Who am I? A mechanic or a socializer?

I re-analyzed the blog's contents through Typealyzer, which, through a text analysis:

[Gives] a snapshot of the persona by looking at the communication style of the text in the moment it was written. Looking on the results over a period of time will, however, tell you something about how a blogger “normally” prefer to communicate, but it might still be a blog that more reflects a role than how the blogger feels inside.

So, what does Typealyzer say about me (my blog)?

It says I am a "Socializer":

The social and opinionated type. They are especially attuned to the feelings of themselves and others. They tend to be very aware of the values of their peer-group and tend to see things as either right or wrong, good or bad. They tend to be traditional and value their friends and family the most.

The Socializers are down-to-earth, practical people and very keen on making sure everyone is alright. This quality makes them enjoy social work places. Since they enjoy being and keeping things neat and tidy, they often also enjoy working in such environments.

Hmmm ... Apparently I am not the same person that I was three years ago, when Typealyzer evaluated my personality and declared me a "Mechanic":

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts. The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

No wonder then that "who am I?" is a tough philosophical question :)

Photo of the day: Natalie Wood

The note accompanying the photo at the source:

Calm at Cannes
In 1962, 23-year-old Wood remained her charming self even as the paparazzi "pursued her like jackals" according to LIFE. "At a party given by the Russian delegation, Natalie, the daughter of Russian emigrants, delighted her hosts by conversing fluently in their language and even joining in folk songs."

Wikipedia tells me that she was Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko before she became Natalie Wood.

Abolish NCAA sports. It has no "business" at universities ...ctd

How about the following point as a follow-up to this previous post?

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

Makes perfect sense to me.  Katha Pollitt has a simple bottom-line in that essay:

Cancel the season. Fire everybody. Get real about rape. Grow up.

Yep. 

Mogadishu was once scenic and attractive like this ...

Above, a picturesque downtown Mogadishu around 1936.
Pictured on the right is Arba Rukun mosque, known as the Mosque of the Four Pillars. Built in 1269 AD, the mosque predates Ibn Battuta's historic arrival in Somalia.
The Italian-built Catholic cathedral, which now lies in ruins, sits in the center, and the Triumphal Arch, honoring Italian King Emmanuel III, on the left. 

More here

Ibn Battuta, a big time wanderer whom I should probably study more given my wandering genes, visited India too, when a good chunk of the northern area was under the rule of Muhammad bin Tughlak.  Oddly enough, the first time I ever knew about this historical note was from Cho's satirical movie. Back in India, when I was a kid!  As I noted in post a few months ago, Cho's satirical writing and movies provided me with quite some fascination for satirical humor.
 

Abolish NCAA sports. It has no "business" at universities.

[It's] time for Division I sports programs to be severed from higher education. Our mission as employees of universities is to teach students and to do research. Supporting felons and keeping long-term pedophiles on the college payroll is not part of my job description.

 Yep.

If higher education is like religion, then atheists say ...

Have we developed some kind of a blind faith in higher education?

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. ...

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing.

How is this "religious" belief working?  The author of this book review article scans a territory that is not new in this blog. 

we will need to turn our backs on assumptions of our most fervent boosters of universal higher education: that access alone is the primary purpose, and that when students and teachers are co-present, education occurs.

Supercommittee becomes Superbad!

Says Jon Stewart:

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America's Finest News Source has a winning proposition to get us over the debt crisis:

Banking on the popularity of its original location, the country hopes to make millions by partnering with franchisees around the world, to whom it would license the trademarked United States brand name as well as the nation's flag, motto, preserved landmarks, college sports programs, movie studios, and bicameral legislature.
"Now, anyone interested in starting a new nation can open an official United States," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. "America already has a brand everyone knows and responds to. Now the time has come for us to grow that asset and monetize it."
"Meanwhile, it's a great deal for our franchise partners, who not only get to fly the red, white, and blue, but also have access to our unrivaled network of foreign oil suppliers." Murray continued. "With an initial capital investment of just $20,000, interested parties can begin building their own U.S.A. immediately."

Thus it was another day here in these United States of America!

Map of the day: the wanderers

The Economist notes:

MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent.

As a wanderer myself, I am all the more excited with this discussion.  Plus, it is not the first time I have blogged about the wandering humans--like this one, for instance.

You can change douchebags. But, ugly people? The economics of beauty

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We can cluster-bomb you back to the stone age!

Some of the students who pay attention to what I say and write think that I have nothing but depressing stuff.  I joke with them that it is no wonder then that they avoid meeting with me in my office!  Well, I have news for them--read what Glenn Greenwald writes about and I will come across as the most optimistic person on the planet :)

It is because Greenwald writes, and often, about the reality that we would rather not recognize, leave alone discuss.  In this edition of inconvenient truth, Greenwald writes about the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, President Obama, being one aggressive warmonger, especially when it comes to cluster bombs that most of the rest of the world is opposed to:

Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democrats have ecstatically celebrated, such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W. Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation rite.”

This alone should depress anybody enough to go jump off the nearest cliff.  But, that is merely the point of departure for what Greenwald wants to point out: despite opposition from even the toadies allies like the UK, Obama is relentless when it comes to the US' inalienable right to use cluster bombs:

Given how indiscriminate and civilian-threatening these weapons are, more than 100 countries have signed a treaty banning their production and use and compelling compensation to their victims. Needless to say, the U.S. has categorically refused to join the Convention, along with the other biggest stockpilers of these weapons, such as Russia, Israel and China. The Obama administration’s refusal to join the Convention has caused tension and controversy even with its most subservient allies, such as Britian, a signatory to the treaty. ...
But now the Obama administration is moving far beyond a mere refusal to join the convention banning these munitions. According to The Independent, the U.S. is playing the leading role “to torpedo the global ban on cluster bombs” through a “proposal that would permit the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a failure rate of less than one per cent.”

Hey, where is the change from previous administrations that Obama promised, you ask on your way to that nearest cliff? Greenwald shows how much there has been no change at all:

Don Rumsfeld, November 21, 2002, on Iraq: “All I can say is if history has taught anything, it’s that weakness is provocative. It entices people into doing things that they otherwise would not do.”
Bill Kristol, July 24, 2006, on Iran and Syria: “We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative.”
Leon Panetta, yesterday: “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been steadily escalating his warnings about the impact of the deep cuts facing the Pentagon if the congressional super committee fails to reach a deal. On Thursday, he played the last – and strongest — card in his deck, arguing that the hundreds of billions of dollars of mandatory cuts would directly imperil U.S. national security. . . . Mandatory defense cuts, he warned, would weaken the armed forces to the point that enemies would be emboldened to attack the U.S. ’In effect, it invites aggression,’ Panetta said during the new conference, just his second since taking office in July.”
Yes, President Obama’s Defense Secretary is actually running around the country trying to scare Americans into believing that if the U.S. cuts military spending, then the nation will be attacked.

Happy landing!  From that cliff, that is :)

Ponzi lives on, through his name. Madoff won't :)

Quote of the day, on government providing hammocks for millionaires

The government’s social safety net, which has long existed to catch those who are down and help them get back up, is now being used as a hammock by some millionaires, some who are paying less taxes than average middle class families.

After reading that, one might be tempted to think it came from one of the Occupy Wall Street people, or The Nation magazine, or any one of the left-leaning faculty.

Guess again.

It is from a report titled The Subsidies of the Rich and Famous from, get this, Senator Coburn, who has solid conservative credentials and a strong conservative voting record.  On this issue, I suppose he will be in good company with Ralph Nader, which, I would have assumed, will never ever happen :)

Americans are generous and do not want to see their fellow citizens go without basic necessities. Likewise, we expect everyone to contribute and to demonstrate personal responsibility. Government policies intended to mainstream wealth redistribution are undermining these principles. The tragic irony is the wealth in these cases is trickling up rather than down the economic ladder. The cost of this largess will thus be shared by those struggling today and the next generation who will inherit $15 trillion of debt that threatens the future of the American Dream. These consequences are the results of shortsighted spending and tax policies like those outlined in this report that should be eliminated.

When even Coburn worries that wealth is trickling up, hey, there ought to be something seriously wrong here.

Waterboarding IS torture. Deal with it!

I have nothing to say to this part of the press conference other than, "Thank you, Mr. President"

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  Last night at the Republican debate, some of the hopefuls -- they hope to get your job -- they defended the practice of waterboarding, which is a practice that you banned in 2009.  Herman Cain said, “I don’t see that as torture.”  Michelle Bachmann said that it’s “very effective.”  So I’m wondering if you think that they’re uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible?

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  That’s a multiple-choice question, isn’t it?  (Laughter.)  Let me just say this:  They’re wrong.  Waterboarding is torture.  It’s contrary to America’s traditions. It’s contrary to our ideals.  That’s not who we are.  That’s not how we operate.  We don’t need it in order to prosecute the war on terrorism.  And we did the right thing by ending that practice.
If we want to lead around the world, part of our leadership is setting a good example.  And anybody who has actually read about and understands the practice of waterboarding would say that that is torture.  And that's not something we do -- period.

How faculty (intentionally) avoid critical conversations about academe

The university's computing services are after the few people like me who are yet to migrate to Google mail that the rest of the campus has transitioned to ... which is when I thought it might be worth spending time looking at the importance of deleting old emails once and for all. I read one email in a folder titled "Senate" and it became obvious that I will have a tough time deleting them all, and will end up migrating all those old emails to Gmail.

The excerpt below is from an email I had sent in June 2003--more than eight years ago--to the incoming president of the faculty senate.  As I re-read it, the feeling is of crushing disappointment that all these are the issues that academe is dealing with even now and we never bothered to tackle them, when all these were so obvious even to a moron like me!

A few days after I sent the email, a big time faculty-leader pulled me aside in the corridor and told me point-blank that the issues I was raising for discussions were within the purview of the faculty union, and that I needed to understand that the only role for the senate was to discuss curriculum.  What a shame!

i suppose that over the next couple of weeks you and the exec. team will put together a work plan for the next year.  may i request consideration of the following?

in my understanding, the higher ed system is rapidly changing.  in addition to the directly influencing acts such as drastic reductions in public spending on hr.ed., larger discussions such as liberal arts v. professional ed., traditional models v. the univ. of phoenix model, etc., are having, and will continue to have, significant impacts on hr. ed as we know it.

it seems like there is a rapidly evolving "new reality" that we faculty need to understand.  perhaps librarians are at the forefront in terms of experiencing the "new reality" that technology, in addition to other factors, is shaping for the profession.  yet, most of these discussions are happening outside the university, and very little is being deliberated by faculty bodies such as the academic senate.  but, faculty bodies, such as our senate, rarely take the lead to figure out what these may mean for their respective campuses; what these may mean not for the next year but for years down the road.

it will be neat if we can discuss at the senate these dynamic events that are happening outside.  in other words, to have the academic senate explore what the future may hold for WOU and how faculty may have to start thinking about that future.  while this will be separate from how the administration and the OUS perceive of the future, i am sure the senate's deliberations will be well received by them. 

examples: will we have to prepare for a future that could sharply change the lecture/discussion/assessment model of today?  all these may lead us to a different paradigm of teaching and learning.  if so, then how do we deliver the content in a new teaching/learning model?  what could be those changes and how can WOU's faculty prepare for those changes?  what do these changes mean for an incoming assistant professor who is joining us for a thirty-year period? 

perhaps this is too broad a discussion.  but, that is precisely my point--that faculty, as individuals and as a body, are perhaps not addressing these issues that form the context within which we conduct classes.  addressing these larger issues will help us in many ways.

thanks.

If only students read this ... (and others too!)

In our eyes, we’ve done everything right.  We played sports and acted in plays even though we are not currently pro athletes or actors.  Shouldn’t it count for something that we were captains of JV tennis?  That’s what is most difficult to face out here in this adult world.  It doesn’t matter what we did.  It matters what we do, the creative choices we make to adjust, the people we have real live conversations with.  Because no one is going to get a job, live in a nice place, have money to date and take vacations simply because he was president of the campus doing-good society, no matter what he’s been told.  The sooner we stop demanding the world to mold to the rosy, impractical view we had as undergraduates, the better for us all.

 The entire essay is a must-read. (ht)

Scientific American: food, fracking, and the first Americans

I loved every article in the November issue of the Scientific American (subscription required.)

It will be so wonderful to merely have this issue alone as reading material in an upper-division general education class and discuss with students the science, politics, economics, and philosophy explicitly and implicitly addressed in the articles.  But, such a course does not exist ... ergo, I blog!

The editorial, and an article, present a compelling argument on the need to slow down our gung-ho approach to fracking--the fracturing of the shale layer in order to release the natural gas from down below.  The editorial points out that the "states are flying blind."  It was encouraging to read that Governor Chris Christie--my choice for the 2016 presidential elections--"vetoed a bill that would permanently ban fracking, then approved a one-year moratorium so his state could consider the results of the federal studies."  I tell you, this guy makes sense way more than other people do.

Now that we have reached that attention-grabbing seven billion number, we naturally start worrying again whether we can feed them all, especially when we know we will easily add another two billion-plus in less fifty years.  The essay here is not any doomsday Malthusian, unlike this one by Lester Brown in an issue a couple of years ago, but it lays out a few important variables that we need to consider, and offers five solutions too.Improving yields in Africa, Central America, and Eastern Europe is a key part of the puzzle.  This article, too, points out how much we can increase food availability if only we didn't use grains to fatten up livestock.  We can even have world peace before this can be accomplished! 

It was neat to read about the revolution in the understanding of when and how the earliest humans reached the Americas.  "They were literally strangers in a strange land. ... they exemplify the spirit of survival and adventure that represents the very nest of humanity."

I sometimes worry that we have lost that adventure spirit.  Everywhere I look, it is more often than not only wimps like me.  Whatever happened to the adventurous and wandering gene in us?  Don't we anymore want to go where no man has never gone before?  Have we become a bunch of self-satisfied creatures content to sit stupefied in front of big screen TV sets?  I hope not--that will be the end of humanity.

BTW, a funny juxtapostion on page 26: The headline screams "Meet your newest ancestor" and the bottom of the page--at the end of the short piece--is an image of Rick Perry and one of his anti-science statements.  You think this was intentional? A dig? I hope so :)

College Football: A tale of two universities

It was such a pleasure to read this op-ed by Barry Glassner, who is the president of Lewis and Clark College here in Oregon. He writes about being smitten with Division III sports, and notes:

Division III schools emphasize the experience of the athletes, not the sports-consuming public. The NCAA specifically calls on us to "place special importance on the impact of athletics on the participants rather than on the spectators ... and the general public and its entertainment needs."
...
On D-III playing fields, student-athletes really are student-athletes. At this level, no one gets athletic scholarships. Students compete not for fame and big crowds, not for a shot at a pro career, but purely for the fun, excitement and educational benefits they derive.

This is what most of us imagined colleges and universities to be--environments where there is enough opportunity to engage the body along with the engaging life of the mind.

In contrast, the former president of the university where I teach justified the gazillion dollar expenditures on athletics-related items:

Since moving from NAIA to NCAA Division II in 2000, Western Oregon University has been adjusting to the economic realities of competing at a higher level.More money was needed for scholarships, travel and increased investment in facilities, such as the new Health and Wellness Center opening this year, that will relocate the football team from the Old PE Building on campus.

Perhaps Division III was no good for us?  Even though it is immensely more than good enough for Lewis and Clark?

(Sarcastic) Comment of the day on university faculty

Faculty are the citizens that Oregon can least afford to lose.
Randy Blazak is an associate professor of sociology at PSU.
Sociology professors are the the citizens that Oregon can least afford to lose!

That was one of the many comments in response to this op-ed in the Oregonian on why faculty salaries are important.

There are many wrongs in that op-ed.  The worst of all is this:

Portland State does a poor job holding onto tenured scholars because of salary. The salary increase that comes with tenure on the nine month school year contract is about $240/month after taxes. That's not much of a reward after a lifetime in school and enormous student debt, and most earn less than experienced high school teachers in Portland Public Schools.

It is a remarkably stupid argument that high school teachers earn more than PSU faculty.  It is a fact of life that different occupations earn differently.  There is nothing in the US Constitution that mandates that university faculty shall earn a lot of money, or at least more than what high school teachers earn.  If higher salaries are what the op-ed authors are looking for, then whatever prevented them from becoming high school teachers, or garbage truck drivers or Wall Street investment bankers?  This is a free country, right?

The claim that the university does a poor job holding onto tenured scholars because of salary is, I am willing to bet, a bogus claim.  If it were anywhere close to being real, then the authors would have provided the data--the number of faculty who left the university because they were "underpaid."

A "reward after a lifetime in school and enormous student debt" is ridiculous a statement to make.  I cannot imagine how the authors can be models for "critical thinking" that higher education is all about.  Clearly they do not suggest that salaries ought to be proportional to the years spent in school, and the debts added up in the process, do they?

The op-ed authors are clearly caught up in their own delusional logic that university faculty deserve to get paid a lot of money because they are university faculty.  If they don't work out their delusions on their own, well, reality will then soon knock some sense into them.

As another reader comments:

Does higher education teach anything but elitist entitlement philosophy anymore? I thought education was it’s own reward?

A quick note to the commenter: beware the difference between "it's" and "its." :)