Working towards getting fired!

If I get laid off, which is highly likely, then from 2022, I will be able to test out what I had been yakking about forever in this blog: Why have we become so obsessed with work to the point of completely marginalizing everything else, especially if our work is non-essential?

Getting fired will be an unplanned way in which I will walk that talk!

When my daughter works, well, she is saving kids, some of whom are only a few months old.  A farmer in India feeds people.  Is my non-essential work important?  Will getting laid off mean that there will one less bullshit job that is being done?

Seven years ago, I blogged that people spend so much time at work, and then want to do fun stuff during their days off, that they even don't care to spend some hours with people that matter--friends and relations, especially parents.  Is working away that important?

Of course, because of the pandemic, many of us cannot visit with our people, within the country or far away.  Which is why I am gladder that I did visit with the parents or the daughter when I could.  Over the last 18 years, by my mental count, I have made 19 trips to India.  Two of those trips coincided with my sabbaticals; I spent three months there during each of those sabbaticals, instead of the usual three weeks.  I have no idea when the next trip might be, and who might or might not be around when I get there.  Or if there will be another trip at all.

In the age of the coronavirus, we live in a Zoom world, with screen time of all kinds with friends, family, students, whoever.  It is practically the world that E.M. Forster wrote about back in 1909.  The following lines that Forster wrote are all the more chilling:

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

A layoff would perhaps give me a lot more flexibility about visiting with the people who matter to me, without worrying about the constraints of the job.

More than anything else, what is the point of working when the busyness prevents people from even the barest minimum of simple pleasures?

In this essay, a recently laid off writer reflects on the busyness of work:

I was frustrated that I had tied so much of my self-worth to my job, especially when I could lose it at any moment. Why didn’t I have something else that gave me the same feelings of satisfaction and purpose? Why did work seem to be the centerpiece of my life, rather than just one other thing in it? Why did I have to work?

I am not the only one wrestling with these questions. Like me, many are reassessing a part of their lives they had once accepted uncritically. Those who were not essential workers realized their work was just that: nonessential. Others discovered that, at the very least, they didn’t have to put in 10-hour days to get their work done, or even to be considered “good” at their jobs. This wasn’t a matter of addressing burnout or general malaise: The pandemic had dramatically altered their very conception of work and made them question the notion that their lives should be built around it.

I hope that this lesson from the pandemic will be remembered even well after the virus is eliminated, or at least effectively contained.

The American Dream

Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler colonialism the American dream.

Those lines have been echoing in my head ever since I read them.

It is also perhaps the first time that I have read the phrase "settler colonialism" outside the academic contexts.  Of course, globally speaking, we are not referring to, say, Black settler colonialism.  In the academic discussions, the US and Australia are classic examples of white settler colonialism, in which the settlers displaced and wiped out the indigenous populations--very different from the colonization of India, for instance.  And, yes, one would add Canada and New Zealand to this list.  A slightly modified version was the case with South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe.)

But, to read "settler colonialism" in a New York Times commentary is a new experience. 

The author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is familiar to me, only because we watched a multi-part documentary on Asian-Americans.  In one of the episodes in that series, Nguyen talked about his family coming to the US as refugees after the war in Vietnam.  I recall him getting emotional while sharing some of those experiences.

Nguyen's commentary is about how writers and poets might use their craft after the sociopath leaves the Oval Office. 

Trump was the continuation of the conservative counterattack. Mr. Trump clearly wanted to roll back the American timeline to the 1950s, or maybe even to 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Will writers become apolitical from 2021?

I hope not.  

In fact, from the kinds of books and essays that I have been reading over the past few years, I am pretty darn confident that writers--especially those who are not white or straight--are going to be increasingly political in their essays and books and poems.  Like Noor Hindi, whom Nguyen quotes.

I followed up on the link in Nguyen's essay and read Hindi's poem, which is also the best way to end this post:

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
By Noor Hindi

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

He stirred his Velvet Head

During fair(er) weather months, at one of our favorite beaches, we spot the bobbing seals riding the waves close enough to the shores.  Sometimes, with their heads alone visible, they look like the ends of periscopes sticking out of submarines.  Which is when we wonder whether they are watching us, when we are watching them.

As we walk along the waters, they seem to follow along in parallel.

I don't need to know if they are really watching us humans.  The science of the animal behavior interests me little.  The idea that they are watching and playing with us from a distance makes us happy.  It is charming.

It is like what Emily Dickinson wrote in "A Bird, came down the Walk."

A Bird, came down the Walk - 

He did not know I saw -

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw, 

 

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass -

 

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,

He stirred his Velvet Head. - 

 

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers, 

And rowed him softer Home -

 

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim. 

So, what is college?

As I understand it, neither the state's elected officials nor my university have clearly articulated to the public what it means to be college educated, especially in the 21st century.  The looming layoff makes it evident that my understanding of what it means to be college educated is worlds away from what the university's managers think.

The following commentary was published in April 2015.
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What is Oregon’s definition of a college education?

I am delighted that Oregon’s Legislature is discussing higher education via the many bills that have been introduced.

There is urgency as well. College education is rapidly becoming a must-have for the young to be economically successful, though I am personally frustrated with the marginalization of vocational education. While a ninth-grade level education would have been good enough a century ago (hence, the tradition of celebrating high school graduation as an achievement in life), the worry now is that a person without a college degree might not even get an interview for an entry-level job.

Further, many students earn college credits from community colleges, for-profit institutions or colleges in other states, and we want to help them with putting all those credits to use toward a degree and not waste that investment. All these matter, especially when a typical college graduate exits the system with more than $20,000 in debt.

I understand, therefore, the legislators’ interest in making higher education more efficient. The bills being considered include accelerated college credits programs that begin even from the high school years, to making transferring credits across institutions easier, to funding that will be tied to outcomes.

However, these also have the potential to make the current situation even worse for a single reason that we do not seem to appreciate and recognize. Investing in, and growing, “intellectual capital” via higher education is not the same as patching together college credits gained from different institutions starting with the high school.

Such a patchwork would add up to a college diploma, yes. However, that piece of paper is not by itself any measure of the intellectual capital that is vital for a vibrant economy and democracy.

If lawmakers believe that higher education is merely a collection of college credits, then their efforts — and the resulting investment of taxpayer dollars — will be wasted. As Aristotle observed centuries ago, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. A mere collection of credits from different places, or even from the same institution, will only rarely add up to what it means to be college-educated.

If it is more than collection of credits, then what exactly is a college education?

Unfortunately, that is the discussion that is sorely lacking. “What does it mean to be college educated in the 21st century?” is a question that is neglected and increasingly, even discredited.

Higher education institutions in particular deserve to be blamed for not articulating a clear idea of what it means to be college educated. Colleges and universities, instead, typically offer a cafeteria menu-like format of classes to take toward graduation. It is such a checklist system that has also led lawmakers, and students and their families, to think of higher education as nothing but a crazy patchwork of credits.

On the other hand, a committed and sustained discussion on what it means to be college educated in the 21st century will lead to a clear definition of how we ought to prepare students for “a world of unscripted problems,” to borrow a phrase from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Now, if only the lawmakers can force us to think about that question!

Should I have gambled?

I rarely found students to be at fault.  I have even told them so.  The system is messed up, and is set up much to the disadvantage of students like the ones at my university, most of whom do not come from privileged backgrounds.

But then, I never followed up those talks with students by telling them that they should take my classes and major in the programs that my department offered!

The following commentary was published in August 2014.
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College: The million-dollar gamble

Will you be at ease with your 18-year-old gambling with a million dollars?

High school students are told that they need to go to college because of the difference of a million dollars in lifetime earnings that a college degree makes. While that figure itself is debatable, it means that we place enormous pressure on 18-year-old high school graduates to choose wisely.

Most of them do wisely allocate their time between classes and part-time work and the occasional toga party and graduate hoping to land that dream job that will start delivering the million dollar premium.

However, more and more college graduates are finding out that there are very few meaningful full-time employment opportunities. As the Economic Policy Institute noted, "the Class of 2014 will be the sixth consecutive graduating class to enter the labor market during a period of profound weakness."

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York echoed a very similar trend: By "historical standards, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have indeed been quite high since the onset of the Great Recession. Moreover, underemployment among recent graduates — a condition defined here as working in jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree — is also on the rise, part of a trend that began with the 2001 recession."

The unemployment and underemployment of college graduates is worsened by their debts. Inflation-adjusted average debt of the graduating classes has tripled in 20 years; the average Class of 2014 graduate owed about $33,000.

Such a context makes a high school graduate's college investment a risky bet towards that debatable million dollar differential.

It is not always the students' fault when they find themselves unemployed or underemployed after graduating. After all, one only needs to recall any number of movies from the past and be reminded that college students were all not scholars every waking moment either.

So, what happened?

The social contract has changed.

Even until a few years ago, it did not matter what students studied (their academic majors) as long as they were able to earn the diploma and demonstrate their abilities to prospective employers. Employers, in turn, knew well that they had to invest in the new hires and train them with respect to the content of the job as well as with soft skills like communication.

Now, employers are no longer eager to make that investment. Corporations have abandoned the commitment to invest in the young, firmly guided by an ideology that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Thus, students are rarely able to land valuable paid or even unpaid internships in corporations, and it is now up to the graduates to prove that they are competent with the content knowledge and job skills.

Which is why the risks associated with the million-dollar college bet appear to be heavily on the students themselves. Would it be too much to ask corporations not to always wear the blinders of short-term profits and to look at the longer term, too?

A guru with no followers will be unemployed, of course

I have often felt guilty that my salary depended on students and their families getting into debt.  To me, working at a university was never transactional.  I always felt a deep commitment to students.  Every once in a while, because of such sentiments, I have even talked with students about the precious dollars.

In the following commentary that was published in May 2011,  I even referred to those kinds of discussions that I have had with students.
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If only we were all aware of the cost of higher education and engaged in those discussions as much as we are painfully in sync with gas prices.

Every once in a while I point out to students that in the academic quarter system, it costs about $110 every week, per term, for each of the four-credit classes that I teach. A majority of that $110 is paid for by students through tuition and fees. Taxpayers chip in a significant amount as well.

Such an expensive investment is guided by a belief that college education is about future employment and economic productivity, but that's not entirely true. In fact, this linkage of higher education to economic performance is relatively new in human history.

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades. As one looks back to the days of gurukula in India or Plato's academy, it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing. Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

Thus, higher education wasn't an industry, either. Galileo pursued research on the cosmos because of his undying, and heretical, curiosity, not because he thought of it as a convenient opportunity to charge students fees that they could not afford.

But especially since the post-World War II years, there has been a transformation that's resulted in a twisted understanding that higher education is some sort of a credentialing service for young adults interested in joining the 21st-century equivalents of trade guilds.

The irony is that it doesn't require an undergraduate degree to complete the tasks in service-sector jobs. Yet we've managed to convince ourselves that a college diploma is a must-have for mere survival, let alone prosperity. Most students I talk to feel that they have no choice but to get a college diploma if they want to get any sort of job anymore. And that presents a horrible choice.

After spending $110 week after week for classes like mine, students graduate, typically, with about $20,000 in debt, only to realize the realities of employment. Despite all my full disclosures in the classroom, they are shocked to find that there really isn't a job waiting for them and that their diploma isn't necessarily the guaranteed route across the (un)employment gates. In fact, trade guilds often add and require their own training and certification.

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases -- even in my classes in the summer. This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever. As economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families and taxpayers, begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

Maybe students and taxpayers will then demand a refund of the money they spent on my classes, eh?

A victim of the perfect storm

If my luck runs out and I end up unemployed, it won't be because of outsourcing.  It will be because faculty and administrative colleagues at my university couldn't be bothered with the warnings that I had been conveying to them over the years.  I have often referred to my own Cassandra's Curse--how much people have always dismissed my warnings--and I now face potential career-ending unemployment.

As I noted in that commentary on outsourcing, “If we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”

A slightly edited version of the following was published in February 2018:
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A perfect storm is brewing in the Oregon public policy environment. When that storm makes landfall, Oregon’s higher education system will be devastated beyond recognition. 

For years, it has been a struggle to fully fund the state’s public universities. But, it wasn’t always like this. Back in the early 1960s pictured in the movie “Animal House,” for instance, the government typically picked up two-thirds of the in-state tuition expenses, and non-tuition fees were minimal. There was no undue financial burden on students, who could easily manage to pay their share through part-time jobs during the school year and by working full-time in the summers. 

That model has been flipped. Now, taxpayer dollars pay for less than 10 percent of the research universities’ operations, and the regional universities—like Western Oregon University, where I teach—manage with a quarter of the operating expenses paid for by the state. Most of the rest comes from student tuition and fees, for which many students I know work full-time even when attending classes. 

This financing model will worsen when the next recession hits. 

While any recession is difficult to predict, it will arrive sooner than later. Economies go through a period of growth, followed by stagnation. Currently, the entire world is experiencing economic growth, after the disastrous Great Recession of 2008 that hit us particularly hard. Since the end of that recession in June 2009, we have had steady growth in the economy over the past nearly nine years. The average unemployment rate in the US is now at a low 4.1 percent, with 16 states having rates even lower than the average. 

However, growth rates cannot be sustained forever. The nature of business cycles makes investors jittery as we near the peak. This is what we are beginning to see expressed through the volatility in the stock market, when the Dow Jones Index dropped by more than thousand points, not once but twice in the same week. 

The coming recession will make state dollars scarce. When that happens, public higher educational institutions cannot even dream of balancing their books on the shoulders of students. Even now, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from Oregon’s public universities with more than $27,000 in debt—a financial burden that the partying students in “Animal House” did not have to worry about. To subject our students to even higher debt levels will be outright robbery. 

Further, because Oregonians, like all Americans, are having fewer kids, the current K-12 student population in Oregon will not translate to increasing numbers of native students at higher educational institutions. The potential decrease in student population will mean lower revenue from tuition and fees. All these will further complicate the coming budgetary battles at Salem, when the next recession comes. 

One way to bring in additional revenue is by admitting students from other countries. Foreign students pay much higher fees than our residents do, and they are eager to come to the United States for their undergraduate and graduate education. Recent estimates are that there are more than a million foreign students studying in the US, and they brought in more than $39 billion in revenue to colleges and universities.

Even locally, it was a healthy decade of increasing numbers of international students enrolled at the University of Oregon. But, as this paper reported on January 13th, “international student enrollment at the University of Oregon dropped for the second year in a row — representing a more than $6 million decrease in annual revenue.” 

But, the Trump administration is increasingly making it difficult for international students to come to the US. His xenophobic rhetoric, and the government’s denial of student visas, mean that we can expect numbers to further decline in the coming year. To put up blocks against international students does not make any economic sense when they help balance the higher education budget, leave alone the benefits of greater understanding across cultures. 

The final piece that makes for the perfect storm is this—over the past couple of years, the political rhetoric in the country has turned intensely anti-intellectual. “We need more welders and less philosophers” has become a mantra. Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful. 

Tragically, we seem to be in denial even as the storm is gathering force. This means that when the recession hits, it will result in a destruction of public universities, for which there will be no disaster relief. I hope educators and political leaders will begin to prepare for the coming storm, keeping in mind the best interests of the state’s children and youth who are our collective future. 

Was I ready for an unscripted future?

Continuing with the series that started here, I am amazed that I lasted this long in higher education while writing commentaries in which I was championing the ultimate loser--liberal education.  All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called liberal education, but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  Once I found it, I latched on to it pretty strongly.

Now, liberal education at my university is rapidly sinking and there is no flotation device for me who doesn't know how to swim!

The following commentary of mine was published in March 2016.
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The price of crude oil and of gasoline have been tumbling to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling for $147 and “experts” predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric price of $200. Now some of those same “experts” are wondering whether it might get closer to $20. There is also a strong feeling that when the prices climb again, $50 might be the ceiling.

A belief that oil prices would climb forever propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering programs. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline.

But over the past few months, news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who will hire a petroleum engineer now?” Oil and Gas Investor, a trade publication, discussed enrollment declines in U.S. programs offering degrees in petroleum engineering.

This is not new. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As the price of oil rose, and as it stayed in the $100 range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come” said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil prices and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown.

It is not merely about a particular resource. We need to think about technological change, geopolitical issues, the health of the global economy and more, all of which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and their implications for employment are not the best indicators to prepare for the economic conditions and the jobs that lie a few years down the road. Even a few years make a huge difference -- the freshmen who began studying petroleum engineering four years ago face the reality that perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on the economy’s current characteristics are betting against the only thing that we know for sure -- the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the distant future. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving people worrying about their futures.

What, then, can young people do? And what should universities do for the young? As the American Association of Colleges and Universities wonderfully put it, the challenge is “educating for a world of unscripted problems.” They’re unscripted because we do not know what the future holds.

But we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future: We can do it by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely involve serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we conclude that we need more engineers and materials scientists, only to realize a few years later -- as was the case with Hynix in Eugene -- that the entire factory could close down. We seem to consider only the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” those students will have skills that they will be able to apply in industries completely different from those they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is about more than a major. It is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”

I led to my own unemployment?

Maybe it was not an issue of running out of luck, but that I was not working hard enough to make my own job secure. 

Instead of writing commentaries to tell the public how awesome I am, I wrote opinion essays like this one from May 2016 in which I wrote that "college is really not about the major."  Perhaps there is virtue in the pursuit of selfishness.  Nah!

The following commentary was published in May 2016:
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“School teaches you only to be better at school,” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment.

The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

Without even knowing it, the student was channeling Ken Robinson. In a highly entertaining TED talk back in 2006 (way before “TED talk” became a part of our everyday vocabulary), Robinson noted that “you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The composition of the academic credits toward a college degree itself easily gives this away — a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be wrapped up within a year and a half after high school.

Even the preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important — skills like writing, thinking, communicating, researching and more — are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about.

Yet the myth persists and, despite all the research, there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others. Of course, that is the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs like elementary school teaching, for instance. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best — unless one wants to be a college professor.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young and, hence, the country’s future, then the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than art history, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers.

Instead, society needs to pay attention to whether students are mastering the skills that are needed to be gainfully employed, along with a broad understanding in order to be caring citizens. Else it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Layoff is the price for overselling college?

The second in the series in which I think about the real possibility of losing my job. (Click here for the first entry.)

In different ways, I have always been worried that college is being oversold.  Anytime such a commentary was published, while I received appreciatory emails from the general public, it was not the case with the people employed in higher education.

It is not a surprise that the dollars and cents aren't adding up anymore.  Maybe it is a surprise that I had a job this long!

The following is my commentary that was published in the summer of 2007.
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Does U.S. oversell college?

A new school year begins soon. I look forward excitedly to meeting new students and re-establishing connections with those who return. But once again, I start the year with the nagging question: Are we overselling higher education?

Growing up in India, it was quite common to run into people with advanced degrees working in unrelated jobs essentially because, well, there were very few positions to match their educational qualifications. Most of the bank clerks I have met in India have degrees in literature or the sciences. During our trip last December, the telephone salesman my father was talking to was happy that he was able to get that job soon after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Selling phones or working as a bank teller do not require four years of college. So, why the degree?

Two reasons stand out.

First, there's the faith that college is the path toward prosperity, and that therefore everyone needs to go to college. Thus, parents do all they can to ensure that their children attend college. Second, college education serves as a filter for employers who are faced with the daunting task of selecting from among the many, many applicants for jobs. This further reinforces the notion that college degree is important.

Against such a background, I can't help but wonder whether our drive to get more high school students to college is a variation of the Indian blind faith that college degree will lead to economic prosperity. Déjà vu all over again!

Ironically, while we "elders" are focused on getting more high school graduates to college, it appears that practically every student I meet in my university is familiar with the joke about college degrees and jobs - you know, with the punch line, "Would you like fries with that?"

Students are aware that a college degree might not get them a job after all. This reality that students see is a total contrast to, and disconnected from, our focus on college.

Perhaps employers here in the United States use the college degree as a sorting tool just as employers in India do. By demonstrating that they successfully negotiated hazards like me, students implicitly tell prospective employers that they have the requisite skills to do the job. But then all we have done is unnecessarily raise the entry-level educational requirement, when in reality a degree is not really required and a high school diploma would have sufficed.

Studies show that the average life-time earnings of college graduates are significantly higher than those of high school graduates. But the studies do not seem to account for the possibility of inflated requirements of educational qualifications.

Further, if the recent preoccupation with outsourcing is what is driving us to focus on college, that is all the more the reason why we ought to focus on jobs that cannot be outsourced, many of which do not require a degree. Plumbing, auto repair and caring for the elderly cannot be outsourced to India. Here again, we are all too familiar with the complaints about how expensive plumbers are, or how difficult it is to find people who can help with the rapidly growing elderly population. Yet we choose not to steer more youngsters into such lucrative careers because we are fixated on college degrees that don't always guarantee jobs.

In India, too, there are boundless opportunities for people interested in plumbing, caring for the elderly and other occupations that don't require college diplomas. Urban India is increasingly short of such help. Samad, the plumber on whose services my parents rely, has become so successful that he has made a career change and is now a real estate agent. Samad did not even complete the eighth grade, a total contrast to the newly graduated mechanical engineer selling telephones.

Of course, university education is not merely about economic productivity. It is also to develop a culture of learning and an appreciation of various aspects of life. Personally, I am immensely thankful for the opportunity that I have to pursue learning as my vocation. But at a huge cost to the youth, are we incorrectly advocating that college education is the only avenue for individuals to be economically productive?

Running out of luck!

A month ago, I authored a commentary about the coming layoffs at the university where I teach.  I wrote there:

Will I never set forth toward class again and work with students, like how I have been doing since joining WOU in 2002? Only time will tell.

We are now a month away from the final decision.  As the doomsday clock winds down, I thought I would re-visit some of my education-related commentaries.

The following was published in March 2008.
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An Honored Ambassador For All of India

When a freshman student in the honors program said, "Dr. Khe, you are the first nonwhite teacher I have ever had," two others immediately jumped in with "mine, too."

Of course, even a kindergartner will easily figure out from my appearance and accent that I am from another country. But until that chance conversation, it had never occurred to me that I would be quite a few college students' first nonwhite instructor ever.

When I left India, I came to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the graduate student population was so multinational that race and ethnicity were nonfactors in my daily life.

After completing graduate school, we lived in Bakersfield, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. While not the ethnic salad bowl that Los Angeles is, Bakersfield, too, had a significant nonwhite population. Every once in a while I ran into people who thought I was Latino until my accent gave it away.

It is more than five years since we moved to Oregon. Living here has been a wonderful experience, and all my interactions have been pleasant. If all of a sudden I am the personification of "diversity" to my students, it is because for the first time I am at a university where only about 13 percent of the students are nonwhite.

This percentage reflects the demographic characteristics of Oregon; according to the 2000 census, whites accounted for almost 87 percent of the population. It is therefore quite possible that both white and ethnic students had nothing but white teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade.

My lack of experience with such an educational environment - despite all the discussions of diversity and multiculturalism - meant that I was not quite prepared for the idea that I am the embodiment of "diversity" to many students. Later, when I engaged my upper division students about this topic during the warm-up before class, their responses were similar to those of the freshmen.

James, a nontraditional student who had initially kept quiet, suddenly came alive with a question: "Hey, Dr. Khe, does this mean you feel a huge responsibility now?"

The answer was a no-brainer. "Yes, because I now feel that if I mess up, there is a good chance that students might think all Indians are awful." With such a responsibility, it is no wonder that I have nagging shoulder pain!

I am concerned about making a good impression, particularly because of the saying in the Tamil tradition in which I grew up, which translates to, "You need to sample only one grain to ensure that the rice is cooked." That one small piece tells us whether the entire pot of rice is ready for consumption.

Of course, the rice analogy does not translate well to human experience. Statistically speaking, we ought to have a random sample that can then substitute for the entire population before we can draw a conclusion. However, I would guess that it is not uncommon for people to draw conclusions based on strange events. We are humans - and we err!

Thus, to a large extent, I now have an opportunity that is presented to very few people. To my students, I am now the metaphorical single grain of rice representing a billion-plus Indians. In the months that have passed since that conversation with freshmen in the honors program, I feel a constant reminder that every day in the classroom could easily be a make-or-break situation for the planet's Indians.

While this is a huge, and perhaps unfair, burden, it is an incredible honor and privilege to fill such an ambassadorial role. I am hoping to make the best of this newly discovered honorary position that I never knew I had.

Wish me luck.

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PS: Click here to read about the demographics of the faculty at my university.

The temporary inanity of a grumpy old man

It was a commentary that broke the internet, it seemed.

Mr. Epstein, 83, an essayist, author and former editor of The American Scholar, has been accused of advancing offensive views before. In a 1970 essay about homosexuality in Harper’s Magazine, he called gay people “cursed” and “an affront to our rationality.” 

“If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality” off the face of the earth, he wrote.

I hope that Epstein has "evolved" on this issue like how Obama famously said that he did.

I have read many essays by Epstein and blogged about them too.  One of his books, with his signature, was in my bookshelf for years.  It is was one of the three or five books that I received after The Atlantic selected my question for an interesting column that the magazine featured a few years ago.  All the books were signed by the respective authors.  Unfortunately, none of the books interested me and I donated them to charity.

There are three posts in which I have referred to Epstein's essays.

In this one, I appreciated the point that he made about "parenting":

My father and I did not hug, we did not kiss, we did not say “I love you” to each other. This may seem strangely distant, even cold to a generation of huggers, sharers, and deep-dish carers. No deprivation was entailed here, please believe me. We didn’t have to do any of these things, my father and I. The fact was, I loved my father, and I knew he loved me.

I have a suspicion that this cultural change began with the entrée into the language of the word parenting. I don’t know the exact year that the word parenting came into vogue, but my guess is that it arrived around the same time as the new full-court press, boots-on-the-ground-with-heavy-air-support notion of being a parent. To be a parent is a role; parenting implies a job.

Under the regime of parenting, raising children became a top priority, an occupation before which all else must yield. The status of children inflated greatly.

The guy can articulate a point of view. 

He could.  But apparently not anymore.

When reading this post in which I had quoted from another essay of his, it struck me why Epstein wrote about the "Dr." in Jill Biden's name.

George Santayana claimed that one of the reasons older people tend to grumpiness is that they find it difficult to envision a world of any quality in which they will not play a part.

Epstein is now the grumpy old man that he wrote about six years ago.  He finds it difficult to envision a world of any quality in which they will not play a part.

I hope that I will keep the grumpiness well inside me as I get older--life is easier when we learn from other people's mistakes ;)

The stories that genes tell

Almost a decade ago, I gave myself a gift. I paid to have my Y chromosome analyzed as a part of a global study: "The Genographic Project was launched in 2005 as a research project in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration."

It was about the old story of migration out of Africa, and not about uncovering any mysteries in my heritage.  There isn't any mystery about my people.  I was glad to help researchers figure out the migratory paths our ancestors took while moving out of Africa into the different corners of the planet that we now inhabit.  And, incidentally, find out the geography of my own genes.

Only a man, who has the XY chromosomes can pass the Y chromosome on to a new generation.  I opted to get this Y chromosome mapped.  Back then, the technology was expensive and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this in order to map the X chromosome too.

The result did not surprise me.  My people have lived in the Subcontinent for a long time.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today. ...

Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

The man who gave rise to marker M20 was born in India or the Middle East. Your ancestors arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan.

But--and this is important--my ancestral father who came to India about 30,000 years ago was not among the first people to come to the Subcontinent.

Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.

By the time he arrived in India, he was an immigrant in a land that was already populated, and this was about 30,000 years ago!

When we take such a long view of where we come from, we will lead humbled lives.  We won't care to think about whether we are different from others, and whether there are some who are inferior or superior to us.  We will recognize our shared past and work together as one.

In this big story, there are millions and millions of subplots.  One of those is told in this fascinating essay in The New Yorker.  It is about skeletons in a high altitude Himalayan lake, Roopkund, that is frozen for most of the year.  Who were those people?

In the process of describing how genetics is helping uncover the mystery, the essay discusses how science helped piece together a story of Europeans by looking at the Y chromosome evidence of the Yamnaya.  The "power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events":

In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover.

I was born into a family of Brahmins whose Vedic beliefs was orally transmitted and later written down in Sanskrit, which was derived from the language spoken by the Yamnaya.  How did this happen, and when did this happen?  What happened to my ancestral people who arrived in the Subcontinent more than 20,000 years before the Indo-Europeans arrived from the Caucasus?  How do all these stories square with the civilized human being that I am?

Some day, we will understand many such mysteries of how we came about. 

Ice Ice Baby

As a kid, I was always impressed with the big city of Madras.  The buildings were bigger. People seemed to know more things.  And there was a lot happening all the time.

My father, who has always had a special place in his heart for Madras after the tragic and sudden death of his father during a visit way to the city back in 1930, was a lot more energized than his usual high-octane self when he took us around.  I could never understand then how a man with the utmost devotion to the sleepy village of Pattamadai could be so much in love with a big city. 

As I recall, every visit we ended up going to the same neighborhoods in Madras--Mahalingapuram, Royapettah, Mylapore, T-Nagar, and Triplicane.  I think it was near Triplicane that there was an "ice house." 

When I first heard "ice house," the nerd in me expected to see a structure that was like an igloo that I had read about.  Stupid me!  It was a carry over from the old days when ice was stored there during the bastard raj.

Ice in the near-equatorial conditions was a rare item back then.  I grew up without a refrigerator at home, and with no culture of drinking and eating anything that had been super-chilled.  On hot summer days, we drank hot coffee or tea, and continued on with our lives.

And then I arrived in the land of ice cream! 

I was stumped the first time I saw bags of ice cubes in the supermarket, and people hauling them to their cars.  It continues to amuse me even after all these years when I see people walking out of stores with wafer cones that overflow with multiple scoops of ice cream-- on a cold winter evening! Americans who have to have ice in their already chilled sodas!  

Observing a new culture is absolutely fascinating, and offers valuable lessons on the human condition.  This is also why I love traveling to places where I am an alien who cannot even understand the local language.  Some day soon, after Covid eases, I hope to resume such travels.    

After more than three decades here, I rarely use the ice dispenser that my refrigerator has.  I cannot even recall the last time that I had ice cream in a cone, and never an overflowing one.  The tropical boy continues to live within this balding middle-aged man.  

(Why all these about ice?  Because I read this.)

A nugget of life

In the summer of 2013, I blogged about meat that is grown in labs and bioreactors, which are essentially the prototypes of the factories of the future.  I wrote then: "It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals."

It is not that I am a cave-dwelling carnivore.  Far from that.  As with any other development, this too fascinated me.  It interested me so much that I wove this news item into appropriate contexts in my introductory classes.  Student response was typically and overwhelmingly one-sided--meat that doesn't come from killed animals but is produced in factories is unnatural.

I would then nod along, and ask them if they eat pasta.  Of course they did.  "Isn't pasta produced in factories?  Have any of you tried making pasta?"

Once--and only once--a young woman's hand went up.  "Sometimes I make pasta with my grandmother," she said.  And then added that it was a lot of work.

My point was this: If students eat "factory-produced" pasta and hot dogs and whatever else, why should they view the lab-grown meat any differently.

I love this Socratic tradition, which I might not get to practice for too long though.

Seven years after that blog post, the world is now getting closer to making cultured-meat a reality in the marketplace.

The first lab-grown, or cultured, meat product has been given the green light to be sold for human consumption. In the landmark approval, regulators in Singapore granted Just, a San Francisco–based startup, the right to sell cultured chicken—in the form of chicken nuggets—to the public.

Just had been working with the regulators for the past two years and was formally granted approval on November 26.

You need a reminder on how this meat is produced?

Most cultured meat is made in a similar way. Cells are taken from an animal, often via a biopsy or from an established animal cell line. These cells are then fed a nutrient broth and placed in a bioreactor, where they multiply until there are enough to harvest for use in meatballs or nuggets.

There is no killing involved. "The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients."   The fact that there is no killing involved makes all the difference to many millions. 

Of course, the killing is not the only issue, which is why there are many firms in the race:

Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork, with a view to slashing the impact of industrial livestock production on the climate and nature crises, as well as providing cleaner, drug-free and cruelty-free meat. Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild.

For now, as with any innovation, the costs are high, and the process is energy-intensive.  But, again as with most technologies, scaling will rapidly decrease costs and the demand for energy.

At some point, the US-based research/entrepreneur will go global--that's the plan: 

"We didn't work two years to get the approval just to sit on this," says Tetrick. "After Singapore we'll move to the US and Western Europe." But US availability won't be that simple: A regulatory process for cultured meat doesn't yet exist between the USDA and FDA

I imagine that tRump, who famously eats steak with ketchup, would have freaked out with this news story!

There are interesting parallels between the cultured meat and electric car sectors: Both are introducing a technology that can inspire initial resistance from consumers and existential alarm from conventional producers, both involve a major shift in infrastructure, and both need some degree of regulatory air cover to succeed.

It has been a long, long way from the African Savanna, and there is no going back.

Your money or your health?

"I'm worried about the surge," my friend said as he prepared to roll the garbage can home from the street.

Neither one of us can understand why some people refuse to follow the public health protocols.  Nine months into the pandemic, it is no longer about any lack of information about the virus and the damage it could cause to the infected person.  If the specter of being lonely in the hospital and perhaps even intubated doesn't humble them enough to wear a mask and maintain a social distance, well, what will?

What motivates these deviant minds?

Researchers set out to do just that: "Just who are these unmasked deviants, and what motivates them to ignore COVID-19 restrictions?"

I would hypothesize a few motives: Money (jobs/income); youthful indiscretion; and political affiliation.

What did the researchers find from 60,000 responses from more than 30 countries?

not a single country ranked the likelihood of getting infected with COVID-19 as a higher risk than suffering economic consequences stemming from the coronavirus. On average, people around the world are more motivated by their wallets than their health.

So, the jobs/income motive hypothesis is validated.

In many countries experiencing second and third waves, there are people who simply ignore or actively protest against governmental restrictions on their movement.The politicization of COVID-19 suggests that people have other pressing concerns that motivate them to de-emphasize the pandemic.

Do these people protest because the restrictions affect their jobs and incomes, or ... The article doesn't include a discussion on this.

The youth angle? "age is not a reliable indicator of rule flaunting."  Interesting.  This finding contradicts the general opinion that is ready to blame the youth.

So, what can be done?

To help mitigate financial strains, a key concern of publics around the world, policy makers can do more to support state-run welfare systems and encourage private solidarity. To depoliticize virus control, bipartisan leaders can communicate the long-term economic benefits of virus control. To reduce grievances, there can be public recognition of essential workers and less blame applied to entire groups. In other words, we recommend a focus on addressing human needs and motivations that could determine whether individuals are willing and able to participate in virus control.

Bipartisan?  With these maniacal Republicans actively engaging in partisan politics contesting the election results and telling their voters that Covid is a hoax?  Bipartisan ain't gonna happen!

Focusing on human needs?  Of course we must.  But, not with these maniacal Republican leaders who are eager to help only one kind of a person--corporation!  A bipartisan deal is not looking possible anytime soon.

Such is life in the good ol' US of A!

Wait

These are stressful times in many ways.  Not that life in 2019 was hunky-dory, before pandemic became a household word in 2020.  Living has never been without stress, but COVID-19 has taken us all to a whole new level of stress.

Prior to the global pandemic, America had already been dealing with a host of pervasive stressors such as health care access, mass shootings, climate change, rising suicide rates, and an opioid epidemic. Fast forward to the present day, as our country continues to struggle with our new reality amidst the global pandemic, select groups of our country are facing greater stress and poorer outcomes.

A few months ago, in my Twitter feed, I read a comedian's comment that the coronavirus has made us forget mass shootings because we are not gathering in groups anywhere now--not in schools, churches, movie halls, and open-air concerts, which have all been the favored venues for the armed sociopaths.

Re-working another comedian's joke, I wonder how many of us ever thought in 2019 that it was one heck of a good year and that the year that followed--2020--would suck.

We feel acedia.  We feel lots of things.  We are dealing with stress.  

[Many] Americans are taking their anxiety, frustration, anger and stress out on their jaws and teeth. “There’s effectively an epidemic of jaw muscle pain in the country right now because of COVID,” said Dr. Mark Drangsholt, chair of the Department of Oral Medicine at the University of Washington’s School of Dentistry.

I suppose the jaw, not the entire face, is the index of the mind!

Here's one easy way to unclench your jaw, and to put your worries and stress aside.

Listen to Wait, read aloud by Amanda Holmes.

Maria Popova writes that Galway Kinnell's poem addresses the "elemental question of existence with extraordinary compassion and spiritual grace in a poem he wrote for a student of his who was contemplating suicide after the abrupt end of a romance."

The poem works for any kind of disappointment, frustration, stress, anxiety, anger, ...

I’m feeling acedia

Perhaps the title of this post is all Greek to you.

It should be.  

Etymologically, acedia joins the negative prefix a- to the Greek noun kēdos, which means “care, concern, or grief”.

Of course, the moment that we read that, we might jump to the conclusion about the negative of "care, concern, or grief" to be something like apathy.  Not so.  The author writes that "acedia is much more daunting and complex than that."

So, what does acedia mean, and why blog about that now?

We are trapped in this age of the coronavirus.  We are working from home (if we are lucky enough.)  Sit-down restaurants have become distant memories.  Travel we can only dream about.  Even friends and relations, well, we keep away from them.

In such a setting, it seems like everything is a drag.  Even though we have all the time to do stuff, it ain't happening.  At the same time, months have gone by really quickly.

Acedia.  "We’re bored, listless, afraid and uncertain."

Often we catch ourselves wondering if we are coming or going.  We begin to do something, and soon decide it is not worth the time.  We are all feeling acedia.

John Cassian, a monk and theologian wrote in the early 5th century about an ancient Greek emotion called acedia. A mind “seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading”. He feels: 

such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.

Recognize this emotion now?

Can you do anything about it?

Decrease your engagement with the media.  That itself will do you a lot of good.  Maintain your relationships with the friends and relatives who matter to you.  And, "maintain healthy sleep, exercise, food and drink habits. Keep a journal, too. Research shows that expressive writing helps people process difficult emotions and find meaning."

Blog, like I do.  Eat, drink, and be merry.

Oh, it is totally ok to admit that you, too, are feeling acedia.