Berkeley Blog

Sex, Drugs, and Rock n Roll: Most Critical Part of College Experience Eliminated by Distance Learning

My German professor at Reed College – who is long since deceased – once said that if he could get only 5 percent of his students’ attention, he would feel as if he had succeeded. That’s because, he affirmed -- based on decades of observation (including his own participation given this was before the #MeToo movement) -- most college students spend 95 percent of their time focused on sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

That was during the 60s, but I don’t think much has changed except for the musical genres. Why would anyone want to “go to” college when entering an actual classroom is now mostly virtual, dining is take-out or socially distanced, and social activities – not to mention sex – are not only highly discouraged but might also result in death via Covid-19?

My brother-in-law, a retired Cornell professor, just sent me an email from Cornell President Martha E. Pollack to students and staff, outlining plans for an in-person year with “hybrid instruction and opportunities for remote learning for those who can’t return” – mainly international students. The plan covers classroom lectures, living arrangements, travel, and schedules but skips over the essential three elements of a student’s life: sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

If I were a student, I’d be tempted to skip the year, save some hefty college fees, and do something to help stop the spread of the virus, especially among communities of color, the homeless, those in nursing homes, and anyone who is food or rent insecure.

Perhaps someone will initiate a Covid Community Corps, akin to the Peace Corps, composed of young people dedicated to healing this nation and the planet, not to mention learning more about themselves and non-similar others than they would in a place of higher learning.

This does not rule out doing distance learning as well, but it should be free and accredited. Covid community work should eliminate tuition fees, at least for the coming academic year.

As to sex, drugs, and rock n roll, those in the Covid Community Corps would have the opportunity to experience and acquire empathy, compassion, and caring, all attributes that could prove more gratifying and just as useful for living their lives as the knowledge acquired at an in-person college.

It Could Be Much Worse

I was ten years old in 1956 and living in Bremerhaven, Germany, where my dad, a U.S. Army chief warrant officer and bandleader, was stationed, when hundreds-- perhaps thousands-- of Hungarians converged on our town carrying their entire possessions and holding onto their young children. The Hungarians were fleeing from an uprising, known as the Hungarian Revolution, protesting the policies of the Soviet government.

Besides their possessions, these refugees were carrying something else: a new strain of flu, which came to be known as the Hungarian flu. They had walked hundreds of miles to our town because it was a large port, and they could board ships to get to other continents, such as the U.S. 

Because many of these refugees had the Hungarian flu, Bremerhaven -- which was occupied by the U.S. and its western European allies under an agreement with the Soviet government after WWII and still in effect -- immediately enforced a quarantine for three weeks. I don't remember whether we could go outside -- I used to bicycle everywhere on the cobblestoned streets and see if I could weave between Army tanks as conveys drove along the roads -- but I do remember that my parents were worried and had probably stockpiled food from the PX, or military post exchange. I don't remember where the refugees were housed ....it was cold by the North Sea and I do remember they all wore thick, heavy coats three weeks. After the quarantine lifted, we departed for the U.S. 

In these times, I think of those Hungarians suffering from a strange flu and having no home or possessions, like the millions of migrants escaping their homelands today. At least most of us have homes. We still have a country, and we still have some reasonable, responsible people in government, perhaps not at the White House, but elsewhere. We are not under martial law...yet. We have possessions and food and most of us have the technology to stay connected. It could be much worse.

Why France Has a Minister of Culture. And the U.S. Does Not.

So I was reminded that France has a Minister of Culture when he was quoted this week in reference to the burning of the roof of Notre Dame. I don’t know what he said but the fact that culture is considered so vital to that country’s identity that there would be a government minister just to make these remarks and do other culture-related tasks blows my mind.

Can you imagine what a Minister of Culture might do in the U.S.? Participate in a ribbon cutting at a new Disneyland or designate the new Apple headquarters, in the shape of a translucent portobello mushroom, a national heritage?

I suppose one could argue that the President usurps this role in his annual awarding of medals to great artists and athletes and musicians. But France doesn’t mix sports with art: it also has a Minister of Sport, which alas, the U.S. lacks as well.

This country does have a history of culture, but it’s the culture of the cultures we’ve destroyed through killings, forced migrations, slavery, and exclusion. So we have Native American weavings, jewelry, sculptures, myths, and dance; from the natives of African countries forced into slavery, blues and jazz and gospel, poetry and literature and history; and from the Vietnamese whose country we tried to but couldn’t destroy, and the Japanese we put into concentration camps, and the Chinese whose women we excluded and whom we worked to death on building our railroads, art, music, literature, ceramics, textiles, and ichibana.

Our country was founded by those inculcated with the Protestant culture. It was and is a culture that values money over the arts, although one might argue there’s artfulness in the sermonizing tracts of Cotton Mather. And those with money generally like to acquire works of art, support symphonies and libraries and museums. But art isn’t part of our collective consciousness the way it is for the French or the Italians or the Greeks or the Japanese.

A U.S. Minister of Culture could change all that by diverting the billions to erect a barrier between our country and Mexico (or Canada, if they decide to invade) for artists, art centers, art education, and community art projects. Venezuela did it for training musicians. Cuba did it for ballet education. But it doesn’t require a socialist state to support the arts. All we’d need is a new cabinet position.

 

 

Newseum Old News from the Start

So the $450 million, 7-story Newseum building in Washington, D.C. erected by the Freedom Forum in 2008, is now being sold to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million to help pay the FF’s mounting debt.

The point is what were the “freedom” founders thinking when they built a physical structure for what had by 2008 become mostly a digital media? Why would anyone pay a $25 admission fee to see what they could easily view on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which provides free access to more a century of newspapers and more than half a century of TV news?

Given the layoffs of journalists throughout media, it seems the money for a building and its decade-long operations might have been better spent supporting the very media it enshrined. Although I’ve never been there, to me the Newseum appears to be more like a cemetery than an institution celebrating and supporting the viability of a free press.

In Foreign Media I Trust

The Knight Foundation just came out with an historical brief on the decline in the U.S. of our trust in media as well as in government. No surprise, since the two institutions are so closely entwined that, like Siamese twins, they needs to be severed at birth in order to thrive and survive.

I grew up partly in Germany and spent some time living in France, so I have always felt as if I had one foot on a different continent than the one I’m living on now: Silicon Valley, which based on its values – progress uber alles – seems as if it were a continent unto itself.

So I read a medley of publications, including the Guardian, BBC News, der Spiegel, RT (the independent Russian media site), and even Le Monde occasionally. Not that I trust any of these publications more than the NY Times or Axios (although the latter with its Why It Matters coda for each story is gaining more of my respect), but by reading news from other countries I can find out more about what’s going on in parts of the world our national media seem to ignore unless there’s a natural disaster or government overthrow.

I can also discover what the rest of the world thinks about our disintegrating government, our shooting-in-schools gun culture, and the #MeToo movement.

As for truth, I try to look beyond individual events, such as crazy people planting explosives at FedEx offices and who is the latest person to lose his or her job at the oh-so-White House. Instead, I read trusted thinkers, people like Robert Reich, George Lakoff, Noam Chomsky, and yes, Michelle Goldberg, Maureen Dowd, and the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, who get the larger picture and can delineate the mindset and motives of the players making the world go under.

So that’s my response to your brief, dear Knight Foundation. Keep funding a free press even if it belongs to the corporations that fund them, as it always has. Maybe some day the promise of the Internet will make us all reporters and create a truly free press. The answer lies in technology that now supports the likes of Facebook but could easily be transferred to an open platform that would allow free access of knowledge and information to all.

The City of Tomorrow Is Almost Here Today

This morning, Jim Hackett, the president and CEO of Ford Motor Company, and I worked together to design a human-centric street using toy people, bicycles, markers, trees, and other miniature implements of street fare. When I suggested we erect a sculpture in a designated park area, Jim put together some Styrofoam bits with toothpicks and cut off pieces of tape for me to 'solder' the construction.

This was part of the City of Tomorrow Symposium at Fort Mason in San Francisco, hosted by Ford on August 19, 2017, to explore innovative approaches to urban mobility. The symposium started with a history of NYC’s bike share program by former head of that city’s transportation system, Janette Sadik-Khan, who said it took six years to transform the city’s streets to make them safe and convivial for bicyclists as well as pedestrians. The biggest obstacle, she said, was the culture of the city’s inhabitants, which was anti exercise, anti sharing, and anti environmental, and anti “French,” Paris being seen as the genesis of metropolitan bike share.

Today, Sadik-Khan said, bike sharing and commuting by bicycle is very popular, not only in NYC but also in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. “Streets can be so much more than spaces. They can be places.”

Ford’s lab in Palo Alto -- Greenfield Labs -- works with IDEO and other designers to plan for the city of tomorrow. Facilitators from Greenfield led hands-on workshops where teams designed city streets themselves. Four long tables were covered with paper on which participants could draw, erect structures, such as cafes and overhead trains, and build parks. The only design imperative was to create a street that was human centered. The group I worked with ditched cars altogether, although we did have one woodie that we kept as a historical relic in the middle of a park area and decorated with a phone booth (also defunct) on top.

During lunch – all utensils compostable – I talked to the head of systems and technology and chief research scientist of artificial intelligence at Continental, a German company that is the world’s largest supplier of automobile parts and has a division in San Jose. He said the world is moving so fast, it’s hard to keep up with it. He says car mechanics will soon be a profession of the past – like taxi drivers and travel agents – because even now, all one needs is a software app to diagnose issues in a car. In fact, he diagnoses his own car – a 2009 Saab – using such an app.

He – and others at the symposium – mentioned the biggest barriers to adoption of new technologies, like self-driving cars -- are not engineering issues but regulatory ones, like integrating state, county, and city transportation policies, not to mention federal ones. But change can happen overnight, or almost overnight, as the U.S. went from horses and bicycles to cars in just over a decade, from 1900 to 1913.

Maybe all we need to do now, I sometimes think, is to reverse that process and return to horses and bicycles.

Why The NY Times Drives Me (and the President-Elect) Crazy Sometimes

The NY Times, its editorial board, and many of its reporters frame the news from an implicit bias. Basically, underlying its reporting is a belief in the status quo.

Sometimes the assumptions its editors make about the status of the world order goes contrary to reality, however.

Take today’s obit for Fidel Castro, which compares him to a puppet queen:

“Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II.”

Excuse me, but what power does QEII exert except to complain about her offspring’s romantic dalliances? As for leadership, what was her role in the Brexit debacle? And how dare the Times compare the political leader, albeit a dictator, of a Communist country with a puppet monarch of a parliamentary democracy?

A more apt comparison might have been with the theocratically selected Dalai Lama, who has – until his recent political resignation – been the leader of Tibetans more than a decade longer than Castro.

The President-Elect might have a point about our mainstream media. Even fools sometimes speak the truth.

We Need to Face Our Genocidal Past, Says Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, won a Supreme Court case banning mandatory life sentencing without parole for anyone age 17 or younger. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, a hinterland that officially celebrates Robert E. Lee alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harvard-trained lawyer dedicated his life to serving the poor, the incarcerated, and children prosecuted as adults.

Stevenson keynoted the final day of the Conference on 2016 Adverse Childhood Experiences held October 19–21 in San Francisco and hosted by the Center for Youth Wellness, based in Bayview/Hunter’s Point, a part of San Francisco as far removed from the thriving high-tech scene as is Birmingham.

The founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, Nadine Burke-Harris, a dynamic pediatrician turned social activist, introduced Stevenson, whom she met at a dinner hosted by Alphabet (formerly known as Google) chairman, Eric Schmidt. Fortuitously seated together, they both recognized in each other a drive to create more justice in this country.

“America is the most punitive nation in the world,” Stevenson began, and then cited statistics the well known statistics. The U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million people today, upr from 300,000 in 1972. An African American himself, he said blacks suffer most, because one out of three male black babies are now expected to go to prison.

He said that part of the problem is our culture. “We use a punishment mindset that exacerbates the trauma (people have already suffered). We have to change that.”

He offered several solutions, some cultural, some policy-driven, such as having the Centers for Disease control and Prevention declare a health crisis in the 200 zip codes in the U.S. where 80 percent of the children are expected to end up in jail because of the traumatic experiences they will face, including violence in the family, the neighborhood, and schools.

To me, the child of a holocaust survivor, whose own parents and grandparents were survivors of anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, Stephenson’s depiction of America as a “post-genocidal society,” created by “an ideology of white supremacy” rang true.

In school, we are taught that this country as shaped by the desire for equality, yet as Stephenson points out, “The demography of this nation was shaped by racial terror.

“Slavery didn’t end in 1865. It just evolved,” he added.

My parents,” he said, “were humiliated every day of their lives. We haven’t dealt with that.”

He cited examples of countries that have faced up to their genocidal history, including South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid, and Germany, where in Berlin plaques are mounted on buildings denoting former homes and businesses of Jews who were killed or forced to leave.

In his own attempt to reconcile with our past and promote healing, his institute is putting up markers at every lynching site in the U.S. He’s also written a best-selling book about his work and life, Just Mercy.

Addressing the audience of 450 clinicians, educators, social workers, therapists, and community advocates dedicated to helping develop resilience in children and adults suffering early childhood trauma, he said “I realized why I do what I do. Because I’m broken, too. It is being broken that can lead us to healing.”

As for what impels him to keep serving the poor, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. It’s justice.”

Lakoff Deconstructs Last Presidential Debate

Last night, the Albany Community Center – situated a half mile from Berkeley – hosted a screening of the last presidential debate followed by a question and answer session with by George Lakoff, retired UC Berkeley linguistics professor, author of many books, including Moral Politics, and political consultant as well as founder of the now defunct Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank. (The institute was a former client of mine.)

Lakoff says neuroscience shows our brains are wired early on to accept one of two world views, based on our family values. Either we were raised in a strict paternalistic family, where discipline and self-control were stressed, or we grew up in a family that showed empathy for each other as well as for the rest of the world's population. You can guess which kind of family or moral values Trump supporters adhere to versus the ones Clinton voters believe in. Of course, there are variants and gradations of this binary value system, but they help explain why Trump supporters relate to the man no matter what he says or has done. They share his belief that people who are poor deserve to be poor because they lack discipline, and that it’s not the government’s job to help them out.

Trump supporters, like children growing up in an authoritarian family, love their parents – and Trump -- even though they are harmed or constrained by them. It's a paradox many of us have experienced and struggle to reconcile with.

All politics, said Lakoff, is moral. That’s why rationality plays so little a role in any political debate. He noted that Clinton stopped citing numbers in the last debate because she – or her handlers – realized that positive words are more effective in reaching voters than statistics.

Here’s an interesting observation Lakoff made about how college educated people vote: Conservatives tend to major in business and marketing, which focus on ways to sell yourself and your ideas, whereas liberals major in history, psychology, sociology, law, and economics, all based on the Descartian premise that people are guided in making choices based on reason, not emotion.

Tens of millions of people, Lakoff, said, feel left out of the American political and economic landscape. They are not necessarily bad people, he added, and they don’t necessarily agree with everything Trump says and does, but they identify with the paternalistic strength he projects. He thinks that Clinton will win Nov. 8 but that she and her administration will be under relentless attacks from conservatives. That’s why he is still trying to set up a national organization that will help progressives frame issues in ways that reach all parts of the brain, not just the thinking part.

It's Time for a No Party System

It’s been a long time coming, but now the dissolution of the two party system is nigh. The NY Times today reports on a recent survey showing most Democrats distrust the party nominee, Clinton, and even more Republicans distrust its party nominee, Trump. So, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, What are parties for?

It’s about time we just voted for a candidate we support, regardless of party politics. Given the ubiquity of the Internet and the influence of social media as well as fundraising opportunities online, why bother with a two-party system that serves to serve no one but itself? We need to disintermediate the political system, just as we did with every other 20th century institution left over from the Industrial Revolution.

Everyone could run on an independent ticket, and just as in personalized medicine and personalized education, we could have personalized politics. The person supported by the most persons wins. 

Hey, isn’t that what democracy is all about?