The Less Than Helpful Student Evaluation

Every semester I receive my four manila envelopes containing student evaluations including the computerized numerical assessments by which instructors are compared to each other within departments, colleges and university wide. Unlike the Secret Agent Man of the 1960s, this is a process of takin’ away one’s name and givin’ you a number. In addition to the official university evaluations and the additional honors college evaluations, there are various online sites where anyone can come and leave comments about instructors. They range from the obscene (myprofessorsucks.com) to the perfunctory (rateyourprofessor.com).

I tend to stay away from these sites for a number of reasons. While my scores are in the good range on all of them, (much like my official evaluations on which I am among the highest rated instructors in the department and in the College of Arts and Humanities) the information is ultimately not terribly useful. One doesn’t necessarily have to be a student in the class they evaluate online nor do they have to actually complete the classes if actually enrolled. And, much like the official evaluations used by the university, these comments occur in a complete contextual vacuum. One has no idea of the student’s major in General Education courses. One has no idea whether the student took the class merely for convenience of schedule or other reasons unrelated to academic concerns. One has no idea what the students’ work schedule might be. One has no idea what expectations the student brought to the course ranging from grade expectations to workload.

Finally, one has no idea what kind of student the evaluators actually are. The fundamental attribution error is alive and well in the minds of most undergraduates: “I earned an A,” “S/he gave me a C,” “I made my A through hard work,” “They didn’t make a good grade because they are lazy.”

Jesse Jackson once observed that “A text without a context is a pretext.” And, of course, that is particularly true of the online evaluation sites. Those who come to the sites are inevitably self-selected and motivated generally by one of three concerns:

1. To take out anger at instructors who did not meet the expectations the reviewer brought to the course, no matter how reasonable, discernable by the instructor or possible to achieve;

2. To serve as loyalists defending instructors targeted by the first group; and

3. To create a consumerist rating for an instructor designed for other student who see themselves in consumer terms and who choose classes based on such ratings without regard for reliability.

It’s precisely the consumerist premise that is problematic here. Education is not a good or service consumed by those with enough money to purchase them, as the example of our soon to be ex-president readily demonstrates. Higher education is an opportunity and a means for human beings to become educated. Paying one’s fees, which actually covers a relatively small portion of the total cost of the production of higher education, does not guarantee a grade, an understanding of the material such courses cover or even a perfunctory grasp of the data presented. Payment of fees does not make one an educated human being or even a minimally trained potential employee. To put it into strictly consumerist terms, it’s a bit like buying a computer and expecting it to run itself. If one wants email, one must get an account, become familiar with its operation, check the mail and follow the rules of the ISP as well as the rules of netiquette in its use. Similarly, one must engage the educational process if one wants to benefit from it.

The comments I get from my students are predictable and consistent. Two consecutive entries from students in my completely online Humanistic Traditions II summer courses registering their comments at MyProfessorSucks.com well illustrate that pattern:

• 
  Yes, he requires a lot of work and effort by the student, but I thought it was well worth it. He is exceptionally learned and often has insightful things to say about humanities and current events. Not an easy A, but you can actually learn. Alot (sic) of critical thinking and self reflection, if that make you uneasy then this class is not for you.

I admit to being a demanding teacher. I operate under the premise that the average college class requires two hours outside the classroom (or class activity for online courses) for any hope of successful mastery of the course. I calculate the amount of time required for reading using a low ball average reading speed multiplied by the number of total pages assigned. I calculate the high ball time students tell me they spend on assignments and exams. I account for group presentation preparation and evaluation time. I total all that time and subtract it from the total number of class hours per semester times two. The result? None of my classes come close to requiring the average time necessary for successful mastery of the average college course.

I also admit to being challenging if not provocative. I readily confess my belief and consistent observation that cognitive dissonance is a helpful element in creating the learnable moment. That’s not comfortable for some students as the next comment will observe. But if one leaves college thinking the same things they thought when they entered, it really has been a waste of everyone’s time, money and energy.

The only aspects missing here from the historical pattern of my evaluations is the comment I often get about the instructor’s concern for the student and his/her learning. I am fairly religious about office hours and trying to work with students when problems arise. I spend hours listening to students talk about class concerns, career plans, personal life melt downs, even spiritual life existential crises both in person and online. Sometimes that is not enough but most of my students agree that I make an effort to put a human face on what can otherwise be a highly impersonal, factory model process.

So that’s the good news. Here’s the bad:

• 
  A ridiculous amount of work with very vague explanations if any explanations at all. Too much work for a Gordon Rule class but if you devote your life to the class like I did and pretend to be a flaming liberal, you should get an A

Too much work? Perhaps. Of course, that presumes a comparative standard that is not here articulated. How much is enough? Enough for whom? Enough for what? How much work should an intensive writing Gordon Rule course demand? And, perhaps more importantly, who should decide that based upon what criteria and experience? Much like the rejoinder “That’s just your opinion” I get from students whose understandings have been challenged, pedagogical decisions are neither matters of opinion nor merely (just) anything.

My pedagogy is decidedly different in many ways from when I began teaching college students 17 years ago. In some cases, I have learned new approaches to teaching that I employ while retaining many tried and true methods. In other cases, like content quizzes to insure the material is actually read, my students have taught me well through their attitudes about learning and their behaviors. I use a wide variety of educational approaches ranging from lecture/discussion to film reviews to observation/analysis. I am conscious of learning styles and seek to accomodate them. But, ultimately, my decisions about coursework are based upon my education, experience and a consistency with an articulable educational philosophy. Student opinions about pedagogy are based largely in comparison between classes and an often unconscious confusion of appropriate work load with the amount of work students want to do. So even if it were a mere clash of opinions, student opinions on pedagogy would generally not be much of a match.

I don’t mind being described as a demanding instructor. Indeed, I see sites like MyProfessorSucks.com as doing me a major favor if it prevents those who don’t want to work hard from enrolling. And I’m not particularly willing to allow students with no instructional experience, limited education and a tendency to confuse the amount of work they want to complete with the amount needed to effectively learn a given course’s material to be the final judge on appropriate workload. Lawyers who allow their clients to tell them how to practice are often headed for disbarment. Doctors who allow their patients to tell them how to conduct their surgery are headed for malpractice court. While both can benefit from the feedback of those who employ them, ultimately the professional decisions remain the province of the professional. Professional educators are no different.

As for this poor soul’s sense that s/he needed to pretend to be a flaming liberal to survive the course, she has my sympathy. Sadly, intellectual cowardice is the mark of many students who come with rigid, often authoritarian perspectives, particularly about politics and religion. Accusations of political bias generally mean that one has challenged the thinking the student brought with him or her to the course and thus drawn into question the authority figures from whom they inherited those ideas generally with little critical reflection. Where this becomes obvious is in observing that those who agree with an instructor’s perspective never complain about it. Interestingly, another student at this site noted that while s/he did not agree with some of my positions articulated in responses to discussion posts, it did not affect his/her grade and that students should not be afraid to state their opinion in this class. Let’s hear it for intellectual confidence!

Besides work load and bias, the other complaint that I get on my observations is about group work. Requiring students to work together for a common cause really does fly in the face of a hyperindividualist culture and a consumerist, vocational skills approach to higher education. The reality is that most students who complain about this simply don’t want to do the work required to be a responsible member of a group, both in preparation of materials for presentation and in working with classmates. And yet, as I often ask my students, in which job will you never have to work with other human beings?

Perhaps the worst element of this entire “evaluation” process is that it is a squandered opportunity for providing instructors with valuable feedback. In all honesty, I do care what my students think, not only about the course materials but also about the pedagogy. Asking questions to establish context about a student’s expectations, relevant life circumstances (such as working) and educational experience can go a long way toward creating a matrix for valuable feedback. A self-conscious eschewal of the consumerist “how did you like it?” premise with its nearly inescapable concomitant confusion of engaged education with passive entertainment would be vital for useful feedback. While I don’t expect that critically considered evaluations will become a regular part of academia anytime soon, we can always hope. And in the meantime, please pardon me and many, many other instructors if we don’t take the current consumerist “evaluations” seriously. I never totally ignore them, but as my students often preface nasty remarks, I am more than willing to give them “all due respect.”

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Celebration at the Education Factory

From today’s paper comes the story of a 32 year old woman who “decided to pursue her dream of becoming a marriage and family counselor by earning a bachelor's degree in psychology. She did it entirely online, because her home is too far to commute to [campus]. Monday's graduation ceremony was only her second visit to campus. For the past four years, she has held down a full-time job, doing most of her studying nights and weekends.”

I find it troubling that a marriage and family counselor would be able to earn a degree certifying her competency to help human beings deal with some of their most difficult and intimate life issues through a program which did not require her to ever have to engage another human being directly. I would guess that the department helped the student arrange for some kind of practical applications of the information she was able to access online in the form of internships or observations where she lived. And I would guess that truncated “discussions” online were used to replace classroom discussions with real live human beings whose body language and vocal inflections are needed to fully communicate words that otherwise appear as mere letters on a screen in the online format.

But who are these people whose words simply appear on our screens? Who are the instructors? What do they look like? What background do they bring to this process? What makes them laugh? What causes them concern? How much can anyone ever know about another human being in the first place and how much less once one is relieved of the obligation of ever actually physically encountering them? And how can such a limited engagement of other human beings provide an adequate means of counseling them?

What is telling in this description is the priority that education held in this woman’s life. She said she couldn’t attend classes on campus because it was “too far.” While a regular two hour commute to the university through city traffic would probably not have been feasible, there is a fine state university a mere 45 minutes by interstate north of the city where the student lives with an excellent psychology program and ample parking garages. No doubt, it provides part of its curriculum online as well. But the proximity of the campus would allow for class attendance as well. Clearly, distance was not the issue.

Perhaps more telling is the revelation about school and work. This is a woman who worked full-time and took full-time course loads. If we assume that online courses replicate classroom experience and that for every hour of class one should spend an average of two hours outside class to prepare, that would mean that this woman was spending 36 hours per week in class-related work in addition to a 40 hour work week. Clearly, that can be done, particularly for the short haul, but the idea that this pattern could become the norm raises no small amount of concerns for higher education.

First, the approach to online courses is, by the self-description of at least one university’s course development staff, a “delivery of services.” It sees the educational process in consumerist terms – the provision of goods and services to consumers willing to buy them. Lost in that understanding is any notion that human beings are involved, that educational institutions represent an opportunity to develop oneself into an educated – and thus more fully human - being and that this is the ultimate end for a university education. College degrees in consumerist terms are reduced to working papers (a truncated vision of life which reduces the “real world” to business) and the means of a rather shallow self-affirmation for the nervous middle class with its fear of falling.

Also lost is the notion that education is a process that requires engagement. Online courses, in my experience of four years now as instructor, easily lend themselves to reductionism and minimization. While online courses were originally designed to be “distance learning,” an evolution out of independent studies conducted by correspondence for students with special circumstances in years gone by, they have long since come to be used for much more immediate and much less noble concerns.

For universities which admit more students than they can house in classrooms, it’s a means of dealing with managerial imperatives. By cutting the cost of cooling, lighting and cleaning classrooms and through the inexorable trend toward farming out online classes to adjuncts who don’t have to be paid benefits as a condition of their employment, colleges are able to reduce their costs and continue to enroll more students than they have infrastructure to handle, at least until the online web services crash because they have been stretched beyond their capacities.

What results is a slippery slope for student engagement. Many of my online section students have admitted that they enroll in online classes because these sections do not require them to actually have to show up in person in class. No need for preparation of materials, no need to have anything intelligent to say, no worries that one might be too hung over to leave one’s frat house or dorm room.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that this logic is quickly extended to content. If there are no demands to attend class and participate, there must be no real demands in terms of what the course will require. Besides, it’s online, the computer does much of the work for you - which is precisely why many students end up crashing and burning in online classes, the exception of our heroine of the day duly noted.

Online classes also have a major impact on instructors. They represent the perfect storm of management, whose primary concern is to spend as little money as is necessary, and computer programmers and technicians whose primary concern is the quickest way to get things done, regardless of their impact on human users (who almost inevitably get blamed for technological failures). The results are programs which are rarely self-evident (read: “user friendly”) to non-computer technician users.

This requires increasing amounts of instructor time in dealing with technical problems, time stolen from development of content or grading and communicating with students. Instructors become the bureaucratic middle man between the nameless and faceless “they” who create and maintain course technology and the consumer students who complain when the programs dump them off in the middle of quizzes, don’t allow them to upload their various word processing programs or prevent images from showing up in their presentations.

Of course, all this works in the favor of minimization, or “dumbing down” as a friend at another local college describes it. At my own training for online teaching, held in a two week summer course which required instructors attend in person (obviously NOT modeling the very behaviors online courses foster), the mantra of the week was the 12 Steps favorite KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid! Of course, in almost every invocation of that mantra in our culture today, the word “I’m” should probably be inserted between Simple and Stupid. But, at a very basic level, keeping it simple in online classes is increasingly not just an option.

If one is expected to handle the ongoing deluge of problems with technology, particularly when trying to incorporate art or music files into class materials (and what humanities class wouldn’t?), and answer the flood of student emails complaining of the same, the less one has to keep track of and maintain, the better. Indeed, after four years of teaching online, I have concluded that truncating course materials – and thus course requirements - to the point of being simplistic may be the only real means of surviving online instruction, particularly if one has a full-time teaching load.

Where does this trajectory point? I see an increasing use of online courses which demand less and less from students in a collegiate factory assembly line which will provide them with a certificate at the end of that process (providing they’ve paid all their fees and fines) that says they are now sufficiently trained to go get a job in the “real world.” Less engagement with other human beings. Less demands on students to think, write, discuss. More instructional time spent playing technical tinker toys and serving as a 24 hour on-call help desk than in pedagogical preparation. All of the credit, none of the demands. College lite.

Today, we raise our glasses to higher education’s version of the first test-tube baby, a college diploma achieved entirely in the artificial gravity of cyberspace. We toast the triumph of consumerism and the minimization of higher education and the trivialization of our humanity that it fosters. We celebrate the triumph of managerial and technocratic imperatives over the needs of a democratic society for an educated citizenry.

Finally we note with no small amount of irony that the student of the hour who found the distance too far to drive to campus to actually attend classes did find a way to get there yesterday to participate in commencement, receive her diploma in person from another human being and claim her 15 minutes of fame in her interview with the newspaper reporter. Apparently the download function for attachments to her email wasn't working.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Happy Holidays! No, really!

Today’s Orlando Sentinel –cum-National Inquirer features yet another earth shattering unscientific “poll” about current events. Just below the question asking whether UF Quarterback Tim Tebow “got robbed” when he did not win the Heisman Trophy (good to see my answer of “Who cares?” got 10% of the vote) one finds this burning question: “Are you offended when someone wishes you the generic “happy holidays”? (Is it any wonder the Sentinel’s parent Tribune Company is in Chapter 11 proceedings?)

While I had promised myself I would withdraw from active interaction with the world for Advent season, I broke my promise and posted this response:

Who is anyone to be offended? Upon what basis? Happy holidays is not only polite and thoughtful, it's also accurate. Holidays, plural, is what is being celebrated. It's an ancient holiday season dating back to the Stone Age observance of the winter solstice and the return of light to the world.

The placement of the Christmas season in that context was not accidental though clearly Christmas is a latecomer to the seasonal observances. The chances Jesus was actually born on Dec. 25 are precisely 1/365 given that we have no idea what day his birth occurred. The recently converted Roman Empire set the date on Dec. 25 to Christianize a pre-existing Saturnalia observance in the 5th CE. But it makes symbolic sense in that the solstice celebrates the return of light to a darkened world. Jesus is not *the* reason for the season itself, to quote the hackneyed claim, he's simply one of the reasons albeit a major reason in western culture.

To those presume a right to be offended, perhaps you could hold onto your righteous indignation until after the holidays are over? The holiday season is a particularly insensitive time to wage the culture wars. How about a little peace on earth, goodwill to humanity this year?

Of course, this was the restrained version of my response to the question. I feel about this non-issue much the way I feel about the prospect of fundamentalist physicians seeking governmental exemptions from treating patients their moral code suggests are impure. So long as such persons work in private practice where they may pick and choose their patients, while I may disagree with their brittle worldviews based in their personal prejudices and their resulting questionable professionalism, I would argue that they have the right to make such choices. But when any professional health care provider leaves the private sphere to work in public hospitals or clinics, they no longer have that right. Public health facilities treat the public, all of it. And in a diverse, multi-cultural (and thus multiple moral code) society, there is no room for privately held religiously legitimated prejudices becoming obstacles to needed health care.

Of course it’s perfectly appropriate to wish your parishioners a “Merry Christmas!” at the conclusion of midnight mass. That’s what they’re there to celebrate. And when I know a person is Christian, it is my practice to wish them a Merry Christmas, even prematurely during Advent. But Orlando has mercifully become a diverse urban center with many religious traditions represented. While Christianity in its various forms (the largest single expression being Roman Catholic) remains the dominant religious tradition here as in the rest of the country, it is not the only holiday celebrated at this time of year. Our country has made Christmas a national holiday so everyone gets the time off work whether they are Christian or not.

We all celebrate this holiday season – perhaps with the exceptions of our resident Ebenezer Scrooges - even if we are not adherents of any particular religion. This is the time for gratitude for another year’s passing, for the many blessings of our lives, not the least of which are our families of birth (recognizing that for some people, family histories may not be the stuff of celebrations) and our families of choice. It is NOT the time for righteous indignation or culture wars arising out of insecurities about one’s religious understandings. I am secure enough in my own Christian identity to wish others a happy holiday season even if they will not be celebrating my tradition’s observance of it. And I pray that the 40% who say they are offended by Happy Holidays greetings can learn to live with a bit more ease in this increasingly diverse culture in which they find themselves.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More Things That Make You Go Hmmm..…
Advent 2008

OK, so I am reveling in having all my finals actually given with only three (!) sets of papers yet to grade. And I actually had time for my walk around Lake Underhill with the wading birds and the ducks this morning. I even had time for my morning meditation and reflection for the first time in a week.

For my Advent discipline, I am actually reading the Morning Prayer Daily Office as my Franciscan Rule provides. I should hasten to note that this is NOT because I consent to seeing the office as a form of obedience even for one second. Forcing people to pray – regardless of the format – as a condition of membership in a religious order is tyrannical and unsupportable, particularly in an order devoted to someone as spontaneous and free spirited as Francis of Assisi. People either are called to pray this way or they aren’t. That they pray might be a legitimate Order concern. How it happens is ultimately not the Order’s business.

Nevertheless, because Advent has a bit of a penitential sense about it, I chose to do the daily office. Though I obediently and somewhat mindlessly did the Office for years when I first became a Franciscan, I am finding many things in the readings for Morning Prayer that I had not noticed before. I find myself being troubled by the solipsism of the Psalms with their continual self-focused themes of rescue. And then there's all the smiting of the others. It’s tribal religion at its best, however good that might. It speaks of a god I no longer recognize.

But it also provides occasional moments of joy and inspiration. From today’s Morning Prayer:

Psalm 31

1 In you, O Lord, I seek refuge; do not let me ever be put to shame; in your righteousness deliver me.
2 Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily. Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me.
3 You are indeed my rock and my fortress; for your name’s sake lead me and guide me,
4 take me out of the net that is hidden for me, for you are my refuge.
5 Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God....
9 Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also.
10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away....
14 But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.”

Today’s Psalm speaks of G-d as the rock. Clearly the writer of this verse saw himself as endangered and pleads for divine deliverance. Perhaps all human beings have had times in their lives where such an understanding made sense. As a spiritual, religiously educated man, I can relate to the notion of the divine being one’s rock, one’s foundation, one’s most basic reality. As a man who lost his home to a hurricane, his beloved mother, his cousin and two uncles within a four year stretch, I can relate to G-d as a refuge, a trusted dimension of life to whose hands I can commit my spirit.

But most importantly, amidst a sea of pious people who focus on believing - buying into a set of ideas and conventional morals confused with divine imperative - rather than belonging to community or even a more existential focus on being, the psalmist has hit a nerve. “I trust you.” Not I believe. Not even I belong. Rather, I trust – I place my existential being in your hands. That kind of assertion speaks of a G-d worth worshipping.

And then from today’s Hebrew Scripture, Isaiah 7:10-25, this interesting statement:

Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (God with us). He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose kinds you are in dread shall be deserted.

In this time of guilt driven consumerist orgy in which one is subjected to six weeks of non-stop Christmas "music" during Advent before Christmas season even arrives, snippets of Handel’s Messiah will mercifully be heard more than once if one is lucky. Given that much of The Messiah is based in the presumption that the prophetic writings of the various Isaiahs (at least three that scholars can identify) somehow pointed toward the birth of Jesus, it’s interesting to see the reference above.

Immanuel means God with us. In Isaiah's understanding, the divine presence would be experienced in a human being who sprang from the house of David’s lineage to redeem the people, i.e., restore Israel. According to this passage, his mother would be a young woman, parthenos in the Greek text, which rarely refers to a virgin. Indeed, young women bearing children would have been totally expectable to Isaiah’s post-exilic readers. Virgins bearing divinely conceived children would have been incomprehensible. But to a 1st CE resident of the Roman Empire, gods begetting children with virgin human women were fairly common. And by the time of Handel, the words of Isaiah, the appropriation of Isaiah by the imperial resident Gospel writers and the understanding of Jesus constructed as the Christ (the Messiah) and the figure of Immanuel in Isaiah had become conflated, if not self-evident.

What is most interesting in the text, however, is the reference to a child who “knows how to refuse evil and choose the good.” Clearly Isaiah had never read Augustine, the 5th CE African patriarch of the Christian west whose construct of original sin would come to dominate western thought complete with its dysfunctional teachings about the body and sex. And if John Calvin, whose religious heritage has played a commanding role in constructing the American cultural self-understanding, had written this story, the child would be seen as born in original sin and thus unable to “refuse the evil and choose the good.” Depraved human beings are inclined toward evil and even when they choose the good, that choice is tainted with sin, per Calvin.

It never ceases to amaze me that people ever bought into the teachings of Augustine and Calvin and that they have been willing to jump through increasing numbers of hoops ever since to justify original sin/depravity constructs. Mary will have to become immaculately conceived, free will will need to be justified despite depravity, predestination will have to be sold to the damned by the self-appointed elect. What nonsense. What pessimistic ways of seeing humanity and the divine. And what a waste of energy defending deterministic constructions of human nature, much of it in a poorly disguised bid to control human behaviors.

Why not take Isaiah at his word instead? God is with us, all around us, all the time. If we are paying attention we can even recognize that divine presence in the world around us. Young women do bear children. Indeed, it is for a child we Christians wait and watch this Advent season. New born babies do bring hope, hope of new life, of the return of light to a darkened world. God is with us.

Children are not born sinful or depraved. They are born children. And they grow and mature into adults capable of recognizing evil and refusing thereby choosing good. God is with us in our growing and maturing. God is with us in our agonizing moral choices. God is with us in the presence of those who bore us and all who played a role in bringing us into fully human existence. God is with us in our daily lives. In our loving of our families, our toiling at our jobs, our celebrations of life passages, even in the harming of our relationships to ourselves, our bodies, others and the created world which is God’s very body, harm we Christians have called sin. And God is with us in our recognition of that harm, our remorse, our rethinking of our lives and our efforts to reconcile with those we harm.

Why must we retroject a construction called the Christ back onto a human Jesus and back even further to a child of exilic era Judea in order to see God with us? Why must we construct systems of control driven by notions like original sin as a condition of recognizing God’s presence with us? Why make Mary into the love object of a Greco-Roman divinity in order to tell the story of Jesus, the child we await this Advent season?

Perhaps my resumption of the Daily Office wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Hmmmm.



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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm….Advent 2008

As a part of my Advent devotionals this day, the following reading prompted reflection:

From Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions, How to Find Your Own Answers To Life’s Essential Mysteries (NY: Rodale Publishers, 2007), the following consideration:

A Tibetan lama once told me that the main problem with worldly people is that they are constantly seeking happiness and fulfillment outside themselves, where it cannot be found. Epicurus thought that a beautiful righteous and wise life was both the cause and the product of happiness. Plato famously said that the happiest man was the one who had no malice in his soul. Buddha himself further outlined what he called the five kinds of happiness:

• The happiness of the sense of pleasure
• The happiness from giving and sharing, including both external virtuous acts and mental states and attitudes
• The happiness, inner peace and bliss arising from intensely concentrated states of meditative consciousness concomitant with purity of mind
• The happiness and fulfillment coming from insightful wisdom and profound understanding.
  Nirvanic happiness, everlasting bliss and contentment, serenity, beatitude, and oneness
  

What I find interesting in this list of five kinds of happiness is how reductionist our American consumer culture’s approach to happiness is. We focus heavily on the first – seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. We tell ourselves that our possessions make us happy and we are willing to work ourselves into poor states of health to have the money to buy those possessions. We overeat, overmedicate ourselves and overextend our budgets seeking happiness. And only once a year do we even seriously consider a second source of happiness – giving and sharing, but rarely due to internal mental states that are happy. We give because our consumer advertising industry conditionalizes our sense of ourselves and prompts us to give out of fear of loss of face and guilt when we fail to live into conventional imperatives. Where the Buddha is pointing toward five kinds of happiness, we settle for one, two at most.

Ironically, it’s precisely the focus on the surface – the superficiality of consumerism – and the constant state of distraction that our consumer goods provide us that prevents us from meditating, intentionally engaging reflection out of which insightful wisdom arises. And it’s our attachment to the perception of happiness that our consumer goods can provide us that prevent true Nirvanic happiness and a sense of interconnected oneness that Buddha taught was the ultimate good of the Noble Path.

I often ask my students, “If our lives of privilege really make us happy, why do we spend so much time, money and effort distracting ourselves from them? Why do we numb ourselves to our supposedly happy lives? “ Lama Surya Das provides an insight on this: “[H]appiness is part of our natural state, obscured only by attachments that veil our radiant, innate nature and limit our potential. The Hevajra Tantra teaches, ‘We are all Buddhas by nature; it is only adventitious observations which veil that fact.’ What we seek, we are. It is all within. This is the Buddha’s secret.”

Hmmmm.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Luddites

I have a friend who likes to call me a Luddite from time to time. That’s usually prompted by my latest round of criticism of the less-than-dependable web course technology that increasingly all college instructors are required to use or of the increasingly solipsistic – even anti-social - use of technology by individuals in public places. It’s not a description that particularly fits someone who uses as much technology as I do in any given day – albeit not without complaining –but it does draw into focus a difference in understanding of technology among human users.

That difference is readily identified in the questions one asks about technology. Most people, who sense a perceived need for the latest greatest technological innovations our consumerist society convinces us we cannot live without, simply ask the question “What is this? What will it do? How much does it cost?” Clearly, there is no small amount of gratification in mastering a new technology. It provides a sense of mastery if not superiority that allows one to look down on the rest of the population whose skills or access to technologies don’t measure up in comparison. Just ask any undergraduate computer science major. And undoubtedly some technologies have the capacity to make our lives easier if not more pleasant. Think answering services that relieve us of the task of talking with the many telemarketers who feel no compunction about invading the privacy of our homes each night. Think Google which provides much of the world’s information – though rarely any understanding of it – at our fingertips.

But technology has a dark side, perhaps unavoidably so given its human creators and users. To fail to recognize that reality is to approach technology uncritically and, I think, superficially. I believe that a realistic approach to any technology, new or old, must include these inquiries: “How does this tool impact human users? Does it serve us or does it reverse that means/end relationship? At what point do human beings become the tools of our tools?”

Neil Postman writes in his work Technopoly, the Surrender of Culture to Technology, that societies that become idolatrously dominated by the work of their own hands often reverse the means/end relationship of human beings to their tools. He notes that in our own society, which he calls a technopoly, technology is seen as inherently good, innovations are seen as absolutely necessary and the inevitable use of such innovations in technology is presumed. To paraphrase The Field of Dreams, if you create it, they must use it. Think end of WWII, Japan trying to negotiate the terms of its surrender and the choice of two non-military civilian sites for the detonation of the new American nuclear innovation.

As a part of my daily meditation and prayer, I am reading daily selections from The Intellectual Devotional, Modern Culture. [i] Today’s reading was about the Luddites. According to the authors, Luddism, which has come to be associated generally - and rather uncritically – with a hatred of technology, takes its name from an 18th CE English textile workers’ movement who accurately saw the new technology as a threat to their livelihoods. While it is not clear whether the Ned Ludd, whose name came to be associated with the movement ever actually existed, what is clear is that when the Luddite Revolts erupted in 1811, it took 2500 troops to put down the revolt. And shortly thereafter, machine breaking became a capital crime in England.

What’s striking in this account is the reality that mechanization did mean the end of many worker’s livelihoods, something that was hardly lost on them. While the machinery clearly served as an end to the profit making of factory owners, that profit ultimately came at the cost of the livelihoods of many workers. That kind of loss of income for minimally educated and narrowly trained workers meant in real terms the loss of their source of housing, feeding and clothing their families, i.e, Maslow’s bottom level on the hierarchy of human needs. The technology of the 19th CE - much like the technological innovation of today - was clearly good for someone. But cui bono? Good for whom? And at whose expense?

It’s telling that the response to the Luddite revolt was the passage of laws making it a capital crime to break machines. Clearly, to those in power, the machines were more valuable than human lives. Killing a human being for damaging or destroying a means of profit suggests a rather perverse moral calculus in which human life is secondary to things. And it would not be long after this nascent rising of organized labor that the force of the law would be brought against labor unions with the formation of police forces in most industrialized cities whose primary job was to prevent labor organizing and disrupting strikes.

When technological innovation and implementation is recognized as creating a power and thus a privilege differential between those who benefit from such implementations and those at whose expense those benefits derive, it is not hard to see why the heathen rage, or, in the present case, why the Luddites responded with vandalism. And it should not be hard to recognize why college instructors like myself criticize the increasing amount of time required to learn the unending parade of “new and improved” technologies designed to serve managerial imperatives (unpacks classrooms, guarantees students can be processed through the university factory in four years, allows students to avoid classroom time so they can work full time jobs to pay increasing tuition and costs).

For myself, I see the onslaught of technologies and the perceived imperatives to have the newest toys as inevitable in a consumerist society where we define ourselves and our value by what we use. I am resigned to the reality that increasingly my time will be spent on tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with education. My response to that reality is to use only those technologies that bear a clearly beneficial relationship to my teaching, to resist the use of technologies where they are not absolutely necessary and to minimize the time spent dealing with them where it is not avoidable. That does not make me a Luddite, at least not in the teasing sense my friend uses it to describe me. It makes me a human being intent upon using human created tools to serve human ends and resistant to becoming a means to non-human ends such as profit or bureaucratic imperatives.

That includes being the scapegoat for technological failures. The Devotional article noted that while it is unclear whether Ned Ludd ever actually existed, the phrase “Ludd must have been here” became a common refrain in English factories whenever a machine was found damaged or malfunctioning. The webcourse technologies I must use daily are undependable, failing during peak usage periods, limited in their applications for teaching of humanities and evidencing frequent “bugs” or restrictions in usage known to their creators alone. The common explanation for such problems is “user error.” It should not be surprising that the same people who were oblivious to and unconcerned for the effects of technology on human users in the first place would prove unwilling to take responsibility for the deleterious effects their technology has on others once implemented.

The Devotional entry ends with the note that while the original Luddite Revolt has faded away, the term Luddite has entered the political lexicon as a way of describing opponents of the relentless onslaught of technology. So let me end this on a political note: To the degree that technologies are imposed upon the public without consultation or consent, requiring their ongoing adaptation to ever changing systems of technology just to carry out their daily life skills, I am a Luddite. To the degree that the presumption of technopoly prevails that every new technology must be used without consideration of its potential effects on human beings, count me in the Luddite camp. To the degree that human beings become the means to the ends of technology, pawns in the struggle for power and privilege, I am a Luddite.

I am not anti-technology. I simply insist that human inventions actually serve – and not enslave - human beings. Much like Immanuel Kant, I insist that human beings always be ends in themselves and never means to non-human ends. That doesn't seem too much to ask.




[i] David Kidder, Noah Oppenheim, The Intellectual Devotional, Modern Culture (NY: Rodale Publishers, 2008)

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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