12: "Time to Act"

For once I'm going to use this space the way it was meant to be used--for chicken scratches.

I just read the Howard Windsor report. There is an update on funding from the government side, but otherwise, no big surprises.

We still need to address that NSCAD is running under an unsustainable business model--not wilfully, perhaps, but given where the current economic climate, enrolment trends, and private fundraising prospects put the school at present. Initiatives like the Friends of NSCAD general assemblies are a good start at addressing deficiencies in that business model from the bottom up.

I'm also thinking that Sharon is partly right when she talked about having to make "brave decisions"--some of the issues that effect the student and faculty experience, including class sizes, after-hours access, and course offerings, are part of what makes the NSCAD model unsustainable, and they do need to be addressed.

I'm thinking about that exchange of information I was talking about between Bernadette Kehoe and I. Bringing different, potentially conflicting perspectives together in an open way.

Allowing imperfect proposals to be put out into the open.

That exchange needs to happen at a larger scale. As students, we spend a significant of time in the studios, navigate through the course calendar every semester, etc. We are in a particular position to point out what needs to stay and what can go (painful as it may be), from a student's point of view.

We might not be "right" (we don't have the full picture either), but we have our particular point of view.

For example, as much as I appreciate the 20-odd-student class size limit, there are some classes where I felt that wasn't particularly necessary. It could've been a little bigger. What is more important is that the classes are more well-planned, the critiques more focused--not less students but less time wasted.

I personally also don't need 24-hour access in the paint studios; if they were eliminated, I would just plan my time around painting when I needed to, and do off-campus work (such as writing) during the night.

What I just said is "wrong" for a lot of reasons (for example, Intro Paint can't go above 20 students anyway because it doesn't have the studio space to accommodate more; also, there are other students who work on different schedules and need that around-the-clock access). But that's just my experience, just as each student has their own experience.

But if we can systematically survey these opinions and find commonalities, together that data can go towards funding useful change.

So what if there was a website where we polled students on all of these matters: studio space, studio access, class sizes, course efficiency, etc.?

That input can be extremely valuable.

I don't see that happening yet--we have student council meetings and meetings with the president, where all students can attend, but nowhere that a student can just say, off-the-cuff, what is more important and less important to his or her educational experience.

Especially since, I believe, many students are similarly hesitant in having to devote time to attending a general assembly, and having to speak their mind on potentially controversial sacrifices (such as reducing hours of access). We need to find out how many people need that campus access, for example, to judge how important it is to keep it. Otherwise, we are just working off assumptions, which may not be the most efficient solution.

It may not be pretty.

Moments after I thought about this I also thought, "wouldn't this just start putting people--faculty, maintenance, security--out of their jobs?"

And students, particularly, seem to think that anything in the realm of sacrifice is sacrilege.

Maybe. Not necessarily. Perhaps as Russell Ackoff says, we (and by that, I mean "I"--my own censor) need to not shoot down suggestions on the basis of what's wrong, but take it and try to make it better.

We need to allow it to happen.

We also need to allow it to be wrong.

11: Going Out on a Limb

When I first started this project in the form of a blog, I was thinking about the problem that the blog format presented, that the entries come up in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones at the top of the page. And then I thought about how reading the research backwards might actually be a fitting metaphor (I forget how, exactly).

At the moment I’m reminded of something that Ernest Hemingway once said in an interview regarding his novella, The Old Man and the Sea:

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better…. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true. (“Books”)

I’m embarrassed to admit that I began this self-proclaimed “journey of errors” with much of the road already mapped out—or, at least, I had preconceived in my mind all the topics I wanted to touch on, all the quotes that would be fitting (the above one aside), all the artwork that I could bring in—all I needed was to go from one, to the next, to the next… and surely some grand, profound conclusion would be reached at the end.

And now I’m sitting in front of this computer screen (and have been for hours), and there are no such conclusions to be found. That’s the point, I think.

Being wrong means not writing the ending at the very start.

We’ll find out tomorrow what Howard Windsor thinks about that.

We’ll find out tomorrow what we think about that.

Works Cited

“Books: An American Storyteller.” Time 13 Dec. 1954. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.

10: An Imperfect Proposal

Earlier in the semester I wrote what I thought was a research essay, but what was in reality an opinion piece, comparing merit versus need-based student funding in art universities (link).

A research essay or an opinion piece: are these two different entities? I will immediately concede that the distinction is possibly arbitrary, but thinking in these terms has helped me re-interpret what I previously thought I had gotten “wrong”.

I’ll give two examples:

For one, I argue in the essay that in a merit-based funding system, there are more students left with unmet financial need, and their struggles (to keep a part-time job, to deal with the effects of debt such as stress and poor health) have an adverse effect on the classroom experience as a whole. Turning to a need-based system that helps these students first would thus potentially improve the overall quality of education enough for everyone to compensate those who lose out on awards under the new arrangement.

But I can’t prove that this is actually the case. To be able to do so requires some level of research—if not a longitudinal study, then at least a thorough survey of current students on their finances and lifestyles, and on how things might be different if they were given more or less assistance from the university.

Later in the essay I propose that well-publicized non-monetary awards could help kick-start an outstanding student’s artistic career, thereby making up for eliminated merit-based scholarships. This claim is also unsubstantiated. Without an analysis of whether existing awards (such as the Starfish or the Sobey Art Award) actually boost artists’ reputations or help them secure more exhibitions, there’s no telling whether my idea would work either. Problematic, too, are the economics of such an enterprise, which would need to be investigated—is it actually cheaper to hold award ceremonies and publicize winners than it is to just give them modest scholarships?

The two statements I had made in the name of research made me very nervous, because in fact no research had been done—at least not in the scientific sense, where experiments must be drawn up and data must be collected. Instead, what I had written bore greater resemblance to a columnist’s article in a newspaper: given a set of facts and opinions obtained in a journalistic fashion, I proceeded to give my own take funded by personal experience and rational deliberation.

It makes me feel a bit relieved, then, to realize that what I had written was not a failed attempt at research, but rather something that belonged to a different category of inquiry. But what is the purpose of this category? What does the plebeian observer have to offer in the realm of the thoroughly-informed expert?

The answer may seem obvious (it became less so when I had to be the intruding non-expert). As Karin Cope suggests, every observer possesses his or her own unique perspective which is inaccessible to someone else, including the so-called expert. In my case, while I don’t understand NSCAD’s endowment structure the way that the school’s Director of Financial Aid does, neither does she know exactly how the decisions being made at her level affect the experiences of the school’s students—not unless a student shares that experience with her.

In other words, each side can learn from the other. One does not necessarily possess greater knowledge than the other; it is instead more likely that the two sides possess very different areas of knowledge. An exchange of such ideas thus requires that both are allowed to get some things wrong without having an error diminish or invalidate their positions completely. It requires that both are flexible to correcting what’s wrong while appreciating what’s right.

Organizational theorist Russell L. Ackoff makes a similar case in his essay “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Ackoff observes that critics tend to shut down any proposed change to a system by immediately targeting what’s wrong with the proposal. A more productive alternative, he says, would be to seek ways to modify an imperfect proposal by removing the perceived deficiencies while preserving the advantages (78).

Works Cited

Ackoff, Russell L. “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Interfaces 33.5 (2003): 78-82. JSTOR. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

9: But of the Quarrel with Ourselves, Poetry

Works Cited

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin, 2000. 465. Print.

8: ...And an Intervention

I was delighted to find that Kathryn Schulz had given another TED Talk while I was in the midst of producing this body of research. Her new presentation is entitled “Don’t regret regret”:

***

To be honest, I don’t feel I’ve had much success with this project.

I thought this was going to be easy. I had constructed this expedient framework within which to advance my research on my own terms, and I had declared from the beginning that within this framework I could literally do no wrong. Making mistakes was, in fact, almost a prerogative.

It wasn’t enough. I had neglected that to be able to make mistakes meant first and foremost getting it past ourselves. No matter what external permissions I had set for myself to be wrong, my gut instinct wasn’t allowing any of it. I still found myself in the same predicaments as before, obsessing over every word and agonizing over every fault, saying to myself “this argument’s logic is all wrong” even when being wrong was supposed to be okay. It was not, by any means, the liberating and inspiring free-form experience I had imagined at the outset.

What brought this whole operation to a halt was when I realized that, if I can’t even allow myself to make mistakes, how could I possibly put forth a strategy of being wrong for an entire society?

Schulz’s talked reminded me that having regrets is an integral part of making mistakes. This was the missing link. I had expected that the structure of my research would allow me to get everything wrong as I please and simply “carry on”. This assumption, in itself, was very wrong. Simply allowing myself to make mistakes was an intellectual decision that made no concessions for the emotional state that such mistakes would put me in. Regret, it turns out, is that emotion, and to fully be able to be wrong means being able to deal with regret.

I’m still not sure what this all means, yet. However, if I may allow myself to go off on a tangent here: I might replace that word, “regret”, with another—shame. Making a mistake brings about a visceral impulse to conceal it, or mask it, or rectify it discretely. A very relevant example is the “edit” button on these blogs, which makes it so easy to go in and tamper with the evidence of all the mistakes I’ve already made (so far I’ve resisted the urge to do so). So here’s a new experiment: instead of hiding mistakes, why not expose them?

With that in mind, I wanted to point out what I feel are the mistakes I’ve made in the course of this research, thus far:

i.) Relying on sentiments: Karin Cope asks, “How can you develop adequate proofs? What kinds of evidence can you use?... What’s the role of your own experiences in ‘serious’ writing?” I feel myself struggling continuously with these questions. Granted, personal experience is a significant part of why I chose to write about being wrong—I have a gut feeling that it’s something that affects me in my daily experience, and it’s also something that I need to look for within myself if I am to understand it (as I have been doing in the current entry). But what is this act of analyzing my own thoughts—is it legitimate research, or is it nothing more than uncorroborated musings that have no place beyond the daily journal or personal blog?

It’s a question that extends beyond my thinking, “what do I need to do to fulfill the requirements of a ‘serious’ writing assignment?” Instead, it’s a fundamental question of how we arrive at what we know, and how we can be certain that we can trust our conclusions. Lynda Barry’s What It Is proves to us that important lessons can come from such a kind of sentimental philosophizing. The insights that she shares with us are profound precisely because she’s lived and made mistakes and learned something that she believes can be universal lessons for all of us. On the other hand, Schulz proves that some of our great cultural wisdoms can turn out to be wrong. In her talk, Schulz explains how she had “drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret… that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets” (Schulz). But upon closer inspection, she realized that this was a largely unexamined and unsubstantiated axiom.

ii.) Failing to be critical: “Wrongology”, as Schulz calls it, is an admittedly niche field. Schulz has produced a body of research arguing that we should allow ourselves to be wrong, and for the most part, there aren’t many people out there who are arguing for the reverse position—at least not in a way that stands in direct response and opposition to what she has put out (that is, unless we get into real epistemology—and as I stated in the proposal, I'm not looking to let things get out of hand). The absence of contradictory evidence is always dangerous, and it’s something that is continually worrying for me, even though I don’t have a real solution for it.

iii.) Coerced evidence: This is another danger in research very much related to the previous—we start out with a hypothesis we believe in, then subsequently spend all our efforts manipulating the evidence, especially by selection and omission, so that what we’ve decided from the outset never has to come into question. From an undergraduate student’s perspective, we typically do this out of constraints for time—having to enter the realm where the initial plans for our research might not actually work out is a risky business that two-week assignments don’t allow us the time for. Yet this tendency is merely symptomatic of our real-life experience: we never want to have to face the fact that we might be wrong, and that our views might need to be corrected.

And isn’t that just the problem I’m trying to solve?

Works Cited

Schulz, Kathryn. “Don’t regret regret.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. Dec. 2011. Web. 6 Dec. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html>.

7: An Interlude...

“‘Do you sing?’ I exclaimed with surprise. At the same time I remembered with amusement the incident of my first youthful love, and how it ended when I heard the girl sing so badly.”

– Hermann Hesse, Gertrude

Works Cited

Hesse, Hermann. Gertrude. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York: Picador, 2005. Print.

6: Better the Devil You Know (Part II)

Determinants of Political Apathy:

- Physical – geography, population density, weather, ease of access to sites of political activity
- Socioeconomic – age and demographics of citizens, wealth/poverty, employment rates
- Institutional & Political – structure of government and political processes (e.g. electoral methods), relevance of political issues in discussion
- Sociological – perceptions of danger, futility, or alienation in political processes

In today’s post, wrongness intersects with the topic of political apathy. I am beginning this discussion with the above list for several reasons:

i.) I want to illustrate that there are multiple causes of political apathy—my discussion on wrongness attempts to find it as an underlying factor in some, but not all, of those causes.

ii.) Most of these variables were, for due diligence, pulled from research literature (Merrifield 666, Rosenberg 350, Dean 186) but I am confident that most readers could just as easily have named them on the spot—they are, after all, conveniently aligned with all the excuses we make for being politically inactive. What this suggests is that our intuitive and emotional response to politics should not be taken for granted.

***

American sociologist Morris Rosenberg took this qualitative approach for studying political apathy. He collected his data through seventy open-ended interviews that were designed “to encourage the respondent to reveal his views regarding the political process with a minimum of direction and a maximum of spontaneity” (350).

From the interviews, Rosenberg identifies threats to interpersonal interaction as one of three predominant deterrents voiced by participants. These include: threats to harmony between families, friends, and communities; threats to business or occupational success; and finally, threat of ego-deflation (353). Some of his interviewees expressed that they didn’t like to talk about politics with their peers because they didn’t understand much about politics or didn’t think they were capable enough to take part in it. Or, by Rosenberg’s clinical evaluation:

…there are [those] who, facing the prospect of revealing factual ignorance
or committing gross logical errors, seek to avoid the feeling of defeat,
abashment, humiliation, or other discomfiture by staying far away from
such discussions. (353)

***

I’ll admit: I ended the previous post with little more than personal experience, and a general hunch, to go on when I claimed that the prospect of wrongness makes us underachieve instead of overachieve. What I’m now trying to do is establish at least one example of a common site of “error aversion”, and I think political apathy is a good one. But why should that be the case anyway? What makes political participation (by which I mean participation in a normal environment—not in, say, a radical protest) such a high-stakes endeavour?

Rosenberg writes at length about the potential hazards of discussing politics as perceived by his interviewees—these range from suffering embarrassment at a dinner party with the in-laws to losing the business of customers on the other side of the party line. Rosenberg makes no effort, however, to examine why politics is so charged to begin with. He seems to take for granted that politics is intrinsically contentious and prone to unhappy disagreement.

To be sure, our personal politics are indeed a sensitive matter. Please excuse, again, the arbitrary terminology—by this I mean our opinions on questions that point back to the core of our society, such as the issues of gay marriage, capital punishment, or stem cell research. These topics are sensitive because, in describing our own ideals of society and governance, we also expose our fundamental beliefs and ideologies. Paradoxically, however, these personal politics are the easier variety to talk about because they require little more than our own “moral compass” as guidance. Everyday conversation is proof that most people are adequately comfortable voicing their political views at this level, even if they are ambivalent or uncertain. So when Rosenberg’s interviewees admit that they don’t understand politics, I am inclined to interpret that they are talking instead about public politics, which has more to do with aligning one’s personal views with this politician or that party, or with this bill or that piece of legislation.

Having just established that “sensitivity” may not be the only concern holding us back from political conversation, we are tasked with finding alternative culprits. My hypothesis, in light of this research on wrongness, is that misinformation makes us very anxious. Indeed, economists Matthias Benz and Alois Stutzer propose that citizens rarely sort through “real” political information, but instead use a variety of shortcuts to lower their costs (time and effort). These shortcut political indicators include generalized party ideologies, past performance of a government, reputations of candidates, recommendations from interest groups, or information collected as a by-product of mass media consumption (32).

I believe that we are all aware of our own failings at heart. Having taken shortcuts to arrive at a shallow understanding of whom or what we’ve decided to support, to voice our allegiances is to tread extremely treacherous waters. We are less fearful of expressing our own opinions, of which we are at least master, than we are in letting our opinions be spoken for by people and parties we don’t fully know, lest we are unaware that they completely misrepresent us on another matter. Debates of politics at the public level, then, are prone to defensiveness and animosity, since we really can’t be sure that we’re sure about what we’re talking about.

To be continued… (What is the solution, and does it have anything to do with wrongness?)

Works Cited

Benz, Matthias, and Alois Stutzer. “Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics?: ‘Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland’.” Public Choice 119.1/2 (2004): 31-59. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Dean, Dwight G. “Alienation and Political Apathy.” Social Forces 38.3 (1960): 185-9. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Merrifield, John. “The Institutional and Political Factors that Influence Voter Turnout.” Public Choice 77.3 (1993): 657-667. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Rosenberg, Morris. “Some Determinants of Political Apathy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 18.4 (1954-5): 349-366. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.