An egalitarian college president

I work at a university where the president has a chauffeur who drives her from one building to another on campus.  She corrects any student who dares to call her by her first name.  She expects her vice presidents to rise when she enters a room.  This offends my values.  Quakers are the ones who went to prison for refusing to take off their hat for the kind.  I am stuck here until I find another way to earn a living.

Marlboro College is one place that has a very different set of values.  I have applied for jobs there, but I have not been offered any jobs there. 

The Summer 2012 Marlboro College alumni magazine has an article about a professor on the occasion of her retirement.  The professor, Laura Stevenson, joined Marlboro in 1986.  She says, "The first winter I was here we got a big snowstorm, and when I finally got to campus with my snowshoes and shovel, there were the president and the dean shoveling the walks."

The Spring 2015 issue suggests that the trend of non-snobby presidents has continued.  Regarding an ice storm in 2008, the magazine says, "Ellen was one of just a few people able to get to campus.  She opened the kitchen and ended up flipping pancakes." 

Ellen is the president of Marlboro.  The magazine refers to her by her first name.  The president of the university where I work not only refuses to be called by her first name, she also insists on being called by a pretentious title. 

Information literacy and the search for truth

I have been concerned of late about information literacy.  On Facebook, I have been noting that:

1. Stories go viral because they infuriate people, even though they are false.
2. People latch on to things which fit with their beliefs.  

In December, the hot topic was Duck Dynasty.  My Facebook feed was filled with posts stating that

1. Free speech means the government can't limit your speech.  However, others are free to speak out against your speech, and companies are free to fire you for things you've said during non-work time.
2. Conservatives are hypocrites because they are outraged about this guy getting fired, but they have not been outraged when liberals got fired for similar reasons.

This really irked me, because liberals seemed blind to the fact that the double standard goes both ways: They don't proclaim that thing about how companies are free to fire you when it is liberals who are getting fired.

We latch on to stories that fit our beliefs.  Therefore, I have recently latched onto some stories which express some of these concerns.

My attention was captured recently listening to the January 3 edition of On the Media.  In one story,  The Best Piece of Radio You'll Hear in Your Life,  Bob Garfield and Luke O'Neil talk about how in the media, the financial incentive is to get people to click on stories.  The goal becomes not truth but to be funny, inspiring, cute, or infuriating.  False stories go viral, because they are designed to tap into people's emotions.  The truth is not so tidy, and does not make such an appealing story. These false stories can have real consquences.  In one example, an elementary school was flooded with threats because of a false story that a student had been suspended for saying "Merry Christmas" to an atheist teacher.

Another story from the January 3 edition of On the Media was  Regret the Error 2013.  In this story, Bob Garfield and Craig Silverman gave some examples of the false stories that journalists aired in 2013, such as that President Obama was using his personal finances to fund a Muslim museum.

I was also struck by what two NPR commentators had to say about Nathanael Johnson's recent research on GMOs.  Johnson set out to do objective research about GMOs for a liberal web site.  In A Green-Movement Web Site Shakes Up the Debate Over GMOs, Dan Charles says that Johnson was accused of being "an unreliable source" by an anti-GMO person.

It seems to me that we tend to think that those whose views are different from ours must lack intelligence, rationality, and compassion.  But when we find ourselves making such assumptions, that should be an alarm bell that our cognitive biases are at work.

The other NPR commentary about Johnson's work that caught my attention was GMO's and the Dilemma of Bias by Adam Frank. Frank asks, "How, then, do we maintain democratic practices when informed consent often requires absorbing new information at odds with pre-existing values and world views?"

 It is okay for fictional stories to inspire us, as long as we understand that they are indeed fiction.  Unfortunately, many of the stories circulating as fact are actually fiction.

Druids are the keepers of the stories of their tribe.  They are scholars and historians.  They provide information to guide the rulers of their tribe.

It is part of my responsibility as a druid to seek truth and to share that truth with my tribe.  I can resolve to start by refraining from clicking on sensationalist headlines, just as decades ago, my great-grandfather resolved not to buy any products he had seen advertised, because he was opposed to advertising as a way of making profit.

But that's just a starting point.  What else can I do?

Years ago, I studied social science research in school because I wanted social policy decisions and social programs to be designed so as to really help people, rather than to be designed on false assumptions about what would help people.   Since then I found that: 1) Though I applied for jobs in social science research, I didn't get any offers, and 2) I don't see research and statistics as holding the answers as much as I used to.    Now I believe that there are some things better understood qualitatively than quantitatively.  Now I believe that we also have values.  Research may tell us the consequences of certain paths, but values tell us which consequences we wish to seek.

So even though I'm not really pursuing social science research any more, I still have the thing that led me to pursue it: the belief that we should seek truth, rather than make decisions based on false assumptions.  I'm still searching for the way I can make a difference.  Do I belong in education? Should I be a librarian? Should I be teaching classes in information literacy?  Should I be doing data analysis?  

Violence prevention

According to Shankar Vedantam's July 2 story "Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime," often violence is not a calculated thing, but a matter of someone getting mad and out of control.  That seems consistent with many cases I've heard about.  On Tuesday, in a neighboring town, at a youth baseball game, an umpire made a call, and as a result was assaulted by a parent and a coach.  Even in cases where it's a little more pre-meditated, often it is still the same dynamic where someone feels disrespected and is filled with rage, so they decide to go after the person who angered them.  A recent case in the news is that of Aaron Hernandez.  After he was arrested for murder, more stories came out of his reacting violently when angry.

The article tells about a program in which young people were taught to slow down and think before acting.  During the year the program was going on, the students in the program had a lower arrest rate than the control group.  However, the change did not last after the program was over.

I think it's a step in the right direction.  Making guns less readily accessible would help too.  So often criminal justice focuses on punishment.  By then it is too late.  I hope we can continue to work on preventing crime before it happens.  When crimes happen, the victims and the perpetrators can have their lives ruined.  Let us teach our young people not to ruin their own lives and other people's lives.

It is present in human nature, this ability to burst into violence.  It bursts out in certain circumstances.  It seems to have to do with feeling disrespected.  It has to do with anger, and anger seems to come from hurt.  Can we care for our young people so they don't have to erupt into anger?

Maajid Nawaz grew up feeling alienated, and became an Islamist radical.  When he was in prison in Egypt, he was adopted by Amnesty International.  Because of this experience of being embraced, he changed, and became a counter-terrorism activist.

Rejecting people, we alienate them, incite them to violence.  Embracing people, we inspire them to compassion and reconciliation.  No, it doesn't always work that way. It doesn't guarantee safety.  But people are more likely to be nice to us if we are nice to them.

It seems so simple and obvious.  Why do people not do it that way? Why when my country feels another country is a threat, do they drop bombs on that country?  We have made more enemies in places like Iraq and Pakistan than we had before we were bombing them.

To educate the world

Three things from yesterday's NRP story After a Marine's Suicide, a Family Recalls Missed Red Flags strike me:

1. Military service is part of his family tradition, going back to the Revolutionary war, and yet his family had never heard of post traumatic stress disorder.  I thought everyone knew about PTSD.  Certainly a military family should know about it.  We need to educate people.
2. He joined the military because he wanted to help the world.  To me that shows a real lack of vision with regard to what sort of action might be helpful to the world.  We need to give our young people more helpful ways to help the world.  
3. A reader going by the name AddySun wrote a comment on the story.   Her husband was in the military. She told of how destructively he behaved, and said that she eventually left him.  Much as we want to help those we love who are troubled, we also have to take care of ourselves. She had to leave him to save herself.  I think if I were in that position, I would always feel there was something wrong with me for not being able to help him find his way back to sanity, for abandoning him.  When I look at her situation, I know she did the right thing, and I just have to remind myself to view myself in the same way that I view others.

I have been thinking the past few days how troubled I am about the ignorance in the world.  Politicians who are leading us sometimes are making their decisions based on wrong information (for example, Tom Akin, who believes, "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”)

I am upset by parents who are cruel to their parents.  I wish parent education were a pre-requisite for childbearing.

But I don't think these things can be mandated.  I am thinking of Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge.  The solution is not to find the truth and impose it on people.  Because we can't be wedded to one version of the truth.  We have to keep our minds open, always learning.

So this is my cause, my passion: to make information available.  To tell military families about PTSD.  To tell young people about opportunities to help the world.  To tell people in harmful relationships that they need to take care of themselves.  To give policymakers accurate information about the topics on which they are making policies.  To teach parents about childrearing practices.  And not only to convey facts, but to convey something about the value of critical thinking and of always being open to new information, rather than being set in one view.  To give people all this information, but then to let them choose what to do with it.

Seeking truth vs. seeking validation of pre-existing beliefs

The Friday before last, the news was all dominated by one thing.  I was taking a vacation day from work, too tired to do anything, just lying there listening to the radio, so I heard a lot of it.  One thing that I heard was Shankar Vedantam saying that when we hear about things like that, we frame it in terms of our pre-existing beliefs.  He talked about how after the Newtown shootings, some people focused on guns while others focused on mental illness.

Then my friend called me, ranting about how outraged he was that some people on the internet speculated that one of the Boston bombers was Sunil Tripathi.  It struck me how much that came from his pre-existing beliefs, that of all the things that happened, that was the only thing that he was going on about.  People say all kinds of stupid things on the internet, this was just one of many stupid things people say on the internet.  But to him, this was the most important thing.  More important than the bombing itself.  More important than the good things people did afterwards to help the victims of the bombing.  More important than the fact that the New York Post printed a photo identifying two innocent people as suspects.  More important than the fact that more reputable news media (such as NPR, which is what I was following) did a better job of presenting accurate reports.

The same set of events has different meanings to different people, depending on their pre-existing views.  People seem so wrapped up in proving their point.  They don't use research to search for truth.  They use research to search for evidence to back up what they already believe.

On Facebook, I see lots of posts that are about showing how stupid the other side is.  They imagine that everyone who disagrees with them is some monolithic other side, with no diversity or subtlety or reason, and then the post things putting down this imaginary other side.

A liberal posts a photo captioned, "If you believe your factory should not be subject to federal regulations,  then you should not get federal funds when it blows up."

A conservative posts an image that says, "The 2nd Amendment isn't subject to opinion polls."

Both of these statements include underlying premises about what the people on the other side believes. I think that they are painting the other side with a broad brush.  That offends me.  It seems like the goal should be to seek truth.  The goal should be for all of us to work together to learn how to thrive as the human race.

What I would like is to see everyone trained in rhetoric and logic.  For example, one device that is used is to present something as "what the government's not telling you," or "what the corporations aren't telling you," or "what the media's not telling you."  I think people respond to this.  They instinctively latch on to the idea of a cover-up.  But if they were savvy to the fact that this sort of phrasing is often used as a way to tap into people's emotions, then they could see past that part of it, and more clearly evaluate how much truth there actually might be to the claim.

What can I do? Can I help my community to seek truth?  In a way, it's what I've wanted to do my entire adult life.  In my 20's, I wanted to do research to figure out how best to address social problems.    I was concerned that the solutions people were throwing at poverty and violence were based on ideology, and I wanted to do research to find out what really would work.  In my 30's, I wanted to work in educational administration, to help shape schools into environments where student learning would thrive.  Now I am thinking of being a librarian, to preserve and pass on knowledge.  I still don't really know what exactly my niche is, but what has been consistent is that I want to contribute to a search for knowledge and wisdom.  In particular, I want to support the quest to learn how we humans can best live together in compassionate, just, and sustainable ways.

Jesuit eduction

T. Frank Kennedy, Director of the Jesuit Institute at Boston College, made the following comments about Jesuit education in the 2011 Boston College Social Work magazine:

Jesuit, Catholic schools have at their core a mission to educate men and women for others....How do you become unselfish, how do you become a person who has a vision that's really common in the old-fashioned sense of the common good? That is the basic vision of a Jesuit education. It's a kind of spirit: to look at people not just as a job, to take care of them, to see them as our brothers and sisters....The school awakens in us a dimension of care and concern. It is an invitation to love....When you are invited to love, you don't exclude anybody....If you're a Christian or you're not a Christian, you are welcome....When you go through these exercises [The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius], that experience of learning to find love not only in other people, but also in a sunset, in a rock, in the sea, in your life as it is happening around you, you say, well, God is moving here....Finding God in all things is the way to sum it up....We belong to one another. If we could all agree on that, and agree to act that way, we'd be better off.

This Jesuit vision is so much in harmony with my Quaker vision and with my pantheist vision. Father Kennedy describes the ideal I long for. I am still struggling to put it into practice however.

How to help

Something else from my class: a quote from Goethe: "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

That fits my experience and philosophy. So many people think they are helping me when they tell me how I ought to be different, but I don't find that helpful.

Student vs. learner

Continuing on with the lecture I started writing about in the post "Learner vs. Performer," the lecturer talked about how students often make up excuses about why they can't do well in a class -- the class is too early in the morning, the class is too big, the subject material is not interesting or relevant, they are sick. (He said there are times when a student is legitimately sick and needs to miss class, but other times they use being sick as an excuse to miss class.)

Then he talked about doing a study of young chess masters. He asked the parents how they keep their children motivated to practice chess, and the parents said they don't have to, the kids are dedicated to it.

He talks about this contrast as if he's telling students they should show that same level of dedication to their classes. As if the problem lies with student attitude. But it sounds to me like the problem lies with the educational system.

The lecture also quotes Albert Einstein as saying, "I have no respect for scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great many holes where drilling is easy." The lecturer says this refers to professors who do easy research just for the sake of getting published.

It makes no sense. They set up a system where students are rewarded for getting good grades, and then they complain that students are more focused on grades than on learning. They set up a system where faculty are rewarded for number of publications, and then they complain that faculty are too focused on getting as many publications as possible. If you want students to focus on learning and faculty to focus on quality of teaching and research, don't set up a system which rewards something different.

Learner vs. performer

I'm taking a class called Learning Principles. In the lecture, they said that learning requires hard work, it's not just a matter of you either have the ability or you don't. They talked about Bobby Fischer as an example, describing the many hours he devoted to practicing chess.

Then they talked about the difference between performers and learners. A performer does what they are told. They try to do well in the class. If you tell a performer that if you don't come to class and don't read the book, you will get an A, the performer will be happy that he doesn't have to do the work. The lecturer said a learner on the other hand would be someone like Bobby Fischer -- he wouldn't have seen it as a positive if you told him he could get an A if he didn't practice chess.

Someone in the class raised the point that it's not realistic to expect students to be learners when taking required courses that don't interest them.

No one made a connection to what was mentioned earlier in the lecture, that Bobby Fischer dropped out of school in order to do chess. Sometimes what a person wants to learn does not mesh with what the educational system tells them to learn.

What would I devote my time to? What am I interested in enough to pursue as a learner rather than a performer?

Or, am I a performer by nature? Earlier in this class, we talked about learning styles, and it was clear that some people prefer more structure than others. Doesn't that mean that it's okay if it's my nature to do the work that I am assigned, rather than to pursue open-ended things?

Talk about grad school

Today I spoke to students at a local college about grad school. There were two professors present.

One was Darren, who talked for about half an hour about graduate application stuff, especially the GRE. I knew him when he was a student, so it was cool to see him as a professor. In his presentation, it seemed evident that he was a professional teacher.

The other was Tim Lederman. He required the students from his software engineering course, which is the senior capstone class, to attend. He sat in the back and occasionally asked questions. His questions were very good because they were basically an opportunity to talk about whatever important information we forgot to cover.

I think asking good questions is a good trait in a professor. I've had professors who did that, whose questions caused thoughts to rush to my head.

After the talk, I went to dinner with Darren and three students. The students had a lively conversation about student stuff, apparently uninhibited by the presence of a professor and a guest speaker. It was interesting to hear their perspectives, to get a view of what it is like to be a student at a small liberal arts college, in contrast to the research university where I work.