A Mature View of Uncertainty

"For the moment, this is anarchy," said Adolphe Reynald, a top aide to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, as he supervised a makeshift first aid center that was registering long lines of wounded people but had no medicine to treat them. "There's nothing we can do. We're out here to show that we care, that we're suffering along with them."
From Patience Wears Thin as Desperation Grows by Marc Lacey, The New York Times

Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake appears a microcosm, of what ails society as a whole, of the troubles we're seeing locally, for example on the university campus where I work, and on a personal level too. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Yet there was no prevention for Haiti. Expressions of concern happen after the fact, when the tragedy is the reality. What happens before the fact? David Brooks, in a rather disturbing column, suggests the fundamental issue is poverty. The San Francisco earthquake of 20 years ago had the same ferocity as the Haiti earthquake of last week. Both measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. But the Haiti earthquake produced three orders of magnitude greater deaths and human devastation. Rich economies take precaution. Poor ones don't. We don't know how to raise other countries out of poverty. So we are consigned to help reduce the suffering once devastation has occurred.
It is now several weeks later. I had stopped writing after the paragraph above, not because Haiti is unimportant, the contrary is true, but rather that the situation was and still seems so desperate. I don't want to deny reality but I do want to provide more uplift. Uncertainty need not be so grim. How can we talk about a "mature view" when things appear so irreparable? I needed a different example to shake me out the doldrums.
From a decision making point of view, I found what I was looking for in the Super Bowl, particularly the aggressive choices made by New Orleans Head Coach, Sean Payton, with the coup de grace the onside kick to start out the second half, a gamble that paid off. New Orleans recovered the ball and went into score a touchdown thereafter.

Yeah, the Colts came right back down the field and scored a touchdown to take a 17-13 lead, but the damage had been done and the tone for the rest of the game had been set by the onside kick. Payton followed that gamble by taking another, letting Hartley kick a 47-yard field goal to cut the deficit to a single point.

The Colts players were not expecting the onside kick. So with that play especially, the Saints became the leaders. The Colts had to react to them, not vice versa. Pulling off a successful gamble, especially one that appears a matter of discretion, not foisted upon the decision maker by circumstance, conveys a sense of bold leadership. When the success of the gamble comes at the expense of a rival, the leader of the rival appears out of position, perhaps indecisive, so the impact can well endure beyond the immediate consequence. All the other participants become infected this way. The Saints transformed themselves from underdog to favorite via this play. Ironically, right before the game there was a brief interview with the Colts Head Coach, Jim Caldwell, and successor to Tony Dungy. Both appear impassive as a matter of style, perhaps a desirable trait for leading tightly wound athletes, who might head south when the going gets tough once they sniff it in the air. If you don't display your inner churn under adversity you can't do so when things are going your way either or the poker face will be a dead giveaway. In the interview Caldwell was asked why he seemed so relaxed. (This came right after the announcers commented that the players, especially those for whom this was their first Super Bowl, had to have butterflies in their stomachs.) Caldwell responded that the team was able to stay at the same hotel and follow essentially the same schedule as when they won the Lombardi Trophy four years earlier. He also said that when you are well prepared you can afford to relax. Those words came back to haunt him.
Economists teach that a risk averse individual will nonetheless take on additional risk when the odds are favorable enough. Yet the evidence seems to suggest that even fairly astute decision makers, in this case head coaches in professional football and basketball and managers in major league baseball, consistently make a conservative choice when what may seem the apparently riskier choice offers a better chance of winning the game. In this paper by David Romer targeted at an audience of professional economists, where he examines the relatively narrow decision to punt or go for it on fourth down, the evidence clearly says that with sufficiently good field position and not too many yards to make for the first down, going for it is the better strategy. Yet most coaches opt to punt. This is a puzzle to ponder. Romer cites much other research to show that the bias towards conservative decision making is the rule; the focus on professional sports in the analysis is only because we are all fans and the micro decision making that happens during games is available for scrutiny by the fans.
There is a further puzzle in the sports case that doesn't extend elsewhere. Because the information is publicly available, insiders could do the sort of statistical analysis that Romer did (or they could hire experts to do it for them) and in that way learn from experience. Yet such Bayesian Learning doesn't seem to have happened or, alternatively, since the book Moneyball popularized the notion of using such statistical information to improve team performance in baseball, it may be that there is such learning but it is happening at a much slower rate than might be anticipated. This is anecdotal information only, but it is interesting to observe that Caldwell came up through the ranks, which might very well be a process that instills a conservative outlook as part of the regimen, while Payton, 8 years Caldwell's junior, went to New Orleans to become head coach in part to bypass the going up through the ranks process. Payton took on Drew Brees to be his quarterback as one of his first steps in the new job, although Brees had experienced what might have been a career threatening injury. So the risk taking has been with Payton, certainly for a while. It is not a new development concocted just for the Super Bowl.
I want to argue in this chapter that the economics way of looking at this sort of decision making is not as helpful as some other alternatives, which I will develop, but first I want to trace my own trajectory in thinking about the issues. A few weeks ago I finished reading How Markets Fail, John Cassidy's tour through the history of classical and neoclassical economic thought, the difficulties that can emerge with market solutions, and the tragic recent history of our economy that resulted in the financial crisis leading to the "Great Recession." One thing Cassidy makes abundantly clear is that there isn't only one "economics way" of looking at things. Cassidy distinguishes between two different schools of thought. One is the Chicago School of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, etc. The other is the Keynesian school. But here I don't want to use those descriptors to consider whether markets effectively self-regulate or if governments need to step in. The question to hone in on is whether the statistical approach that does seem to make sense in the decision making of head football coaches makes any sense at all in real world decision making that you and I engage in, or if instead either because the decision is a one-off or because there has been a regime change in various aspects of the economic environment that causes departure from historical pattern, assigning meaningful probabilities is a nonsense task, in which case other criteria need to be used to come to a choice.
The regime change explanation is the focus of The Black Swan, a book I read last summer. I had planned on writing this chapter well before reading the book. During and immediately after the reading I wondered if Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author, had stolen my thunder. I came to conclude that because he was so caught up in the uncertainty of financial markets and the possibility of enormous one day movements in stock prices, that no, he hadn't already said much if anything I wanted to say. (Cassidy does echo many of Taleb's themes, though Cassidy's style is not nearly as in-your-face as Taleb's.) I wanted to focus on choices that emerge from our ordinary life, inside and outside the classroom. Choice and learning are tied at the hip and what I want to advance in this chapter is that guessing and verification is the approach we all use to make choices. This doesn't mean that if we do it well we'll make the "right" choice. It does mean, however, that if we teach students guessing and verification in school then they will have developed a critical life skill that will endure and that they will come to rely upon, though they will continue to refine it and modify their approach as they mature.
Let me return then to my own development as it will track a variety of questions and issues that should be considered in this chapter. In the early to mid 1980s I began to change my research area from Keynesian general equilibrium models (I couldn't get that stuff published) to Oligopoly Theory (where I had better success). There is a rich tradition in oligopoly theory dating back to the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous of the approaches is the Cournot Model, where the outcome is somewhere in between the monopoly solution (high price, low output) and the the competitive solution (low price, high output). Further, under Cournot firms with identical cost are treated symmetrically; they have the same market share. So Cournot "explains" differences in market share across firms via differences in cost function. An alternative model, the Stackelberg Leadership Model, produces an asymmetric market structure even when firms have identical costs. The leader claims the lion's share of the market. The follower reacts to the leader's aggression by contracting output. The question emerged: what might determine whether the game actually played is Cournot or Stackelberg?
One might very well imagine that in a new industry firms arrive at different times, simply because they become aware of the opportunity differentially. So we talk about a first-in firm and a subsequent entrant. The Cournot outcome results if the first-in firm must accommodate the later entrant, while the Stackelberg model results if there is a first-mover advantage where the first-in firm can make a "credible commitment" to play Stackelberg. At around that time game theory was taking over the teaching of oligopoly theory and the word credible had a very specific game theoretic meaning – once the commitment had been made the play constituted equilibrium behavior thereafter. A paper by Dixit showed that real capacity investment that couldn't readily be reversed would serve as just such a credible commitment, by lowering the firm's marginal cost. So we had an interesting story. A first-mover advantage coupled with the ability to make a credible pre-commitment got you to Stackleberg, or something closely resembling it.
There was just one problem. The first mover advantage itself wasn't explained and a leader-follower outcome seems to emerge in many situations where there is no obvious first mover. Prior to the Super Bowl, Sean Payton announced that his play calling would have to be aggressive for his team to win. Jim Caldwell almost certainly did press interviews every day for the week leading up to the Super Bowl, but his remarks must have been bland enough not to warrant mention on the ESPN Web site. One might ask whether Payton's announcement was a credible commitment or simply "cheap talk," which would have no outcome of the game. This thought brings memories of Super Bowl III, perhaps the most important football game ever played. Joe Namath predicted a victory over the Colts, who were heavily favored. It is impossible to know for sure whether or how the prediction impacted the game. One might envision it having no effect initially but then helping to demoralize the Colts once they fell behind. Similarly, one can imagine that Payton's pre-game comments about aggressive play calling helped to magnify the impact of the successful onside kick.
I wrote a paper about the symmetric case, where there was no first mover advantage but where the outcome could be Stackelberg-like (or no equilibrium at all). It's what Sean Payton understood and every kid at the schoolyard understands as well – if there is a leadership advantage to exploit somebody or some group will emerge to play that role. While the point might be obvious to the non-economist, the paper did clarify that a first mover advantage is not necessary for a Stackelberg outcome and further, that even if the situation is symmetric at the start, it need not end up that way. So it was a contribution to the literature and in working through the implications of the model it got me hooked on thinking about strategic commitment, how it is attained and when it makes sense to use.
At the time of the writing, these results were purely academic to me; I didn't try at all to translate them into implications for real world human interactions. As a consequence, I associated the notion of commitment with rigidity, as in the Dixit paper capacity precommitment created an inelastic output reaction function for the first mover firm over the relevant range. A few years later, while on sabbatical in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, I became more acutely aware of the inconsistency between the economic theory world constructed in my head and and my real world of human interaction.
On the economic theory front, there was an emerging literature on flexibility versus commitment where the tradeoff seemed to be to react to random events after the fact or make commitment before the fact, but not both. Since the department I was visiting in the Business School at UBC had the international trade theorists James Brander and Barbara Spencer, I started to apply my old oligopoly theory ideas to the international trade setting. Combining that with this new found interest in modeling flexibility in light of uncertainty, I wrote this paper on strategic trade policy, not an entirely satisfactory treatment of the issues but a way to get my fingers dirty on the topic.
On a personal note I met my wife on this sabbatical about two weeks after my arrival in Vancouver in mid April. We had a wonderful time that spring and summer, full of laughter and romance. After only a couple of weeks of dating I proposed and we had agreed to tie the knot. A few weeks later we travelled to Bellingham, Washington, to buy "the rock," a big commitment to be sure but not one leaving me feel inflexible. She was an assistant professor in the Human Resources group, a bunch who were not particularly fond of economists. Yet they liked me. I was the living oxymoron, a nice economist, going with the flow with no desire to set the agenda. On a personal level, flexibility and commitment went hand in hand. Was there some way to reconcile the economic and personal perspectives? I wouldn't be able to answer that question for another fifteen years or so.
In the meantime the lessons from economics were stark. Uncertainty was a "bad," something to insure against if you could. The overwhelming evidence on the point came in the form of identifying good jobs – they had salaries rather than performance pay. It's the employers who bore the productivity risks from general economic fluctuations, not the workers. As I write this my university, suffering an anticipated shortfall of state funding in the future, has initiated a voluntary separation program, to allow employees to self-select on the choice to sever from the university, with a cash payout and anticipated future grimness in remaining in the current job the main incentives. This is better for employees than forced separation, what economists call involuntary layoffs, something employees can't insure against nor adequately provide self-protection.
Of course we taught that risk preference varied by individual and, consistent with portfolio theory a la Harry Markowitz, that with greater risk comes greater reward. With that we appropriated language from elsewhere to signify this relationship, particularly the world of sport, it takes leather balls to play rugby, all we needed to have the rudiments of a theory of value creation. Entrepreneurial types created value by coming up with new business ventures, perhaps taking ideas from basic research developed at universities, and parlaying that into emerging growth sectors of the economy. The book that best encapsulated that line of thinking for me was Michael Lewis' The New New Thing, a biography of sorts of Jim Clark, former CEO of Netscape and prime mover behind Healtheon, now WebMD. In the late 1990s it seemed that folks of that ilk, the ones possessed with both smarts and animal spirits, had totally transformed our economy.
This view of uncertainty is inadequate, though I didn't understand that at the time. It doesn't account for the role of learning and its interaction with uncertainty. It doesn't have a place for our emotions and personality apart from the risk preference. And it is essentially anti-democratic in that those of us with little or no endowment of animal spirits are essentially non-players. It is these factors that I wish to explore in the remainder of the chapter, while not entirely ignoring those aspects of uncertainty captured in the phrase, economic rationality, not entirely irrelevant but less important than I had previously thought.
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I begin this section with what I take to be the heart of the matter, the Ignorance Principle.
Ignorance Principle: We are all very smart, yet we know less than we think we should.
Intelligence, or so it seems to most of us, should convey a sense of knowledge. Yet knowledge stems not from intelligence per se but rather from having intelligence interact with experience, as any student of Dewey would surely know. What then to do when the requisite experience is lacking? That key question can be broken down into three cases, first, where we don't have the appropriate experience but we are quite sure that others have, second, where we are not sure whether others have, and third, where we are quite sure that nobody has. To this we might add the metaphysical question – can we really distinguish between these cases? But I don't want to talk about metaphysics. I want to talk about some low to the ground questions. How do we deal with our own ignorance? Is ignorance a spur or inhibitor for learning? When is it the one and when the other?
Ignorance can be a neutral term, a simple not knowing, no harm no foul; or it can be a pejorative, deliberate behavior to avoid considering facts, particularly those that contradict prior held belief, an affirmation of prejudice of an extreme kind, backwardness when there is a more modern view. We tend to take the word one way or the other. Let's try to keep both meanings in mind as we proceed.
Sometimes we prefer myths. There is delight and fascination in the stories so they are deliberately propagated – Elijah the Prophet, Santa Claus, Guardian Angels, the Easter Bunny. Myths are wrapped up in ritual and these ceremonies become one way for the older generation to pass down its bequest. Let's distinguish the myths of the child who doesn't really have a choice on whether to believe them and those of the adult who does. It's the latter where we want to focus.
We have "major college sports" on my campus, both football and men's basketball. Many of the faculty attend the games and among them are prominent research scientists. As fans, do they maintain the view of science or does their being a fan change their perspective? We know the cheering (or booing) in the stadium can materially affect the play on the field. What about the cheering at home, when watching the game on TV? I maintain a fan mentality when I watch and then I believe in The Jinx. Certainly, that's not something I invented. It's part of the sports culture. The analysts talk about it all the time. We fans pick up on it.
Do we adults keep myth cordoned off in the benign regions of our existence, such as during sporting events or religious holidays? Or are myths present in our work as well, perhaps masquerading as something else, best practice maybe, or generational labels, or simply ways to hide our own inexperience for fear that if we don't conceal what we don't know unwelcome change will be forced upon us? I recall watching a West Wing Episode where President Bartlett could have gotten his Foreign Aid Bill passed through the Republican Congress, if only he'd approve a modestly funded study to scientifically test the effects of "remote prayer" on the wellness of patients. In trying to track down that episode, I came across this New York Times article about a scientific study on the efficacy of remote prayer. One of my favorite words is "orthogonal." The study provides strong evidence that remote prayer and the health of patients are orthogonal, when the patients are unaware, with a mildly pernicious effect when the patients do know, the resulting anxiety on the part of the patients the presumed cause.
That West Wing episode, however, makes the adhering to myth sort of behavior seem to be the province of religious fanatics. Let's push past that and consider other examples. In Part III of Cassidy's book, there is a ringing indictment of Alan Greenspan, principally for his conviction that financial markets self-regulate. Look at part 04 of this video, entitled Greenspan's confession. There, the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman gives a compelling recounting of Greenspan as Chairman of the Fed, viewing him as a tragic figure, because he clung to a myth that was patently false – his mental model included that firms are essentially like people and managers of firms have the firms' interest at heart as their primary motivation. Given this belief, Greenspan couldn't fathom that the big financial houses would engage in the destructive, indeed suicidal behavior that they in fact did by holding large amounts of derivative securities based on mortgages that would ultimately end in default. The strong belief in the myth had him discounting evidence contrary to his belief, right up till the financial crisis occurred. The problem, then, is not that we hold myths as truths. Rather it is that we continue to do so in the presence of strong evidence to the contrary. In the presence of myth we cease being empirical. Myth of this sort blocks learning.
There is the question whether we know we're doing that or if it is an unconscious behavior or comme si comme ça. My sense, based on my own experience, is that we know initially but then if we continue to do it we forget and by denying reality pernicious behaviors become entrenched and become extremely hard to undo thereafter. I base much of this conclusion on my experience as an administrator.
I was a complete novice in 1996 when I started, with essentially no experience as a faculty member to parallel the demands needed as a manager. I knew one model of professional human interaction, the co-author model, the mode of interaction between faculty members when they write a paper they intend to submit for peer review. I had a variety of co-authors and learned from those experiences. I had a good sense of the collegiality that was required to make such arrangements work and I understood implicitly the obligations and responsibilities that each person needed to bring to the endeavor. Critical among these was not to pull any punches. If there were an objection about a modeling approach or in regard to a conclusion, that needed to be brought up immediately and dealt with forthwith. Further, there needed to be a true sharing of the labor in the work. Otherwise, the partnership would fizzle.
In the first incarnation of the administrative job my reliance on the co-authorship model actually worked reasonably well. Lynn and I were brought into SCALE about the same time, she for her technical expertise to be the the primary support person, I because of my own teaching experience and willingness to interact with faculty as colleagues. At the outset I viewed Lynn as a peer, where our skills complemented one another. About four months later I was running the show and Lynn became my main direct report, with the other staff and students working for SCALE reporting to Lynn. But things didn't change very much regarding my interaction with her, both because we were a small unit in total and because she and I had a reasonably effective working relationship.
When Lynn left to work for UofI Online (she liked the SCALE work a lot but it was a soft money job so getting something more permanent was prudent) she helped a lot in finding her own replacement. There were a couple of very talented candidates. Eventually I hired Jolee who, though different in temperament from Lynn, was also quite talented with the technology. Further, she was a Ph.D. in Anthropology, a fact which helped to support the co-author approach I favored. We did hire another staff person who was low-key and had an academic bent, John, to support Mallard. So our setup encouraged collegial interaction. On quite a few afternoons we'd spend an hour or so at a coffee place that was then across the street from Everett Lab (where SCALE was located) talking about work and various ideas about how our approach might spread more broadly across the campus. That mode of interaction was exactly the same as when I co-authored papers. So I was on familiar territory and things seemed to be going reasonably well.
However, the arrangement was unstable because it was unknown at the time whether we'd secure a renewal grant. We eventually did, though too late to forestall Jolee and John both finding jobs elsewhere, good for both of them career-wise but putting me somewhat in a bind regarding keeping SCALE going. I did hire replacements (and outsourced our server administrator function) but the arrangement was no longer the same. I had been doing this for a couple of years by then so wasn't quite so green in the job as when I started with Lynn. And I was clearly the boss. There was no shared history of prior collegial interaction with these new people and by then I had a reputation around Campus for doing ed tech administration. So there started to be some fissures with the co-author model, but because we were small and because the job still had substantial division of labor, those cracks didn't yet become a full fracture. That happened soon thereafter.
Not quite a year later, after a lot of cajoling from a variety of faculty members on our Ed Tech Board including me, the Campus formed a hard money Center for Educational Technologies by merging SCALE with a different unit, ETAG, and with some cash from the Plato royalties fund, used to hire additional staff. In a real sense, this was my "reward" from having done a reasonably good job leading SCALE. Yet now I had a diverse group of staff who had different backgrounds and a varying sense of what the mission and their function should be. I was then three years in as an administrator, but I was still clueless as a manager and still reliant on the co-author model in thinking about my own interaction with staff.
To implement that co-author model I needed an assistant director, so I could spend most of my interactions with that one person and otherwise play the ambassador/policy functions for which I had some aptitude. We went to that structure two years later. But we didn't have it right away for several reasons. I had to take an assessment of how things might work and needed a few months to do that. Further, my attention was in other places as well because my dad passed away that summer and because I was teaching an online course. So CET didn't really have my full attention till the summer concluded. Then too, cash was short and there hadn't been any prior articulation of a need for an assistant director.
So I did what I usually do in such situations. I came up with an ad hoc solution that would preserve my concept without going through the formality that really was necessary to search for an assistant director, but that seemed out of bounds. I would name one of the staff to be office manager and that person would be the assistant director de facto if not de jure. I ended up making a choice based on my narrowly defined conception of of what was needed, which emphasized collegiality over all other considerations. There was only real candidate for this role, Leslie. The staff had settled into two cliques roughly paralleling the two units in which the majority of the staff had been previously employed. Leslie was the only one who seemed to interact readily with everyone else who worked for CET. Plus she was bright and energetic. On these criteria, she seemed the only one who could do this.
There were fundamental problems with this arrangement, however. I did nothing to prepare the other staff for it. Indeed, short of actually doing a formal search for the assistant director position, I'm not sure there was a way to prepare the staff for it. I believe some of the staff were resentful of having their relationship with me filtered through Leslie. They didn't recognize the source of her authority. And she was either the most junior or the next most junior of the staff, so some of the other staff felt more qualified by their own self-determined criteria. (There may also have been some gender bias but on that I had less direct evidence.) I don't recall this well but I believe we had a staff meeting where I introduced Leslie as the office manager and gave my reasons for her selection. That started the fissures turning into larger cracks.
So this setup was far from ideal and I as I mentioned, we had some fracture thereafter that I won't elaborate on here. What I do want to discuss is why the myth that I could manage with the co-author model persisted in spite of some rather substantial evidence that it wasn't working well and to draw some broader conclusions from that. There were two potential alternatives that might have worked. First, my then boss was acting CIO (Chief Information Officer) for the Campus, himself a faculty member and a former department head. He was juggling a lot of balls himself and his relationship with me was extremely collegial. I could have gone to him and said, hey, I need an assistant director very badly. Let's do an internal search but I will need some incremental funds to boost that person's salary. Almost certainly with what I know now, that is what I should have done and I should have done it quickly.
But I didn't. As I said, cash was short and actually some of my other staff were still on soft money. So this would have looked strange to do before getting them permanent funding. Then too, I'd have shown to my boss that I was a ditz. I was deeply involved in the planning for CET. I hadn't brought up the need for an assistant director then. I had a rather naïve belief that what we had been doing in SCALE could have kept on going pretty much as is but with more staff. So I hadn't anticipated the need. I should have. Indicating that then to my boss, I'd have gotten egg on my face.
The other alternative was for me to reallocate my time and spend more of it directly on managing staff. I had the authority and there was a definite need. But this I didn't want to do. I didn't get into this work to be a manager and really had no aspirations in that area. Further, some of the ETAG folks needed a lot of staff development and hand holding to get them to do the work in the way I envisioned it. Here again, with the benefit of hindsight, that's exactly what should have been done. But at the time I was simply resentful that I didn't have their salary lines so I could hire whom I'd like. (Also, these people weren't well paid, which created some other incentive issues and meant they couldn't be readily replaced.) So all of this looked like unpleasantness and while I wanted to commit myself to the work fully, I wanted to enjoy doing it.
I'm quite sure at the time I didn't reason it through fully this way because as I do this now, it seems almost like negligence on my part to have opted for the path I did. But this is why we retain our myths, because there are tough decisions to be made that we really don't want to face. I placed Leslie in something of a no-win situation, certainly not the plan for success approach that I'd try for now. She and I did have a largely collegial relationship along the lines I anticipated and she matured in her role as she gained experience, but I micromanaged episodically as fracture issues bubbled up and though managing CET was substantially more difficult than managing SCALE, I reacted in my assessment of the situation more to outcomes than to the challenges at hand. Partly for that reason and partly simply because of the age difference, the relationship with Leslie was more vertical than it had been with Lynn or Jolee and I suppose I got caught up in that somewhat. Even when not everything is working to perfection, there is ego stroking in being the boss and being treated that way. The ego stroking acts as a myth preserving force and as a way to avoid an empirical approach. In that sense it is the basis for Argyris' Model 1.
The following academic year I had a new boss, the first Campus CIO. He was very gracious in our interactions. He allowed me to work through the fracture issues as best I could. Along with his Budget Officer, he and I negotiated to place CET into a more stable funding regime. He encouraged us to do it the right way and perform a national search for an Assistant Director. Several excellent candidates emerged from the search, after which Leslie was selected. Indeed, while he seemed quite pleased with me, he was not happy with the local search that ended up placing me in my job. He wanted a national search for that position as well. We agreed to put that off until these other matters were resolved. In the interim he helped address a rather sensitive issue – as a faculty member the Economics Department Head would determine my salary increases, but the Econ Department didn't see my CET work as contributing to their mission. The CIO helped to remedy this imbalance. All of this was for the good. Yet history cannot fully be undone. Things would have been better still had I more squarely addressed the issues at the outset. Putting those issues on hold till the Campus had a real CIO might seem sensible as an ex post rationalization. But it is not the true explanation for my decisions during CET's first year. Most of those choices were driven by the core belief that I could make the co-author model work in our setup.
There is much irony in what I've written above. Looking back on that time I know that Leslie and I and other staff who worked for CET then feel nostalgic for "the good old days." I've emphasized the issues we had during those early days of CET without talking about the successes. Part of that, of course, is simply that in this subsection I wanted to focus on myth as a blocking force. That is more likely the result of friction at work than because it is all going swimmingly.
Yet there are other reasons too. Some of that is my own sense of quality and a mental comparison I make between the SCALE period and the CET period that followed. (They did overlap for a year.) I do have very high standards and SCALE was more innovative than CET. Some of that had to do with mission. SCALE dealt mostly with early adopter faculty who were self-starters and apart from finances and the occasional spark of an idea required very little from us, so SCALE could afford to be more experimental. CET had a more broad diffusion goal. Many of the faculty it supported needed more help and even with that they'd innovate less. Yet it is important to note that CET achieved quite a bit of good. Though there was occasional internal conflict, there was also a feeling of accomplishment among the staff and that our name brand, CET, had real consequence about learning around Campus and conveyed core values, collegiality and quality of service.
In 2002 CET merged with the main academic computing group to become a division in the new organization, CITES. The goodness that CET achieved was more evident in retrospect; that's regrettable certainly, but a fact.
Now let's move beyond consideration of myth as a blocking force of our own empiricism to look at cases where we do make tough choices based on all we can know at the time.
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Sometimes circumstances appear dire and stark choice becomes necessary as a consequence. In the third episode of the TV miniseries Centennial, The Wagon and The Elephant, Levi Zendt (played by Gregory Harrison) is a young man from a prosperous Amish family. He is proud of his existence and deeply shares in the values of his family and the community. The good life appears his for the asking, though perhaps he is not yet mature enough to do so. He has all the urges of a young adult and those urges demand to be fulfilled. Soon he must take a wife, but he is not yet ready. He needs to explore his emotions, learn about his personal wants, and how to satisfy them. Attractive as well as prosperous and well to do, many of the girls of his age have their eyes on him. He need not search far for his experiments in romance; the opportunities for exploration present themselves. Driving a wagon for the purpose of delivering goods to orphan children, he starts to kiss a young woman who accompanies him on the delivery. This is as it should be, but then things go awry. They get seen by others.
Caught between their wants and the values of the community where modesty is stressed, the girl is trapped and so makes up a horrible fiction to resolve her dilemma. Levi sexually assaulted her. Why else would she succumb? Levi denies the charge but the girl is believed while he is not. There is stern punishment for this offense. Levi is shunned. He has two alternatives having been so punished. One is to take his punishment, work to rectify his good name, and hope that he can regain normalcy in his existence thereafter. The other is to leave and make a new life for himself. The Oregon Territory had opened up and though the road west would be fraught with hardship, it offered opportunity and a complete severance with his past, thus a new beginning.
He opts for the second choice, but it is not the consequence of that choice that I want to focus on. It is the reason, one the viewer can only infer. What would life be like as one shunned? Could he possibly further explore his romantic interests? Could he hold his head up in town? He had has eye on one of the girls at the orphanage. Would she come with him on his trek westward to share a life with him? In the answers to these questions there are stories. It is the stories that compete with each other in Levi's mind, though perhaps not explicitly; they are there nonetheless. The choice ends up being for possibility and against a blocked path.
The hardship on the Oregon Trail and its contrast with the wealth of his family and the well being of his community in Pennsylvania end up as filler, part of the background and nothing more, clearly not as primary determinants of the choice. Might others have chosen differently? Certainly. Could these secondary factors for Levi have been primary and thus driven their choice? Sure. What distinguishes the one from the other? I believe that it's the goodness of the story that matters and that we are our own arbiters in determining what makes for a good story.
* * * * *

Josh: "I can't pick up and leave the White House to go run a campaign for some dark horse I pulled out of a corn field." Impact Winter

In season six of The West Wing Josh is in the doldrums because the Republicans have an improbable candidate, Arnie Vinnick, pro-choice and not beholden to the Religious Right. He is a tough and seasoned politician and looks very hard to beat. The Democrats, in contrast, appear to be between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there is the current Vice President, Bob Russell, nicknamed Bingo Bob, a not so affectionate way of saying the man lacks gravitas. Russell was handpicked by the Republican Congressional leadership. After the prior Vice President, John Hoynes, resigned in disgrace amid a sex scandal, the White House needed a ready replacement owing to the President's Multiple Sclerosis. Hence they couldn't afford to have a floor fight for a candidate with real teeth and real brains but who might have ruffled a few feathers in his day, especially since the Democratic Leadership didn't embrace the President's first choice, the Secretary of State. On the other hand there was Hoynes, scarred by his scandal and without a moral bone in his body, he did have several assets including his prior experience, his intelligence, and his vast political network. He was running not just to clear his good name, but to win.
Josh was distraught about both alternatives. He had an inkling about another possibility, Congressman Matthew Vincente Santos, an extraordinarily able legislator who had worked his way up, the first in his family to go to college, but still a very young man and not on anyone else's radar as of Presidential timbre, the veritable dark horse. Josh was impressed with Santos for his smarts, his guts, and his ability to deliver the goods. But the idea to get Santos to run for President was too wild. He couldn't play that card, could he?
How would any of us decide for Josh if we were in his shoes? If we were fortunate, we'd have a mentor with whom to air the issues, someone venerable and experienced, wise in these matters and sensitive to our own needs, a person we've trusted before who has honored that trust so we're prepared to trust him now. In Leo, Josh has the mentor par excellence. Leo, the former Chief of Staff, who handpicked Josh to work on the Bartlett campaign just as he handpicked Jed Bartlett to run for President, was the ideal personage qua mentor.
Josh felt in his gut that he wanted to leave his Deputy Chief of Staff post to run an upstart Santos campaign, but he also knew in his head that you don't pick Presidential candidates out of cornfields, yet you do dance with the one that brought you. Bartlett was the sitting President so Josh had an obligation to see it through till the end of the second term, or so he thought. Mentors can't make decisions for us. But they can really help with our second thoughts, when to heed them and when to toss them in the trash. Those second thoughts can turn into myths that block our thinking. Or they can be necessary moments of doubt; once overcome they help us to commit totally to our choice.
Leo countered Josh on both points. Bartlett himself was a candidate from the cornfields when Leo asked him to get into the race. It's been done before so it could be done again. There is no endgame in politics. Candidates come and go but issues stay with us and somebody else must govern when the sitting President, either by volition or due to the strictures of the 22^nd Amendment, leaves office. For Josh's two points Leo had two reasonable if not altogether convincing counterpoints. The decision making is not always or even mainly an exercise in logic. Ultimately, the choice comes down to following your dreams, wild as they may be, or doing what you're told to do, by others or by the "do your duty" voice in your own head, sober and sensible but perhaps not uplifting. Leo, who didn't have eyes in the back of his head nor did he know what it could possibly be that was giving Josh the urge to push Santos as a candidate, understood what made Josh's motor run. He gave Josh the answers Josh needed to hear.
* * * * *
Moving from fiction to reality, I have friends who at their jobs have been in analogous circumstances to Levi Zendt and others who developed the same sort of bug that afflicted Josh Lyman. My guess is that many of you too have examples of friends or colleagues caught in these situations.
Steve, when I met him eleven years ago he had a parallel job to mine at a like research university, has since retired and moved into consulting work. After seeing him at meetings on a quarterly basis for a couple of years, we really got t know each other in Indianapolis at the Educause National Conference in 2001. One evening we traipsed around the downtown talking about what we were hearing then and our reactions to that. Each of our campuses had been supporting something called a Course Management System (mine supported three and still other online systems), which provided Web pages and ancillary functionality to assist with the online pieces of instruction. Usage had gone through a takeoff phase, something akin to how the World Wide Web itself had taken off. It seemed clear that we needed to bring some order to this Wild Wild West, but it was far less clear how to do that or if in the process of trying to do that whether we'd significantly retard the spirit that generated the growth in the first place. Nobody had good solutions for these issues. Everyone had lots of questions.
Several years later Steve became entrapped in his position by his supervisor, who had a different vision for his job than he had, where initially when she came into the position there was friendship and a sense of possibility, ultimately that transformed into enmity and distrust. The inflection point occurred soon after Steve's ultimate successor was hired, herself a very good person caught in the middle of it all. Steve, who is quite sharp at reading the tea leaves, understood it would be tough sledding were he to stay. Further, his own interest had drawn him into some projects that went outside his campus, collaborations with a state-level entity and several other campuses. That interest led him to some projects entailing electronic textbooks, where the dual goals were to help improve the quality of what was delivered to students while simultaneously bringing the cost to them down. These projects ultimately led to his consulting work. Steve maintained his geniality throughout and was able to make a graceful exit. By seeing what would come next he didn't have to burn more bridges than were absolutely necessary. As a result, he has kept his humanity and has not been overtly altered by the process.
I engage with Steve now and then, sometimes at a conference or a committee we might be serving on together, other times online just to stay in touch, with electronic and traditional publishing a frequent topic in our conversation. Invariably Steve comes up with some novel counterpoint that helps me with my own narrative, just what a really good friend should do. Recently Steve sent me a link to Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, an essay in the New York Review of Books by Jason Epstein.
People are likening the changes that are happening with publishing now to what happened in the aftermath of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press – a dramatic alteration of the entire culture. Epstein has had a long and distinguished career as a publisher, with several innovations in the field to his own credit, including as the founder of the New York Review. Though I've cast Steve as a real life Levi Zendt, he and many others too, myself included, look for that mature mentorship that Josh Lyman sought as he was seriously considering leaving the White House to run an upstart campaign. In this day and age we need to cherish when we find that mentorship in flesh and blood, it is rare indeed, so we also have to look for it elsewhere, in what we listen to or read in order to find that wisdom. Following the link from the essay to his mini biography, it occurred to me that Epstein was Leo.
As I work through the piece I glom onto three ideas. First, the best fiction, and probably much of the best non-fiction, is still a solitary effort. The individual author partakes in an extended exploration making a world of his own imagination as he travels, even if it is only a journey of the mind. It is the distinctive creation of the individual author that we readers end up seeing on the printed page. Given all that is being written nowadays of benefits from group work and collaboration, I appreciate this bow to individual creativity and the recognition that it is a province which must be preserved. With this recognition comes the added facts that the creative activity is both extremely time consuming and intensely effortful. Further, the reception for the output so produced remains in doubt right until and in the immediate aftermath of when the work is published. Even proven authors, a Mailer or a Talese for example, can lay an egg. The rewards for a success must of necessity be disproportionate, just for that reason. Copyright, questioned by many who wonder if it is a relic from a previous era, the one begat by Gutenberg, needs to persist in spite of the fact that all of us can now be publishers, electronically distributing our works at essentially zero incremental cost.
Second, sometimes we are the victims of our own biases. As a critic of the Reagan Revolution, I can find much causality in our current travails by looking at the policies his administration enacted in the early 1980s and the mindset that engendered. Yet I recognize that this search can become tedious and further, that it can mask other important factors that were entirely apolitical or attributable to earlier political outcomes. Epstein laments the decline of the backlist that became evident in publishing while Reagan held the White House. The backlist is the extant inventory of books in print. Until its decline the backlist constituted a diverse and deep array of contributions, our culture captured in writing so to speak. The backlist was supported by large, independent, urban bookstores. Those bookstores went into decline coincidentally with Reagan occupying the Oval Office but not because of that; as the book buying populace moved to the suburbs so did the bookstores, with the independent urban bookstores ultimately to be replaced by the Borders and the Barnes and Nobles of the world, soon to be fixtures of suburban strip malls.
In the new world of retail book selling, the business model was little different from any other sort of retail. Items needed to move quickly, off the shelves at the stores and into the homes of the patrons. This was the prime driver for the blockbuster mentality in publishing that predominates today, which has had a substantive effect on the titles that appear. The consequence is to produce a triumph of the ephemeral (to use Epstein's term) at the expense of the thoughtful, the offbeat, and the intellectually challenging. Epstein's insight regarding how demography impacted book publishing is helpful in thinking about how both Cable TV and The Movies evolved as well. We can see parallel consequences there.
Third, in spite of Epstein's obvious insight into the forces shaping publishing and his seeming prescience regarding the future of publishing, Epstein goes out of his way to assert that nobody can predict these outcomes except in very broad strokes – the current forces toward digitization and away from paper-based publishing are apparent but where it all will lead is anything but. So Epstein spares us from his prognostications. He offers up instead a glimpse into his own history as a shaper of the future via the Espresso Book Machine and the Readers' Catalog; the latter proved to be the forerunner to Amazon.com's publishing model. The clear message, when there is substantial uncertainty that leaves the the future very much in doubt about something you care for deeply, it is time to get into the game.
Epstein's essay feeds my own prior inquiry in a couple of ways. I had been thinking about copyright for quite a while and in the whole believe we as a society have allowed the moneyed interests to dictate terms regarding copyright in a way that has made for pernicious consequence for society as a whole. Epstein, with his focus on the individual creator and his acknowledgement that much of what is produced in publishing today has little to commend for itself, provides support of my own views. These turn out to be much in line with conservative thinker Richard Posner, who argues that the welfare costs of monopoly are typically much bigger than normally considered in an economics class, as producers compete away the gains in their effort to secure the monopoly for themselves, the competition itself entirely destructive and without social merit. (Once in a while something novel comes along that generates monopoly profit that is not competed away, for example, the recent movie Avatar's use of 3D. It's in the attempt to produce a successful sequel where the competition completely erodes the monopoly gain.)
Posner can be read as an argument against regulation that encourages monopoly or, at the very least, to hold such regulations severely in check. (If in contrast to Posner's assumption the competition is itself productive, as Franklin Fisher argues it is likely to be in this comment on Posner, then the argument to sustain the regulation is enhanced.) What we are actually seeing with publishing according to Epstein supports Posner's conclusions, and the consequences are noteworthy. Profligate waste is part and parcel of the business, with much junk produced. The business justification for the outcome is that each such title plays the role of a lottery ticket to cash in on the next blockbuster, with the winning ticket "justifying" all the social waste. As if this is not enough, Epstein's view helps me to confirm that the reckless risk taking he has identified in publishing is one and the same with the irresponsible investment behavior Cassidy and others have written about in the financial markets, the unity apparent in the search for the big score and the disregard for the adverse consequence the behavior creates.
Steve has carved himself a niche for himself in this world. His particular concern is with the college textbook market, a market that suffers some of the same moral hazard as in the prescription drug market, since it is the professor who requires the textbook but it is the student who purchases the book (or chooses not to). Students typically don't have the option to purchase books on the same subject written by other authors. This lack of choice at least partially explains the hyperinflation in textbook prices we've witness in recent years, with another part resulting from the mainstreaming of the used textbook market, thereby cutting into the market share of new sales. Steve believes that eTexts might be part of the answer, not eTexts sold in the open marketplace, but rather eText bundles with prices determined via negotiation between state-wide consortia and the publishers, so that the publishers face buyer-side counterparts who have some bargaining power, enabling fair pricing to be set in a manner that gauges uptake in usage and industry trends. Like Epstein, Steve will acknowledge there is substantial uncertainty surrounding these efforts, yet he has a need to be a shaper of what is to come next, to produce an outcome that matches his sense of what is fitting and appropriate. He too has gotten into the game.
* * * * *
Barbara's was a different circumstance. I met Barbara online. She had a deserved reputation as somebody who used blogs very well in her teaching. Since I didn't know others in that category and a friend of mine, Burks, was talking up her blog (I was aware of many bloggers who wrote about education, myself included, but I didn't know instructors in this category) I went to her site to find out what was the big deal. We had kind of a funny start after that. I wrote a comment on her then most recent post, a comment that challenged her and more than a little bit (an interesting way to begin a friendship among academics). She deleted the comment, but as it turned out not because of the criticism. The server was getting spam and her blog was receiving its share. She needed to clean that out. Unfortunately she did that while jet lagged, having just returned from a conference in the UK. All of a sudden all the comments to that post were gone, not just mine. I got an an email from her soon afterward where she apologized for the faux pas and then told me it was rare for anyone to take her on so she really wanted to engage with me on what I said. I don't recall if we continued with that particular thread, but we had several others over the next year or so on her blog and on mine, each pushing the other or applauding the other's efforts. (I probably did more of the pushing and she did more of the applauding, which surely is much more a consequence of our personal styles than anything about the quality of the work we were producing.)
Barbara was teaching writing at an elite small liberal arts college when I met her. She was well respected by her colleagues and beloved by her students. Yet she was not satisfied. She tried, very hard actually, to be experimental with her teaching, to give her students insight into themselves as they learned to write together, to encourage each student to have the backs of their classmates as they gave written comments and oral feedback on the work of their peers. I'm sure this mattered to the students, but it may have mattered more to them as contrast to what they were getting in their other classes than by instilling intellectual patterns that would stick with them for life. Other courses, more traditional in their approach, were and continued to be the norm for them. Students develop certain behaviors and attitudes in response to that norm and as a consequence of their prior schooling which seemed to be in accord with that norm. As a consequence, Barbara felt as if she were moving a mountain. It may have given ground, but on our scale it didn't budge very much. She wanted to be a teacher where her efforts would have consequence in a way more overt to her and, independent of that desire, she felt there were learning needs in the community near where she lived not being attended to by anyone while her students at the college were privileged and would fare well in life irrespective of her efforts. So she left the college of her own accord to pursue digital story telling for residents of the rural locales in the state where she lives.
Barbara's was more of a Josh choice. She certainly could have stayed at the college. Nobody was telling her to go. Yet she saw possibility in leaving and not much personal growth for herself in staying. Josh and Levi may have been in different circumstances, but in some key respects the choice to be made was essentially the same. Until you get the bug, the choice may be very hard. Once infected, it's as if no other alternative exists. Then there is no looking back.
Yet old bonds do not break, nor even alter in a fundamental way. Family relationships and real friendships endure remarkable changes in circumstance. In his middle age Levi returns to Pennsylvania. All has been forgiven as the truth became known and Levi's innocence established. He was again part of the family, though independent of it. Josh has a falling out with Toby, who has estranged himself from the White House by leaking classified information about a military space shuttle to provide impetus for the rescue of astronauts on the civilian shuttle that had experienced equipment failure. The damage done between Josh and Toby seems irreparable, but it turns out otherwise because CJ, who had replaced Toby as Chief of Staff, really wants to know how Toby is doing and because of her position she can't make a direct inquiry. So Josh takes the hint and makes an impromptu call on Toby. It goes badly. They are both too headstrong. But Josh is a smart cookie; he persists and tries again. They connect the second time. Eventually Toby becomes a de facto counselor to Josh for the Santos campaign, one who only gets Josh on his cell, but one who has Josh's ear because Toby has been through the wars before.
Barbara believes in democracy in learning, more than anyone else I know. She wants each student to be an active participant. Teacher centrism is monarchy. Bowing down to the ruler in the classroom is a holdover from a bygone era. Barbara wants equal participation from all. In her current work she has opened doors for many senior citizen members of her community, allowing them to tell their own stories, helping them create a picture of their place and the history behind it by digital means.
Yet while she no longer works in a classroom, the paradox with asymmetric roles remains for her. She is the expert with digital storytelling. She has a vision for the the possible, what her friends in the community might produce online as a way to get their own story out. Possessors of great experience and a wealth of rich history, these seniors are nonetheless novices in the online arena. Quite possibly they are intimidated by it. Novices can bring a fresh look to a situation on occasion. But more often they are so focused on getting something done functionally that they fail to see much possibility, which remains beyond their grasp till they become better acclimated. A guide can help them. Barbara plays the role of guide, finding paths that otherwise would not be traversed. A guide is not royalty. But a guide is a leader.
Not too long ago I got an email invitation forwarded to me by Barbara to join a group that would be reading Joyce's Dubliners and discussing the reading online (and doing other activities in support of the reading). I've always enjoyed my interactions with Barbara, so I opt in. I felt a little inadequate for the task and as it turns out so did others in the group. We weren't ready, at least in our minds. Barbara thought otherwise. The water is wonderful. Jump in. Many in the group have roots in learning technology, with capacities and affectations stemming from that. That's sufficient background for us to have an extended online conversation as "reciprocal apprentices," to use Barbara's terminology. We react to the reading and we react to the posting of the others, then their responses to our reactions, and encore une fois.
This lends legitimacy to my babble about what I'm getting from Dubliners. My skepticism requires me to ask if that is a good thing. I suppose what I'm experiencing explains why faculty are often such bad students, particularly in areas where they are not expert, such as learning technology. They can't stand the unknowing and worse, they really can't stand being seen as unknowing. I definitely feel that way, but not to the point where it causes me to drop out of the group. I am conscious, moreover, that knowing others in the group are reading my posts about Dubliners is making me do more work to say something of consequence. So I also try to do what I quite regularly do in other blog writing – bring in disparate ideas and build connections. Whether my take on individual stories in Dubliners itself has merit, I can't say; I have no tools to test that. We are having some interesting back and forth and enjoying it for itself; certainly there is something to be said for that.
Barbara seems much less concerned about whether our group produces an insightful analysis of Joyce; each of our observations matter to her for themselves, windows into our own thinking. Barbara instinctively wants to nurture that thinking and champion it. I would call it cheerleading but for the fact that Barbara is a player too. To be active and effective in both roles is a rarity. Barbara has that dual capacity. It's what makes her such a good colleague.
* * * * *
Should I stay or should I go? It's a fascinating question, one that more than maintains our interest, perhaps keeping us awake at night as well. Yet answering the question invariably hinges on making a different sort of judgment, an evaluation of people, really of a particular person.
The Fundamental Questions: We all become enraptured from time to time with someone new to us. Can we trust that person? Can we rely on our own passion for the person and for the endeavor that brings us together?
The act of becoming aware of this other almost always is accompanied with some other extraordinary experience that is shared; this common experience can then serve as the basis of a bond, one from which trust might be built. Other subsequent experience can then amplify on this foundation or, when those experiences entail unexpected stress, to break it.
Levi Zendt asked Elly Bahm, a girl who lived at the orphanage, to come with him to Oregon. Elly had outgrown the orphanage and was ready to leave simply for that reason. Elly had also witnessed the kissing incident and was the only person other than Levi himself who understood the injustice that had been placed upon him. That was for starters. It escalated from there. Elly soon married Levi. They fell very much in love and remained that way till Elly's unfortunate and untimely death.
Josh Lyman hardly knew Matt Santos when Josh, uninvited, visited the Santos home in Houston during the winter recess to present his nine point plan on how Santos could become the Democratic candidate and then win the election in November. Sure Josh had knocked down a beer in Santos' office after Santos had given teeth to a Republican led bill for a Patient's Bill of Rights that passed after Santos' own plan had died in committee, with Josh playing the unwitting foil on that one, inadvertently illustrating that Santos was his own man and not beholden to the White House for staking his own position. While that episode showed that Santos was skilled at playing the legislative cards, none of that experience spoke to how Santos would do on the campaign trail, something essentially unknowable without giving it a try. The campaign for the White House is like no other.
Indeed much of the remainder of the sixth season is the story playing out of how each of these two characters learns about the other's wants and values within the heat of the campaign and the extreme circumstances the campaign forced upon the candidate and his campaign manager. Of course, Josh and the Congressmen are the heroes of the show, so it all works out for the best. The candidate, in particular, transcends the expectations of the moment, multiple times in fact. The writers of the show well understood what the viewers wanted. So the relationship between Josh and the Congressman becomes extremely close in a hurry, were real life to follow such a TV script.
That it does not means that we need to stay on our toes and be aware of the possibility that the outcome might remain in doubt for some time. Nonetheless, there is an important take away from watching that West Wing season. Operating in ignorance, much of our learning is about determining trust in people whom we want to befriend and rely on. It is a two-way street. As we learn, so does our potential partner in crime. The currency we use to make these transactions go is stories. Choices are made on the basis of good stories. Experience matters. Actions do speak louder than words. A narrative is built based on both. We participate in the construction of that narrative. So does the other.
The bold ones among us challenge themselves constantly by situating themselves in fundamentally new circumstances. There they meet new people to befriend, people who may become part of their inner circle. I suspect most of us do this at best episodically, more likely not at all. When confronting a will I stay or will I go decision we learn as much about our own capacities and wants as we learn about the other. Within this self-discovery one can find the source of both excitement and much stress, good reasons for the bond to be strong when it forms but an equally good reason for the bond to fracture.
* * * * *

"Where the hell is my wallet? Have you seen my wallet? It's a complete disaster if I can't find it."

This was right before dinner on Wednesday evening. We got home from a band concert at the school. Both kids play in the band. The family had agreed to go out to eat at the new place in the neighborhood. It opened up in part of the space the hardware store had occupied before it closed. I know what you're thinking but really it is a pretty good place, with an eclectic menu. I've gotten quite fond of the Szechuan mahi mahi with cocoanut rice. I didn't want to hold us up any more. The place was going to close soon. So we leave for dinner, but without my wallet.
During the meal I try as best as I can to ignore my panic and engage in banter with the kids. The meal goes pretty well, but I want it to end so I can look for my wallet. Maybe I left it at the school auditorium where we were sitting during the concert. It could have fallen out of my coat pocket. After dinner I drive to the school, but too late. It's locked. I start to make mental plans to get there first thing in the morning before classes start, before a janitor or someone else finds it. But then I tell myself that I don't remember having it before going to the concert. Perhaps I left it in the office. So I drive there, but no luck. I'm really in a dither at this point but my options for looking this evening are apparently exhausted so I decide to head home. There wasn't really anything else I could do.
About halfway home I get a call on my cell. As it turns out I had gotten a text message too but I only have visual alerts for that so I wasn't aware of it until the phone rings. It was my wife calling. She found my wallet. It was on an end table adjacent to the small couch in our bedroom, under a report I had brought home. I had changed clothes after coming back from the concert and removed my wallet at that time. I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. Everything that ensued was a result me being a space cadet.
Under the best of circumstances, I'm an absent minded professor. I misplace stuff all the time – keys, sunglasses, laptop, and wallet too. The mild idiosyncrasy that is usually dealt with in a very low key manner – "Have you checked in the drawer in your end table?" – becomes the source of alarm when it is other issues that really are at root the cause for concern: a trip with the family when we're not sure the kids know enough to take care of themselves, a major presentation to be given where it's not clear who will be in the audience so fretting needlessly in an attempt to come up with something that might be pleasing regardless of who they are, a job interview for a position I'm not sure whether I want or not but one I need to go through if only to do my own due diligence.
You see, I'm going through my own should I stay or should I go decision as I write this chapter. I've been procrastinating talking about it. I really don't want to write directly about that choice. What I want to write about here is a subject I raised at the beginning of this chapter. How does the emotional side of our persona impact the decision making and conversely, how does the act of making such a decision affect our emotions? It's not an easy subject to write about and I've got an added liability to bring to this task. My personality type is INTP. According to the essay by Paul James, individuals with that personality find "Extroverted Feeling," what I'm calling the emotional side of the persona, the part of their personality that is least developed. If I'm to write about the emotional aspect with any awareness whatsoever, I had better base what I say on some very rich recent experience, not one far in the past where romanticized recollections of the experience dull and alter what was actually felt. Rather, I need something where the sharpness of the events persists as a clear memory.
My plan here is to recount as much of the emotional bit as I can while abstracting from the other details of the search so as to avoid commentary on that. The reader will have to judge whether I've pulled it off to good effect. Let me begin with why I'm looking for a job and the sort of job that would be interesting to me. In so doing I hope also to illustrate how a story gets made, one fragment at a time.
I got this story second hand from someone in the Economics department. Nonetheless, it helped to shape my thinking. A former colleague of mine, now working at a university in California, was contemplating the job offer from that place some time ago. He was unhappy with the department head and was seeking a more collegial environment. A few other colleagues, who used to go to lunch with each other, were discussing this move at lunch. One junior member asked something to the effect, "I can't understand how he can take this (other) position. The salary is basically the same and the cost of living is so much higher in California." To which one of the senior members of the group responded, "He can't afford not to. He's been around long enough and he's now old enough that he'll get his pension from SURS (the State University Retirement System) if he leaves." Long timers who have good external job opportunities can double dip, the phrase that has stuck with me. As it turns out, several of my other senior colleagues, irked by something about the place, did likewise. It is an interesting lesson, perhaps not a full story in itself, but you can see the makings of such a story in the following facts. This is my thirtieth year here and I turned fifty five in January, the minimal age at which an employee is retirement eligible. (The state appears to have just passed legislation that will increase the minimum retirement age for new employees, but that legislation will not affect folks already in the system.)
Now let me move onto a different fragment, one that doesn't so stress my mercenary side. Several years ago I wrote a long blog post, Second Careers and K-12, which was about how double dippers might go into teaching in the schools after having retired from their previous jobs. The intriguing part of this for me was that the idea leveraged two distinct thoughts, both of which have merit in their own right. One is that that our system encourages talented seniors who are otherwise productive to retire, a real misallocation and waste of human capacity. The other is the extreme shortage of good teachers and, in fact, those college students who intend to become teachers are on average among the lower performing students in college. Senior citizens, especially those whose own offspring have already left the nest, really are in a better position to be altruistic this way and can devote their productive efforts to the development of the younger generation. I discussed these ideas in the earlier chapter, Personality and Guessing, Evidently, the thoughts have stayed with me, though the ideas modify as I learn other things. Having read some Peter Drucker and thinking about the issues a bit more broadly I've concluded that the philanthropic work either can be done as pure volunteering or as part of a paid job where it is an essential component. There likely will be a teaching/mentoring aspect to such work, but it need not only happen in K-12.
Drucker puts forward many interesting points on the relationship between learning and work. Knowledge workers must keep learning in their work related activities. Learning and productivity are intimately tied. We may not always be cognizant of the learning we go through on the job. We may be more aware when that learning has ceased. A few years ago going to national conferences about learning technology, it dawned on me that I was getting little to nothing out of the sessions, which seemed like bad remakes of movies I'd already viewed, but I'd still get value talking with people one-on-one between sessions. That remains true but now sometimes even the one-on-ones are less fulfilling. I've become aware that I've been plateauing in my own work. And if you go back to the essay on the INTP, Paul James argues that this personality type gets bored fairly easily, to paraphrase, "once it has figured out what is going on." James asserts that implementing a known solution is not so engaging for the INTP. I concur. So I believe I need some new challenges in order to be fresh with those and put my full energy into addressing them.
These are three different fragments that together partially complete the picture. They do explain why this year and not last year but they don't explain why this year and not the next one or the year after that or even further into the future. What's the hurry?
* * * * *
The east-west Interstate that Champaign-Urbana abuts is I-74. Follow it eastward into Indiana and further on to Indianapolis or westward to Bloomington, then Peoria, and ultimately the Quad Cities. The north-south Interstate borders the development where I live. To the north it heads to Chicago, southward you can take it all the way to Memphis. If you think of the triangle formed by Indianapolis, Chicago, and St. Louis then Champaign-Urbana is not quite in the middle. It is closest to the Indianapolis vertex though because the other two vertices are outside of Illinois most folks not from around here would guess Chicago would be closest. The terrain is flat in all directions. Once you get out of town and until you approach a major urban area, there is not much traffic and the drive is not very challenging. It leaves lots of time for thought or to listen to music or both. I get about halfway to my job interview and stop for gas and to take a break. I do a mental check of my own composure. I'm doing ok, not too much anxiety, not overly nervous. I ask myself if this is because I'm maturing emotionally as I age or if instead it's because I'm not sure this job is a fit so don't get too worked up about it for that reason.
My schedule has two and a half hours of interviews. The first one is brief, only 15 minutes, and goes well enough. I begin to learn about the mission of the place as told by the insiders and get some insight about things that I can't get from their Web site. In return I give some autobiography and have to provide enough of a story to explain how that autobiography sets me up to be interested in this position. The place is a for-profit university whose students are all adult learners, most who were not well served by the schools when they were growing up. This is a different sector of the education space than I've experienced and one of the obvious questions on the minds of both them and me is whether what I have to bring to the table is appropriate to fit their needs. Following that short session I have about an hour chat with the person to whom this position will directly report. He has an interesting style, preferring to answer my questions than to pose his own. So we end up talking much more about the place than we do about me. The conversation is fine but it feels incomplete. However it needs to conclude because I'm scheduled to meet the search committee next.
Normally with something new I'm edgiest right at the start and then calm down as I get used to the thing. The afternoon of the job interview, the pattern reverses. I'm more charged up with the search committee than I was before and I find the intensity rising during the search committee conversation. There are two different reasons for this, I believe. When the secretary sent me the agenda, for the one-on-one sessions she gave me the names and their titles but for this session she listed the titles only. Then it turned out that only a subset of the members actually were in the seminar room where the interview took place, though every seat was taken. Indeed the room felt snug and was on the warm side. We started right in without doing introductions. A couple of them introduced themselves in the flow of the conversation. For the others, I never quite figured out who they were. This was disorienting to me and contributed to my stress.
One of the things I've learned about teaching over the years is the imperative to be aware of the audience and its reactions, to be sensitive to signals from the audience and make adjustments to what we're doing based on that feedback. Last fall I led a group presentation in an online conference and the planning for it was quite enjoyable. Though the workgroup was mainly people I didn't know beforehand, we got to know each other and shared ideas by preparing for the live session. With the audience for the live session, however, I never could learn about their interests and what motivated them nor were they aggressive about giving feedback via text chat during the session. It was like talking to a wall but knowing other people are listening. I didn't like that feeling at all. I've been sensitized to caring about the outcomes and here there was no way to know whether what we presented was effective or not. Actually, with the search committee, we had time near the end for me to inquire about their reactions. But that was only at the end. During most of the session I was in the hot seat and at best got only indirect clues as to what members of the committee were thinking.
The other reason for my stress is that I had the feeling of being on stage with the search committee while I did not in the one-on-one sessions. I get pretty keyed up when on stage. The feeling seems to arise when I'm with a group and I feel I have responsibility for everyone else. When attending a committee meeting as a member the feeling doesn't emerge; then I can pick my spots. When I'm hosting the committee meeting I feel on stage. I have to step in at certain times to keep up the flow. That is my obligation. Sometimes when that feeling is strong I find it very difficult to follow the flow of discussions and yet discharge my responsibility. For me, at least, deep listening conflicts with being on stage. Aware of this personal limitation, I tried very hard with the search committee to do both. That must have been obvious to the others in the room because near the end of the session one of the people at the table commented that he could see my eyes darting from speaker to speaker in an effort to get a sense of what they were saying as well as to garner what they were taking away from me.
What I referred to as intensity others might call stage fright. I think of the latter term happening before the performance begins while the former happens while the performance is underway. I used to absolutely hate feeling fear ahead of time so when I was younger I must have emotionally discounted the value of the intensity during the show. But in this instance I'm aware that the intensity was enjoyable, a feeling of being alive. Then on subsequent reflection it occurs to me that this sense of intensity is where I derive my own personal commitment. I return to activities that generate the feeling, although what is clear is that the feeling may very well depend on the time and place, not just on the activity. I've kept up writing my blog for five years now mainly because the authoring of the posts gives me a charge, but I stopped doing it daily quite a while ago and now I post only when I'm moved to do so.
After the interview concludes I drive to the airport on a quick trip to see my mom, taking advantage that the airfares will be a lot lower than if I were to fly out of Champaign. I don't really know how long it will take to get to the airport and get checked in so I don't stick around but head directly there. Driving downtown I need to find the Interstate that gets you to the airport but once that's done I can turn my attention to how the interview went and what I'd make of the opportunity. I do that much of the rest of the evening including on the flight down and hardly spend any time reading my Kindle.
What I went through in this reflection immediately following the performance I'd refer to as bouncing. I hold almost diametrically opposite points of view within a matter of moments. One big issue is whether I feel I can do the job. The position has a lot of discretion in it. In other circumstances (like my current work) I have a bunch of experience that is relevant in a tacit way and so I'm quite comfortable trusting my instincts when making a judgment call. I can almost always back it up by by reasoned argument and when I can't I can refine my position accordingly. I'm not sure my instincts will be worth a tinker's damn in the new job. Alternatively, I become cognizant that I will need coaching to get my instincts up to speed. Who would provide that coaching? This organization structure appears hierarchical and the position I interviewed for is not at the top but is close to it in the hierarchy. The person to whom this position will directly report appeared extraordinarily busy. Would he have time for this?
I get the impression during the session with the search committee that those folks want to move quickly and are looking for somebody who is functional and can crank out new faculty development programs quickly. I'm almost certainly too reflective and wanting to figure things out from first principles to be comfortable with what we'd produce. There's a tension there. There is a further tension in the seeming desire to change the internal culture and make that more like traditional academic environments and less like a for profit place. There is a definite gap between what the head honcho describes and how the search committee sees things. I get the sense that this position has more than a little "bad cop" in it, saying no because the expeditious way is not the right way, then identifying the right way as do-able if harder. Do I want to be in authority but a bad cop? I don't know. I cycle back on the developing a sense of taste issue.
One of the big cultural differences is that at Illinois faculty call the shots. They have authority derived from their research record, their tenure, and the tradition of the place. In this new setting faculty are more like teachers in K-12, employees who in large part do what they are told. They get direction from above. I have ideas about how to build community with folks for a common purpose, much of which stems from my recent teaching. Do those ideas carry over to this new setting? I have no way of knowing. I tell myself this job is most interesting to me if I can play it balls out and try things that intrigue me. But can that be functional here? This is another source of the bouncing.
The commuting issue had been a big deal for me before I made the trip. Could I manage that? My wife will still work at Illinois regardless of my choice and we built a house not that long ago that we're very comfortable in now. So this out of town work will come with some sort of a commute and ahead of time I asked about some mix of telecommuting to cut down on the being away from home. But I don't even bring this to mind in the reflections. It's a secondary or tertiary consideration and I'm focusing on the bread and butter.
There is still more to keep me churning. The other big deal, why this job search is now rather than a couple of years into the future, is the budget hell that Illinois is going through and its need to downsize, with it likely I'd have to lay off staff were I to stay. I talked about this with the folks interviewing me. I don't know how credible my explanation of the situation sounds to others. It is reality but I suspect some of my candor backfired.
I call my wife from the airport. She asks me how it went. We don't have a very long conversation. I tell her it was interesting but is a long shot. We talk about it only a bit more when I return home after seeing my mom.
A week or so later I become aware of another job opening in the vicinity for which I appear qualified, maybe over qualified. I apply for it. In this case the job is at a public university and the application process is more formal. I put many of my story fragments in the application letter and try to be as forthcoming about my situation as I can be. Let them determine their interest or not with as much information as I can give them. That's what I would want.
The full story is still being written, the conclusion not yet determined.
* * * * *
One of Cassidy's topics in his recent book is following the crowd, in the context of financial markets this is an old Keynesian idea – such herd behavior can be deeply destabilizing and is a prominent source of market failure. For typical investors and for those working in the financial services industry far from the top of the food chain, Cassidy is content to take the the behavior as a given. For CEOs he adds to the stew the perverse incentives based on near term gain only, so that a CEO who thought it prudent to stay out of holding high-risk mortgage-backed securities for reasonable fear of future default would be punished by getting fired since his firm would almost certainly underperform the market in the very near term.
While the decision making of CEOs is fascinating I'd like to focus on the rest of us mortals. Why is so much of what we do driven by following the crowd? Surely most of us in considering the question will hearken back to our own adolescence, our insecurity then and how we coped with that. And we'll think of the clothes we wore and the music we listened to. When I was in Junior High School where we were required to wear ties, I recall the shoes of choice were penny loafers and with that you wore white sweat socks to make for a sharp contrast with where the pants leg ended. The music played at parties was The Monkees more than the Beatles. During my first year in High School the dress code relaxed substantially. Jeans were allowed and we could wear sneakers. The sweat socks were the only part of the attire to survive the transition. The new fad shoes were leather sneakers made by Adidas.
There is seeming safety in going with the crowd. That adolescents do it should come as no surprise, especially where the goal is to avoid bringing attention to themselves, even if ironically much of the discussion at the time of my adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s centered around non-conformity. I would term this idea that choice is driven primarily by a desire for safety an immature view. There is certainly nothing wrong with being immature, especially when you are young. The question is whether that sort of decision making persists as we get older. The further question is when "thinking it through" is also an option why people nonetheless opt to go with the crowd when they are aware that thinking it through would lead to a different choice.
Kahneman and Tversky would argue that much choice before the fact is driven by a desire to minimize regret ex post, in the inimitable words of John Poindexter, they'd put in a C.Y.A. effort. Following the crowd can be seen as C.Y.A. It lacks originality to be sure, but that is the point. It puts responsibility elsewhere or so it seems at the time. What if part of the maturation process is a willingness to accept responsibility? What then?
In answering those questions I can contribute the following. Regret for me persists not because of bad outcomes but rather because the choice was driven by adhering to notions that I myself don't value after the fact. When I worked for the big campus IT organization I made a variety of choices which (1) were partially driven by my own desire for empire building where after the fact it became clear to me that I didn't really care to have an empire at all and I only pursued that because that is how other administrators measured their own rewards and (2) I ceded authority to technical side of the house often at the expense of the teaching and learning side where I had more direct knowledge. So it is not that there is no regret – as the saying goes if I had to do it all over again, I'd do it the same way. I wouldn't.
What I would do instead is to examine carefully what it is I really care about and then to be in the game and try to shape things as best as I can that are in accord with those beliefs. In that I'd be like Steve and like Barbara.
The economics view of uncertainty has the story remarkably well worked out already. We know almost everything. All that's left is a roll of the dice and whether the dice themselves are fair or loaded. Maybe that's the right way to think about whether to punt or go for it on fourth down in an NFL game. There are a lot of other choices we make where our ignorance is far greater.
We learn what we can and much of the learning is in determining whether we are asking the right questions. We seek wisdom from mentors and opinion from peers who have been through something similar. Then we struggle because there is still a choice that is up to us, one where even when we've done our homework we can't know the outcome in advance.
Let's grow up. Let's make these choices aware of what we're doing. Let's not run away from them.