If photographer Stephen Wilkes couldn’t decide what time of day NYC was most beautiful, we understand. See his photographic series capturing the magic of Manhattan days and nights combined into one.(via)
When I feel I am not performing up to my capabilities at work, I review a list of quote [sic] for inspiration.
Billionaire and UVA donor Paul Jones, arguing that Jefferson would have endorsed the palace coup against Teresa Sullivan because “Jefferson was a change agent.”
This whole fiasco has resulted in a delightful reshuffling of ideological factions. The forces of “progress” and “dynamism,” represented here by a vapid hedge fund manager and his cronies, are up against the defenders of “incremental change” and institutional durability.
I want to rush to the barricades with all the lefty professors and chant things like “What do we want? Organic, incremental change! When do we want it? Steadily distributed across a prudently long time horizon!”
(via mwfrost)
Unfortunately, Teresa Sullivan falls into the trap of describing her collaborative method as incremental and conservative. This kind of rhetoric allows the Board to define her as slow and inadequate in a time of rapid change, and to justify executive authority as that which is bold and decisive. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow academic work and administration to fall into the innovation trap, which casts as anti-innovation anyone who appears to oppose innovation as defined largely by information technology corporations in their equally turbulent and oligarchic markets. Sullivan fell into this, and still does not seem to realize fully how this mechanism works.Academics need to concede nothing to the executive-managerial movement Kiernan and the UVa Board principals represent. They need to define university or school organization that reflects data-based, expertise-grounded, deep creativity based in intense knowledge of the complex system one is trying to change. This is what Sullivan had started to do, and it is the core insight of Theory Y as I discussed it recently. Its forms of reciprocal and relatively egalitarian collaboration generate richer, deeper knowledge and more creative and robust solutions than does the thin knowledge and compulsive changes of tack of externally-focused managers who respond to the influence that seems most powerful at a given moment.
Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:
- Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.
- High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.
- Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.
- Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?
- Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music: $2,139.50 = 1 smart phone 1 full size ipod 1 macbook. Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?
Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?
Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?
Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?
This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:
Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!
Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!
Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered. | The Trichordist. Pretty close to an unanswerable argument. Thanks to @CaptDavidRyan for the link.
But of course the real answer is, “I don’t know how to steal computers and smartphones without risking getting caught and sent to jail. I don’t know how to steal internet access at all. So I pay for those things. But stealing music is easy, so I do that.”
Rally on the UVA Lawn as Teresa Sullivan arrives; this photo and others by Tom Daly
A dramatic top-down reallocation in our general fund, simply to show that we are “changing,” or that we are not “incremental,” seems to me fiscally imprudent, highly alarming to faculty, and unfair to students who expect to get a broadly inclusive education here. I have chosen a lower-risk and more conservative strategy, because I am accountable to the taxpayers and the tuition payers.If we were to embark on a course of deep top-down cuts, there would also be difficult questions regarding what to cut. A university that does not teach the full range of arts and sciences will no longer be a university. Certainly it will no longer be respected as such by its former peers.
Faculty collaborate both within disciplines and across disciplines. In the nature of things, many of these collaborations are not even known to the central administration. If we cut from the top down, without consulting the affected faculty, a cut in one department may have wholly unintended consequences in another department that we are trying to build up.
Nor can we always predict which kind of knowledge will be of greatest import in the future. Before September 11, few of us understood just how important Arabic and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages would become — to our students, to the nation, and to national security. Suppose we had eliminated some of those languages because of low enrollment or other fiscal considerations before 2001. We would be scrambling to recreate them now.
Former UVA President Teresa Sullivan. You should read Sullivan’s whole statement, because it demonstrates quite clearly her deep understanding of how universities work — or how they must work if they are actually going to be universities. It is obvious that she understands the fiscal challenges that every institution of higher education faces, but also that she believes it is possible for a university (especially one that aspires to greatness) to meet those challenges in a way that does not require missional self-evisceration.
I strongly suspect that this is one of those cases where clarity and directness of prose are indicative of incisive thinking and honesty. Contrast Sullivan’s statement to the cliché-laden, evasive, and intellectually and factually empty press release by the university’s rector, Helen Dragas. Read the two documents and, just as a little thought experiment, ask yourself: Which of these women would I want to lead a university I worked for?
UVA, where I got my PhD many years ago, has never received all that much money from me, but, unless I learn something that upends my understanding of the situation, it’s certainly not going to get any in more in the future. From the sound of things, Helen Dragas and her colleagues are just fine with that: it would appear that a university run on a big-business model, funded and controlled by big business, is just what they want. That would be the death-knell of the University of Virginia qua university — that is, an institution whose role is to conserve and transmit knowledge even when it doesn’t know exactly what use that knowledge will be put to tomorrow; but, to look on the bright side, some fortunate university with a more enlightened leadership is likely to get a really good president in Teresa Sullivan. UVA’s dark cloud will have a silver lining for someone else.
Famous writers, drunk-texting
I am not a programmer often means Go easy on me. Ask yourself: Why would someone go out of their way to ask for empathy in this way?Sometimes it’s a way for a n00b to test the waters. Newcomers to a software community don’t always know the community conventions for asking for help. Labeling oneself as “not a programmer” is a gentle way of gauging how others react to new folks.
More frequently, in my experience, I am not a programmer is used by people who have been burned in the past. Maybe the user once asked a question and got an answer that was over her head. Maybe the discussion turned sour when the developers looked down their noses at someone who couldn’t understand a few lines of code. When this happens, I am not a programmer is a shield, a preemptive attempt to guard against the abuse that the asker rightly or wrongly expects to receive.
I wrote a post a while back on how this looks from the developer’s point of view. The gist, so far as this use of The Phrase is concerned, is that developers should be as empathetic as possible in these situations. For one thing, treating people with kindness is just the right thing to do. Beyond that, it’s important to the future of the community to extend a hand to potential contributors.
The other common use of I am not a programmer is something like: I’m not technical, so don’t even try to get me to crack the hood, which often amounts to I refuse to make an honest attempt. Do it for me.
Recording the percentage of people who say they are happy will tell you something, to be sure, about how people use words. It’s worth learning. We cannot ever know whether your experience of the color red is the same as mine, no matter how many brain scans we take. (The new hedonism is allied, incidentally, with the new brain science, which merrily takes the brain for the mind.) Nor can we know what red or happiness 1-2-3 is in the mind of God, the “objective happiness” that Kahneman speaks of as though he knew it. We humans can only know what we claim to see and what we can say about it. What we can know is neither objective nor subjective, but (to coin a word) “conjective.” It is what we know together in our talk, such as our talk about our happiness. Con-jective: together thrown. No science can be about the purely objective or the purely subjective, which are both unattainable.If a man tormented by starvation and civil war in South Sudan declares that he is “happy, no, very happy, a regular three, mind you,” we have learned something about the human spirit and its sometimes stirring, sometimes discouraging, oddity. But we inch toward madness if we go beyond people’s lips and claim to read objectively, or subjectively, their hearts in a 1-2-3 way that is comparable with their neighbors or comparable with the very same South Sudanese man when he wins an immigration lottery and gets to Albany.
Austen published anonymously (as “A Lady”); in her own lifetime she had no public life as a writer among writers. She had a generous critic-champion in Walter Scott, but if her work was read at all (and after her death she was out of print for 12 years) it was thought of as being on the genteel, female margins of literary culture. It’s a teasing conundrum that she could not possibly – could she? – have imagined the scale and the kind of the appreciation that was to follow. (“Did Jane Austen know how good she was?” Mullan asks at the opening of his book; a conundrum even more difficult to unpick.) By the end of the 19th century enthusiasts were making pilgrimages to “Austen-land”, imagining themselves communing with her “mind and heart”, fancying “girlish forms … walking among trees and flowers at Steventon”. Like other pilgrims, Johnson is haunted in pursuit of Jane, disappointed because the cottage at Chawton is “charmless … a functional edifice, not a cosy one”, and by the labels on the furniture: “Although this piano is not the one Jane Austen used, she bought a similar type”, and so on.Johnson identifies different elements in the enthusiasm. The late Victorians, tired of sensationalism, wrote about her “magic”, and needed her to reinvest “the world with wonder”. She was carried to the remote corners of empire as a talisman of English values; hardened soldiers in both world wars hung on to her disabused clear-sightedness. Kipling writes a short story about the Janeites, mystifying them as a sort of Masonic sub-cult. But what is it about these novels that makes them into the repository for so much longing?