Lucas Center Blog

I have been teaching at FGCU since 2004. I was hired to help build an art program with an emphasis on art and ecology, sustainability, and civic engagement. There were 2,500 students at FGCU when I began. I have been on three committees over the years as we crafted our FGCU mission statements, and adapted to radical growth. For the first decade, as you can imagine, our focus was on quality issues and growth. One cannot go from 2500 students to 15,000 in a decade without serious strategic planning issues and faculty involvement in the mission and values of the university. I came to FGCU because I believed in the values and the student population we serve.

I am an omnivorous reader, but I tend to enjoy hard science fiction the best, to just escape into a great adventure. Any book by Neal Stephenson, including Seven Eves or Cryptonomicon would be any easy read, like a romp where you might not even notice you were learning science and technology. Seven Eves would be most enthusiastically recommended for its engagement with bioengineering and ecosystem management, as well as terrifically strong female scientists. Cryptonomicon would be a great way for anyone to become familiar with the history of computing, twentieth century history, and privacy or security rights, in addition to entrepreneurship culture as it developed in Silicon Valley, where I was born. It is hard to balance rigorousness with a fast, engaging read, and Stephenson is my go-to author for that amazing adventurous combination.

I believe we are all better if we work as a team. No one person’s impact on a brainstorming session can be better than the cumulative result of a conversation with multiple perspectives. In my academic culture, we often argue and adapt to new information by changing our points of view when we encounter new ideas. Therefore, I would have a dinner party and invite Harvard law and ethics professor Laurence Lessig for his work on creating an open source, open society. I would also like to hear from Mollie Orshansky, a pioneering statistical researcher who helped us understand how government policy impacts poverty and how we define poverty, globally. Additionally, I would like to hear from the former Yugoslav head of state, Josip Tito, about his ideas on how the Cold War was waged, and how he included non-aligned countries in Africa, South America and Asia as he wrestled with anti-authoritarianism and his own authoritarian leadership following World War II. To keep Tito on his toes, it would be great to have former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright enter the conversation about a future society emphasizing the common good instead of conflict, and bring the conversation forward to our current moment, while remaining historically informed by an immigrant success story. Also adding to the conversation I’d like to hear from two of my favorite living women in tech, Rebecca Enonchong who is a hub and Angel connector for women in tech in Africa and Neri Oxman, an American-Israeli bio-tech inventor who heads up the Mediated Matter lab at MIT.  Tito might seem like the odd man out, but he was the first to have an all-volunteer female army that led him to vanquish the Axis powers in World War II and he lifted more women into literacy than any modern political figure, while balancing a religiously diverse population. He was a strange combination of pragmatist, militarist, industrialist, and nation builder with a global perspective not common in the Euro-American dialog. Lately, while I’ve one foot in the future of technology and what it means for society and culture, I cannot help but rely on my deep historical knowledge of WWI and WWII, and wish that more people could bring the deep lessons learned in those perilous times forward as we sculpt a post Covid-19 world, humanely and inclusively with an open society in mind. I think we are going to build new great things and I’d like to hear these people engage on technology, poverty, open societies, and the freedom of information. I’d make it a potluck dinner, but I don’t suppose those will be very popular post Covid-19.

 

For myself, being present and flexible is the most important thing.  Technology helps me be instantly there for my students when I respond to their message alerts. There has been a drastic statistical rise in hopelessness among the university population of the United States and I feel we must be in that virtual classroom with empathy and structure. I like that they can ping me on my cell phone and I’m not tied to being logged into the computer. Sometimes a student will ask simply for someone to say, “you can do it.” That was hard to figure out this summer. They do not need my technical advice, per say, when they ask me a question, I’m increasingly realizing they just want to know I care and they are not alone as they walk through different activities, probably in isolation. I’m working side by side with more students, just as support rather than a problem solver. It feels gentler, and not what I was used to before. I used to only hear from many students if they had a problem. Now, they check in for simple things and positivity.  Therefore, I check in more frequently with them, too. Over the summer, I used many, many reminders, brief and quick e-mail blasts, to say things like: “45% of you have turned this in, great job! You have three more days.” Then the next day: “70% of you have turned this in already! You are doing an amazing job keeping on top of things!” At first it felt like I was being annoying by blasting them almost everyday. But later, they all said it was tremendously helpful. I also used screen shots of the Canvas Analytics. They liked seeing those images of the class progress. I also always referred to our learning community, whenever possible as “we.” I tried simple statements of inclusion, so they didn’t feel alone. For the Zoom lectures, the free chat feature has been amazing. I find it so incredibly interactive, I never had that many questions in my in person classes. I can see their personalities better now, too, as they ask many questions I would not have anticipated. They ask questions in “private” mode in the chat, which tells me, they feel more confident typing me directly. Nonetheless, I save the chat and send it out. They type and I verbally answer the questions live, real time.

 I try to reach out to old friends more, people I’ve know since high school. That has been funny to realize the “oldies” are the “goodies.” We are more candid with each other and our bonds have strengthened. I also formed new collaborative networks, in the early lock down, that have been weekly productivity meetings for research projects. I speak to colleagues in Europe on Viber or What’s App almost everyday over my morning coffee, just a brief check in, as nobody wants a call at 6am in America, and it helps me feel connected before I start my day. They are also reaching out to me more because the news they see makes the situation seem very scary in America. I try to reassure them, mostly we are adapting. The images of police violence and protests are confusing for my colleagues overseas. They do not understand our national response to the dangers of Covid-19. I try my best to explain where we might have hope. There have been days when my colleagues in Europe thought America was collapsing and it was scary for them. They did not like seeing the soldiers on the Washington mall. We had lots of talks about this. It helped me to talk about media ecology and dis-information, too. As my colleagues in Bosnia and Serbia mostly have Russian television and real problems with propaganda on Facebook, in their own societies, they understand and we have fruitful discussions that give me hope. There are global watchdogs for this and I share updates to help colleagues discern reality by sharing authoritative sites like the Hamilton Dashboard. My European colleagues remember the Marshall Plan and respect the work. As it is non-partisan, people see the daily reports in malware and bots and can make sense of their own information architecture, too. Half of my colleagues are historical propaganda specialists, so it is especially disturbing when they are getting really slick and well designed anti-American news and even the experts have trouble discerning what is real. It helps to talk to them about the balance between freedom of speech, rule of law, and digital platforms. I feel sad we are increasingly loosing faith in our institutions, but talking with colleagues helps.

Getting on a plane and traveling. I never realized how much I traveled before. I see planes in the sky now and think of super spreading events. I used to look at the jets in the sky and think they represented freedom and exploration. Not anymore.  So, it will be a while before I feel safe to physically move around the world again, and even then, we have to wonder which countries will let Americans back in. But, generally, I miss working with colleagues overseas, gathering for an art opening, and attending conferences or mounting art exhibits and public projects. The culture industries have suffered, globally. Culture workers from dancers and opera stars to theater lighting techs are on the edge, with furloughs and institutions closed. Public events are all on hold, so I cannot wait to resume the public life of a culture worker. Museums have radically changed, but online programming is robust for me to teach with, as a nice consequence. I’d like to take my students to museums, again. I’d like to have an end of year picnic on the beach with one of my advanced seminars at the end of spring semester. We used to do a potluck and those were lovely memories, closing out our school year. Maybe it would be possible in May, with precautions and social distancing. I wonder how much time it will take before we can greet each other with hugs, again. I look forward to hugging my parents who live out west.