Steven D. Brewer's blog

This evening, Lucy was invited to a reception with wine and appetizers. She invited me to go along, so we had lots of tasty treats and wine. The reception was for people with investments through the local credit union. Weird.

Earlier today, the Executive Advisory Council met to discuss UMass reorganization issues. It turns out that there is a group of trustees that is absolutely committed to the idea of having UMass participate in Division 1A football. There have been two task forces -- the last less than 5 years ago -- that have made it very clear how unrealistic this is for UMass. But that doesn't appear to matter. The quote of the day: "They are on a mission to have 1A football -- over our dead bodies."

This whole week before our beach vacation is really weird. On Monday, the boys flew down to North Carolina on their own. They're having fun with the grandparents and we're having this odd, detached experience in our quiet empty house. Very unreal.

But I'm staying in touch with the boys because we've set up a new Muppyville MOO. Charlie and one of his cousins have been logging in and working on elaborating the new MOO. Their goal is to create an environment for Daniel's 4th grade class to explore in the fall. We've already got his teacher on board, so I think it will be a great thing.

I've set up moos about 4 times now. The first time was when Charlie himself was in 4th grade. I thought it would be a good way for the kids to learn about electronic chat in a relatively safe environment -- without any on-line predators. As it turned out, one of the kids became an on-line predator -- at least, he tried to use the environment as a way to exert power over others -- and eventually, I had to "newt" him. (If you "toad" someone, it's permanent, but if you "newt" someone, they can "get better".) I told him that if he wanted to visit Muppyville again, he'd have to ask his parents to speak with me. It took him more than a year to work up the courage to have his parents contact me.

Eventually, that muppyville quit working -- it got corrupted or something. So I set up a new one and told the three kids who were interested that they could try being the wizard this time -- I made 3 of them wizards. The system lasted less than one day before they destructively tested it into unresponsiveness. We tried again and it lasted a couple of days. So, we reverted to the original model, with only me being wizard. That one lasted a while, but eventually the kids got bored with it and it went down and I didn't bother to bring it back up.

But now Daniel's going into 4th grade. And Charlie wants him to have the Muppyville experience. So he's going to be the wizard this time. I've providing the technical support, but I'm mostly letting him run the show.

Everytime, I gear up, I go out and look to see what's new. I was pleased to discover Atlantis -- a new MOO client. It's really nice -- I particularly like the alert system and Growl notification stuff. I found a minor problem with how it interacted with the MCP (local editing) stuff in MOO, so I contacted the author, who volunteered to log into the MOO and check to see if she could replicate the problem. She found it and fixed it in nothing flat. Awesome!

Everytime, I wonder a bit if the lambdamoo software is just too old -- the MUSH and MUX stuff is still being actively hacked on. But I like the fact that the MOO system is relatively simple and doesn't include the money and killing commands. I think it would be a lot harder to get the school to take it seriously if students were "killing" one another.

It's hot here and thunderstorms rolled through this afternoon. I don't think it ever did more than sprinkle right here, but the storms were all around us. Around 7:30, there were nearly constant flashes of lighting to the east. I sat out with Penny in the tent, had a cold drink, and watched the fireworks. Fireworks, of course, are really something different.

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states where fireworks -- all kinds -- are illegal. On the news, they showed a demonstration somewhere of how dangerous fireworks are. They blew up mannequins and set some on fire to illustrate what happens if the fireworks misfire. They also had a father who lost a son to a rocket that fell over and hit the little boy in the head. As a kid I always loved fireworks and I think its ludicrous to make them all illegal. My favorite, as a kid, were the ones my grandparents gave me in Illinois called "crickets". They would jump around popping and giving off smoke, littering the sidewalk with bits of newspapers covered with Chinese writing.

Daniel didn't like fireworks as a small kid. When we go to North Carolina, people shoot off all kinds of fireworks from the beach of the barrier island. Daniel was unhappy one time that someone shot one off without enough warning. Alisa told him it was mean of someone to do that, but afterwards Daniel would just "Fireworks mean!" And fireworks are mean.

I began by making the analogy to lightning seeming like fireworks, but in our society fireworks represent military bombardment. When I see fireworks now, I tend to think of the children in Israel and Gaza -- and Iraq -- who are killed when rockets scream in and explode in their living rooms. It has rather taken the fun out of fireworks for me.

Still, I'm reminded of the child who's mother wouldn't let him play a game where he was pretending a stick was a gun. "Don't you know that guns kill people?" she asked. "But, Mom," he said. "This is make believe. Don't you know the difference between real and make believe?" I think that as you get older, it gets harder and harder to tell.

Daniel's birthday isn't until the week after next, but tomorrow he and Charlie are going to travel to spend a week with grandparents before joining us at the beach in North Carolina for our annual family reunion. He had asked for a digital camera this year, so yesterday Lucy and I went to the store to pick one out for him, so he could have it to take with him for his big adventure. He was very happy and so we took a walk down to the field so he could try it out.

I picked out a Fuji camera that was at the low end. I've been happy with my Canon camera -- when they work. But of the three I've gotten in the past three years, all of them have required service. That's simply unacceptable. It was a close choice between this camera and a similar Nikon -- the Nikon camera probably was slightly better, but I wanted a camera that used SD media and used a standard USB cable. It really infuriates me to have the camera manufacturers all using different cables and I'm happy to punish them for not standardizing on one.

I made a point of enjoying my last day of vacation before going back to work tomorrow. We went out to see the new Nancy Drew movie. It was OK, but was a kind of younger and lamer "Legally Blonde" -- not really worth a trip to the theater, in my opinion. But I spent a fair amount of the day reading.

I found an excellent book the describes the challenges of university governance. There are four or five constituencies that university government needs to satisfy: the public, the government, business, and the faculty both from an academic and from a union standpoint. Each has a different take on what higher education is supposed to be and has competing interests on how it should be organized. The book has chapters written by different authors that each have a slightly different take on current trends and how higher education should best be organized: there are a lot of differences, but some common themes. I haven't quite finished the book yet, but so far I'm left with one question. Several of the authors cite the need for the organization to be more agile in order to react more quickly to opportunities or changing circumstances and use this as an argument for a less democratic approach to executive decision-making. But I haven't seen any evidence that less democratic systems actually are more agile or that increased "agility" produces any tangible results in the long term.

Taking a vacation is always good for bringing up one's enthusiasm. We said our goodbyes to the relatives yesterday and today has been a return to our usual Saturday schedule. Lucy and I took Penny to the farmer's market and then to the library. Afterwards, we went to the store to shop for a birthday present for Daniel and to post some birthday presents to Phil and Richard that were too large to carry back -- or uncomfortable to explain for air travel. One such gift was a flask and a hollowed-out book to conceal it in. It might have made for some difficult questions at the airport.

This afternoon, we've been invited to a garden party. I believe the attendees will primarily be Alisa's local political community. I suggested to Alisa that maybe sometime we could have a "weeds and sticks" party at our house.

It's a good thing my enthusiasm is up. It's going to be a busy week back at work before I leave for our annual trip to the beach. We got a new super high-res scanner that it will be fun to set up. But I need to focus most of my time on getting course resources ready for people.

Today, I attended the UMass Board of Trustees meeting and the following General Faculty meeting. There have been substantial positive developments, but it was also made clear how far we have to go. The most exciting moment was when Trustee Boyle broke the otherwise seamless edifice of the trustees to confirm the concerns that have been raised about the lack of open debate within the board. The most embarrassing moment was to see one of the trustees lack of grasp regarding the nature of higher education. I had heard rumors before, but it was interesting to see it on display.

The General Faculty meeting that followed was uneventful. The biggest issue was that a few people have been unhappy that the executive advisory committee that has been setting the agenda hasn't been willing to add motions that some people would like to see -- in particular with respect to particular personalities. I spoke briefly to remind people of the challenges in maintaining such a large coalition of faculty organizations and commended Max and Ernie for finding a common agenda that all the groups could support.

Yesterday, we visited the Peace Pagoda. I probably haven't been there for a couple of years. The trees are taller (it used to be possible to look out and see UMass), there are more benches by the pond, and the old foundations of the building that burned down have been converted to a rock garden, but the place is otherwise untouched by the span of years. The boys enjoyed looking for frogs and tadpoles -- there were several different kinds of tadpoles. Charlie spotted some newts in the pond as well. Jackie and I wore our malas and I brought my staff. The weather was beautiful.

In the morning, I attended a meeting to set the agenda for the continued general faculty meeting on Thursday. Last night, there was encouraging news that UMass will be considered by the Governor's task force on education. Tomorrow morning is the Board of Trustees meeting followed by our press conference and then the general faculty meeting. They had just announced their own commission, but we'll see whether they try to follow through with it tomorrow. We need to keep the pressure on. My contribution was a call for an ad hoc committee on university system governance that can begin doing the research we'll need to have in place to understand what a reorganization might result in and to monitor whatever commission -- or commissions -- are driving a reorganization.

Phil and Richard (and Jackie and Katy) arrived yesterday afternoon. We spent the afternoon chatting and then visited the Taste of Amherst. It was raining, which seemed to push attendance at the Taste way down, but was convenient for us, not having to wait in line. We plan to go back to the Taste for lunch today.

We have a series of adventures loosely planned over the next several days. Phil and Jackie want to visit the Peace Pagoda. Phil is going to try to meet up with a writer he met at Clarion who lives in Northampton. We'll probably have to stop at the Fiber Arts center at some point. It should be a fun visit.

I put in a full day's work today and now I'm on vacation. This morning, I met with a guy who's working with tiger beetles and scale insects. I always enjoy talking to Rodger. We took a brief field trip across the street so he could show me the scale insects he studies. In the picture, you're looking at a single pine needle from a White Pine. In the picture,you can see one adult scale insect and a couple of first instar nymphs. Rodger has been travelling all over the hemisphere collecting scale insects to do PCR on them and build a giant phylogenetic tree of scale insects. You might not understand why until you realize that pines are a commercially important species -- and that with global warming, the scale insects are increasing their range into higher elevations where they previously were excluded by cold weather.

Last night was the Marks Meadow picnic. I took the opportunity to talk with Daniel's teacher for next year to pitch the idea of doing Muppyville again. This time, Charlie wants to run Muppyville -- I (supposedly) will just provide the technology platform. I set up a jhcore with the lambdamoo server again and let Charlie try to give it a try. It's a pretty steep learning curve, but he's got all summer. Daniel's teacher was intrigued. I'm hoping we can persuade her to actually participate. It will be a lot more successfuly if she does.

Tomorrow, Phil and Pop arrive for a week. I'm planning to not go into the office for most of the week. On Thursday, there will be the trustee's meeting, so I'm planning to attend that -- and the following press conference where we'll provide a faculty response to what the trustees have done (or not done). But otherwise, I'm planning to spend the week with my family. A vacation. It's been a while...

I've been interested to see that Dell is finally selling computers with Ubuntu. We've been looking at new laptops to replace Alisa's computer. (She's currently using my old tibook, which I got in 2001). We went to the stores of both and did a point-by-point comparison of a Despiron and a Macbook. The Despiron is about $250 cheaper -- unless you select the same processor as the Macbook -- then they cost almost exactly the same. And its revolting how Dell puts messages and links everywhere on the Ubuntu pages leading away that say things like "Not sure Open Source is for You? Dell recommends Windows Vista!" As if it was easy to find the Ubuntu pages in the first place -- there aren't any links to them on the front page of the Dell site.

You might think its strange that with a "free" operating system, the computers actually cost more. Rather than adding to the cost of the computer, however, using a commercial operating system reduces the up-front-cost to the consumer by allowing companies to bundle all kinds of trial software, spyware, and nagware on the machines. If you really want a cheap linux laptop, you need to buy the laptop with Windows, wipe it, and then install linux yourself.

The UMass President claims that his goal was to have the University System engage in a dialog about how the University might be most effectively reorganized. It has come out, however, that he has had a bunch of ideas about how it might turn out. It's impossible to tell what would be the best way to organize things. Still, there are a variety of extant models and we need to look at them carefully to get some ideas about how we might reorganize UMass and what some of the consequences might be. Even in the absence of specifics, there are a couple of generalities worth considering.

First: organization, schmorganization... A great university is fundamentally about attracting and keeping great faculty. If you measure your success by having great research outcomes, like a Nobel prize or publications in important journals, then you need to attract and keep great faculty: they're the ones who do the research. They don't care much about the organization except to the extent it gets in their way. The Biology Department has had serious trouble keeping the star faculty we've been able to attract. If you want to keep great faculty, you need to make sure they don't feel stifled by the institution.

Second: its all about the resources, stupid. The UMass system got cut something like 30% during the period of "financial exigency". These resources have not been restored and the place reflects that in every way. If you want cutting-edge research, you have to pay for it. And when you're competing for great faculty, you're competing with places like Cornell and Brown. (The Biology Department lost faculty to those two places over the past couple of years). To keep great faculty, you need to provide the resources they need to be productive.

I've been disappointed to see the President's office creating a straw man by saying "its either reorganization or the status quo". Faculty are used to managing change and are rarely for the status quo. But if you want to bring the faculty along, you need to provide meaningful opportunities for genuine participation in the process. Unfortunately, by trying to push through a coup, the faculty are unlikely to merely participate in some process designed by the president's office. Hopefully, we'll see a truly independent process that provides a meaningful role for faculty and the other University consitituencies to consider what form of University governance will be most effective going forward.