CSU Super Sunday

This is the fifth year for California State University's Super Sunday. It's actually a few Sundays around "Big Game" season and Black History Month, in which the presidents and provosts of all the CSU campuses, including the one at which I teach, make a concerted, directed effort to visit African-American churches throughout the state.

Go to about the 12:15 point on this video from KQED's This Week in Northern California:



At first, I wasn't sure about the separation of church and state aspect, but I think the program's been well designed and vetted for that. The campus officials are basically going where they know the parents and kids will be on Sunday. This is a vast improvement over hoping our African-American potential students will just happen to drop by and apply.

Apparently, CSU Super Sunday is trending in the right direction. Many CSU programs don't last five years. Participants have an initial burst of enthusiasm and then fade away. This one seems to have legs. There's also a nascent outgrowth event, CSU Super Saturday, which was added at CSU Dominguez Hills last August.

• CSU Super Sunday on Facebook
• CSU official blog w/ photos (Public Affairs)

Sorry pursuits: On attention, multitasking, reading and writing

"I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place."
--Annie Dillard

I rarely read the fiction of Dillard or many of the literary/general fiction writers. But I know they're there, and appreciate that they prop up a significant part of the reading universe. (Otherwise, it would be turtles all the way down, right?) I like to discover what they have to impart about writing through their unique lenses. So I was curious about Dillard's 1989 book, The Writing Life. It was written before the Web, before cell phones and smart devices were ubiquitous, before the short burst multicasts of Facebook or Twitter or Google Buzz or...

The quote at the top of this post leapt off the page and wouldn't go away, so I tucked it away for eventual use in my campus e-mail's rotating sigline. It came to mind yesterday as I discussed worldly matters with my friend over at Sea Mist. We found we were in substantial agreement on many things, including the apparent foreshortening of the human attention span, and the change in what used to be called "common courtesy" in face-to-face encounters of all kinds. Attention span and courtesy have both seemed to suffer with the siren's call of distracting hip devices (hip in any sense of the word you like).

For now, I'd like to consider that aspect of attention that includes the ability to understand or make an extended argument-- for example, to be able to absorb ideas that take more than a screen's worth of real estate to express.

Is this a problem for you? If so, why? If not, why not?
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Some of Us Are More Equal than Others, or Hold the Dionne

Yes, it has been quiet around here. Not so quiet in real-- er, physical-- life. I think the capper was last week's passing of one of our community elders who was also one of my former students. An IT colleague's heart attack the same week was a close second. So I shifted to mostly reactive mode, commenting & composting elsewhere, as my online cohort (see sidebar) provided the regenerative fodder I needed. Thanx & a tip o' th' battered fedora to P6, Sea Mist, soulbrother v.2. Thanks even to JJP, where there is far too much mess going on in the comments, but I learned a couple things scrolling through.

If it's all right with you, at this point I'm going to catch up bit by bit, item by item, on matters of human (in)equality in current events, until the task completely overwhelms me.

No?

In that case let's just pick one. The fact that there are so many to choose from is telling.

One should always be wary of citing a columnist whose name sounds like a boutique brand of mustard, but E. J. Dionne's Washington Post column of October 12 cuts across several current issues and is worthwhile for that reason. Here's the disease in terms of the latest symptom, the Nobel Peace Prize award to President Obama:

His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have been looking for. [emphasis mine]

Yes, now the President is reviled for being much loved. I will go a step further and suggest that Obama is not just a cosmopolitan figure, but is truly cosmopolitan in the sense described by Kwame Anthony Appiah in Cosmopolitanism. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says in her review of Appiah's book, "Cosmopolitanism... provokes attacks from the left for whom it is dilettante and elitist. The right despises it because cosmopolitans make bad nationalists and patriots. All authoritarians detest the internationalist spirit."

That about wraps it up, as wrapped as it can be without bringing race directly into it. Had Dionne stayed with this theme... But no, he had to go there even as he denied the whiteness of "angry white men" (his quotes):

There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.

This is the current race-not-race meme as it has evolved across the media. No longer able to deny the racist displays, statements, jokes and diatribes that have been there since Obama announced his candidacy (thanks, YouTube) pundits seek to acknowledge and then immediately nullify them. "Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans..." perhaps, but they're conservative Republicans who tolerate, support, laugh with as opposed to laughing at, and definitely fail to decry the bigots in their midst. When called on it, our angry white non-racist conservatives will briefly denounce the occasional bad apple or isolated instance, no pattern and certainly no systemic issues here, folks, and then they move on, as if that settles the matter.

Let me throw Dionne a bone. I commend him for citing the example of Australia's One Nation party. That does allow us to pick up a hint, a soupçon of a pattern across former British colonies such as ours.

Though [Australian deputy PM] Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what's happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, a politician who caused a sensation in Australian politics in the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.

Hanson to Palin... there and back again. Hm. Go on, now.

[Editor's note: Hat tip to P6 whose earlier post on the reappearance of invisibility caused me to slow down and read and not merely skim the Dionne original. Also for the single-word linking trick.]

A brief visit to the other side

Yesterday morning I learned of the passing of one of the perennial students on my campus, Helen Jones. Helen was in her early 80s and had been taking undergraduate and graduate classes for years, dragging scores of younger students in her wake as she showed everyone what "lifelong learning" actually looked like in practice.

I have seen both joy and concern on her face, as various African American-- students, staff, and faculty-- chose to excel or not. She never let us have it with anger, always with love. She did a lot of behind-the-scenes counseling, trying to keep people on the path, but somehow everyone on campus always knew who was getting straightened out. In the past several years, we heard a little more about personal ailments and a little less about her next academic achievement or whether we were acting right, but that goes with the territory of aging. We'll all have our turn.

I last saw Helen about two weeks ago, sitting in our campus library regaling one of the reference librarians with some tale or other. She was big on regaling. I've asked around, and she was busy on campus as recently as last Thursday. Friday, she went into the hospital.

She developed a quilt project for her Master's degree that reflected her Southern upbringing and aspects of Black history that most of us don't choose to remember most of the time. I'll post a photo if I can find one.

One of my colleagues wrote the following yesterday, and I don't think she'll mind if I reproduce it here:

So many of us will remember this woman of vision, determination, and courage.
I will miss her stories, her wisdom, our travels and unexpected errand running.
Her untamed guidance and ways of modeling how to be an extraordinary Student
has rubbed off on all of us who studied.
She gave us a greater purpose of being,
and in so many ways defined a Strong, Independent, Black Woman.
We'll never forget you Mrs. Jones.