Expertise: The Knowledge of Things Unseen

I've written before about the value and importance of expertise. We used to believe, especially in the realm of science, that experts really did know more than the rest of us. Now, in a world of echo-chamber social media and fake news and "alternative facts", a lot of us (meaning here Americans) have chucked this notion out the window. Many of us now believe that we and our friends know the real truth, and that everybody else is either a dupe or a liar.

One reason why it's easy to fall into this trap is that we feel good about our echo chambers - they make us feel powerful and affirmed, a sort of antidote to the fear we've been taught is the proper response to the modern world. That part of the psychology that leads people to reject expertise and accept otherwise wacky ideas is pretty clear.

But there's another aspect to expertise that actually contributes to its widespread rejection. The nature of expertise is that people who are experts see things that non-experts can't see. They perceive things in the universe that are, quite literally, invisible to the rest of us.

This phenomenon has been well-documented in all sorts of arenas. Elite athletes, for example, have been studied extensively. It turns out that, while they tend to be in excellent health and have certain physical gifts, they're not especially more physically gifted in general than the rest of us. It's that the tens of thousands of hours of practice they put in have rewired their brains so they can perceive things other's can't. That's why the best hitters in professional baseball actually stand a good chance of hitting a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher, traveling at more than 95 miles per hour. He can see things about that ball that are invisible to the rest of us.

The same is true in medicine. An experienced doctor will see in a list of symptoms, or the way a patient answers a question, possible diagnoses that we know nothing about. Nor can we understand the connections between those little bits of information and the much larger issue. Doctors carry around a whole world of knowledge in their heads that is inaccessible to non-experts.

So it goes for nearly every field of human endeavor. Architects see things in buildings that the rest of us miss. Musicians hear things in music we can't hear. Engineers, lawyers, designers, auto mechanics - in almost any human endeavor involving expertise, experts are privy to a world out of reach of the rest of us.

Unfortunately, this makes it easy to dismiss expertise. It's easy to assume that everything you see is everything there is to see. We're pretty good at accounting for the data coming into our senses, but generally terrible about accounting for what's not there. Arthur Conan Doyle immortalized this in his story "Silver Blaze", in which Sherlock Holmes solves the otherwise unsolvable case by observing that a dog didn't bark.

I encounter this all the time in my own area of expertise - politics - because, as John Stewart Mill put it over 100 years ago, politics "is a subject which no one, however ignorant, thinks himself incompetent to discuss". In the political realm, we all think that we can see everything there is to see. And when "experts" come along and try to point out what we can't see, we often dismiss them because, well, we can't see what they're pointing at. We think they're just making it up.

There are two conclusions here. First, humility is not only a moral virtue, it's an intellectual necessity. We all need to know what we don't know (the height of Aristotle's wisdom). Second, we need to make an effort to determine where real expertise lies - not in who shouts the loudest or in who says things we want to believe, but in who has really put in the time and effort to establish a track record. Anybody can claim they're an expert - evaluate those claims carefully, especially when the supposed expert is simply confirming your own biases.

Karate and Life: 20 Precepts

Much of what I write - perhaps nearly all of what I write - touches on issues of power, conflict, and peace. Across areas of human endeavor I am endlessly fascinated with how power is created and exercised, how conflict is kindled and resolved, and what paths we should take in seeking to create peace. These ideas weave in and out of my writing, both here on the blog and elsewhere.

Regular readers know that a part of my personal exploration into these issues revolves around learning and practicing traditional Asian martial arts. In this I am both a student and a teacher; I love sharing what I know with others, and I have so much more to learn myself.

Those who spend time in the traditional martial arts world soon encounter one of its central tenets: that karate, or judo, or kung fu, are not merely for fighting in a ring or practicing in a gym. The benefits of the martial arts extend throughout the student's life, and indeed should be actively sought and considered far beyond the simple practice of physical techniques. This is probably why one of my most-read blog posts of all time is titled, The Benefits of Studying the Martial Arts.

Most of what I write isn't new - far deeper thinkers have been developing these ideas for centuries. What I try to do is simply bring them to audiences that might otherwise not be familiar with the practice of Do - "way", in Japanese. Karate-do, Judo, Aiki-do - all have this common root, a call to a broader understanding and self-improvement in service to others.

One of the best synopses of this is Gichin Funakoshi's list of 20 Precepts. Funakoshi, an Okinawan master who brought karate to Japan in the early part of the 20th century, is often credited as "the father of modern karate". He wrote his Precepts as a way to pass his notion of Do along to his students, to remind them that they were engaged in a calling far higher than learning how to defend themselves in a fight.

Starting with this entry I am planning to write a series of blog posts, one for each of the 20 Precepts, with musings and thoughts on how these apply to the world around us outside the dojo (literally, "Place of the Way"). I hope these will be of interest to practitioners and non-practioners alike.

The first Precept is this:

Karate-do begins and ends with respect.

In traditional martial arts, this is summed up in the bow, or rei. Students and instructors alike "bow in" and "bow out" when they enter and leave the training space, and bow to each other at the beginning and end of each exercise. Bowing is a physical means by which we remind ourselves of the culture of respect.

Some people are uncomfortable in traditional dojos because of this formality. Where else in our lives do we have such physical, visceral symbols of respect? In some traditional churches (though fewer all the time), people bow or reverence the altar or the crucifix, but in my experience this practice isn't universal even in churches that do practice it.

The underlying principle, however, is sound - and sorely needed. When we begin and end interactions with a sign of mutual respect, it is much more difficult in between to mistreat each other. If our first thought when starting a new conversation or walking into a meeting is, "I respect the people here as fellow colleagues", our whole demeanor changes. And if things go sideways in that meeting, ending with a similar posture of respect reminds us that we're on the same team, that we're there to solve problems together, that we share much in common.

In our culture today, in 21st century America, we have almost no such signs of respect. And where we do have them, we reserve them almost exclusively for our friends, our family, for those who are inside our boundaries of comfort. "If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?"

The Christian call to love one another as God loves us can be hard, especially today. That verse is followed by an admonition: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return". Even if we cannot imagine ourselves going so far, can we at least take the first step of respecting our enemies?

Funakoshi put this Precept first, I suspect, because he understood that without mutual respect (even mutual love), people will use their power to hurt each other. Karate is a form of power, but we exercise power every day in our conversations and interactions with others. When we start and end with a posture of respect, in between we will work to make sure that we don't use our power to harm, but to help. When I respect others, I want to help them. That is a Way worth following.

America is Dying

I'm not usually given to clickbait titles, but I'll plead guilty on this one. Now I get to explain what I mean by "America" and what I mean by "dying".

What I want to say doesn't dovetail well - or much at all - with most of what we're hearing from the political campaigns and their supporters. Each campaign has an interest in spinning narratives of various kinds of decline, stories that include heroes and villains and moral conclusions. What I want to say isn't related to any of that because I don't think that who wins next week's Presidential election is nearly as important as other things.

That's right: there are things more important than whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes President in 2017.

A lot of rhetoric in political campaigns invokes the "future of our country", but that's almost never what they actually talk about. What they really talk about is the future occupant of the Oval Office, which is not at all the same thing. Presidents are important, yes, but they are not the most important thing.

What is? We are.

By "we", I mean everybody - the entire collection of the American body politic. This includes everybody living within our borders - citizens and non-citizens, "legals" and "illegals", black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, old, young, gay straight, cis, trans. Everybody.

This is what "America" is. Just as "the church" is not a building, it is a collection of people united in the Body of Christ, so a nation is not a set of borders and institutions. The government is not the nation, any more than the narthex or the nave is the church. We are the nation. All of us together.*

A nation, as a collective entity, has a life measurably separate from (but also composed of) the lives of its individual members. Just as a congregation, or a school, or a team, or a business, has a life and a culture and a set of ideas of its own even as individual members come and go, so a nation has a collective life and existence. That life changes over time with the changing of its members, just as our own bodies change over time as cells are created and replaced, as some die off and others are brought in.

The life of a nation, like that of a school or a team or a church, can be healthier or sicker. It may be growing or shrinking, getting better or getting worse. Indeed, given that we live in a dynamic universe things are changing all the time - some for the better, some for the worse, in much the same way that our own physical health is constantly changing.

The idea of a nation "dying" rests on some understanding of the nation as having "health". The health of "America" relies fundamentally on our ability to function cooperatively together in a society. That doesn't mean that we have to always agree - indeed, disagreement is healthy too, because it helps us to identify problems and pushes us to improve. But fundamentally, our health as a nation relies on our ability to work together, to get along, and to contribute to the greater good of the whole even as we are also contributing to our own welfare and those around us.

There has never been a time in American history when our nation was "perfectly healthy". Stories of a past in which everything was "great" are selective readings that ignore the parts of the nation that weren't healthy - the suppression of blacks, the discrimination against Eastern Europeans or Irish, the social subjugation of women, economic discrimination against immigrants, etc. We have always been in a state of less-than-perfect health, but we have mostly also tried to make it better.

So when I say that America as a nation is dying, what I mean fundamentally is that this ability to cooperate together, to see ourselves as engaged in a common endeavor even when we disagree and argue, is rapidly being eroded. I don't have a good barometer of how much we have lost and how much remains, but the trend line is clear. Unchanged, these trends will ultimately kill the nation of "America" and leave us with something very different.

This death is all around us these days. The Presidential campaign is partly a cause, but also partly a symptom. A politics that calls for jailing or assassinating political opponents, that promises to use the supposedly-blind instruments of justice for avowedly partisan political ends, that looks at those on the other side and sees only deplorable, irredeemable people - all of this erodes a very notion that we even have a nation. That we are a nation. E pluribus unum has become E pluribus pluribus.

I want very much for the presidential election to be over, not because I think that its ending - whatever the outcome - will make these problems go away but because the fact of the election itself is getting in the way of the most important work - rebuilding our nation's health. The rebuilding is not primarily economic - things could be better economically, but they could also be (and have been) much worse. Nor is it tied to any particular issue or set of policies. All of these are just individual pieces, and none of them will matter if we don't get the whole put back together.

Our health as a nation is not dependent on government getting policies right. It is dependent on us getting our relationships right.

The really difficult work ahead of us is to remind ourselves that E pluribus unum is a foundational principle, a central value on which we all agree. It is to remind ourselves that there are things on which we all agree, that we are all Americans together and that this togetherness matters. And most importantly, we have to not simply be reminded of these things. We have to live our lives as if they were true.

The task that I am setting for myself, for this week and next week and all the weeks after that, is this: treat everyone I run into as a neighbor. Assume in every interaction that I and the person I am dealing with are part of the same community, that we have far more in common than what divides us, and that the most important thing I can do is engage my fellow Americans with respect, dignity, and love. If enough of us do the same, our nation can be healed - not to perfection, but towards a good, working order.

But if the bile and filth and darkness of this past year overwhelm these efforts, things will get worse for all of us. Problems will multiply, suffering will increase. And we will have only ourselves - not our government, not our politicians, not this or that political party - to blame.

Walt Kelly's wisdom remains true: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

* I recognize that this claim is disputed by some, who see "America" as a nation primarily composed of one ethnic or religious group (usually, Christian Whites). Such people are quick to resort to the rhetoric of "war", because for them they see non-whites as invaders and aliens who really ought to be somewhere else. This is a fundamental disagreement; if you believe that "America" is a nation for one ethnic or religious group in particular, none of the rest of this will make any sense to you.

Guns and Safety: The Missing Human Dimension

A case that (on its surface) pits free speech against gun rights has been making the rounds. A female scholar invited to speak at Utah State University cancelled her appearance there after receiving death threats. In explanation she cited Utah laws allowing people to carry guns on campus, and the campus police's inability to regulate the presence of guns at her talk. She also criticized the university for not doing enough to insure her safety.

Since the speaker fits the profile of the Left (a feminist scholar engaged in cultural critique of misogyny in video-game culture) and the thing she complains about is one of the banner issues for many on the Right (the right to carry firearms freely), this pretty much guarantees this story plenty of airplay. And while there will be some thoughtful discussions, for the most part this will generate a great deal more heat than light in the coming days.

In an effort to promote the former and try to avoid the latter, I want to pick up on one particular aspect of the larger argument here: the discussion about guns and personal safety. This is a subject on which I have written quite a few times in the past (do a search for Gun Control or Stand Your Ground on this blog and you'll find plenty of references). Readers will note that I am not a purist on the issue, insofar as I have written that there are circumstances under which the carrying or employment of personal firearms can protect someone.

But here is where a dose of wisdom from my academic field - the study of conflict at the international level - comes in handy. Because "security" is really two things: whether you are secure, and whether you feel secure. It is both objective and perceptual. And these two aspects are not at all the same thing.

Objective security is often knowable only after the fact: you either are attacked or you aren't. If no one attacks you, you are objectively secure. However, you may not feel secure. If you feel that an attack is imminent or even possible, you may perceive yourself as being insecure even when, at that particular moment, you are not being attacked. And that's where the trouble lies.

Advocates of concealed-carry or open-carry rights talk a lot about how guns make people more secure. Setting aside the tactical question of whether, and how often, having a gun will actually help you protect yourself, I have no doubt that for these folks, carrying a weapon makes them feel more secure. So they're being sincere when they talk about guns increasing security - meaning their feelings of security.

The problem is that when you carry a gun, you make people around you feel less secure. You present yourself as a potential threat for lethal violence. When you carry a weapon - especially if it's openly visible - people are likely to assume that it's loaded and that you're willing to use it. If I don't have a gun - or, for that matter, even if I do - that may decrease my security substantially insofar as I am now aware that there is someone in my vicinity who is both willing and able to kill me.

In my field, this is called the security dilemma - efforts to increase my security decrease the overall security of the system, and may make me less secure in the long run. This dynamic is just as real at the interpersonal level as it is among nations. We just don't understand it very well in our individual lives.

Ardent gun-rights supporters tend to respond to this observation with, "well, they shouldn't feel that way" - or "well, I have a right to carry my gun anyway". At that point, it becomes clear that you don't really care about security - yours or anyone else's. You're carrying the gun because it makes you feel powerful, or because it's a part of your identity, or because you feel the need to show "them" (whoever "them" is) what you can or can't do. It's an ego thing.

People who are genuinely interested in security should be able to realize that security is not only individual, it's collective. That when one individual carries a gun, it make lower the level of security in the room. Just ask John Crawford III how that works. Funny - I haven't noticed any NRA members picketing because his 2nd amendment rights were violated.

So if you have genuine concerns about security, that's fine - take the legal steps you feel are necessary to make yourself feel more secure. But recognize that by so doing, you may be making everyone else around you less secure. And while that may not be illegal (in Utah or elsewhere), it is reprehensible. Perhaps what we need to seek is not so much personal security as mutual respect and concern for our neighbors. That's a value I would think everyone (Red, Blue, Purple, or otherwise) could get behind.

Confederate Flags and Aggressive Identities: When Did "Just Being Me" Become an Offensive Game?

Another conflict over the display of the Confederate Flag has cropped up on a college campus. That's not particularly remarkable; such conflicts occur all the time. What's interesting about this one is that it has stirred up an institution north of the Mason-Dixon line generally thought of as a more liberal/progressive place - Bryn Mawr College.

Despite its unusual location, the conflict has played out predictably as an argument between those asserting their rights to display their heritage under the basic doctrines of free speech, and those asserting their rights to learn in an environment free from coercion or oppression.

As usual, almost everyone is disappointed in the outcome. The students who displayed the flag eventually took it down, likely disappointed that their rights to free speech and to their cultural identity had been trampled on. On the other side, many minority students were disappointed that it took so long to affect that outcome, and are now blaming the college for being insensitive to their needs and voices. I feel bad for the college administration - if ever there were a higher ed version of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, this is it.

What interests me about this story is not so much where it takes place, or the predictable nature of how it has unfolded. It is the origin of the conflict itself - the decision by two students (unnamed, at least in the story above) to put the flag up in a public space in the first place. That's a decision I both understand and find puzzling.

I understand it, in that college students do a lot of things out in public as a means of asserting and experimenting with their identities. Clothes and hairstyles change; attitudes and arguments are adopted, often loudly; posters and flags put up in decoration. This is the time of life when students are growing into their own identities. As southern young women in a predominantly northern institution, it doesn't at all surprise me that these two would choose to assert their southern-ness. I imagine that they, too, felt the pinch of being in a cultural minority (which they undoubtedly were).

I also get the "they have every right to" argument. Yes, we all believe in free speech, even speech that offends. But we see what happens when the argument turns only on rights. It bogs down in anger, recrimination, and division. Rights are important, but they are not the highest good here. They are necessary but not sufficient if the goal is building real human community.

Given that, what I don't understand is why these two young women chose to assert their cultural identity in a way that they must have known would cause pain and anger in others. It's possible that they might argue naiveté - that they didn't see this reaction coming. I find that hard to believe; even relatively sheltered young women from the south must know how incendiary the Confederate Flag is as a symbol. So I can only imagine that this was done deliberately - not necessarily to cause anger but indifferent to whether it bothered others or not.

And there lies our great failing. 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, we have not yet found a way for two important identities - African American and White Southerner - to coexist. The two groups pose no existential threat to each other anymore, yet they continue to behave as if they do.

Some of this, of course, is the difficulty of coming to terms with history. But this far removed from that history, that is an obstacle that should be overcome. Most White Southerners who fly the Confederate Flag today don't want to enslave African Americans, and many of them have overcome the racism of their ancestors. They, and their African American colleagues who are generations removed from slavery and Jim Crow, are free to forge their own identities for themselves.

The problem is not that we can't fashion identities that are both true to their roots and yet coexist with others. The problem is that we don't know how. We know what doesn't work - flags and snarky memes and "in your face" combativeness don't get us where we want to go. Sadly, that's a lot of what these young adults see the rest of us doing - we're no better at it then they are.

But there is a better way. Its details vary from context to context, but it starts in the same place every time: I am who I am. You are who you are. I respect you for who you are, and I ask that you do the same for me. After that, everything else is conversation. If I respect you, I don't demand that you change who you are. But if you respect me, you may change anyway. Everything begins and ends with respect.

If I act out of both identity and respect, I don't throw my symbols in your face. I don't put up flags I know you hate and mark the floor with tape to cordon off "your side" from "my side". I hope that out of this latest kerfuffle at Bryn Mawr, a few of their students - some of the best and brightest we have - will figure this out.

Why is Police Use of Force Different from Other Violence?

Another year, another month, another week, another killing of an unarmed young man in America. Other bloggers (Will Moore in particular) have been much more diligent about covering excessive use of force by police than I have. But the incident this week in Ferguson, Missouri has ignited a national conversation, at least briefly.

That conversation has gone in a number of directions, all of them important and meaningful. There is, of course, the race relations problem - Ferguson is an overwhelmingly black town with a nearly all-white police force, and many black residents have indicated that they have faced harassment from their "own" cops of years. A generation after the Rodney King riots, it is a national tragedy that this problem remains with us.

Then there are the twin problems of excessive force and over-militarization within the police. Scads of photos from Ferguson showing police with assault rifles, helmets, body armor, and large armored vehicles have been plastered across the internet. Some sites have stacked those photos side by side with photos of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The visual similarities are striking, making Ferguson look to the world like a war zone. "Is this what we want our police to look like?" is an appropriate and urgent question. "Shock and awe" was designed as a means of warfare for distant lands, not a means of keeping the peace in American suburbs. Clearly there's something badly out of kilter here.

What I haven't seen much about yet - probably because we're waiting for facts to emerge from an impartial investigation - is an understanding of the actual shooting death of Michael Brown. The few facts there are seem to be undisputed:

- Brown was unarmed at the time of his killing.
- Brown was walking down the street, during the day, when he walked by a police car.
- Brown was killed by multiple gunshot wounds, including one or more to the head.

As a student of interpersonal violence and self-defense, I struggle to imagine ANY scenario under which this is OK for the police officer involved. This seems like a gross overreaction to almost any conceivable "threat" this young man might have posed.

This is where I am left baffled. Every year there are numerous incidents in which police shoot and kill unarmed people and are determined, by police inquiry, to have operated within "proper police procedures". In many of these cases, the victim dies of a great many gunshot wounds, often fired at some range. Police will say that they were operating within their standard procedures - which suggests that the rules and procedures themselves are the problem.

I'm willing to accept that police, because they put themselves in harm's way to protect the community, may be given some latitude that the rest of us don't have. But how much? And shouldn't they be accountable to the public, both for what those rules are and for how they are used?

I can only imagine that, whatever the nature of the opening confrontation between Brown and the police, there were several ways to deal with it that didn't involve the drawing of a firearm. Why are THOSE not "common police procedure"? Introducing a deadly weapon, as every self-defense instructor I know will tell you, should be the absolute last resort. Yet some police, like Ted Nugent and Wayne LaPierre, seem to think that guns in the hands of "good guys" can solve all problems. Where is the NRA now?

Ultimately, I don't really have the right words about this tragedy. An encounter that started out as, at worst, a modest verbal conflict ended in someone brutally killed. That is wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter what kind of bureaucratic crap you slap on top of it in the name of "professional policing". Clearly, at least in some places, our police forces have gotten a badly skewed notion of what force is supposed to be for. Perhaps it's time that we as a society took that decision back, both from "professional police" who are too enamored of their military toys and from gun-culture folks who think the solution to everything is to threaten to shoot it.

Commencement Speakers, Polarization, and the Terrible Price of Moral Certainty

There have been a rash of high-profile commencement speaker incidents this year. Conde Rice withdrew from Rutgers, Haverford's invitation of former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has been called into question, and now IMF Managing Director Christine Legard has pulled out of speaking at Smith College. It's getting to the point where choosing a commencement speaker has become one of the hardest things a college has to do.

Common to all of these cases were small, well-organized, loud campaigns by students and faculty against the speaker in question. Each of these campaigns was built around a central moral claim, communicated with the kind of vigor that only the Righteous (or self-righteous) can muster. Some examples from these various cases:

From the petition against Ms. Legard speaking at Smith:

"By selecting Ms. Lagarde as the commencement speaker we are supporting the International Monetary Fund and thus going directly against Smith’s values to stand in unity with equality for all women, regardless of race, ethnicity or class. Although we do not wish to disregard all of Ms. Lagarde’s accomplishments as a strong female leader in the world, we also do not want to be represented by someone whose work directly contributes to many of the systems that we are taught to fight against. By having her speak at our commencement, we would be publicly supporting and acknowledging her, and thus the IMF."

From a faculty petition calling for Dr. Rice's withdrawal from Rutgers:

Dr. Rice "played a prominent role in his administration’s efforts to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the existence of links between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime," and that "the lies thus promoted led to the second Iraq war, which caused the death of over 100,000 men, women and children, and the displacement of millions of others."

And from a letter from faculty and students calling on Haverford to disinvite Birgeneau from their commencement:

"As a community standing in solidarity with nonviolent protesters across the country, we are extremely uncomfortable honoring you," a group of 50 Haverford students and professors wrote to Birgeneau. "To do so would be a disservice to those nonviolent protesters who were beaten and whose actions you dismissed as 'unfortunate,' as if they brought the abuse upon themselves."

In each case, faculty and students are making statements about values - both the symbolic values attached to a particular individual and the espoused values of the institution. In each case, the complainants are concerned that their institution will be "tainted" by honoring and listening to someone who has done things that differ from (what they perceive to be) the institution's espoused values.

This strikes me as an extremely slippery slope at best, and a thinly veiled way to attack people you don't like at worst. I have my own feelings about each of the individuals named above and the things they have done in their careers. But for me and a small group of like-minded individuals (in each case, the petition or letter originated from about 50 people, which at a college or university is a very small group) to impose our views on the rest of the institution strikes me as simply indefensible. I know intelligent, reasonable people who would disagree with the arguments made above - these are things about which reasonable people can in fact disagree.

And that is very much a part of the problem here. By resorting to internet-fueled, social media-spread controversy, and in some cases threats of unsightly pickets and protests, these groups are essentially imposing a minority veto on the rest of the institution. They are exercising power which, even in an ideal democratically deliberative community, they have no right to. They are shouting down voices they disagree with on a simple premise: we're right and you're wrong.

This kind of logic fails a second test as well: it attempts to equate absolute moral principles with live human beings. This is nearly always a recipe for disaster, because very few humans fit neatly into our absolutist boxes. Ironically, it was the commencement speaker at my own graduation many years ago who pointed this out - so eloquently that I still remember his speech today. He told two stories - one of a Nazi SS officer who amidst all the terrible things he did as part of the SS saved a Jewish family in Northern Italy in the midst of the war, the other of Dwight Eisenhower who despite all the noble and heroic things he did ordered the public hanging execution of an orphaned American soldier as an example to American troops not to desert their posts. The punch line was clear: terrible people sometimes do good things, and good people sometimes do terrible things. The real moral world of human beings is far more complex than you think it is.

This is the point that these petition-writers, despite their advanced educations, have apparently missed. Christine Legard does not equate to the IMF, nor does Condelezza Rice equal the Iraq War - even if those things were morally unambiguous, which they are not. In the drive for moral purity and certitude, some folks seem compelled to insulate themselves from anything tainted with what they regard as morally corrupted. By that logic, they will soon find themselves alone in a room talking to themselves - hardly the kind of "liberal education" these institutions are supposed to champion.

Silly Blather About Master's Degrees

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the silliest articles I have seen in a while. I would ordinarily pass over stuff that's obviously wrong - if I wrote a blog piece every time I disagreed with someone's views on some internet-available publication, I would have little time for anything else include food and sleep. But this one in particular caught my eye, probably because of its provocative title. You can read it yourself here:

Those Master's-Degree Programs at Elite U.? They're For-Profit

Kevin Carey, Director of the education-policy program at the New America Foundation, is trying (in broad, sweeping brushstrokes) to equate master's programs at public universities with associates degree programs at the University of Phoenix and others - credentials of dubious worth that generate high debt rates and (he implies, though he has no data to this point) high student loan defaults. The argument is worth unpacking, if only to see where he's gone so horribly wrong.

First, though this tends towards ad hominem territory it is worth noting that Mr. Carey, though he is billed as "an expert" on "higher education issues", has never actually worked for a university as more than an adjunct instructor, nor is there any indication that he has ever run a master's program. The section of his official bio with regards to his career reads thus:

Prior to joining New America, Carey worked as the policy director of Education Sector, and as an analyst at the Education Trust and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Previously, he worked for the Indiana Senate Finance Committee and as Indiana's Assistant State Budget Director. He also teaches education policy at Johns Hopkins University.

Aside from some classroom work (at what level it doesn't say), it's not clear that Mr. Carey has ever worked in the industry he claims to be an expert in. I'm not sure I follow that logic, but what do I know.

Getting to the substance of his argument - Mr. Carey's main claim that public university master's programs are the same as worthless for-profit ventures rests on a number of observations about rising median debt levels among master's-seeking students. Three specific claims he makes:

According to the latest results, the median debt accrued by students completing master’s degrees in 2012 was $57,600, a 31-percent increase from just four years earlier, after adjusting for inflation.

The median debt for master’s degrees in education, for example, grew from $33,910 to $50,879 in four years.

Median debt for people in the broad fields that grant master-of-arts degrees grew from $43,247 to nearly $59,000.

The first red flag here is that I can't tell from these statements whether he is talking about debt accumulated while in graduate school or total debt accumulated by the student. If these numbers represent the latter, they could easily be the result of rising undergraduate debt loads, which we know have been increasing in recent years. Undergrads who go on to get master's degrees - as many have in recent years, trying to get an edge in a weak labor market - carry their debt with them. So Mr. Carey may well be blaming the problem on the wrong source. At the very least, he is guilty of not presenting his data clearly - and when I see an unclear presentation like this, it makes me wonder whether somebody is hiding something.

Moreover, Mr. Carey implies in his article that this debt is problematic because students getting master's degrees either aren't getting jobs, or aren't making enough in those jobs to pay the debt back - a problem that has been documented with respect to many for-profit degrees at lower levels. But in making this claim, Mr. Carey offers no data or information at all. The best he can muster is hyperbole and snark, to whit:

Do you know any recent M.A. graduates with lots of money to burn?

Similar numbers appear in the catch-all category of "other" master’s degrees. Many of these have—just like "office management"—weak ties to established professions.

A one-year master’s program in something like "government" is accountable to no one.

These assertions sound vaguely sinister, but they are at best anecdotal - and at worst, imaginary. They sound like the claims of someone who has not actually bothered to take the time to research the subject he's writing about, but has decided instead to shoot from the hip and hope that writing style and the general assent of his audience to his political leadings will earn him nods of approval. He is, in other words, just like Thomas Friedman and most other op-ed writers: opining on things he knows little about with sweeping generalizations and a touch of attitude.

I don't know the relevant data for graduate programs across the country. I do know much of this information for my own institution, at which I oversee over 60 master's programs. Here are a few relevant observations:

- Half of our graduate students do not borrow any money at all while in graduate school; of those that do, very few run up the kind of debt that Mr. Carey is indicating, and if they did it would be almost entirely in support of living expenses (money that does not go to the university), not tuition.

- Contrary to Mr. Carey's reference to "largely unaccountable terminal master's-degree programs that offer little or no financial aid", many of our master's degrees, especially in STEM fields, do carry significant financial aid support.  My office alone oversees $1.8 million in tuition scholarships for graduate students across all colleges every year, most of them pursuing master's degrees, and I know that other institutions in my state spend far more. And that's not counting institutional support for graduate assistants - we have about 550 of those every year, all of whom get full tuition waivers.

- Most of our graduate programs care deeply about the careers they are preparing their students for, and take the time to track placement rates either in getting jobs or in moving on to PhD programs. Just because these programs aren't accountable to somebody in Washington doesn't mean there's no accountability - poorly-performing programs face a host of sanctions, up to and including being shut down.

- Even in the one area where he might have a point - Master's of Education programs - our enrollment numbers have plummeted, suggesting that the market is working by discouraging students from chasing a degree that may not help them as much as it once did.

In short, Mr. Carey has painted a picture that looks wholly unlike the reality I work with on a daily basis. Perhaps my institution is not the kind of place he meant to pick on - if so, he should say so. But if he expects to be respected by those of us who work in the industry and read the Chronicle, he should take the time to do his homework before coming to class. Perhaps in my next blog post, I should make an argument for government regulation of op-ed authors...

Power, Character, and Respect: Machiavelli Is Beside the Point

Although I almost never post anything (other than blog post links) to Facebook, I posted the following to my FB timeline earlier today:

People fear power. People respect character.

Since a good chunk of my FB friends are poli sci geeks like me, I quickly got references to both Machiavelli (who obviously made this observation, more or less, long before I did) and Socrates. But as much as I still spend some of my professional life (including my last blog post) musing about politics, that wasn't really what this is about. Unlike good old Niccolo, I'm not interested in giving governments or government leaders advice on how to successfully run a country - which is good, since they're not listening to me anyway.

The context in which this observation was meant, and for which it is much more interesting, is organizational. Loosely, an organization is an entity with a bunch of folks arranged in some kind of structure (usually hierarchical) which is collectively trying to achieve some mission or set of goals. Within the organization, individuals have their own goals, motives, and incentives, giving rise to the oft-cited "organizational politics". One reason why I have had some measure of success in academic administration is that organizational politics follow many of the same laws and predictable patterns as other politics, so there is a connection between what I study and what I do.

One of the interesting challenges to leaders in organizations is the leader-follower dynamic (or, if you're an academic geek, the principal-agent problem). Leaders, of course, want to lead - meaning they want the people under them in the structure to do what they (the leaders) want. Indeed, much of what people think of as "leadership" boils down to "telling other people what to do and getting them to do it". This is a necessary function of leadership, to be sure - although the latter part (getting people to do what you want) can be tricky.

But many organizational leaders, I suspect, don't want merely to be effective in ordering others around. They also want to be respected and admired, including by the people beneath them in the organization. Part of this is ego, part of it may be a sense of efficacy - if people respect me, they are more likely to do my bidding (true).

And this is where organizations differ from, say, running a country - and why Machiavelli is beside the point in an organizational context. Because an organization, even a fairly large one, is still small enough that the relationships between individuals at different levels matters. I work in a fairly sizable university, with up to 2400 employees - faculty, staff, etc. We all work in a space that's fairly geographically limited, and in an organizational context where, while the senior leadership doesn't see everybody every day, there are opportunities for direct interaction that you don't have even in a town or municipality of similar size. The population of the town I live in is substantially smaller than the staff + student population of my university, yet I have far more interactions with people at the university (up to and including the president) than I do with the mayor or town officials of my town.

So relationships matter organizationally. And this is where leaders can get themselves in trouble. Because the higher up the food chain you are in an organization, the worse the information you get. People hate to tell leaders bad news, and they particularly hate to tell them they're wrong - because the leaders at the top have a lot of organizational power, and people are afraid of that power. So if a leader does something foolish that ticks off a lot of people, they're unlikely to hear about it or to see its effects - until the effects are so big and obvious they can't be ignored.

Unfortunately, being in an environment of mostly positive feedback all the time can cause leaders to confuse being feared with being respected. They may conclude that, since no one is criticizing them, everyone thinks they're doing a great job. This is, of course, a serious delusion that leaders have to go well out of their way to fix - if they even want to, which most of them don't.

I have heard many eloquent arguments about the importance of doing "full 360 degree" reviews of personnel, especially leaders. If you want to know how someone is doing, talk to their supervisor, talk to their peers and others on their level, and talk to the people who work for them and others beneath them in the structure - all with total anonymity and no possibility of knowledge or retribution (as much as can be credibly arranged). The benefits to such an evaluation, in terms of getting at the real truth of the matter, are obvious. I've also never seen an organization - including any of the five colleges and universities for which I've worked - do one, ever. It's hard to find a better idea so widely avoided.

I've thought of all of this recently because of a few events (the details of which I can't write about here) where I've seen people in positions of leadership do things that seem almost calculated to destroy respect. I don't think they ARE calculated - I think they are done out of ignorance. But because the people in question have power, the fear which that power generates mitigates (in the short run) the damage caused by the lack of respect.

In the long run, such people aren't doing themselves any favors. But even that is a probabilistic statement - lots of people who are not respected (and whose characters are highly suspect, if not downright despicable) nevertheless succeed in a professional arena. The fact that their organizations are probably measurably worse off for that success doesn't end up mattering much, because those losses are "opportunity losses" - things that might have been, had the leadership been better, but didn't come to pass. Being invisible, they trouble very few, least of all the leaders busy confusing fear with respect.

There's an open question on the end of all of this - given how prevalent these mistakes are, is it the case that organizational leadership selection processes are biased in favor of those who would lead by the use of fear rather than respect? Or are we simply seeing the distribution otherwise reflected in the general population - that most people, given the choice, would rather control through fear than influence through respect of character? That's a question far too large for a blog post, or even for a lifetime of research. But for myself, I know what sort of leader I would like to be if ever I am given that opportunity - and I continue to add to my stock of negative examples, gathered over a nearly 20 year career.