When Our Sphere Gets Shrunk, There's More Time To See What's Still There - The Sun And The Moon And Merton

 Last night, when I went outside, the moon was already big.  And a little googling helped me set my camera so it wasn't washed out.  

And today the sun streamed through the windows to highlight parts of this bouquet KS dropped off the other day.  

I love how flowers go from youth to old age in a week or so, revealing wonders before returning their atoms to the earth for other flowers to use.

I didn't mention flowers in the post title, mostly because what struck me was how the sunlight changed them.  I think of these pictures more about light than the flowers.  But, yes, the light spotlights details of the flowers.  

And tonight I watched the moon through the bare branches of a birch in the back yard.

And let me slip in this last picture - from one of the Olé classes I'm taking this month - Thomas Merton.  I first learned about Merton on an early Talk of the Nation show.  I was stunned by all the people who called in to talk with host Ray Suarez about this modern monk/philosopher, people who were moved and inspired by his words in his many books.    I learned that I had a couple of 'connections' too Merton.  (We can connect with people in odd ways because our paths have crossed, sort of.)  Merton died in Bangkok in 1968, electrocuted in a shower.  At least that was the story I heard.  I was in Thailand teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer.  If I read about his death at the time, I don't remember at all.  I didn't know who he was and probably would have passed over it quickly.

Image from Kathleen Tarr's Olé presentation

Merton also spend some time that year at a monastery in Eagle River, Alaska, a community that is part of the Municipality of Anchorage.  

I got a chance to talk to Ray Suarez some time after the Merton show when he was visiting Anchorage and told him how remarkable I thought the Merton show was.  He said that was an early show, but when the Merton call-in was so wildly successful, he knew that Talk of the Nation would be a success.  It turns out that Kathleen Tarr, who's teaching the class is a serious Merton scholar and that has added to the richness of that first class.  Three to go.  

On a more somber note, something I'd hoped this post would stay away from, I learned, as I was looking up Merton's death just to confirm the details, that a book was published in 2018 saying that his death was murder, not an accident.   The story of his death by electrocution in a shower in Thailand was very plausible to me.  Someone I knew had been knocked unconscious in a shower when the light went off and he tried to turn it back on.  Fortunately, he got up shortly and was fine.  

And enjoy the sun, the moon, and even think about reading a book by or about Thomas Merton.  It's something I look forward to myself.  

“This was a time when the phrase gender bias didn’t exist, except gender bias existed,” - Stories of RGB's Law School Classmates

 An article in Slate, The Other Women In RGB's Harvard Law Class  from July of this year looks at the lives of the nine other women in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Harvard class.  I started pulling out quotes to be teasers for people to read the article.  But what should I be highlighting - the discrimination they faced as women at Harvard Law and getting jobs?  Or should I focus on their accomplishments?  A little of both made sense, but then could I leave any out so I wasn't quoting so much?  Especially after yesterday's post that took a lot from Rosling's book?  

I've gone through and edited out most of what I'd highlighted.  You really should read the original article.  Or, down at the bottom of the article you can listen to it while you're doing something else.

All in all it's compelling reading.  Echoing some themes from the Rosling post, 

• Things change so slowly that we don't really see the progress.  But an article like this helps make it clear.
• Things can be both better and still bad.  The conditions for women are much better today, but there is still much room for improvement.

Carol Brosnahan, born 1934

She was accepted into Wellesley, where she studied economics. Then she took a job on Wall Street, researching investments for wealthy clients. “I wasn’t allowed to meet the clients, because women weren’t supposed to be managing their money,” she recalled.

She stayed at the job for a year, during which she got engaged. “My fiancé said it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to work, but I could go to school,” she said, which is how she began an application to Harvard Law School. 

But while she got along well with many of her male classmates, her professors often singled her out in humiliating ways. She recalled the night when Dean Erwin Griswold asked the women why they were there in law school, taking the place of a man. 

By the fall of 1960, Carol had stopped working altogether. She had three children in under four years. Between the second and third pregnancies, the family moved to the Bay Area for Jim’s job with the U.S. attorney’s office there. When her youngest daughter was still an infant, Carol took the California bar exam—her second certification, after Arizona—as she began to feel she was “going crazy” staying at home. So she took a job with the Continuing Education of the Bar, which provides training and publishes books for practicing lawyers. She began editing and writing books on the law, focused on poverty, bankruptcy, and tenant law. Jim was supportive, but “my husband didn’t change diapers,” she said. “He was a great dad, but the household and the children were my responsibility. It was a lot of juggling and not very much sleep.”

Even as she moved up in the agency, she found that her career growth was limited. “This was a time when the phrase gender bias didn’t exist, except gender bias existed,” she said. Though she had been at CEB more than a decade, she said the director refused to give her the same title as her male colleagues. “And that’s what got me to put my name in for a judge—gender bias.” Eventually, she got a call from a man in Gov. Jerry Brown’s office to inform her she would be appointed to the Berkeley municipal court. “And tell Jim you got this one on your own,” the man said.

Rhoda Solin Isselbacher, 1932–2015 

Her family thinks Rhoda entered Harvard Law as the school’s first-ever pregnant student. She once told an entire lecture hall that she couldn’t be expected to walk to another building to use the women’s restroom (the only one in the entire law school), and instead proposed that she could use the lecture hall’s men’s room, as long as she put a sign on the door. The men agreed. 

Rhoda had child rearing help—from nannies. In 1993, when Ginsburg was named to the bench, Jill Abramson wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about how the careers of the other women in the class of 1959 were shaping up. Rhoda told Abramson the story of being pulled away from a client meeting to take one of her children to the hospital for a dog bite. “My husband’s a doctor, why isn’t he on his way to the children’s hospital?” she remembered thinking. “But fathers didn’t do that back then.”

In the mid-’70s, Rhoda became in-house counsel at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, then known as the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute. (Rhoda negotiated the deal that led to the name change.) She had recently undergone two years of chemotherapy for breast cancer, and the job felt personal. At the time, biotech was giving rise to knotty legal and ethical questions about patient rights, clinical trials, and intellectual property. “It was a new area of law she spearheaded,” her son Eric remembered. She set up one of the very first patient advocacy programs in any hospital in the country.

After 10 years, Rhoda was forced to resign when Kurt became the founding director of the competing Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. To avoid any conflict of interest, she returned full time to the small law firm where she’d spent most of her career, Epstein, Salloway, and Kaplan—which later became Epstein, King, and Isselbacher.

Virginia Davis Nordin, 1934–2018

After graduating, Virginia found that potential employers were unwilling to take her seriously. She told the Journal in 1993 that in those early interviews, she was often asked if she had plans to get married or have children. “You’d end up discussing your theories on birth control and nothing about your credentials,” she said. She landed a job clerking for a federal judge in San Francisco and went on to work as in-house counsel to a New York shipping company—a job she loved but ended up quitting because, as she told the Journal, her boss sexually harassed her.

Wiltrud F. Richter, born 1935

There were warning signs from the start. During the application process, she was interviewed by a man who cautioned her not to get married and drop out. “Harvard thought it was doing a groundbreaking thing by accepting us. That was made very clear,” she said.

When classes started, she found that no men would even greet her, except for a few fellow Swarthmore graduates and one professor. “Nobody else, literally,” she said. “It was like living on an island by yourself. … They didn’t want women.” Trudy doesn’t remember ever interacting with her fellow female students. She lived alone, sharing a hallway and bathroom with an architecture student. “We exchanged a few words every day,” she recalled. “And that exchange was very important to me because otherwise nobody was talking to me.” Even her professors ignored her, she felt.

Her first job as a lawyer was with a legal services firm, working on its family law cases. She later opened her own practice for low-income clients—handling everything from family law matters to misdemeanor defense. She also represented minors needing approval for abortions, pro bono, and helped women fleeing domestic violence obtain court orders. But she wasn’t able to make enough to even cover malpractice insurance and had to close after a year.

She spent the next decade working for the Disability Rights Center of New Hampshire. While there, she filed an amicus brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court in defense of a man who was convicted of a crime for having sex with a mentally disabled person under what she believed to be a discriminatory statute. The court agreed with Trudy and ruled that a person with a disability who is genuinely able to consent to sex can do so. Another time, she resolved a case involving two deaf parents and helped spare them from losing custody of their children. “I don’t think anyone would account for my life in terms of major legal successes because of the kinds of clients I had, and the kinds of issues we had,” she said. But she took pride in her “good legal imagination.” 

Her list of championed causes grew long over the decades. She campaigned to end the death penalty in New Hampshire, pushed to have her Unitarian Universalist church convert to solar power, and lobbied for legislative relief to undocumented immigrants. For five years, she supported a family from Bhutan as they transitioned to American life and used her legal training to draft a manual for other volunteers to do the same. The manual remains the one relied on by the church for its refugee program today. In 2018, at age 83, Trudy was arrested for participating in a die-in with the Poor People’s Campaign in New Hampshire. “Overall, it seems to me that the things I’ve done that I’m proudest of have not necessarily always been part of my work as a lawyer,” she said.

Marilyn G. Rose, 1934–2011

 “She had a real passion for serving the underprivileged,” her stepson Tim Childers said. “It was so much a part of her nature.” As a lawyer, she successfully argued a case that redefined how low-income people and people of color across the country could access health care, and its logic undergirds the entire health care law reform movement.

Marilyn never complained to her husband or stepchildren about her experience at Harvard. If anything, Tim and Teresa recall, she seemed to have thrived there. But it was also one of the first places she started advocating for systemic change—in her second year, she was denied membership in Harvard’s all-male public defenders program because women could not be sent to jails to interview male defendants. So she and fellow classmate Eleanor Voss publicly lobbied to have women allowed into the program, arguing that even without access to jails, they could still do plenty of work. Marilyn didn’t end up benefiting from her crusade, but the program opened up to women the year she graduated.

According to her husband, Bobby, Marilyn graduated with honors and then watched male classmates with worse grades land jobs at firms that had rejected her. Some companies openly admitted that they didn’t hire women. So she “had to go work for the government, the only place that offered her a job,” Bobby said. After a stint at the National Labor Relations Board, she transitioned to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the United States Department of Health and Human Services). She found a comfortable fit in the Office for Civil Rights, where she helped desegregate hospitals and mental institutions.

Flora Schnall

After graduating, Flora remembers a frustrating string of interviews. “The only thing that kept me looking was that I knew that Ruth hadn’t gotten a job,” she said. “I felt if Ruth, who was first or second at law school, couldn’t get hired, I just had to keep looking.” Through connections, she landed a job as assistant counsel to Nelson A. Rockefeller when he was governor of New York. “It was just sheer luck,” she said. “I was the only woman in the office, and they wanted a woman in the office.” The job thrilled her. 

Betty Jean Shea, born 1934

Betty Jean was confident she would excel at Harvard, but since she had a friend who had been among an even earlier group of women there, she knew it wouldn’t be easy. “She said it was challenging, but she also said it’s sometimes fun to be the only girl there.” The experience could be fun, Betty Jean said, but for the most part she felt she was ignored by the professors, with the notable exception of Barton Leach and his “ladies’ day,” which left her feeling under attack. Her fellow students were no better, often asking her what she was doing there. “Young men would blithely ask that question to you directly,” she said. “I’d just say, ‘I’m interested in the law, and I couldn’t figure out a better place to go.’ ” She found solidarity with her roommates Flora Schnall and Carol Simon. “We could tell stories and laugh about a great many things that wouldn’t be so easy to laugh at if you didn’t have them with you,” she said. “It made it easier to take it less personally.”

 

Betty Jean’s first major job after graduation was as an attorney for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where she rubbed shoulders with influential New Yorkers. It was the best job she ever had, she said, but even there she faced discrimination: She said that she was hired by a man who felt “uncomfortable” hiring women and did so only to please his more progressive boss. She recalled that once, when attending a luncheon at the all-male New York Stock Exchange, she had to arrive through a freight elevator to a separate entrance, because the regular elevator was “for business, it was for men”—even though she was there to give a speech on a new regulation she had helped draft. Afterward, she called up the president of the New York Federal Reserve, whom she didn’t personally know, to complain. He promised not to send any more speakers to the exchange until they changed the policy. They did,

 

Alice Vogel Stroh, 1935–2007

Despite having excellent grades, Alice was rebuffed by almost all the firms she applied to. She eventually found an opportunity at the agrochemical company Monsanto, which at the time was looking to hire women. She landed a job in their legal department—one of just a few women at the time doing corporate litigation. She stayed for eight years.

She left the job after she got pregnant, but it’s unclear whether she quit or was simply taking her maternity leave. Her daughter was stillborn. A grieving Alice wrote to Monsanto, telling them she would “not have the joy of being a mother” and asking to return to her job. Monsanto had already filled the position with a man. “She was almost pleading for them to reconsider taking her back,” Elizabeth said. “She had worked so hard to get to where she was, but as soon as she stepped aside to have babies, then that door closed very quickly for her.” She adopted her first of two daughters that same year and left the legal profession to become a full-time mother.

Eleanor Voss, 1936–1958

On Nov. 13, 1958, Voss was riding as a passenger on a motorized scooter when it collided with a taxi cab in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, intersection, killing her. After her death, her friends and classmates from Goucher created a fund, the Eleanor Voss ’56 Fellowship, to send one graduating senior to law school each year. It continues today.

So many good reasons to volunteer or give money or both before November 3.   

Bev Beeton, I'm Glad I Got To Know You

 The Anchorage Daily News has an obituary for Beverly Beeton this week.  

I was a faculty member at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) when Dr. Beeton became Provost.  She was a formidable presence.  My description of her at the time was something like this:

"I've never seen her wearing less than $1000, and she speaks like Katherine Hepburn.  Does anybody speak like that naturally?"

My sense was that Dr. Beeton had a one hell of a facade, one that had been carefully developed.  I made a goal of finding the human being behind that facade.  It wasn't a high priority, more like a curiousness.  

One day the opportunity came.  I was chosen to chair the committee that nominated the people who would get honorary degrees.  And Dr. Beeton, as Provost, oversaw that committee.  She invited me out to lunch to talk about how the committee would work.  

A couple of years before that (my dates are a little fuzzy, but it was close to that time) I had gotten a grant to create a class that would focus on women in public administration.  The proposal was to get five prominent women public administrators and give them the freedom to design a class to "pass on the wisdom of women administrators."  We had three women who had been state commissioners, one Native Alaskan woman leader, and a Superior Court judge (who eventually would become an Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice.)  They were given the freedom to design the class and Arlene Kuhner, an incredible English professor, and I would figure out the mechanics of making it work.  

The structure they gave us was a panel of women administrators each week addressing a different topic with lots of time for Q&A. They invited the women administrators and set up the subject, Arlene and I took care of all the academic work, though the five women, if I recall right, got to see some of the work the students did.   It was a great class and I learned a lot.  I recall one of my students, a man from China, telling me afterwards how impressed he was that all these women were so smart and capable and how it made him realize how China was wasting so half its human resources by not giving women equal access to important positions.  

So, at the lunch,  after discussing the committee work, I mentioned the class and how it had been run as a lead in to this question:  "You're the most senior woman administrator at the university (this was before we had any women Chancellors).  You must feel somewhat isolated."  The ice was broken and from then on we had an entirely different relationship.  We talked about that isolation, about the problems of sex discrimination, and lots of other administrative issues.  

I remember one time she told me that she wanted to set up a more objective evaluation system where administrators and faculty would have to develop measurable outcomes.  That was something I had my graduate students do for their jobs in one of my classes.  But I always told my students that it was useful for them to do for their own jobs, but it was impossible to do really well. And it was easy to misuse the results of such measurements.  Especially if someone just focused on the numbers and not the context of the numbers.  There are just too many important, but hard to measure aspects of their jobs. 

My response to Bev (by then she was Bev to me) was that it was a difficult but interesting exercise and suggested that she set up an example of how to do it for her own job as Provost.  Her response was, "My job is just too variable and complex to be able to do that."  My response was, "That's what every other administrator and faculty member will say.  If you can't do it for your own job, then it doesn't seem fair to ask others to do it."  I never heard about that project again.  

But this started out being about getting past the facade and learning about the real human being inside.  After our first lunch and the committee meetings that followed, I was in her office for something and mentioned that my daughter, a Steller Alternative School student at the time, was taking a spring break hiking class in Utah.  I had resisted at first.  Why do Alaskan students need to go to Utah to go hiking?  Well, she countered, we're going to learn about Utah too.  I asked a colleague of mine who was from Utah for an assignment for her.  He suggested she read Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country.  She agreed she would. 

When I explained this to Bev, she really opened up.  She'd grown up in rural Utah in a not particularly academic setting.  She felt very much like she didn't belong there.  She really wanted to get out of Utah, as far away as possible.  She was even a fashion model in New York, I think, for a while - which began to explain her very un-Alaskan high style way of dressing.  She got herself through school.  But essentially became as different a person as she could.  And once I got past that facade, I got to meet a very warm, accomplished, and charming woman.  

We didn't become the kind of friends who see each other out of work  - though I did run into her once on a garden tour.  We didn't have a lot of opportunities to talk about non-university issues.  I only learned from the obituary, for example, that she'd been married twice and had children but we were allies of a sort who liked each other at the University.  

One other observation.  Bev was a smoker.  When the university banned smoking indoors, small knots of people could be seen huddled outdoors in the dead of winter, smoking.  It created a cohort group of people from various parts of the university hierarchy who had smoking in common.  Their basic connection was that they were smokers, but they got to develop other things they had in common as well.  

I haven't seen Bev in years, but my world is poorer knowing she is no longer with us.  

This wandered a bit.  It's memories, not an academic paper.  It is a reminder that there is a human being inside all the people around you.  A person who is hidden behind whatever facade they've intentionally or unintentionally formed.  Try to talk to the human being - especially in these days of high conflict - instead of just to the facade.  

Random Thoughts On COVID-19 Impacts Now And Later

 Impact On Kids 

There's lots of talk about the debilitating impacts on the mental health and development of kids with schools out of session.  But I haven't seen anything (I did look, though not exhaustively) on all those kids for whom school is torture because they are shunned, picked on, bullied, beat up, or otherwise made to feel miserable at school.  For them, distance learning is probably an improvement.  

Medical Waste

I've been appalled for a long time about medical waste.  I think it started when I accompanied someone to the ER for a twisted ankle that was swelling.  It was winter here in Anchorage with lots of snow.  We got into the ER and they pulled out some sort of chemical ice pack, they twisted it and put it on her ankle.  I don't recall the price of the item - over $50 at least.  All the free snow and ice you could want, perfect for molding in a plastic bag on an ankle, was just outside the door.  

When you get a shot, the syringe and needle is tossed.  My mom was a lab technician and I remember the autoclave (there's a word that's been sitting idle in my brain for decades just waiting for this post, I even forgot it was there) where they sterilized the glass syringes and the needles.  Now things get tossed. 

When my mom caught MRSA in the hospital - new doctors kept coming in and each put on a whole set of protective clothing before entering.  (They all wanted to do new tests which required drawing more blood from my poor mom.)  They saw her for less than five minutes, then tossed all the protective gear when they left.  

While I don't know how much this kind of waste adds to the total medical costs, I do know it contributes to the landfill problems, including plastics and ocean plastic gyres.  

But when PPP were in short supply at the beginning of the pandemic, medical personnel began wearing masks all day instead of throwing them away after each patient.  Hospitals found ways to sterilize PPP. 

I hope there are people rethinking our throwaway hospital practices.  How can they reduce what they add to landfills, reduce the use of the raw materials, reduce costs?  All the medical supply companies will be fighting them all the way.  It would be interesting to see the role of medical supply company lobbyists play in the developing the rules hospitals must follow in these practices. 

Food

The whole way my household gets food has changed radically.  We use an app and then go pick it up 'curbside' in the parking lot.  (There really isn't a curb involved.)  I'm getting better finding what I'm looking for with the app.  I buy less spur of the moment things because I don't see them.  And I realize that we have at least one new staple in our fridge - cottage cheese.  It's an easy to 'prepare' snack that's probably healthier - and less expensive - than the Talenti gelatos in the freezer.  Also, without going out to eat, our food bill has gone way down.  

Will we go back to in-store grocery shopping when this is over?  I  suspect so, but I don't know, but when we're pressed for time I'm sure we'll use the apps.  And I know there will be a huge demand for restaurants.  And there will be plenty of people ready to open restaurants to meet that demand.  

Laws of Nature versus The Rules of Men*

The notion of social construction - things that are created by humans - is becoming clearer during the pandemic.  Often these are institutions that people just assume are 'natural', fixed, the way things are.  Like slavery once.  Like women not voting.  Like until death do us part heterosexual marriages.  (And the * in the heading is to emphasize that until very recently in the US, nearly all laws were made by men.) 

We're seeing now how the economy can collapse.  How school can be cancelled.  How our customary forms of greetings can be put aside.  How covered faces can be seen as the fashion of bandits, the assumed oppression of some Muslim women, to now a badge of political political persuasion or concern for health.  

But while we keep being enlightened about the 'made up' quality of the rules of people, the laws of nature keep steady - the sun comes up each morning, the weather does its thing, viruses do theirs.  

Science is the study of the laws of nature.  Science doesn't always correctly describe how nature works, but it's surely proving that science does a lot better than religion or politicians who want to ignore it for their own personal gain.  

I'm hoping that when this is over, a lot of the rules of men that oppress other people, that keep people poor, that destroy the natural world, that allocate wealth, will be seen as just made up rules that can be changed to create a more equitable and positive place for people to live.  

Video Conferencing

As I'm writing this post in Anchorage, I'm also on jitsi watching my grandkids in San Francisco playing with various Lego and other building materials.  We're just hanging out together doing our own things, but we can look and see each other as we do it.  It's VERY cool that we can be together like this.  I think back to my childhood when even a call to outside the local area in Los Angeles cost so many cents per minute, and international calls were dollars per minute.  This video conferencing is as amazing a change as anything I can think of.  (As I was proofing this my granddaughter pulled  apart her big brother's lego creation and he got so mad he hit her.  And she cried and told him to go away.  And now they've made up with the guidance of their dad.  

Everyone enjoy your weekend.  Time for me to get away from this screen.  

Some Nice Stuff For A Break - Clouds, Sunflowers, And The Power Of Teachers

First, here's the view I saw at Goose Lake yesterday.  Clouds can be so amazingly beautiful.  

And sunflowers at UAA.  

My own sunflowers - planted from seed - are just now budding.  There is time for them to bloom still!  (I'm trying to put this on the right and have the text on the left, but Blogger has created a new "improved" version and I haven't figured out how to align the pictures and text the way I want them.)

And finally, I found this AOC twitter thread truly endearing.  

pic.twitter.com/eUhZ3P21uR

— Alberto Cairo (@AlbertoCairo) August 13, 2020

{If it's too small to read, click on it.  It will take you to the Twitter post.  Then click on the image again and it will let you see each of the four tweets enlarged.]

This young member of Congress is so intelligent and so creative!! And then you look at the old men in power and scratch your head.  If more people with the energy, decency, intelligence, and imagination were in Congress, we could have such an incredible country.  My only hope is that when the people of AOC's age now gain power in Congress is that they won't have been worn down by the tedium of fighting entrenched power.  But meanwhile this exchange with her 2nd Grade teacher is priceless.  

University Of Alaska President Resigns - Good Time For Board of Regents To Eliminate Statewide

The Anchorage Daily News just announced that UA President Johnson is resigning as of July 6.

 Johnson was making $325,000 in salary so I'm guessing with his 12 years of previous employment at UA plus his five years as president he'll get an annual retirement of somewhere between $70,000 and $110,000.  (It says he's retiring on July 1 and his appointment was announced July 28, 2015, which is just short of five years. I'm not sure if his pay is based on highest 3 years or highest 5 years.  He first worked at UA in 1996 and July 1, 1996 appears to be the cutoff for counting 3 years of 5 years.  But I'm sure the Regents could give him credit for the missing month if they chose to.) And I'm not even considering bonus pay which he appears to have received.  While he says he donated that back to the University, it would still count (at least it used to) toward his highest salaries.   (Calculating pensions is relatively straight forward, but there are some variables you have to know and I haven't been involved for 14 years now.)

Note: COVID tab above for daily updates on state case counts

Why Not Leave Position Unfilled?
 It had occurred to me when he was the finalist for the University of Wisconsin statewide presidency that it would be a good time to rethink whether we even need a statewide president.


Better Yet, Why Not Cut Out Statewide Altogether?
I also wondered why we couldn't just cut back on most of the positions in Statewide and use that money for faculty who actually teach students and do research and service?

The 2020 Alaska State Budget says , if I'm reading it right, that Statewide had 142 employees making a total of $16,385,300 in salary and benefits.  (That's an average of $115,389 per person).

Instead of having a backup bureaucracy in Fairbanks for every administrative function, they could cut back to just do the things that need to be done to coordinate the three campuses as a whole?  Oregon has already done this.  

"Established in 2011 and vested with its current authorities in 2013, the Higher Education Coordinating Commission is a 14-member volunteer commission appointed by the Oregon Governor, with nine voting members confirmed by the State Senate. The Higher Education Coordinating Commission is supported by the state agency by the same name, comprised of eight distinct offices led by Executive Director Ben Cannon.
The HECC develops and implements policies and programs to ensure that Oregon’s network of colleges, universities, workforce development initiatives and pre-college outreach programs are well-coordinated to foster student success. It also advises the Oregon Legislature, the Governor, and the Chief Education Office on policy and funding to meet state postsecondary goals.
Agency Mission and Values
Agency Mission Statement
By promoting collaboration and coordination between Oregon’s education and workforce partners, as well as through our own programs and policy leadership, HECC staff ensure that Oregonians experience increased access, equity, and success in completing their higher education, training, and career goals.
Agency Values
Transparency, Equity, Integrity, Trust, Collaboration, Accountability, Lifelong Learning"

So there's a volunteer commission and a state agency with 8 offices, each of which presumably has a few staff members.


Growth in higher education administration and administrative salaries is a key factor that many people point to as the reason for the increase in college tuition.  Here are just a few references:

The Reason Behind Colleges' Ballooning Bureaucracies
Universities’ executive, administrative, and managerial offices grew 15 percent during the recession, even as budgets were cut and tuition was increased.

​​​Colleges Must Cut Administrative Costs to Survive This Crisis

There are other articles that say the cost has gone up because of student loan programs or  that for public universities the biggest factor is legislatures cutting budgets.  I'd note that Johnson's here - the UA president he wrote his doctoral dissertation on - was known for going down to Juneau and convincing Republican legislators that money spent on the University was an investment rather than an expenditure, and he reversed cuts.  Johnson was never able to do that.

However, it would appear among the costs universities have direct control over, the biggest factor is administrative costs.  The $16 million figure is just salaries, not any other expenses like upkeep for the buildings they occupy or travel to see what's happening on the various campuses.

If the Board decides to keep the president position, I hope they make fund raising the primary job and let the campuses run themselves with minimum interference.

New Inventions At The Invention Fair

The conference this weekend set me behind on lots of things here.  So let me catch up on the invention fair at my granddaughter's school.  This is a K-6 optional program where all the kids are in two giant connected rooms.  There's an emphasis on independent learning and working cooperatively.     This is part of the local school district.  Sort of like Steller in Anchorage, or Polaris.

They have a three year cycle:  1.  science fair; 2.  environmental project; and 3.  invention fair.

All the kids have to come up with a problem.  Figure out a solution to the problem (the invention).  The presentation at the fair is supposed to cover the process - problem, solution, steps to the solution, materials used, etc.

So here are a few.  I don't post pictures of kids except in rare circumstances with parent permission so the focus is on the project here.

This is a special backpack to carry school papers, using a paper sized folder so papers don't get all wrinkled on the way to and from school.


I need to say there were maybe 50 or 60 projects by first graders to six graders.

This one quantified the number of plastic, non-biodegradable sandwich bags a kid uses a year and talks about the time it takes for the plastic to degrade (400-100 years), the toxic materials in the plastic bag you wrap your sandwich in, and the harm bags do to the animals that ingest them.

And I'm afraid I can't remember the edible material they used as sandwich bags.  It seems that side of the-poster is blocked by a head.  It isn't seaweed because I thought of that as a possibility and they used something else.

This one was my personal favorite.  (After my granddaughter's, of course.)  The inventor explained that her mom kept getting on her for leaving the light on in her room.  So she designed a little M&M holder (in the middle)  contraption to put above the light switch.

And when you turn off the light switch, it causes an M&M to drop out to reward the energy conscious kid.

Here you can see an M&M just released from turning off the switch.





All the kids were at the projects and eager to explain them in detail to anyone who asked.  Even people who didn't ask but were close by.  I know that some of these kids would not willingly talk to a strange adult, but they were so into their projects they all just wanted to tell me everything.






The student who made the Mopping Slippers has a dog that regularly comes into the house with muddy feet.  So she made these slippers with sponges and scrubbers on the bottom that she can wear that help clean up the mess when she walks around.  (She being the student, not the dog.)

I did ask whether the dog jumps on her bed.  She sighed, said yes, but you just have to wash the sheets.

This was another popular invention - a new cookie recipe.  She tried a number of different new types of cookies and as you can see on the poster, Mango won.

Not only is she a good inventor (no one else seemed to think about inventing a new recipe) but also a good marketer.  She had pieces of the mango cookies there to taste.  And I can vouch for these cookies.

This student's problem related to reading in the dark.  So she invented a book mark that had a light on it.

You can see it at the bottom.


Another student had a very similar idea.  He said when he wanted to read at night in bed under the cover, he could never find the light.  So he invented a strap that goes around the book - which I think could also be used as a book mark - that holds a small light.

Another book related invention solved the problem of arms getting tired hold the book.  He took a bike helmet and put two extensions and connected them to the sides of the helmet.  At the end, they had clips to hold a book.  So you could sit with the book held out about 15 inches in front of you.

And this student enthusiastically explained his project.  When I jumped with his skateboard, it often falls away and he falls off.  So he invented a magnet to attach to his shoes and some metal on the skateboard.  He demonstrated the electromagnet he made with the battery and the nail wrapped in wire.  He could then turn the magnet on and off in his hand.

And finally my granddaughter's invention.  Her problem was that her arms get cold, so she wanted to invent arm warmers for her forearms, sort of like leg warmers.  She used toilet paper rolls (with a slit so they could stretch for bigger forearms) and material from old pants and tights to wrap around the rolls.

As demonstrated in this project, the instructions were to recycle materials for the poster boards and most projects did that.

This is a reminder that if you let kids chase what they're interested in, they've got all kinds of creativity and enthusiasm.

TSA Starts Trip Poorly

We both got flagged by the security machine at the Anchorage airport.  I got a very intimate patting down.  "I have nothing in my pockets"  "You're wearing Levis.  The keep you warm and the machine detects heat."  J got the same treatment.  But she got a second one as well.  Here's my wife the terrorist.

Really, how many 70+ year old American women terrorists have there been in the US?  Ones who have a record of recently flying fairly frequently without incident and have round trip tickets, etc. 

There are at least two ways of detecting terrorists:  One is to examine the person - find out if there is anything in their background or behavior that suggests a problem that needs more attention.  That's not what all these airport detectors do.  They examine based on the machine.  They told me when I pointed out that my wife was a very unlikely suspect that "if the alarm goes off, we have to exam."   

This really does feel a lot like theater.  Somewhere there has to be a happy medium between ethnic profiling and terrorist profiling.  How much time and money does TSA spend on people who have .00001 chance of being a terrorist?   I'm sure they have detected plenty of guns with the machines, thrown away lots of pricy water bottles, and someone has sold a lot of scanning machines.  

(I checked.  There seem to be a fair number of companies making money of this theater. ) 

But once we were in the air, life looked better.

The fresh snow on the Chugach looked magical.  

And the Olympic Range was poking out of the clouds as we neared Seattle.  So was Ranier.

If you look closely, there's an airplane to the right of the mountain against the clouds.  

And walking my granddaughter to school we passed this tree with all its leaves in an almost perfect circle below it.  

The school is really wonderful.  It's part of the public school system, but like Stellar and Polaris in Anchorage, it requires a lot of parental volunteer work.  There's grades 1-6 in two large connected and non-institutional classrooms.  Here's a part.  

Every child should have access to a place like this.  I stayed about 15 minutes.  All the kids had stuff to do and were working quietly.  My granddaughter was writing in her journal.  Then they had a small meeting where they talked about empathy.  And about lice - it's that season.  

Later, after school, we went for a walk through the woods while she was having a music lesson.

There's lots of other things to write about, but I've been busy.  

On The Edge Of Snow - And OLÉ Classes Continue

It was in the mid 30s when I went to Pecha Kucha class yesterday, but the streets were good, so I biked.  My presentation was ok, people said nice things afterward.  Here's the first of the 20 slides.

and I tried to make the case for how learning another languages let's you escape the confines of English (or whatever your first language is) as you learn that the words and grammar of one language reflect the world differently from other languages.  This shows most concretely in the fact that words of one language don't translate exactly into the words of the other language.  Even concrete objects might not translate right.  Banana would seem an easy translation, but in Thailand there are about 20 kinds of bananas that regularly show up in the market and many people there pick bananas off trees in their garden.   And that, say, a black cat, has meanings in one culture that it might not have in another.  And words that describe relationships get even trickier.

The Thai words closest to brother and sister really focus on the older/younger relationship more than the gender relationship, or even the blood relationship

People without any blood connection use the terms for older and younger about each other all the time. (And it's different from the more recent US use of 'Bro'.)  At one point I asked somebody, after he'd introduced me to his sixth or seventh 'brother', how many brothers did he have.  Oh, they aren't that kind of brother, he said.

The class liked the blue and red circles I used to show how much the English and German or Thai words overlapped.  I didn't think of that until I was finishing the last slide, the night before the presentation.  Then I went back and put in circles for the different slides that compared English and German or English and Thai words.  Good thing I did.  I argued that when the words don't overlap completely (usually the case) is when you learn what your own language doesn't capture about the world.  And the less the words overlap, the more you learn about yourself and the world.

It was just starting to rain when I returned yesterday.  It was more a light drizzle, and the drops were tiny specks of hail.  Much better than raindrops, not as good as snow.  I could feel them on my face.  But I got home fine, but I was expecting snow on the ground this morning.

There wasn't any and the street in front of our house was wet, but not icy.  And large chunks of sky were blue.   So I biked.  For the most part it was ok but then I saw a police car's lights flashing ahead and this car on the side of the road.

The culprit seems to have been a piece of light brick colored cement at the intersection.  While all the other surfaces were fine, that piece of cement was really slick.  Was there a second car involved?  I don't know.  A stop sign had been flattened.  (I thought I took a picture, but it's not on my phone.)  I walked the bike around the debris and down the hill.  Back on the flat I rode carefully to the church where today's OLÉ classes were held.

By 2:30 when I came back, the sun was out and any ice or frost that had been there was either a puddle or dry pavement.  But I did have two voices in my head this morning.  One said:  "Don't be such a wimp.  You can't let a little weather threat keep you off the bike."  The other said, "A broken arm would really be a pain.  Don't be stupid."  Stupid beat wimp today, but I know I should be more careful.

The classes today were good.  The Innocence Project class was a continuation of last week's list of reasons innocent people are convicted.  I'll put that into another post.  It's interesting.  And this class is a great one after seeing "When They See Us" the Netflix series on the Central Park Five case.  Everything they talk about in the class happens in the series.

The afternoon class was on Pebble Mine.   We've had a representative from Pebble. A person from the Army Corps of Engineers, whose in charge of the Environmental Impact Statement, and today, was someone from Bristol Bay Native Corporation who are strongly opposed to the mine.

A Recovery Day

That's me, like the sun, trying to see through the clouds.  101˚F, chest full of crud.  It wasn't quite that bad yesterday when I went to my OLÉ classes.  But I did try to sit away from others.

I'm staying in today.  I'm not good at being sick  I'm drinking lots of hot water with honey.  But I'll try to get some stuff done.

The sun has broken through a couple of times.  The trees are losing their leaves.  I do want to write a bit about SB 91 - the criminal justice reform bill that was essentially repealed this year because that was the main topic of our state and federal courts class yesterday.  And also about how our class talked about homelessness (the other class) while waiting for the speaker to come.  Actually, it was a good thing we had time to get to know each other better.

Once Upon A Time I Thought I Might Catch Up. Fat Chance.

As I wrote the title, I realized we never can catch up in life, but I was referring to little things like writing blog posts and paying the bills.  Today was my wife's birthday.  We went for a movie and dinner.   It seemed like a good day to spend the early afternoon in a movie, but the rain had stopped and there were even breaks in the clouds when we got there.

 And the snow was mostly gone from the Chugach.


I've already  written about my mixed feelings about going to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.   Now that I've seen it, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have missed anything important.

Even though I've eaten at Musso & Franks, went to movies at the Bruin theater when I was a student at UCLA, and even interviewed George Putnam (there was an ad for his newscast on a bus stop) for my junior high school newspaper.  Putnam arrived in a gold limo - a Rolls, I think - and he smoked through the interview even though his bio said he didn't smoke. (At least that's what my memory tells me.)

The movie began in a Pan Am 747, which set alarms off right way, since the date posted was 1969.  I'd read that the period details had been carefully done.  And yes, I know some odd details.  In this case because I first flew on one of the early Pan Am 747 flights - from Honolulu to Tokyo - in March 1970. (I was flying from a Peace Corps training program I worked at in Hilo to the second part of the training in Thailand.)  Pan Am 1 and 2 had just started flying. I think it was Pan Am 1 that flew around the world toward the west and Pan Am2 to the east.  Did it start earlier in 1969?  I've now had time to look it up and the first commercial flight was in January 1970.

It wasn't a bad movie - though I generally skip movies with lots of violence - but it felt artificial throughout.  Cardboard.  I assume that was intentional since it was about Hollywood and all the phoniness of that life, but as the birthday girl said over dinner at the Thai Kitchen, with all the really good stuff we're seeing on Netflix, it just didn't cut it.

So I'm reduced to writing filler pieces like this because I just haven't had time to finish my thoughts on the Joseph Maguire hearings and several other drafts that probably will never get beyond that stage.  

And tomorrow I start a slew of OLÉ classes.  (Continuing ed classes aimed at retired folks at UAA.  I think they pay for themselves so maybe they won't disappear next year.)   I have an actual project in one that I need to spend extra time on and I haven't figured out what I'm going to do.  It's a Pecha-Kucha class - you present 20 pictures in seven minutes with narration of the story they tell. Well, I've got plenty of pictures, but organizing a compelling story is the challenge.  As I see it now, though I'll probably discover that was the easy part once I get the story figured out.

Other classes I enrolled in include:

• An Overview of the Pebble Copper-Molybdenum-Gold Prospect 
• The Innocence Project
• State and Federal Courts and Current Legal Issues
• Homeless, Homelessness and Finding "Home"

And a one time short class that's a trip to an Escape Room.

I'm hoping the classes will provide plenty of fodder for the blog.

Alaska Now Is Like a Home Invasion - What Do You Do When Your Governor Is The Terrorist Destroying Your State?

Imagine people in your house hauling out your furniture, setting off bombs in different rooms, and tearing out the wiring, plumbing, and foundation and nobody can do anything about it.

If someone physically destroys university property, he can be arrested.  But if the governor destroys the university through line-item vetoes, and he's got 22 legislators on his side, we're just screwed.

It's like watching a terrorist in slow motion, like in a dream in which you can't move. This is what's happening in Alaska.  The governor is systematically destroying the state.  This is no hyperbole, no exaggeration.  And we're struggling to figure out how to stop him.

Brother Francis Dunleavy

"JPMorgan Chase JPM  agreed to pay $410 million to settle charges with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for manipulating electricity prices in the same markets Enron used to play its dirty tricks." And who did the dirty tricks for them? "Saddled with loss producing assets, the team at the Houston-based principle investments unit developed several bidding strategies which turned out some juicy profits.  Reporting directly to Masters, [Francis] Dunleavy and his team showed how “asset optimization strateg[ies]” managed to  turn out tens of millions of dollars in profits from units that lost millions at market rates."  From Forbes.

Our governor got elected with considerable financial and other backing from his brother Francis and from the Koch brothers (via their Alaskans for Prosperity).  And now he's making our state defenseless in the face of Outside resource extractors by destroying the independent expertise at the university that can challenge rosy corporate reports that assert 'no harm will be done.  The environment will be better when we are finished.'  And destroying the government's ability to monitor what they do.  And setting up a brain drain that will set the state back to Territorial days.

Once in office the Kochs gave him Donna Arduin (who practiced trashing states in Illinois, California, Kansas and Florida) to start taking apart those government structures that people most use - education, health, the Alaska ferry. The university is taking a 40% hit (which will cost much more in federal and private grants.) Even normally conservative Republican legislators have joined with Democrats to put the money back into the budget. But enough Republican legislators (22) held with the governor and the legislature couldn't get the necessary 75% of the legislature to override the governor's vetoes.



There have been protests in the streets, at the legislature. People have overwhelmingly testified against the cuts at every legislative hearing. People have called, emailed, and mailed legislators and the governor.  People are reading the parts of the constitution that talk about impeachment and recall and trying to figure out if the language covers his actions.  The constitution does require the state to " establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the State, and may provide for other public educational institutions."  The University Board of Regents has already declared financial exigency.
The constitution also says "[t]he legislature shall provide for the promotion and protection of public health."  The Mayor of Anchorage has already declared a Civil Emergency in anticipation of the impacts of the governor's budget cuts on health and safety and homelessness.

Lawyers are, I'm told, working on lawsuits to stop this madness.

Not unlike at the national level, Alaskans are trying to figure out how to stop invaders, who got into the governor's mansion via election,  from destroying the state as we know it.

Our instincts tell us to keep within legal bounds as we watch him cut vital organs out of the university and kill the Alaska Marine Highway - the only 'road' that goes to many communities.  Imagine a governor bombing major highways so they are totally unusable.  That's what he's doing.

Everyone would love to physically remove the governor from our house to stop the damage.  Or twist the arms of enough (8) legislators until they vote to override the vetoes.  When is a coup justified?  We're too used to the rule of law, we don't know what to do when our elected leader, violates all norms of public participation, is set on destroying key institutions, and is immune to the pleas of the overwhelming majority of the population?

Letters to the editors use logic and reason, but our governor's logical assumptions are rooted in the orders he gets from the Koch brothers and their representatives, not the residents of Alaska and their representatives.  His mantra is "balanced budget, $3000 Permanent Fund Dividends, and no taxes" an unworkable formula.

When the dust settles, we'll probably find lots of legal violations on the governor's part.  One of his first moves was to privatize the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and turn it over, in a no-bid contract, to an Outside company with ties to Donna Arduin.  I'm sure there are lots of other acts like that.

While people continue to do battle some of us need to be working on the emergency recovery plans, but I don't think FEMA helps out with human caused disasters. (Well, they do help if someone causes a forest fire, but if your elected officials are the vandals?)

Obviously this is not just an Alaskan dilemma.  The White House has similarly been invaded.  But the attack on the university and its research capabilities is particularly troubling and a warning to people in other states.  This war on public education and science is, at least partially, aimed at making it harder to fight corporate 'expertise.'  This is going to happen in other states if it hasn't already.

Olé - Chugiak Eagle River Chamber of Commerce Wants Your Thoughts On Closing The UAA Campus There.

Today was the second Friday with my three Olé classes.  As I wrote last week, I'm taking a class on Brain Neurons, one on Photojournalism, and one on the Origins Of English. The Secret Life of Neurons These were the learning objectives in the Brain class.  If you click on the picture it will enlarge and focus better. An easy to share part of the class is this video from the "2 Minute Neuroscience" series on Youtube. This was one of two we saw today: The meaning of intelligence came up today after looked at a chart that showed the ratio of brain weight to body size of many different animals.  It seems one of the dolphins is higher in this than humans.  (Whales have heavier brains, but the ratio to body weight is lower.)  She mentioned that the brain of a certain moth has one part that is highly developed and researchers discovered this was the part of the brain that helped the moth evade bats.  That isn't what I would call 'intelligence' since the moth is not thinking about that, just some part of the brain automatically does it.  Prof. Hannah even said (after class) that the moth can get better at evading bats (at least the ones that don't get eaten first.)  My prior understanding of intelligence was going beyond what the body does automatically.  But as I thought about the different kinds of intelligence Gardiner discusses, some are more like the moth's ability.  Say someone with high interpersonal intelligence.  Perhaps someone's brain is really good at face recognition and interpreting body language, so the person can 'intuitively' know how another person is feeling.  But that person may not know they are better at this than others.  She may assume everyone has this ability.  And she can get better and better at this with more experience.  Is that different from the moth's ability to avoid being caught by a bat?  And  Gardner calls that one type of intelligence.    Perhaps it's the vocabulary that is lacking.  Or is this an ability and when one becomes conscious of it and consciously uses it we can call it intelligence.  I still have to think more about this. Professor Hannah also passed around models of six or seven different animal brains and we were supposed to figure out which was which.  We didn't do too well, but in our defense, we really needed to have them all in front of us at once.  I only ever saw two as they were passed around. Photojournalism The guest lecturer in the Photojournalism class was Scott Jensen, a 22 Emmy award winner who was born at Providence Hospital and eventually went outside and worked in television and has returned to Alaska working with the ADN and KTVA television in Anchorage. Erik Hill, who is the teacher, offered us some links to some of the photojournalism awards that have come out recently. World Press Photo Awards - The winning picture is at the top of the page.  "Crying Girl on the Border" by  Photographer John Moore.  It just eats at me.  Maybe because I've just been with my grandkids and saw the two year old, toward the end of the day start to cry for her mom (who was out of town for work which was why we were there.) Origin of English, On the surface this sounds incredibly dry but it keeps me riveted.  Trying to convey things we covered - like alphabets and  pronunciation of Old and Middle English, well I don't think I can do that.   But here's another video.  This one from the Open University.  But, unfortunately I can't figure out how to embed it here, so you have to go to the link.  It's History of English In Ten Minutes.  The link takes you to the first of ten tracks.  This one on Anglo-Saxon.  Well worth it and shorter than the Neuroscience video. But I can give you some of our homework, which is to find a video of someone reciting the beginning of Canterbury Tales.  Here's what I found with someone reading the old English words, but the modern English translation is there too. And tonight, when I got home, there was an email from Olé with a link to a survey that the Chugiak/Eagle River Chamber of Commerce has about the closing of UAA's Chugiak/Eagle River campus.  Olé offered classes there in the past. Here is my response to question 8. 8. Do you have any suggestions, ideas or options for continuing a UAA campus here in Chugiak Eagle River? Get rid of our governor. Then get Chugiak/Eagle River voters to elect people who strongly support the university and a budget that will keep it thriving (along with other important public services that Alaskans expect.) 157 characters left.

If anyone wants to fill out the survey,  here's the link.  After all, Eagle River and Chugiak went for Dunleavy last November and they regularly send very red reps and senators to Juneau.  Did they think they'd get spared?