The school energy

After a couple of years of dashed hopes and the zoom-fog, we are finally back. I will let you in on a secret; all educators know it, but most of other people do not. We have an endless source of power that makes education tick no matter what. If you gather many young people for a peaceful and productive purpose, they exude a special form of energy. Let’s call it the school energy. It is especially abundant and palpable this year, although it is always there, and always more visible at the start of a school year. To be completely honest, many of us in the teaching profession get a bit addicted to it; it is one of the main reasons we do what we do.

The way it works is a mystery. Get together hundreds of young people, with their own hopes, anxieties, peculiarities, their passions, the capacity to love, dreams and ambitions. Make it clear they will be learning something. I am not sure if they are just happy to see each other, and the learning part is a good excuse to do it. But it works. The ingredients are: young people, a school of some sort, the first day of the school year. Mix quickly, and you get a boost of energy, both invisible, and unmistakable. Consume with caution.

Speaking at orientations for future educators, I always struggle to convey this little trade secret we have. How do I tell them, it is not all hard work and sacrifice? Teaching can also be an immensely pleasurable experience if you know how to look. There is nothing as hopeful and optimistic as a crowd of young bodies and minds who came to make their – and your – lives better. You can watch future by watching a Sci-Fi flick with starships, or you can come to one of the new school year events. The latter is a much more joyful activity. You drink this energy of the young freely, without taking anything away from them. To the contrary, you help them get where they want to go. That is the paradox of the school energy – the more you take it, the more is left for others to take. Take this, the first law of thermodynamics.

Dispatch from a very slowly sinking Titanic

As the fog of COVID pandemic recedes, we can take a good look at the road ahead of us. Before pumping the gas pedal, we should probably take a better look at where we are going from here. It does not hurt to remember that our mission as an institution is not to survive, but to advance certain priorities the public entrusted us to focus on. But that is easy, for our mission does not change much. The more difficult part is to imagine the specific mid-range goals. They have to be ambitious enough to motivate us, and yet realistic enough to maintain focus. Calibrating the mid-range goals is actually a non-trivial task. Organizational eyes tend to be far- sighted: we can see far fairly well, but the next few years look a bit fuzzy. Or rather, they look exactly the same as now; the movement, the subtle shifts in the needed direction is what’s hard to imagine.

As I noted before, higher ed is very good at re-enacting the annual cycle. I know that classes will be scheduled, rooms assigned, students registered, plus or minus a few glitches. Students will be taught, assessed, grades assigned, and diplomas duly issued. I feel no anxiety about the new school year or semester starting and ending. What we are not very good at is change. It is precisely because we are so good at routines. The organization is built to reproduce itself, to enact the same motions, according to the same rules. Wanting to change something involves making the procedures of self-replication less efficient. Improvement requires disruption. This is not just a paradox that sounds good; no, this is literally how things go. The ratio of disruption/progress could be different, but it is never zero. Even if you want to do the simplest act of improvement – abolish some procedure entirely, for example – it needs resources to explain to people what not to do anymore. You need time to figure out any unintended consequences of the change. The time must come from somewhere. Spending time on non-routine things is disruptive.

We are contemplating a way to reduce the teaching load for all faculty who want to do more scholarship to 9-9 level. This looks like both an ambitious and a realistic idea for, say a 5-year horizon. However, it has a massive disruptive potential. We need to find reliable revenues to support it, we need to find someone to teach all the sections without the loss in quality. There is a complicated question about who and how will get it, what criteria to use, how to not destroy incentives for applying for campus-wide resources. The one issue I spent a lot of time on is whether we can use our off-campus revenues to cover this cost. Once we figure out the basic questions, someone has to put together the process, the paper trail, and other supporting mechanisms. We need to estimate the increased burden on our staff and on lecturers. Someone needs to understand the potential for internal resentment and conflict. One you take in the scope of the project, an inevitable question pops up – do we have to do it?

Do you now see why it is so easy to just play defense, to just keep doing what we have been doing? There is no risk in just paying more attention to the routine, to reduce glitches, to spend more time going around and strengthening relationships, and cheering people up. Unlike private businesses, we are not under a constant threat from competition ready to eat us up after the first wrong move. And yet, we have long-term challenges. The higher ed is shrinking; only some of it is related to demographics. Students of color are losing ground on campuses. Our costs rise faster than the public is willing to tolerate. Like global warming, this is a very slow, almost imperceptible sinking. The responsible thing would be to try to change, to adapt. Yet our DNA is set up to reproduce. That’s what I am worried about. We can start the academic year just fine; that is not the issue.

What’s wrong with Russians?

That is the question I get from some of my friends, in one form or another. Why would a country reject opportunities for a democratic, peaceful development and chose totalitarianism twice within a century, and both times with disastrous consequences for themselves and for their neighbors? It would be easier to say “yes,” and produce some esoteric stuff about the mentality, culture, or deficiencies of the mysterious Russian soul. I can give you ten of these theories right off the top of my head. BS is too easy.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is nothing special about Russians. In other world, all their failings are common to all other peoples. People who now singing praises to Putin’s war are not very different from people who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. An attentive observer will notice the same breed of paranoia, the same toxic mythology, and the same xenophobia. Similarly, the urban educated and liberal class looks the same in Moscow or in Sacramento. Russians had demonstrated their ability to create a robust civil society, and grassroot democracy, and a modern economy, just like everyone else, before it was wiped out in the last 15 years or so. The only difference is a fragile framework of institutions and traditions that the US has, and Russia does not.

Instead of speculating, let us look at two very similar neighbors, Russia, and Ukraine. The history of both nations is very similar, and so is their respective culture, demographics, and the economics. Both countries came out of the Soviet slumber with a very similar set of challenges and assets. Both struggled with building democratic institutions and confronting massive corruption, while trying to modernize. Both countries inherited powerful secret services and weak court systems. The only difference is oil and natural gas. The natural resources put enormous money to the disposal of one small group of Russian corrupt officials. In political science, this is a classic example of the rentier state. In Ukraine, none of the oligarchic group was rich and powerful enough to monopolize power. While such groups fought with each other, there was enough room for a relatively free press, a civil society, and some democratic institutions to survive. Ukrainians are rightfully proud of two anti-corruption revolutions they staged to defend their fledgling democracy. With all due respect, they had not been dealing with an oppression apparatus as rich and as powerful as the Russian Federation. Belarus is an outlier, for it did not have many natural resources. However, its dictatorship emerged almost immediately from the Soviet system, and can be considered a simple continuation of it. In this sense, it is closer to Central Asian states that to Russia and Ukraine.

One policy lesson for the global democratic coalition is this: do not help enrich dictators. The resource-fueled wealth is going to be used against their own people, and in many cases, against neighbors. Putin’s Russia is an unintended consequence of the global trade. So was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and ayatollahs’ Iran. Examples from the Middle East and Africa abound. The West made China powerful through unlimited trade and technology exchange, and we still do not know the consequences of this approach. The pattern is the same: a dictator needs to use the resources to stay in power forever. Staying in power often needs a small victorious war to whip up the patriotic frenzy. Poor dictators oppress their own people. Rich dictators go to war with others.

The other lesson is that the institutions need protection. They cannot be taken for granted. The fact that a demagogue like Donald Trump had been elected president and attempted a coup d’état is a warning bell. The fact that George Bush started an unnecessary Iraq war on false pretenses is another warning bell we failed to do anything about. The presidential power to wage war must be legally limited. The weaponization of social media must be contained. Let’s not look too deep; the lessons are specific, and pragmatic solutions must be found. There is nothing wrong with us. 

The pull of the rough draft

In general, executives try to walk out of any meeting with minimal to-do list in their hands. When discussing a project, we have a temptation to say “oh, I can do it so easily, and I may be the best in the room to do it.” That is almost always the wrong thing to do; if you a leader, you should find someone else to do it, whenever possible. Otherwise, your time will be completely eaten up by such tasks. More importantly, you are not letting your team learn and grow. Delegation of responsibility is essential for a learning organization.

However, there is one exception to this rule. When a meeting resolves in a need for some sort of a document, I often volunteer to do the first draft. It is because the framing of the issue and structuring of the initial document are critically important to get it right. After that, people can contribute to it in many ways, including completely overriding the initial idea. But everyone tends to stick to the original frame. A document with three sections tends to stay with three sections, no matter how many edits it goes through. If it has the Background part, and a summary part, they normally stay. If you include a section called “Limitations of the proposed approach,” people usually keep it there. I may never have any input or control over the document again, but I can influence the questions people ask themselves while writing it.

The structure of things, not just documents, is something that is obvious to the point of becoming invisible. It affects our thinking in subtle, barely perceptible ways. The most potent power is that of a blank page, where everything is still possible, and nothing is solid yet. We rarely get to deal with the blank page. None if us get to do anything really from scratch. The “scratch” is the sensation of boundless creativity. That is the reason not to miss such rare moments where nothing yet is fixed. Whatever you or others create later will increasingly limit further steps. The way you use your freedom determines the shackles that will eventually confine it. Treasure the potency of a rough draft.

“My dog is racist”

Googling “My dog is racist” will return 1.2 million hits. “Are dogs racist?” – over a million hits. Of course, dogs are not intrinsically racist, but their owners train them to be. Most often, it happens completely unconsciously. Dogs are not that smart in many respects, but they are very good at reading subtle behavioral cues. If you tense up, pull a leash a little shorter, when you see someone different, or engage more often with people who are similar to you, the dogs will pick up on that and eventually learn the unconscious bias from you.

This is nothing new, and there has been some empirical research to back the story up. If anything, the phenomenon is an irrefutable evidence to support the existence of unconscious bias. (Yes, some people still do not believe it exists). However, I think it is important to remind, that just like dogs, humans are capable of learning subconsciously from each other as well. Kids will sense their parents tensing, or using exaggeratedly polite expressions, or somehow treating people differently depending on their identity. Neither the teacher nor the learner is aware of the lesson, and yet the transmission of such implicit attitude does occur. Just like a virus, prejudice does not need the carrier’s intent to be passed on.

It is difficult to unlearn what you do not remember learning. As I attended Resmaa Menakem’s workshop last week, that much became abundantly clear to me. He encourages all of us to refocus on our bodies, learn to read what our bodies are telling or hiding from us, and eventually overcome both the implicit trauma and the implicit bias we may suppress away from the consciousness. This is why racist, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice are such hard problems to solve. We are dealing with much more than just the self-aware human mind. We cannot talk our rational minds out of it.

As I am thinking about our own social justice agenda, I am more and more convinced that we should think of it in terms of two buckets – the quick and the slow. The quick are policies and curriculum we need to change to eliminate barriers. That can be done relatively quickly. However, classroom pedagogy, the interpersonal interactions among people – are different kind of phenomena altogether. They are significantly connected to the unconscious minds, and deeper, to our somatic constitutions. Confusing the two types of change, using the same strategies for both seems to be a mistake. I am not saying we should give up or literally go slow. We just need to use different strategies on the slow problems.

Can I zoom into your class, professor?

This seems to be a persistent post-COVID request, a difficult one to address. On one hand, instructors want to be accommodating and compassionate to students. Everyone now knows it is theoretically possible to have some people Zooming in. Students have very good stories, including being sick with COVID. Other faculty relent, so one may feel a bit of a peer pressure to say yes. On the other hand, it is very hard to do well. The dual or HyFlex modality turned out to be very hard on instructors. First, the technology is not there yet. We thought it is, and some ed tech enthusiasts will tell you it is. But do not believe them. Someone has to point the camera to the right direction, make sure the sound feed is OK (most rooms do not have good microphones). Someone has to monitor the online portion of the class and include them into all kinds of activities. Depending on the class, the effort ranges from very difficult to impossible. Also, you look like an incompetent fool to the students, when fumbling about technology. These impressions may affect your student evaluations and ultimately your career.

Universities are reluctant to regulate for obvious reasons: Faculty tend to value independence on decisions, and classes and programs are too different to merit a one-size-fits all approach. Yet the lack of regulation is a problem on its own: it breeds inconsistency, and makes peer pressure worse. Going through the existing services for students with disabilities seems to be too cumbersome. Those procedures work for semester-long accommodations, but not for short-term, or one-time requests. Even regular doctors notes won’t work consistently.

To address the issue, we have been working on a set of guidelines and best practices. The fundamental assumption is that we should communicate three things to the student:

1. It is a curtesy accommodation; you are not entitled to it. It comes at a cost to me and to other students in class, so please only request when you are truly desperate. “Gas is too expensive” does not qualify. And even then, I may not be able to grant it to you, sorry.
2. Do not expect experience similar to being in class. We do not yet have technology to provide full participation for remote students in a f2f class. It is much more difficult than a regular online class, and you should appreciate the complexity.
3. If I agree, find a zoom buddy in class who will do this for you: turn the laptop around, make sure your sound is good enough, ask questions on your behalf, etc. The instructor is too busy teaching to do this for you. And your zoom buddy should do all of that without disrupting the rest of the class. 

We also started to collect the best practices for such remote participation. I am sure, in a few years, people will find better ways of supporting such requests. I hope some smart entrepreneurs are working on better tech solutions. In the meanwhile, we should try to live with the imperfect the best way can.

A shoestring conference. Downshifting in the academia.

No deep thoughts here, just some practical tips on how to run an international conference with no budget and minimal support. There is an international network of scholars that has no legal status and no budget. We intend to keep it that way as long as possible, because setting up an organization is a headache regardless of jurisdiction. It is because once money start exchanging hands, tax authorities reasonably require some accountability. It is harder in some countries than in others, but still it is a burden.

We use Qualtrics, a common survey software to collect names of all people who are interested in being in the loop. Conference proposals are also accepted through the same survey software. Once proposals are in, we created one long file with all the anonymized proposals. Reviewers would all go to the same file and insert their reviews right there, after each proposal. The reviewers also use a code number, so we maintain the double-blind standard. This little trick cuts down on writing back and forth, matching reviews with proposals, and virtually eliminates manual data entry. The only small manual step – we mark rejected proposals on the list and mark the rest of them automatically mark accepted. A mail merge trick allows you to send 60 emails in a few seconds. It can send a thousand in a few minutes.

Now, the next trick is important; we discovered it this year, and it works. We created a google doc with empty time slots, and invited presenters to enter their name and paper title in any empty slot. It worked great, and we have a program no one spent any time putting together. It literally assembled itself, and people had a choice on time. The non-editable version of the program is automatically published on the conference website. Now, we got people a little confused because for the global conference, we had to use UTC, and it is surprisingly hard for many people to figure out the time difference. This is something to improve next time around.

Because the conference is virtual this year, we did not have to deal with hotels, contracts, food, receptions, and all that stuff. We sweet-talked the keynote speaker to give the talk for free, which eliminated the need for registration fees. The conference is open to all, so people come to the site, enter a zoom room, and participate. No worries, no zoom bombing took place. I believe it is a very rare event, and even if it happens, no one is physically hurt. Those who ran conference know, what a headache registration is, both in terms of money collection, and maintaining records.

One can, of course, pay someone 50K to run an online conference, and charge a few hundred dollars in fees. The treasurer has to worry that if not enough people register, the conference will be in the red. Well, we have no treasurer. However, the quality of conversation is not affected by that at all. I the end, it is the same 8-12 people in every room, listening to a presentation, and engaging in productive conversations. With available distributed information processing technologies, there is a way to downshift in many areas of life. Scholarly conferences is one of them.

If we ever decide to go f2f, there are ways of keeping the cost down. Any campus can give rooms and tech support for free. People can book their own hotels without conference discounts. The way those discounts work is – you must buy a lot of food in exchange for slightly discounted rooms, and free or discounted conference rooms. And if you do not make the quota – you are liable to pay the difference. It is a racket, really. Unless you run a conference in very expensive cities, the discounts are not worth the registration fees. The local host campus can always sponsor a reception, with a cash bar, of course.

Success of academic downshifting is not entirely dependent on the virtual modality. It is a matter of choice and skill. Simple is beautiful. Sorry, middlemen.

Misreading intentions

Human conflict almost always starts with misreading the other’s intentions. The ability to infer intentions from behavior is a gift that comes to humans with their particular kind of sociality. We evolved to guess what the other person might be thinking. However, as it is often the case, an advanced ability comes with side effects, when it is in overdrive. Humans in general do not tolerate uncertainty very well; even less so in relational context. It is difficult to us to observe another person’s behavior and think: I do not know why she did that. I do not understand how he really feels about me. The temptation is always to create a coherent story. A very curt email means he is dismissing me. An objection means she is angry at me. Critical feedback means they are biased against me. Those kinds of explanations pop into our minds quite naturally. And once the misreading of intentions happens, every new interaction tends to reinforce the initial erroneous hypothesis, because every new interaction is colored by the initial misreading.

Anthropologists specifically train to avoid over-interpreting their subject’s behavior. They learn to assume that within a different cultural lens, the meaning of every behavior may be very different than one the researcher naturally assumes while using his or her own cultural lens. However, when people come together to work at a place like university, they do not act as anthropologists. They overestimate cultural coherence of their group, and routinely overinterpret each other’s actions. In the Academia, people get mad at each other all the time. In my humble estimate, at least 90% of these conflicts are absolutely baseless. Those involved share values and beliefs, but simply misread each other’s intentions. I also cannot help noticing, that such conflicts are more common towards the end of the Spring semester, when people are tired, and are subconsciously looking to attribute their fatigue to someone else. Their relational imagination is fried, and more generous interpretations of other people behavior is more difficult to achieve.

What helps is personal contact at the very onset of a conflict. Go to the other person as soon as possible, and talk about intentions. A face-to-face interaction involves more universal, more culturally-neutral means of communication, such as body language, facial expression, and the tone of voice. Face-to-face contact is a routine relational hygiene. Another good habit is to simply learn to suppress the over-active imagination, and ignore behaviors that may be interpreted as hostile.

It is especially damaging to assume that if you feel that someone’s behavior is offensive, it is therefore offensive. This kind of over-trusting one’s own feelings leads to disastrous consequences for all involved. Our feelings lie to us all the time, in the same way our rational minds may deceive us. To assume that you are incapable of making a mistake is a self-destructing trait. It closes the feedback loop from other people, and claims too much righteousness. People who go in that direction for a long time lose all ability to adjust, to learn, and ultimately, to relate to other people. If you think you always know what other people mean, you cannot work and live among human beings.

Parallel universes and the freedom of speech

Sci-Fi is full of stories about parallel universes. The Man in the High Castle is one of the most vivid recent examples. It shows a universe where Nazis won the WWII, and the US has been divided between Germany and Japan. Every being that has imagination can envision an alternative future. The drama created when some people sometimes are able to cross over from one world into another. I have a similar eerie feeling when I watch Russian State TV. It feels like a parallel universe, separated from our own reality. It is a world where noble Russian soldiers are fighting evil Ukrainian Nazis, saving children and elderly people. It has this weird coherence to it; it almost feels real. Even a skeptical mind, being exposed to hundreds of hours of this, will adapt, will accept the reality despite itself. That’s what humans do – they adapt, they accommodate, they find their way in any circumstance. Survival means accepting reality, or what looks like a reality.

If you read QAnon sites, you know the feeling. It feels like strangely coherent whole universe that is like ours and yet not like ours. It is a world where Trump has won the election, and a secretive cabal of shady operatives is running the country towards its ruin. These people disagree whether it is the reptiloids, or the pedophile Clintonites, or the Jews that are behind everything. But those disagreements are within the same whole self-sufficient and parallel universe. It is the universe that is impenetrable to ours, just like ours cannot be accessed from there.

In The Man in the High Castle, Nazis have found a way to penetrate into other universes, to infiltrate and poison them. Similarly, the seemingly autonomous universes have been invading our own. Russian tanks are every bit as real as the US Supreme Court’s majority or Trump presidency.

In recent decades, the magic power to imagine has been enhanced so greatly that large swaths of humanity seem to be unable to control it. Too much imagination is psychosis, where one cannot keep straight where is reality and where is the illusion. The ability to alter video, distort information, and validate falsehoods through peer communities – those tools are too dangerous to be used uncontrollably. The classic standards for freedom of speech did well, when speech meant mostly black print marks on cheap paper. We are dealing with entire vivid, emotional, shared multiplayer universes that are better than reality. I do not know if classic liberal principles such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech can survive such an assault. When Twitter kicked out Trump, they have been criticized from the Left and from the Right, and by libertarians of all shades. But perhaps they were the first to understand the new reality we are living with. Or, to be exact, with multiple realities.

I have no answer, and a part of me protests censorship. Yet, it would be foolish to ignore the new danger of holistic fictionary worlds invading us again and again. At the very least, we need a robust debate on how to regulate tools that potentially can lead to collective psychosis.

This war is against the future

My heart goes out to Ukraine, but I worry more about Russia. While Ukrainians undergo tremendous destruction and human suffering, they are fighting for their future. Their future looks bright. The world is already thinking about restoring their cities. Ukrainians have fortified their national identity and affirmed their democratic choice. They may even overcome corruption than plagued their country for decades. Russia is fighting for its past, or for a version of the past that never existed. Their remaining institutions of democracy have been extinguished, free press crushed, and their minds are poisoned by propaganda. The Russian economy will decline. Most strikingly, Russian public space contains no conversation about the future. How do they all think it is going to turn out? How the fighting against the entire world will improve their lives? No one wants to think about it, instead regurgitating clichés about the glorious past and paranoid delusions about a global anti-Russian conspiracy. The country literally obliterated its own future – first in their heads, and then in reality.

Russia has lost the war on February 24, the day it was started. No matter what happens on the battlefield, an aggressor will never stop being called an aggressor. While there are more and less catastrophic and shameful ways of getting out of this predicament, escaping a harsh moral judgement of future generations is not one of them. Those who think that the future is not real do not know what they are talking about. The future is already here. It is the only real beacon that allows us to have a direction. A racist has no future. There is no plausible vision of a world where White people continue to dominate all others and command most benefits. A multiculturalist has a vision of the future, where all races and ethic groups co-exist without losing the ability to choose their identities. One can almost see it; this future makes sense. The racist future can only exist as an antiutopian image, where things did not go well for the world. Similarly, Russian and any other radical nationalists can construct no plausible future. It is just very hard to imagine where one nation is thriving, and everyone else is in decline. It is very hard to imagine the corrupt dictatorship to continue its existence in perpetuity.

Putin and his cronies know that they live on borrowed time. They only vision is of a personal future. Yet personal futures all end up with the same – death. Only collective future has a long-term motivating power. To live without some image of a better world is intolerable. This is why apocalyptic nightmares are so strong. Death of the world somehow compensate for the despair of the futureless world. Russian state TV has been seriously discussing the prospects of a nuclear war. It is because they cannot find themselves in any positive future.

The ethics of false promises, or What education cannot do

Could Russian educators have prevented the moral catastrophe of popular support for the aggression? Could American educators have prevented the poisonous blooming of paranoid anti-democratic Trumpist movement? For centuries, education was thought of as a remedy against hatred and ignorance. The results are less than encouraging: the world has never been as educated, and paranoia and xenophobia are as alive as ever.

I have been thinking lately about the ethics of over-promising. Did we, educators, implicitly promised to solve problems we cannot truly solve? We have been happy to receive public funding under a false assumption that we can reduce inequality (we did not), diminish xenophobia (we did a little), eliminate racism, reduce poverty, and solve a host of other social problems. What is the moral responsibility of the one who promises regarding the extent of their ability to deliver? Are we pitching snake oil to the public?

To be fair, on some promises, we delivered. Getting a college degree does improve your life outcomes. Desegregation actually benefited a lot of children. Head Start is a successful program. Free and reduced lunch program does improve children’s wellbeing. Multicultural education does reduce prejudice. I am not linking empirical source here, but I think I can find evidence for each of these and many other positive outcomes. We are doing something very impactful.

An ethical position is not to over-promise, and not to under-promise either. Our professional responsibility is to be clear on what we can, and what we cannot deliver. An old plumber in Ohio told me about my old war box house’s sewage pipes: “I will clean your roots for you, but you will be calling me the same time next year.” The caveat is a sign of professional responsibility. We just need to be very clear with ourselves and with the public on what we can, and what we cannot deliver. While the principle is clear, I am not sure of the pragmatics of the solution. Who exactly, and how should tell the public about the limits of education as a vehicle of social improvement? I cannot think of a genre of scholarship of policy communication that does this. Which advisory to which political body will deliver the language of moderation? No one wants to hear the “curb your enthusiasm” message in the midst of political fight over resources. Do you want some extra funding for K-12 education? Well, maybe this is not a good time to tell people what you cannot achieve. And there is never a good time to say it, because there is always a political fight for resources. So keep on giving false promises. Will we eventually suffer from the backlash? Oh, wait, we already do.

Workflows or How do we tame Higher Ed inefficiency

One of the main causes of low organizational efficiency is that universities do not routinely review their procedures. It does not seem to be anyone’s job. Various people create procedures all the time, but no one seems to be in charge of periodically reviewing them and making dure they still do what they are supposed to do. For example, in the College of Education, there are 47 annual processes that require some college-level coordination. Some of them repeat every semester. In addition, there are dozens within each of our branches that only their respective staff have. Some of these are fully redundant. For example, we report reassigned time for our chairs and coordinators in a special form, but we also report the same on faculty workload modules. Or here is another beautiful thing: The University has a storage for course evaluations by students. But because they wipe the data out every so often, for completely obscure reasons, our staff download hundreds of them on a network drive, and then upload a significant portion of them again to faculty RTP files, this time on OneDrive. What should have been one link, becomes three downloads and two uploads, for hundreds of files. I could go on and on with a list. A fundamental problem is that someone creates workflows, but no one reviews and improves them.

To conduct a workflow review, these are the basic steps:

1. Is the work process needed at all? What happens if it is simply abandoned? In most cases, the answer is no, but asking this question really helps tog et at the purposes. Some procedures have been designed to prevent a very rare undesired outcome. But their cost is often disproportionally high. I worked at a place, where the President had to sign all travel requests over $250, because many years ago someone had an embarrassing trip to Hawaii that got media coverage. Well, such trips never occurred again, but the procedure stuck for years.

2. Work procedures are flows of information. It is helpful to start considering them from the first point to the last one and try to create the shortest path possible. For example, some processes are applications, where everyone is eligible. There is no point in approving applications, so that step should be removed. In other cases, a university unit would send something to deans with a request to distribute to faculty. However, that unit has access to all faculty emails and can the information directly, without bothering deans. Sometimes extra steps appear just in case, because in similar processes, there have been such extra steps. The shortest is the chain, the better.

3. Similarly, instead of approvals, consider informing. If the risk of inappropriate decision is very low, consider self-attestation instead of active controls. For example, we routinely approve student requests for late class drops. And these requests require approvals of their instructor, the chair and the dean. I guess the hope was that 3-level approval would give the process some rigor. But it does not, for none of the three have any way of verifying student stories of hardship. In these cases, it is enough to say something “I swear the explanation is true, and if not, this would be a violation of honor’s code.” This way, three people would not be involved in processing a decision none of them actually made. Examples of extraneous approvals are a many; they all distract us from doing our jobs.

4. Universities have many databases that often do not speak to each other. What we do not want is a process, where someone reads data and them manually enters it into another database. Not only it is insanely time-consuming, but also prone to errors. If at all possible, a procedure should stay within one database.

In the end, a workflow review is not a set of specific steps. It is just an attempt to take a look at what we are doing and why we are doing it. There is no magic solution, just a drive toward simplicity, sanity, and automation.

After the pandemic: soft or hard landing

Many large CSU campuses have not yet dealt with the anxiety of dropping enrollments so prevalent in most of the country. Because of our young, ambitious, mostly immigrant population and relatively generous public support, we never really had to think hard what students really want. They came anyway. This is all about to change soon, and we will be subjected to the unrelenting forces of market-driven competition for enrollments. I am just a little worried about how well we as a system are prepared for it.

Here is one example. A new diversity among students has emerged and is patently obvious to anyone who wants to notice. Some students prefer f2f classes while others prefer more hybrid and online classes. We can debate endlessly about why this new split had emerged, and which group is wiser than the other. The difference in preferences does exist, and we can chose to ignore it or address it. “Hard landing” would be to ignore these new preferences, then face a drop in enrollments, and then fight to get back those students who may have come to us if we were more accommodating. A “soft landing”  would be to hedge our bets, and try to accommodate both groups of students.

Neither of these two options is easy. Going fully back to the pre-pandemic f2f world just does not seem like a good idea. And yet we do not know what to go to. So far, we have been operating on arbitrary target numbers, like 80-20, or 75-25, where the first number is for f2f or hybrid sections, and the second is about online sections. We do not know, however, what the real preference is. We do not know how many students want fully online programs, and how many – just some classes online and others f2f.

If we try to accommodate, the same questions must be answered. Do we redo whole programs, or just throw in a few online sections, so students can choose? Logistically, it is very difficult to guarantee students either a f2f or online track within an existing program, mostly because of our gened and free electives, and partially because of accreditation definitions. Adding additional layer of complexity will stretch our ability to manage to the point of breaking. And what if we misjudge the situation, and offer something students do not want, or few of them do? That would be a waste of resources. From a PR point of view “Sac State will meet your preference for online, f2f or hybrid course modalities” would be a great promise. The question is – can we keep it?

I have too many questions and too few answers. This is probably one of those cases where a committee could work through these issues. I just don’t think we can afford to ignore it.

Changing the name of this blog and the question of identity

"It used to be called “The Russian Bear’s Diaries.” When it started in 2006, I was at the University of Northern Colorado, whose mascot is a bear. Sometimes my gay friends teased me that it sounded like a porn character, but I kept the title for nostalgic reasons. However, the imagery of a Russian Bear has now taken on a much older and more menacing tone. So many things have changed. OK, now it is “Admin Diaries: Weekly Musings of a Philosopher Dean.”

Most Russians living outside of Russia now face an uneasy reconsideration of our ethnic identity. Suddenly, the country we all love has shifted from being troublesome but still respected for its culture and its people, into an evil category. We are the Nazi Germany; we are the Mordor of this planet. It is hard to look into the eyes of our Ukrainian friends and neighbors without some guilt, even if you opposed Putin for decades. I guess the closest nightmare scenario for an American would be if Trump managed to override the elections and then invaded Canada – with missiles hitting neighborhoods in Toronto and Vancouver.

We cannot shed our identities and must bear their weight, even when the weight changes. White people in this country cannot stop being White, cannot unload the bad baggage of racism and keep only the good bits of freedom. Many people would like to, but they cannot; it simply is not up to us. We have no choice and should work through this complex legacy. Similarly, it is easy to be Russian when you listen to Tchaikovsky or discuss Tolstoy. It is much harder when your country is killing unarmed people in the neighboring country under a ridiculous pretext. Of course, we all are running around, trying to organize help for Ukrainians, writing open letters, forming anti-Putin committees, and all of that. Yet all these seem like too little too late, not making enough of an impact. There are 20-30 million ethnic Russians living outside of Russia, including about 8 million in Ukraine. Many Russian-speaking Ukrainians are enlisted in the Ukrainian army or the territorial defense units, fighting against the invading Russian army. Those of us in other parts of the world are seething with rage, praying, and trying to help the best we can, while feeling powerless.

One of the most painful disappointments is realizing how many Russians in Russia support this senseless war. It is not likely to be 70% as the official numbers tell us, but a good guess is that about half of the population is evil or stupid or both to believe the propaganda. Despite all the restrictions, information in Russia is available and can be found if you want to. Like die-hard Trumpists here, they have chosen to believe in only one source of information and talk themselves into denying reality. We may entertain a fantasy that one day they will wake up and comprehend the enormity of what they have done. Realistically, most of these people will never acknowledge the truth. Does the fact that I share a language, culture, and history with them make me one of them? The answer is more complicated than I would like to admit. Perhaps our identities are only canvases on which we can write our own stories. Yet sometimes, the canvas becomes so dirty, it is hard to see the writing."

Compartmentalizing and its discontents

In one part of my life, a horrendous war destroys cities I know and love. In another part, we need to organize our requests for faculty hires to start in the fall of 2023. In yet another part, I am responding to a paper by a British philosopher who examines Dostoyevsky and the concept of vulnerability. The only way to do it is to erect walls dividing all these and other concerns. One develops some sort of separate personalities to think about these things, and by necessity they must be semi-independent. If you go too far with this, you end up with a dissociative disorder. However, going there just a bit helps to maintain functionality in different spheres of one’s life. This is how we maintain the semi-separate spheres of work life, parenthood, civic engagement, or an involved hobby, etc.

You may move down the road of compartmentalization one step further, when one of the spheres causes a lot of stress. This means erecting fences just a bit higher, keeping the different spheres more separate. This is because you don’t want the sick part of yourself to contaminate the relatively healthy ones. It is a bit like an internal quarantine for the part of your soul that is aching.

I am sure many of us go through this experience sometime in our lives. Your mother dies, and yet you need to do your taxes. You are going through a divorce, and yet grades are due. You almost died in car accident, and there is a meting to attend. The chasm between the profound and the mundane never feels natural or pleasant. It always feels like a little betrayal, of is you denigrate the profound by paying attention to the mundane. Yet there is no other way, because the mundane deserves our attention. That is where life happens, where other people depend on us. We all must compartmentalize sometimes.

Is collective responsibility just? Невинны ли русские бабушки?

This one is in two languages, and the versions are not the same. Этот блог на двух языках, но это не прямой перевод. Русский ниже.

The sublime art of complaining

Many students, staff and faculty do not know how to complain well. People should defend their rights, and it is important to know how to do it effectively. Make is easier for the administrator you are complaining to to be more helpful. 

1. You need to know what you want to achieve, what would be an adequate resolution for you. If you just want an apology, say so. If you want your problem fixed – say which one and what would be an acceptable solution. Iа you don’t want what happened to you to happen to others -think about how to do that. However, if you want the offending person immediately fired or burned at stake, well, it is unlikely to happen, so be realistic. If you want the world to know how horrible A is, keep in mind that administrators cannot really share a lot of personnel-related information with others. Perhaps good old gossip will work better for you there. If you just want the administrator to know about some misbehavior, just in case there are other complaints like this – it is totally fine, as long as you are explicit about your intentions. If you just want to tell the other person you do not appreciate the way you are treated, it is better to confront them directly. Bullies and tyrants are rarely aware of their bad behavior. They always have a theory about why what they do is a good thing. Tell them first, before complaining to others.

2. Don’t start with your conclusions, start with facts. In other words, don’t say so-and-so is disrespectful or ageist. What did they say or do to you? We need specific words and actions. An administrator needs to know facts, not only your opinion. Of course, you can also say how you felt about it, and why. Your personal perceptions do matter, just start with facts. Also, if there is a written policy that the other person’s actions violate, name and cite them. It helps to process the complain better.

3. Don’t expect to be immediately believed. You can count on empathy and validation of your feelings. An administrator cannot be dismissive, or immediately distrustful. However, the accused must have an opportunity to present their point of view, and until that moment the administrator must refrain from making her or his mind. This is just the basic due process, without which any action is not defensible in court. I know it does not feel good when someone is checking your story. The very fact checking feels a tad disrespectful. However, think about it in terms beyond your own case. After all, when someone complains about you, you would want that story verified, and you would welcome an opportunity to defend yourself, right?

4. Anonymous complaints are very hard to do anything about. Unless they are about something very serious like sexual harassment or threats of violence, they are likely to be forwarded to the person you are complaining about and that’s about it. Eve if they keep coming, there is always a suspicion that it is the same person waging a campaign. Only rarely anonymous complaints are so specific that they are verifiable. For example, “so and so said this in class.” But even that is hard to check – no administrator wants to go to the entire class of students, and ask – did your professor say this horrible thing? We ask the professor and unless she or he fesses up, it is hard to pinpoint. If you want to be serious about your complaint, sign it.

5. Student complainers often want their name to be kept confidential, usually out of fear of retaliation. Those are very hard to deal with. To confront the accused, an administrator must provide examples, details, facts. Providing those details will identify the complainer. I cannot go to a faculty member and say, “Hey, listen, there is a student concern aboutcontent of your email, but I cannot tell you which one, and what kind of a concern.” Any institution is obligated to prevent retaliation, so don’t be so afraid about revealing your name. If you are still afraid, just keep in mind that your complaint will be very difficult to do anything about. It will not be as powerful as an open one. Retaliation is not as easy as you might think, and putting your name forward automatically places you under increased protection.

6. While you can complain on behalf of other people, to raise an issue, it is always better if the victim of alleged mistreatment complains on their own behalf. Don’t be a passive bystander, talk to the victim, offer your help. Your administrator or whoever pick us the case, will have to check with the direct victim anyway, to verify the facts, and to see of the person want to raise a complaint.

A disclaimer: this has nothing to do with Chancellor’s resignation. We were just working on the College’s grievance policy since Fall semester.

Expecting a war on Wednesday

It has been a tense couple of weeks. US intelligence is predicting an invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Like most Russians, on both conservative and on liberal sides, I don’t want to believe something as crazy as this will actually happen. Many Ukrainians believe that also. Belief, however, is not evidence. The news reports are so specific, so menacing that a part of us is thinking – what if this is true?

It is hard to predict one man’s behavior, because you never know if the man is still sane. Actions of larger groups are much easier to predict – just go on previous patterns and understand power dynamics within those groups. With one man in charge, there is always the risk of him going full psycho on you. This is exactly why monarchy does not work – no checks and balances make a country highly unpredictable.

How do you conceive the inconceivable? How do you think the unthinkable? When imagination fails, anxiety replaces it. Ukraine is not an abstract for me. We have family members, friends there. Our honeymoon was in Ukraine. I love the language; it was widely spoken in rural Siberia, where one of four people is Ukrainian, and most people have some Ukrainian ancestry. I went to Kharkiv just a few years ago to give a talk at a local university. That is the same city that Russian artillery may hit without crossing the border. I have personal memories of Poltava, Nikolaev, Odessa, Lviv, Rivno, Crimea. It is the place I came from, just like Russia is.

We all hope sanity prevails so we can go on with our lives, because right now it is quite difficult to do. Imagine your neighbor picking up a rifle, aiming at you, and gently suggesting: “Oh, by the way, let’s talk about that fence repairs…. And no, I am not threatening you. What do you mean, am I crazy? I am not going to shoot you. Just standing here talking to you, holding my gun on my backyard, don’t worry, it is my right,” – all this while aiming directly at your heart. I find it highly problematic when people suggest that well, he has a legitimate grievance about the fence. And he is not shooting yet. He does and he is not but threatening is already a crime. Talking to the guy to please put the gun away is an honorable thing to do. Justifying him is something else. And if he expects an invitation to the next neighborhood barbecue, he must be just a tad crazy. And that is exactly what makes you worry.  

Cause-blind solutions and the puritan sense of fairness

In social affairs, it very difficult to untangle multiple causes of a problem. Here is a recent example. Our DWF rates have risen during the pandemic. The causes are many and their relative weight is unclear. It could be that online modality is generally bad, or it could be that many of our faculty have not mastered it yet. It could be also what was happening in student lives: illness, family care, job losses, stress. Most likely, the decline in course completion rates is probably a confluence of these and other unknown factors. Disentangling the causes is a lengthy, and sometimes impossible process. True experimental studies are often impractical. The thing is – we will probably never know for sure.

Yet one can already hear opinions that, it was FOR SURE the modality, and we should all go back to what it was before. They assume that once you get students back to f2f classes, success rates will automatically improve. But we do not know if they will. We know anecdotally that some students have terrible time in online classes, while others actually prefer to stay online. We do not know how many are in each group, why they prefer one modality over the other, and whether their own explanations of their success or failure are correct. It may be the case that a student was depressed but blames Zoom for it. Or, a student aced all the courses online, but only because she or he stayed with parent, did not go out, and did not have to work at their part-time job as much. So, subjectively, they feel like the online instruction fits their style, while in reality it was something else. This is why surveys are not always helpful. We have no idea whether actual learning online is more or less robust than in f2f, and for which subjects, for which age groups, etc. The depth of our ignorance is so great that one actually has to study social sciences to appreciate it.

What happens if we jump into conclusion that is too closely tied to a presumed cause? We risk creating interventions that do not work. For example, we knew for decades that student engagement in campus life correlates with their academic success. Increasing extra-curricular activities seemed like a sure path to success. However, it is more likely that students who are more likely to engage are also more likely to be successful in classes. It is the king of all errors - confusing correlation and causation.

We should have robust hypotheses about causality, even thought we cannot test them properly. Having the menu of possibilities will help us design solutions that are cause-blind, which is to say, they are likely to work regardless of what primarily caused the problem. For example, designing more extensive incomplete policies would be an example of such a solution. It helps all students regardless of why they could not finish – because they were stressed, lost their job, could not cur it academically, were evicted from their apartment, or got high and lazy. These kinds of solutions will remove us from a moralistic assumption that only people who suffer at no fault of their own deserve help. Paradoxically, the intense interest in causality is fueled by the puritanic sense of fairness. The other approach is to help everyone, whether they deserve it or not. While in prevention, causality is important, in mitigation – not so much. Stop obsessing about the “why.”

Designed to Fail or A little Taylorism is OK, really

Let’s say you have a campus with 1200 non-academic staff. You want to launch a process where every one of them submits a form, and you approve it. Even if you think a most cursory review, plus 3-4 clicks, it should be at least 5-10 minutes for each. Assume an average of 7 minutes, although it Is better to pilot just a few and time yourself to see how long it takes in the field. We then have 140 hours of non-stop work. Further, let’s estimate that 10 percent of them forms will be problematic and need some communication, further review, or an email exchange. If you assume none of them will be problematic, you probably do not need a review at all, right? Well, let’s allow 180 hours just to be safe. People take breaks, they have to answer other emails, or take care of left-over business. Do you have five people and time on their hands? Will you make sure their schedules are completely cleared of everything else? If yes, congratulations, you are a good manager! If not, you just created another Designed to Fail (DTF) processes. Hope is not a strategy. You are likely to find yourself burning midnight oil, just frantically clicking through without reading, seething and looking for someone else to blame. If only those damned 10% idiots paid attention!

Or here is another example. You plan an event where about 200 people are expected. So you set up a check-in procedure, with about 5-minute worth of checking in. You know, with finding names on the list, giving some swag, and showing where to go. 5 minutes tops per person. If 50 of them show up at the same time, and you only have two check-in persons, we can expect a two-hour long waiting line. Either have a lot more checkers or cut out something from your check-in sequence. If event is open, let them grab the swag and make better signs. Later during the event, send around the list, and ask to self-check. Do something, don’t hope it will somehow will sort itself out, because it never does.

Here is an example especially for faculty. If you have three sections of undergrads, at 30 students in each, and assign a 10-page final paper, with average of 20 min of grading for each, do your math. It is 30 hours of non-stop work, even without detailed written feedback. Grading is almost impossible to do for more than 8 hours a day; even that can give your brain an inflammation. It is because all papers tend to be similar and concentration eventually becomes very difficult. Even if you add music, wine, frequent breaks, etc. – do the honest, not hopeful math. Do you have four full days free from all earthly cares to do this work? If you, the DTF philosophy will get you to the same midnight oil, deep in regrets about your choice of career and a resolution to quit and go back to your happy barista days. You are not a hero you may think you are. You did not plan well.

Many people think Taylorism was a joke, a pseudo-science. OK, think what you want, but a little bit of it is a good thing. It is not rocket science. Do the honest math, do a realistic estimate of how much time a process takes. It is better to design a less rigorous but done well procedure than to put out some DTF monster. The latter is likely to make you look bad in the end and not accomplish its ambitious goas. Let’s use a little of the scientific management, just enough to keep us out of trouble.

Living with the virus, living with mortality

It seems highly unlikely that COVID will be eradicated like smallpox or polio. The current debate about continuing the restrictions or trying to live with the virus, is only a debate about when, not about whether. Some people believe it is now, while others think it is later. I don’t hear anyone arguing that the virus will simply go away on its own.

The problem is that it does not fit into our proud narrative of continuous progress. While we all understand temporary setbacks, the humanity does not know how to deal with permanent losses. For example, life expectancy in developed world has dropped. This feels a little like defeat, or perhaps a lesson on humility, or a reminder of our mortality. Not only individual people die, but there is no guarantee for our species to survive indefinitely. Many other species came to this world, and are now gone – what makes us think we are somehow an exception? For now, we are still kicking and doing well – a little less smug, a bit humbler, and not as many of us than before. At least 5,5 million people died because of the virus, 310 million are sick right now.

Learning to live with the virus is not just a pragmatic arrangement – which restrictions, for how long, etc. It is, to some degree, an adjustment of our attitude, a revision of the belief in steady progress, and some tempering of arrogance. Let’s learn to live with the virus.

Vision, mission, and other sacred nonsense

Few management concepts in academia are subject to such wide-spread misuse as mission and vision statements. Every university has a page with its mission and vision (and sometimes value) statements, buried somewhere deep, because they are so embarrassing. Why would otherwise smart people publish uninspiring clichés is a genuine mystery I will try to solve.

Mission statements only make sense when they are different from each other. Such statements should describe what this university does and does not do, with respect to other universities. The mission statement defines a niche. Clearly, Harvard College educates the elites, while Sac State educates the masses. Their mission includes a lot of cutting-edge research, while ours is focused on quality teaching. Their freshmen come well-prepared, while ours often need a lot of help. Curiously, people refer to “our mission” in conversations, in this exact sense. But they NEVER refer to the official mission statement, and I bet most of them do not know what it says. Similarly, “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.” No kidding, it could be a mission of any university on the planet; what’s so special about Harvard? Why don’t we just say what we really think?

Vision is also meant to be a pragmatic tool. For example, if you are a residential campus in the region where young population declines, you need to make some choices. For example, you can bet on reaching out to non-traditional population through online or off-campus programming. Or you can learn to be a smaller university. Or else, you can specialize in something, become a niche school, market like crazy, and recruit students from a wider demographic area. Or you can attract international students. Picking one of these strategies constitutes a vision.

Another example: if you live in a state that continues do cut public subsidy to its higher education, you should diversify your revenue stream somehow. If you are losing to local competition, well, there should be a realistic answer to that. That is what a vision supposed to be – some idea where you are going if you want to survive. It can actually be a very useful tool, allowing an institution to focus its priorities, rather than trying to be everything to everyone, and pursue all strategies at the same time (which in the end equals to not having any strategy at all). But why does it have to be some tasteless, pompous nonsense, like this one: “So-and-so University will create an accessible and equitable undergraduate student experience, both inside and outside the classroom, that empowers all students to learn, develop purpose and passion, and grow as individuals to achieve their goals?” How’s this a vision? Can you envision it, can you literally imagine it?

One reason is the way these statements are written. There is always a committee that will word-smith to include everyone’s opinion. Consensus is always bland, boring, and verbose. Committees will include words not because they are brilliant, but because, well, Joe has to be given a token on respect, since he is a member of the committee. The bigger the committee, the more words per sentence. No one edits those statements for clarity, no one critiques them, or seriously tries to improve them. University presidents don’t feel like alienating their faculty by questioning such statements. Not one of the committee members would put anything like that in their own academic paper fearing ridicule for bad writing and lack of originality. But it passes for something profound as a piece of collective writing.

The other reason is the believe that strategy is a sacred text. By its very nature, sacred writing tends to be non-pragmatic, dense, and haughty. That is an unfortunate assumption that guarantees failure every time. The sacred speech requiring taboos, preventing us from clearly communicating our intent. Harvard cannot say “The most capable students in the world;” that would be non-egalitarian. Sac State cannot say “First generation, diverse students most of whom were denied an opportunity to attend a great high school.” That would also be non-egalitarian. Those are taboo words in the context of a sacred text. They do not belong in a mission or vision statements, which condemn such statements to impotence.

Mission and vision statements are simple pragmatic tools for planning purposes. If you thought a hammer was a sacred object, it would probably look pretty. A hammer would have pearl incrustations, and a golden head. It would not be ever used for such mundane purposes as driving nails. You need your mission statement to work because it prevents you from mission creep. You need your vision statement to work because it allows you to implement a strategy. You don’t want them to hang on your wall, pretty, but useless.

Solidarity versus identity

I encourage most people, including student call me by my first name. I am an older and bearded gentleman in a Dean’s office, so I want to be more approachable. However, I am well aware that faculty of color, and younger women do get confused for students, or for support staff, and therefore need to insist that people call them Dr. So-and-so. The question is: should I give up on the approachability thing, and ask people to refer to me as Dr. out of solidarity with those who may struggle with recognition? In fact, in the presence of student, I try to address faculty as Drs. But should I do it always? Keep in mind, strangers will not know, am I simply being a pompous prick, or sending a message of solidarity with women and faculty of color.

Here is another example: A friend of mine always refers to his wife as “partner,” avoiding the disclosure of his dominant form of sexuality. The non-disclosure is a message of solidarity with gay people, not an attempt to pass for a gay person. Of course, in any conversation, that identity will still be somehow disclosed later through pronouns, or other details. The total message is then more complex: being in solidarity with an oppressed group, I still ultimately highlighting my dominant status. In other words, I draw MORE, not less attention to my superiority.

Let’s keep going. Should I state my pronouns? It is a more complicated case, where I don’t know the answer, just searching for one. The thing is, my gender does not define me; it is not even among the top 10 categories that I would use to describe myself. I don’t want to be defined by my gender, even if other people do. I can hear an objection – “Yes, because as a cisgender man, you have the luxury to ignore your gender identity, just like a White person has a luxury to bypass race in self-identification. By ignoring it, you perpetuate the power imbalances, assert your dominance. Do it anyway out of solidarity with those for whom pronouns are important.” Yes, all true, but by flaunting the “he/him” label, don’t I reinforce the dominance, don’t I make it more visible? In a group, where everyone discloses their pronouns, don’t we minoritize those people who may have different gender identities? For many people, their ethnic or racial identity is much more important that their gender. By forcing the gender identity forward, don’t we deny those people the right to define their identities the way they see fit? Putting my pronouns forward, I am encouraging other people to do the same. Well, I am not so sure I want to. Many people do not want to disclose to the whole world how they think of themselves in terms of gender, and about its linguistic representation. Some people do not want to be referred by any pronouns whatsoever. Do they also deserve solidarity?

Using my own identity to express solidarity with other people’s identities is just sometimes self-contradictory. There is an inherent tension between authenticity of self-disclosure and using the self-disclosure for another aim. By inserting the message of solidarity, into my identity statement, I also obscure some of my authentic self.

My point is simple – this all is far from simple. I think we should keep looking for delicate ways of declaring our solidarity with historically disadvantaged groups. But we cannot be simple-minded or crude about it. Some messages of solidarity offend more than support. Recognizing and affirming others’ identities is a search for the right conventions, and it has not been completed. Those who rage against “political correctness” do not want to even start that journey. Those who think they have already completed the journey are too self-righteous.

The end of the average student

This is really a part II of the previous blog.

Despite all the rhetoric, large organizations like universities have a hard time dealing with differences. The only way to make hundreds of policies and procedure work is to achieve a consistent application. Every time a student or a faculty has unique circumstances, someone has to review them, make a decision, and manually record it somewhere. With 30,000 students, you want to minimize the number of unique cases for obvious reasons. This simple reason trains our minds into imagining an average student, someone for whom the standard procedure is intended to work. Human concepts in general are consequences of our practice. We create a concept that allows us to reduce variety. For example, “fish” is such an abstract concept, for there are many varieties of organisms that breathe oxygen dissolved in water. But many of them could be caught and eaten in similar ways, hence the need for the shortcut. However, if you live in the area where the puffer fish can kill you if eaten, the diversity of fish species becomes very relevant. Consequently, the concept of fish become less relevant.

Suddenly, we realized that some of our students value personal contact more than convenience, while others do the opposite. Some want the online teaching to be over for good, while others prefer most of it still going on. I have to say most of our minds fight the newly found distinction. We stubbornly try to invent a situation good for the average student, who does not exist anymore.

We briefly considered offering specific f2f and online schedules to students and found out relatively quickly that our system is not set up to do that. We already sort students by major, class, and identify several categories that need help with building their schedules. Adding another large attribute (virtual preferences) would through the scheduling and registration system into the nightmare of massive manual processing. However, for students it is very important – to get a lease here in Sacramento, or continue living, say, in Stockton, and only occasionally driving here for a specific reason. Those are consequential decisions, but we cannot yet accommodate for them.

It is not like we did not see it coming; we certainly did. Yet knowing of a problem is not the same as solving it. For a while we thought a perfect solution would be to make every course section to be both f2f and online, by using the split modality. I was hoping for something like this to emerge for at least ten years. Unfortunately, the technology is not there yet, and I wish some startup would take this problem on.  While in theory it works, the split modality imposes an extreme cognitive load on the instructor. A few people can do it, but most will have a hard time. As we know from theory, a high initial barrier of learning the innovation makes wide-spread adoption unlikely.

However, the average student disappeared, and we sooner or later need to address it.

Post-COVID innovations to consider

We should bite the bullet and start thinking about offering students on-line tracks. No one wants to do it, and I don’t want to do it either. It would add a layer of complexity onto already unmanageable complexity of a large campus. However, we need to find reasonable way of guaranteeing students entire schedules online, within reason. This could be temporary for a semester, or permanent for as long as they are enrolled. It will not for sure be applicable to all majors and all programs, but it could be done for many. These students may get special priority in registering for on-line sections of large courses, in exchange for their lighter footprint on campus. Why would we do that? I have no deeper theory, or a sophisticated rationale. It is just a function of demand. Some students, a significant number, want it, for whatever reasons. And we should think of providing it to them, for no major cost is involved, and there is a cadre of instructors that are willing to teach online.

Life itself created a form of accommodation, where students for whatever reason cannot attend a class. At least some faculty members agreed to accommodate them by providing a zoom access to classes – either in real time, or in recording. It does take extra time and effort and may be of questionable quality of engagement. And yet, since people are doing it already, we should recognize it, and perhaps create some incentives for faculty who are willing to take on extra work to accommodate students. Again, the burden of proof should be on those who opposes the practice, not on those who do more.

I know about the objections of identity. After all, we are not an online university, and do not intend to become one. I do not find the argument compelling. Having a substantial online track will not take anything away from our identity. I just do not see how it could happen. As long as we do not force people online, our reputation is safe. Students may still want to come to the library, to hang out with friends at Starbucks on campus, or join a student club. Some of them just don’t want to be sitting in class. Because we know we can do it, it is not clear why we would refuse to continue, if enough students want it to happen.

Innovation is many cases does not involve sitting around and brainstorming. It does not often come from special people. Sometimes life itself creates new things, and our job is to notice, support, and make possible for new things to exist. If we do not, students may take their business elsewhere, eventually. It will take many years, but if we miss this opportunity, we will be looking back on this moment, wishing we acted differently.

There is no shortage of teachers, only shortage of money to pay them

The absolute majority of policy-makers work under the assumption that the laws of labor markets somehow doe not apply to teachers. The professions is somehow exempt from the basic laws of economics, like supply and demand.  Every few decades, the US educational systems go into paroxysms of teacher shortages. The panic results in urging to prepare more teachers, exalting the virtues of teaching profession, and just luring more people in. ‘

However, teacher educators prepare more than enough teachers; our school districts just cannot hold on to them. The problem is about 90% in teacher retention, and only about 10% in supply problems. The labor shortages in other professions are resolved differently. For example, when we do not have enough plumbers, the labor market reacts, and their wages go up. Some people agree to pay more, and eventually more people will want to be lumbers, while others will learn how to install a toilet on their own, and the demand shrinks. The market balances itself. If a teacher would make $100,000 a year, we would have no shortage, and could be more selective in who we admit into the profession. Millions of people with credentials that do not work in schools will return to classroom. No exaltations of virtuous teachers would be needed, no heroism, or the language of public service. Of course, no one wants to significantly increase taxation to pay for it, hence the hand wringing.

It would be much more honest for, say, the California State Assembly to pass a resolution like this: “Sorry, folks, we overpromised and cannot deliver. We built a huge universal educational system, made promises of quality teaching and afterschool enrichment, of supporting equal chances in life for children of different backgrounds, of and services to children with special needs. But we cannot do it on the tax money we can collect from you. Not enough teacher want to work for the salaries we pay. Therefore, the State is declaring the great educational bankruptcy. Starting tomorrow, the school districts are allowed to collect tuition from parents who can afford to pay it,  and use the additional revenue to compete for better teachers. All the promises are off the table. Free and universal public education ends now. It was a good run, but alas the public does not really want it.” This is not what I want to happen, just pointing out this would be an honest solution; more honest than letting tens of thousands of absolutely unprepared substitute teachers to babysit the most needy children.

The White People’s Problem

Empathy works through identifying with others’ pain, or with other strong emotions. If you are not a psychopath, you can empathize with someone being ill, losing a parent, or learning of a bad diagnosis. It is not just pain, but also such things as love for own children, romantic love, or joy. You draw on a bank of your own experiences, and find a similar one, remember how it felt, relive it to an extent, and therefore can be helpful to the person you empathize with. Just communicating your empathy is very helpful. Building long-term healthy relationships is impossible without empathy. It works very well on universal or nearly universal human experiences that have to do with our bodies, family relations, love, and a few other things we have in common.

However, the mechanism breaks down when others experience pains we never experiences. For example, I never felt an intense gaze of a security guard, and never second-guessed myself, if the gaze is real or is it my paranoia. My heart does not beat faster when I am pulled over by a cop. I never had to, because I am not Black. I can learn about this experience from others, or from the literature, or movies, but my own personal experiential bank does not have that experience. I have never been mistaken for a student and spoken to condescendingly, not  even when I was a much younger professor. It is because I am not a woman in academia. I heard that story many times, so I get a rough idea, but there is not an emotion easy to recall to match that experience. I was never pushed by an angry person behind me in line, who thought I am ignoring him. This is because I am not Deaf and don’t need to see people to know they are trying to talk.

This failure of empathy is not symmetrical. Of course, there is some unique experiences I had that people from marginalized groups did not have. However, precisely because I don’t have to worry about what my race, gender, ability are, my own pains belong to the class of more universal, and therefore more commonly understood ones. People from marginalized groups are much likely to empathize with me than I with them. This is because they are likely to have the emotional bank of the common human experiences in addition to their unique bank of specific pains. It is like they know my language, but I don’t know half of theirs.

Sometimes is it perceived as pretending not to understand. It is not actually easy to imagine the other person who had never experienced your particular kinds of pain and lack emotional vocabulary to express the empathy. It is totally understandable, and may be true for some people. But in many cases, we simply have a hard time to actually see and perceive the slights and offenses you experience. We know they exist. Theoretically we want to empathize, but it just takes much linger to process these kinds of recognition.

I remember attending a reception after a meeting in Paris, where I was chatting with a Dutch guy. It was just after the Russian missile shot down the Malaysian Boeing with hundreds of Dutch people on it. I happened to represent the Russian government at the meeting (don’t ask, the Russian government sends academics to meetings, because almost no one in the government speaks English). So we were chatting and joking. The Dutch guy looked at me somewhat intensely, and only on the next day I realized why. I knew the story, of course, but it was not the same knowledge as his was. Mine was theoretical, his was visceral. Seeing him did not trigger an emotional alert, so I forgot to say the right words. I still feel guilty about my silence. These kinds of misrecognitions are a result of our different lived experiences. What took him a split second, took me a whole day to realize.

The mismatch of experiences between White, able-bodied, straight men and others is both tragic and mitigatable. There is still a way to train our imagination and learn to experience what others experience without actually directly living it. It takes a specific kind of imagination, and significant willingness to try. We may never get very good at reading other people’s pain, but we can definitely get better at it.

Wearing your failure as a badge of honor?

In education, it takes two to tango. Hence, it is not always easy to tell who fails. In any normal year, some students struggle with their coursework. They may not have enough skills, or are slacking, or life happens to them. Almost every college course will show a single digit percentage of DFW rates. While instructors may or may not provide sufficient support, some students will quit or fail a course. These rates randomly fluctuate a bit and may be affected by the sudden forced change of modality or of the grading options universities applied to adjust for the pandemic.

However, if a particular instructor consistently, every semester fails one out of five or more students, it is a clear signal of the instructor’s own professional failure. Such a teacher fails to teach and support students; it is just as simple as that. If one out of four or five students fails to learn, it is no longer their own problem. It is the instructors’ failure, and no one else’s.

Some people say, oh, my course is just too hard for many students to pass. Well, the stewardship of curriculum is faculty members’ collective responsibility. If a course is too hard to pass, it is designed inappropriately, and should either have prerequisites, or pa placement test, or be split in two courses.

I still sometimes hear that this is a screening course, designed to fail many in order to select those who can continue in a certain major. But this is such an expensive and cruel way of screening. Why not be honest, declare your major to be impacted, and offer some other, less devastating ways of selecting the best students? Making students waste tuition money and several months of their lives on failure is just not an ethical option.

What is truly shameful when a professor wears his or her own utter professional incompetence as a badge of honor. Such people imply that everyone else is not rigorous enough and giving students free passes. And they are the one true knight of the academic rigor in shiny armor, standing alone against the rising tide of mediocrity. This kind of attitude inevitably betrays a deep-seated anxiety about one’s own professional incompetence. I wrote earlier about “the harsh professor’s syndrome,” on the psychology of the phenomenon. But I am wondering why is ours the only profession where people can get away with wearing their own failures as a badge of honor? When do we collectively stand up to it? When will the academic freedom cease to be an excuse for poor teaching and stagnant curriculum?

How good departments self-destruct

The path to self-destruction most often winds its way through the terrain of prolonged and intractable personal conflict. Educational relation in general has a little element of utopia, of a perfect community. Educators are prone to make a mistake of confusing the in-departmental working relation for an educational one. They sometimes develop unreasonably high expectations about their own small community; expectations no group can ever meet. In other words, imagining a family, or an activist group in place of an academic department sets up a wrong model of relationality. If you expect your colleagues to change because you really want them to is a really bad idea. Instead of weak values of civility and decorum, people erroneously pursue intense values such as friendship, common beliefs, solidarity, and heightened sensitivity to each other’s personal needs. And it is just too much for a not-quite-a-voluntary community to sustain.

The beginning of such a conflict is completely irrelevant. It could be almost anything or nothing at all. The culprit is not the conflict itself – they are plentiful anywhere two or more humans come together. The culprit is the intense, obsessive focus on interpersonal relations. That is indeed the main cause of the self-destructive impulse. The more you stare to your own relations, the more twisted and distorted they will look. Every action, and every reaction, every word and every silence will be interpreted as a hostile move. Once a conflict builds its own history, it becomes very difficult to set aside. The longer it festers, the harder its fibers become.

In theory, we should not worry about such conflicts. After all grownups should be able to sort out their won relationships. However, it inevitably starts to affect the work. Curriculum will not be updated and passed, talented people will not be recruited and retained. Faculty will start looking for other jobs. Scholarly collaboration will wane. And most importantly, the creativity in pursuing new ideas, new programs, new projects will stop. Maintaining the status quo leads to stagnation. In the end, both the students, and the entire institution will pay the price. The damage is not only to the department – it is to other people, which is where I begin to worry. Eventually things may get so bad, that departments become the sick child, get disbanded, split, absorbed, or just closed down. It may take many years, but I have seen or heard of several examples in my 30 years in higher ed. TO be fair, it happens only rarely. Most groups will stop somewhere in the middle, redefine and rebuild their working relationships, and manage to move forward.

The solution is very simple. Our job is to serve our students, and to maintain the long-term interests of the institution. The public does not pay us to get along, to be friends, and to spend many days (of paid time) gazing at the collective navel. While faculty well-being is important, it is important as long as it serves the students and the public. It is not why we all are here. To refocus on the needs of students, on new ideas will help. Generally, looking outward rather than inward is helpful. The public trusts us to do the right thing, and grants us self-governance, tenure, and other privileges most professions do not have. While many faculty members feel underpaid, it is still a middle-class wage job with unparalleled flexibility and intellectual freedom. Let us not forget that the public wants something in return.

Academic freedom and disciplinary authority

Here is a case: Another unit at the University has invited someone to be a guest speaker at a public event. The speaker happened to be in one of our fields. Should the other unit consult us before inviting someone, or should they maintain the stance of academic freedom, and invite anyone they want, no matter how controversial?

Let us say you are in the more pro-freedom camp. Yes, they should feel free to invite whoever they want. However, let us extend this logic a little further. What mechanism can prevent a university inviting, let us hay a Holocaust denier, or a climate change denier, or an anti-vaxxer? That would make us look like a collective fool, right?

My preference is to always check with whoever has the disciplinary authority. If you speak about homelessness, perhaps check with Social Work. If you are talking about science, let’s talk to the college of math and science. A talk about nursing should probably be run by the Nursing faculty, etc. The thing is – you may in the end override your colleagues’ objections, and still invite a controversial figure to come. After all, every discipline is full of disagreements, and many fields are split on specific issues. But you would be making this choice from a more informed position, not out of ignorance.

This is the important lesson: in making a choice, just the ability to make a choice is not enough of a motive. Flipping a coin is not an act of choice. Freedom of choice does not apply to the choice between knowledge and ignorance. In some cases, equally well-informed people have strong differences in opinion. It is enlightening to hear their dialogue. In the absence of hard facts, informed opinions are the next best thing. But when opinions get stuck on egos, when having a different opinion is the goal on its own, the talk is not fun.

The question is, who can make that distinction between wacko quasi-science and a real science? Well, this is why we have academic departments, with their own disciplinary knowledge. You don’t have to believe them, but you must try to listen to what they have to say. That is the limitation imposed by working at a university. 

Cooler winds sweep through Central Valley

Every summer, the Valley restarts its probation period. ‘Can you withstand the heat?,’ - it asks, and then again – ‘Are you sure? How about some more?’ Sometime in September, it relents and sends one of it cooler winds, - not yet cool, just a little cooler. The trial is over, you may now go out in the afternoon, and no one will try to bake you alive.

Despite a plenty of warning, people keep trying to live here, and every Summer the Valley tries to scorch them, sometimes adding fire and smoke for variety. And yet, every September it relents, and rewards the patient with cooler winds.

To be fair, the reward lasts twice as long as the tribulation. The Valley is not unreasonable. It is just maddeningly obsessive in its cyclicity. It mocks our naïve understanding of hell and paradise: “How about both, every year? Four months of hell, eight of paradise?” Like a crazy parent, it keeps switching from bad days to good days, back to bad, and back to good again. We all know the game; it is nothing if not predictable. And yet never fail to feel grateful for the fist cooler winds of September.

When reasonable people disagree they don't get mad at each other

Here is another interesting tidbit from our internal debate on COVID contact disclosure. Someone from the other side of the university presents an argument that we should not inform students who we know had a low-risk level contact with an infected classmate or instructor. The rationale for this is the following: (1) The blanket notifications result in "notification fatigue" and people ignore them later, when they may actually need to pay attention. (2) You create unnecessary anxiety and unnecessary healthcare demands which comes at a cost. The logic is impeccable from the public health perspective. I am sure it represents the best thinking in the public health.

However, in the context of our relationships with students, this does not work. In colleges, we deal with specific small groups of students – we face them in classrooms and know them by names. When students find out we knew about the exposure, and did not tell them, they will be upset with us. Our unspoken agreement is not that of a healthcare provider and a patient. These are longer-term relationships of mutual trust. We are expected to share the information we have and let them make their own decision about whether they should worry or not. Withholding that information makes us look somewhat paternalistic and untrustworthy, regardless of the actual outcome. The considerations of cost do not enter into our calculus at all. Because we do not deal with thousands of students, large effects like lowering the sensitivity to exposure messages also is not a part of our worldview.

This is a classic case where a disagreement does not arise from one of the parties being wrong. We just operate in different relational worlds, with different assumptions about the nature of the relationships. It would be interesting to see how such a no-fault difference of opinions gets ultimately resolved. Ideally, it should have happened before the school year started, but we cannot resolve a difference in opinion we do not know about. The problem with disagreements like this is that pop up unexpectedly. Each party is blind to the fact that the other party may see things differently, until such differences clash.

They normally resolve as a compromise of some sort, just like any other disagreement. For that to happen, we continue to talk across the organization. It is not a matter of figuring out whose argument is stronger, and who holds more power. A successful solution depends on how much we all can expand our horizons beyond our immediate professional experiences and consider the other position seriously.

The ethics of COVID disclosure and the unlikely events

Let’s say a student in your class tells you he has tested positive for COVID-19. The first steps are obvious: please stop coming to class, inform the University, and get medical advice. However, the next step is tricky. If you tell his classmates that he has tested positive for a communicable disease, you violate his right to privacy, and it is illegal under HIPPA. However, if you do not tell anything to anyone, you are sitting on information that could feel very important to the other students and their families as well as all those other people they may be in contact with. We prepare educators, so most program have a lot of field experiences, so the circle of potentially exposed includes children, who cannot yet get vaccinated. So, the student in question may infect one of his classmates, who will have no idea, go to a school for a field experience, and infect a child. The child would suffer the extremely rare case of severe childhood of COVID and die. I am not going to be responsible for a death of a child and am going to alert the rest of the students, and suspend the program’s in-person classes and field experiences.

That was my initial thinking, and it was wrong. Incidentally, most of the initial thinking about any complex problem is wrong. Those who favor the “gut feeling” I strongly encourage to think through their conundrums.

Like all ethical dilemmas, it has two sets of values balancing against each other. Unlike some of my friends-analytical philosophers, I am not interested in an abstract, universal solution applicable to all contexts. I would much rather consider it within a specific context of a large institution with specialized units dealing with special problems. When someone tells me – do not worry, we have a policy and procedure for these kinds of things, - I do not always find it within myself to completely believe it. It is just a function of a larger organization. Because we cannot know each other’s business, mistrust is easy and natural, while trust is difficult; it needs to be built specifically.

I am not sure of the exact math here. What would improve our collective trust is some sort of a disclosure: here is the protocol we use, and these are the probabilities of low risk vs. high risk. After all, many of us in higher ed do understand probabilities. But in general, 0.1% chance of a large disaster and 100% chance of a small disaster do not weigh equally; the latter outweighs the former. Our lives are filled with small disasters and we rarely experience large disasters. We should all think about consequences of our actions in probabilistic terms. We can be sure about some consequences, but other remain merely a possibility, sometimes remote.

The truth is that ethics is useless without some understanding of probability. Hence risk assessment is a probabilistic discipline. The student is not sick, just positive. Everyone in his class is fully vaccinated. All are required to wear masks all the time. The chances of an outbreak are actually fairly low. I should recognize that people in Risk Assessment are professionals and have the best interest of students in mind.

Should we include very unlikely events in our moral reasoning? We normally do not consider a possibility that while driving we may kill a pedestrian. Let us not stop driving because of it. Any action or non-action can go wrong and have disastrous effects.

Nostalgia is a poor guide to the post-COVID future

Some people want to get back to the happy times where students were buzzing around the campus, faculty had passionate debates in person, when grass was greener, and the sun shone brighter. That is all good and dandy, for we all need some energy to keep going forward. However, nostalgic feelings prevent us from being more realistic, more specific about the future. It stands in the way of actual serious planning of the post-COVID world.

Nostalgia is just a feeling, not a roadmap. Some conservatives create a version of the past that never existed: with full families, innocent teenagers, and wholesome TV shows. They attach their personal warm feelings to the made-up picture of the golden age and try to get there somehow. Just to be fair, not all conservatives do that. Some are also pushing a specific version of the future, not tied to any specific version of the past. They want to preserve certain principles, not their own rich imagination.

OK, back to the universities. As the first step, let us acknowledge that some of its operations will stay online. Student crowds will be thinner, although perhaps as joyful. Students will not come to campus to get advice, to turn it a paper form, or two attend every single class. Moreover, different students will have different preferences. The young and single would want to spend more time on campus, while those older and with their own families – less. Following that pattern, staff and faculty will spend less time on campus, and work more from home. Again, some jobs require no on-campus presence, while others will remain pretty much as before. We may avoid building more classrooms (for most classes will be hybrid) and more offices (those can be shared by partial telecommuters).

Planning is about nuance, about differentiation. It uses a different kind of imagination. Nostalgia is too wholistic, too undifferentiated to be useful. It assumes an average student, an average faculty and staff member. Such people do not exist. Let us get a little more realistic, a little more specific. Let us use our differences to our collective advantage. This is actually a very good time to start a conversation on re-imagining the future. We all learned much about ourselves, our preferences, our jobs, and technologies that help us. Going back while blinded by nostalgia is not much of an option.