I recently wrote briefly (it was during my 1200 word limit period) about Guy Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages In it, he's taking on the dominant linguistic paradigm (and Noam Chomsky) which argues that humans are genetically wired for language, all languages come from the same basic blueprint, and thus language does not affect how people think. Deutscher thinks it does.
The first part of the book was really interesting - it's about colors and whether they are 'natural' or 'culturally dependent.' So I'm going to get into this a bit more deeply than I do with most books. But remember, I'm just hitting the highlights, there are a lot more details that fill in the gaps in the book.
[I'd note this is also a great topic to put into your mental notes about how people know what they know - a basic theme of this blog.]
The first major foray into this battle for Deutscher is a discussion of color, or more accurately, a history of what scholars have observed about how humans perceive color. It's fascinating. Deutscher tells us this is important in the debate between the nativists - language is genetic - and the culturalists - language impacts how we see the world - because people think of color as an obvious natural phenomenon. Natural phenomenon - like cats and dogs and birds (and color) should have matching words across languages while abstract concepts could be expected to differ more. Thus every culture should have words for red, green, blue, yellow, etc. If they didn't, then that would give ammunition to the culturalists. (By the way, he does say that the concepts of cats and dogs and birds do have labels across languages that translate pretty easily.)
He starts in 1858 with future British Prime Minister William Gladstone who wrote a three volume treatise on Homer's Oddessy and Iliad. A chapter in the third volume looks at color in Homer's works. Gladstone's conclusion is: there isn't much and what there is, is peculiar. The sea is wine-colored. So are oxen. Honey is green. The sky is black. Blue is never used, and despite Homer's rich descriptions about many aspects of nature, color is almost absent. Gladstone hypothesized that humans 3000 years earlier weren't advanced enough to perceive as many colors modern folks.
Nine years later, a German philologist, Lazarus Geiger, intrigued by Gladstone's observations on Homer and color, examined other ancient texts and found the same general lack of color, and where it was the colors were strange.
I'd note that as I read this, I kept coming up with plausible explanations such as maybe Homer was color blind, only to have Deutscher explain away my point. The idea of color blindness wasn't generally known in 1858 and since the lack of colors showed up in other texts, then everyone would have been color blind, which is pretty much what Gladstone was saying.
But the concept of color blindness was being discovered then and a German doctor, Hugo Magnus, went to Sweden to study a train wreck - despite the stop signal, the engineer went right through. The engineer was dead, but Magnus got permission to test 266 engineers and station masters and found 13 to be colorblind. Deutscher writes:
The practical dangers of color blindness in an age of a rapidly expanding rail network thus became acutely apparent, catapulting color vision to a status of high public priority. . . The climate could not have been more favorable for a book which implied that latter-day color blindness was a vestige of a condition that had been universal in ancient times. And this was exactly the theory proposed in Hugo Magnus's 1877 treatise on the evolution of the color sense.
Then people began to realize that there were still people living in 'pre-modern' cultures and they should see what words they have for color. This became a big deal and surveys were sent out to test as many 'primitive' languages as possible. The results found similarly restricted language vocabularies.
No one could any longer just brush off their [Gladstone and Geiger's] findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the color descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic license. For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world.
In 1898, W.H.R. Rivers went on an anthropological expedition to the islands in the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea to study a group of people who'd only been exposed to outside Western culture in the previous 30 years. He found their color words to be very similar to what was found in Homer and other ancient writings - black and white, reddish, green which included blues, and just different ways of using color labels - including black sky. But when he gave his subjects color tabs, they were able to pair up matching colors. So, the conclusion was that while they could see and distinguish all the colors, how they described colors in their language was very different from how modern European languages described colors. It was the language that was different, not their physical ability to see the colors.
This was a 'big win' for the culturalists. It 'proved' that language and culture affected how people see the world.
Until 1969 when Berlin and Kay published a color guide - Basic Color Terms - based on studies of 20 language groups. Their study showed that all very similarly classified the same basic colors as did European languages - black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orange, and brown. The ball was now back with the nativists. Language doesn't affect how you see the world.
Except, 20 language groups aren't very many. As linguists began to test other language groups, things proved to be less neat, and a number of languages proved to have different ways to categorize the color spectrum. There was also discussion about the order in which different colors gain names in different cultures. Black and white followed by red seems to be a basic pattern, but then the others aren't as predictable. This has left enough ambiguity for both sides of the nativist - culturalist battles to feel justified. (I'm skipping a lot in the 90 so pages he covers this in.)
Deutscher ends this section by saying both sides have points and summarizes the state of affairs as Freedom Within Constraints.
In light of all the evidence, it seems to me that the balance of power between culture and nature can be characterized most aptly by a simple maxim: culture enjoys freedom within constraints. Culture has a considerable degree of freedom in dissecting the [color] spectrum, but still within loose constraints laid down by nature. While the precise anatomical basis of these constraints is still far from understood, it is clear that nature hardly lays down inviolable laws for how the color space must be divided. (90-91)
He also tips his hat to William Gladstone before going on to other topics (he suggests we're going to hear about space and spatial relations, kinship, and grammar) in the culturist-nativist wars. Here's a passage that showcases the kind of stylistic playfulness that makes this book so much fun to read:
A lot of water has flowed down the Scamander since a great Homericist who occasionally dabbled in prime ministry, set off on an odyssey across the wine-dark sea in pursuit of mankind's sense of color. The expedition that he launched in 1858 has since circled the globe several times over, been swept hither and thither by powerful ideological currents, and got sucked into the most tempestuous scientific controversies of the day. But how much real progress has actually been made?
After another paragraph that chronicles modern scholars' lack of mention, even knowledge of, Gladstone's contribution he goes on:
And yet Gladstone's account of Homer's "crude conceptions of colour derived from the elements" was so sharp and farsighted that much of what he wrote a century and a half ago can hardly be bettered today, not just as an analysis of Homeric Greek but also as a description of the situation in many contemporary societies: "Colours were for Homer not facts but images: his words describing them are figurative words, borrowed from natural objects. There was no fixed terminology of colour; and it lay with the genius of each true poet to choose a vocabulary for himself."
"Meanwhile" begins with our young hero Jimmy choosing whether to buy a chocolate or vanilla ice cream cone; choosing vanilla sends Jimmy home after an enjoyable but uneventful afternoon, while picking chocolate sends him on myriad science-fiction adventures.
The lines lead you to other parts of the book - like a very elaborate Choose Your Own Adventures book. But it's complicated enough to require this instruction page that warns you:
Most [adventures] will end in doom and disaster. Only one path will lead you to happiness and success
"I wanted to start the book off with the type of choice that we make every day," Shiga told CBR. "Once thereader is familiar with how choices in the book are made, I try and graduate to weirder choices like whether to kill every human on the planet or to travel back in time and punch yourself in the face."
Definitely worth checking out at the library or book store. Meanwhile, here's a link to Shigabooks
Dear Lemon Lima (Lima like the bean, not the capital of Peru) first came to the Anchorage International Film Festival in 2007 as a lushly beautiful short film focused on teenagers who were real and interesting. The color was vivid. The exchanges between the kids was often the way kids talk to each other when they have serious things to say and there are no adults listening. And mostly the movie was anti-slick. Hercules' parents seemed a bit arch, but I took it that we were seeing the world through the kids' eyes, so maybe that's how they looked to him. It was maybe ten minutes and I guessed it was the first glimpse at what promised to be an interesting feature.
[I've found - at video.nymag.com - what appears to be the short we saw in 2007 and some of the main characters, including Vanessa, are played by different actors. I was close, it's 11 minutes. The color on here isn't as rich]
And it came back to the Festival in 2009 as a feature length film. And it got an audience award in the feature class that year.
Suzi Yoonessi, the director, emailed me the other day to say the movie would be released VOD (she thought I was hipper than I am and it took me a while to figure out that means video on demand) on Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, and Verizon Fios in Alaska on March 4th. It will be released in LA that date too in theaters. Then March 11 in New York. If it does ok in those places, the rest of the world might be able to see it in theaters too.
But as I went to look for more information I found info on the movie, but the Alaska star's name wasn't included. Savanah Wiltforng - an Alaska Native teen - plays the lead role of and assimilated Yup'ik who gets the Native scholarship to a boarding school in Fairbanks and because she has the scholarship people expect her to be expert in all things Native which she then has to become.
Here's an example from IMDB - where's Savanah's name? It's not there.
Screen Capture from IMDB - so this is an image, the links won't work except IMDB
Here's the official poster:
Can you find Savanah Wiltfong's name on the poster? Even though she's the star, you can't find her name among the four names on top. It is on the poster. It even says "Starring Savanah Wiltfong." But you'll have to double click it to be able to read the purple on black small print. (hint, right side)
When I asked by email what happened to the star in the publicity, Suzi Yoonessi, the writer and director (can you find her on the poster?) wrote back, in part:
Savanah is included in the materials that our PR people send out, but it seems the popular teen sites are really focused on Meaghan Jette Martin or Vanessa Marano, since they have larger fan bases. This isn't a bad thing, since kids will make it out to see an indie film because of Meaghan's popularity in more mainstream material.
Maybe my readers are cooler than I am (or teenier) and recognize those other two names. I get it though. The point is to hook people to what they know. I get it. Let's see if it works.
The director spoke after the short version in 2007 and surprised me by saying the story takes place at a boarding school in Fairbanks, but because it was so expensive to do it in Fairbanks, she was doing most of it in Washington State. I posted about that and asked Fairbanks folks to contact her if they could help with housing and other services, but it didn't happen.
It came back to the Anchorage International Film Festival in 2009 as a feature length film. I liked everything about it, EXCEPT that it purported to be in Fairbanks. If Fairbanks residents want to see what there town will look like after 50 more years of global climate change, then check out the movie. You'll be hanging around in your shorts and t-shirts on the grass mid-winter. But Anchorage audiences voted it, as I said, an Audience Choice Award for what that's worth.
Suzi made this film as an independent. That means she made every penny stretch as far as it could go - which didn't reach all the way to Fairbanks except for a few location shots as I understand it. The State Film Board hadn't reopened yet. Now that there are tax advantages for film makers on location in Alaska, let's hope this is the last 'green December in Fairbanks' movie until the weather has really changed that much.
On the good side were great acting, interesting characters, and a good story about an assimilated Alaska Native girl discovering her Native roots. It does use the underdogs in competition theme, but has a sweet - I'm tempted to say quirkiness, but it's only quirky for a movie. These are real kids who just aren't the cheerleader types that most common in Hollywood type movies.
And it starred a young woman from Eagle River - Savannah Wiltfong.
So, Alaskans, check it out. My first reaction to the Dear Lemon Lima website was it was waay to girlie for me, but it is original and it captures an aspect of the film.
Here's the trailer.
(Think this is too promotional? Trust me. Like always, no one has paid me to write this. I just think pushing a film by an indendent director - and Indian-American woman if I'm correct - dealing with Alaska Native assimilation and then discovery of her Native culture, starring an Alaskan, with a (unfortunately fake) Fairbanks setting is the right thing to do. I'm just letting people know it's there.)
[This is a bit embarrassing. I thought I'd posted this yesterday, but it went up as a tab - you can see those just above here - home, anchorage film festival, chancellor search. So I'm posting it for real now.]
As often as I've gone through the Anchorage airport, I've never gone upstairs in Concourse C to the observation deck and Alaska Native Art Gallery.
Yesterday I took some time to check it out on the way to Seattle. (When your daughter writes that she has a week off and do you want to visit, there's only one answer.)
The gallery is upstairs ( there's an elevator too) after you come out of security as you get into Concourse C, the long one where the Alaska Airline gates are.
The architect designed this so the window at the end of the concourse perfectly frames Denali (Mt. McKinley) on a clear day. Yesterday it was, but it was hard with my little Powershot to get the mountain clear. My memory (faulty as it is) says there didn't used to be a roof blocking most of the mountain. But it is that white speck above the roof in the inset I put on the right.
There are some very good pieces in the gallery. The white mask is by Fred Anderson of Naknek and the other is by Nathan Jackson of Ketchikan.
But I don't think think the art work they have is supposed to be getting direct sunlight as it was yesterday. It probably doesn't happen often, but I imagine a museum curator would cringe.
The blur isn't that I was shaking, but it's the shadow of the lettering from the sun.
I think this is "Going to the Mud House for a Party" by Rosalie Paniyak of Chevak. Seal skin face, appliquéd nose, seed bead teeth, badger hair, bearded seal gut parka. . .
Admission to this gallery is a plane ticket to or from Anchorage since it is inside security. It's also at the observation deck so there is a view of all the Alaska Airlines planes.
Attention: If you ignore this invitation, your registration will not be
activated.
Good luck!Best regards,
VK Administration
It turns out VK.com is a Russian version of Facebook. Here are some comments on a Stream Recorder.com forum in 2009:
I wanted to delete the thread at first, but then realized that it might be useful. Many of my friends really use vkontakte mainly to listen to music. It is absolutely free and they don't have any ads. And you can find almost anything there. Although vkontakte itself doesn't allow to download music, it is pretty easy to download/save HTTP mp3 music streams. You can use many free programs for that or even download such streams with your browser. You can also use Replay Media Catcher that renames and tags songs automatically.
10-13-2009, 08:14 AM
I registered in vkontakte and I like it! I would add that not only music but video could just as easily view and download!
Wikipedia has this article (which they say needs verification):
VKontakte (Russian: ВКонтакте, internationally branded VK) is a Russian social network service popular in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Because of its design and functionality, VKontakte is often claimed to be a clone of Facebook, accommodating not only a similar concept, but also a comparable business model.[citation needed] However, its incorporation of other features makes it more like YouTube, Pandora, and MySpace rolled into one, with an interface highly reminiscent of Facebook.
As of December 2010[update], the network has around 102 million users and is the leading site in Europe in terms of user visits, page views, and the amount of data transfers per day. VKontakte is ranked 35 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the third most visited website in Russia.
Since 2007, major Russian companies have been sending job offers via VKontakte. Most of the site's users are university and high school students. However, as the site's popularity increases, more and more people are joining, many of whom are youths of various age groups.
In English, В Контакте or V Kontákte is literally translated as "In Contact", but basically means "In Touch". It can be alternatively translated as "Linked In", which is another mostly business-oriented social network.
View More By This Developer Open iTunes to buy and download apps.
The app functionality includes easy access to friends profiles, statuses (online/offline), activities, a simple, fast and powerful messaging system with animated smileys, etc.
App support URL handling + internal browser, cool animated smileys, landscape and portrait orientations, full copy/paste, etc.
App work very easy!
App work very fast!
Now you can receive new messages when app work in background.
Image from iTunes Store
I took it as my blogger responsibility to my readers to check this out, but,
You entered an invalid ID code. Personal identification code must come to the phone as an SMS, if one of your friends sent you an invitation. Personal code: Attention! Send invitations to all the users can not facebook. If you know they do not, you can not register.
The code I got was in Western alphabet, so maybe that was the problem. Another problem I just noticed was the date of the email which just came today:
J wanted to see the Illusionist. I didn't know anything about it except she told me it was animated. I noticed the name Jacques Tati in the opening credits, and later when the Illusionist stumbles into a movie theater, My Uncle is playing.
I remember my dad taking me to see My Uncle and then Mr. Hulot's Vacation. It must have been when they came out in the mid-50's. Even though they were in French, they left enough of an impression on me that I still remember seeing the movies and the bumbling Mr. Hulot.
The Illusionist is a very melancholy story. The illustrations are beautiful - the scenes when he first gets into rural Scotland reminded me of the mountains portrayed in Paxon Woelbers The Prospector.
Here's an interview dubbed in German with the director Sylvain Chomet, who directed The Triplets of Belview, that has a number of shots from the movie.
The movie tells a sad story that makes me want to know happened to Jacques Tati that is coming out in this movie. And so, I had to start looking things up.
The Illusionist (2010) is an animated film based on an unproduced, semi-autobiographical script that Tati wrote in 1956. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, known for The Triplets of Belleville, the main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself. . .
Between 1940 and 1942 he presented his Sporting Impressions at the original Lido de Paris . There he met the dancer Herta Schiel, who fled Austria with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942, Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Following the pressure of his sister Nathalie Tatischeff, he refused to recognize the child and abandoned the mother and his first child.
For those of you who know history, you'll recognize that this was during WW II which began in late 1939. Wikipedia gives a bit of explanation why this young man wasn't fighting:
In September 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War Tati was conscripted into the 16th Regiment of Dragoons. Placed into a new unit, he fought in the Battle on the Meuse in May 1940. Tati ended up in Dordogne, where he was demobilized.
In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film. The script of L'illusionniste, they say, was Tati's response to the shame of having abandoned his first child [Schiel] and it remains the only public recognition of her existence. They accuse Chomet of attempting to airbrush out their painful family legacy again.
The movie now makes sense - why it is so overbearingly sad. It's Tati talking to his long lost baby girl and telling her there is no magic. (Tati died in 1982)
The movie got slow toward the end and we needed that brief walk out in the moonlight after that movie. But the movie will stick. And now that I have a sense of what was behind it, it's very powerful.
I realized that I didn't have my contact lenses in this morning when I was cutting the onion for our omelet this morning. One of the side benefits of contacts for me, is that I don't cry when I'm cutting onions, and so this morning, without them in, I could feel the onion on my eyes. (I have hard, gas-permeable lenses. I don't know if this works with the soft and disposable lenses.)
This makes three posts under 1200 words (including 1000 for the picture.) I kind of like this, but I know there will be some long ones again soon.
I picked up Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages at the library last week. Ever since I was a student in Germany and had to take all my classes in German and got to the point where I could let go of English and just talk in German without translating, I began to think, “Wow, a different language makes you see the world differently.”
I was vaguely aware that not every linguist agreed, so I thought this book might be interesting.
Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound sense beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages lead their speaker to different thoughts and perceptions?
So, what’s your answer? [STOP! Don't read on until you answer. Just a yes or no will do.]
I, of course, want to say yes. But then it said.
For most serious scholars today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The dominant view among contemporary linguists s that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity. . .
OK, so I should read this and find out where I’m wrong and why. I’m open to changing my stories about the world if I get new information. But then I read on.
In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above is - yes.
Hot damn. I have an ally. So, I’ll let you know if the rest of the book is as good as the beginning. He does have a sense of humor and playfulness that I’m enjoying just in the prologue.
See, I can do it. This post is under 400 words. One more short post to go. But maybe I can make this a habit.
[Another long post, so another synopsis: I tried to look at this as a clash of cultures. The University's culture of shared governance runs into the Air Force's culture of accountability. And I follow that theme for most of this post. But the more I mull over Gamble's account of how he did the search (on the video clip) and the points raised by the Faculty Senate the more I'm wondering why he seems to have totally skipped over the basic process for hiring set out in the Board of Regents Regulations and why the Board went along with it?] [And this week, I'm wishing I had an editor. Sorry if there are still typos, you can email me to point them out and I'll fix them.]
The Objective: Hire a Chancellor to replace the retiring Chancellor
The Cultures:
Culture One: Patrick Gamble comes from the Air Force (he retired as a general), via a stint at the Alaska Railroad, to become president of the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Culture Two: University of Alaska, a state university with three main campuses and a pretty standard University shared governance system.
The Outcomes:
1. A new chancellor - a former dean of the College of Business and Public Affairs at the University of Alaska Anchorage and also a former US Air Force general.
2. A very upset faculty which felt the standard search process used for every faculty and administrative position, which includes a great deal of significant faculty (and other) participation with the President selecting from the final two or three recommended candidates was completely violated. The standard search also follows a set of procedural steps spelled out in the Board of Regents Regulations, which Gamble never mentioned as he spoke about how he did the search.
The Showdown: (OK, I'm getting dramatic now, it was more a polite, if occasionally heated, group conversation.)
After his surprise announcement, the president got the message that the faculty was upset and he ought to meet with the Faculty Senate. He came to visit them Wednesday Feb 10, eleven days after the announcement.
I've been seeing and posting this story from the faculty's perspective, but now that the President's been to talk to the UAA Faculty Senate, we can fill in some of the gaps. I'm going to look at this through the lens of cross-cultural miscommunication.
The Lessons:
I listened to the discussion Wednesday between the president and the faculty. It was like listening to people from totally different cultures whose languages had the same words, but with different meanings. Actually, I think it's easier when you go to a different country because you KNOW that you are going into a different culture, you know you can't understand the language easily, and so you expect there to be misunderstandings. But when you are in your own country, in a city you've lived in many years, and the people all seem to be speaking a common language, it is much easier to forget you are, in fact, in a different culture.
Note: I should also say that I spoke to the president after the meeting and it was cordial and he's sending me some information relevant to a post I did last year when he was selected as President. I could always be wrong here, but I felt that he was being sincere and open with the faculty and me. And that is consistent with my longer term relationship with Tom Case, the new chancellor-select. He also explained that the Chancellor decision was made prior to the January 31 announcement, that he had to get with the Board of Regents and then Tom Case. Then Case wanted to notify his boss, so the Alaska Aerospace Corporation had more than a few hours to find a new COO. But if he made the decision after the January 18 meeting, they had less than two weeks.
The president began by saying he'd been advised that shared governance was the most important thing he needed to know about the university system when he came into the position. And he read a bunch of books on shared governance (the video starts just at the end of the book part) but that just wasn't enough and he hadn't fully realized what that meant in practical terms. He apologized. And he opened it up for people to talk.
I'll slip in the video of that part right here so you can hear what he said. Then I'll go through it and other things that were said from the two different cultural perspectives.
Much of what he heard from the faculty was about vocabulary. Though he and the faculty were using the same words, they didn't mean the same thing. I'll use some of the key terms as the outline for this discussion.
Sense of Time - Let's get the easy ones out of the way. Gamble said he had enough time for the search. Chancellor Maimon had been hired in 8 months, so when he started in November, he thought there was plenty of time. Conception of time is a big difference between cultures. Apparently, he wasn't aware that there is a national academic hiring cycle, starting at the beginning of the school year. For the highest positions, like Chancellor, they might even start earlier.
Searches that start later run the danger of missing the top candidates, who get and accept offers earlier. By the time a search committee that started in November is ready to make an offer, the people still in the pool are often those passed over by other universities. That's not hard and fast and you can be lucky. And if your opening happens mid-cycle, you don't have any choice. But in this case current Chancellor Fran Ulmer gave notice already last January putting UAA in a great position to get a good start for Fall 2011. President Hamilton publicly noted this and thanked her for being considerate enough to give so much lead time to replace her. The way Gamble talked about the time - he felt he had plenty - suggests he didn't understand this cycle. It's the kind of thing you learn over time being in a new culture. And it's why you discuss what you're thinking with people who know the culture much better than you, why you have shared governance. Instead, his strategy was not to let people know what he was thinking, he said, so as not to create expectations.
Worldwide Search - this is a term Gamble used a number of times. But people in the University system actually say 'nation-wide' or 'national' search.' This isn't an issue here, but just another sign that he's still learning the language and perhaps his ear isn't that good. Like any new language learner, he got the sense, but not the idiom.
Gamble emphasized this notion of national search and that he wasn't inclined to go that way if there were good Alaska candidates even though the faculty wanted such a search. But the 'search' part is also important. Even if not national, the faculty expected the standard set of steps that happens with every search and so they were totally surprised when none of those steps had happened and Gamble simply announced a new Chancellor.
Downtowner - Another term Gamble used a lot. One faculty member asked him what he meant. Anchorage is not a big place, she said, and 'downtown' is where many government offices are, where her doctor's office is, and her kids' school is. Did he consult with her doctor? Her kids? Or her kids' teachers? The faculty live all over and some are 'downtowners.' But we don't talk about people as 'downtowners.' We do talk about the bigger university community. Gamble responded that this was a term the Air Force used and perhaps he misspoke. Again, not a biggie, but part of learning a new culture. This idea of 'downtown' and its stake and say in the search came up again as part of the understanding of shared governance.
Shared governance is the essence of how the university works. This embodies the basic democratic principles of the United States. Faculty, staff, and students are also involved in governance. There's even a student on the Board of Regents. There are even community people involved in governance. Things may take longer because democracy isn't always efficient, but when decisions are finally made, they have widespread support because the affected people had a chance to participate. Gamble served 30+ years in the Air Force in defense of democracy around the world and the faculty expected him to support it in his own organization.
From the discussion, I'd say the president and the faculty had real differences with two aspects of shared governance: 1) How it's shared and 2) With whom it's shared.
How it's shared
Basically, the custom is that major decisions are worked on by committees. (No snide comments about committees, please. Democracy doesn't work without committees. That's why learning to work in groups is such a critical skill.) In some areas, the committee has the jurisdiction to make the final decision. In others they present the final options to the decision maker - say a dean, or chancellor, or president - to decide. If the dean disagrees with the options offered, she has the right to make a different decision, BUT, and it's a big but, she better talk it through with the committee so she understands their rationale and they understand her issues. In most situations, they would work out an option they can both live with.
A dean or chancellor who disregards the committee's recommendation completely - as it appeared to the faculty the President did to their memo - will alienate the faculty and lose their support and cooperation in the future. You don't need an MBA to understand this. The lowliest employee in any organization knows he can work slower, misplace materials and equipment, and use other guerrilla tactics to make up for lack of official organizational power.
So, the faculty assumed that when the president started the search in late November, there would be a search committee made up of people chosen by various governance bodies that would represent the various constituencies in the university and community. They knew the routine of a search because it's used for every faculty and administrator and follows the Board of Regents regulations. They were alarmed by his unaddressed 'flyer,' as one faculty member put it (objecting to his word 'letter'), [Yes faculty can be nitpicky too] which hinted at skipping a search. In response, they sent a memo back to him saying in essence, "Whoa, if you're gonna skip the search, then here's a person we can accept." They got no response to that. Instead people in the president's office invited people to a committee meeting (that most uninvited people didn't know about) to talk about the search. (The President did not allow his staff to be blamed for this at the meeting and took the responsibility himself.)
From the clip above and the rest of the meeting, it's clear to me that Gamble saw 'shared governance' as meaning, "I'll ask a bunch of stakeholders what they think and then I'll make my decision."
With Whom it's Shared
The president talked about all the stakeholders he talked with over two months. Faculty, students, downtowners, even someone who caught him in the elevator at the Captain Cook. One of the faculty members took him to task on this idea that everyone he meets has equal standing in this decision. And he was clearly moved by her passion on this. "I've devoted my life to a very low wage, not because I like making no money and having decisions made for me, by people not expert in my field, but because believe in this and consider it a calling and a service. I'm a faculty member, I'm not just a stakeholder, I'm a faculty member with a PhD who teaches and does research. I matter more to this institution than a 'downtown' CEO of a bank. If I go away and the faculty go away, you don't have a university."
Like in Animal Farm, not all animals are equal. But in this case, with good reason. The bank CEO is important as a supporter of the University, but he or she doesn't walk the streets asking the people of Anchorage whom to hire as bank manager. And most public agencies don't either. They rely on the people with specific expertise in that area. But the university believes in shared governance and that extends into the community. But we do assume that the faculty and staff and students are the experts here and will be much more affected by the choice of Chancellor and should have more say in the decision than people who have a more casual interest in the university.
This came up again when the president talked about the - did he really say séance on that clip? - meeting he held in January. He tells us that he threw out two issues, and, he said, the message to me was clear: 1) Pat, you've got to make the final decision, and 2) We've got talent inside Alaska, let's hope we can find someone from here. He took that to mean a national search wasn't necessary. But another faculty member who was at that meeting said, "I objected and said we should have a national search and so did the other two faculty." But the faculty voice was voided by all the other 'stakeholders.'
The president said he got lots of letters, so the faculty letter was just one of many. Another faculty member pointed out that the letter from the Faculty Senate calling for a national search had been approved 44-0. And each of those 44 represented 15 other faculty. (I'm not saying every faculty member agreed because that will never happen, but 44-0 in the Faculty Senate is pretty convincing.) And it should have carried a lot more weight than the advice from some individual he bumped into in the elevator in the Captain Cook.
Surely, as Commandant of Elmendorf, he gave more weight to the people working on the base about key base operational decisions than he did to the Chamber of Commerce. Or maybe not.
Shared governance means people with different perspectives weigh in on the details of important decisions so that one person doesn't overlook something important or isn't swayed by some personal bias. Especially when that one person doesn't really know the culture that well. It doesn't mean three faculty at a two hour meeting with 30 other 'stakeholders.' Based on that initial 'flyer' to the world, Gamble was already leaning toward limiting the search to Alaska and he seems to have heard people who agreed with him much better than those who didn't. (In a normal search process, everyone who attends a presentation by a candidate is asked to submit written comments and so there is at least some quantifiable documented evidence of how many had what opinion.)
Accountability meets Shared Governance
Gamble used the term accountability frequently in the discussions. While Gamble knew Wednesday that he'd made a mistake, he still had questions about exactly what 'shared governance' means. (Not unreasonable, it takes time to get it.) I'm paraphrasing here, but several times he said something like, "If the faculty tells me 'We want this person or else we do a national search' I can listen to that, but are you saying I have to do it? Because ultimately I'm responsible, I'm the one who is accountable, not the faculty."
And the faculty did send such a letter. They'd gotten his email late November which said he was starting the search (and they thought he'd wasted a lot of important time already getting started) and in the letter there was a paragraph saying:
I am mindful that the last formal, national UAA chancellor search in 2003-2004 cost $250,000* and took eight months. I am equally mindful that all three of our current chancellors, who I personally consider exceptionally talented leaders and working partners, were not selected through an extended and costly formal search process. Considering these past experiences I believe we should remain open minded about a method that will lead to the best outcome for UAA and the state.
[Note, this did say 'national' not 'world-wide.']
Just before that, the letter said,
Please send me your comments and suggestions. If you actually have a candidate name to offer, at this point it's not too early to advise me of your recommendations.
The faculty had assumed the search would be run like every other search, but were concerned that he was already saying we might not need a national search because all the Chancellors we have now are great and they weren't from national searches.
So they responded, fearing the national search might be scrapped, with a memo from the Faculty Senate saying, in part:
But, if you opt for a direct hire, the only person Faculty Senate would support is Mike Driscoll because he was hired as Provost after a national search, he has performed well as Provost, he knows UAA perhaps better than any other applicants for the position, and he has served as Acting Chancellor several times as Chancellor Ulmer has worked on the Presidential Oil Spill Commission.
After hearing Gamble speak Wednesday about accountability, I'm guessing that he took that letter as an ultimatum, possibly an impossible demand given his take on accountability. But coming from the University culture, I read it as a very loud - "hey, we're serious, we want a national search, but if you really are thinking of cutting it out, we know Driscoll and we'd be comfortable with him as Chancellor." This wasn't an ultimatum, it was an alarmed memo, worried about what an Air Force general who is now the University President was going to do. (We don't know your culture and you don't know ours!) They weren't expecting him to roll over and choose Driscoll, but they did want him to know that a national search was how we normally do things - even if we have a local candidate - and they expected there would at least be a lot more discussion. Minimally, they expected that there would be shared governance, a search committee that would go through all the candidates, and make recommendations to the President, and he'd pick from one of the acceptable finalists. As was the case in the search the resulted in Gamble becoming president.
Accountability seems to be an important term in the Air Force, maybe on a par with 'shared governance' at the university. Here's an excerpt from a paper by Lt Col Jackie Tillery done for a course at Maxwell Air Force Base, dated April 1997 (a few years before Gamble retired), called "Authority: Inconsistent, Situation Dependent and Subjective."
It's larger and clearer if you double click it
So the faculty's understanding of 'shared governance' seems to have come into conflict with Gamble's understanding of accountability.
Outcomes
The president used the term 'outcome' a number of times. "I'm an outcomes guy." Outcomes is a hot management word. Outcomes people are no-nonsense types. It fits well with accountability. Without good ways to track outcomes, you can't have accountability. Far too many organizations continue to do things the way they've always done them even if they're no longer effective, if their outcomes are poor - say, too many students drop out. And I'm somewhat of an outcomes guy myself. Outcomes are why an organization exists. But with some caveats. Everyone who matters needs to participate in defining the outcomes. And some important outcomes are a lot more measurable than others. The less tangible ones shouldn't be sacrificed because they aren't as easy to quantify. And a set of outcome numbers can't substitute for informed understanding. Thus the protests against "No Child Left Behind."
Here, the president had already come up with his list of criteria for the new chancellor in the letter that announced the beginning of the search. These characteristics might be good for what an Air Force general wants for one of his team, but do they cover everything needed in a University Chancellor? Out of 15 lines, there's only this to hint this is a university chancellor position and not some generic leader:
We need someone with . . . an unwavering belief in the efficacy of shared governance, and a leader who actively promotes the value of academic and research integrity. [click here for the whole memo]
And outcomes don't justify the means. In this case the means relate to a search process. I've already discussed the participatory nature of the search process at the University of Alaska as a manifestation of the idea of shared governance. But there's another aspect - the technical procedures for filling a position as spelled out in the Board of Regents Regulations.
Search
The two of you who have read this far already know there's a gap between the president's model and the faculty's model of a search.
The President's Model, as he described it in the video, was to gather information from a wide range of people and then, because there were two highly qualified Alaskans he knew who fit the criteria he'd written up himself, when people said a national search wasn't necessary, he chose one. (Herbert Simon described this in the 1950's as satisficing - taking the first option that meets your minimum qualifications and not trying to get the best possible outcome. He did say this was a rational way to avoid spending too much effort getting more than you needed. Good enough is good enough.)
The Faculty's Model. The University of Alaska has a professional selection process which includes
announcing the opening in standard public media so that people interested in such jobs would know to apply and people aren't discriminated against because they don't have inside connections
screening processes with criteria and rating systems so that the subjective judgments of raters can be objectified as much as possible against the stated criteria and several people evaluate the applicants to minimize the risk of bias - intentional or unintentional
a record of how each candidate was scored by each rater so if there is any legal challenge to the decision, all the paper work is available
1. develop the vacancy announcement and advertising copy;
2. develop screening and evaluation criteria;
3. select the screening committee/individual screeners;
4. conduct interviews and reference checks;
5. select the best qualified candidate based on job-related criteria and available information;
6. obtain approval for the recruitment process from the regional human resources office prior to making the job offer;
7. for staff positions, identify appropriate starting salary in conjunction with the human resources office, and obtain authorization from the human resources office to offer the position and the approved salary;
8. for faculty positions, identify appropriate starting salary and obtain authorization from the Provost, or designee, to offer the position at the approved salary;
9. offer the position;
10. notify unsuccessful candidates;
11. submit required reports and documentation to the regional human resource office; and
12. forward recruitment records to the regional human resources office or maintain the records for the required period of time.
While there are some exceptions in the regulations - they don't seem to cover this hire. (This search didn't involve Temporary or Emergency Hires, someone from an underrepresented class, or Casual Labor for example.)
So it isn't remarkable that the faculty were expecting the Chancellor search to comply with Board of Regents regulations which would have meant the process officially had barely even started.
While it's true that the president makes the final decision on the selection of the chancellor, I can't find where this means he can by-pass all the regulations for announcing the position and evaluating the candidates.
The president seemed particularly eager to avoid the expense and time of a national search, but even an in-state search should include all the steps outlined in the Personnel Rules of the Board of Regents regulations.
I know enough about rules and bureaucracies to know that there are often back ways to get waivers to not follow the regulations in some cases. If they were waived, who did it, when, and what was the justification?
As the president related the process in the video tape above, he never mentioned anything about the regulations, that he got approval from HR for the job announcement, that he created any rating scales for evaluating the candidates, or even that he got all this waived.
In fact, when one of the faculty members said something like "every faculty and administrative position has to go through all the steps so why wouldn't the chancellor?" he seemed to be genuinely surprised. And he experienced some of these steps himself last spring as an applicant for his current job. So he knew that the process includes more than asking people for suggestions and then making a decision. Even in the speeded up President search process last year, there were public forums in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau for all the three finalists and feedback from everyone before a decision was made.
I'm not sure how people get appointed to positions in the Air Force. I know there is a very demanding evaluation system that all officers go through regularly. Perhaps a general can just pick his preferred candidate without justification - but those candidates come from a pool of people who are eligible to apply for that position and who have been carefully vetted. In this case, according to the president, there were two Alaska candidates that he knew. There was no mention of developing evaluation standards, of reviewing candidates against those standards, or anything remotely like that. I don't even know if he got applications from both candidates or not.
I've said there was a clash of cultures here - and if you'd been at the meeting, I'm sure you would agree. Every successful organization has its own culture that is appropriate for the kind of work they do and while organizations sometimes bring outsiders into the culture, they don't generally have half their top leadership from the same alien culture unless it's a hostile takeover. It takes time to learn a culture, to understand the language, to know all the rules and procedures. Gamble's apology and acknowledgment he'd made a mistake, while appreciated, show the consequences of not understanding the culture.
More than culture
Writing this has given me time to think things through. The president presented himself during the search for his own position as an experienced manager with an MBA. He was into strategic planning and achieving outcomes. One outcome of the search - Tom Case as Chancellor - could have been much worse. Though, as I said in the very first post on this appointment, the collective impact on the University of Alaska is a very homogeneous top four positions and does not reflect the diversity of the faculty, students, or the state. But the other outcome was a very alienated faculty and people raising questions about cronyism.
Being an outcomes guy shouldn't mean you are oblivious to the process. Cause the impact of a bad process IS an outcome.
As he described the search process, I didn't hear any evidence of the human resources class he must have had as part of his MBA. There was no process. There was no official announcement of a position. No system for rating the candidates. It appears there were no official candidates even. Just a couple of names he knew about.
The strategic planner was doing this by the seat of his pants. "It was a process that wasn't laid out yet. I wanted to see where this process was going to take me." And it doesn't seem to have taken him to the Board of Regents Regulations governing hiring at the University. I'm guessing the HR people found some loophole to waive requirements. Did this happen before or after he announced his decision? But what was the justification? Covering up for a president who didn't know there were any rules?
Gamble's education isn't in chemistry or Arabic language. Those fields don't teach management as part of their program. But Gamble has an MBA and 30+ years in the Air Force, so he should understand that organizations don't operate in a vacuum, that there are processes designed to deal with routine activities like job searches. (Maybe this is how they do things at the Railroad.) I can give him slack for not understanding the shared governance part, but the hiring steps are pretty standard and basic in the private sector as well as the public sector. While he sounded open and honest with the faculty, and acknowledging one's mistakes and apologizing mean a lot, what I heard at the meeting now raises new questions for me about how this all happened. And where were the staff who should have let him know the University rules? Are they all yes men? And what about the Board of Regents?
Is it any wonder the faculty are concerned?
*Also, I don't doubt someone told the President that the last UAA chancellor search cost $250,000, but as I think about it, I don't see how it could have been that expensive. $10,000 each to fly up three candidates from Outside should be way more than adequate. Another $20,000 for advertising. That would leave another $200,000 to go. Did they count the time all committee members spent on this? That wouldn't be a real expense because all the committee members' time was out of their own hide. The faculty still had classes to teach and research to write. Administrators still had their jobs to do. Most would be salaried and not getting overtime. If that's what they negotiated with a professional search company, I'd like to see the profit margin the company got off this contract. In any case, I think the $250,000 was something of an easy excuse for not going national and that a reasonable search could have been done for considerably less than that.
OK, my next three posts will be under 1200 words. :)
