Teaching online: Week four tips

If this is your first time, by now you did the heavy lift. Congratulations. Next week, all the frustrating limitations and inefficiencies of online teaching will become painfully obvious. You may be doing either too much zoom time, and it is difficult to engage students. Or you assign them too much independent work, which makes it difficult to engage. Or else, you spent all your waking time providing individual feedback to students, which maintains their level of engagement, but is killing you. Welcome to the joggling world of the online teaching circus!

If you are still zooming the entire time, feel entitled to reduce the zoom time. Use it for weekly check-in, emotional support for students, and Q&A time. Use the break-out rooms in Zoom to add variety. Ask small groups to do a specific assignment, let them select their reporter who will present the highlights of the discussion back in the common room.

If you must lecture, pre-record several 5-8 minute segments rather than an hour-long lecture. It is much easier for students to watch, for they can skip, take breaks, and re-watch. It is actually easier for you to produce in chunks. But also, try searching YouTube or open lecture databases of other universities – there is a chance someone has done the same lecture better than you, or at least acceptable. It is all fair game: your job is not necessarily to produce content. It is to curate content, to select it, and include it in your class’ structure. You know how a school teacher will never let kids loose in a museum without a worksheet? It is the same with any kind of content: give students something to do beyond “take notes.” For example, “Draw a mind map of today’s lecture,” or “Build a list of key concepts.”

You manage a face-to-face discussion with your tone of voice, facial expression, and comments on comments. These allow students to learn what kind of thinking is good and appropriate in your discipline, and what kind is not. None of this subconscious communication machinery works in a Canvas discussion thread. You worry about student comments being shallow, and factually wrong. Adapt by building a very structured discussion. For example:

• Write an example where the concept A is applicable. Google and link the best illustration of the concept B.
• Comment on at least two of your classmate’s entries, using one of the two patterns: (1) I agree, and can further develop your point, or (2) I disagree, because.
• Find an error in this statement, explain why do you think it is an error (You would have to prove the statement)
• Self-assess your skill doing… What do you need to do to grow?
• Define С in your own words, differently than your textbook does it.
• Develop a test to assess your classmates’ knowledge of today’s reading (thanks, Aaminah).

In threaded discussion, do NOT read and give feedback to every single entry; that would make you miserable. And you will find yourself repeating the same point over and over again. The frustrating limitation of online environment is that students do not automatically “hear” what you said. Rather, glance through quickly, spot most common errors and good examples. Point out to the rest of the class, whose response was especially brilliant, encourage them to re-read those. Comment on common errors without naming those who made them, of course. Make it clear students have t read ALL of your comments. Your voice has to be on loudspeaker.

While high stakes standardized tests are almost always problematic, short low-stake quizzes are fun, and can be highly engaging. Both Zoom and Canvas have polls/quizzes. There is a number of external quiz-making platforms, but stick to Canvas if you can, because it will automatically add them to your gradebook. Putting the quizzes together will save you time on grading, and will make your course more interesting. Besides multiple choice, consider fill-in the blank; those are not automatically graded, but still very easy to grade, and help spot misconceptions.

If you use final essays in your assessment, make them shorter; it will save you time on grading. Also consider progressive assignments: an idea one week, an outline the second week, a draft third week, and the paper at the end. This kind of process discourages plagiarism, and lets you do the last grading more cursory. Most students won’t read your feedback on the final paper, sorry. Recycle your comments. If you wrote an especially good feedback, same it in the comment file. There is a very good chance another student will need exactly the same comment.

In general, online teaching is about relentlessly prioritizing, simplifying, defining what is the bottom line, what essential skill or set of facts you need students to learn. And it is about making explicit what you used to convey implicitly. It is a lot about reflecting on your own assumptions and expectations.

The COVID denial land and failures of imagination

In retrospect, American reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic looks excruciatingly slow. WHO declared the public health emergency on January 30, Wuhan was on quarantine for a week, and a first US case was already ten days old. No one has really done anything, other than some travel restrictions. Everyone saw the huge hospital build in China in a few days, but no country rushed to build their own. It is easy to blame Trump’s administration, and the blame is probably well deserved. Many other world leaders were in denial, including the Chinese. But let us not ignore the collective failure of imagination. We all have visited the denial land. Some were there only briefly, some longer, and some are still there. But we all were there at some point.

There is a very completing argument that the denial is partially explained by the West’s cultural superiority. Indeed, the Italian lock-down on March 8 had actually prompted some action in the US, but it was too late for New York. However, let us look at ourselves. I went into our weekly updates. The first time I carefully suggested we may go online was not until March 9. Yet by that time, millions of school children and university students in Asia and Southern Europe were already out of school. We could have had 2-3 weeks of planned preparation rather than rush and transition in one week. It did not take a gigantic mental effort to imagine we will close campus soon.

Both the human mind and human cultures have elaborated mechanisms of denial. No one wants to panic, and then look silly if it turns out to be a false alarm. The society places heavy sanctions on the one who panics too soon. I guess it makes sense; you don’t want to go to overdrive every time a small chance of a disaster appears on the horizon. There is, of course, the Monday morning quarterback phenomenon: in retrospect, things look a lot more certain that at the time, because we know what happened. Yet fear of shame is what prevents us from letting our imagination work.

We have a hard time dealing with an invisible threat. It is just hard to generate the right amount of adrenalin without some visual representation of the danger. The graphs CDC and others put together do not do the trick. More paranoid people who have hard time trusting anyone, go immediately into one or another conspiracy theory, imagining a man-made panic. I have seen a lot of them, in both English and Russian social media. Russians, are unfortunately, are much worse. Their minds have been massively infected by paranoia after years of distrust and state-sponsored fake news. However, the general trend is this: I can see people talking about the danger, but not the danger itself. The fear misplaces its object: instead of fearing the danger, one begins fearing people talking about the danger. It is basic projection, both primitive and powerful. Shooting the messenger is the universal human sin.

Imagination originates with memory; it is the ability to remember extended on things that have not happen yet. This is why it works so well when the future is familiar. It does not work very well when the future is unprecedented. Because no one has been in the lock-down situation before, we failed to accept its reality. We perceived as a safe fantasy of science fiction, and just could not imagine it as a reality.

If there is any lesson in all this, it is that we have to be aware of the limits of our own collective and personal imagination. Humans are not that smart after all.

Walking the dog in the dark

Pandora, Jem Radio, not NPR tonight: I had enough of talk, enough already. And Stitcher doesn't stitch. И врут календари. Let’s change the soundtrack of self-isolation. The tunes and throaty female voices shatter hard plates of thought into colored shapeless glass pieces, like in kaleidoscope’s guts, without its mirrors. No pattern to think of, none, just these random pieces. What a relief it is, not to be thinking.

Trees and bushes mark their territories with small fragrances; only one or two occasional show-offs give off heavy gorgeous perfume of their bloom. Mostly, these are fine smells of bark, mulch, grass, and leaves, subtly shifting every few steps. The dog is interested in something else, perhaps earth worms or moles. He seems to be is lost in his fantasy, chasing imaginary critters through the night. He attends to soundscape of his own, manages to get excited about what I hear as total silence. Dog walkers cross the street to avoid each other. No one says anything; what is there to say? Even a nod would not be visible.

The chill of night on my cheeks, why do I need you so much? Who knew, a child of the harsh land would crave the cold air on his face. It reminds him of something unnameable, like being alive and alert, and alone, cheek to cheek with unsympathetic darkness. I walk the dog, and life dog walks me yet again.

The probabilistic ethics of solidarity

My colleagues demonstrated an incredible outpour of solidarity during the last week. I do not know most of things, but do know for sure that several tech-savvy faculty went to their colleagues in need, helped set up Canvas shells, Zoom sessions, and everything else. Our staff figured out a myriad of small and large work processes, so both students and faculty get uninterrupted help. Out of 6000+ students that take our classes not one panicked of complained. And on top of that, we were working on a new initiative I cannot quite disclose publicly yet. The giant organized shift into the new reality was remarkable to watch. It was like a large Roman legion silently took down its thousands of tents, kitchens, armories, marched into a completely unknown territory, and rebuilt it again in a matter of hours. You cannot manage this process; it is guided by people’s own competence and driven by the sense of solidarity. You can only help it a little if you can, but mainly stay out of the way. Ethics is the strongest force of a human society.

The probabilistic ethics of social distancing is a whole different beast. It is counter-intuitive and takes an effort to practice. For example, one’s instinct is to take personal risk and to come to work. However, it does not turn out to be the best thing to do. You want to support people during the difficult times, which has always meant socializing, hugging, talking. None of these normal behaviors are available. And the reason we are doing it is quite bizarre: it is not to prevent the disease; that fight has been lost already. No, the goal is to slow down the disease so we have enough healthcare resources to cope with the pick of the epidemic. The countries plunged themselves into a deepest economic recession because of the possible shortage of lung ventilators.

Many observers pointed out that our societies have not been that compassionate before. For example, almost 200,000 people die prematurely each year in the US from air pollution. 37,000 people die in car crashes per year. In comparison, 5476 people died of the coronavirus in Italy so far. No one was suggesting we through massive resources to fight air pollution. No one suggested we stop driving to save all those lives. Of course, ethics is not about logic; ethical thinking looks like a calculation only to some analytic philosophers, and to no one else. Ethics is about imagination, about pictures we see and remember. Military trucks in Italy carrying dozens of coffins is a powerful image, and the power comes through novelty as much as anything else.

Yet there is some hope that people will learn to apply the ethics of probabilistic solidarity. The very economy we have created does have massive unintended consequences. The question that we are forced to face is simple: is it worth it? Is our consumption, our entertainment worth the deaths they literally cause? We have learned to see that you do not need to be directly putting someone in danger by your action or inaction. No, we just realized that shaking hands may spread the disease, and kill someone many handshakes away from us. OK, apply the same logic: my buying many cheap clothes will kill someone because of the environmental damage the textile industry causes.

Is it ethical to grow the economy? Why should it grow, and perhaps it can shrink and stay shrunk?

Final exams in an online course

Many instructors use performance-based summative assessments: essays, papers, projects, etc. For them transitioning their assessments online is not an issue. For those who are used to more traditional proctored exams, the new situation presents a dilemma. Proctoring online is technically possible, but none of the services will cope with the high demand. There are ways of locking the browser, but they are glitchy and won’t prevent from browsing on a phone, while taking exam on a computer. Here is an incomplete list of options for you, the exam-lover:

1. Think of a performance-based assessment. Whatever the essential skill you want your students to learn, think of an artifact they can produce that would demonstrate it. Final papers are very difficult to fake and plagiarize, and cheaters are easy to catch. I am aware that some courses have substantial portion of declarative knowledge to be learned and assessed. After all, if you have to learn educational law, or history, you need to memorize something. There is a minimal basic set of facts that creates a cognitive map of a discipline. However, there is probably a more profound skill – like the ability to exercise the specifically legal way of thinking that is actually more important than the knowledge of statutes. Apply some effort, and you will find a good performance-based assessment that will assess both the fundamental skill, and the student’s ability to call on important facts. Just give it a good rubric – and voila!

2. High stakes multiple choice tests are great, because they are objective, and easy to grade. However, they are almost always biased and have validity problems: you end up assessing memory, not thinking. Here is a plug for low-stake open books multiple choice (or short answer) quizzes. Make many of them – every week or so, give them low point value, and it will remove all incentives and opportunities to cheat. The number of points for each is just too low to bother. Also, if you time them, say, give 20 minutes for a 5-question quiz – there is enough time to look it up in the book when you read it once; you know where the answer is. But it is not enough time to start reading the book anew. So, you are making sure they read the text, and isn’t it the whole point?

3. Remember oral exams! It is an ancient form of assessment, highly biased. However, if you ask students to solve some problem, or create a project, a 5-minutes online conversation will quickly reveal if they have done it, or a friend helped. I would not assign them too much weight, because prettier, more assertive kids with no accent will inevitably score higher. But as an additional check, it works fine.

4. And finally, consider getting rid of one final assessment altogether. Just ask yourself: do I know enough about my students’ learning to make sure they got the main thing I want them to learn? If the answer is yes, you may not need the final exam at all. Education is not about assigning a fair grade; grades are the means, learning is the end.

How to run a university during a crisis

It is amazing how things that looked very important just a few days ago, are now deemed non-essential. And things we were taking for granted, are now issues to be solved. Actually, the ability to shed the non-essential is the key to success, not just during a crisis. The trick is now to understand the shifting border between the important and unimportant. The game has definitely changed, and so did the job of running a university. However, different people adapt with different speed. Here are a couple of tips on adapting faster.

You need to delegate a lot more than before. Do not try to find solutions for people; give a broad set of goals and helpful tips, and let those close to the ground to figure out most problems. The mind of the crowd is stronger than anything you can do centrally. The farther away from the ground is the administrator, the more it is true. For example, our huge CSU System has been known to be micromanaging in the normal times. Now they need to understand that the best thing they can do is remove themselves from decision making to the largest extend possible, and work on relaxing requirements they have imposed in the past. To the System's credit, it is doing some of it. 

Some units are so used to be the controlling, rule-enforcing offices that they continue to produce regulations, forms, and requirements to deal with the crisis. They believe more or less sincerely, that they are helpful. It is very hard for them to recast themselves into support units, providing resources, ideas, technical assistance, etc. But that is exactly what is needed. I you ask people to do something extraordinary, don’t follow with “And by the way, here are the requirements I am going to enforce while you’re doing your extraordinary thing.” There are still rules, you just have to follow the changing practice (which you cannot anticipate anyway), and them gently channel it into the existing regulatory environment, if and when it gets off track.

We all must learn to think fast, to find pragmatic, simple solutions, but it is important not to play defense the entire time. Remember the old truism that no crisis should be wasted? It is true; each unusual, crisis-like situation opens up possibilities that were not there before. If we do not build anything and do not learn anything from this particular crisis, we have not done our jobs well. At a minimum, we should revisit all those things that were found out to be not that important, and see, which ones we can stop doing altogether. We have to figure out how to use our newly found massive expertise in online teaching. And I believe we should push all the administrative units in the university to stay closer to the support function, and shift away from command-and-control mentality forever.

Transitioning your course online

Let’s assume some weird virus hits, and you were asked to transition your courses online really fast, like right now. What do you do? First, on most campuses, a course shell (that is a little private website for you and your students) is automatically created. You just need to find it. At Sac State, we use Canvas, but all the Blackboards and Moodles of the world are not that different from each other.

Once you get in, get rid of most of the stuff there. The LMS (learning management systems) are designed to make an impression of something complex and sophisticated. After all, they all want to sell their products. However, they all are very simple platforms. Remember, just because the stuff is there does not mean you should use it. The opposite is true: on your first try, keep it basic, keep it simple, keep it repetitive. You, the instructor, with your knowledge and experience make or break a course, not the medium through which you teach. Even your very first, simplistic online course can be great. In any case, it beats cancelling classes, and robbing students of a chance to graduate on time.

Ignore modules; they are for the next time. Ignore course calendar; it is not essential. A simple list of deadlines in your syllabus will do the same. Ignore analytics, chats, announcements; ignore EVERYTHING, other than the syllabus, where you can post stuff, and the discussion. Literally go to Settings, and make all the items you do not need or do not understand invisible to students. If you could get down to 2-3 buttons, great. And do not ever feel bad – all those whistles and blows add very little value to your course. If you need a special feature, ask, and LMS gurus will find it for you.

At the very rudimentary level, an online course is three things: (1) content, which is your lectures, or readings, or videos; (2) student work with content, like reflections, answering questions, quizzes, tests, short essays; and (3) assignments/assessments where you make sure they have learned whatever skills and knowledge you want them to have. So, as long as you know how to post content, engage students in working with it, and collect assignments, you’re good to go. When exploring your LMS shells, focus on three things: how to post stuff, how to engage students (most likely, through threaded discussion), and how to collect their work and give feedback.

The course routine should be simple and repetitive. DO NOT overload students with complicated assignments. Pick something simple: every week, read a chapter (watch a video lecture), respond to a prompt on threaded discussion, and turn something in. The routine reduces anxiety, makes students look in familiar places. I would discourage any kind of group work in your first try. It is a lot to manage and not that important. The same for any kind of synchronous chats: OK to hold online office hours, very hard to hold a good chatroom. However, if you can simply broadcast yourself lecturing via Zoom or something like that, it is a great and simple option.

The most difficult for many online rookies is to figure out what students can DO in an online course. Here is a list of tips:

1. Focused, prompted comment on reading. Don’t just say “Comment.” Say something like “Can you give another example, illustrating X?” Or, “Find an example of X in the news or in journals.”
2. Ask students to find online resource or story or evidence, describe it, and share a link
3. Upload their own videos of projects and performances (like teaching). Students critique each other.
4. Create short PPT of Prezi, digital storytelling.
5. Practice individually something (like walk-through, observation, etc.), then produce a report on it.
6. Reflecting on own learning, self-assessment of skills.

It is very important to not overburden yourself with feedback and grading. If you end up reading 45 reflections every week for one class, it is going to kill you. Instead, tell students you will read selectively, and respond in general to all. One of the most common assessment tasks is to see if they understood a concept. Ask to write 2-3 sentences blurbs, where they apply the concept to a new context, not the one you gave them. Reading them takes no time, and you will see immediately how many still struggle.

Online teaching focuses on what is important to learn. It forces instructors to be much more explicit about which specific skills and knowledge that you want students to learn, and how would you know if they did or did not. Focus, keep it simple, but rigorous, and you can do it!

The virus and communications

Humans are intelligent, restless beings. They have a hard time dealing with uncertainty. Their minds keep working to anticipate and solve a problem. Those who work for a large organization like a university expect a plenty of information from their leadership. People want to make sure someone is working on some plans, AND being intelligent, they want to help.

However, if you are in the leadership, being completely transparent is actually much harder than you think. With the COVID-19, we are dealing with literally a dozen scenarios, each with a different implications. For example, campus closure for up to two weeks is dramatically different than closure for the rest of the semester. Add to that various scenarios of partial closures, the unknown recommendations from various health and government bodies, and the System. Let’s assume you plan for more likely scenarios. Once you made your plan public, your people will think that this is a done deal, and only a matter of time before it is implemented. Detailed plans takes on the power of self-fulfilling prophecies.

In organizations, planning creates reality; it does not just anticipates it. Detailed plans will add panicky reactions to the mix, for people will act as if the plan is going to be fulfilled. For example, a student may stop coming to class, figuring the campus is going to close soon anyway. In reality, no one knows if it will. We cannot even estimate the probability. One can provoke a whole scale panic by over-communicating contingency plans. It is VERY difficult to communicate that a contingency plan is not a plan of actions. Consequences of a panic tend to outweigh the consequences of the epidemic.

Here is another limitation: the contingency plan will be always different than the actual implementation plan, because assumptions will change. So, if you release a contingency plan too early and then, maybe just a couple of days later, publish another, slightly different one, it will confuse the hell out of people. Which one to follow?

Imagine you tell students in class, yes, the campus may close and we may go online. OK, how are we going to do this assignment? That assignments? What will there be the attendance policy? Where do I go if I have slow internet at home? See, your students will take the scenario as a reality. But do you want to spend a lot of time planning for something that may or may not happen? Probably not, you will tell them: will let you know when and if we get there. It is the same with the University and its faculty and staff. There is the Cabinet, they consult daily with the Senate Executive Committee, and others as needed. I am not anxious to know what they will come up with if we get to the point of higher incident epidemic. It may or may not be perfect, but it will be better than whatever I can come up from my more limited vintage point within the organization. Instead of worrying, I should spend more time thinking of possible school and other agency closures, should they continue. That is a potential problem for our College mostly.

Some confidentiality in planning is absolutely necessary, however most people don’t like it. They start suspecting the leadership is not doing its job. So they make their own decisions about their own classes and units, according to the information available to them. Yet as I just described, the planning information cannot always be shared widely. Acceptance of benevolent ignorance is a sign of wisdom. However, broad areas of preparedness, can be and are shared. For example, thinking of transitioning a course online may not be a bad idea, for it may fit many other emergency situations. Most universities have robust infrastructure in place for online teaching, and it is the most reasonable way of addressing longer kinds of closures or similar disruptions. Thinking about the alternative universe of fully online teaching in broad strokes would be a time well spent.

Speaking to the Deaf

We have several Deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues. To be included in a meeting, they need similar accommodations: state your name, do not talk too fast, ad do not talk over each other, do not have side conversations. It is done to allow interpreters or captioners to make a better sense of the conversation.

To be clear, yes, it does have some cost to the rest of us. For some interruptions and bantering is a culturally acceptable and enjoyable part of any conversation; it is a symbol of informality, an invitation to engage. If you have to wait to crack a joke, the timing may be off and the moment gone. And the very intrusion on the other person’s speech may be a part of the joke. I would argue that it is a very small price to pay for including our colleagues, and we should do it on ethical grounds just a matter of course. We are not there yet, but slowly learning.

However, I noticed that the meetings with interpreters or captioners are actually better in more ways than one would expect. Despite going slower, those meetings actually run faster and accomplish more. Why? - because people tend to formulate their thoughts better before they speak. There is less repetition, and fewer asides and digressions. People think a little more before speaking, and sometimes it is not a bad thing. They speak in more complete sentences, do not go in circles as much, and tend to summarize their points. Instinctively, people strive for more clarity, and it benefits everyone, including the speaker. Participants also understand that they may need to articulate their emotions through words, not through tone of voice. That removes a lot of ambiguity in messaging, because the tone is not a very straightforward communicative tool. The tone can be deceiving, and some people come across as angry while they are simply excited. In some subcultures speaking with more emotion is a signifier of authenticity, while in others it shows you are unstable. The Deaf use more energetic facial expressions for the same purpose, and their way of doing it is a lot less ambiguous. Facial expressions are much more culturally neutral, for they have deeper evolutionary roots. If you are looking at a Deaf person signing, you would never be mistaken on how they feel about the subject. To find a common venue between tone and expressions, we all have to explicitly state our positions. There is very little room for concealing your disapproval while remaining superficially polite, or vice versa. You have to say how you feel, and it cuts down on a lot of dancing around.

I have to say, it does take some effort to get used to this form of a conversation. But don’t feel sorry for yourself – it is immeasurably more difficult for both Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to navigate our communicational landscape. I also keep reminding myself that the situation is asymmetrical. All of us who hear can learn ASL if we really wanted to. But Deaf people cannot learn to hear. Hard-of-hearing people cannot learn to hear better. At the very least we should shift our mode of speaking and enjoy the unexpected benefits it provides. Yes, we meet more like Norwegians than like Italians or Russians. So, what? Isn’t learning something new fun?

Speaking of cultures, I think the kind of conversations we are mastering is quite typical in multilingual communities, where almost everyone speaks as a non-native speaker. People learn to accommodate each other by being clear, speaking in full sentences, and avoiding obscure cultural references and excessive word play. When a Finn and a Spaniard speak to each other, they use the Pan-European English in a similar way. And it takes a special skill that a native speaker may or may not possess. American domestic English if full of cultural references, baseball-related idioms and slang that very few people who do not live here can fully comprehend. However, many Americans with international experience easily switch into a friendlier mode when needed, and use it masterfully. African English dialects tend to use similar communication mode, with complete sentences and pauses to allow for fuller comprehension. It is actually not that hard. It is not a poorer, less expressive form of communication. Rather, it is different, but just as rich and perhaps significantly more efficient. You just need better jokes.

February in the Central Valley

To truly know the seasons, you need to be here for a few years. Each season has a place, between what came and went, and what is yet to come. Your body learns the rhythm, and shapes the experience.

Now is the closest to paradise we will get around here. The sun’s warmth is still a blessing and relief from the night’s cold; it is not yet the punishment of the “too much of a good thing” kind. My skin wants to prolong the in-between-ness.

The quality of light is odd. It is not the yellowish harsh light of the summer, nor is it a weak, low angled light of December. Rather, it is a milky white, hazy light set so soft against the still naked tree branches. Some more flamboyant trees bloom without care or shame. Others wait, collecting moisture inside their trunks and branches. The crazy orange trees bear fruit, on their own time, ignoring everything. The light loves all equally, for now.

It smells unlike spring smells elsewhere in the world. The local bartender concocts a rather subtle cocktail, with earthy, grassy, flowery and dusty base, and hits of smoke so faint it may be only a memory of the past. Every gulp will clear your mind, tell you a vague, unfinished story, and make you thankful – not sure to whom, not clear for what, but it will.

I hate lines and so should you

Perhaps it is my growing up in the Soviet Union, where waiting lines were as inescapable as they were humiliating. It may be my compulsive instinct to improve anything I see around me. Whatever the reasons, I hate seeing people wait in line for more than 5 minutes. For me, it is always a manifestation of organizers’ ineptness at best, and their callousness at worst. Tolerating lines sends a subtle message that you do not care about people you are trying to serve, or that you are not smart enough to fix the problem. Both messages are terrible PR.

Take, for example, lines to sign in to a meeting. The first question to ask – do you need the sign-in sheets at all? If the food is paid by grant or something like that, then maybe, check on it. If you are collecting attendance fees, then yes. If neither of the two is applicable, don’t do it at all.

The second question is, are there alternatives? Let me give you a few:

• Let people will come in and sit down. Send a sign-in sheet around, so they all get to sign while sitting down, while the program is going on.
• If that is not an option, print out several copies of the same list, and have people sign any of them at the same time; this will cut the wait time by ¾.
• If you have a food line, set it up for two of four lines, so they go faster. Or order food boxes instead of a buffet.
• Place your swag at the tables, or give it at the front door; do not check names. It is not worth it, even if someone gets two things of swag.
• In an office setting office, develop a procedure where extra people come out to the front office, if the line gets too long.
• Have someone triage people as they come in. There is no bigger frustration then waiting in line only to find out this is the wrong office or just to turn in a piece of paper.
• If your lines are too long, develop an appointment system, for God’s sake. People can have a cup of coffee, walk around, and then come back to talk to you. There are dozens of cheap technologies to do that.

Do not normalize lines; do not pretend they are OK. Things happen, I know, but please perceive a long waiting line as a true emergency, needing an immediate intervention. If you planned one procedure, but something unexpected happened, take responsibility, think quickly, and resolve the situation. Do not just let people wait in line, because you or someone else miscalculated. Ask for help if you do not have any ideas. If you constantly observe waiting lines and do nothing about it, not reporting to someone, not thinking about a solution, you are not doing your job.

Don’t enable, elevate. The Third Email Rule

If your first two emails to have not been answered, the third email should copy the addressee’s supervisor, as well as your supervisor. This elevates the issue to the next level, and at least lets the supervisors know there is a problem. Going around the person, or calling him or her, or going in person – all of these enable poor communication habits, and hide the problem, rather than address it. Instead, apply good work standards. If you are the only one who does it, you will get a reputation of complainer, and may damage your relationships with colleagues. If we all do it, we are simply following a simple rule, and bringing more structure into our communications.

Those include replying to people’s requests, even if the reply is “no can do,” or “contact someone else.” Regular emails, addressed to you (not just copied to you) should be answered within five business days. Emails marked as urgent should be answered within one business day, two at most. The same should work for office phone messages. The rule applies to me, and yes, my supervisor, the Provost is OK with that.

I can anticipate an objection from many people saying they receive too many emails, especially from students. Yes, I am fully aware of that. However, this would give us an opportunity to review our procedures. No one has to be flooded with emails; it is not fair to the receiver, and not fair to senders. If you get flooded, consider one or more of the following:

• Change information publicly available on your webpages, so people do not need to contact you as much
• Manually or automatically forward some of the e-mails to others who can help. Alternatively, create a generic mailbox with several people helping to address your traffic. Delegate and divide labor. There is no reason you should do this alone.
• Instead of giving out your e-mail address, create a small online form, like those you’ve seen in service areas of many corporations. Structure the messages in a way that it is clearer what people want from you and steer them away if you are not the right person to answer a certain kind of requests. This will reduce time needed to process each email, and allow you to forward more of them to other people who can help.

In short, do not stress out, do not work late, do not ignore. Solve the problem. If you are getting too many emails, there is a problem with your position in the organization. Perhaps you have become a bottleneck, and it is time to delegate more. Whatever the problem exists, it needs to be addressed calmly and solved, not buried.

SWAWT (Stop Worrying about the Wrong Thing)

OK, we need this shorthand. Not SWAT, not SWOT, but SWAWT, stop worrying about the wrong thing. When we share out worries with each other, it is very important to say, “SWAWT.” I want others to say it to me, for I am as guilty as anyone else. I want to be able to tell it to other people, because we all sometimes have hard time prioritizing. It is just a code word, asking to question whether a worry, an agenda item is misplaced. Let me give just a few examples, and see if you recognize yourself or others:

- It is too early to worry about that thing. It may or may not happen, and we have no way of knowing if it will. Worrying about it now does not help at all, and you can в nothing about that possibility of things going wrong. When and if we get to it, we will think of a solution. For now, please SWAWT.

- Knowing the state of affairs in your area of responsibility, I am surprised you chose to focus on this particular thing to worry about. It does not make much of a difference one way or another. You have other, more important issues to work on, and you and I both know what they are. Perhaps you worry about this particular thing because it is more comfortable for you, and perhaps you like or can solve this particular issue. And yet, your time would actually better spent on critical issues that make or break your success. Therefore, why don’t you SWAWT right now.

- What happened, happened. You cannot undo the past. You have learned your lesson, anв other people involved learned theirs, hopefully. Worrying about what could have happened, and how it all could have been different serves absolutely no purpose. Stop replaying alternative history scenarios in your mind. In other words, SWAWT.

- This thing bugs you, because of whatever idiosyncratic experiences you have had in the past. You are re-fighting an old fight that only exists in your head. This is a different day, and a different circumstance. You are irritated about this thing, perhaps justifiably, but it is not worth your time to fix it right now. Yes, you can go after it, spend a lot of time, spend your political capital, hurt your relationships with some people, and why? Is it going to make a difference, or is this just scratching your psychic wounds? Be reasonable, SWAWT.

Staying focused on priorities takes a lot of discipline. Doings a lot of marginally right things, just because they are right here, is easy. It is very easy to fill your day with the great flow of things than need to be done anyway, eventually. It is much, much harder to fish out of the flux things that are truly important. Let us help each other to do that. When you see I seem to be preoccupied with a wrong thing, just tell me to SWAWT. I will return the courtesy. It is not criticism, not an accusation, no. It is a gentle reminder to prioritize. And the ability to prioritize is at the heart of doing a good job.

Customer service at universities: From non-existing to pathetic

As I was listening to Horst Schulze, the Ritz-Carlton co-founder, I was suddenly struck by how poorly universities do customer service, and how used we all are to our low standards. At Ritz-Carlton hotels, whoever gets a complaint from a customer – either a room cleaner or front desk person – they deal with it. They do not send the concerned guests to someone else. Every employee, including kitchen staff, are authorized to spend up to $2000 without further approval to make a customer happy. By contrast, on many campuses, hundreds of students are still forced to walk around collecting signatures on paper forms such as Add-Drop class, and Change of Major. Technologies to eliminate this irritating exercise have been around for at least 25 years, and yet no one somehow thinks it is a priority. Even freshmen know that electronic workflows do exist. They assume we simply do not care enough, and they are right.

Despite all the talk about student success, most universities are not committed to customer service. We say all the right things about student success, student engagement, and student experience, but we fail to address multiple bureaucratic micro-barriers to having a pleasant, friction-free experience on campus. We profess lofty ideas of challenging their minds, expanding their horizons, and training them for real life, but fail to make campus life as smooth as a stay in a good hotel. Do you want more evidence? Let me give you a few, and these things are by no mean unique to my university.

Our systems are so glitchy that hundreds of students fail to register for the classes they need and want on time. Students experience massive anxieties and frustrations, and so do chairs, program coordinators, and staff members that have to manually register all of these desperate students. This happens every semester on every large campus, and somehow is never treated as an emergency, and it is by choice. We have other priorities. Not one university has put in their strategic plan something like fixing these small bugs.

Our rules are so complex, that the absolute majority of students do not understand them. I have written about problems with catalogs several times before and will not repeat the argument. Just tell me what kind of business creates such complex rules from their customers? What kind of business keeps their customers accountable to the rules that are beyond comprehension? Just imagine your local grocery store having a loyalty program explained on 30 pages of text.

We tolerate incompetent employees (both faculty and staff) who are rude, patronizing, or dismissive, skip or cancel classes, do not return graded work for months, do not respond to emails, bounce a concerned student around, refuse to help, do not bother to prepare for class or update syllabi. There are very few of those, about 1 %, but they cause sustained damage to many students. We tolerate them for years and decades. What kind of business can afford to do that?

We all have no refund policies, no matter how awful was student experience in a particular class or program. Yes, sometimes we relent, and offer tuition refund to make a legal threat go away. There is very limited practice, but no policy. We are definitely not Costco, and not willing to bet any money on student satisfaction with our services.

I know what you all are going to say – we are not a hotel, and education is not a service industry. We need to have authority over students, we maintain academic standards, and ours is a higher calling. I say: BS. There is no educational reason not to make student experience pleasant and anxiety-free. We just cannot muster the will to make a simple and strong commitment to customer service. We prefer build innovation hubs and art museums, instead of truly caring for the everyday experiences on our students. The first university who implements the kind of commitment Horst Schultze did will set the trend for the next generation of higher education.

Trumpism and the discourse of sin in education

How do educators talk to people who seem to be impervious to ethical argument? A democratic society is hard to conceive without the possibility of persuasion. The problem is not in “echo chambers” of social and mass media, and not in deficiencies of communications. The problem is in refusal to enter dialogue and to consider ethical argumentation. This paper will examine the Augustinian concept of sin and Martin Luther King’s notion of “social sin” and indicate the educational potential of the authoritative moral discourse.

In his July 17, 2019 speech, President Trump had not even once spoke of compassion, empathy, love, forgiveness. The speech was built on such virtues as greatness, success, victory, and revenge, the state of the economy, trade, markets, and jobs.[i] A typical MAGA rally otherwise, it distinguished itself by audience’s chant “Send her back,” repeated 13 times under the speaker’s approving gaze. The chant was referring to the Somali-born House representative Ilhan Omar; it echoed the President’s own tweet a few days earlier. The incident did not damage Mr. Trump’s ratings that have been at about 40% for a year.[ii] Trump’s supporters show no sign of abandoning their leader – not because they do not understand him, but because they do. Regardless of the outcome of the impeachment process, and of 2020 presidential elections, Trumpism is here to stay whether Trump stays or goes.

The psychological Ur-Fascism

I will begin with a diagnosis. Earlier explanations of Trumpism still works – to a degree. The movement’s core is disaffected, economically constricted, mostly White people of all social classes, alienated from both the new global economy and from democratic politics. However, the explanation does not account for such people’s refusal to acknowledge Trump’s moral failings, both personal and of his performance in the office. I used to think it was a form of denial, but the chant episode shattered the illusion. Trumpism is not a case of a bad shepherd leading ignorant flock. It is more likely that he is just saying what these people want to hear, so it is not clear who is corrupting whom. The phenomenon of mutual reinforcement is hard to deny. We are dealing with a mass movement that resembles Fascism – not necessarily as a political ideology (although there is some of that, too), but as a cultural and psychological phenomenon. My intention here is not to stick alarmist labels on people for political reasons, but attempt to find the closest historical analogy. Fascism just fits best.

I will begin with Dmitry Bykov, a well-regarded Russian writer and literary critic. Bykov initially relies on a work by Umberto Eco Ur-Fascism.[iii] Eco points out significant differences among various totalitarian regimes in the first part of 20th century Europe, and yet tries to identify family resemblance. He lists 14 features of Ur-Fascism, all of which can be observed in Trumpism: anti-modernism, the cult of tradition, irrationalism, and rejection of critical thinking, the fear of difference, the appeal to frustrated middle class, the conspiratorial nationalism, the sense of humiliation by enemies, the idea of life as permanent warfare, the cult of a hero, the machismo, the elective populism and disdain for parliamentary institutions, and finally, the use of Newspeak. It is debatable how many of those features can be found in Trumpism—arguably all of them and most at the very least.

Bykov elaborates on the idea that Fascism rejects modernity. He further defines Fascism as a “cult of ecstatic, orgiastic pleasure.”[iv] Fascism, he says, is intentional evil. His description of Fascism in terms of erotic and intentional embrace of evil is very perceptive:

"If the Modern is characterized by a cult of suffering and sacrifice, Fascism is a cult of pleasure. […] Take a look at the German culture of 1930-s. […] Notice the excitement of corporal liberation, the ecstasy, the cult of eroticism, of sexuality. The Fascist culture contains a lot of sex; it is the sexuality of submission, the sado-masochistic, and celebratory, complacent sex. […] It is the cult or orgiastic, ecstatic pleasure that is characteristic of Fascism. […] Fascism is a conscious evil, because without the intent, there is no orgasm, and no orgy. It is a conscious and joyful violation of moral taboos.[v]"

This is why people like David Remnick are wrong when they are trying to persuade Trumpists by appealing to their moral sensibilities.[vi] Trumpists know they are being bad and unkind to immigrants, to people of color, to the disabled, to sexual minorities—to all others. The unkindness is exactly what they enjoy. It is a collective psychosis impenetrable to rational dialogue. A Trump rally is an orgy of hate, and people show up for the same reason they would attend other orgies: for the pleasure of being bad. The sheer number of those attending allows them to avoid personal responsibility, to drown the moral voice in the crowd’s ecstasy. Notice the joyful rejection of “political correctness” which is simply a contemporary version of politeness or propriety. The ability to say what is on one’s mind is an act of delightful liberation from ethics. The source of pleasure is not the mass violence yet, but the first step in that direction. After all, the process of dehumanization always starts with words, not with actions. While Trumpism is a very young species of Fascism, it bears the mark of a future monster.

The phenomenon of the conscious rejection of moral constraints may be understood in a pragmatic sense. What do we do with it, at both the political level, but also in the educational realm? We have a diagnosis, but what is the pathogen? Is there a cure? Can people be inoculated against it? I will now turn to St. Augustine’s concept of sin in search for answers.

The concept of the sin

Augustine begins with a famous incident, when he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor, and fed most of them to swine. He describes his motives as “having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Your [God’s—author] firmament to utter destruction— not seeking anything through the shame but the shame itself!”[vii] He notices the pure desire to be bad, to break moral taboos. In general, he observes, there is something else that sinners normally want – money, power, or pleasure. However, in this case, “my sole gratification in [pears] being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.”[viii] If Bykov is right and Fascism is intentional evil, Augustine has captured it well.

He eventually suggests the origin of this desire to be bad: it is the desire to “the obscured likeness of Thy omnipotence.”[ix] Conscious evil is a case of seeking the thrill of pretend omnipotence, a case of God-envy. Augustine establishes a more general, and important principle: all sins are shadows or perverse versions of some benign desires:

And sloth seems to long for rest; but what sure rest is there besides the Lord? Luxury would fain be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fullness and unfailing plenteousness of unfading joys. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality; but Thou art the most lavish giver of all good. Covetousness desires to possess much; and Thou art the Possessor of all things. Envy contends for excellence; but what so excellent as Thou? Anger seeks revenge; who avenges more justly than Thou? Fear starts at unwonted and sudden chances which threaten things beloved, and is wary for their security; […] Grief languishes for things lost in which desire had delighted itself, even because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can be taken from Thee.[x]

According to Augustine, sin is a desire without God. One can also understand it as unlimited desire, where missing limitations are not of quantity, but of quality. He does not call for moderation, which would be a quantitative limitation. Instead, a desire must be shaped for some higher purpose. Sin is desire not shaped by love. In Christian theology, “God is love,”[xi] among other things. It is important to note that the kind of love John refers to in his gospel is agape, not the romantic, exclusive love. Agape is more of a kindness to distant others. The ultimate sin is the desire to be God, at least where the omnipotence is concerned. It is the desire for power without a good reason to use of that power.

The idea of privation was not unique to Augustine; it was more or less a common place among his contemporaries, both in the West and in the East. For example, Mark the Hermit thought that the source of all sins is to forget God.[xii] The idea goes back to Aristotle’s concept of privation, the opposite of possession. Any desire not shaped and channeled by agape is sinful. The entire Trump speech at the rally is one long manifest of sin. I must note here that what I am saying here is not new, and should be known to any anyone with rudimentary knowledge of theology. The fact that a significant segment of American clergy seem to ignore such a direct manifestation of sin is quite puzzling.

The link to Bykov’s notion of orgiastic impulse in Fascism is Augustine’s observation on the social nature of sin:

"…had I at that time loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere commission of the theft by which my pleasure was secured; nor needed I have provoked that itching of my own passions, by the encouragement of accomplices. But as my enjoyment was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the company of my fellow-sinners produced.[xiii]"

Augustin then wonders about the origins of conformism, especially “when they say, ‘Let us go, let us do it,’ we are ashamed not to be shameless.”[xiv] This confirms his initial observation: sin is a perversion of a natural human desire for friendship, a perversion marked by the absence of the divine grace. The joy of being bad has to be shared with others; it does not have much pull when enjoyed alone. This is why one needs a rally, a movement, a social media platform to derive pleasure from sin as such. I will return to the sociality of sin in the concluding section of this paper.

The problem with Augustine’s initial concept of sin is that he does not stick to it. As soon as Chapter VIII of the Confessions, he begins wondering about “sins against nature,” including those of Sodomites, which are very quickly swapped for “those offenses which are contrary to the customs of men are to be avoided according to the customs severally prevailing.”[xv] He still contends that “when God commands anything contrary to the customs or compacts of any nation to be done, though it were never done by them before.” However, that is where Augustine and Christians after him go wrong. Instead of consistently applying his own concept of sin, he succumbs to convention. To remain consistent, he would have said something like that: “the Sodomite desire, like any other, is subject to the presence of the Divine Grace. Without it, it is sinful; with it, it is not.” Yet he never says that. He began with a focused and insightful concept, and ended up with one broad, unfocused, and open to abuse. Christians were trying to convert, and could not afford to be too radical where conventional mores were concerned. It was very difficult to develop a philosophy, a theology, and a social institution of the church at the same time. That is not an excuse for philosophers; we just need to remember Augustin’s failings.

Stretching the notion of sin to the cover the social conventions opened the door to manipulations with the sin discourse. The concept that was initially meant to help accept and shape one’s desires, was eventually used to classify and categorize desires into good and bad ones for the benefits of maintaining social order. Can the original ethical sense of sin be recovered? It is hard to say if the word itself is salvageable. Perhaps it is not, for too many other connotations pollute its original meaning. I am more concerned with the philosophical notion than with the word with which it can be described.

The Augustinian concept of sin does specifically recognize the importance of desire in human action. He goes overboard in his suspicion of desire itself, but it does not negate the importance of desire, including the most important desire to belong. He offers a criterion that distinguishes constructive desires from destructive ones: any desire has to have another directionality, and extra vector, in addition to the object of desire. Augustine teaches us to check if our desire is consistent with agape.

There is an important question here: how do you know whether God wants something or not, and whether your desire is therefore blessed or sinful. The difficulty here is rooted in the very concept of God, both central to religious worldviews, and elusive by design. Epistemologically, God is a construct that describes intentionality and directionality of truth seeking. It is a kind of an ideal that was intentionally left almost blank or extremely vague, so it maintains the potential for a universal appeal. All Abrahamic traditions, as well as Buddhism and Hinduism, point to the general direction of compassion, love/agape, and kindness. There are significant differences in application, but a remarkable unanimity about the general direction. While this cluster of values does not in any way exhaust the maddeningly multiple meanings of the divine, their absence strongly suggests the absence of God.

Negative criteria are in general more robust than positive ones. For example, correlation of two variables can rarely prove causation, but the absence of correlation generally proves the lack of causation. It is the same with God. The pragmatic sin test is simple: take a discourse and look for instances of compassion, love, or kindness, as well as forgiveness, and charity. If these values are referred to, the discourse may or may not be good; it is open for further analysis. If these values are absent, but strong and shared desire is present, it is definitely sinful. Sin is easier to detect than goodness.

Trumpism is sinful not because of its economic or social policies, or its stance on climate change or on deregulation. Those are within the realm of legitimate political disagreements. No, it is sinful because of the collective orgiastic solidarity of being uncharitable to others. To recognize the sin within oneself, it is enough to ask, “Why am I having so much fun?” Even a quick reflection of the rally’s content will reveal the utter absence of agape in it. One does not have to be a religious person to recognize the gaping void where compassion should have been all along.

How does one talk to sinners

Although this is outside the scope of this essay, a brief detour on how to talk to those not yet infected. The conventional wisdom so far has been to focus not so much on Trump, but on developing specific policy proposals. I think only the first part is right. The way forward is to create the broadest possible anti-Fascist coalition, and focus on the moral danger of the Trumpist movement. Yes, do not focus on Trump as a person, but focus instead on the moral abyss that is Trumpism. People who did not succumb to the temptation need the sense of urgency to resist. Fascism have been defeated many times in the past by creating such broad anti-Fascist coalitions. Popular anti-Fascist fronts rarely presented positive programs, but knew exactly what they were against. It can and should be done in the US one more time. Instead of debating fine differences in policies, considering the benefits of Medicare for all, anti-Trump candidates should appeal to the broadest possible coalition of liberals, progressives, and moderate conservatives. The only reason Nazis took power in Germany was the Communists’ stubborn refusal to form a National Front with Socialists and centrists. By the time they relented, it was too late. However, the strategy worked in France in 1936, and yet again in 2017.

The question more pertinent to this essays is, - How do we talk to Trumpists who have already succumbed to the temptation? Here I revisit the Augustinian notion of sociality of sin (the orgiastic component of ur-Fascism). Martin Luther King has formulated a similar idea in a more contemporary terms: “When man comes together collected in society, when persons come together and come into, bring into being this big something called society, then sin rises to even more ominous proportions.”[xvi] King develops the notion of “social sin” that in his words, “is almost inescapable in this level.”[xvii] King takes Augustine’s observation a step further. While for Augustine, the social dimension of sin was a curious aside, King realizes that sociality is actually one of primary causes of sin.

King’s solution to the massive social sin is another key Christian concept of Grace. Grace is a gift, something one neither deserves, nor merits. Historically, it has been invented in Judaism to counter the naïve hope for “contractual” or reciprocal relationship with God. The prohibition of idolatry has the same origin. King gives several examples of sin and grace; the most poignant one is about racism:

America, you’ve done that. You’ve trampled over sixty million of your precious citizens. You have called them “dogs,” and you have called them “niggers.” You have, you have pushed them aside and kicked them around and pushed them in an inferior economic and political position. And now you have made them almost depersonalized and inhuman. And there you are in that far country of oppression, trampling over your children. But western civilization, America, you can come home and if you will come home, I will take you in. And I will bring the fatted calf and I will cry out to all of the eternities, “Hallelujah,” for my nation has come home.[xviii]

Like any Christian, King predicates Grace on redemption: “If you will come home” means “if you repent.” How do you make Trumpists to repent, especially given the strong sociality of their particular sin? How do you repent alone, how do you go against your friends and co-sinners? What makes social sin a super-sin is that is masks as solidarity, as friendship. The camaraderie of raiding the neighbor’s garden is the vehicle that gets the virus of evil past the ethical immunity defenses of the soul.

The whole point of all religions over the millennia was to have an institution, where one is told what one does not necessarily wants to hear. A religious congregation is an authority that would call people on their sins. In a sense, telling people what they would rather not hear that is the central social function of any religion. American religious institutions all but failed this essential mission. Support for Trump among White Evangelicals is 25% higher than the national average.[xix] For Evangelicals specifically, it is a tragedy with long shadow stretching into the future, implications of which will be painful and long lasting. Let me just cite the diagnosis by Peter Wehner: Evangelicals are “Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche.”[xx] This may be unfair to Nietzsche, but fair to the Evangelical thought leaders.

The point is that the society as a whole cannot count on of its Evangelical churches and Orthodox synagogues to bring Trumpists back to their senses. Even if they were willing to do that, their reach and authority are not sufficient. Besides, plenty of more secular people support Trump. The institutions we have now are public education and mass culture. For better or worse, teachers and celebrities are clergy and bishops of today. Schools, universities, and streaming services are temples of today. Movies are sermons, and social media is the church hall. Whether we like it or not, there is nothing else.

Here again, the example of early Christianity is telling. The late Roman Empire was a remarkably pluralistic society with respect to religion, with Manicheans, Arians, Gnostics, and Trinitarian Christians competing for the minds of both the elites and of the masses. Of course, Christians received huge help from the imperial authority, but they were remarkably successful on their own it as well. They were not big on dialogue. In fact, all they did was telling people how rotten they are, and how terrible their sins were. The authoritative moralistic discourse worked in the past, and there is no reason it should not work now. M.L.King’s sermons were still sermons, but their appeal was not limited to a particular congregation, or even to the community of believers. In search for a non-denominational, and secular equivalent of a sermon, I will use Mikhail Bakhtin distinction between the authoritative and internally persuasive (dialogical) discourses:

"[The authoritative discourse] enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands or falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up – agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. [xxi]"

In the internally persuasive (dialogical) discourse, a word is half-ours and half-someone else’s:

"Its creativity and productivennes consists precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and doesn’t remain in an isolated and static condition ...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean.[xxii]"

Bakhtin himself, and many of his followers, including the author of this essay, have always posited the dialogical discourse as superior to the authoritative one. However, the ideal of dialogicality clearly fails when we encounter ur-Fascism. The social sin is impervious to dialogue with outsiders. However, it is not impervious to any and all communication. King demonstrates the authoritative discourse of a preacher, an impassionate direct speech that is aimed at destroying the social fabric of the sinful orgiastic community. What really works against orgies of immorality is shame: not dialogue, but the authoritative discourse of a preacher who delivers the self-righteous admonition. The victory of the Civil Rights movement, no matter how imperfect, was a result of shaming the White majority into abandoning its social sin. Dialogue had little to do with it, nor did any kind of rational persuasion.

The authoritative discourse of shame works, because it appeals to the evolutionary shaped social instincts of our species. It is the same instinct that makes the social sin possible. Both sin and shame are social, conformist, and intuitive. Telling people they are sinners plays on anxiety of belonging – what if I belong to a wrong crowd? What if I am the only one naked in this orgy of hate while most of guests are dressed and well-behaved? What if the other, larger group will reject me for it? God in this sense represents the larger, universal social group that includes not just the rest of the humanity, but also the past and the present of humanity.

As long as liberals, the Left, and centrists speak with a voice of a particular group, one of many political voices, they can be ignored by the Trumpist. Only someone who can represent a higher authority, who can speak as a historic American, or as a voice of God can plant doubt into the sinful solidarity of Trumpism. Many educators have cultivated a careful, neutral teacher voice, voice that is reluctant to sound like preacher’s. It is a voice of dialogue, and of doubt, a voice that asked students to form their own opinion, to exercise critical thinking. The pedagogical discourse was meant to resemble Bakhtin’s internally-persuasive (dialogical) discourse. However, we went too far, and I am now calling for passionate, authoritative teacher voice that shows no doubt and hides no position. There are areas of fundamental human morality that are off-limits for dialogue; that are non-negotiable and non-discussable. Those are the fundamental, essential values of love/agape, compassion, and kindness. It would be wise to point out that the authoritarian moral discourse has its limits, and that a teacher must master the internally-persuasive (dialogical) voice, too. However, it should be made clear that both are acceptable, and should be used for different purposes.

The same or almost the same can be said about the mass culture. Someone has to portray the social sin of Trumpism, in all of its complexity, with its deceptive and so appealing qualities, and with its sinful nature. While Hollywood almost universally rejected Trump, it has done almost nothing to expose the moral failings of the movement he represents. There has been no artistic examination of the phenomenon, only a few attempts to expose the far-right wing of the movement. There is no movie where an average Trumpist would recognize himself and be horrified.

We should be calling on people who go to Trump's rallies: "it smells really bad, and you will be ashamed of yourselves one day. These rallies are not fueled by compassion or by love. I know they feel good, but ask yourself, why do you feel good? It feels great to free yourself from the constraints of political correctness. It feels good to feel great again. Nevertheless, your mother and your clergy have probably told you, we should not do everything that feels good. Watch out; it is a dirty path, because freedom at the expense of compassion is the path to hell. There is no goodness there, only pleasure, only freedom from constraints of common decency. No, you did not go all the way down that path, but you are on it. It is not too late to turn back."


[i] Donald Trump Speech Transcript at North Carolina Rally ‘MAGA’ Event, Rev https://www.rev.com/blog/donald-trump-maga-event-speech-transcript-north-carolina-rally


[ii] Project FiveThirtyEight, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/, retrieved July 26, 2019.


[iii] Eco, Umberto. "Ur-fascism." The New York Review of Books 42, no. 11 (1995): 12-15.


[iv] Дмитрий Быков, «Фашизм как высшая стадия постмодернизма» [Dmitry Bykov, Fascism as the highest stage of Post-modernism], Radio lecture 07/10/2016, https://yadi.sk/d/keP7PPI6wPS3y


[v] Bykov, 2016, translation by the author.


[vi] Remnick, David, “A Racist in the White House,” The New Yorker, 07/15/2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-racist-in-the-white-house-donald-trump-tweets-ocasio-cortez-tlaib-omar-pressley


[vii] Augustine, Saint. Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. Vol. 1. Random House, 1948: 24.


[viii] Ibid., 25


[ix] Ibid., 26


[x] Ibid.


[xi] John 4:7-9.


[xii] Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. 3. The golden age of Greek patristic literature: from the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon. Spectrum Publ., 1960, p. 505.


[xiii] Ibid., 27.


[xiv] Ibid., 28


[xv] Ibid., 37.


[xvi] King, Martin Luther, Jr., Man's Sin and God's Grace, circa 1954-1960, The Martin Luther King, Jr.

Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mans-sin-and-gods-grace


[xvii] Ibid.


[xviii] Ibid.


[xix] Wehner, Peter, “The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity.” The Atlantic, JUL 5, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/evangelical-christians-face-deepening-crisis/593353/


[xx] Ibid.


[xxi] Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imaginatio.n: Four Essays by M.M.Bakhtin. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342-346.


[xxii] Ibid

The relational university

In higher ed, we have been innovating a lot, but mostly in the wrong areas. The information technology has done very little to improve instruction. Assessment and data analytics have done very little as well. It is time to recognize that students come to universities to have the cultural experience of college, to make life-long friends and to find older, wiser people with whom they can build stronger relationships. In many cases, they come to fulfill their families’ dreams and aspirations, to gain recognition and higher social status. Of course, they also come for skills, leading to good jobs, but those are actually hard to predict and measure, so let’s keep them a bit of a mystery. Best universities have been on the path I am describing for a long, long time, although some of the regional comprehensives may be a bit behind. This is not a proposal for radical change; rather, an acknowledgement of what works, and an appeal to focus on it, while reducing effort in other areas.

To push a university along these lines, we need to do several things:

1. We need to refocus the entire innovation strategy on the relational side of education, and pull the resources out of the informational side. Education has turned out to be a lot more about relations than it is about information.

2. Radically reduce the complexity of curriculum and program/graduation requirements. Students are uncomfortable with too many choices; there is enough evidence to show that too many choices frustrate rather than liberate. Processing the choices create logistical nightmares for administrators. Not a single student is able to understand academic requirements as they presented in our catalogs. As a result, we create massive anxieties, breeding ground for many costly errors, and must spend many resources on translating the bureaucratese into plain English – for every single student. While I am a strong believer in the value of gened (common core) and liberal arts, there are ways to make those simpler. Academics should be as easy to navigate as Instagram or TIkTok. I have written about it before (1, 2, 3, 4).

3. While we are at it, university’s operations (HR, payroll, facilities, registrar, IT, etc.) should be simplified, automated, and partially outsourced. They consume too much of university resources, and create too many frustrations and irritants. There has been much progress on it within the last 20 years or so, but no real R&D money is spent on it. People Soft and Banner are ancient systems in comparison to what Walmart and Amazon have. Besides, they are bottle-necked for security reasons, and are hard to make flexible. This is a part of focusing on student and faculty experiences. They have to be pleasant and not frustrating.

4. Let’s evaluate faculty for the right things. Stop requiring service on committees - many of those are unnecessary and can be eliminated. They only exist because of the service requirements for tenure and promotion. Instead, every faculty member, tenure track of adjunct, should have obligations regarding student engagement outside the classroom. Those can be advising of student clubs, organizations, research groups, reading groups, athletics, etc. Reduced expectations of institutional and community service should create time to focus on students. About 70% of survey students reported being mentored by faculty, 50% by student affairs advisers (Thanks to Igor Chirikov for the reference). Of course, those are overlapping numbers. The numbers are not bad; we just need to improve on them.

5. The co-curriculum record should be strongly encouraged if not required of all students. Some campuses have that, and it needs an infrastructure to support. To create an opportunity for group work with others outside classroom is the essential part of the college experience. That is what students need and want, and we must nudge them, as well as provide space and structure for that. Right now, about 20% of students report they have never been involved in any college groups. I am sure this number is higher for mostly commuter campuses. We have no idea of the relational quality of those organizations students do get involved with. Intramurals actually lead here, not academic clubs and organizations.

6. Universities should stop the mission creep, and stop trying to be everything for everyone. They need to focus on their students, as well as faculty and staff, and on the relational side of education.

Just tell me why, or the Tale of the Lost Rationale

You know how good newspapers do this idiot-proof summary at the end of their articles, for people who may not know the context. They were under the rock for the last 20 years. It is something like “The second and the last US president who was impeached but not removed from office was Bill Clinton in 1998.” Or, “American Civil War was between the North and the South states in 1861-65.” This is a good journalist practice every organization should try to follow.

As J.Q. Wilson has noted, every instance of red tape or of a seemingly stupid bureaucratic rule is the organizational memory of a past incident the rule aims to prevent from re-occurring. A contemporary large organization like a university is a land of forgotten rationales. We follow certain rule or a procedure without remembering why it was implemented in the first place. Not knowing why things are the way they are can be an alienating and frustrating experience, especially for new people. Why do we have to approve international travel a month in advance? – Because it goes all the way to the President for approval. And why does it goes all the way to the President? – Because international trips are especially sensitive to public perception, and because there were improper uses in the past that caused public embarrassment.

Only a trained mind can reconstruct the correct rationale. Most people have no organizational imagination whatsoever, because they had never been in a position to make those rules. When I taught a course on ed policy, I asked students to come up with any stupid rule they could not explain, and then brainstorm what would be the rationale for it. I remember one of them brought up the ordinance that banned overnight parking without a permit at any curbside in the City of Providence. Students thought it was just dumb, but I saw at least two different rationales for it, anв was pretty sure both were considered.

This is not an attempt to justify every stupid rule. Indeed, very often the original rationale has either gone away, or was weak to begin with. Without knowing the rationale, it is very hard to rescind a bad rule. I think every communication about a rule or a decision should have this short paragraph of explaining the initial rationale. It would help people who must follow the rule to feel more comfortable, and also help to see bad rules that need to change. Right now, we normally include rationale only in more formal memos that justify a new and complex decision. We do not provide rationale on our numerous forms, platforms, e-mails, and in routine and simple decisions. I think it is a mistake, and we all should try to write an extra sentence or two in most decisions and requirements. Let’s not assume the Why is obvious – it is often lost on most people, and almost always lost on some people.

Why is outcome-based education so wrong?

Focusing on outcomes means losing focus on the process. Philosophically, the outcome-based education is a soft extension of “ends justify the means” approach. Imagine that you have found a method that trumps student dignity, but helps students learn more. Would you use it? All kinds of “tough love” theories assume that yes we should use such methods – as long as the outcomes are good. In fact, fear or pain may make our memory work better. Memories coloured by strong emotions tend to last longer. Should we go back to flogging children in school, if it proves to be effective?

Assessing quality of education should not be limited to easily measurable outcomes. It is like evaluating the quality of marriage by the number of healthy children produced: you can do it, but you really should not, if you have any brains. The very process of education should be if not all the way pleasurable, at least interesting and pleasant enough to justify subjecting students to it.

I am not the first person to say it, and yet we keep trying to reduce assessment in education to the measurable outcomes. Instead of trying to measure more, we relegate the things that are hard to measure to second class.

It is the same with the workplace. The quality of my experience here is just as important to me as how much good I do to the world, or how much money I make. I enjoy most of my meetings here, because I am interested in what people I like have to say and catch up on their news. My work has the stimulating value for me that the taxpayers of California did not necessarily intend to support. Yet they benefit, too, because if I enjoy my work and trust my colleagues, we are much less likely to screw up or hide problems. We are more likely to do our primary job better.

The thought here is simplistic enough to border on triviality. Here, take it or leave it.

The hell of micro-tasking

None of these things is a big deal. Complete another required training. Approve a request. Sign a contract. Confirm a transaction. Find and send me this one file. RSVP. Complete a survey. Evaluate so and so. Submit your absences, approve absences, now do the same for UEI. Sign the log here. Set a reminder. Enter into the project list. Schedule a meeting. Put together a Doodle poll. Send a message to your faculty. Send a message to your staff. Find that e-mail, and send it to me. Find that form online, complete it, sign in, send it. Build a survey, get a link, send it out.

None of these will take more than a few minutes to do. However, they eventually swell into a huge swarm of micro-tasks. Like mosquitoes, their individual bite is almost imperceptible. All together, they can suck your blood, all of it, to the last drop. All you have to do is to send me your […] once a semester, in this format. Because any single task seems reasonable and easy to do, they do not trigger resentment and do not provoke a revolt at the time of introduction. What is one mosquito bite to me? Gradually, they add to a huge swarm that can darken the sun. You tend to get frustrated and paralyzed, suddenly sending messages too short to be polite, because you cannot afford to write a longer one.

This is the unfortunate side effect of automation. Each individual procedure was meant to remove routine, boring clerical work. And it does – 99% goes to a machine somewhere, but 1% comes back to you, the dean, the chair, the faculty member. Objectively speaking, the management revolution within the higher ed is remarkable. With digital tools, we can now do much more, much faster, with more accuracy, and fewer mistakes. Subjectively speaking, it feels like the special hell of micro tasks. Each requires a tiny thought, a small effort that depletes the brain power one bit at a time. They fill all the small gaps in the day. I pee with a phone in my left hand. I eat my lunch with an eye on yet another dashboard. Something went wrong with automation, probably a few years ago. Half of emails in my inbox are written by computers; no human being wrote the, and I am just another computer in the network.

I have a hypothesis. There is evidence that introducing helmets made football even more dangerous, because athletes believe they are less vulnerable, and take more risks. In the same way, institutions would not dream of doing that much over such short periods if they did not have the online forms, the data processing, servers, mail merge, email, including automatically generated email. We just attempt to do too much, because we know the power of the information technology at our disposal. Human hubris is fed by the believe our brains are as good as the machines we make. They are not; they cannot handle too many easy tasks. The micro tasks make us incapable of handling the real, important tasks. Well, at least this is how I feel right now, on vacation, while looking at my inbox, horrified.

Is preschool a deniable service?

Karen, and Associate Dean, and I had exactly the same thought while visiting a preschool in Shenyang: “Why they can afford it, and we cannot?” The preschool is a gorgeous building with large windows, a number of role-play areas (a toy kitchen, a supermarket, a hospital). There was a multi-layer crawl construction in the middle, bedrooms for all children, classrooms, a pond with real fish, a fruit and vegetable garden… Whatever stereotypes you may have about Chinese preschool, definitely did not apply – the kids were happy, outgoing, curious, and busy playing and socializing. I specifically asked if this private preschool is an exception. I was told that it is one of the 5-stars, better preschools, but by no means is an exception in the city of 8 million. In fact, many university faculty kids went here. In China, university professors are solidly middle class, of course, making more than an average person, but still one can tell – this is not a place only for the elite.

Now, the median salary in Shenyang is $14,826 per year, while the median household income in in Sacramento is $ $56,943. Those are not the same measures, but still. Why is it again that they can afford such preschool, and we cannot? I actually know all the answers – about the labor cost, about the taxation structure, about the paternalistic state… Yet somehow, none of these answers satisfies. We have the money build and run quality preschool for every child. What we lack is a political consensus on whether such a service is undeniable.

There is a class of services I call undeniable – they are impossible to deny to anyone. And the list of those services have been expanding with time. For example, anyone who shows up at an emergency room will be served regardless of income. That right cannot be denied anymore, even though it is a relatively recent achievement. No one can starve in this country. While some people’s diet may be terrible, there has not been starvation. No child can be denied a K-12 education. Its quality may be questionable at times, but K-12 education is an undeniable service.

As the scope of undeniable services grows, so does the role of the state. You may or may not be a fun of socialism (I am definitely not one), but the practical reality is strikingly obvious: the list of deniable services keeps shrinking, while the list of undeniable services keeps growing. Preschool is still a deniable service, but for how long? Higher education is deniable, but we are not sure if it lasts. Basic healthcare has been deemed an undeniable service in most of the developed world, with the exception of the US, but the exception will not last for long. The existence of disposable wealth itself drive the process. It becomes morally impossible to see a starving person in the middle of an affluent society. There are many socialist and even communist institutions in the US, you only have to make an effort to see them. Public libraries are utopian communist organizations – free to all, unlimited. The military and the police, public education, community health clinics, environmental protection, fire departments, urban infrastructure - all socialist institutions, already here.

As anyone who grew in the Soviet Union, I am wary of all things socialist. A powerful bureaucratic state contains many dangers, including over-rich into private lives, and inefficiencies. At the same time, I cannot ignore the growth of undeniable services, and am not at all surprised at the rise of the Left wing of the Democratic Party. I am not sure what it would do to the next election, but the long trend seems to be towards more socialism, and more redistribution of income. We will have preschools in Sacramento like that one in Shenyang, sooner or later.

Gingko leaves

In California, fall comes gradually; as if unsure it is welcome. In New England or in Siberia, it invades the world quickly, uninvited, and cocky. But not here: plane trees will start rusting slowly and dutifully long before the first hints of cold. The grass never dies; to the contrary, it gets greener and thicker in the fall. Sequoias ignore the whole seasonality thing altogether. Some ducks leave while others hang out through the winter, if you could call it that. It is a mixed picture; only the sun comes up not as high, glancing sideways at us, changing the tint of every color slightly.

I take my clue from gingkoes. They are the masters of the autumnal arts. Their leaves will greet me with such an honest, naïve, and courageous yellow. Colors normally do not tell me much. Svetlana can see thousands of interacting shades, hear a whole symphony of colors. I barely get the tune; perhaps this is why gingkoes seems to be so loud to me. Their yellow is like trafficс light letting another fall into the city. A gingko leaf is shaped unlike any other leaf. It looks like a delicate insect, or a fairy. If you don’t see gingkoes in the fall, you are missing the season altogether.