writinginthewild.com

Residents of Kankakee County, Illinois are ready for the new clean energy economy. Inspired by the calls for more green jobs during the 2008 presidential campaign, a local group of business, education, and government leaders is working to make green-collar jobs a reality in their region. They recognize the potential for green-collar jobs to transform the local economy while also benefitting the country and the environment. They also see investment in wind energy as the wave of Kankakee’s clean energy future.

Vision Energy’s $1 Billion Wind Bet in Illinois, April 21, 2009, Mac Lynch, Apollo News Service

I am really trying not to be Mr. Education-Politics Party-Pooper. These are horrible times for education, with cuts at all levels in every state. Much of that is due to the economic slowdown, although no doubt the right will not let this crisis pass without chipping away at educational autonomy in one way or the other. The real loss will access; tuition is like a tax without regulation.

We are on the verge of a real boom in education, once the economy recovers and the Obama administration gets past the health care debate. (I will avoid the obvious Dickens reference.) The highway robbery of the student loan system will probably end, releasing all sorts of money for education. The worst of the “No Child Behind” debacle is probably over, even if its effects remain.

There’s a close link between the Obama administrations’ economic stimulus package, the greening of energy, and the community colleges, too. It’s hard to complain about that, either. The community college system is probably one of the most accessible educational systems ever created. More of that is always good. But here’s where I start feeling that sharp pinch of liberal limitation.

It’s great that they are putting windmills up in Kankakee (about 2 hours north of here) and it makes sense that the community colleges would work together to try to provide the training. But it bugs me that they feel they have to do this in such a narrowly vocational way. Where’s the vision? The community colleges do much more than just train workers.

We need people who know how to work on windmills, but we also need windmill workers who have the critical and intellectual skills needed to accelerate the ongoing expansion and refinement of democracy here in the U.S. I don’t mean to disparage community college teachers. I bet they will add the critical thinking elements wherever they can. But it should be a part of the rhetoric, too.

I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.

Kevin Kelly, The Technium, Better than Owning

I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which the economic impasse is eating away at older property forms and creating the possibility for new forms. The textbook industry is a good example. Suddenly, materially privileged professors and administrators are ‘discovering’ that textbooks are expensive.

“We can fix it,” they say, as if they were not, in part, responsible for this inaccessibility. Still, whatever the origins, online textbooks are going to kill off the textbook industry– of course, something equally awful might arise in its place. In any case, this might be one of those silver linings in the dark recession clouds.

These musings and potentials are complicated and unpredictable. The CD may disappear but the LP seems to be back, complete with free digital download of the music so you can play it on your MP3 player as well as your turntable. Some of the musing, however, doesn’t make much sense.

I like the way Kevin Kelly mulls over the things he, personally, does not own but uses daily. These are our collective wealth: the highways, much of the internet, and so on. He’s less persuasive when he linke these forms of ownership and rent-to-own schemes or leasing. These are mostly confidence games.

The root problem, I think, lies in the lack of a critical economics in popular culture. Economics as commonly discussed, is business economics, that is, discussions of how to make capitalism work better. You have to venture fairly far out to the periphery to find anti-capitalist economics.

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals—global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability—by 2015, and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.

With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages’ specific needs and designed to achieve the the Millennium Development Goals.

About the Villages

Positive thinking can be a bad thing if it blinds you to criticism and ongoing problems. Pessimism, though, can be just as bad if it prevents you from seeing potential and the possibility of change. So when someone, person or organization, makes large claims it’s important to try to find some balance between skepticism and wishful thinking.

That’s why it can be so difficult to think though the idea that poverty could be eliminated in the same way that certain diseases have been eliminated over the last century. A century ago, of course, we did not know enough about the origins of diseases to really understand how we might prevent them. And, of course, we have only eliminated a few.

In fact, the very techniques we developed to fight diseases caused their own problems; bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. And new diseases have arisen, such as the AIDS pandemic, that may not be resolved, much less controlled, for decades or more. So when we say we can eliminate poverty we have to be cautious about what we mean.

Still, projects like the Millennium Villages illustrate that there is a lot of common sense yet to be applied to the problem of eliminating hunger and poverty. We save an enormous amount of energy– in every sense– if we buy food aide regionally rather than shipping it from the United States. African farmers are willing and able to grow their own crops.

Similarly, it makes sense to apply some sort of systemic thinking to poverty. That means considerations of sustainability and scale, as well as a focus on agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. This is not your father’s Care Package, dropped by parachute when famine strikes. I think there is every reason to be hopeful about this new model.

1. Striving for tenure at a university is like gambling in a casino; the house sets the rules and controls the odds. From a university’s point of view, the granting of tenure is an enormous commitment. If one assumes that a newly tenured professor will work at the university for 30 years with an average salary and benefits of $100,000, granting tenure is a $3 million commitment, a substantial obligation for any institution to assume. Therefore, to protect the institution, university tenure guidelines include phrases stating that the granting of tenure shall occur when it is in the best interest of the university. Tenure is based on the university’s needs, not the achievements of those seeking tenure, and the university sets the rules and controls the odds. Changing budgets and administrations vary the standards for those receiving tenure over time, making comparisons with earlier cases potentially dangerous to current tenure candidates.

What I Wish I’d Known About Tenure, March 27, 2009, Leslie M. Phinney

Irony is one of the most difficult concepts for students. It’s not that they don’t have a sense of irony, it’s that they use the term in a very broad, sweeping fashion, almost as if it were synonymous with anything unusual and funny or humorous. Irony, though, is more specific; it always involves a kind of reversal of meaning.

When I read this piece on tenure I kept thinking that I was reading an ironic description. This is the way things are, Phinney implies, but it’s the opposite of the way things should be. I am fairly certain I am wrong. There is no irony in this text, and certainly it does not see anything it describes as unusual or funny.

This is a ‘realpolitik‘ depiction that tries to present the ‘hard truths’ that, it assumes, few young academics are willing to face. It’s accurate and, in the end, a little silly in the way it asserts what it calls the ‘institutional’ needs, as if that were a distinct ‘interest group’ separate from students, faculty, and staff.

It all sounds clean-cut and simple, like a character from a 50s sit-com. The truth peeks out from behind the rationality when Phinney admits that “the majority of those beginning tenure-track positions will end up in the gray or middle zone, and the outcome will depend on local departmental and university conditions.”

What Phinney doesn’t say is that the ambiguity or ‘gray area’ isn’t resolved ethically, as a matter of right and wrong, but as a kind of aggressive psycho-pathology. Typically, she defines it as “integration into the department.” Ask anyone who’s been through it; it’s a much nastier thing.