If only colleges had a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement!

Last night was a wonderful moment in my teaching this term.

The quality of responses from students to the question that I had assigned them was awesome.  Thoughtful and to the point.  It was one of those "By George, she's got it. By George, she's got it" instances that I like to think that faculty get excited about.

I wanted to let the students know right away that they "got it."  And, even more, I wanted to thank them for making me feel on top of the world.  I wrote to them:

... you folks have done a remarkable job of responding to the question that I had assigned.  It is one of those moments in teaching when I feel like I want to shake hands with every one of you for your responses. 

I added there:

I am convinced, yet again, that it is all worth it.  I can ditch my Rodney Dangerfield syndrome, at least for now.  Thanks for making me feel awesome that I am doing something constructive.

It is especially exciting because that course will not by any means get them a job.  The course is about understanding some of the larger issues of decision-making in a liberal democratic political economy. Even two weeks in, students started commenting along the lines of "I had never thought about these issues."  Through important issues, the students and I engage in inquiry--the kind of thinking that higher education ought to be about:

If a school doesn’t have a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement supporting its curriculum, if going to College X doesn’t mean entering into a force field that boosts each student’s will to learn, grow and discover, then the best rules in the world can only guarantee conformability of transcripts. With such a culture in place, many sets of rules can produce admirable results. Without it, we are tinkering with technicalities of compliance.

That was from a talk that the president of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead, gave at "the Notre Dame Forum on the topic of “What Notre Dame Graduates Need to Know.”  I like Brodhead's phrasing: "conformability of transcripts."  Unfortunately, the transcripts and the mechanics of completing the requirements has resulted in the atrocious "technicalities of compliance." I wrote to students about that too:

In fact, [a much richer and nuanced understanding] is far more important to me as an educator than whether students earned an A- or a C+.

More Brodhead on the habit of mind:

Its value is that it supplies enrichment to personal lives, equips students to be thoughtful and constructive social contributors, and prepares them to participate in the dynamic, ever-changing world that awaits them after college. It’s easy to see why people might get anxious about something whose payoff is not immediate and the path to whose payoff is so oblique. But the fruits of such education can only be reckoned over long time-horizons, as they enable people to rise to challenges and seize opportunities they could not foresee at first. The lives of successful people almost never involve continuing to do what they first prepared for. As their lives unfold, they find that by drawing on their preparation in unexpected ways, they’re able to do things they had not originally intended or imagined.

But, of course, this is not the message that we convey to students, nor do we always have "a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement."  The net result is that most universities like the one where I teach are nothing but glorified diploma-mills: you give us the money, we will issue the transcripts.

Perhaps I am being a Don Quixote tilting at windmills.  But, I find it to be a rich life following my convictions and in pursuit of truth.  All I need is even an occasional moment like the one last night and I feel ready to charge full speed ahead at more windmills.

This academic term is already a success.

Is the game over when even Buddhists engage in genocide?

Not too long ago, it was common for the United States to loudly complain about human rights issues in other parts of the world--in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Iran, ... a long list of countries.  Of course, the US had human rights issues within its own borders (and continues to have) and it also conveniently overlooked abuses in countries that were governed by "our son-of-a-bitch."

Now, it feels like the US has even stopped complaining, at least pretending to worry, about human rights issues.

President Obama will have plenty of opportunities to address human rights issues in the next few days, but my guess is that he will not.  In his post-shellacking 2.0, the President will be in China and then in Burma, and both countries have immense human rights issues, which he will certainly gloss over.

In addition to the lack of everyday democratic rights that people in those countries lack, there is that acutely worrying treatment of the Muslim minority in China and Burma.  With the economic ascent of China, the US has pretty much stopped even whispering about human rights there.  I would love to have a reporter ask the President a question such as, "Mr, President, what do you think about the student protests in Hong Kong?"  Or even, "President Obama, have you ever tasted traditional Uighur dishes?"

Money talks, and bullshit walks, as they say.

But, there isn't even money in Burma.  No nukes, a la North Korea, either.  Yet, we don't seem to care about human rights issues in that country, especially when it comes to the horrible treatment of a certain group:

The Myanmar government has given the estimated one million Rohingya people in this coastal region of the country a dispiriting choice: Prove your family has lived here for more than 60 years and qualify for second-class citizenship, or be placed in camps and face deportation.
The policy, accompanied by a wave of decrees and legislation, has made life for the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, ever more desperate, spurring the biggest flow of Rohingya refugees since a major exodus two years ago.

A few months back, I blogged here about Buddhist monks leading the protests to drive out the Rohingya.  Yes, Buddhist monks, who are supposedly the followers of the uber-pacifist Buddha!

The crisis has become an embarrassment to the White House ahead of a scheduled visit by President Obama to Myanmar next week. The administration considers Myanmar a foreign-policy success story in Asia but is worried that renewed conflict between Buddhist extremists, who are given a free hand by the government, and the Rohingya could derail the already rocky transition from military rule to democratic reform.

The news item mentions that:

Mr. Obama asked the Myanmar leader to revise the anti-Rohingya policies, specifically the resettlement plan. Myanmar must “support the civil and political rights of the Rohingya population,” he said.

A tiny little country Burma is, and all that the President of the mighty US can do is mildly ask his counterpart to do something.  The Burmese president is far from shaking in his military boots!

the government appears to be accelerating a strategy that human rights groups have described as ethnic cleansing.

The Burmese government knows how to keep the Americans off:

In a gesture in advance of Mr. Obama’s visit, the government released 15 political prisoners in early October, including three Rohingya. Among them was U Kyaw Hla Aung, 75, a prominent lawyer, who was jailed after the violence in Sittwe in 2012.
One of the few Rohingya trained as a lawyer — Rohingya have since been barred from studying law or medicine — Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung said it was illogical for the government to insist that Rohingya were not citizens.

Amartya Sen, is among a few who is intellectually involved with raising the awareness of this human rights issue and is even ready to use the "g" word:

Sen said it is important that the word “genocide” not be tossed around lightly, and he acknowledged that this situation looks different from the murderous examples of Nazi Germany and 1994 Rwanda. Still, he said, the term applies in this case, with lives lost not just to the outbursts of violence, but also to the denial of healthcare and the right to work.

Of course, the American people couldn't be bothered about all these.  For one, we are all into worrying about our First-World-problems.  If we do manage to look beyond our own petty problems, then there is that distraction of nude photos of celebrities.  Who cares about some genocide somewhere, particularly if it is Muslims who are targeted!

If the Internet of Things is the future, then I want no part of it!

The other day, I went to Best Buy.  I walked about in the store to look at some of the latest gizmos.  From flashy refrigerators and laundry machines, to snazzy coffeemakers, to cameras big and small, to phones and tablets, all of them made me feel like everything I own dates back to the Flintstones.  I worried that if I talked to a sales person there, whatever I say might comes across as Yabba Dabba Doo! ;)

And then there were all those gizmos with which you can watch your home from anywhere on the planet, set the thermostat, open the garage door, switch lights on and off.  The gizmos that are connected to the internet, and all you need is your smartphone.  They looked cool.  And, at the same time, it is freaky!!!

I am not the only one who is uncomfortable about the future that is already here:

It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. “Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,” reads the ad for one.
Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT).

I used to have a coffeemaker that had a simple clock-driven program feature--load up the coffee and water in the night before going to sleep, set it switch on at a certain time and, presto, the coffee is ready waiting for me in the morning.  I hated that, and stopped programming it.  It felt, yes, freaky.  I was missing my connection to the experience of brewing coffee through all the steps, and being there as the first drops percolated through and as the wonderful aroma of coffee started wafting through the home.   The Internet of Things take that programmable features to a dimension that no man has ever gone before.

These gizmos are slowly creeping up on us:

One reason that it has been easy to miss the emergence of the Internet of Things, and therefore miss its significance, is that much of what is presented to the public as its avatars seems superfluous and beside the point. An alarm clock that emits the scent of bacon, a glow ball that signals if it is too windy to go out sailing, and an “egg minder” that tells you how many eggs are in your refrigerator no matter where you are in the (Internet-connected) world, revolutionary as they may be, hardly seem the stuff of revolutions; because they are novelties, they obscure what is novel about them.

Many of these novelties that are tethered to the internet are simultaneously devices that in turn keep track where we are at any moment.  (Even now, the location info in my smartphone is one that I always keep in the off mode unless I really, really, need that feature.)

as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. In the world of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.

Freaky!

in September Apple offered a glimpse of how the Internet of Things actually might play out, when it introduced the company’s new smart watch, mobile payment system, health apps, and other, seemingly random, additions to its product line. As Mat Honan virtually shouted in Wired:

Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER.

So, where are we headed?

So here comes the Internet’s Third Wave. In its wake jobs will disappear, work will morph, and a lot of money will be made by the companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming. Privacy will disappear, too, and our intimate spaces will become advertising platforms—last December Google sent a letter to the SEC explaining how it might run ads on home appliances—and we may be too busy trying to get our toaster to communicate with our bathroom scale to notice. 

First those evil corporations come for our toasters ...

The Flintstones era is looking better in the rear-view mirror, but is fading rapidly.

But, hey, only twenty-five more years! ;)

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