The Huffington Post has a piece taking my worries about the pledge to another level.
And anyone following this ought to read the Christakises' piece in the Crimson and the comment thread attached to it. I don't agree with everyone who agrees with me, by the way.
I am glad the display of the signed pledges has been abandoned, and appreciate the good judgment of the College on this decision.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The Innovative University
An interesting book by that title has just been published. The authors are Clayton Christensen of HBS and Henry Eyring, an administrator at BYU-Idaho. The book provides parallel histories of the evolution of these two universities, Harvard and BYU-Idaho. BYU-Idaho is an LDS-church affiliated institution, and I was surprised when I learned that my rendition of Harvard history in Excellence Without a Soul seems to have influenced the authors. It's quite a good account of why change is hard in higher education, giving a case history of one instance in which it has been successfully implemented. I enjoyed reading it, and was interested to learn about what used to be called Ricks College, though I might have learned more if some other examples of higher ed innovation, ones more comparable to places like Harvard, had been presented--though they are not that easy to find!
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Freshman Pledge
I think for the first time in history, Harvard is "inviting" all freshmen to sign a pledge. This is what it says:
An appeal for kindness is entirely appropriate. Apparently there has been too little of it in the Yard sometimes. But for Harvard to "invite" people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and sets a terrible precedent.
First of all, it would be a precedent. Of course, students regularly commit themselves to pledges and oaths at the behest of student and national organizations. But I am unaware of another instance in which the university itself has asked all students to sign a pledge. In fact, Harvard has a deep and ancient antipathy to pledges and oaths. The Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing on pages 339-341 of The Founding of Harvard College, describes how remarkable it was that Harvard did not, in any of its founding documents, follow the practice of its British ancestors in requiring a religious oath of its students. "Our founders knew from their English experience," Morrison writes, "that oaths are powerless to bind conscience. … Accordingly this academic vessel was provided with the barest possible code of statutes, and her master and crew, unhampered by oaths and religious tests, were left to exercise their best judgment, as God gave it to them."
In more recent history, President Pusey raised his voice in 1959 to object to US legislation that would have demanded that certain scholarship recipients swear to uphold the Constitution. Loyalty oaths, even ones affirming unexceptionable principles, are, as Pusey put it, "odious."
But, it may be objected, no one is required to sign the freshman pledge. Its purpose is to make people think and to induce conversation on the important matter of civility and generosity. I am assured that the intention is not to make anyone feel compelled to sign the pledge.
In this case, alas, the line between an invitation and a compulsion is exceedingly narrow, and I doubt those who explain it to students can consistently do so with the required nuance. The pledge is delivered to students for signing by their proctors, the officers of the College who monitor their compliance with Harvard rules and report their malfeasances to the College's disciplinary board. Nonconformists would have good reason to fear that they will be singled out for extra scrutiny. And their unsigned signature lines are hung for all to see, in an act of public shaming. Few students, in their first week at Harvard, would have the courage to refuse this invitation. I am not sure I would advise any student to do so.
The substance of the pledge is critically important. This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one's thoughts. Though it refers to sound institutional values affirmed at Commencement, the pledge pretends to affirm them not through the educational process to which the Dean testifies, but through a prior restraint on students' freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.
On the face of it the pledge is so benign that one might reasonably accuse me of making a mountain out of a molehill. But the right to be annoying is precious, as is the right to think unkind thoughts. Harvard should not condone the sacrifice of rights to speech and thought simply because they can be inconvenient in a residential college. In the words of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case involving compulsory flag salutes, "Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. … As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. … Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."
I want to stress that I concur with the ends. I do not condone rudeness or incivility in students, and I agree that the exercise of personal kindness in this community is too often wanting. But trying to get students to sign a pledge, in their first days on campus, is not the way to build a healthy community. After all, there is plenty of faculty rudeness too; why would we not ask the faculty to join in this communitarian commitment? The way to create a kind community is to model kindness, not to tell the most junior members they should be kind while not expecting others to meet the same standard. Who, except for our clerics, has urged kindness on the rest of the community?
Because I fear the precedent, I am planning to propose legislation to prevent pledges like this from being promulgated in the future. I am tweaking the language and would welcome editorial suggestions, but here is my first crack:
A thought in closing. This pledge is tied up with the "Community Conversations" that take place during freshman week, in which entryways discuss readings about diversity and community. The readings vary from year to year, but one text, no longer used, was once constant: excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance. This is a difficult text, and always a conversation-starter. It is an ennobling and empowering essay, but it also makes it clear that Emerson would have been the roommate from hell. I think, if the Pledge had been around in his day, he would have refused to sign it.
Class of 2015 Freshman Pledge
At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that "each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society." That message serves as a kind of moral compass for the education Harvard College imparts. In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses, students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility.
As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.The names of the students in the entryway are printed below the pledge, and the students are to sign by their names. The document is to be framed and hung in the entryway throughout the year.
An appeal for kindness is entirely appropriate. Apparently there has been too little of it in the Yard sometimes. But for Harvard to "invite" people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and sets a terrible precedent.
First of all, it would be a precedent. Of course, students regularly commit themselves to pledges and oaths at the behest of student and national organizations. But I am unaware of another instance in which the university itself has asked all students to sign a pledge. In fact, Harvard has a deep and ancient antipathy to pledges and oaths. The Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing on pages 339-341 of The Founding of Harvard College, describes how remarkable it was that Harvard did not, in any of its founding documents, follow the practice of its British ancestors in requiring a religious oath of its students. "Our founders knew from their English experience," Morrison writes, "that oaths are powerless to bind conscience. … Accordingly this academic vessel was provided with the barest possible code of statutes, and her master and crew, unhampered by oaths and religious tests, were left to exercise their best judgment, as God gave it to them."
In more recent history, President Pusey raised his voice in 1959 to object to US legislation that would have demanded that certain scholarship recipients swear to uphold the Constitution. Loyalty oaths, even ones affirming unexceptionable principles, are, as Pusey put it, "odious."
But, it may be objected, no one is required to sign the freshman pledge. Its purpose is to make people think and to induce conversation on the important matter of civility and generosity. I am assured that the intention is not to make anyone feel compelled to sign the pledge.
In this case, alas, the line between an invitation and a compulsion is exceedingly narrow, and I doubt those who explain it to students can consistently do so with the required nuance. The pledge is delivered to students for signing by their proctors, the officers of the College who monitor their compliance with Harvard rules and report their malfeasances to the College's disciplinary board. Nonconformists would have good reason to fear that they will be singled out for extra scrutiny. And their unsigned signature lines are hung for all to see, in an act of public shaming. Few students, in their first week at Harvard, would have the courage to refuse this invitation. I am not sure I would advise any student to do so.
The substance of the pledge is critically important. This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one's thoughts. Though it refers to sound institutional values affirmed at Commencement, the pledge pretends to affirm them not through the educational process to which the Dean testifies, but through a prior restraint on students' freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.
On the face of it the pledge is so benign that one might reasonably accuse me of making a mountain out of a molehill. But the right to be annoying is precious, as is the right to think unkind thoughts. Harvard should not condone the sacrifice of rights to speech and thought simply because they can be inconvenient in a residential college. In the words of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case involving compulsory flag salutes, "Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. … As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. … Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."
I want to stress that I concur with the ends. I do not condone rudeness or incivility in students, and I agree that the exercise of personal kindness in this community is too often wanting. But trying to get students to sign a pledge, in their first days on campus, is not the way to build a healthy community. After all, there is plenty of faculty rudeness too; why would we not ask the faculty to join in this communitarian commitment? The way to create a kind community is to model kindness, not to tell the most junior members they should be kind while not expecting others to meet the same standard. Who, except for our clerics, has urged kindness on the rest of the community?
Because I fear the precedent, I am planning to propose legislation to prevent pledges like this from being promulgated in the future. I am tweaking the language and would welcome editorial suggestions, but here is my first crack:
Students shall not universally be requested, invited, or expected to commit to any pledge or oath that would oblige them to curtail their freedom of speech or thought.I am not sure how much of an explanatory note the legislation would require, but to be clear: This is Faculty legislation, so the subject of the passive is implicitly the Faculty; this would not prevent a student organization from offering a sustainability oath, for example. Nor would it prevent a specific group of students from being expected to make certain promises and commitments before being given access to certain privileges, equipment, or information not generally available to undergraduates. Nor would it preclude commitments to act in certain well-defined ways (not cheat, for example), if the Faculty ever wanted to propose such a regime. (I am not in favor of such a code, but I am not trying to preclude it here.)
A thought in closing. This pledge is tied up with the "Community Conversations" that take place during freshman week, in which entryways discuss readings about diversity and community. The readings vary from year to year, but one text, no longer used, was once constant: excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance. This is a difficult text, and always a conversation-starter. It is an ennobling and empowering essay, but it also makes it clear that Emerson would have been the roommate from hell. I think, if the Pledge had been around in his day, he would have refused to sign it.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Prius Review
I've had a Prius for about two years now, mostly commuting the short distance to work. But one of the reasons I bought it was to drive cross-country when I had the time, and this summer was the time. I drove out to our summer place in northwest Montana, and back. I thought I'd offer a few observations for the benefit of anyone who likes long drives.
- Reliability. The car complained about nothing the whole way, nor did I find much to complain about. Oil and coolant levels were the same at the end of the trip as they were at the beginning.
- Driveability. I was pleased to discover that I could set the cruise control and the car would hold the speed perfectly, even in the hills and even when I had it set for 75mph (which is the speed limit in Montana and Wyoming on the Interstates). Even more surprisingly, cruise control holds the speed fine even with the car in Eco (high fuel efficiency) mode. Eco mode definitely is less zippy than normal mode when accelerating manually, but once I decided to try Eco mode (somewhere in Minnesota, driving westward) I never turned it off. The car did not feel at all unstable even at high speeds, nice smooth ride.
- Audio. It's a base model Prius with one accessory: XM satellite radio, an invention made for cross-country drives. Wonderful. Also listened to the music on my iPod and iPad.
- Fuel efficiency. With gas varying between $3.59 and $3.89/gallon (except in Wyoming, where it was $3.39), this was the biggie. I had gotten used to getting about 43 mpg in city driving. This trip was 7690 miles total, from the day I rolled out of my driveway to the day I rolled back in. About 5400 miles of that is the drive out and back and about 2300 is local driving in Montana during my time out there. Mileage for the whole trip was 51.6 mpg. Best performance was at 65-70 mph; on the last leg yesterday, from Syracuse to Boston, with a passenger and a full load of furniture and baggage in the back with the seats folded down, I drove 230 miles and got 54.8 mpg. Highest I ever got for a long day's driving was 56.0 mpg. But at a steady 75 mph (across Wyoming and South Dakota) the efficiency drops to 48.5 mpg.
- Complaint? Only one. The dashboard dims when the headlights are on, and I like to leave the headlights on during the day, except that I can't then read the speedometer. Or maybe I just didn't find the right control!
Friday, August 19, 2011
New Blog Just for "Baseball as a Second Language"
Head over to the Baseball as a Second Language blog at B2Lbook.com to participate in the conversation about the book!
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Baseball as a Second Language
I've written a little book to help people unfamiliar with baseball understand the way baseball language gets used in American English. I got the idea from explaining the game to international students at Harvard. The book (78 pages, including about a dozen photographs) is called Baseball as a Second Language and it's available for $9.99 from Lulu.com by clicking here. (Eventually, Amazon will list it and other booksellers will also have it in their database, but apparently that takes 6-8 weeks.) Hope you enjoy it!
My professional justification for this basically recreational project was to experiment in dis-intermediated publishing. The book is published under a BY-SA Creative Commons license, so anyone is free to re-use the material it contains as long as they give proper attribution and publish their own work under the same terms. This was key to getting good images-- I was able to draw on a huge store of BY-SA photography on Flickr. Thanks to the fine photographers who made their work available!
My professional justification for this basically recreational project was to experiment in dis-intermediated publishing. The book is published under a BY-SA Creative Commons license, so anyone is free to re-use the material it contains as long as they give proper attribution and publish their own work under the same terms. This was key to getting good images-- I was able to draw on a huge store of BY-SA photography on Flickr. Thanks to the fine photographers who made their work available!
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Great License Plate Kerfluffle
There has been a lot of press lately on a plan to increase the use of license-plate reading cameras by Massachusetts police. The state will pay for the equipment, on the understanding that the data will be shared with state and national law enforcement. The notoriously liberal town of Brookline, where I live, is tied up in knots over it (see the Globe), in part because the hated TV cameras already installed actually helped solve a horrible crime in Coolidge Corner a couple of years ago.
The issues are pretty straightforward: Are you more worried about the government tracking the innocent or about the possibility that a crime will unnecessarily go unsolved? As with all such tradeoffs, the analysis, to be done properly, needs some numbers. How big are the risks of abuse? How big are the chances of solving a crime by use of this data that would not have been solved without it? How big are the damages due to potential abuse? How big are the damages due to those unsolved crimes? The answer to the last question is "almost infinite, if the crime was against you or one of your family members." But how do you make policy out of that, even if you could come up with good estimates for the four numbers?
Harvey Silverglate is quoted in the Herald this morning in opposition:
License plate reading cameras are consumer commodities now. They cost a few hundred bucks. Here is one site with a lot of choices for you. There are many others. Fire up your shopping fingers and go to town.
What if we made the car-location database a crowdsourced project? A bunch of us buy these cameras and set them up outside our homes, aimed at the street. Logging every car that goes by and creating a database of license plate numbers and times of day at our location.
Then we share the data with each other and start to build up a city- or state-wide database. Or more likely, a peer-to-peer network of our individual databases so no individual has it all.
Of course, the database would not be as useful as what the police would have, because the index of who has which license plate number is not public information. But we could crowdsource that too. Make it a high school project -- have all the students walk around their neighborhoods and jot down the tag numbers of the cars parked in their neighbors' driveways. Better yet, give the Girl Scouts an extra badge if they collect this information as they go door to door all across America selling cookies. Such a database would be imperfect, of course, but obviously useful.
Disintermediation. We don't need the police any more to invade privacy; we can do it ourselves, particularly if we collaborate. If ordinary people can build Wikipedia, they can certainly build this database.
I have been thinking about this scenario for some time and I have no idea what to do about it. It shouldn't be against any laws to jot down the license numbers of the cars going down the street (when I was a kid trying to see all 50 states' plates, I was supposed to write down the actual number, not just the color pattern). Can't see why photographing them would be any different. Can't see why sharing information with my fellow citizens should be criminalized (now we're talking about my civil liberties). Ditto for writing down what is plain to see in public view, the street number of a house and the tag humber of a car parked in its driveway. If someone who knows more law than I do sees a logical leap in this reasoning, I'd love to know what it is. Perhaps this kind of data will be treated like nitrogen fertilizer--unregulated in small quantities, but heavily regulated in bulk. Would such a law about the private aggregation of mere facts pass Constitutional muster?
The first thing I said to Mark Zuckerberg (I still have the email) when he showed me the "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis" web site almost exactly seven and a half years ago was "It's all public information, but there is somehow a point at which aggregation of public information feels like an invasion of privacy."
In 1998, in his book The Transparent Society, David Brin asked a question which, updated to this particular scenario, would go like this: Would you rather live in a world in which the police have the location data for everybody's car -- or a world in which everybody has that data?
My problem is, I don't see how to stop the latter transparent world from evolving, unless we are prepared to limit other personal liberties (each individual's right to observe what is happening in public and to share that information with others). And at that point I have to conclude that we're not going to make the police the only people kept in the dark!
The issues are pretty straightforward: Are you more worried about the government tracking the innocent or about the possibility that a crime will unnecessarily go unsolved? As with all such tradeoffs, the analysis, to be done properly, needs some numbers. How big are the risks of abuse? How big are the chances of solving a crime by use of this data that would not have been solved without it? How big are the damages due to potential abuse? How big are the damages due to those unsolved crimes? The answer to the last question is "almost infinite, if the crime was against you or one of your family members." But how do you make policy out of that, even if you could come up with good estimates for the four numbers?
Harvey Silverglate is quoted in the Herald this morning in opposition:
“What kind of a society are we creating here?” asked civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who along with the ACLU fears police abuse. “There comes a point where the surveillance is so pervasive and total that it’s a misnomer to call a society free any longer.”And it is hard to argue with that. But what if the "surveillance" were done by ordinary citizens operating in public spaces?
License plate reading cameras are consumer commodities now. They cost a few hundred bucks. Here is one site with a lot of choices for you. There are many others. Fire up your shopping fingers and go to town.
What if we made the car-location database a crowdsourced project? A bunch of us buy these cameras and set them up outside our homes, aimed at the street. Logging every car that goes by and creating a database of license plate numbers and times of day at our location.
Then we share the data with each other and start to build up a city- or state-wide database. Or more likely, a peer-to-peer network of our individual databases so no individual has it all.
Of course, the database would not be as useful as what the police would have, because the index of who has which license plate number is not public information. But we could crowdsource that too. Make it a high school project -- have all the students walk around their neighborhoods and jot down the tag numbers of the cars parked in their neighbors' driveways. Better yet, give the Girl Scouts an extra badge if they collect this information as they go door to door all across America selling cookies. Such a database would be imperfect, of course, but obviously useful.
Disintermediation. We don't need the police any more to invade privacy; we can do it ourselves, particularly if we collaborate. If ordinary people can build Wikipedia, they can certainly build this database.
I have been thinking about this scenario for some time and I have no idea what to do about it. It shouldn't be against any laws to jot down the license numbers of the cars going down the street (when I was a kid trying to see all 50 states' plates, I was supposed to write down the actual number, not just the color pattern). Can't see why photographing them would be any different. Can't see why sharing information with my fellow citizens should be criminalized (now we're talking about my civil liberties). Ditto for writing down what is plain to see in public view, the street number of a house and the tag humber of a car parked in its driveway. If someone who knows more law than I do sees a logical leap in this reasoning, I'd love to know what it is. Perhaps this kind of data will be treated like nitrogen fertilizer--unregulated in small quantities, but heavily regulated in bulk. Would such a law about the private aggregation of mere facts pass Constitutional muster?
The first thing I said to Mark Zuckerberg (I still have the email) when he showed me the "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis" web site almost exactly seven and a half years ago was "It's all public information, but there is somehow a point at which aggregation of public information feels like an invasion of privacy."
In 1998, in his book The Transparent Society, David Brin asked a question which, updated to this particular scenario, would go like this: Would you rather live in a world in which the police have the location data for everybody's car -- or a world in which everybody has that data?
My problem is, I don't see how to stop the latter transparent world from evolving, unless we are prepared to limit other personal liberties (each individual's right to observe what is happening in public and to share that information with others). And at that point I have to conclude that we're not going to make the police the only people kept in the dark!
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