Richard Erlich's Open Salon Blog

"I can change!" (But you probably won't.)

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:05:49 -0400

[…] after changes upon changes we are more or less the same;

After changes we are more or less the same. — Paul Simon, "The Boxer"

I didn't go out of my way to bring up the topic, but now and then I scared my college-freshman students by telling them that though people indeed can change, most of us don't, or not that much. By the time you're 16, 17, 18, you pretty much are who you're going to be.

(A couple mothers I talked to put those ages much younger, but I'll stick with the late teens.)

Now there is such a thing as conversion experience, and now that Chuck Colson is dead we can say that he really did convert from a Watergate-era hatchet man to a pretty compassionate human being: prison does that to and for some people (though not very often).

Still, with many conversions there is less change than meets the eye. Commenting upon that most famous of conversions — the moment on the road to Damascus when Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Apostle — Eric Hoffer holds that "A Saul turning into Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle" and puts Paul into the continuum of converts to what will become mass movements (The True Believer III.14).

Saul was zealous for the Lord as an activist agent for Jewish orthodoxy and then became zealous for the Lord Jesus as an apostle (Acts 9.1-19). Saul the agent of the High Priest didn't become Paul the baker.

In our near-future politics, look for a Tea Party activist or two going over to the Occupy Movement, and vice-versa, even as some famous Leftists from the 1930s-1970s became neoConservatives and neoLiberals on the Right.

Also, circumstance change.

We have a cliché in English that one's theories about what to do with an ox that gores another ox depends on "Whose ox got gored." And Dave Barry notes in some column how guys' feelings about the joy of knocking over mailboxes changes when they own a mailbox.

A colleague of mine didn't have a life-changing conversion experience on the road to Cincinnati, but she did have a moment in the mall among misbehaving kids when it hit her, "Oh, right; I'm the Mommy now."

She hadn't changed much from when she was a kid, but her role had changed, and she visited upon the misbehaving kids The Wrath of Mom.

And we can learn.

Most of us grow more cautious as we go older, and that may be a genetically-based changed. For sure we eventually grow frailer. Most of that increase of caution with age, though, is from experience. Age may or may not bring wisdom — "Many grow old; few grow wise (and some don't even grow up)" — but it does bring experiences, including experience of all sorts of things that can go wrong that never occurred to us when we were young.

Or, like one shivering kid on a dive boat I was on, you learn that when the geezers tell you it can get cold on the water even in the tropics, they might actually know something.

So I am still the same person who didn't experiment with drugs when he was young but let my friends experiment. And when marijuana seemed to do them no harm, I used marijuana. I soon learned not to smoke marijuana but to cook with it — smoking can't be good for you — and my circumstances changed so that using illegal drugs was inconvenient and hazardous to my employment. I could take dope or leave it, so I left it (and will return to it if and when the law changes, and I'll drink some dope tea now and then rather than a indulge in a semi-hard drug like wine or beer).

Do I think the Honorable Barack H. Obama is still basically the kid who did illegal drugs? Yeah, a developed, "evolved" form: someone whose circumstances have changed radically. He's a Daddy now, and President of the United States.

And do I think Mitt Romney still has as part of him the preppie who led a clean-cut posse to hold down another student and cut his hair? Yes, I do.

Romney would never do anything like that again: a kid's act of bullying. But I think Mr. Romney is still the same person: still a guy who — oddly for someone from a minority religion — has trouble identifying with, or even sympathizing with, outsiders and the weak.

"After changes […] we are more or less the same; / After changes we are more or less the same."

New Fantasy!

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:05:03 -0400

I have a new fantasy.

The corps of sex slaves is out; what I want is a staff.

A secretary to answer the phone and put through only actual, human people I want to talk to. An administrative aide to go through my mail and pass on to me only actual mail — and to write checks to the small number of organizations I really want to support.

A personal assistant to review incoming e-mail and delete the spam that makes it through the spam filters — and to charge to some special account contributions to the relatively few worthy groups hitting me for money on line.

And a flunky to go on Facebook every now and then and see if there are any status updates I really need to look at.

You know that "bubble" people worry US Presidents get caught in? The insulation that prevents rich people from really knowing the world of most people? That's what I want: a bubble, with insulation!

Do You Work or Do You Teach?

Wed, 9 May 2012 00:05:02 -0400

Either/Or: False dilemmas, false dichotomies, and such: Back to Basics #31

I've never been asked, "Are you a stay-at-home-mom, or do you work?" but I have been asked "Do you work, or do you teach?"

I also attended a meeting in 1970 between the University of Illinois Graduate Student Association Executive Committee and the U of I (Urbana) Chancellor, where the Chancellor tried to warm up his audience by referring to a recent event where, "The students did much better than the adults." The GSA president responded with, "The students did much better than the nonstudents, Mr. Chancellor" and went on to tell him that the average age of his audience was about 26 and that most of us were married and had children.

Our GSA president was neither married nor had children, but, then, he was a Roman Catholic priest. We didn't press the point, but we could have thrown in that the University was rather strenuously trying to drop the doctrine of in loco parentis and replace it with the idea that "College is for grownups"; they were pushing the idea that even undergrads should act like adults.

Nowadays, the adulthood issue comes through when I have to declare whether I'm an adult or a "senior"; and the larger issue of categories comes in with the occasional medical-form-update when I've turned in a list of prescriptions I'm on and noted that I drink beer or wine maybe once a month — and I'm asked if take drugs.

Hell, yes, I take drugs! Look at what you've prescribed for me!

And, yeah, I "do drugs," recreational drugs, maybe once a month when I drink for pleasure some wine or beer.

Okay, most of us most of the time speak without thinking a whole lot, and that is just as well: if we had to think through every sentence, we couldn't hold conversations.

Still, we need to be more careful.

As I've mentioned often, alcohol is a drug, so locutions that differentiate between alcohol and drugs present an error in categories — and worse. It is indeed common usage to say "alcohol and drugs," but it's common usage based in a common bit of dishonesty: the denial by many of us booze-users that they do drugs.

Similarly there are possible deep problems in thinking that students by definition and necessity aren't adults and that people who teach or care for homes and children aren't really working.

Now at one time, a college teacher anyway — a professor — might have been "a scholar and a gentleman," and people might see him as not really working because what separates gentlefolk from their men and women is that gentlemen and ladies don't work. ("When Adam dug and Eve spun, / Who was then a gentleman?")

Something like that idea lasted into my lifetime with the folklore of a sergeant gently correcting a new soldier who called him "sir" with, "I AIN'T NO 'SIR'; I WORK FOR MY LIVING!!!" Still, we in America rarely have that concept any more and usually expect even rich people to work and — usually — condemn people who find work beneath them as parasites upon society.

Our problem I think, the more usual problem, is seeing most centrally as an adult and full citizen a man doing man's work. You know: The sort of work you'll see in the universe of old beer commercials, where there are more lumberjacks than actuaries and accountants and nurses; and, well, where no teachers appear that I recall.

Children go to school, and a man isn't a boy. Women do the mom thing: the quintessential kind of women's work — and a man isn't a woman.

We need to get beyond such thinking.

If Ann Romney did moms' work raising her sons, she worked; and she works as the wife of a professional politician. The issue for debate with Ms. and Mr. Romney is choice for parents to stay home with kids and just how much American society should do to allow parents to stay home, and/or to provide childcare so parents can work at things other than childcare and housekeeping.

The issue for debate is when and whether American society should allow healthy adults to live a life of leisure — when people doing no useful work (arguably including a retired person such as I) should be seen as leeches upon the body politic and a problem to be dealt with.

For our thought and language — the cliché notwithstanding, we can compare apples and oranges, or we can if we have the rather simple concept, "Fruit." In buying apples we compare apples; with oranges, we look at oranges; we can decide between them when we buy from the set of things most of us are sophisticated enough to recognize as fruit.

In the set of things we call "Drugs," we can find prescription drugs and recreational drugs; among recreational drugs, we find drugs that are legal, or "licit," and illegal. And so forth, for some fairly complex distinctions — e.g., for an alcoholic, alcohol use is far from recreational; ditto for other addicts — but none of which allow us to ignore in the set of drugs, ethyl alcohol imbibed to seek pleasure or avoid pain.

Most students are children, but students can be adults, and college students should act like adults — at least most of the time (nobody should be dourly mature all the time). College is for grownups, even undergraduate programs.

And it wouldn't hurt movie theaters and such to have prices labeled "General Admission" and then list prices with "Student Discount," "Senior Discount," "Child Discount," or whatever — though they should add, "One discount per customer," since most children are pupils anyway, and senior citizens may be taking classes.

It's unfair to imply that old people are necessarily in our second childhoods or otherwise not adults.

Similarly, work is work; and honest work of all sorts should be respected: manual labor, intellectual labor, and, emphatically, care-giving and the crucial task of raising children.

I worked hard at my teaching, and as a student. I was an adult as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, and I'm pretty sure I remain an adult even today in retirement. In any event, one isn't a senior or an adult: that's a false dichotomy, confusion about categories.

And false dichotomies and such are errors we should take a bit of care to avoid

Goodbye, Mr. Erlich (Thoughts on Retirement)

Wed, 2 May 2012 20:05:37 -0400

For everything there is a season and a time for

every matter under heaven. (Eccl. 3.1)

After thirty-five years teaching at Miami University in Oxford, OH, I retired in 2006. My retirement was my choice; colleagues had told me that when it was time to retire I'd know, and I knew.

Part of that knowledge stemmed from straightforward economics built into the Ohio retirement system. The unsentimental number-crunchers responsible for such things wanted faculty to stick around for our thirtieth through thirty-fifth years of service; after that, they made it increasingly more attractive for us to retire and less attractive to keep working.

Experienced professors in their late fifties and early sixties, Yes! Geezers with declining productivity and increasing medical costs, old farts with a lot of rank and seniority and significant salaries — uh, no.

Still, part of the inducement to get faculty retired was the opportunity to get hired back and work half-years for (at that time and place) up to three years.

I'd sold my house in 2006, at the top of the market, and was living in an apartment. Economic logic was for me to retire at sixty-two, live in the apartment, work part-time for three years, and then, and only then, fully retire and get my butt to the west coast for good weather, fewer attack trees — Oxford, OH, is in a major allergy area — and my last chance to sell my soul to the film industry.

I didn't wait but retired immediately after thirty-five years, moving on and buying a condo in a California housing market I was well aware was about to collapse.

It was no time to buy a house but time for me to retire.

As a fairly typical professor at a public university, my job was divided into three parts: teaching, scholarship, and service; for purposes of rewards and punishments, those were weighted at Teaching: forty percent, Scholarship (research, publication): forty percent; service: twenty percent.

Part of my service was a kind of journalism, which I enjoyed and — obviously — still do: I applied my publicly-financed training to writing newspaper guest columns on public issues. Much of the rest of my service was doing a job for the Miami University English Department most of my colleagues really didn't want to do, and which the Department Chair really needed done well. I was "Student Mediator" and handled student complaints against teachers.

Mediation was interesting and rewarding work, but I didn't often mediate. What I did, mostly, was paperwork, guiding students and faculty through a bureaucratic process. And I listened to complaints; I'm a good listener. But I did similar work as a fraternity officer when I was nineteen and twenty, so year after year of sympathetic listening was a challenge to my patience, but that was pretty much all the challenge to it. I'd listen, and then — since it was usually way too late for mediation — the student, instructor, and I would go through the process of a complaint about a grade.

My first scholarly essay appeared in 1967, and I had rounded off my career in 2000 with a big book on Ursula K. Le Guin (now available at a reasonable price from Borgo Press). I've published two scholarly essays since retiring, and a note — and I've edited for friends and delivered the keynote speech at a conference. Still, by 2006 I'd pretty much said what I had to say.

And for much of my scholarly career, I'm not sure many people were listening to what I had to say. Mine was and is an old-fashioned kind of empirical "close-reading" literary and film criticism, with strong social, political, and ethical concerns. The newer fashion is what I see as philosophy, where the social, political, and ethical concerns can get highly abstract, and esthetic — "formal" — aspects of the works get less attention than I think they deserve.

As a practical matter, though, service and scholarship weren't even half of my job; most of my effort went into my teaching.

Teaching for me had always involved "intermittent reinforcement," as Behaviorist psychologists put it, but I'd really gotten off when my students taught me something I didn't know or when I saw a figurative light going on behind a pair of eyes not used to a whole lot of thoughts going past behind them.

Toward the end of my career, the intermittent positive reinforcements became less frequent in my teaching undergraduates; the negative reinforcements — mildly unpleasant moments — became more frequent.

Part of what was going on was simply natural: I got older; my students didn't. Undergrads tend to be eighteen to twenty-one; the gap between eighteen and twenty-six is already significant; the gap between eighteen and fifty-six is wide. There were increasing numbers of (collegiate-length) generations between me and my students, increasing differences in backgrounds.

Part of my increasing discomfort stemmed from changes in the academic demographics of college students: more Business majors and, more to the point, an undergraduate culture that became increasingly stereotypical B-school. Or, for you older folk out there, more stereotypical "Gentleman 'C'" students: i.e., college as a kind of finishing school to be enjoyed by a gentleman who didn't have to worry about finding a job after getting (or not getting) a degree.

There was no change in "The College Student" between 1966, when I started, and 2006, when I finished; there's no such animal. There were changes, though, in the percentages of students falling into different "typologies," changes in the campus "cultural dominant." As a couple of my students reshaped those pedantic phrases into essay titles, more undergrads were into "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood" and "College: The Four-Year Vacation."

Alternatively, and/or additionally, there was just more honesty, and/or less sophistication and professionalism.

In any event, in the view from the front of the class — my students were more obvious about being bored and more open about what they wanted from me: a good grade, efficiently achieved.

This gets tricky. I could have gotten more boring in some absolute sense; my students may have become more easily bored. Well, etc. I think the major issue wasn't so much my becoming more boring or they're getting more bored, but that that more students didn't bother to hide boredom.

A bit of indirect evidence here, something not related to my teaching.

The Film Studies program had a brief series where we brought in alumni who did serious work in the movie industry. This included a friend of mine I'll call Mike, Mike-the-Movie-Producer.

I introduced Mike-the-Producer to the Chair of my Department, who said, about one-eighth seriously, "Rich, tell your students in production to place their lips firmly on Mike's butt when he arrives, and keep them there until he leaves."

A number of people did suck up to Mike while he was there, and they were wise to do so: if they got to Hollywood, he was someone who might someday be able to help them.

None of those people, however, were Miami University undergrads; they were mostly twenty-something and older folk who'd driven in for Mike's presentation.

I'm not sure it's that clichéd complaint of a sense of entitlement, but many of my students had a sense of self-worth and comfort in the universe that was mostly admirable but also sometimes self-defeating and, now and then, delusional.

Increasing numbers of my students were going for a gentleman's "C" — now the gender-inclusive and grade-inflated genteel "B+" — without being genteel. Their parents had high incomes (Miami University is the most expensive public university in the country), but few had landed wealth or a family-owned company to inherit. For the most part, my students would have to work for a living, and they needed high-paying jobs to live the lives to which they had grown accustomed.

Which means they needed to know how to cultivate people who could help them.

Or at least not offend unnecessarily those in positions to do them good or do them harm.

I was the Student Meditator. I dealt professionally with issues of professional ethics. I had graded "blind" my entire career, making sure I didn't know the name of the student whose written work I was grading. Still, I started quoting to my students the Haitian proverb, "Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river." On one occasion, I put two chairs together, sat in one, put my feet up on the other, pulled my cap down over my face, crossed my arms, and asked my class what they thought that body language was saying to a professor teaching a class.

My reading of the body language as "F*ck you, a**hole; you're boing me!" was stronger than they would put it, but we agreed that the tenor of the message was something like that. "I can see you from up here!" was my final comment.

On another occasion, in a film-studies class, I put on the theme of The Godfather and said in my best Don Corleone voice, "Someday — and this day may never come, but some day — you may want a favor from me: entrée with Michael, some punk from Tattaglia rubbed out, an extension on a paper, a letter of recommendation …. Some day you may want a favor, and I'll ask 'Has this student shown respect …?'"

It was funny; I got a laugh. But earlier in my career I wouldn't have had to explain about showing — not necessarily feeling, but showing — respect.

Or needed to explain about professionalism.

Shortly before I retired, I found myself reminding my students of the folklore on "the oldest profession" and suggesting that the heart of professionalism remained a crucial skill of that oldest profession: showing an enthusiasm one might not feel, "And believe me," I said, "after thirty-some years of teaching, a lot of the time I am faking it. If I can do it; you can."

Now if you, dear reader, have made it this far through this essay, another problem for me will be obvious to you: I was a masculine-style, informal or crude — depending how one looked at it — instructor, in the manner of "radic-libs" of the late 1960s. I had an ideological commitment to "dialectic": to teaching through challenge and argument; and fewer and fewer of my students wanted to argue.

An example: One day a student came in for a conference, and I greeted her with, "Before we get started, let me thank you for your comment in class today; it was really beautiful." She said, "Then you're not angry?" And I said, "Why would I be angry?"

"I thought you disagreed with me."

"In theory," I said, "if my courage held — I'd die in defense of that position."

"I thought you were angry with me; you argued."

"They pay me to do that," I said. "In all my classes, but especially writing classes. Not all the time — but we need to get at where you're coming from, how you'll support your argument, where you can take it …."

"You should have told us," she said. And after a moment I responded, "Yes, you're right; I should have told you." And next class meeting I told that class — and told all my other classes — that I'd argue with them.

As a freshman at eighteen, I assumed my teachers would argue with me; I just assumed that's what one did in college.

I'm not sure how the changing gender demographics of American universities worked here, and I'm not convinced it is crucial that women started outnumbering men, at Miami at Oxford, upper-middle-class women.

More important, I think, is that idea from a male student of "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood," which opposed my slogan of "College Is For Grownups."

I had always said that my teaching was inappropriate for children, and I think I was getting in my classes increasing numbers of children — and children can't be expected (or desired) to be sophisticated; and children are entitled to nurturing.

I try to give people sympathy, empathy, mercy, and such — we all deserve that — but I wouldn't give college student the sort of nurturing, absolute affection, and reinforcement of self-worth owed to children.

Not to large people who could vote and be drafted.

Not when doing so would contribute to arrested development.

So especially with teaching, it was time for me to leave. The State of Ohio wanted me gone, and I'd had a good run for most of forty years.

It was time.

Reading Is Not Dead! (Though, Unfortunately, Redefined)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:04:16 -0400

Just a decorously quick note: Reading is far from dead in contemporary (spring of 2012) US culture. It's just been warped into "scanning for content," of which there is an ever-increasing burden.

For a personal example, it may be taking me over a month to re-read Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, a well-written novel of reasonable length; but one of the reasons it's taking me so long is that I've had to scan for content such things as the instructions to my relatively new clock-radio-iPod-player to find out how the frack to turn off the g*ddamn alarm, plus sections of the short-form of the owner's manual for my new rental car to figure out the trip meter.

Shortly, I'll be reading up — so to speak on the word "reading" — on how to work the radio-DVD-player-iPod-Bluetooth ... device in the car. (This is now possible since I located the long form of the owner's manual, which wasn't in the glove box because the set of manuals is too big to fit into the glove box and leave room for anything more than, say, a pair of gloves.)

No, I suspect Americans, and especially young Americans, are doing more, in quotes "reading" than ever before. It's just not reading for pleasure or anything that could be properly called education or improvement. We're scanning for content for training in various skills, mostly trivial. (Though necessary: I really needed to turn off the g*ddamn alarm on a clock-radio-iPod device I bought to simplify listening to The Diane Rehm Show.)

It's part of what was sold to us as "lifelong learning": you will scan for content, 'cause there's more and more you just don't know how to do without looking up the instructions.