One Flew East

"Data Driven Instruction"

2012-01-21T18:31:00.000-05:00

Mark Naison, a tireless proponent of common sense in education and politics, has reminded me of the Orwellian aspects of "Data Driven Instruction." He writes:

Anyone who thinks this approach is going to improve the quality of instruction, and create better relationships between teachers, students and parents, is sorely mistaken. It will increase the stress level on all concerned and squeeze out compassion, empathy and community building along with creative instruction. But the school reformers don't care. They are determined to bring a "business atmosphere" into public education, with teachers poring over test scores the way executives pore over sales data!

That's only the consequence. There's also the internal nonsense of the phrase itself.

As one website describes it, "Data Driven Instruction":

emphasizes frequent testing and focused attention on what the children are actually learning allows educators to effectively and realistically pinpoint, assess and remedy weaknesses and reinforce success.

The assumptions here are as dangerous as they are mind-boggling (to say nothing of the grammar--but we all err in that, sometimes). There's the assumption that frequent testing is a good thing, that testing can tell us what students are "actually learning," that testing provides useful information, that testing leads to success. None of these things is true, but we've been conditioned to believe all of them in an Orwellian bombardment of misinformation masked by false equivalencies ("war is peace").

The basis of the problem here is the assumption that testing is an effective measure of learning. However, I have yet to see that really important first step, discussion of just how a test gives useful information. Hell, the fact of being a test means nothing: tests can be designed so that any one of us fails--or any particular group among us succeeds. Most tests are designed to do no more than show a temporary mastery of a particular set of "facts." That's no way of evaluating education.

"Learning" is not something that can be assessed through testing alone, for testing is a tool of limited utility. It is a tool, yes, but it cannot be the only one.

Neither can "data" be the sole judge of effective instruction. Much of learning only becomes apparent years after it has taken place. Immediate assessment, the provenance of educational data, covers only one small part of real education. Reliance on assessment data alone (or even primarily) limits education. In fact, it debases it. Certainly, it does not enhance it.

GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. What we are asking students to produce on tests is garbage--if it is considered a sign of the effectiveness of education. Not only is testing necessarily backward-looking, but it is reductive. You can't test the future; you can't reduce learning to Scantron sheets.

PIPA and SOPA: Just Whose "Property" Is It, Anyway?

2012-01-20T12:37:00.000-05:00

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw writes on his blog that:

In a free society, you don't have the freedom to steal your neighbor's property. And that should include intellectual property.

Should it? Why? Because Intellectual Property is called "property"?

What we have here is homonyms being mistaken for synonyms.

Simply put, calling an apple an orange doesn't make it one.

Intellectual Property (IP) has a completely different status both in law and culture than does physical property. Conflating the two simply confuses issues of the provenance of creative activity and rights for profiting from it, rights limited from the get-go by the US Constitution.

So let's stop these analogies, making IP the same as physical property, can we, please?

Moving on:

I've a suggestion for those trying to craft anti-piracy laws: Why not, while finding ways of strengthening protection for new creative output, make a trade-off? Roll back copyright extensions to, say, the creator's lifetime only or, for corporate holders, to a maximum of 75 years. That way, the intellectual commons won't be nearly so threatened and it will appear that those wanting greater protection now are also ceding something. I think many of us who are anti-SOPA and PIPA right now would feel a lot better about the desire to protect if there were a more magnanimous aspect to the argument, too.

SOPA and PIPA: Who Are the Pirates?

2012-01-20T06:48:00.001-05:00

We forget, in our discussions of piracy of Intellectual Property, that those complaining loudest about piracy are pirates themselves.

Or, at least, are the descendants of pirates, still profiting by the piracy of their ancestors.

The initial patent and copyright laws in England, in the 17th and 18th centuries, allowed for "ownership" for a period of 14 years, renewable once. US laws, by 1800, had followed suit. This limitations codified an intellectual commons of material open for use by everyone. The particular creators, who had made use of the commons in their own activities, were provided an incentive, the right to profit from their work for up to 28 years. After that, what came from the commons went back to the commons.

Nothing, of course, is created out of thin air. Everything is based on what went before. Creativity in the future can only occur if 'what went before' is available for use.

The system made sense.

Oh, and it had another factor: things weren't in copyright by virtue of publication. It took an effort on the part of the creator. If someone didn't want a work copyrighted, it was quite easy: don't copyright it. Newspapers, for example, which were generally political organs, wanted to see their stories reprinted as often as possible. Automatic copyright would have added an unwanted barrier to that, reprinters having to make sure they had clear right to republish instead of just going ahead.

That also made sense.

But, soon, that sensible system was encroached upon, by people who had begun to see the creator as the individual genius and the creation as "property" like any other. They chafed at what they saw as limitation of their rights over their creations. By 1831 (earlier, in England), the duration of copyright had been doubled.

It has gotten longer (and stronger) ever since. It would last forever in the US, except that would require a Constitutional Amendment (the Constitution specifically calls for copyright of limited duration).

Why? Because the companies and corporations (who hold most of the valuable copyrights) have the money to push Congress to expand their ownership rights.

To steal from the intellectual commons.

That's right, to steal.

Under the law as it was established during the infancy of our republic, there was a robust intellectual commons, a wide range of work "owned" by all of us. Today, that commons is quite a bit smaller, much of it stolen from us and given to copyright holders. Today, The Jazz Singer belongs not to the culture that created it and sustains it, but to a corporation that "protects" it, a corporation that has no connection to the initial act of creation but that has stolen our common right in order to maintain continued profit. Today, Mickey Mouse, whose popularity is ours as a whole and who has become a part of our broader culture, place maintained by us, is not owned by us, but by people with no connection at all (except in law) to his creation. Our rights to Mickey have been stolen from us.

This is very real theft, though we have been taught to look at it the other way around. What we once had is no longer ours, but belongs to corporations who continue to profit on our cultural legacy, making "theirs" what should be "ours."

There's reason for strengthening protections of Intellectual Property for new creations. I am all for that. But, at the same time, let's start trying to get some of our own back, our cultural heritage, the commons that makes future creativity possible.

SOPA, PIPA, and the Strangling of Creativity

2012-01-18T10:16:00.002-05:00

There's not much I want to add to this today, except to applaud those sites going black to draw attention to what happens when we constrict the commons, as we have been doing slowly over the past two centuries, expanding copyright protections and contracting just what one can do in terms of new creative work.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are bills now making their way through Congress, bills that will allow tighter control of Intellectual Property (IP) by corporations than is already possible--and control is now way too tight. If you will, please, sign this petition against PIPA. Here's a Daily Kos piece on it and on the websites going black for the day.

Here's a link, though, to the first pages of my chapter "Intellectual Property in a Digital Age" in Robert Leston and my Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children. In the chapter, I discuss the history and implications of the way we look at IP and at the concept of "copy."

The Old Red Truck

2012-01-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

In 1986, I bought this truck in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. I got it from a Dutchman who had used it to travel down from the Mediterranean. He had put a Peugeot diesel engine in it.

I used the truck for over a year, often sleeping in the back, traveling across Burkina Faso and, once, down into Togo (the right-side windshield fell out, that trip, requiring the passenger to wear goggles).

This picture was taken in the north of Burkina Faso during the rainy season (obviously), just an hour east of Aribinda on the road from Djibo to Dori.

By the time I left, there was little left of the truck. The roads had taken quite a toll on it. Just shortly after I took this, we got stuck in the mid. It took all of us (I think there were five or six) in the truck plus maybe twenty people from a nearby village to get the truck out of the mud and back on the road, even using the tracks that I carried on top.

The tubes on top on each side held water that fed a sink inside. Quite the motor home!

Lessons for Academics: What Journalists Know About Gatekeeping (Part 2)

2012-01-09T11:08:00.001-05:00

Journalists today know how to use the internet for research so well that they don’t even know they know it. That is, digital tools now come so naturally to hand, and have been tailored so expertly to the needs of the specific individuals and projects, that the journalists don’t even think about them—they just use them. In this, most academics are a decade or so behind.

“Traditional” news aggregators (“newspapers” and the like), sources, and depositories of information no longer suffice, in journalism. At least, not in the forms they once exhibited. Nobody trying to keep up with international affairs will rely on The New York Times, for example. They will read it, yes, but differently than they read it twenty years ago. Then, it was often the only available source; now, it is one of a tight weave of information possibilities. This fact has changed The Times as much as it has changed how the newspaper is read.

Today’s news stories aren’t over once they see “print.” They are changed, updated as new information is found, as errors are pointed out, as events unfold. The writer constantly looks to comments and to related stories, among other things, to make to make the story stronger. Unlike the way it was when I was trained as a reporter in the 1970s, stories aren’t over once they are in the paper.

In most areas of news gathering and news utilization, everything has changed (to use the cliché) over the past decade. In fact, in most areas of media, everything has changed. Book publishing is moving beyond reliance on a single (paper) platform. Magazines no longer center on print and the demands of print timetables. Television shows aren’t schedule bound. Movies exist everywhere.

Academic publishing is one of the only areas where digitally sparked changes aren’t yet universally manifest. There are at least two reasons for this: First, academic structures are inherently conservative, loathe to change, and academic publishing is tied directly to those structures. Second, academic communities are walled off, to some degree, from the forces at work in the broader culture. As a result, they don’t feel the pressure towards change that entities in journalism, for example, have had to respond to. In addition, and (rather ironically) partly as a result of digital possibilities, the amount of money being made through academic publishing has grown substantially over the past decades, making the publishers (many of them outside of academia itself) protective of the way things are and unlikely to tolerate experiment.

At the same time, some of the most interesting experiments in publishing are occurring within academia. There are new types of journals with flexible and inclusive editorial structures and openness to multimedia presentation, book creation that begins online and that embraces contribution from various quarters, and much beyond. Change is happening. It is just slow in comparison with much of the rest of the publishing, media, and information worlds.

When an assistant professor hears that re-appointment, tenure, and promotion are greatly influenced by publication in ‘significant’ peer-reviewed journals, she or he almost instinctively pulls back from work that tends toward the experimental or new—for self-preservation. And even their supporters on the various committees find themselves retreating to defense of the candidate’s work in traditional venues, recognizing that as the safest ways of getting the candidates through the process successfully. This ends up providing push-back against any pressure towards change, keeping the new and wonderful work being done on the sidelines.

So, it is not sufficient that the journals and publishers change, though that is part of the equation. Until those responsible for hiring, promotion, and tenure processes willingly back away from emphasis on peer review as a requirement, academic publishing will continue to lag far behind. Already, the continued focus on peer review seems anachronistic; soon, it will seem bizarre.

Why?

The means for replacing peer review are already present, and are in use in many other areas of the media world. These allow academics to engage more actively in a world of scholarship, to experiment with avenues of research, and to demonstrate the contribution of their work.

Social networking can become academic networking, for one thing, as is happening at academia.edu, on ‘faculty commons’ sites across the country, on area-specific websites, and even through the communities that online academic journals are building. Academic organizations are doing much the same, even setting up digital versions of their conferences, allowing the papers presented to be housed in places where they can become parts of on-going conversations.

Each scholar becomes something of an aggregator, much in the way each journalist does, utilizing certain pieces and ignoring others. When each scholar has a vigorous online presence (something that is coming), those who react to them positively can look at their connections, at the papers and books they ‘follow,’ and at the work they are cited in to then make their own decisions without having to look at each paper or other item purporting to deal with a particular area of interest. Communities of scholars are most certainly becoming the center of much of our activity—and these communities are increasingly anchored online.

As younger scholars become more and more involved in public research and writing, it also becomes easier to evaluate what they are doing. Who has cited them? Even now, that is easy to find. And how often? Who links to their work? It is becoming easier and easier to discover the impact of the scholarship even of someone outside of our own particular specialties.

Soon, as has already happened with journalists, we academics will have each developed online methodologies for our own work, ways of skipping over that which we can safely ignore, ways of pointing ourselves to work we really should be examining. Soon, we will be able to use these skills in evaluating the contributions of each other in our institutional capacities.

Soon, and probably (for many of us) without even knowing it, we will find that we have by-passed blind peer review altogether, replacing it with open (to the writer, at least) systems of editorial evaluation and improvement and public means of viewing just how much, or how little, each of us has accomplished.

Lessons for Academics: What Journalists Know About Gatekeeping (Part 1)

2012-01-08T14:09:00.002-05:00

In preparing my talk on peer review for the MLA conference in Seattle last week, I forgot that few of my fellow academics have much familiarity with ‘gatekeeping,’ certainly not to the extent that journalists have, especially after the upheavals of the past decade. Though the situations are different (journalists working with a responsibility to the public sphere directly where academics look to the needs of specific disciplines away from more generalized discussions), academics should know as much about the responsibilities and ramifications of gatekeeping as do journalists. But they don’t.

In journalism, the discussion of the problems of gatekeeping have been public and even heated ever since Benjamin Franklin’s 1731 “Apology for Printers.” The responsibility of the venue, both to the public and to the author, is keenly felt and its implications hotly contested. As this is something I have written about, both in the first two of my blogosphere books (The Rise of the Blogosphere and Blogging America: The New Public Sphere) and in “The Citizen Journalism as Gatekeeper: A Critical Evolution” (for Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise andReality of a Citizen-Involved Press), I made the mistaken assumption that editors and writers in academia have parallel concerns.

In a way, of course, they do. But the discussion has never been as public as in journalism. The academic gatekeepers, also, have never been challenged from outside, as gatekeepers in journalism, given the nature of the profession, always have been. In addition, the field of journalism, in keeping with the concept of freedom of the press, is not limited to credentialed professionals. As Gary Hudson and Mick Temple write in “We Are All Journalists Now”:

Despite the belief that the forums that debate the question of “what is journalism” are controlled by communities (for example, the journalism academic community) with a vested interest in a limited definition, we have no wish to limit access to “the profession”. Indeed, such a wish would be ludicrous in today’s world. The blogger, the online pundit, the producer of an online community newsletter can call themselves journalists, but unless they are committed to writing new and accurate material they have no right to do so. (73-74)

Things are, of course, quite different in academia. In addition to entry qualifications, scholars have found themselves beholden to the gatekeepers in other ways never the case in journalism, where stepping outside the establishment has always been easier than in academia. It is much simpler to start a newspaper than a college; an academic journal needs more behind it than The Journal from Joe’s Garage.

Gatekeeping is a major topic in journalism today, and has been for quite some time. It should be in academia, too, but the conversation has yet to be either as broad or as deep as in journalism. One reason for this is that the gatekeepers have tremendous impact on scholars—through editorial and review functions for journals and presses and through procedures for tenure and promotion. People are loathe to challenge, for fear for their own careers. Gatekeeping has greater impact on individual scholars than is found in journalism on individual reporters, for journalism has less formulaic structures and more alternatives.

As I write in “The Citizen Journalism as Gatekeeper: A Critical Evolution”:

During the second half of the twentieth century, theories of gatekeeping began to appear, generally extending the work of Kurt Lewin (1947) whose explorations of leadership and group dynamics provided a starting point and initially were applied to journalism by David Manning White (1950). Examinations of gatekeeping continue today in the work of Pamela Shoemaker, whose recent book (with Timothy Vos) is Gatekeeping Theory (2008). Shoemaker has provided the framework for study of gatekeeping on a theoretical level since the 1980s, with her 1991 work (written with Stephen Reese), Mediating the message: Theories of influences on mass media content, examining the gap between experienced and mediated version of events. (46)

Over the past half century, journalism has developed a complex understanding of gatekeeping that, perhaps, still eludes most academic publishing. This goes back at least to White, who studied the gatekeeping of an editor he calls “Mr. Gates”:

It is a well-known fact in individual psychology that people tend to perceive as true only those happenings which fit into their own beliefs concerning what is likely to happen. It begins to appear (if Mr. Gates is a fair representative of his class) that in his position as “gatekeeper” the newspaper editor sees to it (even though he may never be consciously aware of it) that the community shall hear as a fact only those events which the newsman, as the representative of his culture, believes to be true. (171)

Though, even in academia, as Shoemaker and Reese write, “gatekeeping involves the selection, shaping, and repetition of information” (255), we don’t really question the ability of academic gatekeepers to do this competently and honestly, referring to academic credentials as proof enough that they can and will. Journalism has never been quite so complacent, recognizing that, as Shoemaker and Reese also claim:

the media gatekeeper must winnow down a larger number of potential messages to a few. The book publisher chooses from many possible titles; the network programmer selects from among several ideas for sitcoms, serials, and dramas to compose a prime-time schedule; and the newspaper editor must decide on a handful of stories to run on the front page. These decisions directly affect the media content that reaches the audience. But are those decisions made at the whim of the individual? (100)

Their question needs to be addressed in academia also, especially by anyone who is going to argue in favor of retaining blind pre-publication peer review, where the possibility of “whim” decision-making can warp a field of study in all sorts of unanticipated ways. This is especially important when “whim” can have great impact on careers, far more than in journalism, as well as on the course of future research.

Unlike journalism, where traditional forms of gatekeeping are being re-assessed in light of changes brought on through new digital possibilities, the grip of traditional academic gatekeepers is still strong. The forces granting tenure and promotion continue to use “peer review” as a shortcut in their decision-making and there is no alternate system of higher education for scholars to turn to. That is beginning to change, and it will have to, as digital possibilities make themselves even more strongly felt in scholarship and its publication.

The question is, can we academics learn enough quickly enough to replace reliance on peer review with a fair and open system that promotes genuine effort and scholarship without placing limitations on either means or avenues of exploration? I’ll try to provide a few suggestions for such a system in Part 2.

Reaction to Our Peer Review Panel

2012-01-06T16:33:00.002-05:00

After delivering my talk as part of a panel on academic peer review at the Modern Language Association annual convention yesterday, I felt extremely let down. I did not feel I had read well, and had fumbled the questions afterwards. Part of the problem was that I delivered the talk via Skype and was unable to see or hear the audience (the computer's camera in the room was directed to the podium and away from the audience). That was disorienting, to say the least.

Another problem was that I followed Cheryl Ball, editor of Kairos and at least six times as competent as I am. And was followed by Allen Mendenhall, a lawyer and PhD student in English, also better than I am. Even the moderator, my colleague Sean Scanlan, knows more about the issue than I do--and did a great job handling the panel.

Today, then, I was a little shocked to read Scott Jashik's article on the panel on Inside Higher Ed. He makes me wish I could have been there in person. I am pleased that he could see beyond my stuttering delivery to the point I was trying to make.

The issues surrounding blind peer review are complex and daunting. Perhaps our panel, along with Jashik's article, do provide some small movement towards resolving them.

I hope so.

The Bearable Light of Openness: Renovating Obsolete Peer-Review Bottlenecks

2012-01-05T14:22:00.001-05:00

This is a talk I gave at the Modern Language Association annual conference in Seattle 1/5/2012:

When I was opening my café in the early nineties, I redid the plumbing for the entire space. This meant, at the time, that a New York City plumbing inspector would have to sign off on the work before we could open. My licensed plumber was there, of course. We followed the inspector around, his face growing more and more glum as he looked at the new waste lines, the sinks, the hook-up to the espresso machine. Finally, when he had seen everything, he turned to the plumber and shrugged. The plumber suggested that they take a little walk around the block. When they returned, the inspector was smiling. He signed the necessary forms and left. When I asked the plumber how much I owed him for the bribe, he laughed and said I had already paid; it had been worked into his estimate.

A month or so after we opened, the inspector re-appeared. He sat on a stool and I gave him a complimentary cup of coffee. We chatted.

He told me a little about inspecting, including that he could always find problems enough to fail any installation. He gave me three or four examples from my own establishment, none of which was a problem, but all of which diverged from the letter of the law. He also told me that the law would change, that inspectors would no longer be required; the plumbers themselves would be permitted to conduct self-inspections. He was philosophical about it, telling me he was ready to retire anyhow, and that he had a nice bit put aside.

It has been many years and a housing boom since—and plumbing in New York City does not seem to have suffered. Just the opposite.

Had I been involved in academia at the time of my talk with the inspector, and had I been so inclined, I could have told him that I understood completely what he was talking about. There’s not a book or an article that a serious academic can’t make look foolish. You don’t even have to be particularly dishonest, just look to the details and forget the whole, forget the purpose, forget the possible effectiveness. If you don’t like the conclusion, the scholarly trail, the particular school of thought or the place where the scholar works, you can even ignore those and hide your bias, making a case against the work solely on petty grounds.

Until recently, the scholar whose work you are reviewing had best make the right payment, just as my plumber had done with the inspector. The payment’s not in money but in conformity. Peer reviewers, particularly those conducting blind peer review for academic journals, are picked because of status in their fields. They are the ones who have already made it; they define what is legitimate and are rarely open to challenge from those who have not yet reached “peer” status—the state of many of those writing for such journals. We all know this, and understand the corruption. Yet we continue to participate in the system. Well, some of us do.

Last month, I was asked to review an article for a rather prestigious venue on a topic relating to one of my books. The general editor had suggested to the area editor that I be asked. It was something of a set-up: the article contained no reference to my book, even though it purported to be an overview of the specialization. Clearly, the general editor had noticed this. For whatever reason, that editor did not want a positive review; I could be pretty well guaranteed not to give one. So, the burden of rejection was being passed on to someone the author could never identify.

I refused the opportunity, pointing out the omission and saying I did not believe it would fair for me to review the article. The area editor wrote back, clearly surprised, but thanking me for being so honest. I got the feeling that my response was a rare one. To respond otherwise, however, would have been just as corrupt as that plumbing inspector.

I’ve also been on the other side recently. An article I wrote was panned by a blind reviewer, one who, for whatever reason, had taken umbrage. To make a point, I had illustrated a parallel progression in two American institutions; the reviewer scathingly pointed out that I made no convincing case that the two are the same. Quite rightly; I wasn’t trying to, for they were tangential. The reviewer then listed a number of statements I had made, claiming I had not substantiated them. Again, quite rightly—but I hadn’t been trying to. At no point did the reviewer address my argument or refute my claims. There was no advice for the author in the review, and none for the editor, except “reject.”

So, I wrote back to the editor—who had praised the piece before sending it for blind review—and withdrew it, though the second review was not yet in. I love the editorial process, and love comments that can help me improve what I write—but not this. So, I published the piece myself, on my blog…

where I’ve already had a scathing comment from the right-wing political agitator David Horowitz: “Aaron why do you continue to peddle this horseshit about me, which you know not to be true?” Frankly, though Horowitz addresses my points no more than did the blind reviewer, at least he is willing to do it in public. I can respect that: Horowitz is nothing if not open about his prejudices.

All of this brings me to my main topics: bottlenecks and the dark.

In an earlier time, when there was limited space for publication, a rigorous pre-publication peer-review process could have been justified—to some degree, at least. Keeping it blind, though, had even less justification. An attempt to allow openness and honesty without consequence, it just as often produced pettiness. Today, when it is possible for anyone to publish at any time, we don’t need either the bottleneck or the darkness, especially since the process is so easily corrupted. Just as advances have made plumbing self-inspection safe and efficient, we now have open enough and strong enough post-publication review possibilities to make blind peer-review prior to publication unnecessary. As we all know, whether we admit it or not, it continues simply because we have made appearance in peered-review journals the standard for advancement. It continues because our committees on re-appointment, tenure, and promotion want an easy benchmark. We have not yet institutionalized post-publication review, though why that is baffles me. Wouldn’t the number of citations, reviews, and other responses give as strong an indication of the value of an essay as its original venue? Stronger, I’d say.

Especially since, in a digital environment, even the published essay can be improved in light of comments and criticism. And should be.

In response to an article by Richard Smith in Breast Cancer Research, Developmental Neuropsychologist Deborah Bishop wrote of “the real function of peer review, which should be to offer advice to the editor and the author.”[1] Sure, but why should this not be post-publication, in a milieu where change, unlike in the days of reliance on print, is easy? Bishop’s criticism of peer review is that it is often an easy way for editors to avoid making decisions—and she is right. This is why I prefer writing book chapters: anthology editors are quite focused on their topics and don’t pass things off. The function of any editor, today, should be to help strengthen essays that he or she has selected, for whatever reason. This should be the case in journals as well. Certainly, a peer-review process with this in mind could still start before publication, but there’s no reason it should become a bottleneck or a means for evaluation from the dark.

Journals like Cheryl-Ball edited Kairos have developed open and productive systems of review, in this case a three-tier process revolving around a named editorial board and the clear purpose of working with creators to strengthen their work. But even Kairos, a respected journal presenting the best, most cutting-edge of its field, is sometimes looked at askance by those evaluating careers. It is not, after all, a traditional, blind-reviewed journal. It’s system, though superior to blind peer review, is still sometimes seen as suspect.

My plumbing inspector had made his money, legitimate and otherwise. There’s money in peer review, too—and not only for the relics of the past. Perhaps this is part of the problem. Companies like Sage and Routledge make a great deal off of the peer-reviewed journals they own and continue to protect. Zoë Corbyn asks:

have these gatekeepers for what counts as acceptable… become too powerful? Is the system of reward that has developed around them the best?...

Unpicking the power of academic and scholarly journals, with their estimated global turnover of at least $5 billion (£3 billion) a year, is a complex business. There are an estimated 25,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals in existence….

It is these - particularly the elite titles… - that are at the heart of the recognition-and-reward system…. From career progression to grant income, "wealth" within the academy is determined by the production of… knowledge as recorded in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.[2]

The owners of the journals make their money from the fact that scholars are beholden to them for creation of that “’wealth’ within the academy.” Those with that “wealth” have too little incentive to give it up—and they are generally the ones evaluating the advancement of others.

On the other hand, as Richard Smith writes:

what happens after publication can also be called peer review, and that, I believe, is the peer review that really matters - the process whereby the world decides the importance and place of a piece of research…. Many studies are never cited once, most disappear within a few years, and very few have real, continuing importance.

And the correlation between what is judged important in pre-publication peer review and what has lasting value seems to be small…. Many papers get very high marks from their peer reviewers but have little effect on the field. And on the other hand, many papers get average ratings but have a big impact'[3]

So what to do? Well, we’re already doing it. Joe Pickrell suggests we aim for:

1. Immediate publication without peer review….

2. One-click recommendation of papers….

3. Connection to a social network….

4. Effective search based on the collective opinion on a paper.[4]

I would add in a number of modifications, such as something akin to the political blog Daily Kos’s “trusted user” status for readers of any particular journal. And I would spotlight social-networking sites like Academia.edu, where scholars can post their own work, connect, and search keywords for pieces that might interest them.

For anyone still wondering why blind peer-review should be jettisoned, Smith provides a list of reasons:

Firstly, it is very expensive in terms of money and academic time….

Secondly, peer review is slow….

Thirdly, peer review is largely a lottery.....

A fourth problem with peer reviews is that it does not detect errors….

The fifth problem with pre-publication peer review is bias….

Finally, peer review can be all too easily abused…. [5]

Frankly, I find it odd that reliance on blind peer-review continues, especially in career evaluation—but it does. My own institution has recently instituted a third-year deans’ review where one of the benchmarks is at least one peer-reviewed publication.

Still, blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. It certainly doesn’t warrant renovation; the structure is collapsing. The bottleneck it once created is no longer necessary. It The situation in this regard is much like that of journalism, just five or six years ago, when the blogs were first seriously challenging a profession that had become almost terminally inward-looking and almost completely averse to change or innovation. Though I saw—and still occasionally see—old-style journalism’s stalwarts pounding the podium, red-faced, claiming that the lack of gatekeeping they imagined in the challenge of the blogs would destroy journalism forever, that has not happened. If anything, the profession is much more vigorous today, more varied and experimental—even though many of its older structures have collapsed. The plumber I used a couple of years ago said much the same thing about the state of his profession, post paid inspectors.

Kairos and Academia.edu are only two examples of what will replace those 25,000 peer-reviewed journals if those journals don’t begin to change. The money and other wealth generated by peer review will dwindle, as will the numbers. What is now 25,000 will soon be 2,500, and those will be the one that have changed, that have embraced openness and digital possibilities and the new sorts of post-publication review that seem to pop up every day. As journalism has found, gatekeeping does not die when new venues can be established cheaply and by anyone. It simply changes. Aggregators funnel the best or the selected, citations rise in import, and choice, such as that represented on WorldCat.org of library inclusions, becomes a significant benchmark. A deliberate and controlled editorial bottleneck becomes irrelevant.

This is probably the last year a panel like this will seem necessary. No matter how much we try, academics cannot hold the fort any more than journalists were able to. What we have to do is adapt, or we will be superseded—and there are few of us who, like my plumbing inspector, are willing to be pulled down that route. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to bear the light of openness—and quite soon, now.

[1] Deborah Bishop, “Comment on ‘Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun’ by Richard Smith,’ Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13/comments.

[2] Zoë Corbyn, “A threat to scientific communication,” The Times Higher Education, August 13, 2009, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407705.

[3] Richard Smith, “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun,” Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13.

[4] Joe Pickrell, “Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?” Genomes Unzipped: Public Personal Genomics, July 13, 2011, http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/07/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php.

[5] Richard Smith, “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun,” Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13.

What the Dickens?

2012-01-03T12:55:00.000-05:00

As subway reading, I've turned to Victorian literature: Austen, Trollope, Eliot, Dickens.... Great stuff, and perfectly absorbing, an hour each way.

This morning, I was reading Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son and came across this:

'But he's chockful of science,' he observed, waving his hook towards the stock-in-trade. 'Look'ye here! Here's a collection of 'em. Earth, air, or water. It's all one. Only say where you'll have it. Up in a balloon? There you are. Down in a bell? There you are. D'ye want to put the North Star in a pair of scales and weigh it? He'll do it for you.'

It may be gathered from these remarks that Captain Cuttle's reverence for the stock of instruments was profound, and that his philosophy knew little or no distinction between trading in it and inventing it.

'Ah!' he said, with a sigh, 'it's a fine thing to understand 'em. And yet it's a fine thing not to understand 'em. I hardly know which is best. It's so comfortable to sit here and feel that you might be weighed, measured, magnified, electrified, polarized, played the very devil with: and never know how.'

Somehow, this seems more appropriate to today than to a century-and-a-half ago.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah

2011-12-23T21:21:00.000-05:00

My block in Marine Park, Brooklyn consists of 52 nearly identical houses. 48 are semi-attached, shared driveways between the pairs. At each end, facing each other, are the others, stand-alones just slightly narrower than the rest on the block. The houses were all built in 1926 to be homes for New York's growing middle class, but the Great Depression put off house ownership for many of the original inhabitants, who were forced to rent instead of realizing their dreams to buy. As time went on, the houses did become owner-occupied. After World War II, an influx of first-generation Irish settled in, some still here. Over the past decade, the largest group coming in has been Orthodox Jews, joining the wide range of religions present, from Catholics and other types of Christians to Conservative and reformed Jews to non-practicing people from all of the religions found here.

We're teachers and cops, garbage collectors and owners of small businesses. We're retired, some of us living across from our kids; we're young families nervously looking to our finished basements to ease the pressure on the three small bedrooms upstairs. We're at the far right end of the Tea Party and vocal supporters of Occupy Wall Street--and everywhere in between. We're Irish and Italian, Israeli and Russian, African-American and Latino.

There's constant low-level strife over street parking and dog walking (or, more specifically, on where dogs do their stuff), both sometimes erupting into on-street screaming. There are neighbors shoveling snow for those who can't, or running errands or sending over pies. There are long-term antagonisms and unpremeditated acts of kindness. Some of us put food out for the stray cats; others curse those who do under their breath, even though they may be friends.

Children play street basketball and hockey. Fathers tossing footballs to their kids keep one eye on the end of the one-way street, watching for cars turning onto the block. School buses and garbage trucks make their leisurely way down the block of a weekday morning, teaching us patience and, like the playing kids, keeping our speeds low.

Tonight, taking my last walk of the day with our own two dogs, I looked at the Christmas decorations that adorn almost half of the houses on the block--some of them rivaling the more famous lights on the more palatial homes of a part of Dyker Heights. Ours, I like better, for these are not the products of professionals, but of the loving care of the individual home-owners. Many of the other houses show Menorahs (though the lights were out by the time of my walk), not quite so many, but I suspect that the block, now, is about half Jewish, half Christian, of all variety of observance, along with a small number of 'blended' families, like mine. The lights and declarations of adherence to a faith, no matter how little or much one observes the rest of the year, make for a pleasant walk, this holiday season when Christmas and Hanukkah overlap so neatly.

“Objectivity” As a Barrier to Education: Teaching Intellectual Responsibility and the Role of the Citizen

2011-12-20T18:38:00.000-05:00

Often, when people wonder if American higher education might follow the fate of journalism, falling victim to inability to adapt to new technological milieux, they are thinking in terms of money and its impact. The financial structures of protected and centralized institutions can collapse when product becomes cheaply and widely available, both for creation and consumption, even to individuals with few skill-based assets. But the parallels extend further, into a preceding erosion of the quality of the “products” each “industry” produces. It was this erosion that set the stage for what was to follow for journalism, and that is setting it now for education, and it stems in part from fears, in both fields, that public opinion can adversely affect the income, the status, and the prerogatives that had become so cherished by those in power.

Certainly, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, once vigorous newspapers and colleges had become timid. Financial success of unexpected and unequalled degree led first journalism and then higher education into protectionist stances where the primary desire of the institutions came to be maintenance of income and status, not improvement of the product—a problem, of course, that many other industries have faced. As happens so often to stagnant enterprises, the products of journalism and education became, or will become, vulnerable to competition from unexpected sources. But there is a difference between these institutions and industry in general. At least one basic and critical function of each of these particular institutions sets them apart from just about any other American institution or industry, and that is their function in preparing people for their role as citizens in the American democracy. This, not just ability to turn a profit through new, possibly risky endeavour, has been atrophying.

One sure sign of timidity, providing a false sense of “objectivity” through a reliance on “balance” instead of on evidence and on confidence in one’s own ability to stake out and defend a position, can be seen today in both journalism and education. This sign, often also manifest as an unwillingness to step outside of “traditional” methodologies (hiding behind them, more accurately), became more and more evident over the decades before the collapse of journalism in the early years of the twenty-first century, with education soon (and currently) following its example. It was, and is, best exemplified by the withdrawal of willingness to take a public stand on any issue, except in defined corners of either operation, and claiming a dispassionate “objectivity” as the goal. The real reason for this, though, is that the stakes have become so large, the rewards so great, that these institutions, and the individuals in privileged positions within them, have reached the point where they are not willing to do anything that might jeopardize the funding stream. The unspoken goal of much of academic research is now primarily the continuation of funding, not the solving of problems, scientific or otherwise. This attitude extends far beyond the sciences: in all of education, as in journalism, the goal certainly is no longer the creation of an educated citizenry, once a purported objective of both. Certainly, the overriding goal of retention of income streams precludes concentration on, or confidence in, anything outside of protection of fiscal position. Necessarily, it precludes risk.

Ever since the money involved became enormous, journalism and academia “players” have been reacting like winners at poker who have grown cautious after amassing huge numbers of chips. While this may be judicious in a situation where the sole goal is monetary gain, in realms dominated by creation of product, especially ones that have taken on civic roles and responsibilities, it leaves much to be desired. When the top becomes risk averse, also, the attitude trickles down even to those like me operating in support positions, who then find themselves taking little risk on their own, worried about the possibility of offending superiors whose goal, now, has little directly to do with the activities of us subordinates.

The timidity from the top reaches down into the methodologies of the news story, for journalism, and the classroom, for higher education. Though manifest in a variety of ways, it is easily seen in the tendency of retreat toward false balance, a result of that unwillingness to risk taking a stand, particularly on controversial topics but eventually, through imitative analogy, in almost everything printed or taught. In journalism, this has led to the opening that bloggers took advantage of, once developing technologies had provided the tools. In higher education, it has not only helped open the door for new “for profit” colleges willing to move into areas the older institutions fear, but it has allowed those feeling shut out by extremely hierarchic and code-bound institutions to sense an area of weakness—and to attack.

All sorts of justifications are put forward for the attempts to present what is claimed as “detachment” or “objectivity” or “balance” in both venues, from a sense of fairness to an odd re-conception of intellectual honesty. In many cases, however, it is mostly, as I have written elsewhere, “indicative of a complete lack of principle and an abundance of opportunism”[1] no matter how well dressed up it is. I was paraphrasing a statement in a Washington, D.C. newspaper, the U.S. Telegraph, on October 7, 1828 attacking a new Baltimore paper’s claim that it would endeavour towards neutrality of opinion. That older suspicion of “objectivity,” unfortunately, was already dying, as the claims put forward by that new Baltimore paper hint. Journalist and commentator on his field Davis “Buzz” Merritt describes quite succinctly what has happened over the years since and the attitudes that have developed as a result:

The dominance of scientific thought and methods sanctified the most distanced observer as being the most reliable. Others attribute it to a crasser impulse: the need of publishers in competitive situations to move away from highly politicized, opinionated coverage so as to please a broader audience and offend fewer advertisers…. Detachment, it is almost universally believed by journalists, is the fount of their credibility…. The newspaper is separated from other institutions by its duty to report on them…. If we maintain the proper separations, then surely our product is pure and will be perceived as such: its objectivity is insured and we therefore will have credibility.[2]

Following journalism scholar Jay Rosen, Merritt refers to this as “separation fever,”[3] a false belief that it is possible for the reporter to remove herself or himself so completely from the story being covered that real “objective” reporting results.

The pose of impartiality, however, reduces all positions to “opinions,” and this creates problems not only in presentation in journalism but in effective classroom learning and in public debate subsequent to reporting in the press and education in the classroom, calcifying belief and making compromise (as we are seeing in contemporary American politics) almost impossible. This, of course, not only runs counter to the purported goals of the institutions, but it actually subverts the very sorts of discussions and compromises both journalism and education are supposed to promote in a democracy. In an era of constant strife between foundationalists, who believe in knowable “truth,” and pragmatists, for whom “truth” is little more than “current understanding,” attempts to find “balance” inevitably tip the scale instead, making the relativists look lame and lightweight, lacking confidence in contrast to the solid certainties of the foundationalists. The differences, as Michael Bérubé, writes (characterizing the faculty as, for the most part, “liberals”), are stark:

In any standoff between secular liberals and religious conservatives, then, each side will have a drastically different conception not only of the issues at hand in the standoff but also of the consequences of the dispute itself: the liberals believe that the religious conservatives will craft social policies that will hurt gay men, atheists, and rape victims, whereas the religious conservatives believe that a just and omnipotent deity will consign the liberals to unending torment in hell, where they belong. Surely you don’t have to be a secular liberal to see that, in this game, the deck is stacked.[4]

Certainly, such situations rarely lead to compromise or attempts to understand the viewpoint of the other.

The believers in “balance” set themselves as a third camp, ignoring the irreconcilable differences between the other two. In fact, they pretty much disregard them. They are, generally, those who see themselves as neither foundationalists nor pragmatists but as “realists,” starting from the claim that, as Richard Rorty puts it, “the only true source of evidence is the world as it is in itself”[5] and from a belief in the possibility of understanding the world without the intercession of human bias and limitation—the underpinnings of any belief in objectivity. When they think of them at all, they look down on the other two groups, the former for seeing the world through belief, the latter for not believing in the “real” world at all.

The arrogance and confidence of all of these attitudes, even the third, is distinct from that of William James’s “most useful investigator” who “is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.”[6] This does not necessarily translate into a lack of confidence or into an inability to go onto the public stage and perform, as it were. Nor does such an attitude hide belief behind a veneer of objectivity, nor worry about whether or not its base is foundational. Instead, this one is a constant questioner, listener, and evaluator, someone ever attempting to undercut her or his own assumptions and even cherished beliefs—even while presenting to an audience. Unfortunately, this investigator has almost completely disappeared from the American classroom, just as it has in American journalism.

James does go on to extol “the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis.”[7] This “objective” position, though it is an impossibility or simply a theoretical starting point, is what many journalists and educators claim to establish at the end, a claim that foundationalists love to undermine, when journalists and academics make it, easily showing both the claim’s arrogance and its falsity—and its essential timidity when used as an excuse against “opinion.” It is this, and the lack of confidence that it generally hides, that set journalism up for its fall within the last decade—at least in part. And this, too, may prove to be a factor in any coming downfall of the current American system of higher education.

People such as David Horowitz, a right-wing activist and author of (among many other books) The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, are finding it easy, today, to hoist many scholars by their own petard, showing that their cherished objectivity is no such thing. They use this as a tactic towards a strategic design, the replacement of the current “liberal” establishment from its seat of dominance within American universities with much more conservative leaders. As Paul Starr, author of Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, wrote in a review of Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University by Martin Anderson (quoted in Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?), “Mr. Anderson seems to want to do for the universities what [Newt] Gingrich and his confrères have done for the Congress: bring the institution into such disrepute that conservatives, long stuck in minority status, will have a chance at gaining power.”[8] The strategy, shared by Horowitz, hasn’t changed over the twenty years since Anderson’s book, either in politics or against academia. As the ascent of Sarah Palin shows (not to mention later permutations of the anti-politician politician such as Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain), belief and personality now trump knowledge and skill in the political arena—and even in journalism, where entertainers such as Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh hold greater influence than anyone who has made a career of studying issues rather than audiences. Unless things change, this will soon be the case in American universities as well. David Barton, a self-styled “historian” with a clear and self-proclaimed “Christian” view of American history, is already more influential than most with real training and experience in that field of study. Bill O’Reilly has found as much success as serious popular historians as Ron Chernow and David McCullough with the bestselling Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever (written with Martin Dugard), a work riddled with historical error and examples of amateur scholarship. In a comment on the book, novelist Nelson DeMille goes so far as to write, “Add historian to Bill O’Reilly’s already impressive résumé.”[9] The term “historian” is thereby reduced to equivalence with “entertainer,” with accuracy, care, developed skill, and even peer approval jettisoned completely. Disrepute indeed.

People within academia, including me, have allowed this to happen through our own growing unwillingness to grapple with hard issues and to publicly defend the positions we establish, especially if our positions challenge our own institutions. Ira Shor, one of the rare American academics who refuse to bow to the forces of inertia, complained of this more than fifteen years ago though, in keeping with what seemed to be the case at the time, he blamed political pressure instead of financial protectiveness:

A teacher’s authority to question the status quo… varies with the changing tides of politics. Different eras have different political climates, encouraging or repressing democratic activism. In what I have called the “conservative restoration” following the activist sixties—the reactionary period from Nixon through Gingrich—it became increasingly harder for me to pursue experiments, as students, colleagues, and administrators pulled in their sails, in tune with the declining social movements and the rising reactionary politics of these decades.[10]

In the mid-nineties, the financial imperatives stemming from the attitudes of the Reagan era (speaking culturally and not simply politically) were not so starkly apparent as they are today. The destructive impact of the synergy of politics and money on journalism and education, certainly, was not yet quite so visible as they have become, especially, since 9/11. They have even had an impact on teachers as outspoken as Bérubé:

in the years since, as conservative students and pundits have begun to mount campaigns against what they perceive as liberal “bias” in American universities, I’ve had many occasions to wonder whether I’ve always dealt with [conservative] students… in the best possible way. Although I’m a fairly opinionated and outspoken liberal-progressive writer outside the classroom, I keep most of my political opinions to myself when I enter the classroom, and only very rarely do I encounter an undergraduate student who’s familiar with my writings for Dissent or the Nation or major-city newspapers. Nor do I pry into my students’ personal beliefs; ordinarily, I neither know nor care where my students stand on abortion, the minimum wage, genocide in Rwanda or Sudan, war in Iraq, the regressive Social Security tax, or the policies of the World Bank.[11]

Though I do much the same thing, I am beginning to believe I am wrong—not wrong to never pry into student beliefs (Bérubé’s bringing that up shows the power that has developed around the quest for “balance”) but wrong to leave my own beliefs, for the most part, outside the classroom door. I would be a stronger example to my students if I met questions on such topics directly (which, I suspect, is how Bérubé actually approaches things), instead of avoiding them by saying something like “That’s not really relevant to the topic under consideration.” Doing so only makes me look weak and makes it harder for my students to learn. Why? Because questions that might lead to debate, that might spark interest, are thereby shown to be easily shunted aside. Good education focuses as much on attitude as on topics. At the very least, if we force attitude aside, we leave education dull.

In addition to weakening the institutions of journalism and higher education and reducing the likelihood of compromise in political debate, the quest for “objectivity” has also weakened, within universities, any defence of academic freedom. After all, academic freedom is a freedom for teachers, not simply for scholars, one necessitated by the role of professor as exemplar, as one both willing to take a stand and also to doubt it—and to invite students to do the same. So important is this to academic freedom that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, addresses teaching directly: “Academic freedom in this sense comprises three elements: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.”[12] The Declaration goes on, reflecting early recognition of the problems that financial success for educational institutions can entail, but that were not yet generally a controlling part of academia:

If education is the cornerstone of the structure of society and if progress in scientific knowledge is essential to civilization, few things can be more important than to enhance the dignity of the scholar’s profession, with a view to attracting into its ranks men of the highest ability, of sound learning, and of strong and independent character. This is the more essential because the pecuniary emoluments of the profession are not, and doubtless never will be, equal to those open to the more successful members of other professions. It is not, in our opinion, desirable that men should be drawn into this profession by the magnitude of the economic rewards which it offers; but it is for this reason the more needful that men of high gift and character should be drawn into it by the assurance of an honorable and secure position, and of freedom to perform honestly and according to their own consciences the distinctive and important function which the nature of the profession lays upon them.[13]

As Shor indicates, the status of all teachers, including university professors, has been diminished over the past generation in a climate that has become distinctly anti-intellectual. No longer are professors accepted as authorities, certainly not with the enthusiasm of the past when college professors could be popular local lecturers. In part because they have not defended their positions (it is too easy to blame the public alone), professors have lost status to the point where lightweights like Barton and O’Reilly can easily challenge their place of authority within the public imagination. The timidity brought about by fear of losing funding, a timidity academic freedom was supposed to protect against, has combined with fundamentalist and conservative distrust of the universities (especially strong, coming off of the role of universities as hosts to sixties leftist movements) to create a situation where anti-intellectual momentum becomes nearly impossible to counter.

Showing that, even a century ago, the members of the AAUP understood the dangers of money, at least, in an academic environment, the Declaration is used to try to establish a firewall between the financial needs of the educational institution and its scholarly and educational needs:

In the political, social, and economic field almost every question, no matter how large and general it at first appears, is more or less affected by private or class interests; and, as the governing body of a university is naturally made up of men who through their standing and ability are personally interested in great private enterprises, the points of possible conflict are numberless. When to this is added the consideration that benefactors, as well as most of the parents who send their children to privately endowed institutions, themselves belong to the more prosperous and therefore usually to the more conservative classes, it is apparent that, so long as effectual safeguards for academic freedom are not established, there is a real danger that pressure from vested interests may, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unconsciously, sometimes openly and sometimes subtly and in obscure ways, be brought to bear upon academic authorities.[14]

The Declaration goes on to describe problems that public universities might have, different from those of the private schools in that the funding source is the government, to a large degree, but still parallel in that both instances require the protection of the faculty through academic freedom as an explicit aspect of a successful university. In both cases, academic freedom is meant to provide a barrier against the influence of both money and public opinion:

The tendency of modern democracy is for men to think alike, to feel alike, and to speak alike. Any departure from the conventional standards is apt to be regarded with suspicion. Public opinion is at once the chief safeguard of a democracy, and the chief menace to the real liberty of the individual. It almost seems as if the danger of despotism cannot be wholly averted under any form of government. In a political autocracy there is no effective public opinion, and all are subject to the tyranny of the ruler; in a democracy there is political freedom, but there is likely to be a tyranny of public opinion.

An inviolable refuge from such tyranny should be found in the university.[15]

It still could be such a refuge, were academics willing to protect their reputations and show their strengths by standing their ground in the classroom and in public debate. Instead, when attacked, today they tend to fall into a defensive, protectionist posture, one that makes them appear weak. One that invites attack. When coupled with negative public perception of other aspects of academia, including tenure, this makes many people see the professor’s position as little more than a sinecure.

It is no wonder that the profession has fallen into such low repute. The “public intellectual,” the academic playing the role of advising authority in the public sphere, almost disappears as a result of the deliberate attack on the professors and of our inability to defend ourselves. We rarely do what the effective teacher, the one who can lead in the classroom by example, does, in part because we do not maintain the respect the professor had once earned within the wider community, to say nothing of the classroom.

“Teaching by example,” once one of the most important aspects of what occurred in colleges, includes showing what it means to take a position, understand it well enough to defend it, and to stand by it in the public sphere. And, just as importantly, to publicly change one’s position when shown its errors. The crumbling of support for academic freedom over the past few years stems, at least in part, from the inability of so many of us professors, like so many journalists, to take courageous public stands on issues and to demonstrate an intellectual ability to change one’s mind in the face of new evidence. It has led an increasingly timid profession to back away from its own responsibilities within the citizenry. At the same time, emphasis on impartiality has provided cover for other fears, such as the one Horowitz and others on the right perceive and use in their attacks on academia, fears of the professoriate being perceived by the wider public as composed of propagandists instead of scholars.

In “My Pedagogic Creed,” John Dewey wrote: “I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.”[16] Taken seriously, this leads teachers to model for their students, to show how one ought to act in the public arena of a democracy. It means that “teaching” must be much more than simply providing a conduit for “content.” By withdrawing from this responsibility under the cover of impartiality, academics have opened themselves up to the charge that, given new technological means of obtaining information and even of developing skills, their services are no longer needed. Furthermore, they continue to create easy openings for attack from the right. Assuming (they do it for this argument only) that all stands are opinions only, certain conservative forces attack syllabi as one-sided if, for instance, creationism is not offered as an alternative to evolution or doubts about climate change are not given equal weight in the classroom to evidence for it. This is crazy, for it teaches students that no opinion is better than any other, an attitude that will make them less than prepared to deal with the questions the future will certainly raise. Dewey writes:

With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently.[17]

Accepting “balance,” students can never next grasp the essentials for reasoning, for any one idea is considered as good as the next, making the act of reasoning irrelevant:

I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational processes) also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.[18]

In the news media, a consistent stance, rather than reasoning, has become a commentator’s stock-in-trade. In news entertainment, which is the largest part of journalism today, changing one’s point of view merely confuses audiences and creates problems for those responsible for booking guests on television and radio shows where the intent is often to feature competing opinions as the basis for the conflicts that drive the shows. As a result, most anyone whose views evolve will eventually drop from sight, for they cannot be guaranteed to provide entertaining opposition. The attitude that one must be consistent in opinions is now carried over to an unprecedented degree to politicians, who are pilloried if they change their minds on any issue. Because they have not publicly held themselves as models for how and why attitudes can change (not recently, at least), college professors are seen in the same light. That, their attackers conclude, they should not have opinions at all but should be “objective”—and should stick to “content” alone.

An opinionated faculty, however, is part of what has made American education effective. The radical behaviourist B. F. Skinner once told me how rhetorician I. A. Richards would introduce him during his annual visits to Richards’ classes at Harvard: “And now I introduce… the devil!” Skinner laughed, enjoying the recollection—and the fact that two men who disagreed dramatically could both be friends and listen to the other—and even allow the other to put forward his own views to his classes.

These two weren’t interested in “balance,” but in debate and continued learning. Each fervently believed in his own theories, but each was willing to be challenged. Each was confident in his position but open to be proven wrong. Each was modelling for students an attitude towards learning and towards intellectual discussion of a sort that the quest for “balance” has helped to erode over the decades since their heyday.

How is what they were providing different than what the political right wants, when it asks that creationism and climate-change doubt be included in the classroom? Simply this: Skinner and Richards were opinionated and proud of it; they did not, however, hold “opinion” itself in high regard. Instead, they valued support of a position, confidence in one’s ability to consider and evaluate evidence, and a willingness to take into account new information. They could do this because they knew they were protected by the principle of academic freedom. Even when their opinions were at odds with prevailing cultural winds, they were protected—not as people who will imbue certain beliefs into the students (it was expected that family and culture could take care of that) but as exemplars of the process of search, conclusion, and action. But academic freedom has itself atrophied, becoming little more than job protection—a right and not a responsibility.

Skinner remains one of the most significant cases in point for the value of traditional academic freedom, especially for those whose beliefs run counter to prevailing cultural winds. Long vilified for, supposedly, raising his daughters in a Skinner box, for hating ‘freedom and dignity,’ and for reducing every human action to stimulus and response, he is now recognized (though not yet fully) as a visionary. The ‘Air-Crib’ he developed and wrote about in an unfortunately titled article (“Baby in a Box”: in a note in Cumulative Record, Skinner claims he did not create the title[19]) for Ladies Home Journal in 1945, foresaw such household commonalities as monitors in cribs that allow parents to hear a child’s breathing and activity from anywhere in the house. It was not the operant chamber, or Skinner box, that was used to teach generations of students about operant conditioning. And, though it took a generation for his book Verbal Behavior to recover from a scathing review by Noam Chomsky (Skinner would later say to me that he had never responded to Chomsky because Chomsky’s review did not deal with the points of the book but with Chomsky’s own vision of a type of behaviourism, often called ‘methodological behaviourism,’ that was not Skinner’s), it is now of increasing importance to the study of language usage. Finally, Skinner’s take on technology in education, though still mostly ignored today, probably should become the starting point for development of effective “hybrid” (combined classroom and online) education. His words on the subject more than fifty years ago certainly remain relevant today:

There is more important work to be done—in which the teacher’s relations to the pupil cannot be duplicated by a mechanical device. Instrumental help would merely improve these relations. One might say that the main trouble with education… is that the child is obviously not competent and knows it and that the teacher is unable to do anything about it and knows that too. If the advances which have recently been made in our control of behavior can give the child genuine competence in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, then the teacher may begin to function, not in lieu of a cheap machine, but through intellectual, cultural, and emotional contacts of that distinctive sort which testify to her status as a human being.[20]

This, of course, is the most important role a teacher plays. But it is also the one that, through timidity, we have been giving up. We have, in fact, been allowing measurement and “outcome” to replace teaching in almost all of American national discussions on education: “under the blandishments of statistical methods, which promised a new kind of rigor, educational psychologists spent half a century measuring the results of teaching while neglecting teaching itself.”[21] Now, it has been a century.

The result? A system of education that, all too often, takes engagement out of education, replacing it with boredom:

Though physically present and looking at a teacher or text, the student does not pay attention. He is hysterically deaf. His mind wanders. He daydreams. Incipient forms of escape appear as restlessness. “Mental fatigue” is usually not a state of exhaustion but an uncontrollable disposition to escape, and schools deal with it by permitting escaped to other activities which, it is hoped, will also be profitable…. A child will spend hours absorbed in play or in watching movies or television who cannot sit still in school for more than a few minutes before escape becomes too strong to be denied.[22]

By college, the disengagement between student and teacher becomes almost complete, the courses following an “almost universal system of ‘assign and test.’ The teacher does not teach, he simply holds the student responsible for learning. The student must read books, study texts, perform experiments, and attend lectures, and he is responsible for doing so in the sense that, if he does not correctly report what he has seen, heard, or read, he will suffer aversive consequences.”[23] Yet it is through interaction with teachers that a student really learns:

It has been said that an education is what survives when a man has forgotten all he has been taught. Certainly few students could pass their final examinations even a year or two after leaving school or the university. What has been learned of permanent value must therefore not be the facts and principles covered by examinations but certain other kinds of behaviour often ascribed to special abilities.[24]

Those other kinds of behaviour include actions such as continued search even in the face of failure, change of direction in light of new information, and engagement with others pursuing intellectual goals. These are gained, usually, through interaction with real scholar/teachers and through notice of the examples set.

The reasons education fell into the timidity of “objectivity,” while sharing an essential protective component with journalism, are somewhat different. Those of journalism are explored by a number of scholars and journalists, including Rosen (What Are Journalists For?) and Merritt (Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News Is Not Enough). Those of education have not been as well explored.

Unfortunately, a certain portion of the blame for what has happened in higher education can be laid to a misapplication (and often a misunderstanding) of one book, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, Freire describes ‘the banking model of education,’ something that has become the bête noire of many educators and an excuse, couched in leftist terms, for removing oneself from responsibility in the classroom and from the engagement Skinner promotes. Freire argues that the contents of courses, through this banking model (which is more talked of and vilified than understood), tend “to become lifeless and petrified.”[25] It turns students “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher.”[26] Freire sees the solution to the tendency to fall into this pattern in development of a paradigm where all in the classroom act both as teachers and as students. It removes the lectern, so to speak, making everyone involved explicit learners. He writes:

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.[27]

The irony, today, is that Freire’s own suggestions have been turned to that same preservation. Adapted into a situation that cannot maintain it honestly, Freire’s own model of education simply becomes another means of protecting the status quo. What Freire envisioned was a complete revamping of the system of education, including its hierarchies. It is impossible, for instance, to institute a real community of equal learners when one member of the community is invested with the necessity of evaluating all of the others and when that one has been selected for membership in an elite fraternity. Shor, who collaborated with Freire on later projects, recognized this, writing that, “in terms of transforming undemocratic power relations, I cannot instantly shed or deny the authority I bring to class. Many students won’t allow that. They expect me to install unilateral authority; in some ways, they prefer it or want it, more than just expect it.”[28] Grafting Freire onto an unchanged hierarchy cannot work. More has to be done. Yet a flawed and bastardized version of Freire’s pedagogy, taking none of this into account, has become the unquestioned standard for too much of contemporary classroom teaching, at least in the humanities.

Small groups, short activities, sitting in a circle: these have become the core of any acceptable teaching in more and more eyes and are enforced through peer classroom evaluations. Lecturing is out. People extol ‘the guide by the side’ and bemoaned ‘the sage on the stage.’ But teaching is much more than that, as Shor says. As Bérubé does, like Freire himself did, and Dewey and Skinner. These are (or were) all real teachers, not people satisfied with a restrictive methodology coupled with a timid approach to their topics or the world. Freire argues that teachers should be as much learners as students, but never meant that to reduce teachers—he meant to enhance learners and teachers by emphasizing the contribution learning makes to teaching and that teachers constantly learn about teaching through their students. Following that line of thought, Shor writes, “critical pedagogy is a constantly evolving process which calls for continual change and growth, in me and the students.[29]

Taking inspiration from Skinner, psychologist Fred Keller wrote an article, published in 1968, called “Good-bye, Teacher.” It wasn’t, as it might sound, an argument for ridding schools of their instructors but a presentation of a plan expanding what is done in our schools. Use technology, yes, but not solely; use teachers, but not alone and not in the traditional fashion, focusing their energy on organization, motivation, and example. Take things in small steps, students sometimes working alone, sometimes with classroom peers who have already mastered the assignment, sometimes with former students of the course now acting as proctors, making everyone in the classroom clearly teachers to some degree. Called the Personalized System of Instruction or the Keller Method, it actually works—but it requires extra effort on the part of the teacher, far more than does assigning tasks to small groups, keeping activities short, and letting students talk in a circle. It requires planning and also requires confidence on the part of the teacher, confidence that the traditional classroom role can be given up without loss of authority.

Shor writes that students are “talked at, talked about, talked around, and talked down to, but rarely talked with in traditional schooling.^{^[30]} Keller wanted to change this as much as Freire did (both of them developed their methods in Brazil in the early 1960s). This cannot be done through halfway measures where students are not given the full picture of the teacher’s role or when parts of what can make up effective teaching are utilized without the rest, as Skinner makes clear by saying that technology in education is not, by itself, enough.

Whatever the method used, education will never regain its strength it we do not actively pursue the school’s participation within the culture as a tool for improvement—not just of individuals but of the society as a whole. We teachers need to be aggressive in our agendas, and those need to extend well beyond the classroom. Dewey writes:

I believe it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.[31]

This is not objectivity—but it is education.

[1] Aaron Barlow, The rise of the blogosphere (Westport, Conn: Praeger. 2007), 61.

[2] Davis Merritt, Public journalism and public life: why telling the news is not enough (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1998), 23-24.

[3] Ibid., 24.

[4] Michael Bérubé, 2006. What's liberal about the liberal arts?: classroom politics and "bias" in higher education (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 289.

[5] Richard Rorty, 1999. Philosophy and social hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 150.

[6] William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The will to believe, and other essays in popular philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 21.

[7] Ibid., 21-22.

[8] Bérubé, op. cit., 277.

[9] Amazon.com. Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America. http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Lincoln-Shocking-Assassination-Changed/dp/0805093079/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321281355&sr=1-1.

[10] Ira Shor, 1996. When students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 25.

[11] Bérubé, op. cit., 2-3.

[12] Edwin Seligman, et al, American Association of University Professors 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1915.htm.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” School Journal vol. 54 (January, 1897). 77-80. http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] B F Skinner,. Cummulative Record: A Selection of Papers (New York: Appleton, Century-Crofts, 1972), 427.

[20] Ibid., “The Technology of Education,” 156-157.

[21] B. F. Skinner, The technology of teaching (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 94.

[22] Ibid., 97-98.

[23] Ibid., 99-100.

[24] B. F. Skinner, 1965. “Review Lecture: The Technology of Teaching” (London: Proceedings of the Royal Society B.1965), 441-442.

[25] Paulo Freire, 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000), 7.

[26] Ibid., 58.

[27] Ibid., 6.

[28] Shor, op. cit., 18.

[29] Shor, op. cit., 4.

[30] Shor, op.cit., 16.

[31] Dewey, op. cit.

"Beyond the Blogosphere": Link to Excerpt

2011-12-13T20:10:00.001-05:00

Follow the link to read a few pages of Robert Leston's and my new book Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children.

Though it was released on the seventh of December, I did not get my hands on a copy until today.

I am quite pleased with the book, though I haven't done more than look through it as a physical book. Praeger, as usual, did a fine job with the cover and the printing--and the book looks as though it was made to last for centuries.

Beyond the Blogosphere is the third book in my series on New Media, the first two being The Rise of the Blogosphere and Blogging America: The New Public Sphere. This will be my last New Media book for the foreseeable future. For at least a little while, I want to concentrate on film, on culture, and on literature.

Testing Can Never Suffice (How Many Times Must We Say It?)

2011-12-13T12:57:00.000-05:00

Standardized testing is based on a number of assumptions, including that knowledge can be broken down into identifiable bits of absolute, unchanging information—and that education is mastery of such bits. This is nonsense, of course, and has been understood to be nonsense for eons. As Paulo Freire writes, it is an ‘imprisoning of reality,’ pretending that reality is somehow a static ‘thing’:

The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a “circle of certainty” within which he also imprisons reality. On the contrary, the more radical he is, the more fully he enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he can better transform it. He is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. He is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. He does not consider himself the proprietor of history or of men, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he does commit himself, within history, to fight at their side. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 23-24)

It shouldn’t have to be the ‘radical.’ It should be all teachers who do this. But we do not allow it. Instead, we instill fear in our teachers—fear of evaluation based on factors they cannot control… the factors of the standardized test. Scared of losing their jobs, they end up doing as much as possible for their students, ignoring that education really comes when students do for themselves. They help create passive citizens, rather than involved ones. They promote an inability to grapple with problems through always having been provide ‘answers’ that students need only memorize, not experience or find.

The tests, and the fear they engender in teachers, also promote a generalized attitude that the future is controlled by factors that can be tested. And, again, that education is limited to information, not problem-solving. As B. F. Skinner writes in The Technology of Teaching, however, this omits at least one major part of education, learning to behave in an ethical fashion:

The ethical problems to be met by an individual cannot of course all be foreseen, and the future may need to teach a kind of ethical problem solving which permits the individual to arrive at his own precepts as occasion demands. This is sometimes done by teaching second-order precepts or ethical heuristics. Teaching the student about himself as a behaving organism is important. Precepts useful in self-management have at times been an explicit part of educational policy. They are now usually left to the family and to religious and governmental agencies, especially when they deal with punishing consequences arising from these sources. (193)

Much of this should also be in the schools. None of this lends itself to effective evaluation through testing, standardized or otherwise.

Freire and Skinner were writing over forty years ago. Why is it that, today, we seem to have learned so little? Have our own educations been so bad that we have devolved to the point where we see education as nothing more than the gaining of narrow sets of skills?

Over and over again, those of us with real experience in education, with real backgrounds in the development of our schools and colleges, with real command of the thoughts on education put forward in the past, put forward argument after argument against overly strong reliance on standardized testing. Yet the testing juggernaut rolls on and on.

Will it ever come to a halt?

I don't know. Though, today, the chorus of frustration with standardized testing is growing, the forces arrayed behind it, which see testing as profit, may still win out.

After all, it is money, today, that has the ear of government. Not people.

Skinner, Freire... and Ravitch

2011-12-12T12:25:00.000-05:00

In a speech last week, Diane Ravitch said:

The philanthropists and Wall Street hedge fund managers and Republicans and the Obama administration and assorted rightwing billionaires have some ideas about how to change American education. They aren’t teachers but they think they know how to fix the schools.

Their ideas boil down to this strategy: NCLB [No Child Left Behind] failed because we didn’t use enough carrots and sticks. They say that schools should operate like businesses, because the free market is more efficient than government. So these reformers—I call them corporate reformers—advocate market-based reforms. They say that states must hand public schools over to private management because the private sector will be more successful than the public sector. They say that teachers will work harder if they get bonuses when test scores go up. They say that teachers should have no job protections because workers in the private sector don’t have job protections, not even the right to a hearing. They say that if schools have low scores, they should be closed and replaced by new schools, just like a chain store—a burger franchise or a shoe store--would be closed if it didn’t make a profit; or the entire staff should be fired and replaced by new staff. They say that the quality of teachers should be judged based on whether their students’ scores go up or down.

This is nonsense, of course—which is Ravitch’s point. It is nonsense for reasons that few bother to consider seriously these days. It is nonsense because in precludes the diversity of ideas, people, and possibilities that are at the heart of good education—along with dialogue, the mutual exploration whose goal is to shed light on the unknown. Education needs to be something of an oxymoron, of ‘planned chaos,’ something that cannot be attained through standardized testing, where everything is funneled toward pre-set benchmarks.

Writing in the sixties (and using a different sense of ‘diversity’ than we often do now—but including our contemporary one), B. F. Skinner wrote of education that:

in the long run, an effective diversity must be planned. There is no virtue in accident as such, nor can we trust it. The advantages of a planned diversity have been abundantly demonstrated in science. Men first learned about the world through accidental contacts under accidental conditions and, hence, only within the range of accident. Scientific methods are largely concerned with increasing the diversity of the conditions under which things are known. Current differences among our students are for the most part accidents. A technology of teaching should permit us to diversify environmental histories and increase the range of the mutations from which the cultures of the future will be selected. (Skinner, The Technology of Teaching, 236)

Things change; our education should be ready for that and should be part of that. By establishing exactly what should be learned, and by judging teaching on that basis, we make this impossible. New thought comes through encounter with the unknown, and diversity—of all sorts—promotes that. Preparing for tests does not. Operating schools like businesses does not, either.

Through the attitudes of today's "reformers," we also are making dialogue impossible. As Paulo Freire wrote at about the same time Skinner was writing, dialogue is an essential part of that diversity of Skinner's and of education, dialogue based on love, humility, and faith—not only as preparation for filling in answer sheets:

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with other men. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it…. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait. As the encounter of men seeking to be more fully human, dialogue cannot be carried out in a climate of hopelessness. (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 80)

Working to impress an unknown test preparer or unknown grader (in the case of standardized essay exams) almost completely removes hope from the equation… taking it out as effectively as it removes love, humility, and faith. These are, in Freire’s view, the basis for any real dialogue—and dialogue and diversity are the basis for any real education. The regimens of the group Ravitch describes squelch both. They run counter to effective education instead of promoting it.

It is time we stop this nonsense and return education to promotion of learning, through diversity, dialogue, experiment and, yes, risk.

Diane Ravitch: The Virtue of Admitting Error

2011-12-12T07:35:00.002-05:00

In a speech last week, education expert Diane Ravitch (and not for the first time) did something that our politicians are scared to death of doing: She admitting that she can be, and has been wrong:

I said that I was wrong. I was wrong on every count. Testing should be used for diagnostic purposes, to help students and teachers, but it has turned into a blunt instrument that is used to reward and punish teachers and schools. Charters should serve the neediest, but, with some notable exceptions, they have become aggressive and entrepreneurial. Instead of seeking out the neediest students, many of them exclude the neediest students and skim the best.

At this point, saying it once more only reinforces the obvious--for her personally and for the issues, generally. It has been years since Ravitch first stepped away from her old beliefs, and the broad acceptance of the value of standardized testing and charter schools has finally begun to deteriorate. But the battle, though the tide may be turning, isn't over. The press needs to continue, and Ravitch, bless her, continues to press.

Just five years ago, anyone making this claim of hers would have been seen as an extremist:

The entire current reform movement rests on a fanatical belief in standardized testing. Yet testing experts warn us that the tests should be used for diagnostic purposes, not to fire teachers and close schools. The basic rule of testing is that a test should be used only for the purpose for which it was designed. A test of fifth grade reading tests whether students can read at a fifth grade level; it is not a test of teacher quality. Testing experts warn that tests are subject to statistical error, measurement error, and human error. Sometimes the answer is wrong. Sometimes the question is wrong. Sometimes a thoughtful child will pick the wrong answer because it sounds plausible.

Now, it's a standard drumbeat of the push-back against what Ravitch these days admits is a mis-named "reform" movement, one more attuned to corporate profit than to the improvement of education. She asks:

So why would we make testing the most important measure of education? Why would we take the technology that is most discouraging to children in the bottom half and then insist that it matters more than anything else? Why would we give more credibility to standardized tests than to teachers’ and parents’ judgments about children’s potential?

She continues, later, with some more questions, the very questions that have led many of us to resist the "reform" movement, and to have done so for years:

Do we want to be a decent society or a decadent society? Do we want to nurture, protect and inspire all of our children? Do we want children who are leaders or followers? Do we want to make sure that this generation of young people is prepared to sustain our democracy? Do we want citizens prepared to ask questions or just to answer questions posed by authorities?

We must stop the trash talk about our public schools and dedicate ourselves to making every one of them a school that is just right for all our children. Yes, it will cost more, but ignorance and neglect are much more expensive.

Ravitch is right... today, and has been for some years now. That she was once wrong and was able, in the light of new evidence, to change her mind, shows that she is one of the few real intellectuals with prominence in today's public sphere in America. Unlike the entertainers who pose as pundits on TV, who are wedded to their positions simply because those positions define the personae they play, Ravitch looks to learn and understand, not simply to argue.

That makes her an exemplar, too, for our students. She's not just an advocate but shows what our children should strive to become.

If we ever win the battle over education, winning it for real reform and not for greed, she will deserve all of our thanks.

Breitbart: Confusion Over Cause and Reasoning

2011-12-11T09:09:00.001-05:00

Andrew Breitbart, who really is David Horowitz 2.0, connects his conversion from left to right with personalities and hypocrisy, not with reason or conviction--just like Horowitz 1.0. Both of them found people on the left to be inconsistent and dishonest, and both offer that as a reason for moving to the right.

Not that they make any sense. Personality neither bolsters nor detracts from position.

Breitbart, though, continues to try such ersatz reasoning, writing:

of the significant impact the practice of “outing” had in my evolution from the political left to the right.

He is responding to an "outing" of a gay member of Rick Perry's campaign staff. He says that it should not have happened and that he stands:

by gay conservatives who boldly and in the face of much criticism from many fronts fight for limited government, lower taxes, a strong national defense as well as the other core conservative principles.

Thing is, the two things, hypocrisy and conservative principles have nothing to do with each other. Conservatives long ago proved they are as mean-spirited and as two-faced as the worst of liberals. This is a human condition, though it does not excuse behavior (something neither Horowitz nor Breitbart seem to understand, taking the bad actions of others as excuse for their own).

What I would ask Breitbart is just what I ask Horowitz: How do the failures of personalities lead you to change your principles? In other words, were your shifts from left to right driven by people or by ideas?

Personally, I don't think either Breitbart or Horowitz had a real road-to-Damascus conversion. They both exhibit strong authoritarian streaks and an ego-centrism that twists politics to the purposes of personal success. They are out for themselves, and don't really care about principle, changing that as easily as a suit of clothes. Each of them would change again, were they to think it would advance them financially and popularly.

Look at Breitbart's record, for example, as Scott Wooledge does in discussing Breitbart's reaction to this "outing" on Daily Kos: His actions show no principle, only a willingness to destroy in order to make his name more prominent. His desire to connect "outing" to his movement to the right rings hollow, for "outing" has nothing to do with ideas or ideals.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Beginning

2011-12-09T12:17:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Eight can be found here.

As he got out of the taxi and walked over to where the driver had told him he could find a bus to Ghana, Paul wondered just why it was he suddenly felt such a sense of loss, felt that something was wrong, that he, somehow, had made a mistake there, in the hotel. But what else could he have done? It wasn’t his responsibility, his business, anyway. Not anymore. All he had done, or had tried to do, at any rate, was a good deed. He had rescued that man, after all, had saved him from a great deal of trouble. Even if, for a while, it looked like one of the stupidest things he’d ever done. And Sam had been grateful in Bobo. Paul remembered his tears. There at the hotel, however, all he had wanted to do was to get rid of him.

He looked around him, trying to think of something else instead of himself, drinking in the real African environment now surrounding him, far from the hotel and its sense of being in Europe or America. This was his world, however different he might be from an African, this here, he told himself, not the world of the rich. This was his world, even if it were Africa and he a foreigner. That much, he told himself, was clear.

But something had changed. Something in him.

Sam was going back to things he cared about, Paul knew, things he really cared about. To his wife, his little articles for airline magazines, his children and, Paul expected, even grandchildren. To a life that, somehow, satisfied him in ways that Paul was sure he never even wanted to fathom. Sam’s world, he repeated silently, was not his own.

But what about Paul? He walked slowly down the street. What was he going to? What did he care about? Was there anything he held dear? He had spent four years, now, in Africa, working and studying, or so he told himself, but for what? So he could be embarrassed by an American tourist? He suddenly realized that he had turned away from the open-air bus station and was stepping into a street bar to get a beer.

“Look at yourself,” he demanded into a dirty mirror as he waited for his drink, “and ask what another sees, what Sam sees. What do they see that I don’t? And why can’t I see it?

“What do they care about in life? What do they love that I am missing?”

He didn’t want to answer that, so got up and shouldered his pack. “Forget the beer,” he shouted to the barman who hadn’t yet returned from the back. He wanted the drink, badly wanted it but, again, something was wrong, something he couldn’t even identify. Even without knowing what it was, he realized that he was now able, for the first time, to state at least that much clearly. Something in his life was desperately wrong. Whatever it was, he had to deal with it, to deal with it first, before he could have even another drink.

What was he doing here? Why had he come? Oh, there had been some folderol about a girlfriend, but he could hardly remember her name, let alone what she looked like. And some excuse about learning a different culture, a different land. But hadn’t those things been, really, just excuses? Wasn’t there something else wrong, behind it all?

Again: what had he accomplished in the last four years? Sure, and again, he had learned something about this part of the world, and he did love it. Africa had become his passion. But what had he done for himself? And was it a passion he had stoked to deflect attention from something else?

When you came right down to it, all he had become, in Africa, was a drunk. Standing on the street there in Abidjan, looking around at the bustle on the streets, the distance taxis coming and going from the yard across the way, he admitted it to himself for the first time. He had isolated himself from his own culture, using it only when it was needed to help him negotiate this one. All that he had once thought he had cherished about becoming a better person, that had been so much crap, hadn’t it. Since he had been here, it had all been an excuse to isolate himself and to drink.

He looked around himself, standing there at the side of the road, tears trying to form at the corners of his eyes, deliberately stripping himself of the illusions he had so carefully build over so many years.

Had he done anything for anyone here? Even for himself? Had he meant to, or had even that been an excuse? As a PCV, he had tried—or so he thought at the time—to bring something of his own skills to an African situation. To help somebody else, to be more than just a leech on an alien culture. But what had resulted? At the school, nothing. Though his pepinieres, certainly, had been fun to create, he had done little that Adam, the old grandfather, hadn’t already been able to do. His contribution had been to bring in a little money that hadn’t even been his.

What had he been so proud of, when he’d first seen Sam? Was it because Sam, though black, was an outsider here and Paul could maintained the illusion that he wasn’t? Had he really had the nerve to imagine that he was any more of an insider? Just those few days ago, and had he really been that stupid?

More and more disgusted with himself the more he thought about his life, Paul started walking down the street a bit. Then he stopped short and turned again toward the bus station. It was time to get away from this. He had to move on.

But he found he could not move.

He stood still in the street for some time, seeing nothing around him, currents of people swirling around him in both directions, tears now actually on his cheeks, the first tears he had cried in years. There was something else to his life, he realized, something somewhere, that he was missing, that he had been missing for a long, long time, never knowing it. Yes, perhaps he had even been using his life in Africa to block it, so that he could ignore it.

Was there a mask he was wearing that he hadn’t even realized he had on, a mask to fool only himself? If so, could he lift it? Could he look at the reality behind it?

He liked himself, didn’t he? He admired himself, didn’t he? He had done, could do, things few other Americans even imagined. So what was wrong? What was he ignoring?

Two images broke on him simultaneously. The first was old, one of his earliest and most cherished memories in Africa, the second much more recent. Through the streaked and scratched window of an ancient bus, he saw three elephants walking. Without stopping, one casually reached its trunk up into a tree and pulled, bending the tree until the leafy branch snapped off. The elephant stuck the greenery into its mouth and chewed as the tree, now a slow and easy step behind, swayed and danced. At the same time, in the brightness of a rainy-season dawn, he saw an elephant walk away and into a wood, reaching down with its trunk and nonchalantly pulling up a clump of grass.

Someone bumped into him; he looked around, seeing, for maybe the first time, the reality around him.

For the first time. Or the first time in four years. He understood clearly then where he was, what he was, and saw for once where his road was leading. A drunk and a wastrel, he was turning into nothing more than a fool. A foot self-created and self-deluded.

Was this what he had wanted for himself? Was this pointing him to anything but a lonely death in some dusty, isolated town in a culture that could never be his own no matter how much, honestly or not, he may lust after it?

He stared about him for a moment, taking in this new world that was speaking its admonishment from every corner, then he turned and walked back in the direction he had come from.

He remembered something Sam had said about risk, that it came with having something to lose. For the first time, Paul admitted that he did, in fact, have something to lose, and that he was, at the moment, losing it. To stop that, yes, he would have to risk something, the only thing he could.

He needed help, though. He had needed help, he saw surely, for years. He had fooled himself into believing that Africa could provide the growth he wanted, when really he should have started with self-examination. He had imagined that Africa was improving him, when really he was using it as an excuse to drop lower and lower, further and further away from any knowledge of how to help himself. Now, he had to put himself in other hands, were he to survive at all.

Led, by himself, away from just the things he was seeking, from community, from friendship, he was going to need a hand guiding him back. He had allowed himself to subsume himself in alcohol, finding in the bars a false construct that looked like community. But it hid only his own degradation and that of those around him.

He reached into his shirt and pulled out a battered leather African wallet worn on a string around his neck. In it were two things. The first was his passport, which he used regularly. The second was the one thing he had brought with him that he had kept over the years, his ticket out, carefully updated each time it neared expiration, updated and then forgotten. He had always told himself that it was just an escape hatch. Most often, he even forgot he had it.

It was time to use it.

He found a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the airport. He slammed the door and did not look back.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Returning

2011-12-09T11:47:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Seven can be found here.

The paved road, Paul and Gilly found once they got to it on their way back from Nazinga, was blocked. A cordon of uniformed men stood on both sides of the tarmac, their guns held across their chests. Paul wished he had seen them earlier so they could have pulled off the road and avoided them by seeking out some of the myriad trails through the bush, but they only became visible after a last rise, and were now a mere twenty meters away. It wouldn’t be a good idea, so close, to turn around. Someone would come after them.

So he stopped, slowing as though nothing were wrong, putting his feet down some ten meters from the soldiers. He waited, Gilly patient on the back. The soldiers ignored them. Something going on down the road, they saw, had captured their attention.

“What do you think is happening?” Gilly leaned her helmet around his and spoke just loudly enough so that she could be heard over the idling engine.

“I don’t know.” Paul turned the key, killing the motor. “But I think we’d better just stay here and watch for a bit.” He waited until Gilly had gotten off the bike, then also dismounted, sliding the kickstand down as he did. They both lifted off their helmets and slipped their hands from their gloves.

Down the road to their right, they could see a larger mass of soldiers on the road itself, a few of them loading something or other onto the back of a pick-up. Beyond a thin cordon of soldiers that stretched along both sides of the road, a crowd of Africans was growing, especially down where the truck was. People were stretching, trying to see over the lines of guards, to see what was being loaded onto the truck.

Paul wheeled the bike into a bit of shade. They placed their helmets on the ground and sat on them to watch and wait. They both knew from long experience that, in a situation like this, it was safer for them to stay still and remain obvious. Anything else would attract attention and suspicion.

Soon, the pick-up, with a mass of soldiers walking in front of it and followed by a couple of larger military trucks loaded with troops, civilians walking along outside the cordon of guards, started slowly up the road toward them and, they guessed, eventually going on to Ouagadougou—though it would take them a couple of days or more, at that speed. Whatever had been loaded was now perpendicular in the back, rising higher than the cab by a meter or so. Part of it was flapping around as the truck bounced over holes in the road.

“My god, that’s a person.” Gilly noticed it first. She stood up and started to turn away.

“No, it can’t be.” Paul put his hand on her shoulder. What seemed to be arms were flapping too erratically. It had to be something else, perhaps a straw figure or something else meant to look human.

“It is, though. I know it is. You look at it. I don’t want to see any more.” She covered her mouth and continued turning away. Paul stared at the truck. Maybe his eyes weren’t as good as hers, he thought, or maybe she was just wrong. He had a suspicion, though, that she was right. Why else all of the soldiers along the road? What else would they be there for?

“Yeah, I see.… Now I can make out something.“ As he started to see more clearly, Paul wanted to look away, too, but could not. Gilly had gone around to the other side of the tree, and was resting her head against her hand upon its trunk. Paul kept talking, though he was sure she wasn’t listening. His voice was a monotone. “He’s dead, I think. He must be. I think they’ve tied him to a post, which they’ve stuck upright in the pick-up. It’s got to be someone connected with the coup.”

“I think you are right. Of course you are right.” Gilly had raised her head from the tree for a moment and was looking again at the truck, her eyes wide with horror and distaste. She paused for a moment, staring in spite of herself. “Oh, oh, Paul… I think I know who it is. I know who it is.”

The truck was getting closer, though it was hardly even moving at a walking pace, stuck as it was behind the unorganized, undisciplined mass of soldiers. Paul still couldn’t see what was on it that well, but could now make out that the body was of a light-skinned man, thin, with darker blotches on this face.

“It’s Pridi. That’s who you think. It’s Pridi.” Paul, too, could now see that it was the man who had once almost run him over, who been terrorizing Ouaga with impunity, off and on, since Sankara’s own coup years before.

“He must have been trying to get away, after the coup. He must have been running to Ghana.” Gilly sat back down on her helmet and lowered her head, looking only at the ground.

The mass of soldiers moving down the road between the rows of guards started to cheer, then took up a chant. It was impossible to understand. Neither Paul nor Gilly wanted to look more closely as the truck finally passed in front of them, but they found they could not keep their eyes away, so stood and looked with the rest of the crowd. The bloodied head bounced in a macabre nod and the arms continued to flap. Finally, it moved further down the road and dwindled back into a one with the truck. Once again they sat down on their helmets. Both of them stared at the ground, unwilling to look each other in the eye.

“Makes you feel sort of like a ghoul, looking at it, doesn’t it?”

Paul nodded. “I wanted to stop looking.”

“But you couldn’t, not any more than I.” Gilly got up and put her helmet back on. “Let’s go. I don’t think anyone is going to bother us. Let’s see if we can swing around on the pistes and get ahead of them.”

“Yeah, I guess we should.” Paul stood, too. “Otherwise, we might not manage to get to Ouaga for days.”

They got back on the bike. Gilly pointed out a dirt road leading vaguely north. They took it, took to the dirt, paralleling the road until they had passed well beyond the procession, which they could occasionally see in the distance, and could return to the pavement.

When they got to Ouaga, neither felt very sociable. The clerk at the Kilimanjaro, where they both had decided to stay, told them that a curfew had been put into force. They would have to be back in the hotel by nine. There would be no nights out, not for a while, at least. Gilly took her key and walked up to her room without a word about getting together later. Paul was just as happy to let her go. He liked her, but didn’t want to be with anyone, just then. He was sure she felt the same.

He dropped his bag off in his own room then, on foot, went looking for one of the few remaining of his favorite local bars.

The next day, as he was riding into the center of town in hopes of scoping out a new contract, perhaps a better one than he’d had with AfroProg, Paul saw Bakary walking along the road, a large bag, probably containing sculptures he wanted to sell, slung over his back.

Since early that morning, Paul had been toying with the idea of asking Bakary to paint an elephant on each side of his gas tank. He knew it was something the artist could do in a couple of minutes, though he would charge well for doing it. Paul kept thinking back to that encounter, now just three days old. He wanted to memorialize it.

“Hello, Bakary!” He pulled to a stop next to the man.

“Well, Paul!” Bakary set down his sack and held out his hand. Paul shook it.

“Can I give you a lift? Can I take you somewhere? I have a favor, no, two favors I want to ask of you.”

“Sure. Just help me tie this on the rack. I am going to the Hotel Independence.”

Paul turned off the bike, took the spare helmet off the rack and loosed the bungee cords strapped under it. As Bakary held the sack in place, Paul looped the cords around and attached them again. Bakary pushed the sack to see that it was secure, and nodded. Paul handed the helmet to Bakary and got back on the bike, Bakary climbing on behind him. Paul turned to make sure he had the strap tightened.

Once they had stopped at the hotel, Paul asked Bakary if he could do the painting. Bakary said, sure, he could do it the next day, and named a price. Paul nodded.

“There’s something else I would like to ask you, too.” For quite some time, a few years before, Paul had pestered Bakary to take him to the National Museum, to act as a guide, explaining the pieces that he knew so well, having once copied all of the major ones for the Frenchman who had been director. “Remember how you always told me that, one day, you would take me to the National Museum and tell me about the art there?”

Bakary looked at him, his expression unreadable. “Sure, Paul. I remember. Sure. We can go tomorrow while the paint dries on your bike. Is that OK with you?”

Paul nodded.

Paul arrived at Bakary’s house the next morning when the roads were still wet from an unusual early rain. He waited in the sitting room while a child fetched Bakary. The room, he noticed, was much like that of every other urban African room he had been in, with nothing to indicate the artist Bakary was. The chairs and couch had clearly been made by a local carpenter, as had the low coffee table. On a credenza evidently made by the same artisan sat a large cassette player, the centerpiece of the room. The walls were bare, the floor well-swept cement.

Bakary, when he entered the room, seemed unusually quiet, even more so than the day before. Perhaps the coup had depressed him, Paul thought. He had felt a new gloom, even greater than that which had descended on the town over the past months, in Ouaga since he had arrived. He had heard, the evening before, that people were severely grieved over the death of Sankara, and that his shallow grave had been found, and was already becoming something of a popular shrine. Someone even told him that people had thrust their arms in the ground, to take bloody soil from around his body.

Paul asked for a bucket of water and a rag, and cleaned the areas where the paintings would be on the gas tank while Bakary assembled paints and brushes. Soon, he was at work, drawing outlines quickly and confidently with a marker while Paul watched from a stool nearby.

“How is that?” He finished a tuft of grass near the elephant’s feet, stood, and looked at Paul.

“Great, that’s just great!” And it was. Paul just stared at it as Bakary continued, moving from marker to paint, then going around to start on the other side. The elephant’s trunk was up, but not as though in warning. Its mouth was slightly open and its ears were back, so Paul could imagine that it was about to pick some morsel and eat it. “That’s wonderful, Bakary, exactly right. Thank you.”

Bakary smiled at him briefly. He was already engrossed with the other side.

When, an hour or so later, they arrived at the museum, Bakary seemed almost reluctant to go in. They had arrived in a small town taxi, and Bakary had been silent throughout the ride. Paul now turned and looked at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like this place. There’s something about it that makes me think of a jail, a jail for art.”

“You don’t come here very often, I take it.”

“I haven’t been here since I finished the copies I had been hired to make. I told myself I would never come again.”

“Do you want to not go? I don’t mind, but I do want to see the stuff, so I will go alone, if you want to leave, and go back to your house for the motorcycle later.”

“No, I told you I would go with you, and I will.”

They walked into the building. Paul paid the small admission price for both of them. Bakary led him around to the right, to the area where the masks and other objects he had copied were displayed. Paul walked into the room and started to work his way around it from the left, looking at the first item, a Yatenga Mossi mask from the north, from just south of the region where he had lived as a PCV.

As he was examining it, he realized that he was alone, that Bakary hadn’t continued on into the room with him. Instead, he was standing in the doorway, a look of horror on his face. Paul thought he might fall down.

“What’s wrong?” He quickly stepped over to him.

“We must leave.”

“Why? We just got here.”

“We must leave.” Bakary turned around and headed for the exit. Confused, Paul followed.

“We must go away from here.” Bakary walked quickly not even looking for a taxi. Paul struggled to keep up. They walked that way for about fifteen minutes before Paul had had enough. As they passed a small bar, he said, almost yelling, for Bakary didn’t seem to be paying attention, “Let’s stop. Let’s sit down for a moment. Drink something. Then I’ll find us a taxi.” At the table, he ordered a beer for himself and a soda for Bakary.

“No, a beer.”

Paul looked at Bakary, surprised. The sculptor rarely drank.

“What’s up, then? What did you see?”

“Paul, you know the copies I made?”

“Yes, I know about them.”

“They are there. They are hanging in the museum.”

Paul was confused. “What do you mean? I didn’t see anything but the displays, the old stuff.”

“That’s what I meant. It’s not the old stuff. It’s all the copies that I made.”

Paul stared at him, trying to put it together. “You mean, the man who contracted you to make copies, he took the real art home and left your copies in their places.”

Bakary nodded, a miserable look on his face. “And no one would notice but me. I did a good job.”

“A little too good.”

Again, Bakary nodded. Looking at him, Paul thought he was about to cry. Their beers came just then, fortunately, and they both drank quickly and deeply.

A few minutes later, after each had emptied his bottle, Bakary gently let Paul know that he needed to be alone. They took a taxi back to Bakary’s house, riding in silence, and Paul paid him for the paintings on the bike. Bakary disappeared inside as Paul wheeled it onto the street. He drove back into the center of town for another drink or two. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

That evening, as he wandered from bar to bar seeking people he knew, he heard constant discussion of the coup, and felt a sadness in Ouaga that he had never experienced before. Few Burkinabe wanted to drink that night, so Paul sought out the Ghanaians he had known when he had first arrived in town. He found a few, but they were in no higher spirits.

It turned out that one of them, the woman who had been Fati’s best friend, had died the morning after the coup. A large, amiable woman who had once been a teacher in Ghana before having to leave because of her family’s political connections, only to become a Ouaga bargirl, she had been found dead, fully clothed, in the pool of the RAN hotel.

No one knew how she had gotten there or if it had anything to do with the coup.

Paul drank with them for a while, then moved on, looking for others he had known, seeking someone who could cheer him up.

Finally, he ran across the drummer from Mousa’s band. But he was told, on asking about the little guitarist, that Mousa had been arrested one time too many, and he, too, had died, just some weeks earlier in the Ouaga jail out by the road to Niamey.

It was time to leave Ouaga for good, he realized. Everyone he knew there seemed touched by death or corruption.

But where to go? He had no work, though he figured he could find another short-term contract pretty easily. He had plenty of money. Most of his Peace Corps readjustment allowance still remained, as did the greater part of his AfroProg salary.

He needed a new start, he decided: he would sell his moto and head down to the coast, spend some vacation time in Ghana. Everyone had told him life was great down there, especially now, when the country was a little more stable, economically and politically. Plus, he could then buy a bigger bike, perhaps one of those Tenerés that could take him through the desert.

Stumbling into another bar, drinking another beer, he began to plan a trip that would take him out of Burkina Faso, that would lead him to Accra, where he would start a new life. Learn a new area of Africa, he told himself.

The thing to do, he decided, was to get the bike to Boromo, for an living there had already made an offer on it, when Paul had seen him in Diabagou toward the end of his AfroProg contract. If he could cement the deal, he would take the bike on one last trip north to Ouahigouya. He would leave the bike there and make his way to Dori and Gorum-Gorum, would find a ride up into Mali from there, across the desert. Once he made it to the Niger River, he would pick up the riverboat—he’d liked that—one more time. Come down through Mopti and south, swinging through Ouahigouya to get the bike and deliver it or head right down to Bobo and worry about the moto later. It would be a last time touring through the Sahel and into the edge of the desert.

Yes, that was the thing to do, he told himself. That was the thing to do.

Chapter Thirty-Nine can be found here.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Gaining

2011-12-09T07:42:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Six can be found here.

As dawn came, urban, almost European Abidjan rose ahead of them, showing off its multi-story buildings, highways, modern stores, banks, and hotels. So distinct from Bobo, or Ouahigouya, or Mopti, all essentially still African cities. Paul, still half drunk and completely exhausted, and having slept for a couple of hours, only, looked at it with trepidation. This was his first trip to the coast in four years, his first view of an essentially modern city since he had left Lomé so long before. He didn’t want to be there, he realized. As soon as he could, he would have to find transport to Ghana. It didn’t matter where. He just had to get out of Abidjan. It wasn’t a town for him.

He saw that a different Africa was facing them, one far more like home, for Sam, and a sure sign that he was returning to a world he had once thought he understood or, at least, knew. Unlike Paul, who was reacting so negatively, Sam did feel relief at the sight of the tall buildings, though he now had a contrasting world clarifying them in a manner distinct from anything in his past experiences. To him, on the one hand they meant a world of regulation and regularity, where one could expect certain things to happen, and they would. A world where there was always someone who could be of assistance, if one were willing to pay, where things could be made to happen, where systems worked or were worked around. On the other hand, it was now clear to him that it was an incomplete world, only half of a picture of a world that contained poverty and strife of a sort unimagined even in the violence of his own early childhood in south central Los Angeles.

The two did not talk as the train entered the city, only looked out the window at the city as it grew around them. Any camaraderie they may have established seemed to evaporate as the urban environment began to tower over them. They gathered their belongings separately, readying to leave the train.

When the train pulled into the station, they did discuss what each should do, but dispassionately, as though analyzing sheets of data. If he could have, Paul would have liked to put Sam into a taxi and simply send him off to his hotel, and be done with him. Sam would have liked the same thing. The problem was that Sam’s ten-thousand francs from Paul were gone, so Paul would have had to give him more money to pay for the taxi, and then there was the question of repayment of that ten-thousand. Sam could get money now, he was sure, but not at the train station. He would have to go to the hotel, or to a bank. Plus, unstated but in Paul’s mind, was the idea that, having promised to get Sam here safely, he had to go the final step with him, like it or not.

So, neither wanted it, each felt forced to agree to go to the hotel with the other. Beyond their growing wariness of each other, Sam, with his long experience of fine hotels, knew he would be judged by the hotel staff, and that he would be judged poorly just for bringing in Paul in the door. And Paul, who had stepped into a fancy hotel only once or twice over the past four years, had absolutely no interest in invading that environment, one where, he knew, he wasn’t really welcome. But he needed the money Sam owed him and felt he had to finish the job, so decided to go.

The Abidjan they rode through as they left the station and headed for the hotel was even less African, Paul noticed as he stared out at the streets, than Lomé had been when he arrived there four years before and had taken that taxi into town with El. In the area they passed through, at least, there were none of the crowds, none of the over-loaded shops. More of the people were white, and many more of the cars were in good repair. In all, it was quieter and, to Paul, disappointing. As he watched, he realized that, even more than earlier, he wanted to get his money and get going. Not just to be away from Sam, but from Abidjan itself—from the modern urbanity it represented. From the world that he had, he told himself, left behind.

The hotel was one of the fanciest of the city, an imposing affair of an international French chain. Paul didn’t walk to the desk with Sam, but loitered by the door, not wanting to impose further, and recognizing that he would be no help to Sam, certainly not looking as he did, in this environment. If he could have, he would have stayed outside, but he would have been even more conspicuous there, standing alone except for the doormen.

Sam, relieved, left him and walked up to the desk clerk.

“Do you speak English.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“I believe I have a reservation for one night. Tonight. My name’s Sam Boudy. I’m flying out tomorrow, so will also need transport to the airport.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Boudy. We did have a reservation for you, for last night and tonight. You had indicated that you would be coming from Mali, so we held it for you, even though you weren’t here, given the war.”

Sam didn’t believe that, but supposed they must have lots of empty rooms and wanted to impress him. He was back in a world he understood, and could see behind the words.

“How will you be paying for the room?”

Sam slid over his passport and a credit card. “I also need to get a cash advance. Can you arrange that for me?"

“Certainly, sir. How much will you need?”

“Why don’t you give me the equivalent of two-hundred dollars, in local currency.”

“Yes, sir. Franc CFA. Will you want that money now?”

“Please.”

Sam felt both relief and satisfaction as the clerk deftly manipulated his credit-card machine, handed him a receipt to sign, and slid the money over to him before turning to call a bellhop to show him up to his room.

“Wait just a moment, please.” He handed his pack to the bellhop and walked over to where Paul was waiting.

“Look, Paul, I don’t know how to thank you adequately. But, if you need anything, any time you are back in the States, look me up.” He handed Paul his business card and a ten-thousand franc note. To Paul, this was a new Sam, someone in command, comfortable and in control of his environment. He felt what almost amounted to a pang of jealousy. “I know you aren’t likely to be there soon, but keep the offer, for if you ever need it.” Sam also was seeing a new Paul, or an old one, the man he had first seen sitting with a beer in his hand that morning in Mopti, that disreputable outcast. He felt that he needed to get over this goodbye quickly, to get to his room, a hot bath, and bed. But he had an obligation to Paul, and wanted to make sure he acted correctly toward him.

“Thanks, and you’re welcome.” Paul thrust the money and the card into the pocket of his jeans. “Look, it’s time I get going. And I am sure you are tired. Anyhow, we got through it.” He held out his hand.

Sam took it, and shook it briefly, then turned and walked away, followed by the bellhop.

As he reached the door, Paul looked over at the newsstand. The headline on the papers all trumpeted a ceasefire between Mali and Burkina Faso. He shrugged; it didn’t matter anymore. Not to him, at least, and it certainly wouldn’t matter to Sam.

Their paths would contain no further convergence, no matter what the future might bring. Paul turned and watched Sam’s back as he disappeared into the elevator, wondering why he was hesitating. He turned, then, and walked out of the hotel to the taxi stand, dropping Sam’s business card into a trash can by the door.

“Take me,” he told the driver, “to somewhere I can get a bus or a taxi going to Ghana.” The driver, who had examined him carefully, nodded. The destination made sense for someone looking like Paul.

Who did not look back as they pulled away from the hotel.

Chapter Thirty-Eight can be found here.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Losing

2011-12-08T22:25:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Five can be found here.

“So you’re not worried by riding on the back with me driving?” Paul attached his camera bag to his backpack and handed it to Gillian, who was arranging bags on the rack over the rear wheel of Paul’s bike. “I mean, I never had all that moto training you non-teachers got.”

“I think I’ll chance it.” She started wrapping a large sheet of plastic over both of their packs, preparing to strap them down with bungee cords. “Besides, you can’t be that bad at this point.”

“Think we’ll get wet?” Paul looked at the plastic as he opened his tool kit, extracted a wrench, and went to work taking out the spark plug. “At least wait to tighten all that down. Leave space for the tools.”

Gilly stopped what she was doing, sat down, and watched as Paul cleaned the plug. “You haven’t been down there, haven’t seen what it’s like. I have. We have paved road nearly to Ghana, but just piste as we head west after that. And the last piste, when we turn south again, is pretty bad. If it rains, we’re gonna be stuck—that road turns into a river—and it’s gonna rain unless we make extraordinary good time.”

“Want to wait ‘til tomorrow, leave earlier?” The rains, they both knew, generally came in the later part of the day. Paul replaced the plug, tightened it, and ran a small metal bar over the spokes, listening for ones whose tings would be too low, showing they had become too loose.

“Naw, Stu’s expecting me, so we might as well go on. Plus, what’s to do around here?”

“Not much, any more.”

Paul, his contract up, had wandered back to Ouaga just a couple of days before. The city he had returned to oppressed him, just as the last time he’d been there. It seemed dead to him. Fortunately, he had run into Gilly, who was doing a third year extension of her Peace Corps service and who was looking to get south to visit Stu, who now had a contract at the Nazinga game park, collecting and analyzing elephant dung.

“You just remember to drive carefully.”

“I will, but I shouldn’t have to. Especially since I got my gris-gris.” He replaced the plug, tightened it back down, and reattached the wire.

“Your gris-gris?” She turned and looked at him and laughed. “You have some sort of motorcycle gris-gris?”

“Yeah.” Paul laughed, slightly embarrassed. “Actually, it’s a hunter’s gris-gris, one meant for keeping the hunter out of reach of charging animals. Turns the hunter into a bat, I think.” He checked the tension of the chain and looked at the oil.

“Why the hell did you get that?”

“Down in Diabagou, you know, there really wasn’t much to do, once I realized that the project was going to be a washout. So, I spent my time learning moto mechanics and talking to people, looking into things like gris-gris. Things I had never bothered to find out about before.”

“Tell me: how exactly do you ‘look into’ gris-gris?”

“I asked the local gris-griseur to tell me about things. He showed me some of his charms, and explained how he came to be doing it—he almost died of a fever when he was a kid. When he recovered, people decided he was a gris-griseur—and he asked me what I needed. I couldn’t think of anything in particular but liked the idea of getting a charm made for me, so settled on something to protect me on the moto. The guy thought for a moment, then said the hunter’s protection should work.”

“What did he do? How did he make it?”

“He wouldn’t show me everything, but I had to give him a white chicken and a little bit of money. I’m not supposed to show anyone the charm, but it’s in my pocket.”

“Drive safely anyway, OK?” Paul grinned as he closed his tool box, stood, and placed it under the plastic that Gilly then secured with the bungee cords. They both grabbed up Peace Corps issue yellow, full-faced helmets and put them on. Gilly waited as Paul got on the bike and kick-started it. She climbed on behind; he shifted down into first and eased out the clutch.

Gilly proved to be a better passenger than anyone Paul had ridden with before. She should be, he told himself, after he accidentally rode off the pavement, onto the shoulder, and back up again—and she didn’t flinch. She had been the only member of their stage who had prior motorcycle experience, both as driver and passenger. He remembered vaguely her saying that she had had a motorcycle nut for a boyfriend at one time or another. He turned the throttle and accelerated down the paved road.

They made good time all the way to the turnoff close to the Ghana border. Paul, as they pulled to a stop to get something to drink, said that he thought they might get there before it rained. Gilly laughed at him as she dismounted and walked to the roadside bar a few feet away.

“You haven’t seen the road yet. Just you wait.”

“There are lots of bad roads up north. I doubt this can be much worse.” He followed her and sat down next to her. They ordered their drinks. “Washboard, sand… I’ve seen it all.”

Gilly laughed again as she poured a little bit of beer into her glass and sloshed it around, washing it out. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend.”

Paul rinsed his own glass, filled it, and looked out over the road. “OK, OK… but you don’t mind if I reserve judgment, do you?”

“Be my guest.”

The first dirt road they took was wide and clear and recently graded, so there wasn’t even much washboard yet upon it. So easy was it that Paul paid little attention, and only a nudge from Gilly alerted him to the small road he’d been told to look for, almost just a path, leading off to the left.

It took them on a slightly uphill grade, and Paul could see constant signs of recent rains on it, a tremendous number of washouts and gullies. At some point, it had been dug out from the land around, or a large number of trucks had used it, for it was lower than the surrounding land. Also, it hadn’t ever been graded, so its edges were higher than its center. Paul was beginning to understand what Gilly had been talking about. He sped up, determined to get over as much of this as possible before the rains came.

And they were coming. He could see the clouds to the southwest, boiling, moving their way. In a while, he knew, the cool winds would come and swirl around them, raising dust and pulling up anything not tied down. The rains would follow in about fifteen minutes.

In Ouaga and north, the rain, though monumental while it was falling, was generally over in less than half an hour. They were further south, though, and the rain could last all evening. Paul found he couldn’t keep up the speed he was going, not with a passenger. The erratic surface was pushing him this way and that, and he was finding he frequently had to use his feet to keep them upright, something he could not do at much more than jogging speed.

They were still more than twenty kilometers from Nazinga when Gilly reached past him and pointed. Yes, there was the rain over there, only a few minutes away. Paul could see that the wind was blowing around him but, with boots, gloves, jean jacket, scarf, full-face helmet and goggles on, he couldn’t really feel it, though he could feel that he wasn’t sweating as much as usual.

The rain didn’t slam into them the way Paul was expecting, though it came down fast. The drops seemed huge to him, but they were falling straight, with little wind, which also surprised him, given the swirling gusts a few minutes earlier. Almost immediately, however, the piste became a stream and he couldn’t tell where the gullies were, so had to slow down even more, to little more than a walk, using his feet more and more to right them when the rear wheel started to slide.

He flipped on the headlight. The rain had brought darkness with it. They plodded on, Paul struggling with the bike, Gilly sitting still, never saying a word. Once, they ended up in water to their waists, which stalled the moto. They walked for a while, with Paul pushing the bike, neither taking off their helmets, for the rain still fell fast and the helmets were the only things keeping any part of them dry. Every few minutes, they would stop, and Paul would try the kick-starter again.

About twenty minutes later, the moto started. They got back on and moved again, though not much faster than when they’d walked.

All in all, those last twenty kilometers took them more than two hours.

By the time they arrived at the game park the rain was stopping and it was completely dark. Gilly pointed Paul toward the road to Stu’s house, which was visible, a hundred or so meters away. They pulled under the awning where Stu’s moto rested, got off Paul’s, released the bungee cords, and carried their stuff onto Stu’s porch.

The glow of a hurricane lamp had told them that someone was at home. They didn’t bother to knock but, after dropping their bags, just opened the door and walked in. Why not? Stu, after all, had been one of their stage mates. The lack of privacy they had had from each other during their training had carried over into service and beyond.

“Hullo.” Stu put down a book and stood. “Didn’t expect you folk, not right now!”

“Bit of rain stop us?” Gilly took off her helmet and shook her head to loosen her hair.

“Hope you’re not too surprised.” Paul took off his helmet, too, then rolled his jean jacket, completely soaked, from his back and arms. “And hope you’ve got a beer. That was hard.” He collapsed, still soggy, into a chair by Stu’s hand-made table.

“Uh, I hope you guys don’t mind, but could you get out of those clothes? You’re dripping on my stuff.”

“Oh, sure.” Paul got up again, though it suddenly hurt, and grabbed their packs. “Damn. I can feel that ride.” Stu threw them a couple of towels and then fished a couple of bottles of So.B.Bra from the water-filled earthen jug next to the table. While they changed, he opened the bottles and asked for news.

“It looks like we’re the only ones left from our stage in country,” Gilly told him, as she toweled herself. “Jack’s in Ghana, and Syl’s back in Washington.”

“Too bad.” Stu handed her a bottle as soon as she’d shrugged on a tee shirt.

“The whole country is changing anyway. It’s not the place it was when we came.” Paul sat down again.

“Yeah, I know. Last time I was in Ouaga, I just hated it.”

“I did love what it was. Though it was a crazy town.”

“The Burkinabe don’t smile as much as they used to,” Gilly said, pulling another chair to the table. “It makes me sad.”

They drank their beers in silence for a few moments, all three lost in his or her own thoughts of the changes the last three years had seen. As Paul and Gilly were exhausted from the strain of those last twenty kilometers, little conversation ensued even as they finished their bottles of beer. They all went to sleep quite soon, each wishing their small reunion could have been a little more joyous.

Paul woke, as usual, at six o'clock. It is hard to sleep late in Africa, where activity begins with the sun and its heat soon makes repose impossible. Stu was already preparing coffee under the canvas awning that served as a porch for his tiny house. Somehow, he’d gotten hold of a number of fairly fresh bagettes. He was cutting them as Paul walked out to join him.

“Here,” he handed Paul a piece of the bread and pointed to a jar of raspberry jam, open and with a knife in it, on the table. “Gillian still asleep?”

“Yeah.” Paul started spreading jam on the bread, hoping that the water for coffee would be ready soon.

“I’ll try to keep the noise down, then.” Stu took the kettle off the burner and poured steaming water into two cups with coffee crystals at the bottom, passing one to Paul. “But I’ve got to be out of here in a few minutes, gotta talk to the boss before a staff meeting at seven.”

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate that. She never was an early riser.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Stu laughed. “We had an early Moré class together in stage. I don’t think she made breakfast before it even once.”

“She’ll be up soon. But you get going.”

Stu nodded. “As soon as I finish my coffee.”

Paul sipped from his own cup, his palms and forearms still remembering the shaking of the night before. “I think I’ll take a walk, once you are gone, before she gets up. Any elephants around? Anything I should particularly want to see?”

“Haven’t seen many elephants the last few days. There were about sixty close by last week, but they moved on. Keep your eyes open, though. You might see one.”

“I’ll take my cameras,” Paul pointed to the bag he kept them in, which still sat where he had dropped in last night with his other stuff, too tired to bring it on inside. “You never know.”

“Got a telephoto lens?”

“Naw, just stuff I’ve picked up, an old Leica M3 with a moldy 50 millimeter and a Yashica D twin lens.”

“Nice cameras, but they aren’t going to do you much good around here. You won’t get close enough to capture anything but gray lumps.”

“Well, I’ll do what I can.”

Stu got up, ready to leave for his meeting. Paul finished his coffee and picked up the rest of his bread, planning on eating it as he walked.

“See ya later, then.” Stu walked down the steps to where the motos sat. Out of consideration for the sleeping Gilly, he pushed his bike a ways before starting it. Paul grabbed his camera bag and strolled in the opposite direction.

It was one of those beautiful, rainy-season mornings, so refreshing after torrential downpours like that of the night before. The leaves of the trees and plants still had water on them, and the ground was still quite moist. The air was cool, and smelled of soil and growth. Paul breathed it in deeply as he walked, munching his bread and looking around for elephants.

He walked down a path by a small lake, one side of which was forested, the other fronting an open area and the road they had come in on the night before. Figuring he would never see anything in the woods, Paul headed for the field, walking toward a small rise he’d spotted about half a kilometer away.

He finished his bread and pulled the cameras out of the bag, making sure they were loaded with film, and looped their straps over his neck. Rummaging around in the bag, he found his light meter, stopped for a moment, and determined what he thought would be the best general setting for the morning light. Because the ground was so soft, he had to follow a meandering path he almost stumbled across, but it did seem to be taking him closer to the rise.

He was paying more attention to the cameras, readying them, than he was to where he was going, but a movement off to the side of the little hill did catch his attention. Ha! Stu had been wrong. There was at least one elephant still around.

He scurried to the top of the hill, which rose about three meters above the field, high enough, he hoped, high enough to keep the elephant, which appeared to be heading just to the other side, from charging him.

He knew, from talking with Stu and others who had experience with elephants, that, most often, they merely shooed humans away by flapping their ears and raising their trunks. Scaring them, not chasing them. So, he wasn’t particularly frightened, just excited, as he stood atop the rise, trying to frame the moving animal in his viewfinder.

He clicked a picture with the Leica, then opened the top of the Yashica and looked down into it. By now, the elephant was quite close, nearly filling the frosted glass. He clicked, shut the top, and looked over at the elephant.

And turned and ran.

Without warning, the elephant had veered toward him and was now charging—straight up the little hill.

It moved quickly, much more so than he would have believed possible. The soil beneath him shook as it gathered speed. He turned and fled, its steps roaring over him from behind. He lost his sandals as he dashed down the other side of the hill and turned to sprint into the part of the field the elephant had come from, cameras and bag flapping from their straps, elephant right behind. Someone had told him that circling, rather than running straight, was best when an elephant was after one. He considered screaming, decided not, then decided in favor of it. It came out an odd, loud, scary moan and he clipped it off. Hearing it made it just too clear just how bad this situation was; it made him shudder even as he ran.

Once ten meters or so into the field, he tried to make a further quick turn to get around behind the elephant and back up the hill, but he slipped on the moist earth and fell.

Fell flat.

He felt hopeless, so very much more helpless than ever before he’d felt. As he went down, he twisted to look at the elephant and wondered what its feet were going to feel like, coming down on his head. He wondered if he would survive and doubted he would.

Looking back at the gray agent—of what? He thought of pain, not destruction—seemed preferable to him, certainly better than the terror of running. He felt less panic as he fell and twisted around, for he finally could see it. Before, as he’d been running, he’d had no idea how close it was, no idea if it were about to catch him, to crush him right then, or if he might have some slight moment more before the strike, the pain, and whatever might follow that.

The elephant, he saw as he slipped, was slowing. It was no longer running. It knew he was trapped.

As he went down, he decided to stay down. Scrambling about in a panic wasn't going to do him any good. Stay still, he told himself, face it. This may be very painful, but there's nothing at all you can do. Maybe the mud, he reasoned idiotically, would cushion the blows.

The elephant, even though just walking now, would be on top of him in seconds.

And it could have been.

But it decided, for some reason, not to be.

The elephant halted about five meters from him. It looked at him, first out of its right eye. Then it swung its head and looked at him from its left. He stared at its trunk, at the massive furrows between its eyes. It moved its head back, and looked at him once more out of the right eye. He saw that its tusks, both short, were of different lengths.

The elephant's ears, he noticed as he lay there in the mud, as they slowly flapped, providing the only real motion in the absurd tableau, had a series of healed gashes along their edges and holes torn clear through in places. Perhaps this elephant was old. But why, then, were its tusks so short? It swung its head again, for the other eye, and then back again. He stared at its skin, rough and dirty, wrinkled and gray, with occasional thick hairs upon it.

‘It's your move, elephant,’ he thought to it as it regarded him, as he stared back, ‘for I'm at your mercy. Please make it soon, whatever you do, for this lying here waiting is giving me too much time to think. I don’t want to imagine, any more, what it might feel like if you decide to do me in. And I do not even like these thoughts.’

The elephant did nothing. It merely swung its head, looking at him from one eye and then the other.

He hadn't moved, hadn't done anything but look back at the elephant for the minute or so since he'd fallen. Now, slowly, shrugging mentally, his brain racing, figuring he might as well, that he had nothing else to do and, certainly, nothing to lose, he slid the straps attached to his cameras and bag from around his neck. If the elephant gave him the chance, he decided, he would run once more. This time unencumbered.

By watching him and not attacking, the elephant was giving him hope. He wasn't going to let that die. If it only wanted to crush him, it would have already done so. There must be something else, something else it wanted.

The elephant continued its contemplation of him for the eternity of a moment more, then turned slowly to its left, to face the hill instead of him though turning its head back to watch him, still. It had its tail, now, toward the pond he had walked around earlier.

‘If what you're doing is offering me a chance, elephant,’ he thought to it, ‘I'm certainly going to take it.’

So, scrambling, he was up, dashing madly toward the pond. He stopped when he reached the side of it and almost collapsed. He turned to look for the elephant, out of breath, unable to run further and curious as to why it had let him go, as he was curious as to why it had chased him in the first place. He didn’t feel scared any longer, but he realized he was shaking.

It had turned back to where he’d lain, had stepped over to the equipment he'd abandoned. One piece at a time, it brought the cameras to its mouth with its trunk, tasting and dropping each in its turn. Then it took the camera bag by its strap and, lifting it high over its head, twirled the bag through the air. Film canisters, filters, and odds-and-ends of paper flew from it before the elephant let go, sending the bag on an arcing course out over the field.

The elephant turned away from him, walked a few meters on, and then looked back. Slowly, it reached down with its trunk and snatched up some grass from the edge of the field. Unconcerned, it ate the grass. Finally, it headed back to the woods.

After a few minutes just standing there and looking after the elephant, Paul gathered up as many of his things as he could and carried them back to Stu’s house. As far as he could tell, none of his cameras was broken—the ground, after all, was soft—but he didn't have the heart to check carefully.

At the house, he examined himself in Stu’s small mirror, finding he was bleeding from a couple of scrapes on his face. He didn't remember getting them. His right side was a solid streak of mud, down arm, trunk and leg.

The clock by Stu’s bed said it was now a couple of minutes before seven. He didn’t bother to change clothes but walked outside to the porch, heated the water back up, mixed more coffee, sat down, picked up Stu’s transistor radio, adjusted the dial to the BBC for the hourly news, and tried to prepare once more to watch the day begin.

Irrationally, right then, he desperately wanted to hear about things happening elsewhere. He didn't want to have to think, certainly not about what had happened to him. The world, he told himself, was more important than what had happened to him, to one single person in southern Burkina Faso.

His hands didn't shake, not then. Not anymore. It now seemed as if the chase and fall had been merely a dream, or as though they could be of no importance, no impact. It was over, after all; he was safe.

His hands shook again later, though, after Gilly awoke and saw him sitting there, still bleeding, still covered in mud. She shrieked and asked what had happened. He told her, she looking at him, almost unbelieving. When he was done telling her about it, she fetched a bucket of water for him to wash with. Still in a dream state, he bathed from the bucket and put on dry clothes. He felt cold, but his denim jacket was still soaked from the night before. Gilly rummaged around and found a thin blanket which he wrapped around him. It was then that his hands started shaking, his teeth chattering.

They sat quietly, just looking out at the woods beyond Stu’s house, for more than an hour. Paul was trying to sort through what had happened to him and Gilly, with the empathy that had always been her strong point, was merely waiting to see if he wanted to talk more. If he could sort it out enough to put it into more words.

Stu returned soon after, as pale, Gilly later said, as Paul had been, and neither was a pale man. He sat down and, before either of the others could speak, started talking.

“You’re not going to believe this.” He shook his head. “I can’t really believe it.”

“What?” Paul didn’t even look up.

“Something happened to Paul that you won’t believe, either.” Gilly spoke gently, hoping Stu would delay telling them his news, for Paul, she knew, was still in a bit of a state of shock, and she hoped he would talk about it, bring it out and get over it.

“It’ll wait.” Stu brushed her words aside. “We got a call from Ouaga while I was in the office. There's been a coup.”

“What?” Paul looked up, and spoke at the same time as Gilly.

“They’ve killed Sankara. Blaise Compaoré’s men went to the presidential residence. Sankara saw them and, according to what we were told, walked up to them, saying ‘I’m the one you want. Don’t hurt anyone else.’” He stopped for a moment. “And they shot him.

“Now,” Stu looked at the two of them, “what’s your story?”

Chapter Thirty-Seven can be found here.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Advancing

2011-12-08T12:43:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Four can be found here.

The train pulled slowly into the station just after seven, almost exactly at dusk, hours late, but no more than expected, given the attitudes of the others on the platform. Stiff, still, from the ride the day before as well as from sitting on the hard benches in the station for several hours, Paul and Sam picked up their packs and headed onto the platform’s edge, looking for the car corresponding to their tickets.

Paul had bought them a small compartment, for they would be traveling through the night and he didn’t think either of them wanted to sit upright in a coach car for all that time. After the day before, he assumed that both of them wanted a little more comfort than that.

The compartment wasn’t much, and would hold two more, should the train fill, and it was filthy. Paul couldn’t help but noticing that Sam, once again, was a little put off by it. But he had gotten used to him, at least a little bit, so didn’t say anything when Sam grabbed some paper off the toilet-paper roll Paul had had the foresight to buy and bring along and started wiping down the surfaces of the room. Also in keeping with their past, Paul, without a word to Sam and as soon as the train started pulling out of the station, walked up to the bar car and brought back a couple of bottles of beer. As an afterthought, suddenly feeling that he might have been rude, he had purchased a bottle of soda for Sam.

After he had finished about half of his first bottle, Paul wanted to talk some more. He had a feeling that Sam, though grateful to him, really had little respect for him, somehow. That, protestations aside, he knew at some level how much Paul had put him in danger. Foolishly. Now, he urgently wanted to show him that he wasn’t just a nice fool, and that when he had talked about how little he had done, he wasn’t really telling the whole story.

“Before you came, Sam, did you do any reading about development? About Americans in Africa? Or about the history of Africa?”

“No.” Sam, for his part, was tiring of Paul, and a little embarrassed by his emotional outburst earlier. And Paul was right: he did, in fact, see him as worthy of little respect, even given what he had done for him. Right then, on the last leg of their journey together and when, for the first time in days, he really was no longer dependent upon him, he didn’t want to listen to him, especially as Paul was starting to get a little drunk again. So, he tried to deflect Paul’s overtures, though gently. He had slept well the night before, but he was still exhausted from the chaos of the last few days and the emotional upheaval of the morning. He now knew that he could make it to Abidjan and safety, and really wanted to be alone. The more he thought of it, the more he felt that he was no longer obliged to listen to Paul.

“It’s interesting, and tragic.” Paul though, now that he had started, wasn’t going to be deterred. So Sam listened, not really paying attention, as Sam rambled, talking about development in the third world, about African cultures, about anything that came into his mind and, in his view, made him look like something more than an idiot. Sam owed him something, after all, so he thought, even while realizing the thought was stupid, so could damned well be an audience, at least.

“Those of us who are here now, from the West, I mean, who want to work with the Africans on developing Africa, can do our best by doing close to nothing at all. We need to let the Africans do things for themselves. They can, you know, they surely can.”

“Then why are you here?” Sam had been trying to doze, by this point. His eyes had been closed, but he couldn’t resist the question.

“Because I love it here, because the people here do help each other. Well, sometimes, and if the other is from their ethnic group. Otherwise, not as much. There’s harshness here, and beauty… “

As he listened halfheartedly, Sam began to think back on his first impression of Paul. It certainly hadn’t been a good one, he remembered, and it had gone up and down, since. Now, though he felt grateful to Paul, he realized that his earliest impression of Sam was probably his most accurate: the man, for all his ability to negotiate this strange land, for all he had learned during his years in Africa, had created a disaster within himself. He was alcoholic and alone, running from himself in a land not his own. Thinking that, Sam wanted to pull away, but he had nowhere to go. Not wanting to insult Paul, he listened and said as little as possible as Paul continued to ramble. He was feeling sadder, perhaps, than he had in a long, long time, and was wishing he could make himself more remote.

“There’s also a closeness with the land, here, a seeing of things as they really are… ”

Sam sighed, low so Paul wouldn’t hear. That was a good one, ‘seeing things as they really are.’ This man, this guide who had helped him, who really did know something about this area of the world, saw so little, so little of himself. How could he think he could possibly see anything else clearly?

Did he have any idea of what he was? Of what he had become? Sam wondered. He doubted it. Paul probably imagined himself, when he was feeling positive, as a romantic character, someone free in an alien world, knowledgeable of it, but not part of his. An outsider, but one with real understanding of the inside.

But the inside of himself? Sam suspected Paul hadn’t looked there for a long time and wondered if he even could.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Sam said, breaking a period of silence. “The other day, when we met…”

“Yes?”

“I was pretty frantic, ready to take anything that would get me out of there.” He hesitated. “But you, you didn’t have to hurry.”

“So?”

“Well, you were anxious to get out of there too. I’ve been wondering why.”

Paul didn’t answer, but stared out the window at the darkened sky.

Their train swayed continually toward the south, through the border to Côte d’Ivoire, stopping where crowds of women and young men with trays of oranges or peanuts on their heads, or selling bags of chilled water for a couple of francs, surrounded it. At each station, Paul would lean out the window, talk and negotiate, and come back with fruit or sweets or nuts. He always offered to share what he had bought with Sam, but Sam shook his head each time, now wanting to share as little as possible with Paul, as though his disease, somehow, would rub off. Now, also, wanting to keep his stomach free of the various diseases he had heard about, especially since he was so near flying home.

The two men continued to talk between stops, or Paul did, mostly, though he never did answer Sam’s one question. Sam closed his eyes again and pretended to sleep, but Paul, now having made two or three more trips to the bar car, didn’t seem to notice. He talked on, his words slurring more and more, making less and less sense.

At times, now dead tired, Sam wanted to open his eyes and yell at him, to tell him to shut up and stop trying to convince someone else of what he could not convince himself. But he restrained himself. There was nothing he could do for Paul. That would have to come from Paul himself. All he could do was get away from him as quickly as possible and keep his feelings as grateful as possible. So, he kept his eyes shut and tried to urge the train on to Abidjan. He wondered if Paul really realized, as he did, that something in their relationship had changed. Although that could be why he was talking so much. As the night wore on Sam grew more and more tired, more distant, more and more looking forward to Abidjan, that nice hotel where he expected to stay, and an easy flight home. He would be glad, so glad, when he reached the hotel. He had learned enough about Africa, however, to only hope he still had a reservation.

Chapter Thirty-Six can be found here.

Field of Dreams: Academic Edition

2011-12-08T07:41:00.001-05:00

One of the impacts of the digital revolution should be the breaking down of barriers even in academia, making it more and more possible for scholars to move out beyond their specialties, to collaborate, and to bring into their own concentrations work by others that might, at first, seem far removed from one's own area of study. To some degree, this is happening. In my own case, my original specialties were science fiction, genre literatures, and American literature more generally. Because of the new exploration possibilities, I have been able to enter into specialized conversations beyond those areas more readily than once was possible. This has allowed me to expand my brief to include cultural studies, film studies, and a great deal more.

A quarter or a century ago, I attended a meeting of radical behaviorists, almost all of whom were quite familiar with the jargon developed by B. F. Skinner (Skinner himself was there). One heard phrases like "contingencies of reinforcement" batted around constantly and, in a smaller grouping, "mand," "tact," and "autoclitic." No one, without having read Skinner's Verbal Behavior, could have made any sense of these last bits. Today, on any smartphone, one can identify them in seconds and, if not participate in the discussions, at least understand a bit of them. And, perhaps, even add to them from the outsider perspective that is always worth considering.

For a variety of reasons, the concept of disciplines (as we know them today) was established in universities in the later half of the 19th century. The number of these has grown as time has passed with new departments being established with frequency. Each of these centers around its own vision of an increasingly narrow "field," sometimes based on the "seminal" work of a particular scholar (Skinner for the radical behaviorists, for example) or even on a geographic area (Appalachian Studies, for instance) and the people who, though from diverse perspectives, produce work relevant to that region. To establish a place for themselves with the university structure, groups must provide clear delineation between themselves and whatever department (or departments) they are coming out of. One result of this is the pitched internecine battles between departments who feel that another has stepped on their prerogatives.

The attitudes of separation this necessity engendered continue today as people insist on establishing new "fields." This maneuvering, though perhaps necessary in the past because of the structures of academia, really has nothing to do with scholarly activity itself. It simply provides a convenient place for a particular scholar to hang her or his hat. Oh--and for those more interested in promoting careers rather than scholarship, it provides a whole new vista of positions, journals, and conferences, places where, at the beginning, competition is light--and where who you know or if you got there first is often more important than what you do.

To me, there's a great irony, today, in the claims for a "digital humanities" field, in demands for its 'place at the table.' This is exactly the opposite of what I had imaged happening in academia as a result of the digital revolution. Rather than continuing to limit conversations to certain in-groups, certain cognoscenti, I was hoping to see all sorts of barriers in academia start to crumble, from classroom walls to the fences around fields.

In a digital age, we have less need for division, for we can rely on digital tools to provide us greater connection instead, allowing for increased knowledge of both subject areas and those working within them. We no longer need the restrictions of "field." In fact, we should be promoting just the opposite, a revolutionary approach to academia, one that dispenses with disciplinary boundaries rather than creating more of them. None of us needs to be in a department any longer, not if we are willing to rely on our digital tools for keeping track of who is doing what, where, and when. In terms of our scholarship, digital tools allow us to evaluate ourselves and each other, and to see how even people across the world view the work, in a matter of moments.

One advantage of teaching at New York City College of Technology is that the school lacks, for the moment, any sort of English major. That means that the vast majority of our classes in the English department are composition classes, and at a low level. It also means that we don't have to "cover" as many specialties as do departments with their own majors. It means I am able to write about journalism, about new media, about academic freedom, about popular culture, about film... about whatever I please... without being accused of stepping beyond what I was hired to do.

Until the other day, I didn't realize what a privilege this is. In talking to someone teaching in a university where the English department recently split into two, into a Literature department and a Composition department, I learned that, in the Composition department, publication outside the "field" of Rhetoric/Composition does not count for tenure or promotion. I was appalled. Scholarship is only scholarship, to me, if you follow where it leads--even if that is far beyond your original goal or in a different direction completely.

We can "unfence" our academic fields today but, too often, we do not, but continue to follow patterns that, though they might have once been necessary, are no longer needed in this digital world.

Chapter Thirty-Four: Breaking

2011-12-07T21:00:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Three can be found here.

None of the supply stores in Ouaga had seen anything like the parts Paul presented to them. One, finally found a diagram matching one of the pieces in a supply book, and said he could order it from France, though it would be expensive, and would take several months. It wasn’t from the pump manufacturer, however, and might not even work.

Appalled, Paul rode back over to the AfroProg building. Earlier, he had visited there, to ask if there were a supply of spare parts around anywhere, but no one who had been connected with the project was still around to tell him anything. No one who was there knew anything about the project, and no one cared. They had given Diabagou the wells. Now, responsibility rested with the local people. When a project is finished, they told Paul, it is best that the aid organization move on. Otherwise, dependency can result.

On walking back into the office, he asked if he could rummage through their storage sheds, to see if something had been left over and forgotten. The administrator told him to help himself, but he doubted he would find anything. When he returned to the office several hours later, empty handed, he asked if there were any possibility that AfroProg could pay for the needed parts or, even better, could find a way to expedite their delivery.

No. That part of the project was over. It was up to the people of Diabagou. The administrator spread his hands. There was nothing he could do. In fact, he said, Paul shouldn’t even be concerning himself with the pumps. Paul, wanting to explode, closed his mouth, turned, and left. It wouldn’t do him or anyone any good for him to get into a fight with AfroProg. After all, he was still dependent on the NGO’s money.

Because it was nearby and he needed the release of a drink, he drove over to the Oubri and ordered a beer, flipping bottle tops at the road the way El had taught him, so long before. No one he knew was there. At least, no one joined him or recognized him. Not even the waitresses were the same. He tried to ask about some of the ones he had known, but the new ones just shook their heads. Instead of making himself feel better, he now started to get depressed as well as angry.

There weren’t even the European tourists, he noticed, who once had populated the bar, swapping stories about trips across the desert, relaxing before heading south, or getting ready for the crossing north once more. They might have been vain and obnoxious, but they had certainly kept the place interesting.

He left, too depressed to stay there, and decided he would give Don Camillo’s a try. He couldn’t do anything more about the pumps that day, that was for sure. Probably couldn’t do anything at all. So he might as well get drunk, try to find some people he knew and see if they couldn’t tie one on together.

When he pulled to a stop where Don Camillo’s had stood, he saw only a hole in the ground, and a sign telling him that a new building of some sort would soon arise on the spot. Stunned, he stared at it for a moment. He couldn’t imagine where the clientele would go. Without Don Camillo’s, Ouaga just wouldn’t be the same. Not in his eyes, at least. He rode on, looking about more carefully and trying to figure out what had happened to the town.

He hadn’t really been paying attention, the last few times through. It had been two years, really, since he had spent a great deal of time in Ouaga. As he rode around, just looking at the places he had once known, he saw that a lot more of Ouaga than he knew had been torn down, to make way, he assumed, for more of the new quartiers like those he had seen on the road to Koupela. Most were of the cement the regime preferred to the banco brick and mud. An entire sector near the airport, once a vibrant community, was now merely a clear space over rubble, still crisscrossed by the streets that had once served the neighborhood. Riding through, Paul wondered how he had missed it last time going by; it gave him a chill. He quickly moved on to places where buildings still stood. There was a good bar/restaurant, he remembered, down the road from the airport, near where one turned to go to the American embassy.

He ordered and sat at one of the two tables in the little courtyard by the street, hoping to see someone he knew go by. No one he knew appeared along the road, and the food didn’t seem quite as good as he remembered it. He ate, drank a beer or two, and got up to go.

But where? Though he had visited Ouaga every few months while in Peace Corps, and had been there just a few weeks ago, he no longer knew it the way he had when he had lived there. The hangouts, obviously, had changed, as had the people. The people, at least, that he had known.

Now more than a little depressed, Paul decided to find Michel and see how he was doing. He drove out to the shop, hoping to take him out for a drink. It was just about time for him to be getting off of work, after all.

But another man was there, older. Paul had never seen him before, though he had been to the shop often.

“Hello.” The man looked up from his work adjusting the belts of a cassette player. “Is Michel around?”

The man put down his tool and stared at him, then slowly shook his head, saying nothing.

“Will he be back soon?”

The man shook his head again.

“Has he quit? Did he finally open his own shop?” Paul couldn’t figure out what was going on. Was the man being hostile? Had Michel done something wrong and gotten himself fired?

Again the man shook his head. But this time he looked directly at Paul and spoke. “Il est mort. He is dead.”

Paul arched his neck forward and stared at him. This wasn’t possible. It took him a moment to speak, for his breath seemed to have died. “Michel?” The man nodded, his own eyes sad with the news he had imparted. “How? How could he possibly be dead?”

The man, compassionate if distant, walked from behind the counter and motioned for Paul to go out front, where he could sit on the bench for a moment. The man sat next to him. After a few minutes, he told Paul what had happened.

“He was stopped at an intersection in town, one with a light, on his way to work. A couple of weeks ago. A truck going too fast, came around the corner and into his lane. Gave him no warning. Hit him. Smashed right into him. Threw him into the air. He came down on his head.”

“He wasn’t wearing his helmet?”

“Oh yes, he was.” The man nodded vigorously. “But it flew off.”

As usual, Paul thought to himself, sickened, Michel had left the chin strap undone. He put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. After a few minutes, the man got up and went back inside to his work. Paul didn’t even notice.

Not quite knowing where he was going, Paul later rode back to the Peace Corps office. When he saw where he was, he shrugged, parked his bike, and walked to the small bar across the street, really just a hut with a bench out front. He ordered a beer and tried to think.

As he was brooding, missing Michel, wondering why so many people had to die such stupid deaths, he saw one of the APCD’s, a man named Walter, walk from the Peace Corps compound, which should have been closing for the night right about then. He looked uncertain, baffled. He started to unlock his car, fumbled with the key, dropped it, picked it up, then spotted Paul sitting across the street and walked over.

“You heard?”

“About Michel?” Paul was perplexed. He didn’t think Walter knew Michel at all, though he probably had met the Kiema’s, having been Lori’s APCD.

“Michel?” Now Walter was confused. “No, who’s Michel?”

“He’s… never mind. Just someone I knew who died.”

“Oh.” Walter stared at him for a moment, then sat down and indicated to the barman that he wanted a beer. “I’m sorry about that. That’s not what I meant, though. No, I was talking about Peace Corps.”

“Why? What’s happened to Peace Corps?”

“We’re kicked out. We’ve been told to leave Burkina Faso. The stagieres waiting in Philadelphia to fly here will all be reassigned.”

“Jesus.” That woke Paul from his shock about Michel. “And the people already here?” he’d heard about cases of Peace Corps being kicked out before. Often, all the PCVs were forced to leave immediately.

“They can stay, but no extensions. We will be gone in less than a year.”

“They give a reason?” Why would a poor country give up free teachers, free forestry workers, and more? It didn’t make any sense.

“Spying, of course. We’re only here to spy on them.”

“Right.” On second thought, when had anything this regime had done make any sense at all.

He sat with Walter for an hour or two, joined by others who straggled from the building. They held an impromptu wake for Peace Corps, with Paul holding a private one for Michel, too.

He would have to drive out to Koupela, he knew. He would have to see the Kiema’s. The only son they had left, now, was the deaf boy. He hoped they weren’t so traditional that they could no see the value of their daughters, for it was with them that their future now rested. He got up and slipped away, riding straight east to Michel’s family.

The trip out to Koupela was a disaster. Paul should have known it would be. The Kiema’s might have been interested in seeing Paul soon after Michel’s death, but it had been weeks now. It was rainy season and there was work to do. Yes, there would be a funeral at the end of the year, but it wouldn’t be much. Michel had been young, after all, and had no children. It was the children who made a funeral feast, anyway, not the parents.

The stoicism of Michel’s family shocked Paul. He had planned on staying the night, but decided to drive back to Ouaga in the dark. He would, he decided, leave Ouaga the next day, to get back to Diabagou. All anyone he might know now in Ouaga would want to talk about was Peace Corps leaving. Paul didn’t want to think about that, let alone discuss it. It was just too absurd. And all he wanted was to talk about Michel.

By the time he returned to Diabagou, three more pumps had broken down. The chief came to his house, this time alone, as soon as he heard that Paul had returned, asking if he had been able to find the parts. When Paul told him that he had had no luck, the man just shook his head. He was facing a disaster, now, for Diabagou no longer had the water to support its overgrown population. If Paul couldn’t help him, he said, he had no idea what he was going to do.

Paul didn’t either. It would be useless to turn to the government. It hadn’t been their project and didn’t care about a village in the middle of nowhere, anyhow. And who else was there? None of the other aid organizations would be willing to come in. To do so would be for them to admit that AfroProg had made a mistake, that USAID had, too.

“We’ll just have to try to dig more wells, and deepen the ones we have,” the chief told Paul, as he left. “There’s not much else we can do.”

“Let me know if I can help.” Paul didn’t know what else to say.

“No, but thank you. I think it is time for us to try to take care of ourselves.” The man walked away without looking back. Paul stepped into his house, feeling guilty and cursing himself as a failure, though he knew there was nothing he could have done to change things.

Paul’s contract would be up in another two-and-a-half months, so he decided just to wait it out, even if there wasn’t much good he could do, now. The rains had begun and his seedlings had sprouted. If he were lucky, there would be enough rain so that he wouldn’t need water from the wells. However, he didn’t think, given what had happened, that he would be willing to use well water at all for his trees. That would just seem too much like he was robbing the villagers.

Though it might lack water, Diabagou still had plenty of bars, and plenty of beer. Paul spent more and more of his time in them. There was, he kept telling himself, little remaining that he could do on his project. Nothing he could do about the pumps, which continued to break down. Soon, only two remained working; it would only be a matter of time until there were none. His seedlings would soon need transplanting, if any survived. After that, he could write his report and wash his hands of this whole dirty mess.

While he wasn’t drinking, Paul spent his riding his Yamaha and learning motorcycle mechanics from Abel, the mechanic who had helped him with the Isuzu and the well. They became pretty good friends, Paul’s only friend in Diabagou. Paul would generally ride over to his stall in the morning and complete a new maintenance project on the bike. He learned to take off the head and replace the piston, to change the chain and sprockets, to adjust or replace brakes. The work fascinated him, and kept him from thinking about the failures surrounding him, or the failure now growing within him.

Chapter Thirty-Five can be found here.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Talking

2011-12-07T15:20:00.001-05:00

Chapter Thirty-Two can be found here.

War or not the train would leave for Abidjan sometime in the late afternoon. Or so they were informed once they arrived at the station. At least, it would leave Ouagadougou at two. That much was certain, the agent assured them, but he refused to give a firm time of arrival. When pressed, all he would do is point to the schedule. But that, as Paul explained to Sam, was to be expected. Though they had tickets in hand with a time stamped on them, one couldn’t really be as sure about what time the train would get to Bobo, let alone leave. Paul handed one of the tickets to Sam and led him back outside.

It was a clear day, and quiet. No dust in the air, nothing overhead but blue. Across the plaza trucks, busses, cars, and motos whizzed by, but the sound was far away. As they stood there, outside the train station, itself a low, long building facing that wide, empty plaza, Sam, who had been staring at the ticket, his face grave, suddenly turned to Paul, facing him squarely.

“Look, Paul, I have to say this, but it isn’t easy. I understand quite well what you’ve done for me these last days. They haven’t been easy, and I’ve had a lot of second thoughts, but you got us here. Thank you Paul, thank you.” Tears were in his eyes, Paul noticed, and upon his cheeks. He wanted to turn away; anything but this. Besides, he really felt that Sam should be angry with him, not thankful. All he had done was put the man in danger unnecessarily and through his own arrogance. He winced at Sam’s words and tears, not wanting to listen, but unable to turn away, there in the middle of that open plaza. “I really didn’t know what would happen…. That waiting in Mopti, I could hardly have stood another day of it, and I didn’t know if I would ever get out. Then, I thought I was going to die yesterday, though I had been scared I might in Mopti, too. Without you, I don’t know what would have happened to me. Thank you.” The man stared at him, pain in his expression and confusion, for he could clearly see Paul’s aversion. Even so, for a moment, Paul thought he was going to hug him, right there in the middle of the plaza.

“That’s OK.” Paul still didn’t know how to react to this, so different from his own take on what had gone on, these past few days. He hadn’t helped that much, he had decided, and had led Sam into even greater trouble than he had been in before, no matter how Sam might see it. He knew that part of what Sam said was true, they had come close to being killed… or so they had thought. And that weighed on him. No one should thank him for that. He was extremely embarrassed by the memory of his own arrogance in Mopti and was only happy that matters hadn’t ended up worse. “But you would have survived without me. I did no more than anyone should, perhaps trying to do too much.”

“No, Paul, most people wouldn’t. Most people let others go on their own way. They rarely take the sort or responsibility I now know you took for me.”

Now he knew, Paul though, what all the silence that morning had been about. He had thought Sam was finally recognizing the needless danger Paul had put him through. But he couldn’t let this go on. “Look, let’s get our bags and come back here and eat. There’s a nice restaurant with air conditioning close. We’ll go there.”

“You didn’t really have to do what you did, to take me. I must have made things difficult.” Sam persisted. He really seemed to want to offer some sort of recognition, but Paul adamantly didn’t feel he could accept it, so shook it off.

“Not really. Come on. Let’s go.”

Sam looked at him, a little confused, but followed quietly when Paul started to walk back to the hotel.

A little later, they made their way to the restaurant Paul had mentioned, carrying their bags. The heat of the day now lay on the town. The restaurant’s air-conditioning chilled the sweat on their shirts, shivering both of them as they entered. This was, Paul realized, the first western-style restaurant they had been in since they had met. Ever since Mopti, Paul had been worried that Sam hadn’t been eating much. Now, he hoped that the familiar-style surroundings would bring his appetite back.

It did. Though he couldn’t read the menu for himself—it was in French—Sam ordered a full meal and attacked each plate as it came, finishing off everything, even ordering more. Paul ate, too, but much less. He’d ordered a beer, of course, with his meal, while Sam made do with bottled water.

“Look, I wish I could make you understand what I mean, why what you did is so important.” Sam had finished his meal and had even managed to order a cup of coffee on his own. “Not everyone would be willing to take on the welfare of another so easily.”

“I think I do understand, but it’s just the sort of responsibility one has to accept. My problem is that I placed you in more danger instead of getting you out of it. What also makes me feel guilty is that I did for you what I probably would not have done for any random other person.”

“But there were no other stranded strangers there, just me.”

“I know that, but you’re an American, like me. Would I have helped you, were you French? Or African? I don’t know.”

“The point is, you did help.”

“I suppose you are right, in a way, but you’ve made me think of something else. Of something a friend of mine, a Fulbright scholar named Eric, once told me.”

“And what was that?”

“His house in Ouaga was always open to Americans passing through. At first, his cook, who had always worked for French families, resented these visitors. Suddenly, his attitude changed, and he was more open toward them. Eric asked him why. ‘I didn’t understand,’ the cook told him, ‘that these people are like your family. Like family, you have to take care of them.’

“What bothers me is that I have been treating you like family, in that cook’s sense, but ignoring everyone else—as I ignored your own best interest, really—but I know you disagree, so we won’t get into that. Anyway, did I worry about the Sawadogos in Ouahigouya? They were in danger as much as we. But, no, I concerned myself with getting you out of town, maybe even using that to mask my own fear, wanting to flee myself.”

“But you can’t help everyone in the world. You have to merely do what you can. And I suspect there was nothing you could do for them, anyhow.”

“What can I do, though? I have been living, for four years, in a land of death and tragedy, thinking only of myself and occasionally of others the Africans consider my ‘family.’ My main preoccupation has been this.” He drank from his glass of beer. Since Sam’s tears earlier, Paul was finding it much easier to tell him things that he rarely had ever mentioned to anyone. Certainly not since his time with El, four years earlier.

“I’ve noticed that.” Sam seemed about to say something more, but sipped his coffee instead and looked out the window.

They stayed in the restaurant through much of the early afternoon, real conversation diminishing, chatting only occasionally and about nothing, basically. Paul drank pretty steadily. Sam mostly stared at the life of Bobo going by outside the window of the restaurant.

Each, of course, spent much of the time wondering about the other. Neither felt like pursuing their earlier conversation. Each felt they had overstepped boundaries; each needed to pull back a bit.

Eventually, they headed back into the station to await the train, that late train.

Chapter Thirty-Four can be found here.