grant.  The new Provost wasn't convinced that was a good idea and didn't offer up the funds.  In retrospect, we should have used the ETB funds for the campus match and then continue to do those ETB summer workshops in the years of Mellon funding.  Alas, that's not how it played out. 

Then too, many instructors who hadn't attended any of the workshops wanted to start using a course management system for the online component to their classes.  This was overwhelmingly a dull use of the technology, mainly file sharing and not much more. But it occurred with large numbers of instructors and it began to seem that CET's core mission was to enable this use.  In so doing we went from an organization that encouraged interesting adaptations of the technology to the particular course needs and instructor viewpoint and instead became a technology services provider.  This drama took a long time in playing out.  CET was eventually merged with the larger IT organization to form CITES, and the drama continued in those years as well. So the back end of the ed tech services were provided in a more technically proficient manner, but I thought we lost our true raison d'être in the process. 

I've belabored this history of SCALE, CET, and my involvement with campus ed tech, because I think there are lessons from that experience that are relevant to the current effort with diversity, equity, and inclusion.  In particular, there needs to be a plan in place for moving down the entire diffusion curve, including whether the effort can be sustained when there is a change in campus leadership.  There also has to be a realistic assessment of the revenues that can be brought to the effort after the novelty has worn off and whether there still will be campus commitment to the effort at that time.  This is a challenge.  What seems super important now may get lost in the shuffle a decade from now, with the agenda not yet complete, because some other bright new shiny object has come along to capture the attention of campus leadership.  

* * * * * 

In the back of my head I'm asking myself, what would it take to get a grant from MacKenzie Scott to support the effort, funding that would be large enough to sustain the entire diffusion curve.  Let me get back to that. 

My sense of things is that if we are to think big about diversity, equity, and inclusion we need to involve a large aggregate, such as the Big Ten Universities.  Then we need to have a major prior accomplishment for the Big Ten Academic Alliance to lay claim to, to create enough positive press that donors would be interested in funding further efforts in other areas 

My candidate for hitting a home run among the public university members of the Big Ten (sorry Northwestern) is to do away with the current system of in-state and out-of-state tuition, which made sense when states were funding the lion's share of the education cost, and replace it with a common Big Ten tuition that any student from a state that has a Big Ten university would pay to attend any public Big Ten university. The Big Ten tuition rate would be higher than the current in-state rate but lower than the the current out-of-state rate.  Let's leave its precise determination for now and consider the benefits from moving to this new arrangement.

Under the current arrangement, there is not a good substitute for the in-state flagship school, which offers both a good tuition rate and a high quality education.  The exceptions are in Indiana and Michigan, where there are two such universities in each of these states that might be thought of as substitutes for each other, but with some specialization in offerings and the division of clientele served between the two.  Elsewhere it is rather expensive to go out of state and one would likely not do so unless the student was rejected by the in-state flagship university or the student wants to enroll in a highly specialized program that doesn't exist at the in-state school or the student gets into an elite "honors program" at the out-of-state school, but does not get into the equivalent at the in-state school.  Having a fixed Big Ten tuition rate would lessen the risk across these outcomes, though admittedly cost more to attend the in-state school than it would have previously cost.  Alternatively, while many families do receive the benefit of in-state tuition, some families do not.  The uniform Big Ten tuition would be a fairer approach. 

And from the perspective of Big Ten members, there would be other benefits.  Campuses through negotiation could specialize somewhat and move away from the comprehensive approach.  Campuses would be encouraged to compute the marginal cost per student in program x as well as the average cost per student.  If the in-state tuition is below the marginal cost, the campus has no financial incentive to admit the student.  But, as far as I know, in-state tuition rates are now a political animal and are set by the Board of Trustees, in reference to historical tuition rates as well as tuition rates at certain peer institutions that are use for comparison.  It really would be better to get tuition rates more closely tied to the cost of the education. 

I'm not saying this wouldn't be a very heavy lift.  What I am saying is that this would be seen as a major accomplishment, if it could be done. That would set the groundwork for other ambitious projects in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space that are funded with large grant support.  Perhaps with this major accomplishment in hand, Mackenzie Scott would then be interested in funding the Big Ten effort in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

* * * * *

I want to make one more point and then close. When I first started as a SCALE faculty member, the year before I began to run SCALE, the approach I took in teaching my class was completely determined by imitating others who had done this stuff before me and then trying to fit that to the subject matter of my course.  I was willing to experiment with the implementation to see if it was effective, but at the time I didn't have the wherewithal to come up with an implementation that was totally of my own design.  In other words, the most effective pedagogy, especially early on, is monkey see - monkey do.  

There is learning by doing and confidence is gained when at least some of the experiments seem to pay off.  Then one might try things that are more off the beaten path.  Eventually I did that sort of thing, for example with Excelets.  (Scott Sinex is the one who spread the concept so that it has real use, mainly outside of economics.) And likewise for using student blogging in teaching economics, which given the subject matter is quite an unusual practice. However, I was already quite far along with ed tech when I started to experiment with student blogs.

There is a common mistake made that instructors are the pedagogy experts, so they know up front how to introduce diversity, equity, and inclusion ideas into their own courses.  I think that is quite wrong.  Most will be clueless about how to do this, even if they care a great deal about teaching and want to encourage all students regardless of their background.  They need to learn from the lessons of the innovators and early adopters, who do have a clue about what to try in their classrooms.  

As the innovators and early adopters have full-time jobs already, there needs to be an organization that partners with these first movers, learns from them and then provides ideas about where to start with majority faculty. This is how the mechanism should work.  

I hope we get there, but it doesn't seem that we're there yet. There are risks in moving too fast, especially about not anticipating entrenched resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.   This piece in the Chronicle illustrates the pain that might be created when the potential resistance hasn't been assessed at all. But there are also risks in ignoring real problems that need to be address but instead letting them fester, as this other Chronicle essay illustrates.  There will be Monday morning quarterbacks who don't see the full picture but think they know better about how to implement.  In the SCALE days I didn't face much of that.  Later, when we first tried to implement an enterprise LMS, that was all I was hearing.  What I'm trying to say is that this won't be easy to get done.  I hope we can persist and do just that.