September 4, 2009

Blue Ribbon Preface

In July, the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of URI completed and delivered its printed Report to incoming URI President David Dooley (the document is not yet on the web). As a member of the Commission, made up of URI faculty and senior staff, I will comment on the document and related matters throughout this semester. Two thoughts today serve as a preface to those coming postings.

The first is that URI owes a great deal to the chair of the Commission, Dr. Andrew Harris, now Associate Provost of Bridgewater (MA) State College, who was resident at URI as an ACE fellow in the President's Office as the report was written. Dr. Harris is responsible for organizing and tasking the Commission to be productive, and for setting a tone and fact-oriented style for the document that makes it a valuable contribution. He also wrote a critical section on finances, placing the University's dire straits in a larger dire national context. While Andrew may have felt that I personally had a proclivity to merely raise hell once in a while, he showed me the respect appropriate for a senior professor, and we, as is true for all of the Commission members, developed a substantial degree of mutual understanding and admiration (and suitable editorial toning on my meagre contributions). Bridgewater State has a superb thinker and scholar in Dr. Harris, and Kingston Hill owes Bridgewater a debt of gratitude for allowing Dr. Harris to engage the URI community through this Commission, along with his other contributions via the President's Office.

The second thought is that, as I had expressed in an earlier blog entry, as structured by President Carothers (again, below), the charge to the Commission was severely handicapped by a short-term, market-obsessed focus—certainly understandably under our current circumstances—not at all like the original long-view 30 year scan once envisioned by Faculty Senate chair Michael Rice. Or, as I suggested then,

Accordingly, and again I speak as an individual and not for the Commission, as it stands, the first report of the Commission is largely prefatory to a deeper look into URI's future. Short-term finances, declining recruitment pools of whites and expanding pools of non-whites, faculty discontent at over-work and under-appreciation, institutional slave culture for adjuncts, and faculty phobias about the future of research and scholarship (again, my biases, and I am not speaking for the Commission) all are critical matters of great immediate concern to the institution. Certainly, if the document can assist the new President and still-new Provost in turning their attention to the impossible task of squeezing a few more shekels out of a Governor and Legislature who serve the rich in an "undeclared war against the middle class" (see Thom Hartmann's Screwed and Christopher Newfield's outstanding Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class)(Andrew Harris would have been able to do marvels with my not-at-all-subtle tone issues here...*sigh*), then the short-term focus will have proven itself strategically. But I do hope, for reasons I will attend to in this blog in the immediate future, that President Dooley will reflect on the deep need for serious institutional meditation on the future of the society served by this public institution, that he will accept my view that the current Report should merely serve as preface, and that he will agree that the Commission should be retasked (and given adequate time and resources) to work on the larger, deeper assessment that respect for the future commands.

July 1, 2009

CELS Transition

CELS administration has a long-awaited opportunity to move on as Dean Seemann departs after eight years to become Texas A&M Vice President for Research. Provost DeHayes appointed HSS Associate Dean (previously CELS Assistant Dean) Dr. Nancy Fey-Yensan as Interim Dean. The appointment over Associate Deans Richard Rhodes and Dennis Nixon, both with longer tenure than the new Interim Dean, came after chairs and senior faculty expressed discontent with the former administration. The Provost had said he wanted an interim-only appointment, but Fey-Yensan is now believed to have been told she can seek permanency, following the pattern of the recent interim, now permanent, deans of Engineering and Pharmacy. This establishes URI as an institution that appoints deans from within, which may deter qualified external candidates from applying for an administrative position that, for many reasons, is already daunting. Expressions of relief among the former cronies reveal little anticipation of change in CELS during the interim appointment. If this expectation proves true over the coming months, it will be a great disappointment and a lost opportunity for long-overdue reform in CELS.

For me, the departure offers a glimmer of hope for an end to a prolonged "wtf?" moment in CELS history. I will not miss what many considered to be a dreadful administrative style. From the first year, when the AAUP publicly called for an end to bullying of faculty and staff, to the last, with the Dean's characteristically self-congratulatory departure announcement—pronouncing things to be much improved compared to what he had found when he'd first arrived—the administrative style was confrontational, narcissistic, hubristic, and deprecating.

From the very beginning, meetings with faculty or staff were often intentionally intimidating, with a coterie of subordinates—a fiscal clerk and both associate deans—used to gang up on individual faculty members or chairs. Sessions would typically begin with an assault on performance ("I hear you are a problem employee...") in an attempt to leave the target grateful to still have a job at the end of the inquisition; I have heard several tales with this identical mode of operation, an approach that has no place whatsoever in a university setting. "Don't underestimate the oppressive and threatening nature of this group," was how one senior professor expressed it. The purpose of all the heavy-handed control was never clear; its sole purpose may have simply been to control. There was no attempt to unify the College. Early demands that all departments produce a strategic plan within the first 90 days, for purposes of developing a unified College plan, led nowhere. Lack of a well thought out, consensus-based college plan is a too common flaw at URI, and CELS is not alone in this. Similarly, there was no effort to promote a unifying vision (more), beyond a mania for biotechnology over every other consideration, underwritten by a constant reminder that in CELS, it was "my way or the highway." "I", "me," "my," and "mine" became the most frequent words in the Dean's vocabulary. By the end, the Dean's ego came through unbounded, taunting the faculty not to "force me to show you why they pay me the big bucks" in matters of collapsing majors or combining departments to placate dictates from the Board or Green Hall.

College faculty meetings were avoided at first, until faculty used bylaws to force public meetings on issues, beginning with moves by the Dean to destroy the Department of Community Planning. Bylaws were changed, stripping away vestiges of shared governance, including the elementary use of parliamentary procedure. Thereafter the biannual events became tedious exercises in self-congratulations, often marked by unintended hilarity, such as when Rhodes proclaimed "This graph shows that nearly a third of the grants awarded to CELS in the last ten years came during the first three years of the current administration." Whenever there was a possibility of contention, the Dean and one or both of his Associates made their presence felt, menacing from the front of the room, rolling eyes at the opposition, or staring at the ceiling from the front row. Faculty tried a range of strategies to cope. Most tried duck-and-cover attempts to avoid being noticed. Others experimented with taking sycophancy to new heights (there were a few who genuinely thought the aggressive style of the administration was a positive for CELS, but many of the public admirers revealed gross hypocrisy behind the administration's backs). Most just tried to read the signals and to go with the flow, yielding to pressures to increase teaching, drop extension, etc., as the horoscope seemed to demand.

My own experiences included a remarkable, but not unique (several others have told me similar tales), combination of deliberate threats and general shunning. I had, after all, eight years of experience as Associate Dean under Robert Miller, and as Director of AES (5 years) and CE (2 years, jointly with AES) with Margaret Leinen (both were superb leaders and administrators): my regional reputation was good enough to earn me a top-level request to apply for the Assistant Administrator (2nd from the top) of CSREES, the USDA federal-state partnership. Nevertheless, Seemann never spoke to me after a single meeting during his interview, when he informed me that the Provost had agreed to hand him (after promising me otherwise) the titles of Director of AES and CE; as Seemann explained it then, he needed all that authority for "when push comes to shove," a true preview of what actually followed. It became completely clear to me at that pre-hire interview that the administrative style would be strictly top-down, rather than the networking and consensus-building style that is the sine qua non of enlightened academic administrations everywhere; it was intolerable, and I wrote to the Provost that day to clarify that I would not consider taking a role in the Seemann administration. Others also quickly bailed, Acting Dean Bill Wright taking an early retirement (at 57) along with the Dean's secretary, Maggie Ford. The titles may have also been useful in justifying a rapid rise to become the fourth highest paid state employee.

To be clear, the loathing was mutual. For reasons that were never stated, but presumably because I had resigned rather than become part of his administration, the Seemann administration treated me, and the unfortunate but excellent staff who had worked directly for me, as outcasts (those who worked for me relocated elsewhere in the University within 1-3 months). I particularly detested the treatment of my former staff, dedicated and extremely hard working people who had done well by the College and Station, but were subjected to badgering and denigration that finally led to union interventions ordering the new administration to either immediately cease and desist or face legal prosecution. Although I kept quiet and pretty much returned to my job as an entomologist, resuming old teaching assignments and making new starts with new courses and research, the new administration persisted in handing me a series of roadblocks, setting up obstacles or prohibitions that seemed weirdly vindictive and counter-productive. This included no support for research ("we don't support research on potatoes in Rhode Island any more; it isn't an important crop now"—ending work covering 15 years and some 48 refereed articles (for a whole research group) on potato IPM); that was ironic in the face of later support for biotech work on rice and long-necked garlic. The message was clear, and it consistently applied throughout the college: if it isn't biotech, CELS admin was likely to oppose it and, in true Borg fashion, "resistance is futile." It was a truly toxic work environment for all but a select few.

My experience also involved constant interference with my teaching, with not-too-subtle messages delivered through a series of four department chairs over five years. (It was never clear to me whether my presence in the department was in part responsible for the extraordinary punishments Plant Sciences received over the years, although the harsh treatment didn't seem to end with my departure.) I was told, "We don't want you to teach science and tech writing in this College;" "We don't think web development should be taught at URI;" "We don't approve of joint appointments," after I'd been approved for a split with Arts and Sciences;" and finally, despite several years of teaching and a lineage that goes straight to North American authorities Rich Merritt and Ken Cummins, with whom I'd TA'd, "You can't teach Aquatic Entomology in my (Dean Seemann's) College, and you can't have a lab, either". Given a veiled threat that I would be put in charge of teaching undergraduate biology labs (my degrees are in entomology and systems science, not biology), in 2006 I transferred to Arts and Sciences permanently, where I am finally living the academic dream, teaching the University's only two full time web development courses, continuing the Graduate Writing in the Life Sciences course that Sue Vaughn and I began in 1987, teaching undergraduate Scientific and Technical Writing, and next year teaching two advanced courses on scientific communication. Aquatic Entomology is no longer taught at URI, despite its importance to entomology, natural science, ecology, and water quality programs. I feel fortunate: others were not able to escape, except by leaving work early each day, a now common symptom of the depressing work environment of many parts of CELS.

Outside of CELS, the same administrative style was met with disapproval. The board that runs the University Club removed the Dean as President over abuses of style. The Dean misused his appointment to the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council to issue a self-serving propaganda piece, "Building the Future at the University of Rhode Island: Research, Innovation & Economic Growth" (critiqued here). The Biotech building was designed by $10,000,000 over budget in an effort to force creation of a fourth floor of elaborate administrative quarters, doubling (for the second time in less than 8 years) CELS administrative space (without comparable doubling of anything in the College), irritating members of the House Finance Committee, creating considerable ill will toward URI. (When Governor Carcieri moved to include $5.1 million in his budget to complete the CBLS 4th floor, URI administration finally put its foot down, declaring that one wing (half) would be for teaching labs, and another half wing would be for two chemistry labs, leaving half a wing (still featuring roof-top gardens, etc.) for CELS administration, despite no mention of administrative space in the language used to acquire the public bond funding for the building.)

Normal review of the dean, contractually within five years, was delayed into the seventh year. Despite reports of a number of strongly written negative reviews by several faculty, and frequent muffled expressions of disapproval from Green Hall, there was no public calling to task; it is not clear that there was even a public announcement of the Dean's reappointment. There is, nevertheless, a quiet consensus on campus that the administrative style was over the top to a degree no one had ever experienced before.

Academics might want to stop to think about some standards for administrative behaviors. Periodic aberrations, and a possible institutional inability to deal with them, may be the most probable outcome of the way we systematically overlook preparation of the people we select for administration. To too great an extent, preparation is more assumed than apparent. Outside of ACE (American Council on Education) fellowships (essentially, in-house shadowing of current academic administrators), few higher education administrators are the product of formal institutional training centers for deans, provosts, or presidents. For the huge cadres of assistants, associates, and vice middle level executives there is usually only on-the-job training, most often a continuation of practices inherited from predecessors or brought in by a new superior based on "the way we did it back in good old LMU." It isn't clear what consistent set of educational principles and standard purposes would be advocated at such centers, even if they were the expected route to administrative positions. Codification of current administrative leanings in higher education are, I submit, unlikely to produce a national system that would be more principle centered, more focused on the public university's larger sense of purpose (sensu Harold Shapiro) in meeting the needs of society, nor would it make public universities less subservient to local politicians or corporate influence. But it couldn't hurt if there were required instruction, or if administrators were at least occasionally forced to attend a crash course on basic civility and enlightened methods of leadership.

Suffice it to say that most higher education administrators come up through the academic ranks, and with minimal training or forced reflection on administrative methods and styles. They tend to see the world through the lens of past experience and the filter of one discipline and one or two institutional backgrounds. For larger institutions, upper administrators may be imported based on service at high levels in government or corporate America, for a variety of generally mistaken reasons confusing the military, government, or for-profit corporations with academic enterprises, one of the tragic flaws in contemporary thinking about higher education. Selections tend to weed out academic scholars (they have already found nirvana in the library stacks or at the laboratory bench) in favor of people who find the work of budgeting, accounting, managing, planning, or directing the work of others more rewarding. My predecessor, Earl Patric, remarked publicly that administrators who were also scholars were rare, and that I was one of them; it was one of the greatest complements I ever received. But Patric's perspective reveals a tragic flaw that applies to much of the Nation's university governance.

Often the motivation for administrators is simply to climb an academic corporate ladder, accumulating experience at a chair, dean, or vice level en route to an executive suite. Ladder climbers jump at each new opportunity, switching roles within and between institutions as opportunities are perceived, moving from smaller public institutions to as close to the top of elite private schools as fate and skill will allow. Age is not the only reason that the tenure of academic deans averages about five years. There is nothing wrong, per se, in accepting advances as experience grows, but there is something lost each time a local, dedicated veteran, carrying useful institutional awareness and critical memory, is deprecated in favor of mere freshness. In choosing administrators, the weight of academic selection committees may be offset by external political pressures so that appointments may on occasion be based on political cronyism, with or without awareness of traditions, cultures, or priorities that are peculiar to American universities. At times, individuals may become so infatuated with their own notions that they simply wall themselves off from their new organization, as though history began the day they assumed authority; for these leaders, there is no difference between themselves and the organization they head; all that exists is weighed against personal ambition, and the environment soon becomes tainted. This is, of course, my perception of the previous CELS administration, which too often behaved badly, as though a talented and diverse group of faculty were best treated like a group of children, subject to a game of chess or compulsion by legalism, creating a toxic, malevolent, and controlling culture, not at all suited for a healthy, progressive university.

Faced with strong local corporate influence (exercised through political appointments to boards of regents/governors) or with a need to live with the constant cuts to poorly-defended public higher education budgets, contemporary universities feel enormous pressures to effect structures and policies that are "more efficient," or "more like a corporation," which is another way of saying more focused on a set of priorities that are distinctly opposed to many of the core values that altruists would like to see associated with higher education (for more, see Christopher Newfield, "Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class", Roger Geiger and Cresco Sa "Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth," or Frank Donoghue, "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities"). One thing that has become quite clear to me is the extent to which contemporary higher education has failed to keep up with the abundance of excellent criticism of many of its current mistakes, including the ubiquitous infatuation with the glitter of riches to be obtained through commercialization of university research, a myth thoroughly exploded by the likes of Newfield and Geiger, who should be required reading for all URI administrators and board members, as well as a majority of faculty involved in shared governance.

I believe that URI was easy pickings for Dean Seemann. This thought first occurred to me when I read the letter announcing Seemann's appointment; the Provost announced that the new Dean was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Phytopathological Society, as though these were honors, apparently not understanding that one becomes members of these two groups by subscribing to the magazines Science and Phytopathology. A prominent external reviewer assessed Seemann's resume as "productive but not leading edge," but there was no one at URI competent to make such a judgment. Given no options (there was only one other candidate interviewed, and that interview was a disaster), Seemann was a shoe-in. Slick talk, empty promises (the promise "I will see to it that external funding for research doubles in five years," made to faculty during his interview, was repeated in the STAC report earlier this year), and an unchallenged belief that the Dean was fully supported by the State's Republican Governor gave Seemann a free pass for whatever he wanted, including the fourth highest salary in the State and virtual freedom to dismantle shared governance, to run rough-shod over his College, and to create havoc with the core of URI's land grant programs, the Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension.

Seemann leaves behind questions that may never be publicly asked or answered. These include questions of truthfulness in spending (Plant and Animal Sciences have seen drastic cuts in AES and CE support based on claims of "no money," yet there were over $2 million in unexpended federal land grant funds during FY02-04, and I would bet much more since then). Seemann's poster-child biotechnology hire was caught plagiarizing in an internal grant proposal, yet the University has failed to act in over 3 months, nor has it addressed speculations that a much larger DOE grant may also have suffered a similar shortcoming, a symptom of a culture in which biotech mania covers all sorts of misconduct. Community Planning was successfully obliterated, leaving the State no local source of the critical expertise needed to address the enormous challenges of redesigning suburban infrastructure in a post-peak oil world. There is no remaining horticultural or plant related outreach in what is left of Plant Sciences, marking the end of nearly 100 years of institutionally supported agricultural outreach at the State's land grant university. Although farming has increased 42% in Rhode Island in the past 5 years, there is now only a single, grant-funded person left to meet the huge needs for university expertise. The promise of doubling external funding was never reached; even the appearance of a very successful FY2009, marked by an 80% increase in funds compared to the year before he came, is mostly due to crediting much of a $12.5million grant for science and math teaching improvement outside of URI awarded to CELS PI geologist Dan Murray, and not to any of Seemann's pampered biotech agenda. Far too many faculty and staff have been left feeling beaten up and abused by their experiences over the past eight years. Higher administration safety nets, which should have interceded to stop the abuse, were revealed to be disturbingly weak in the face of alleged gubernatorial cronyism, to the detriment of too many faculty and staff. I can only agree with Dean Seemann in this: On the day that he left, CELS was better off than on the day he arrived. It was an amazing run of eight years, and I hope the transitional administration is capable of beginning the long processes of repair and recovery that are now needed.

March 9, 2009

"We can’t do this anymore."

I listened to a talk by Tom Sgouros on Thursday night, "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Rhode Island," presented at the Rochambeau Library on the East Side, hosted by the RI Progressive Democrats. It was a nice group and a fun talk, filled with the wonkish detailed content that makes Tom's Rhode Island Policy Reporter such a first-class contribution to Rhode Island politics and to intellectualism in general. I was joined by Representative Michael Rice, who was in Providence on legislative business; Rep. Rice seems to be greatly enjoying his new role, learning how it is done at the State House. A brilliant and mature academic, Rice possesses the wisdom and scholarship that will make him invaluable to the State; I hope the voters of district 35 have the good sense to return him to office for as long as he cares to serve.

Afterward, I was fortunate to be able to dine with Sgouros and Rice at the unpretentious but consistently good asian restaurant, Apsara, near the library on Hope Street. Our conversation focused on the nuances of Tom's talk, the possibilities of tax reform, the implications of unsellable tax credits (the subject of the Policy Reporter's most recent column), and about the future. Provoked by the reluctance of the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of URI to look seriously into the future (see), I asked whether RI government had any offices in which future vision had been institutionalized, in effect. I recalled the Office of Statewide Planning, under Dan Varin, had had that sort of proclivity. But no, the answer is that State Government really doesn't look down the road, except to coordinate plans of various agencies (to make sure a highway doesn't cut through a new housing project, for example). As to attempting to envision what the world might look like in mid century, or whether we'd be able to feed or water ourselves after that, no one is doing that. I'd once asked Mike Sullivan, Director of DEM, whether his agency had any such capability. He replied that he was having enough difficulty with next year's budget, let alone 5 or 10 years out. I should not find that surprising. To most folks in government, the future is the next election cycle, I suppose. We are all very busy, and there are so many urgent things today that keep us from the merely important things of tomorrow.

Friday morning, I missed half of the second meeting of the Commission (I teach), but I still found a few things worthy of note. Having shortened its perspective from the 25 years into the future of the original charge—at the first meeting it was suggested that more than 10 years was a waste of time, and maybe 2-5 years into the future was all that would be useful—the group now seems to be of a mind that any effort to look into the future (to suggest how the world might change, how URI could react, and how URI would be affected) would require outside expertise, as well as more time than was allowed (the original 15 months envisioned was shortened to 90 days, of which 75 remain). I asked for a clarification, asking "Are you saying that the University of Rhode Island lacks the capacity to say anything of use about the future?" and was told, "Yes. We would have to seek outside expertise." There was no dissension from that answer.

It was decided that the principle product of the Commission would be a letter to the next President, as had been suggested at the first meeting. The letter would focus on a literature review. When asked what would be the guiding topics of the review (I teach scientific writing, and literature reviews always are built around predefined topics, although I wasn't the one asking this time), the answer was that we would read first, and formulate questions later. Read books about universities in the marketplace, the future, competition with for-pay or elite Universities, the global economy (it isn't clear whether anyone in this group has read Friedman, but I have major doubts they've read Stiglitz, either), etc.? Well, no, actually. The group would start with the recent accreditation study, 3 years of internal management letters and some other internal documents. We are supposed to get a list this week and to read blind (without a predetermined agenda) and then to volunteer for one of several topic groups. It was suggested that the letter should be written very carefully so that the Commission would not be "proscribing" (that's what I heard, but the meaning was probably "prescribing"). This is another variance from the original charge:

Finally, at the end of the meeting, it was also suggested that the group read Building the Future at the University of Rhode Island: Research, Innovation and Economic Growth. The URI Commission on Research and Innovation, which was already on our list, because it was "such a good report." I beg to differ.

I should also note that Commission member Jeffrey Seemann is a candidate for the URI Presidential search. Having used the STAC report to persuade search criteria and to appoint crony Saul Kaplan on the search committee (to represent "economic development" interests), Seemann's words from the first meeting are making more sense to me. He had said, "Our role, then, is to tell the next President what we want him to know," adding, "or what he wants to hear." I wonder whether the Commission will be led to endorse the flawed logic of the STAC report (which the South County Independent labeled "another state boondoggle")? Does anyone see anything wrong in any of this?

I am puzzled by too many of these machinations. It seems to me that—except in the absurd sense that action in the past is impossible—there is very little sense of any meaningful analysis of the future in any of the Commission's discussions. At best, the current trajectory is leading toward an introspective short-term market analysis, with the caveate that it has the potential to be heavily shaded toward one very narrow vision of the relation between the University and the society that surrounds it (i.e., a corporate perspective whose primary intent is to make money): is that sufficient as a vision for URI?

In contrast, I stumbled upon this morning's column by Tom Friedman. I am very skeptical about Friedman, I should say. I wish the Provost hadn't mentioned him in his academic vision statement. At the very least, I wish that everyone who has been taken by Tom would at least try to achieve a balance by reading Joseph Stiglitz or Naomi Klein. Still, Friedman had this to say, with which I can agree:

There is something disturbing about the shortened perspective and cautious approach being used by the Commission. I wouldn't have agreed to serve had I not thought that I possessed sufficient expertise to contribute to a discussion of the future, and to prescribe what we must do. I have thought and read about the issues which should be the subject matter of the report (as they were in the original charge, to a large extent) for over 35 years. If none of the rest of the Commissioners feels competent to deal with the subject matter, or feels only people outside of URI can say anything meaningful about the future, then either the Commission is made up of the wrong people or the University is sadly inadequate to carry out its social contract and obligation to be dedicated toward a better tomorrow. If URI can not face the external forces, understand the things that have been written outside of its own walls, or rally itself to address the real needs of the future—and not just the narrow short-term agendas that are systematically distorting the original purpose of the Commission—then the institution contributes to Romm's Ponzi scheme, and is part of the problem, not the solution.

March 4, 2009

Scenarios

To the Provost's effort on Academic Planning and the President/Faculty Senate's Blue Ribbon Commission (see next), this week saw the addition of a futuring exercise from the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.

In an email dated February 26, a CELS committee was charged to

At first glance, this appears to be a heartening initiative, a forward-looking revision of undergraduate curricula, with a time-line of up to 20 years into the future. Outstanding, you might think. But then you have to take another look at what is going on here. First, look at the full charge—a dense 3+ page list of demanding details—as distributed to the committee (here, MSWord document). Then, note the instructions that came with the charge last week:

"We have our charge [...] and we need to act quickly to provide a [final] report to the Executive Committee by March 11. To this end, we will have to meet twice next week, for 1.5 hours each (max), and then again on Monday, March 9 (for a shorter time to approve our report due on March 11)."

So, here's a college that is going to do its futuring about its curricula, going through a major agenda in two 90 minute meetings on a cold week in Kingston. I'm appalled. Is this how we are going to go about the weighty task of developing vision for our future, how we will evolve to better prepare our students, or how we gird ourselves to confront the needs of society, armoring higher education for the coming struggles? Wow! What is going on in CELS? And noting the strong presence of CELS on the Blue Ribbon Commission, can we expect more of the same at the University level?

At the very least, we should ask ourselves about how committees like this get to know about the future. It isn't apparent that URI faculty are any different from ordinary citizens in this regard, woefully unschooled and unprepared for such tasks. Ever since Apollo cursed Cassandra, thinking about the future has had a bad rap. Certainly, URI has no academic department where people are actually employed full time to research, teach, or write about the future. You would think that given its importance, the future might actually have been identified as a subject worthy of some sort of academic program; at the very least, we should have an associate provost position in charge of thinking down the road, shouldn't we? I once had an assistant provost from Michigan State come to give a talk about the future of fossil fuels. Herman Koenig referred to the fossil fuel era as a "blip on the scale of time," in his 1982 presentation to the College of Resource Development. On the way back to Logan airport, Herman told me that he needed to find a way for him and John Cantlon, Michigan State's Provost, to get away from the pressing business of running MSU day to day, so that they could think more about the future, and the big picture. They really needed that sort of thing in Michigan. I don't think Herman was sufficiently influential, however; you'd have seen some sign of it in Detroit if he had been, and there is nothing in the Motor City that indicates they ever thought about the future.

To academics, the future may be a dirty concept. I once suggested to the late Tom Weaver that URI should have some sort of economics center that paid attention to world resources, looking out for threats and opportunities that would affect Rhode Island. Tom curled his lip and nearly swore at me, "We aren't going to reinvent Lester Brown's World Watch Institute here in Kingston." Tom's troops had their hands full enough with figuring out the economics of fish and ways to get people to put a price on not destroying their back yards. I saw his point.

Academics actually like to mock people who spend too much time thinking about the future. Carl Sagan, who dreamed of one day making contact with an extra-terrestrial species (see SETI) never made tenure at Harvard and wasn't accepted into the National Academy of Sciences. If they could deride a magnificent thinker like Carl, don't expect the rest of us to admit that we, too, sometimes think of the future.

But I don't think I would like to be on a committee charged with thinking about the future if no one had actually done that before. I mean, people on futuring committees should have actually sat down for a long time and thought about the future, and then talked to other people about it, and then lived to talk about it some more. Very few people have actually done that. It isn't academic enough, or something.

If I were going to be on such a committee, I'd probably suggest that the committee should think about scenarios. We don't know what the future will bring, but we should be able to set our imaginations free to do their thing. But of course, doing that might put us in a suspect position. "Oh, there goes that darn fool Leonardo again, looking at the birds and thinking he'd like to be up in the air with them some day. Poor lad will never get tenure that way."

At the very least, I'd want the committee to have read, studied, played with (there is a CD) the models, and talked about the Limits to Growth book. Oh, I know: You've probably heard that they made a bunch of predictions about things going really bad by the end of the century when they wrote the first version, in 1972. And of course, none of that came true. You might have read something from the Hudson or Cato Institutes, some moron like Julian Simon yucking it up—In the future, there will be twice as many people, so there will be twice as many Einsteins to think up brilliant solutions to the problems of twice as many people; things will be just fine, so don't listen to those dopes over at MIT. On the other hand, you might have stumbled upon Matt Simmons's note Revisiting the Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct After All?, where he actually read the thing, after hearing what a crock it was for so many years. Simmons said, "After reading 'The Limits to Growth' I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention of running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the books entire concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later [2100]. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000." In 2004, the book was revisited in Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update." I'd have people read that. It is required in my junior-level Century of Limits course. I think it should be required of anyone on any academic futuring group. If it were, I'd ask people to think about why it is that world population peaks and then declines significantly before the end of the century, and I'd have the committee discuss what it was that would lead them to pretend that the world was different from the models that came out of MIT 37 years ago.

For some reason, people don't like to read books like Limits to Growth. My students certainly don't; they complain that it is too dull and demanding. Sorry, I make them read it anyway. Then I have them read two more books, one about sinks and one about resources. Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming is about the sink; I like it because it portrays communications within the science discourse community, and the systematic distortion of scientific discourse by the press and politics—it doesn't get any better than this when you are teaching scientific communications! I use Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies for a discussion of resources. The student's seem to get into those two more readily. Mooney does a great job of using hurricanes to drive home a point, and anything that affects the American entitlement to a private automobile also gets student attention.

I'd thought about using fiction to get students to think about the future. I didn't like journalist James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, mainly because I was gun-shy about how it would be clucked over by imaginary academic critics. It reminded me of Roberto Vacca's Coming Dark Age, a mid-80's mega-disaster thriller (although Vacca was dead serious, of course). I'd loved Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere (1992) and Return from Nowhere (1994), but suggestions that trans-pacific trade might some day break down (imagine, he actually speculated that there would some day be pirates on the ocean again!). More to the truth, I have been haunted by Kunstler's suggestion that the world might turn to religious practices when things got really rough; I have enough trying to comprehend old friend Jim Wallace's rise to prominence as an evangelical green. Fortunately, when Kunstler did actually sit down to write a more-in-my-own-backyard account of life post-grid-collapse, World Made by Hand toned down the migrating Virginian bible thumpers, making it possible for me to relax once more; still, the near feudal barter-based world after the collapse (the date isn't specified) is haunting. A lot is lost when there is no more electricity. The future of Washington? Gone when the terrorist's nuked it (Long Beach port, too, hear tell). Well, at least Kunstler restores some semblance of government in Albany; that's what the crazed out guy with the gun in the governor's office will tell you. Fun story.

World Made by Hand has part of the population getting by. Okay, there are only some 100 million American's left after the diseases and disorders, and I don't think the rest of the world is really mentioned (keeping with the American tradition of not remembering there is a rest of the world). (This isn't quite as bad as Lovelock's prediction of only 500 million left on the entire planet by 2100; on the other hand, it's nice to have lots of empty homes to steal stuff from.) But people are eating, making things with their hands (world made by hand, remember?), and it's not so bad, what with everyone learning to play the fiddle again and all. And it's way less depressing than Cormac McCarthy's The Road; it amazes me how a book can emerge totally gray, as ashen as the world around it. I love the way McCarthy writes without ever using a semicolon. That's a good trick. Even better is how he writes pages of dialog without ever using or needing any quotation marks. Not one quotation mark in the book. That's good writing. That's a 2007 Pulitzer Prize. But that's also one heck of a depressing tale, and not exactly rich, didactically speaking.

It would have been possible to turn to Betty Cotter's Roberta's Woods as a thought-provoker. Set in western Rhode Island in 2013, it's just a hint of what life will be like as soon as it becomes apparent that we need to impose government regulation over the distribution of gas and electricity. I love the Senator Fred Maine character (but I'm stumped about just who he reminds me of) and the menacing nature of Rhode Island state government throughout the book. People will dissemble that it won't be that bad (lights actually go out and people actually run out of gas for their cars) by 2013. Probably not. I think that will come a little later, probably in 2020-2025, but then, who knows. This generation of students doesn't even know about gas lines and the embargoes of 1973 and 1979 (what? buy gas on odd and even days depending on the last number of your licence plate? you must be crazy!). But it makes me think way back, to 1986, when Beyond Oil troubled me with

If academics thinking about the future would get outside of their academic boxes, their discussions and their universities might become very different. Certainly, reading books by presidents or other academics about the university of the future (which always looks like the university of today (but with lots of internet competitors and vaguely menacing chinese and indians out there on the edge of some globalizicivilization) hasn't produced a lot of innovative thinking so far. Maybe getting the crap scared out of you by modelers or novelists isn't all that bad of a thing to do.

The CELS futuring exercise will have no time for any of this. CELS is too busy replacing its departments with a couple of schools, destroying all of the old departmental boxes, escaping academic traditions of the nation's top Universities. The CELS effort can not help but foster cynical suspicions. CELS has already killed community planning. Plant and animal sciences are all but dead, starved of Agricultural Experiment Station support (except for converts to the rapture). CELS' future is steadily dimming, made myopic by an obsession with the gamble of entering an overcrowded, overly-competitive research technology arena, 20 years late. And when the gamble is over, what? A final "oops," drown out by the sounds of a society collapsing around us?

February 22, 2009

Roads Diverging

URI is conducting two major exercises that may be important to its future plans.

• On January 30, the Provost assembled a well-attended Academic Planning Summit on "Ideas towards implementing the University's academic vision." (see "The New Academic Vision for the Future," pdf). The Summit goals were to discuss critical issues for 21^st century URI, to produce recommendations for a 5-year academic plan, and to establish task forces.
• On February 13, the President summoned a Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the University of Rhode Island. [Disclosure: I am a member of this Commission.]

The Provost's vision, much like the earlier draft (see my commentary), could provide material for a future strategic plan, an outline of internal strengths and opportunities—this leaves room for more introspection on internal weaknesses and threats (including the threat of yielding to a corporate mentality) and the broad external SWOT analysis that all institutions of higher learning should be performing today. It long, abstract, and present-centered, not yet ready to serve as the vision statement for the intended 5-year strategic plan. It worries me that the Provost implies ("Ideas towards implementing...") that the time to reflect on vision is now behind us, as though the community needs to pursue vision no further for now. The Provost continues to exhibit an open, embracing administrative style that is essential for URI, and the significant, enthusiastic participation by large numbers of faculty signals general appreciation and good will. Further dialog, including deeper consideration of vision and the future, should be encouraged. [Note: this is also true of the colleges, many (all?) of which have been running for a decade or more with no public, stakeholder-based strategic planning visible (machinations in the dean's suites are not a substitute for open, participatory planning, people!), no vision or up-to-date mission statements, etc. How has this been possible?]

The President's now-parallel futuring effort, begun over a year before the Provost's arrival, was derived jointly with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee through a process that involved two years of deep thinking, led by Faculty Senate Presidents Michael Rice and Celest Martin. The original five page charge (pdf) encompassed a meaningfully deep future (2030) and adequate time for a work of significant scope (15 months). What was presented to the Commission was notably more concise; the full charge read:

The focus on "the next decade" was perhaps misleading. The President told the Commission that he favors a look of two to five years into the future; deeper than that, he suggested, and things become too fuzzy to be useful. The time frame has also been condensed; instead of beginning last September, as was once hoped, and reporting at the end of Fall 2009, the Commission is now asked to complete by May 15 (90 days) a report addressed to the next president, which one Commission member characterized as a turning to the questions "What to tell the next President?" or "What does the next President want to hear?"

The Commission will next meet to consider means to organize these tasks. Tentatively, it is considering categories, including

• enrollment, demographics, financial aid, class composition, etc.
• directions in undergraduate education (liberal arts, internationalism, technologies for instruction)
• graduate education, research, and economic development
• public finance and accountability, including accreditation, Rhode Island support, and broader public perceptions and image

(Alternatively (or possibly, additionally), one member suggested that organization should focus on

• campus life and community
• undergraduate programs
• graduate programs
• research and scholarship
• outreach and external relations
• recruitment and retention of both students and faculty)

As the discussion turned to URI in a competitive marketplace, the meeting also considered the concerns of parents, who are focusing on using the college degree to get their student a job, and on critical skill sets and career needs related to that goal. With what seemed like potentially daunting lists of things to ponder, it was suggested that the Commission might leave open the question of responsibility for asking long-term questions. One member suggested that URI culture is rarely forward-looking and that this, too, should be listed as a challenge for the next President. The Commission was also given a suggested reading list.

While I am not a religious man, having no use for the supernatural (well, there is that pesky pooka...), there was nevertheless a certain charm in the coincidental arrival, on the morning of the first Commission meeting, of both a copy of Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities and the January newsletter from the group URI/AAUP Part-time Faculty United. I will suggest that the Commissioners also consider reading The Last Professors, as well as

• Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, by Derek Bok
• Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace, by Roger Geiger
• In Pursuit of Prestige: Strategy and Competition in U.S. Higher Education, by Dominic Brewer et al.
• The Future City of Intellect: The Changing American University, edited by Steven Brint
• The Future of Higher Education : Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market, by former URI President Frank Newman, et al.—this one was on the suggested reading list (above)

These books cast light on the common theme of universities in a marketplace and are in that sense introspective. I think it is also useful to be mindful of one cost of life in that marketplace, suggested by former Harvard President Bok and by former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis:

• Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, by Derek Bok
• Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? by Harry Lewis (originally subtitled, "How a Great University Forgot Education;" one can only imagine how Harvard's lawyers got that one changed!)

Had the reduced charge included any of the original's enthusiasm for uplifting "historical stages of RI (and URI) success," I'd have also suggested

• The University of Rhode Island: A History of Land-Grant Education in Rhode Island, by Herman Eschenbacher
• Colleges for our land and time: The land-grant idea in American education, by former URI President Edward Eddy.
• Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities
  • Returning to Our Roots: Executive Summaries of the Reports of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities (January 2001; 48 p.)
  • Renewing the Covenant: Learning, Discovery, and Engagement in a New Age and Different World (March 2000, 36 p.)
  • Returning to Our Roots: Toward a Coherent Campus Culture (January 2000, 59 p.)
  • Returning to Our Roots: A Learning Society (September 1999, 56 p.)
  • Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution (February 1999, 59 p.)
  • Returning to Our Roots: Student Access (May 1998, 60 p.)
  • Returning to Our Roots: The Student Experience (April 1997, 44 p.)

To review even these samples of contemporary assessments of higher education, while also preparing the data-rich "environmental scan," as charged, is a worthy challenge to the Commission.

To be sure, there is a significant story to be told. I do not know what the Commission will eventually say, but perhaps these snippets from Donoghue's The Last Professor, can at least frame one aspect of the discussion, which contrasts state public universities (URI) with elite private universities (Harvard, Yale, etc.) and lean, mean corporate for-profit diploma mills (The University of Phoenix, etc.), essential to URI's self-awareness as it begins its quest to re-find its soul.

Hm... 'increasing the proportion of part-time and temporary personnel?' At URI, says the URI/AAUP Part-time Faculty United newsletter, 450 part-time faculty (40% of the faculty as a whole), teach 29% of all undergraduate class sections (for a flat rate of $3200 per course at URI), generating $52 million in tuition income for a salary (part timers are paid no health insurance, retirement, etc.) of $3.98 million (5% of the total salary and health insurance costs paid to the full time faculty and lecturers). This is life in the marketplace; this is the meaning of "industry logic".

URI in the marketplace is, in all its myriad Ram-ifications, both fascinating and important. It is no wonder that the reduced presidential charge and the focus of the first meeting of the Commission dwelt almost exclusively with this multidimensional challenge. The problem is clearly immediate, and, given URI's current trajectory of achieving zero state funding in 4-5 years, it may well be one of institutional survival, certainly drawing the attention to concerns over the next, say, 2-5 years.

I wonder, however, whether this is the long-term, externally focused perspective that URI really needs most? Isn't the longer-term, largely external perspective of the original charge somehow equally important, even if it is not as pressing as the urgent annual business of steady privatization? What happened to

^*refers to M. K. Hubbert's projections of oil production, first made in 1956. See his 1980 "The World's Evolving Energy System" for a comprehensive review that is remarkably contemporary in its projections of fossil fuel futures.

For further reading, I suggest

• The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg.
• The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update, by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (3-volumes plus summaries and other documents, all available as pdf's; I suggest you download and read the summaries first, starting with the physical science basis (18 pages, pdf).
• The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, by Rob Hopkins. (In a business world hung over from the gin of Friedmanian globalization, might it not be ultimately healthier to focus on regional and local transitions?)

In its first discussion, the Commission was highly internally-oriented on problems of the short-term survival of the University, heeding the advice of the President to narrow focus to the near term. Yes, survival matters. But when I tried to suggest that a panel on the future of URI might want to consider, say, the implications of peak oil and the impending end of the liquid fossil fuel era over the next 10-30 years, it was suggested that the exercise would be as useless or laughable as the 1960s Disney imagination of future flying cars portrayed (allegedly, as it has been a long time since I was last able to afford a trip to Orlando) in EPCOT Center (the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow—how cool!). Similarly, if global climate change is the unprecedented challenge of the 21^st Century, as is the scientific consensus (see Oreskes, 2004 (pdf)), it escaped comment during the first meeting. Really? James Lovelock suggests that by 2100, "the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes—Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin." That thought, from a widely respected elder in the global systems community, buzzes away at the back of my mind. Somehow, the thought that the Commission "might leave open the question of responsibility for asking long-term questions," becomes most troubling. The future is hard to predict, but witness the IPCC exercise, and the relative robustness of the visions that the scientific community has put before the public. Witness also the questions and challenges presented by an increasing array—seldom led by academics—of thinkers working hard on making sure we are in command of the future, authors of myriad books (too numerous to begin listing here) with deep insight about the future, filled with thoughts that are neither fuzzy nor risible, are abundant, if anyone wants to read. (more, more, more, and more, from me)

URI faces two roads, diverging in a Frostian yellow woods, and it can not travel both. Will URI continue down a road of the industry marketplace, buffeted by corporate ruts, weaving between the elites and the for-profits, selling whatever wares we must to survive? Does anyone find that inspiring? Instead, can not URI choose a road less traveled by, a road to a rhetorically and technically transformative culture for Rhode Island's future, a road with a greater calling—learning for tomorrow, today?

The two roads diverge. There are many who think they are the same road, that the only path to the future is the one we are on. I understand that. You have to eat to survive, and we don't have any experience except what we have been doing to feed ourselves for all of our collective academic lives. But we need to examine the metaphors, here. The road we are on is clearly lethal, killing the planet in the long run, but also making Kingston just like every other campus in the world, and too many of them are dying right now (or should, for all the needed change they are failing to produce). This old road is just not all that exciting, and dull same-old same-old really isn't that much of a marketing strategy. We need learning that will allow us to build a new culture, a prospect can be intellectually and spiritually invigorating. Who knows, it might actually turn out to me an effective marketing ploy as well...really big thinking. Hey, URI! Wouldn't you like to be the change we have all been waiting for?

November 24, 2008

URI Visions

October saw postings of two visions for the future of URI.

• "Defining the Future of the University of Rhode Island: An Academic Vision" (here, pdf) was a draft posted by Provost Donald DeHayes as an invitation for a campus dialog.
• "Building the Future at the University of Rhode Island: Research, Innovation & Economic Growth" (here, pdf) was a Report by a legislative "URI Commission for Research & Innovation;" note that this was not a URI Commission, but rather a legislative commission created at the request of the RI Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC). STAC is co-chaired by a URI Dean rumored to be seeking the URI Presidency vacated next July. Oh, my!

The contrast between the two visions and the administrative styles that produced them is noteworthy.

The Provost posted his draft vision to ask for campus reaction. Provost DeHayes has been learning about URI in the midst of an enormous budget crisis imposed by out-of-control State government. URI's chronic crisis management ran on steroids this year as the University reeled from the enormous cuts and forced retirements imposed late in the spring. Still, the Provost took time to think about what lies ahead, inviting campus dialog about a look down the road, a sign of clear respect for the principle of shared governance. All of that is remarkable and encouraging. (more)

The Provost's draft focused on the structural organization of the University. He wrote about trying to position URI to deal with the coming forces of globalization, climate change, peak oil, etc. I felt he overemphasized the polytechnical, understating the importance of the regulatory sciences (psychology, economics, political science, communications, social sciences, history, etc.) and the critical roles of philosophy, the arts, and the humanities in making the future into a time worth living in. I also felt that the vision was too near-sighted, not looking down the road at the problems facing society in 10, 40, or 90 years, for example. My basic feeling is that URI is still preparing students for the world of the 1970s-1990s, the world that existed when most of the URI faculty arrived on campus. Even the contemporary buzz over global this-and-that, I suggested, is buzz about a world that is rapidly disappearing even as we attempt to grasp it (i.e., Thomas Friedmann's flat world, or Milton Friedman's free trading, unregulated trans-nationals), leaving us still looking in that much-clichéd rear-view mirror. My academic colleagues may cringe at that, but I'll stand by it for now. I asked the Provost to consider a much darker and more challenging view of the future, and hence a still more engaging and vitally important roll for public higher education. He responded with a kind email note and promised future conversation. I like that.

I also critiqued the STAC report (here), summarizing:

It is hard to fathom that anyone in State government would waste $85,000 to produce a report this bad. The premise was weak and the benchmarking nearly worthless; why ignore a good contemporary (2001, updated in 2006 and 2008) benchmarking study? Was it really worth $85,000? Will the $100 million bond for URI personnel—an end run around URI's capital improvement priorities—stand without comment from the Kingston campus? Will a narrowly-focused advisory body be unchallenged when it proclaims that the next President should be an economic development wonk and invades the selection committee toward that end? Certainly, the URI Commission Report was a document that the University community and URI administration should find highly troubling, deserving more than campus-wide silence.

To those who are concerned with the future of Rhode Island, it is patent that the State has to provide much better support for URI. It does no one any good to make that case poorly, however, or to ignore good work that is current and readily available. The contrast between the visions of the Provost and STAC's ersatz URI Commission is jarring. People concerned with the future of the University should learn to work openly and collegially, following the example of the Provost.

November 4, 2008

NonBlogging

Question: When is a web log not a web log? Answer: When the blogosphere says so?

Commentary: People who set out to blog share at least one characteristic, I speculate, which is a high degree of passion. That passion may be for issues, or it may be simply a passion to write; unspoken is the assumption that there may actually be readers eager to absorb the written passion—a highly doubtful illusion, most likely. In a few situations, the value of blogging may be well founded, as when experts realize that they must escape the confines of disciplinary discourse to reach and motivate a broader public, perhaps to persuade that public into forming a social movement. I think of Judith Curry's epiphany, as described in Chris Mooney's Storm World: Curry, said Mooney, was led to understand the importance of blogging by a realization that her work as a climate scientist needed to reach a broader audience beyond the science community; She apparently does not blog, although other climate change experts do (see, for example, Roger Pielke). For academics, there is a risk of being betrayed by the academy for blogging, as though one had willingly sullied one's reputation by consorting with the Great Unwashed. Ironically, it may well be the tenured grey-beards who are in the best position to blog, but the fire of untenured newbie academics may be lacking. There is no cure for this dilemma, unfortunately.

If passion is an essential ingredient, then this blog has failed of late. Small wonder, given the drains on its author. Without whining or self-pity, life with alimony and a bitter ex, and life in Don Carcieri's emaciated University, both are significant fiscal and emotional drains, sapping passion from an old man. Nevertheless, the earth moves, and we all must carry on. For me, this has meant returning to scholarship, and for part of the summer this translated into intensive reading on scientific writing, reviewing a new book manuscript for the University of Chicago Press and reading good works by rhetoricians of science in preparation for a new graduate course on Communications in Science and Anti-Science for Fall 2009. As classes resumed, I was able to translate part of that summer study into a new approach to teaching the evolution of the contemporary scientific journal article, something unleashed on the undergraduates in my Scientific and Technical Writing course. It will be further refined and used again in the graduate version of that course this spring. Teaching three courses in the fall (writing, web development, and an honors course), and four in the spring (undergraduate and graduate writing, advanced web technology, and a large topics course in communications) are also draining of time and emotion, but part of the call of duty (or, at least, a necessary justification for salary), about which there is to be no complaining.

I will whine, however, about the costs of poor state support on URI faculty, at least as I have experienced them. For the last few years, I have been called upon to maintain web sites. Because constructing web pages and sites provides a good practice medium and a source of examples for teaching, I have agreed. It is also part of that academic good citizenry that we have all been conditioned to accept as a social obligation to peers and the institution (although I'm pretty sure we've just been flummoxed by administration here). So, I maintained the Plant Sciences Department website, until it was recently taken over by College administration and trashed (imagine: an academic department denied access to its own web site by an all-controlling college administration!). I now maintain my department site as well as the upper level College site, and I've been providing major support to the Department of Psychology to upgrade their website. I also get called upon to help friends and students with their pages and projects. Why not turn to the department or college support staff for web development? This is (or should be) the amazing part: Despite being the largest department and the largest college at the University, unbelieveably, neither the department nor the college has any dedicated staff to attend to its web needs. There isn't a single technical person or clerk assigned to this. So, it falls back to whatever volunteers can be found, with the usual result that pages built badly by total amateurs proliferate across the University, clogging its servers with some 400,000 web pages, too many of which are very badly done. Most of the pages and files that reside on the University's servers (one estimate is that this includes 85-90% of files) are not active anymore (they have no live links from current web pages, although they can still be found by search engines, leading to total confusion for many who search www.uri.edu), but no one has money or time to maintain these web sites at a level that would be expected at a major public university. The exception, of course, is CELS, which uses federal funds to build its college web empire; a recent review of URI's web site by student focus groups at Northeastern University led many to the conclusion that URI was mostly CELS—no surprise for a college that diverts huge sums into self-promotion (mostly of the Dean's office, of course).

This blog has produced enough text (if not enough meaningful text) to have reached the somethings-gotta-be-done stage. This means that I have to spend a couple of weeks over Christmas break coding to create a database-driven approach, and then carve the content of this page into database entries, producing a more manageable searchable archive, as though that were something the world has been waiting for. Again, a good practice media, and something the institution can't possibly do for me. In the meantime, I've settled down enough for the semester (it is 2 weeks past mid term, already) to foresee time freeing up for at least two entries that have been begging to come out (there's a little voice that gets louder each night, and currently it starts screaming around 2 a.m., telling me it is time to get up and WRITE SOMETHING!).

Next? The Provost's Vision statement and the non-URI "URI Commission for Research and Innovation." Stay tuned.

July 21, 2008

Detoxing URI

Crossing the Quad today reminded me of my first impression of the campus, 31 years ago. As a new post-doc, I had come from the wealthy and well-maintained 44,000 student Michigan State University campus in East Lansing, where I had been for 11 years. I could not help but sense that the 1977 Kingston campus was some kind of abandoned Navy base, with roads and buildings astonishingly poorly maintained. (Coming only 4 years after the Navy's pullout from Quonset Point, with its major impact on the economy, perhaps the extension in symbolism was warranted.) I recall my dismay that Rhode Island would allow such disrepair to pervade its public research university campus. Those, of course, were the good old days. Daily exposure to this has at least softened the initial shock, and on most days the decrepitude now escapes notice. And indeed, noticeably since Vice President Weygand arrived, there have been sincere efforts to maintain campus appearance. Well, not entirely, as the rotted sills of the chronically unpainted windows in my office building, which greet me every time I enter, remain a daily jolt of depressing abandonment. Where similar campuses spend about 4% of their budgets on maintenance, URI allocates only 1%, and can afford no more. The result is a backlog in maintenance, not all of it visible, which I must guess is upwards of $100 million.

While I have steadily chronicled the ever declining support of Rhode Island for the Kingston campus (here, for example), I have not been able to find a way to quantify the human impact of state neglect. I believe it is time for the campus to consciously, and conscientiously, begin to do this. Here's why.

June 20 was the last day at work for 84 retiring URI employees, with another 50 estimated to go by September; several lecturers and other contract employees were simply not rehired. Many had begun drifting away the last two weeks, using up vacation days that would not be compensated for. Staff in human relations, accounting, information technology, and elsewhere looked around rooms where five or six people once worked, and found one or two coworkers left. The others—senior staff representing irreplaceable institutional memory in most cases—were unlikely to be replaced, given the enormous budget cuts foisted upon the University (URI's percentage cut was more than double the overall percentage by which the entire state budget was being reduced). Faced with certain loss of expensive supplemental medical benefits, and increased costs, low paid staff had few options but to leave. Faculty saw the handwriting on the same wall, and many decided it was too much to stay, whether or not they had taken the time needed to psychologically prepare for retirement (and many clearly had not, to their eventual detriment). For many left behind, with too few years to make retirement possible, there was a feeling of entrapment. Others knew they were simply not ready, and stayed, for whatever is to come. Many, of course, stay because they are happy to be here. It is, nevertheless, on the whole a discouraging environment.

For me, one of the most revealing stories was a middle manager who had supervised an academic unit. I was told that she had elected to sell her house and to resign, intending to live on the proceeds until work came along. Fortunately, she found a job at a very good university with almost no delay. What was disturbing was the reason she gave to her co-workers about her decision. URI, she said, had become "toxic" to an extent that she could no longer work here.

Too many faculty colleagues and senior staff people are telling me they have never seen a worse situation, nor lower morale. "I used to be certain that I would eventually retire out of URI," said one, recently. "Now, that isn't a given." Many are thinking of working elsewhere.

There are no efforts to assess such sentiments, which are alarmingly common. It takes little imagination to estimate the extent of pervasive gloom and despair among faculty and staff. The survey of attitudes about URI—given to scientifically significant numbers of faculty, staff, and students last year as part of the Branding Initiative—was held under wraps by the administration, its numbers so negative that they couldn't possibly be made public. This is tragic, not only for the negative data, but also for the deceptive posturing of administration. Hiding what is nevertheless understood only contributes to still lower morale.

It has been the URI way for many years to put on a public face that things are going well at URI, that everything is fine, and everyone content and eager to work hard. But all of this is bordering on being patently false today, and even the President's recent assessment leaves off with the most ethereal vagaries of campaign slogans like "Hope" and "Yes we can." The campus will open for classes this fall with critical shortages in far too many places. Efficiency is unlikely; morale is severely endangered. How is it considered possible that this will not quickly become fully felt and understood by the student body? And if dissatisfaction prevails, and student retention plummets between September and January, URI's reputation could be severely damaged for a long time. If RI once again stands out next year as being the only state in the nation to actually cut support to higher education, as was true last year, and if we cannot sustain student numbers adequate to meet the budget, danger of fiscal failure for the campus cannot be far behind. The lethal "death spiral" which Richard Gelles first warned us of many years ago, is in grave danger of accelerating for a final plunge, as all measures of fiscal trajectory indicate is now happening. I do not believe this can be discounted or dismissed with glib administrative assurances.

What I am certain will not work at URI is an administrative style that increasingly pits management against labor. Certainly, the obliteration of shared governance that characterizes the disastrous administrative style of CELS, for example, is a case study of how one would go about guaranteeing eventual organizational failure; having already destroyed one academic unit critical to the future of the state, the Department of Community Planning, CELS administration has now nearly completed destruction of the last two agricultural departments, just as the need for local food production is becoming critical. As Provost DeHayes turns current attention to this phenomenon, he too must wrestle with his own administrative style, resisting a rumored proclivity toward an imperial approach to decision making. The greatest asset left at URI is the strength of its remaining faculty and staff, and administration needs to adjust itself to maximize the creative potentials of its workforce. Bullying and brow-beating, and dismissive attitudes toward those with other perspectives (moi, for example), are the worst possible tools for administration in our current situation. Certainly, a bull-headed dogmatism focused narrowly on maximizing flow of undergraduate tuition dollars has already shown itself to be bankrupt as a paradigm capable of retaining the most creative resources, as was clearly demonstrated in the "wrong" (as characterized by all local media and all leaders of the RI arts community, as well as myriad current and former students, faculty, etc.) decision in the case of the Fine Arts Center Galleries Director. Decisions by other key staff and faculty to retire early (code for being given an "offer you can't refuse," in the worst of RI's traditions), or to engage in the slow process of finding a job to escape URI's current toxic environment, will only further sap the body and soul of the University, leaving it anemic and impotent in the near future.

No one is challenging the reality of the absurd position Rhode Island state government finds itself in today, nor of the insane decision to target higher education near the top of the list for budget reductions. While others, such as the remarkable Tom Sgouros or the encompassing Rhode Island's Future blogs provide valuable commentary and insight on the corporate hijacking of the State by moneyed interests, we nevertheless must live with the contemporary economic chaos that government has wrought. We should, of course, be also leading the counter attack, speaking out for the core interests of our democracy, providing a voice for future generations, as this is our critical cultural function, lest we forget. But that is the whole point. While nearly paralyzed by the disaster capitalism that is current state economic policy, we must nevertheless rise above perpetual crisis management and assume responsibility for our critical role as a vital agent for social change. We have not demonstrated a tradition of doing that for many, many years.

There are many starting points to begin changing our current trajectory, to finding a new path. I would be more encouraged had the President not been recently inactive on his promise to advance the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of URI, instead focusing (if there has been any focus on this at all) on consideration of an "external chair," which would allow the President to steer the Commission down whatever path he chooses to narrowly confine it to. Deep reflection on the societal needs to which the University must respond is key to developing a vision that we currently lack. Reestablishment of an articulated future-oriented vision, and reclaiming of the social contract wherein higher education enlists to attain that vision, should be a primary function of University leadership. In a summer marked for its transitional politics—distinguished by Al Gore's recent call, "America must commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and other clean sources within 10 years"—our visions cannot be deliberately short-term or minimalized, as URI's myopic vision currently is. For those who look for signs that URI may yet use the circumstances of the moment to rise above its chronic malaise, this is one opportunity I hope the President—or his increasingly empowered surrogate, the Provost— will recognize as defining. Without such signs, hope is far too nebulous, and the toxic cloud over Kingston too threatening to institutional and individual health.

July 18, 2008

Galleries Finale

The culmination of efforts to save the URI Fine Arts Center Galleries was a meeting on July 2. Afterwards, we issued a final statement and press release, posting them on the Friends of the FAC Galleries web page, as follows:

What was clear was that although the President had agreed to take the meeting, the decision to cut the Galleries was not one that would be challenged. Despite very clear statements that the cut violated the core principles outlined by the administration as the basis for cuts—it had a major impact on curriculum and it was an academic program in itself, which were not to be cut without review—the administration would have none of it. Coming on the immediate heels of a further reduction to the University's budget of another $3.1 million, Dean Brownell immediately pulled her offer of $30,000 in support, and the Provost immediately followed suit. Efforts by Foundation President Kirkian to push for the possibility of finding a $100,000 donor, and by Vice President Weygand to seek a short-term funding solution, were squelched by the President, who offered only a long term "solution" of eliminating the position. Carothers clearly resented the over 100 letters from students, RI artists, and gallery directors from all over the state and region (see Friends for examples), the only major public protest to any of URI's many draconian budget measures; no one was going to call him on this. A quick sell-out by interim chair Bob Dilworth, who offered to take over the galleries despite no staff or budget to run them, was instantly taken by Provost DeHayes as an acceptable solution, and the matter was all over.

There is a clear lesson in all of this. URI administration has assumed a one-dimensional principle for budget cuts. The University must make money. (The code for this is "We are looking out for the interests of the students.") Any considerations of traditional roles of the State's only Public Land Grant Research University, including research and outreach of any kind, or any principle of cutting strategically so as to preserve programs or people of unique distinction or quality (as had been abundantly established here) will not be heard under the current (perpetual) crisis management. The University serves as a local example of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, artificially induced disaster capitalism in action, part of the continuing war on society by a corporatist Republican state. It is a recipe for enduring campus toxicity.

June 23, 2008

The Ugly Spotlight on the New Culture for Learning

In 1992, 1993, and 1994, the University saw itself as a victim of devastating public exposure in the Princeton Review of Colleges and Universities, where URI was listed as America's TOP PARTY SCHOOL. It responded to its public relations nightmare by announcing a "New Culture for Learning," a battle cry which survives 15 years later as a prominent slogan on the University's home page. New Culture also appears now at the bottom of every boiler-plate response to writers protesting the University's latest indecent exposure, URIs toss overboard of the Fine Arts Center Galleries and their Director, Judith Tolnick Champa. How different is today's situation from the public relations nightmare of 15 years ago? It may be far worse. When the State's leading paper claims, "URI Wrong...," the New Culture for Learning is in a truly ugly spotlight.

In the debacle of the early 1990's, students at least had a solid reason to pick URI—it was the top rated party school! I wonder whether, as we near the end of a long institutional death spiral, will we be tempted to revert to our once notorious claim to fame? Should we convert the sterile Ram's Den cafeteria into Rhode Island's largest 24-7 beer hall, a bold move that would soon eliminate alcoholic student rowdyism "down the line" and improve highway safety Thursday and Friday nights? Why not deliberately return to the Princeton Review glory days? Compared to 2008, 1993 looked pretty good on Kingston Hill. Is the "new culture" going to hold us back? I don't believe it will. Surely, we are already showing our willingness to sacrifice any legitimate real culture for the kinds of superficial fluff that marked the lagered 1990s. Have we not made it clear that we are prepared to sacrifice the visual arts at the altar of football? Of course we have. The budget decision has been made: We are going to hold on to football and keep the boosters and discretely inebriated tailgaters placated.

To be sure, the entertainment value of football can be high (even to actual students), and the boosters can contribute lots of money. We do live in an era of bread and circuses, where the masses place entertainment on a pedestal and pay huge sums to keep it there. Perhaps we shouldn't go so far as to suggest that the University should consider strip clubs or casinos to make even more from being an entertainment industry, but I must ask just what sort of principle is at stake here? The State University sets its priorities based on making money? That much is very clear. We have boldly declared what URI stands for: the culture of the gladiatorial arena triumphs over the culture of the gallery because the operating principle is to make money. And if that is the operating principle, then shouldn't we stick with it and ask ourselves just where we want to take this? Have we yet reached our highest aspiration? Why not truly think big and aspire to the top? Let's go for it! Why, we can once again become the #1 party school in the Nation! Think Big (Party): We Do! Little Rhody's coming back! Yeehaw!

I concede that URI is on this road. But do we want to be?

When URI rammed into the budgetary iceberg that ripped open its hull, its officers picked up the bullhorns and ordered midshipmen Deans to throw overboard everything needed to help keep the doomed ship afloat a little longer. The decision to toss the Galleries and its Director is tantamount to casting away one of the University's brightest lights, one of its largest lifeboats, and ablest sailors. Judith Tolnick Champa, I read in the papers, is "one of the state’s true cultural treasures," an appraisal by the Journal's leading art critic, not to be taken lightly in my book. The College of Arts and Sciences finds itself adrift, the new College of Some Arts and Few Sciences. It's a big, competitive academic industry ocean out there, and I can't for the life of me understand why good ship URI so willingly abandoned one of the few lights that made URI most visible, one of the few hopes for URI to be spotted on the vast sea; the hasty decision has left the flagship in the pitch black, just one more gray and sinking educational hull in a fogbank of drifting relicts.

Three weeks after the order to begin throwing lifeboats and treasures into the budgetary sea, where do we now stand?

• The University's stock explanation— "to insure that we could deliver the curriculum"—has illuminated the sole remaining focus of the Flagship public land, sea, and urban grant comprehensive research University. The tunnel vision of official University rationale and the inability of leaders to champion the broader mission or to defend public investment in higher education is drawing widespread scorn.
• Outraged citizens in an ever expanding radius from Kingston—amplified in local newspapers, the Providence state journal of record, and a number of regional arts publications and blogs—are soundly condemning the University's narrow focus in eliminating its most important cultural outreach program.
• Judith Tolnick Champa, Gallery Director for 17 years, has been given a disgraceful bum's rush following the pattern laid down for an excessive number of faculty, lecturers, and senior staff who were forced out; Judith is now facing a final signature deadline coercing her into irreversible and highly premature "retirement" from the RI public sector by July 4, even as supporters come forward with thoughtful solutions and constructive alternatives.

From the abundant outcry, however, this much is now more than clear:

• The loss of the Galleries and Judith Tolnick Champa has a terrible impact on the curriculum, far beyond the patently critical internship experience touted by so many former students who have learned in the Galleries. The loss is not only to the Art Department, but also on the Honors Colloquium and on the many courses whose faculty have publicly documented their pedagogical dependency on the Galleries. That Champa is also an experienced art historian with previous teaching experience at Brown, RISD, and URI, and that there is a need for her teaching, opportunities for collaborative multidisciplinary courses (e.g., with philosophy), and tremendous potential for initiative an advanced curatorial studies program have also become clear from faculty input. In short, the facts give lie to the pretense of "saving the curriculum."
• Similar cuts have not been made at CCRI or RIC (both have retained gallery directors), although neither of these can claim to offer anything near the scope or sophistication of Champa's one-person URI productions.
• Loss of the Galleries severely, perhaps fatally, erodes the entire Art curriculum, possibly throwing into question the future of the Department. The arts at URI will now be virtually unique among major university departments in trying to exist without a professionally run Gallery; the Department has made it abundantly clear that it does not have the resources to do anything meaningful with the University's proposal to simply transfer responsibility. The transfer is seen as a patent smokescreen, a falsification intended to create an illusion that something will exist where it in fact it will not. Who are we kidding here? A plethora of uninformed suggestions from various sources includes notions such as turning the galleries into a new home for the homeless Hera gallery of Wakefield, or various invitations to bring in lesser (often local) artists, etc. These embarrassing albeit well-intentioned suggestions reveal a failure to appreciate the great difference between what Champa has been able to create over 17 years and the vastly different qualities that can be produced by local and amateur efforts. They aren't even reasonable facsimiles, and the public can spot the difference. There is something far more serious, however. High school art teachers can also spot the difference, and they talk to their guidance counselors. URI is running a very bad risk that soon there won't be a high school counselor in the region who would seriously advise an arts student to come to URI. "URI? Well, they can't really be taken seriously anymore, being without a real gallery, etc. It's not like the old days when they had a state cultural treasure in charge. No, instead, why don't you consider..." And when this ominous message crosses the country, as it will in no time at all, where will A&S and URI stand?
• The University is taking a major public relations hit for slighting the tax-paying public by gutting its only quality arts outreach programming effort. The hit is only beginning, but it will continue as the public finds fewer and fewer values returned by the University for public tax dollars. To the taxpayer, URI is more than the classrooms and undergraduates held sacrosanct by the administration. URI's fixation on delivering an undergraduate curriculum can not possibly stave off a retention disaster during the coming year; it will certainly eliminate the last vestiges of support in a nearly moribund public. Instead, URI should be doing just the opposite, returning highly visible real value of the highest standards directly to the public as proof positive of the value of the institution on Kingston Hill.
• The perpetual-crisis management style necessitated by URI's years of budget decline, albeit especially heinous this year, has not produced a long-term vision or strategic plan for the arts anywhere on campus. Crisis management has obviated visionary leadership for too long, with too obvious consequences, at all levels of State government. To be sure, URI's crisis is a crisis of State leadership, a casualty in a national war of wealth concentration for the super rich, at the expense of the common good. But if not from higher education, where can the clarion call for vision and leadership be sounded? And URI is certainly not sounding the horn.
• The University has, for reasons that serve no one's interest, seriously understated and consistently invalidated Judith Tolnick Champa's immense contributions and potentials, and it has been publicly called to task on this by leading voices from both within and outside of URI. Champa's treatment leaves a shabby institutional stain.

In only three weeks, a coalition of friends and supporters of Champa and her Galleries has formed and begun to act. Representing a far broader and more valuable constituency and advocacy group than University officials have yet come to appreciate, a public movement has already put forward bold and challenging views and workable solutions to allow the University a badly needed face-saving reversal of its toxic Gallery decision. Now working through the slow process of addressing the University through its existing bureaucratic channels, it is not clear whether the lethargic officialdom can be jarred out of its rigid, self-justifying boiler plate retorts. The public has, at least when pricked into consciousness by loss of the Galleries and Champa, briefly awakened itself, and it is in a very bad mood. "This is not fun," the President has protested to the protesters in many of his letters. My guess is, three weeks into this horrible mistake, the real misery for URI hasn't even begun.

June 9, 2008

Cutting to the Soul

Witnessing and charting decades of steady budget slashing (above) sometimes leaves me feeling that the Flagship University metaphor—a noble vessel leading a powerful educational armada—serves the public poorly, as does the slogan "New Culture for Learning." But all of that is about to change, as the University unveils a new Branding Initiative.

I hope that as the University repaints its brand, it will also rethink its metaphor. The proper metaphor, I submit, should be far more organic, akin to James Lovelock's Gaian Earth, a more complex living organism. More simply, the public needs to think of the University using a metaphor of flesh and blood, to see the Kingston campus as a complex, thinking, feeling human being because what happens on Kingston Hill is consummately about us, common people in an ordinary democracy. The URI community—the simple faculty, staff, and students who care about their very human institution—have mourned the steady atrophy (the now emaciated tissue and brittle bones) as The Kingston Hill campus has become a sad veil of its former self. But decades of budgetary starvation have been nothing like the flesh-eating consumption tearing at URI in 2008. The budget hackers have finally reached too far, and the soul of the University has been exposed, dragged out for brutal carnal assault in the broad light of day. The Governor and legislature have cut too deeply at the frailest lamb, higher education. The sacrifice is too great, and to stand by and let it continue would be a permanent public disgrace. If it is not already too late, it is surely time to protest and to begin reversal of the death spiral in Kingston.

Last Tuesday, the Fine Art Center Art Galleries became the latest victim of the brutal budget wars. The Galleries is a singular entity, with a single Main Gallery, an intimate Photographic Gallery, and a utilitarian Corridor Gallery, all under the directorship of Judith Tolnick Champa. The Galleries and the Great Performance links have already been scrubbed from the Arts and Sciences college website, leaving the pitiful "Turning to the Arts" section to highlight only the student-based performance music and theatre programs. The remnant link to the Galleries Schedule reflects the diversity of the galleries programming. That schedule also bears a poignant irony, highlighting the fundraiser that had brought a few hundred people to the Kingston campus only three days earlier for a formal appraisal of private arts works, asking "What is it Worth?" Further, the announcement for the September photography exhibit ("Cancel it," was the executive order) shows a picture of the Arizona desert with a sign, "Buy now; pay later." The sign now needs to be replaced by one in front of the cultural desert that will settle in on the Kingston campus if the decision to close the Galleries is allowed to stand, "Close now; pay later."

In August, URI will launch the fruits of a year's work on the Branding Initiative, unfurling the new "Think Big. We do!" tagline. As a lad who grew up in Missouri and who has lived in New England most of his life, URI will have to show me that there is substance behind those words. I'll have to be told about Yankee ingenuity and inventiveness, about standing up for principles, about daring to take on the establishment. I'll want to see what it means to think big through tangible actions. When you brand yourself, you have to be prepared to live up to your tattoos, to walk your talk. The students get it. They'll want to see URI do something that matters. And they are watching now. Only five days after closing, 300+ users of the Facebook social utility have joined an online group, "Save the Galleries," to share protests, links (the media has already started blogging about this), and ideas. They are out there, and they are very upset.

The issue, however, is not about being angry, nor is it about blaming anyone for this. The decision was, of course, nobody's fault. It was part of huge collection of cuts by Dean Brownell, under orders from Provost DeHayes, who was given a number by President Carothers, who listens to Board of Governors Chairman DeCaprio, who responds to second-term Governor Carcieri, who just wants to kill a deficit without displeasing important people or riling voters. The buck, or course, stopped at each desk in that chain of command, and all decisions made at all desks ultimately became also decisions of the body politic itself. We are all accountable. So in the end, what does this say about the citizenry and our decision-makers ? Is anyone living up to "Think Big. We do!" or are we all going to shrug our shoulders and sheepishly ask, "What can I do"?

There are three things at stake here. Any of them make the ultimate cost of closing the Galleries completely unacceptable, no matter the horrible weight of other fiscal exigencies, and therefore require an immediate reversal of the decision. Dean Brownell has acted under the narrow directives of preserving, to whatever extent remains possible, the ability of the College to meet classroom teaching needs this fall. A reversal, therefore, needs to come from Provost DeHayes or President Carothers, both of whom need to rise to this occasion to demonstrate that they do indeed Think Big! What a grand opportunity for leadership lies before these two gentlemen!

First, on a student-centered campus, the closing of the Galleries has a disastrous effect on the students themselves, and not just art students! Many faculty, who use the Galleries to drive home the meaning of philosophical or humanistic lessons taught in classrooms across campus, have often told me that for many of their students, the visit to the Gallery has been their very first exposure to high level public art! Operating at that level—exhibiting professionally curated contemporary art of the highest caliber—also directly involves a significant number of gallery interns who assist in the technically and aesthetically demanding business of curation and installations. For these interns, this may also be their closest behind-the-scenes contact with the epitome of the working visual art world, as they learn from a true master how galleries are run. For many students, that experience provides the essential entry level qualification leading to their first post-graduation professional position. Myriad students maintain contact with Director Champa, frequently reaffirming their gratitude for the quality of their internship training. Closing the galleries significantly diminishes the visual arts experience of any URI art student, diminishing the entire arts program, while it also impoverishes the campus culture for all other students and faculty.

Second, by coordinating with major programs across campus, the Galleries are able to significantly enrich major public offerings, which are available to both students and the public at large. There have been many examples of this during Champa's 17 years at URI, but the most recent was the collaboration with the Honors Colloquium, titled China Rising. More than a year before the Colloquium opened (in September 2007), Director Champa was at work conceptualizing and planning a coordinate installation, China—Seen by.... How would it be possible for URI students or the RI public to understand the true immensity of China's impact on the international economy or the global environment, or to develop even the basest understanding of the meaning of contemporary China without being able to see it with a full visual impact? In electing to respond to this need through a contemporary photographic exhibition, the Director became cognizant of the great differences between native chinese photography and the work of outsiders. The eyes of the person taking the image mattered! As a friend, I was privileged to share long talks with Director Champa as she studied published works, and to accompany her on a few of the dozens of scouting trips to places like the Philips Exeter Academy and Tufts Galleries, and to even follow her around on an exhausting day trip to targeted China installations in major public and private galleries in New York City, where she does her homework for future exhibitions. Similar scholarly preparation went into previous Colloquium collaborations on the Vietnam War and Global Sustainability, again benefiting both students and the hundreds of visitors to campus who saw these installations.

Emanuel—Harpers Ferry, WVA
Wet Plate Collodion Photograph by Robert Szabo
Date: 08/15/2003

One of the most enjoyable and unique aspects of Director Champa's programming was the often whimsical or playful nature with which she would seek to engage the public. During the winter of 2006, the "States of Siege" exhibition brought together the work of several reenactment photographers, including the great Wet Plate Collodion Photographer, Robert Szabo, whose work had appeared in, and on the cover of, National Geographic (April 2005). Director Champa assembled an amazing cast for an opening celebration, a bright and sunny day in early February, including several reenactor groups from southern New England, and Rob Goldman's youthful 14th Rhode Island Heavy Cavalry regiment from Providence. Szabo himself came up from Virginia, swapping stories with another wet plate photographer from Connecticut who produced a number of civil-war era tin-type photographs during the day. Some 300-400 people assembled, lunched on civil war troop rations (hard tack, salt pork, and gritty cornbread), listened to the roar of musket fire, and stirred to the sound of fife and drums, bringing the University vibrantly to life on a wonderful Saturday at the Galleries.

It must be emphasized that the public nature of these incredible exhibitions is a clear manifestation of the historical public outreach mission of URI. The URI Fine Arts Center Galleries are the only Rhode Island public arts outreach center in the State (The Bell Gallery at Brown, and of course the RISD Galleries, are private). This is of particular importance in the southwestern part of Rhode Island where not only local senior citizens, but great numbers of K-12 school-age students rely on the Galleries for the experience of being able to see a wide variety of contemporary art in a professional installation. This form of outreach is supported by the taxpayers and it is a major error to undervalue this form of public support and recognition of the value of the University. Cutting off the Galleries eliminates a strong reason for many local residents to feel in touch with their state University, and URI can ill afford to alienate these constituents.

Finally, it should be clear to all that the proven value of the Galleries is only manifest through the extraordinary contributions of one person, Gallery Director Judith Tolnick Champa. Lifelong companion and wife of the great Brown University art historian, the late Kermit Champa, Judith is a native New Englander who has spent most of her life in Rhode Island and as an integral part of the Rhode Island arts community. Director Champa is a well known and well loved member of the URI community, often described as one of the most interesting and vibrant people on campus. One of the things that I have come to appreciate about her 17 years of work at URI is the enormous volume of literature produced as part of her job, the detailed catalogs and booklets that go with each installation. From the first time I met Director Champa I was aware that she was one of the very few people I had ever met whose everyday working vocabulary is far larger than mine. Reading the euphonous and always highly imagistic things that she has written makes it clear that there is extraordinary genius and talent here. Her reputation extends far beyond the State and New England, and for many Europeans in the art community, she is all they know, or need to know, about Rhode Island. The single most consistent presence of the University of Rhode Island in the New York Times, and thus the most visible sign that there was anything in Kingston, was the frequent listing of URI FAC Galleries events carried in the arts section, the result of a cultivated and carefully maintained relation between Director Champa and the paper. The departure of Judith Tolnick Champa from the URI campus would itself be a devastating blow to the spirit, culture, and erudition of the institution, a severe and immediate diminishment from which there would be no recovery. The University's official press release explaining that responsibility for the galleries would be "shifted to the Department of Art and Art History" is ludicrous; without Judith Tolnick Champa, there are only empty rooms and there is no creative spark of genius left to carry on, not in the entire art department, not on the entire University. A promise by Dean Brownell to begin talks with donors "to endow both programs" is far too little, far too late, and insulting to both the students and the community without Judith Tolnick Champa at the helm. It is also nearly impossible to accept the University's claim that cutting the Gallery and the self-sustaining Great Performances program would save $325,000—the University should be challenged to document this claim—and of course it is patently false to claim that this savings would be used to deliver the curriculum (no, it will merely be used to cover the budget loss so that tax cuts for wealthy Rhode Islanders and their corporations can be preserved!).

What makes the final decision on the Galleries unique is the fundamental quality of the values at stake. Is URI to continue to assert its claim to be the State's public outreach institution, a core of its historic land grant mission? Does this claim extend to the arts and humanities as well as to the sciences and technologies? What are the humanistic and artistic claims of the University, and how are they reflected by this decision? What does it mean to "Think Big" and how does this decision illustrate how "We Do"?

Without its major sports programs, like football and basketball, URI would remain an important center of higher education, and a vital public asset critical to life in the 21st century. Without its Galleries, it is just another school, with little soul and little to contribute to culture. URI may yet rise to make important contributions to survival in face of the monstrous global challenges that are the focus of this blog. But if it does not rise to this particular challenge, it will not be able to make meaningful contributions to the values that give meaning to mere survival. Surely, to think big requires an immediate restoration and restatement of the priority of the Fine Art Center Galleries and their truly unique Director.

May 30, 2008

Campus Trajectory

At the beginning of the 21^st Century, the scientific community consistently advises that within the century we will witness

• unprecedented anthropogenic, detrimental global climate change,
• global exhaustion of the liquid fossil fuels, ending the age of the automobile and car-dependent suburbia
• an enormous loss of most species, most natural habitats, and significant damage to most "renewable" resources, and
• with a high probability the peaking and thereafter rapid decline of the size of the human population.

James Lovelock suggests, and presently I do not have strong reason to dispute, that by the end of the century a half billion human beings will survive to mourn the 6.5 billion who entered the century, or the 8-9 billion alive when the human population reached its limit to growth, probably within a few years of 2070, shortly before numbers plummet as a result of disease, famine, war, and general disorder.

As Sagan may have added, there remains (always) a possibility that I could be wrong. I'd like to say with confidence that I really do not know. But I have read too much for too many years, and lack that confidence in my own ignorance. Disturbingly, the evidence before me holds me steadfast to my pessimism. The best I can do is to seek out a number of others, the wisest I can persuade to enter, and to enjoin a widespread conversation. That is, I would feel much more comfortable with my fears and doubtful projections if there were an extended social dialog seriously examining the underlying issues of science and technology, and more importantly investigating the human mechanisms to react to those issues.

I will return at a later date on this page with more specific local concerns, about, for example, the patent dismantling of the University's ability to contribute meaningfully to society's growing need for community planning, or even basic agriculture, as the liquid fossil fuels disappear. There is surely a pressing need to reevaluate the skills and knowledge that is being transmitted to our students, who I feel are being better prepared for 1970 than 2030. But there is a more fundamental mortal weakness threatening the University, and this needs immediate attention and long-term wisdom.

In 2001, I was hired by the RI Economic Policy Council to prepare a study, "Research Benchmarks: Funding University Research Operations and Infrastructure." Benchmark studies are a standard approach to gauging whether a company or a state is performing in ways that can be compared to the competition. Here the focus was to assess whether Rhode Island was investing adequately in academic research at its only public research university; the study concluded we were not making comparable investments and that indeed, by several critical measures we were last in the nation. I updated those disturbing benchmarks in 2006, and more recently over the Memorial Day weekend (one state employee, at least, worked his tail off over a holiday, and without compensation from the taxpayer, let it be noted). The 2008 Research Benchmarks update assesses state general revenues and general revenue contributions to URI. It looks at URI's expenditures on research and compares them with Brown (a private university incorporated in RI, RI's only other research university) and national trends. The 2008 update provides a few comparisons on our relative state standing as a contributor to public academic research. The study provides links to data sources and the detailed (sometimes tediously so) excel worksheets and charts needed to build the assessment.

The 14 charts in the 2008 benchmarks (using most recent data sources which vary from 2006 National Science Foundation research expenditure data to the Governor's 2009 Governor's Budget Recommendation) support the following observations:

1. For nearly 4 decades URI's State General Revenue budget has declined (-27%) while the State's budget has grown (+120%); The Budget Recommendation for 2009 would cut total state spending by a deflation-adjusted 5.7% but state spending for URI by 10.2%.
2. Over the same period, URI's priority within the state budget has steadily dropped, from 7.7% (1971) to 2.5% (2007), with the Governor recommending that it drop to 2.4% in 2009.
3. The share of URI's budget covered by the State has therefore dropped, from 63.7% in 1969 to 16.8% in 2007; the Governor recommends that it drop to 14.2% in 2009.
4. Between 2007 and 2008 Rhode Island cut its higher education appropriation by 1.2%. All other states raised theirs, an average of 7.5%.
5. Nationally, inflation adjusted expenditures for university research have increased steadily for nearly 4 decades.
6. URI's research expenditures have remained almost flat. While most recent (2006) expenditure data show URI with an almost average level of institutional research support for the first time in over a decade, overall enrollment, faculty size, and budget projections indicate that this will prove to be an aberration from URI's heavy dependence on faculty success in competitive federal granting arenas as a basis for the University's research.
7. Brown University research expenditures have doubled (inflation adjusted) over the past 20 years, largely due to institutional funds; Brown's research agenda does not meet the same broad spectrum of research needs addressed by public URI, however.
8. The percentages of academic research conducted by private Brown and public URI has changed from nearly equal in the 1980s to 2.2:1 Brown:URI currently; academic research is being privatized in Rhode Island.
9. URI's status as a research university has steadily declined, from top 100 in the 1980's to 151 in 2005 (145 in 2006).
10. Adjusting for size of state populations, RI's per capita support of University research was less than half of the national average and next to last in the nation in 2006.
11. In 2008, RI's per capita State support for higher education operating was slipping, down from 79% of the national average in 2006 (44th place) to only 59% of the national average (45th place). The Governor's Recommendation of a further 15.1% cut in state support would land RI in 47th place next year.
12. Rhode Islanders are not particularly poor; 2006 personal income placed us 17th in the nation.
13. URI spends relatively less of its institutional funds on research than national averages (33rd ranked in aberrant 2006, last in 2003).
14. Rhode Islanders spend relatively less of our per capita income to support University research, 46th ranked.

Again, there are no clear indicators from within URI that supporting research has become a higher institutional priority. Atypical amounts of institutional funds allocated in 2006 will almost certainly disappear in next year's accounting, returning RI to the last place status that has distinguished the State for several years. If President Carothers is correct in his belief (Pro Jo 5/22/08, pg F3) that the RI economy is being harmed by low investments in higher education, then we would expect Governor Carcieri to return to his supportive stances from his 2003 and 2004 State of the State addresses and follow his words with budget recommendations. The Governor can not, as he did at the recent commencement, pretend that voter or University initiatives in supporting a few building renovations or the long-overdue construction of science facilities are either something that he can take legitimate credit for, or that they are sufficient to mask institution-gutting cuts in operating and research funds.

To have RI State government, led by its Governor, withdraw its support from its historical social contract with its University is an odd experiment for a state that is at least cognizant of a relation between Yankee inventiveness—in its contemporary form most effectively facilitated by well endowed state universities—and a vibrant economy. Widespread talk of modernizing the workforce through education for a more sophisticated high technology local economy is incongruous with current budgetary practice, reflecting either a lack of vision, poor planning, or gross insincerity from the State. When long term infrastructural and unprecedented social challenges (resulting from global climate change and loss of the liquid fossil fuels) begin to be factored into state planning, these challenges may be seen to loom far larger than the present concerns over fitting into an already recognizably unsustainable national and global economy; serious reevaluation of the relation of the state to its only public research university would seem to be a first order of business. Perhaps this will become part of the task of the University's Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of URI, a joint faculty-senate and presidential venture that convenes this fall. Given the crippling impact of the myriad forced retirements that have recently impaled the University, threatening its ability to function this coming fall, the task may be more one of picking up the crumbling flotsam of a beached campus rather than merely adjusting the course of an already vibrant flagship institution. But then again, I may be wrong.

March 20, 2008

Un-sustainable

In a separate, lengthier posting, I raise extensive local and general concerns about the meaningless word "sustainable," and its vaporous cousins "sustainability" and "sustainable development." Here is a condensed version.

In the longer posting, I refer to and quote extensively from four writers: Herman Daly, Richard Heinberg, James Lovelock, and Christopher Alexander. Briefly, here is part of Herman Daly's concern with the phrase "Sustainable Development" (H. Daly, Beyond Growth, Beacon Press, 1996).

Heinberg approached sustainability with an eye on peak oil (Richard Heinberg. 2007. Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. New Society Publishers. 212p.) (why this is familiar?).

Heinberg's Peak Everything "history and background" also mentions Karl-Henrik Robèrt's Natural Step (1989), William Rees's ecological Footprint Network (1992), and Albert Bartlett's 17 Laws of Sustainability. These are insightful sources. For example, from Bartlett we have:

Heinberg cites a search of Amazon.com which yielded 25,000 hits for books related to sustainability, and 62,000 containing sustainable, including sustainable leadership, communities, energy, design, construction, business, development, urban planning, tourism, etc. He also cites a search of Google Scholar, producing 538,000 hits. See also Waking Up in the Century of Limits, posted July 2007 (same as publication date of Heinberg's book!). Heinberg consolidates much of the above by positing five axioms:

Perhaps the most critical of sustainable development is James Lovelock (2006. The Revenge of Gaia. Basic Books. 177p.)

Lovelock suggested that we replace sustainable development with sustainable retreat, to promote the idea that it is essential for humans to understand the crisis nature of their current devastating impact on gaia. Heinberg has subtitled his Peak Everything "Waking up to the Century of Decline." While I agree with Lovelock, I suggest that we give the public a little more time to get used to the idea that we must stop charging forward with planetary destruction (sustainable development), and must first adjust to the notion of stopping, prior to the essential long term (i.e., beginning within the next 2 generations) process of retreat (lower human population with vastly lower use of global resources and sinks). As does Heinberg, I anticipate that for most people this stepping back will initially feel as though it is an unwelcomed imposition, an assault on "life style," and therefore a decline. But I think we have the power to decide to get over that, and to come to a global concensus that living within global limits (well below the carrying capacity of the planet) represents no decline at all. I disagree, that is to say, that there will ultimately be anything negative about the outcome of retreat or stepping back, and therefore wish to deflect the negative connoted by addressing the vital transition as decline.

What Should Replace Sustainable?

In search of a replacement for sustainable, I feel as though I am on a search for Christopher Alexander's The Quality Without a Name (1979. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press. 552p.)

Alexander then circled, using but eventually rejecting alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, and eternal; the effort ultimately ends with failure. "And so you see, in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it."

If we are going to seek a word that carries both the environmental and the economic intentions of sustainable, we should at the same time seek in the same word a sense of the quality which Alexander cannot name. That is, we should also seek to inject the human into the natural and economic machine. (See also Orion Magazine editorial, Jan/Feb 2008)

I have struggled with this search for a word. I assigned this as a task to my Century of Limits students, asking them to contemplate the problem over spring break (without many illusions as to whether any of them would actually consider such cogitation). It is a struggle that I cannot end right now.

But in pondering, I recalled a word that my late father, Donald Logan, had once used to describe the 1966 movie, A Man for All Seasons, with an excellent portrayal of Sir Thomas More by Paul Scofield. How ironic that this thought occurred to me today, during the morning of the day Mr. Scofield died. My father was greatly taken by the Oscar-winning performance, and I recall how he sought a word to describe its greatest quality, and came up with "constrained."

I can do no better for now, than to offer this word. If we must turn the adjective into a horrible nominalization, then I suppose we might be stuck with constrainability. It doesn't fall from the tongue, and it has too many syllables, but I am going to leave it on the table at present.

My greatest concern with sustainability comes from seeing how readily my students recoil in horror when they begin to understand some of the real implications of global warming, the end of the liquid fossil fuel era, or the meaning of overpopulation. Their first response is to want to hold on to all they have known all of their lives, seeking ways to retain a hold on "life style." While it saddens me to think of the fearful shallowness of such a materialist generation— not too different from the overly-indulged and privileged baby-boom parental generation—it saddens me more to think that they may be being led to believe that we can, in fact, sustain this age of self indulgence. It is not the illusion of perpetual growth of population, consumption, or wealth that is most disturbing. It is the delusion that any aspect of this is worth sustaining for even a single further generation.

I'll end this overly long post with the thought that while our goal this century is certainly to exit the century with as little misery and disorder as possible, my hope is that we can also develop a sense of individual constraint to our rapacious propensities, yielding to a socializing awareness of the need for world and generational brotherhood. The key, I submit, is to learn the humanizing meaning of constraint.

March 9, 2008

Aware Enough

To be healthy, we need the abilities to be aware and to act.

To be aware means to know both your self and your surroundings. We are evolving and becoming more complex both as selves and collectively in relation to our surroundings. The current age sees a contest between accumulated human understanding of individual and social psychology and a din of advertisers, entertainers, and informers. The tools of psychology—analysis, economics, sociology, politics—serve us poorly both as agents of information and as tools for action. Individually and collectively, we are too easily left unaware and too easily fail to act in ways needed to be healthy.

In healthy people and societies, to be aware and to act are matters of deciding. We decide to pay attention or to ignore. We decide to be paralyzed or to get moving. When we are unable to decide, we are unhealthy. In the Century of Limits, the times in which we live (see here, here, or here for more from me), Americans in particular are acting like an unhealthy society, unaware of our individual behaviors and detached from our collective relation to our environment, or worse, aware but deciding to act with willful neglect of the destructive path we are on or its ultimately suicidal implications for the planet during this century.

Action needs to be based on awareness and it needs to be purposeful. I think Lester Ward (Dynamic Sociology, 1883) was right on this. Ward felt that there needed to be direction in human society (I'll return to that another day). Whether or not anyone is harmed by the insane action, to be disconnected through unawareness of our selves or our surroundings, or to act in ways that disregard in purposeless ways either our selves or our surroundings, must make no sense to us. To be responsible, for ourselves and to others, we must act on what we are aware of, and with a direction that makes sense. Sane people can decide to do this for themselves.

I think it is likely that many Americans are capable of acting badly, which is to say being very selfish in their use of resources and sinks (e.g., the resource oil and the sink atmosphere, which receives our CO₂), a willed action: Live for today and to hell with people in the future or on the other side of the world. But I trust that we as a society, faced with the consequences of our actions, would eventually decide not to act badly. If so, then our present actions could most favorably be construed as being the result of not being aware of what we are doing. How likely is this?

There are two aspects of being aware that are important. When we are uncertain, we may be aware of conflicting feelings or information, and so long as we are uncertain, the uncertainty itself may prevent us from acting. That is reasonable. What if we act prematurely, before we know enough about what our actions will mean? We might be wrong. We might be doing something that isn't necessary, perhaps wasting time or money, or causing some kind of harm, unnecessarily. Individually, we confront such situations all of the time.

Somehow, people do get to a point where they are certain enough that they act. Sometimes, their decision turns out to be wrong. That half of marriages end in divorce suggests that maybe people aren't actually aware enough at the time they make their decision. Nevertheless, at some point they will take a step forward, a leap of faith, and commit to action. Life is full of such decisions. What is critical is that we do not need to be at a high degree of certainty about the outcome of our decision; we just have to be certain enough. That is, we have to convince ourselves that we are aware enough about how we are feeling or thinking; then we are ready to make a decision and we do. If we can not decide, we are either not sufficiently aware, or we are incapable of acting on adequate information (which is unhealthy); we either decide, or we wait a little longer until we are ready to decide.

There are three things that Americans have to act on: global climate change, peak oil, and population; we are only talking about one of them presently, global climate change, and we are only talking, not acting. We complain about fuel prices and dependency on foreign suppliers, but we are barely aware of the pending end of the fossil fuel era and can not contemplate the changes that are coming very soon. We fear discussing population as though we would be discussing murder or eugenics, yet too many people (we have too many now) are likely to be the root of the problem (does it feel like I've just killed someone?).

We're beginning, as a people, to be more aware of global climate change, although most of us still reveal our relative ignorance by calling it global warming. I have a feeling that most people don't quite understand what the implications are, and that only a very few think it will actually affect them in the foreseeable future (at least those of us who don't live in Atlanta, Miami, or New Orleans). Jim Hansen started sounding this out in 1989, when the evidence was convincing enough already. Nineteen years later, Americans are only increasing their fuel consumption and emissions, egged on by criminally irresponsible government. Yet we have the current volumes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (here, for summaries and online versions of the entire things, over 3000 pages of amazing stuff), and they tell us enough. Thank you, Al Gore and all you scientists. But we are really only just starting to come around on this, barely aware as a people, even with the information right in front of us. Poor leadership in American has not helped (here, for more on indicators of awareness), but how much residual doubt is there that we have are raising planetary temperature as a result of changed atmospheric CO₂? Here are two images from the IPCC Working Group I report, "The Physical Science Basis:"

We are aware enough. Further obstructionism and contrarianism is foolishness at best, criminal at worst. Yes, James Imhoff and the contrarian right are a criminals. We know enough and merely waste time listening to these fools any further.

As discouraging as is our denial over global climate change, what is most amazing is how poorly understood peak oil really is. Marion King Hubbert had been sounding off on this since 1956, warning (accurately) that the US (then only 48 states) would reach a peak in production in 1971, after which production would decline each year. Today, we produce less than 1/3rd of what we produced in 1971 in the lower 48 states. We would consume all of what is left in 3 years were we cut off from foreign supplies at current consumption rates. And then there is no more. We can reasonable expect that no oil will be pumped in or around the U.S. after about 2030. Done. Gone. History.

Here's one of Hubbert's graphs from a 1981 paper (here, as pdf), showing the production cycle of oil for the planet:

Global oil production did not peak before 2000, as Hubbert had estimated a few years earlier; a global recession explains most of that. It may have peaked in 2005, as Matt Simmons indicates, or it may yet peak in the next year or so. No one says it peaks past 2015. I use this graph not to estimate when global production will peak, and quibbling over that is a waste of time. Rather, I suggest that what is meaningful is how fast production will decline. What fraction of today's production would you expect to be produced in 2030 or 2050? And with 2/3rds of oil (converted to gasoline) used in the US going into transportation, how likely is it that the automobile age will endure much more than, say, 20 or 30 years, if that. But won't we divert oil to higher priorities, such as feeding ourselves, industry, and home heating as we begin to run out? Would we allow an open market where those who can afford high priced gasoline continue to run around in personal automobiles while people begin to go hungry or are unemployed because of fuel shortages? (At $100+ per barrel, how much of the human race has already seen the end of the fossil fuel era? The bottom billion people? The bottom two billion? And how soon will the rest of us exit the petroleum age? Certainly, oil and natural gas will be essentially all played out by the end of the century, replaced by substantive quantities of coal only if we are willing to deep fry the planet for time to come longer than humans can imagine.) Regardless of the exact shape of the depletion curve, we're substantially out of gas by mid century (and I'm ignoring the explosive growth of the automobile in China, which has 4 times as many people as the US).

Aren't we aware enough of the future of global oil production? Don't we know we don't have any left, and we have little to trade for what is there? Don't we have enough clarity about the future of the automotive age to begin to act on it today? I believe we do.

And finally, what are we aware of when it comes to the size of our population? Do we really think that we will be able to feed, clothe, and shelter this population by the end of the century? What does it mean that the Limits to Growth models all show precipitous population drop-off after 2050-2070, to 1-4 billion people (down from 7.5-8.5 billion mid-century)? What did James Lovelock mean by predicting that by the end of the century "the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin?" Do we know that we can not maintain a human population as large as the one we already have? Do we not have enough information to suggest that we should do all we can to reduce our population, without coercion or brutality, through humanitarian means and education?

This posting is already too long. But at least we are ready for our next topic.

February 24, 2008

Far Field

The field in Roethke's Far Field lay at the end of a long, dwindling road. Like many of his greater poems, Far Field is a mix of frightening and uplifting images drawn, as Roethke drew much of his poetry, from his Michigan life. There were remnants in one corner of Roethke's field, a half-eaten dead rat and the entrails of a blasted cat "...among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery...," yet even with its horrors the far field was a place of rebirth and hope.

In this space I will write about a Far Field of my own, that "white light of tomorrow" that is the future of our country and world. I will approach that domain from the only perspective I have, that of an aging academician in an urban sphere. But it is not a strange field for me. I first visited it as a freshman at Michigan State. Late in the fall, 1966, I found myself south of campus in a grassy pasture, under an old and spreading solitary oak, looking at emerging evening stars. I do not recall the circumstances, but I had only recently come across Malthus, and I was intent on his warnings. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was still fresh, and Harding's Tragedy of the Commons was not yet written, but the future lay before me, and it was as immense and astounding as the infinite stars of that moonless Michigan night.

I wonder. Do we approach the far field of tomorrow in a spirit of fear and avoidance, seeing the future as "the dying of time?" Are we frightened by our future, and in denial, engaged in various postures of insanity, incapable of connecting to reality? Can we waste time being arrogant or pathetic, dim in intelligence, hesitant to think, or afraid to act with foresight? Why do we sit here, spinning wheels in the snow as the lights dim?

"I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel,
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken."

These pages, then, are for thoughts about what we must do, and how we must go about doing it. They will reflect the times as I see them. They will be informed by the students who come and go from my classes, and by colleagues who inspire hope. A frequent theme will be that higher education must engage; therein lies hope, and I will contemplate why and how this may come about. That is all. I'll keep it simple. I don't think there is mystery here about what we must do, nor much cause to speculate about when we should get started. The only question, at present, is why we are not moving already.