Purchasing power parity: a parable of two opticians

When I was working in Sri Lanka last summer, the piece holding my glasses frame to my ear broke. Fortunately, opticians are in plentiful supply. There was a small shop in the somewhat downscale district of Borella, within easy walking distance of my residence. There were no other clients when I arrived. I was greeted by the owner and his assistant, both neatly clad in white shirts and ties, This being Sri Lanka, we chatted for a few minutes before getting down to business. The owner said it would be difficult to purchase a replacement but he thought they could weld the broken piece back together. We exchanged business cards and I agreed to stop back the next afternoon, which I did. The repair was successful. The cost was 800 Sri Lankan Rupees, about $8.00. I have no had further problems, except that….

Last week, the piece on the other side broke. Fortunately, there is a shop, Voorthuis optical in the upscale shopping center near American University. I have traded there for a number of years, purchasing more than $1,000 worth of services during that period. There was another customer being served as I waited behind the counter. The young woman serving her did not acknowledge my presence. Four other staff members avoided eye contact, pretending not to notice me. Presumably they were preoccupied with more important matters. After a wait of five minutes or so the transaction with the other customer was completed and the young woman deigned to notice me. I explained the problem and how I had be dealt with it in Sri Lanka. She seemed incredulous and said sharply, “we don’t do welding! I’ll see if I can order a replacement.” The next afternoon, I received a voicemail message that the part had come in and the repairs were complete. Later, I picked them up. On this visit, the service was excellent. The cost was $88.00.

We don't need leadership to know right from wrong - remembering Dana Meadows

Today is the 6th death anniversary of Donella (Dana) Meadows. Christians typically don’t acknowledge death anniversaries, but Buddhists do. Dana and I were friends and collaborators for a number of years. Then, for personal reasons that seemed important at the time, but less so now, we chose to follow separate paths. After many years, circumstances were bringing us back together. Tentatively, we were beginning to explore where our common interests might lead us. We spent at never-to-forgotten afternoon tramping about the farm where Dana had begun to create an intentional community, Cobb Hill. We began to share emails and an occasional telephone conversation. Then, Dana died suddenly.
This morning, I chose to remembered her by reading some of the columns, entitled “The Global Citizen” that she wrote for many years. The columns have been indexed by Dana’s former research assistant, Diana Wright, and are posted on website of the Sustainability Institute. The following, ‘we don’t need leadership to know right from wrong’ captures some of what I remember as being most important about Dana.

"Assaulted by sleaze, scandals, and hypocrisy, America searches for its moral bearings," the cover of the May 25 Time magazine says. The essay inside describes how the Reagan administration has failed in moral leadership -- or, more precisely, how it has succeeded in promoting "mindless materialism" and a "values vacuum".
Given the national confusion on ethical issues from Baby M to the defense of the Persian Gulf, we could use some moral leadership. But if I'm a typical example, I'm afraid we are likely to look for it in the wrong place.

My all-American public-school education was not exactly heavy on ethical analysis. In fact, since I took mostly science courses, my moral confidence was systematically eroded. Every day I absorbed strong messages -- values have no place in the laboratory; observe what is happening outside you, not inside you; your feelings have no validity.
My scientific training taught me to determine rightness and wrongness from outside, from measurable criteria such as economic profitability, not from the promptings of an invisible, unquantifiable conscience. And my elders provided me with hundreds of examples of how to rationalize glibly just about any act I might want to commit.
Then I was asked by my university to teach a course on ethics. I didn't know how to begin. How could I lead students through the thickets of moral controversy about population growth, nuclear power, acid rain? And yet what could be more important than to provide them with some ethical grounding?

To prepare for the course I sat in on philosophy and religion classes. I read books on ethics. I talked to pastors, priests, and gurus from many religions. I looked outside myself for moral leadership.
What I discovered was that I had known right from wrong all along.
Religions and ethical theories all have lists of moral rules. The rules generally boil down to the ones we learned at our mothers' knees. Don't hurt people, don't steal, don't lie. Help each other out.
The rules are not the primary authority, say the ethicists. They derive from something we all have within us, a clear sense of rightness, a sense that is given many names. We can get in touch with it whenever we want to. Prayer and meditation are ways -- not the only ways -- of getting in touch, of listening for moral guidance.
What that guidance says is consistent and simple. You are precious and special. So is everyone else, absolutely everyone. Act accordingly.

Don't do to someone else what you wouldn't want done to you. Don't do what would cause society to fall apart if everyone did it. Try to do what you would want done if you were someone else -- a homeless person in New York, a child in Ethiopia, a Nicaraguan peasant, a Polish dockworker.

You don't want your spouse to commit adultery, so don't do it yourself. You don't want to raise a family on a minimum wage, so pay your workers decent incomes. You don't want to live near a hazardous waste dump, so don't create one. If everyone cheats on income tax or insider-trading laws, the government and the stock market wouldn't function. So don't cheat.
It's really not hard to see what's right. What's hard is to admit how much of what we do is wrong.

Moral confusion is greatest not at the individual level, but at the level of nations. We forget that nations involve people too, people who are all as unique and precious as we are. The rules still apply. We don't want Libyan jets sweeping down in the night to bomb Washington -- therefore it was wrong to bomb Tripoli. We don't want Nicaragua to finance hoodlums to shoot our people and destabilize our government -- so it's wrong for us to do that. Creating weapons that can destroy not only enemy nations but also our own is so irrational that it defies ethical theory. To think ethically you have to be at least sane enough to recognize an evil when it threatens YOU.

The usual excuse for state-sponsored immorality is that it opposes the evil of others. When the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, when white Afrikaners oppress blacks, when Qaddafi harbors terrorists, when Chile tortures political dissenters, they are acting immorally. Don't we have an obligation to do something about it?
That's the hardest part of moral theory for me -- what to do about the evil of others. I have found Gandhi to be a wise guide here. Do oppose evil, he says, with all your might. Use every form of resistance and non-cooperation. But don't use violence, which sucks you down into evil yourself. Even a person doing wrong is a person, whose soul you must respect, though you do not respect his actions.

The base assumptions of our foreign policy -- assumptions not invented by the Reagan administration but greatly strengthened by it -- are clearly immoral. Americans are more worthy than other human beings. Our nation ought to have its way at the expense of other nations. The existence of evil elsewhere justifies committing evil ourselves. Not one of those statements is morally defensible.
New moral leadership does not mean someone to tell us what to do. It means someone to help us discover that we already know what to do. Someone who can recognize the smokescreens we all throw into ethical discussions to make us feel good about what we know we should feel bad about. Someone to keep reminding us that we are special and precious -- all of us, every one of us.

It is not by abstract principles that the world is won

As regular readers know, I try to spend a few minutes each morning in “quiet time and prayer.” The quotation marks are because the phrase is from the title of a book by my friend Elizabeth Neeld, ‘A Spiritual Primer: Guide to Quiet time and Prayer.” A part of this practice is reading. Over recent months, I have read Gandhi, two books on Buddhism, parts of the Christian Bible and one of Ibsen’s dramas, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Most recently, I have turned to ‘Faith and Practice: the Book of Discipline of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.’ On the inside cover page is an inscription that reads, “John M Richardson Jr., Upper Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting, 1958.”

The following passage is from this book. I used it as the opening quotation for last week’s CTE Management Group Agenda.

“It is not by abstract principles that the world is to be won, but by the transforming influence of personality. Words can not explain the meaning of our message., it needs the dedication of devoted lives. In such lives, the old distinction of sacred and secular disappears as the whole nature is controlled by a common purpose, and a higher power becomes the inspiring center of action and of thought.”
Epistle of London Yearly Meeting of Friends, 1907
(With minor JR paraphrasing)

Do you promote social justice...?

Living in Hume precludes my attending Sunday meetings of Friends Meeting of Washington. But each month I receive the Meeting's weekly newsletter. To the degree that quakers have a body of doctrine, it is often expressed as questions, called queries. Wahington Friends Newsletter always begins with a query. This month's query is entitled, "The Social Order."

Do you promote social justice and make your life a testimony to fair dealing? Do you seek to understand and appreciate differing cultures and social values? Do you support fair treatment of all, regardless of race, gender, age or other differences? Are you concerned for those in our society who are disadvantaged? Do you take your full share of civic responsibility by voting and giving service? Do you oppose the use of land, labor, technology and capital for human exploitation or in ways destructive to other living things?

Visitors from Nigeria

About two years ago, American University became affiliated with a new higher education institution, called ABTI American University of Nigeria. For various personal and institutional reasons, I chose not to become deeply involved. But when AU’s Vice President for International Affairs arranged a visit four AAUN Deans to AU and asked me to play a role, I could not refuse. Among other things, CTE was asked to give a presentation. The duration of our time with the Deans, only an hour, communicated that the Vice President intended it to be little more than a cameo. But these men were guests of AU and so I chose make it a top priority personally, and for CTE staff members. An hour is more than long enough to communicate a powerful message, though not to make connections and engage in meaningful dialogue, especially across cultures.

Preparing for the visit, and reflecting on the challenges of creating a new higher education institution I experienced an epiphany. As I told our visitors, I had not considered Nigeria as a professional interest in decades, but it was the first developing country to which I gave serious study as a graduate student. I read writings and biographies of the Nigerian Federation’s four ‘founding fathers’ and still remember some parts of them vividly. The subject of my first book, Partners in Development (1969), was collaborative programs involving nascent developing country universities and US Land Grant Universities, under AID auspices. I studied eighteen ‘sister” relationships in depth, conducting interviews with participants and reading virtually every document the projects produced. I reviewed more than one hundred projects more superficially and later consulted with AID and a Midwestern university consortium on a project called “building institutions to serve agriculture.”

On Wednesday evening, AAUN’s Dean of the School of Information and Communication Technologies, whom I had helped recruit, accepted an invitation to attend my class, which teaches students to build nonlinear dynamic systems (System Dynamics) models of environmental and development problems. At the class’ conclusion, the Dean told me that he had been seeking an opportunity to study system dynamics because he believed it was essential for pursuing his new research agenda, understanding the causes of poverty. Three weeks ago, I defined a very similar project as my next research focus. After the class concluded, we spoke for nearly 45 minutes about what our research agendas.

I have no idea where this juxtaposition of events is leading, but throughout most of my life, I have tried to be open to “leadings.” I need to be open to the possibility that the higher power who shapes our lives, sometimes tragically as well as joyfully, is sending me a message.

Collateral Duties

Each January, faculty members at American University (probably most universities) are required to write an Annual Report. The report asks for a description of activities – and how faculty members have contributed value-added, both to the institution and external reference groups, in three categories: “teaching,,” “research” and “service.”

While my major university responsibilities are as a manager, the requirement to submit this report emphasizes that I am supposed to balance the responsibilities of teacher-scholar and center director appropriately.

Committees and task forces play an important role in a university’s functioning. Professors often complain about the amount of ‘committee work’ they must do. The obligations can be time consuming. But different committees provide windows on the institutions’ distinctive cultures, which can differ from one another almost as much as the cultures of Brazil, Iceland and Sri Lanka.

Because I play multiple roles at AU: faculty member, faculty mentor, faculty member in residence, IT and multimedia manager, technical services provider, the list of my “service responsibilities” as a member of various groups may be somewhat different than the norm. Since I had not compiled the list recently, the number of these ‘collateral duty’ obligations – fourteen − surprised even me. The list follows:

Co-Convener, Faculty Resident Advisory Group, Office of Campus Life.
Convener, Advanced Technology Coordinating Group, Office of the Provost.
Member, Provost’s Council.
Member, Ph.D. Committee, School of International Service.
Member, University Senate (reelected to a second term in April 2006).
Member, Search Committee, University Librarian.
Member, Ad Hoc Search Committee, Chief Information Officer.
Member, Search Committee, Executive Director, Housing and Dining Services
Resource person, Senate Committee on Information Resources and Technology.
Ex Officio Member, All Staff Group, Housing and Dining Services, Office of Campus Life.
Ex Officio Member, Resident Assistant Staff, Anderson Hall.
Ex Officio Member, Directors’ Group, Office of Information Technology
Member, AU Task Force on IT Security.
Member, AU Task Force on Classroom Facilities Planning.

And of course as Director, CTE I chair groups within my own unit
CTE Directors’ Group
CTE Management Group

And serve as ex officio member of various working and planning groups that help manage the CTE programs and activities;

Then of course there are roles with groups outside the university, both in the US and Sri Lanka, including memberships on two Boards of Directors.

The tasks associated with each of these groups seem important, but viewing the list as a whole leads me to wonder if I am contributing enough to each to justify my participation. I need to keep this in mind when additional ‘opportunities to participate’ appear on the horizon.

Communicating across generations

As last evening’s Anderson Hall dinner (two kinds of pasta with beef sauce, vegetarian mushroom sauce and Alfredo sauce with clams), our guests included a features reporter and photographer from the Associated Press. They are writing a story on faculty members living in residence halls. We have been told that it may appear in as many as many as 150 newspapers.

The reporter, who had not too long ago completed his own ‘in residence’ experience as an undergraduate, posed thoughtful questions, as well as the usual ones about noise and fire alarm evacuations. I was reflecting on one as I finished cleaning up the remains of dinner for moiré than thirty, this morning: “isn’t it difficult to communicate across two generations?; How do you do it.?"

This has come more-or-less naturally to me. When I asked my own children – now the age of Anderson students’ parents, they told me living in would pose no problems. It would be fun for the students and for me. For many years, I have related to them (my children) as peers. Genuine peer relationships are what I strive for in Anderson. This requires of course, that students be true to themselves and that I be true to myself. Easy to say, but not so easy to do. Seeking to bridge the gap by pretending I was nineteen, rather than nearly sixty-nine would be greeted with derision (not to my faceof course) as it should be.

The answer to communication across generations may lie in advice given to me by my counselor when I was seeking help re-energizing a barren and troubled primary relationship.

“The secret of successful relationships,” she said, "is no expectations.”