CUTTING TIES: A NASTY BUSINESS

Dear George, 

I have a huge decision to make. When I took a job as a social psychologist at the university I held a joint appointment and had separate offices in Psychology and Sociology. I retired some forty plus years later and moved out of my Psychology office. However, Sociology had access to some vacant space in their high-rise building, and they offered me a new office as an emeritus faculty member. Though the department was on the tenth floor and my new office would be on the thirteenth floor, it suited my purposes and I took them up on it. I like having a place to work other than home, and having an office at the university made my transition into retirement much easier. I went into work regularly — I just didn’t get paid. None of the other retired faculty were interested in an office, so I got to have my own space. Perhaps the biggest attraction for me was that I didn’t have to dispose of the five large file cabinets full of stuff that I’d accumulated throughout my career. Tons of lecture notes, data and records from research projects, published and unpublished papers, assorted graduate student files, miscellaneous angry memos, and my library of a couple hundred books. I’ve used my emeritus office mainly for writing — most recently for poetry, OLLI writing classes, stories for my blog, and papers for my writers’ group. While I had occasional contact with former colleagues on the tenth floor when I first retired, that’s declined over the years, and my visits have become less frequent and more solitary. 

Recently I got an email from the Sociology department head saying that in August the department will move to a different building on campus. The head said that I could have office space in the new location though it would be shared with several adjunct faculty members. She added the adjuncts spend little time at the office. I went over and looked at the space. It’s much smaller than my current office, with room for one desk and one or two file cabinets at best. It didn’t seem to me that two people could use it at the same time. This office will be right in the middle of the department, allowing for more potential contact with faculty and staff, though I’m not attracted to that. Now I am pondering what to do. It’s a quandary. The most clearcut option is to discontinue office space on campus, discard all the stuff I’ve accumulated over the decades, and move a few things home to our crowded attic. I can write poetry at home just as well as on campus. That choice, however, would close down one of the main places outside of home in which I spend time. Alternatively I could move a few things to the new office and see whether I want to spend time there. Part of me says it’s better to have crummy office space on campus than no office at all. I waver back and forth on a daily basis. I have started to throw things away, and I must say it’s been brutal so far. Fortunately I have some time available to make a final decision. 

Love, 

Dave

NIL: A Nightmare for College Sports?

Dear George, 

College sports have been turned upside down in the last few years. For over a century the NCAA treated college sports as an amateur enterprise and prohibited college athletes from earning anything beyond a free education (tuition and fees, room and board). Following the Supreme Court’s rejection in 2021 of the NCAA’s “amateurism” argument, the NCAA ended virtually all restrictions on what athletes could earn from deals involving their own identities. 

“NIL” stands for “names/images/likenesses” and refers to an NCAA rule change that allows athletes to earn money from endorsements, social media postings, personal appearances, and other similar activities involving their personal identities. They can even accept money from boosters, usually longtime wealthy donors with ties to a university. Social media influencing is most frequent NIL activity performed by athletes, accounting for nearly 75% of NIL deals. If athletes have 10,000 or more followers on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, etc., they can earn money from companies by adding personal endorsements of products and services to their media posts. 

The main rationale for NIL is that college athletes generate billions of dollars for their universities, TV and radio networks, and the NCAA. Up until recently athletes haven’t been able to profit a single penny from their own names and images. Advocates of NIL argue that it’s simply fair for athletes to be compensated for the value they create. 

Soon after the NCAA changed its rules in 2021, groups called “NIL collectives” formed in order to help athletes profit from NIL. These groups are most often composed of boosters and fans, and they operate independently from the university. There are also new NIL collective business firms that specialize in connecting athletes with potential sponsors. Most NIL collectives raise money from boosters, alumni, fans, and businesses, then use the funds to compensate athletes for their NIL activities. It’s estimated that over 250 NIL collectives are currently in operation nationwide. 

In 2022 about 17% of athletes at Division I universities participated in NIL activities. Local deals have been far more prevalent than national brands. It’s expected that NIL earnings will reach over $1.5 billion in 2024. The size of NIL deals for individual athletes varies dramatically. The average NIL deal during the first year was about $1,300, and the median was $65 (meaning that about half of all NIL earnings were below $65). However, top athletes are known to have secured NIL deals exceeding $1 million or more, sometimes 30 or 40 times annual faculty salaries at their university. To take a few examples, the University of Alabama quarterback received 3.1 million in NIL deals in his senior season, and the University of Colorado quarterback earned between $4.8 and $5.1 million. A freshman on the USC basketball team earned $7.5 million this season before he played a single game. Last year a high school quarterback in Florida was offered $9.5 million by a booster to commit to the University of Miami. He initially accepted the offer but changed his mind with University of Florida boosters offered him $13.5 million. Evaluations of NIL are all over the map, with lots of arguments pro and con. 

My own opinion is mostly skeptical. Here are some of the problems: 

     (1) Negative team effects. Star players are much more likely to secure lucrative NIL deals, potentially creating resentment or jealousy by teammates, many of whom do not receive any NIL money. 

    (2) Inequality across universities. Schools with wealthy boosters are likely to offer richer NIL opportunities to attract top recruits, widening the gap still further between well-funded and less-funded schools. Likewise, athletes may be even more prone to use the transfer portal to transfer to schools with better NIL deals. 

    (3) Gender inequity. Female athletes have fewer NIL opportunities compared to males. Studies indicate that male athletes receive about 70% of total NIL earnings. The top 100 recent NIL earners this past season included 94 men and 6 women. 

     (4) Inequality across sports. NIL deals are concentrated in a few revenue-generating sports, mainly football and basketball. Athletes in those sports have a much higher chance of getting NIL deals (i.e., 92 of the top 100 earners in 2023-24). Further, as donors redirect their donations to individual athletes in football and basketball, athletic departments will receive less general funding which they could have used to support secondary sports. 

     (5) Academic disruption. With its emphasis on financial gain , some athletes might give NIL money-making activities priority over academics. 

Overall, I think that the NIL system is potentially unfair in lots of ways. However, the situation is rapidly evolving, and it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. 

 Love, 

 Dave 

SOURCES: 

Carter, Bill. Seven data points that will tell the story of NIL in 2023. sportsbusinessjournal.com, Jan. 17, 2023 

Grady Capstone. Collegiate Female Athletes Pay As Males Dominate Revenue: Exploring the NIL Gender Pay Gap. gradynewsource.uga.edu, Apr. 12, 2024. 

Rudder, Paul. Who is the highest paid college athlete? NIL endorsement deal money in NCAA sports. en.as.com, Mar. 25, 2024. 

Schoenfeld, Bruce. “Student Athlete. Mogul.” New York Times, Jan. 24, 2023. 

Teamworks.com. A Changing Game: The Rise of NIL Collectives. Sept. 6, 2023. 

Wikipedia. Student athlete compensation.

CONFESSIONS OF A PROFESSIONAL HOARDER

Dear George, 

I retired from my faculty job at the university in 2009, but, thanks to available space and a generous departmental policy, I’ve been able to maintain an office there since that time. It definitely eased the shock of retirement, since I still found myself continuing to go to my workplace four or five times a week. Though I was no longer teaching or doing research, I used the office for writing tasks on the computer, including working on this blog and later poetry projects. Over time my use gradually dwindled, and the pandemic drastically reduced my time on campus. Recently I was notified by the department head that the university was shutting down the entire 16th floor that my office was on and that he was looking into alternative space. I told him that it wasn’t vital to me to have an office, but he persisted and, much to my surprise, came up with a larger office than my current one, all my own. The university’s moving date will be August 15th. 

This left me in a quandary. When I retired I disposed of about half my books and some of my files, e.g., old exams, grad student projects, faculty meeting notes. However, I held on to five file cabinets full of documents related to my career: e.g., all of my lecture notes, all of the xeroxed articles I used in teaching and research, published and unpublished papers, research data, even a couple of undergraduate college papers, my grad school class notes, and the materials from my dissertation project, now 55 years old. I haven’t had the need to use any of this material for the past thirteen years — I don’t think I’ve even opened most of the file cabinet material drawers. If all of this material vanished overnight, it wouldn’t have any tangible impact on my existence. 

To make my decision still worse, the deparrment put a large recycling bin in the hallway outside my office for use by myself and two of my emeriti colleagues who are also moving. What to do? I could get rid of all of the stuff, half of the stuff, or none of the stuff. While all that paper material had no practical value for me, it had a lot of sentimental value since it documented the entire course of my career (plus representing perhaps ten thousand hours of effort on my part). As astute reader probably knows the answer to my dilemma. I decided to keep everything, down to the last paper clip. So far I’ve boxed up my five file cabinets into 22 sizable cartons, and next I have to work on my books, desk, and table, saving all that as well. It was just too disturbing to say goodbye to my entire career. I’ll force myself to throw a few things out the next time they tell me to move. 

Love, 

Dave

What Do Translators Do?

[Note: The following is an excerpt from a paper that my spouse Katja L. presented to the Contemporary Club, her Cincinnati women’s writing group, on April 9, 2018.]

Dear George,

The art of translation has been of longstanding interest to me.  Primarily because I was surrounded by relatives and friends who chattered away in languages that I couldn’t understand.  English was the lingua franca of our home but my earliest memories of non-English are of my father and mother speaking in Yiddish.  My father loved to recite long passages from King Lear and the Merchant of Venice in Yiddish, whereas my mother belted out musical numbers on our well-tuned upright piano in that hysterically funny sounding language which she spoke effortlessly with her father.  My weekends were spent with my grandparents in Germantown, Philadelphia, and they spoke Yiddish in between the hours when we all listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio in Italian, German, French, and occasionally Russian.  My grandparents would translate the operas into Yiddish (for me), and I would try to make sense of it all by nodding my head and translating a word or two into some shred of understanding. 

My grandparents kept an orthodox household which meant we sat in the dark all day Saturday, waiting for our beloved opera to begin and then, for four hours, we sat in silence (except during the Opera Quiz).  After the opera, we all went on our Saturday walk, both adults discussing in Yiddish and English the pros and cons of the afternoon opera.  If Richard Tucker had sung that afternoon, their lives were made complete.  “A cantor and an opera singer!”  What could be better!  I was five years old at the time this routine began, and to my young ears Yiddish mimicked gibberish — a crazy mixture of sounds that sounded like perpetual jokes.  It was the lilt, the tone, the gestures which accompanied it, and the fact that I was unable to read it or understand it which frustrated me.

Moving on to other languages, I remember the relief I felt when I learned to read Hebrew and received a reward (a Bible) for translating the chapter about the Jewess Rebecca in Ivanhoe from Hebrew into English.  Of course, the fact that the original was in English helped enormously although there were no Cliff Notes at the time. 

In high school I was introduced to Montaigne and Rabelais, and that was when I began to learn the importance of translation.  Years were spent learning to understand the vocabulary, word-play, and acrobatic sentence structure of Rabelais, the serious, clarity, and irony of Montaigne.  Translation became terribly important to me during my many years of graduate study in French for it introduced me to a different culture, religion, history, ideology, philosophy, and above all meaning. 

Graduate study led me to a variety of jobs as a translator.  One was with the the Ford Motor Company where I managed to turn a manual into English that had originally been written in Japanese and previously translated into French.  This task required numerous trips to the Ford plant in Batavia where I met with the engineers and learned the functions of various auto parts.  I then spent hours searching through engineering dictionaries trying to decipher French and English engineering vocabulary. 

While working for Laura Strumminger, French historian and Head of the Department of Women’s Studies at UC, I had the opportunity to translate articles and books from the French into English. 

When Kings Island was being built, the need for a French-English translator for signage throughout the park was needed, and guess who ended up translating the golf course and miniature golf course signs!

The utilitarian aspects of translation are certainly important.  Once in France I had a job as both interpreter and translator for the Bic ballpoint pen company.  They were in negotiations with the Texas instrument company called Casio. 

It was during this period that I was introduced to some of the conundrums of translation and interpretation.

•     Does one interpret word for word?

•     Does one interpret bad or ugly remarks or does one smooth things over?

•     How does one choose the words one uses? 

  

In November, 2017, I came across a fascinating article in the New York Times Review and Magazine section regarding translation.  It referred to a wonderful new translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Professor Emily Wilson of Yale University.   Dr. Wilson is the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English.  As I read the article and then the book, I wondered if the translator’s gender had an effect on the translation.  So many other things have an effect on a translation (scholarship, cultural background, history, linguistic evolution, choice of words) that it seems reasonable to think that gender is an additional factor.

Modern literary scholarship can actually be redefined by the translator’s word choices.  The whole question of “what is the story you are trying to tell depends on the word choices that you choose.  For example, the Greek word “polytropos” appears in the first line of the Odyssey as a description of Odysseus.  A literal translation of “poly” is “many”, and “tropos” means “to turn”.  Thus, polytropos literally means “many turns”.  However, the translator must choose a word in English that describes Odysseus. Sixty different translations have been made of this word, including: crafty; full of resources;  of many a turn; many sided man; deep; sagacious; adventurous; shifty; ingenious; various minded; of many  of twists and turns; cunning.  

Emily Wilson chose the word “complicated” in order to answer the question, “What sort of man is Odysseus?”…. 

Love,

Katja

Stopping By Antioch: A Trip Back In Time

Dear George,

Recently Katja and I took an overnight camping trip to Yellow Springs, and we spent some time there walking around the campus of our alma mater, Antioch College.  We visit Antioch every now and then, and we’re always filled with nostalgia.  Katja and I were students at Antioch from 1955 to 1960, a time period that’s often viewed as part of the institution’s “golden age.”  Along with Oberlin, Reed, Bard, and a few others, Antioch was widely regarded as one of the most innovative liberal arts colleges in the nation.  It was also known as a bastion of left-wing politics and was soon to become a center for student activism and the counterculture revolution in the 1960’s.  Having grown up in a staunch Republican family in a small Upper Peninsula Michigan town, it was a transformational experience for me.  Intellectually exciting, sometimes mind-blowing, confusing, engaging, challenging.  It’s nearly five and a half decades since we graduated from Antioch, and I still have a firm sense of identity as an “Antiochian”.

Main Hall

Main Hall is the college’s administration building and constitutes its iconic visual image.  Along with the North and South Hall dorms, it’s one of Antioch’s three original buildings.  The college was founded in 1852.  It was the first coed college in the nation to offer the same educational opportunities to women and men and the first to appoint a woman professor to its faculty.  Its first president was Horace Mann, an abolitionist and educational reformer who was known for founding the American public school system.  Mann gave Antioch its college motto: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

South Hall

When I arrived in 1955, South Hall was the men’s freshmen dorm.  I was assigned to Viking Hall, located on the west half of the third floor.  My classmates were mainly from big cities, mainly on the east coast.  My freshman roommates, Les S., Bob P., and Ted R., were from New York and greater Chicago.  The campus was filled with bright and gifted students.  Our Viking Hall bunch came to be the most cohesive group of which I’ve ever been a part.  Members ate their meals together at the cafeteria, drank 3.2 beer at a local tavern, played pranks in the dorm, talked philosophy and politics, and stayed up all hours of the night playing poker for cafeteria meal tickets.  As the end of our first year approached we swore that we would reconvene for a twenty-fifth reunion, but, alas, that never happened.

North Hall

North Hall, the freshmen women’s dorm, was right across the quadrangle.  Katja lived on one of the floors there.  I’d seen her from a distance on the first day that we’d arrived on campus and fell in love at first sight, but I didn’t possess the courage to actually speak to her.  When I walked into a common room area in North Hall one evening that first year, Katja was alone there, playing a mournful song on the piano.  I listened for a moment, then passed on through.  It would be a year and a half before we met through mutual friends while we were on coop jobs in Madison and Milwaukee.

The Science Building

My high school math teacher had strongly urged me to become an engineer, and I started Antioch as an engineering major.  That was a major mistake.  I shirked my studies in calculus, had trouble working the instruments in my surveying class, and stopped attending Engineering Mechanics because it was at 8 a.m., an impossible time for a late night poker player.  Worst of all, I mixed the wrong chemicals together in my Organic Chemistry class, and a mixture containing sulfuric acid exploded and scalded the corneas of both my eyes. 

The Infirmary

I spent ten days in the infirmary after my chemistry accident.  The blisters eventually peeled off my eyes, and, much to everyone’s relief, my vision was still intact. 

Horace Mann Hall

I’d enjoyed creative writing throughout high school and, after my engineering fiasco, I declared Literature as my new major.  Faculty offices and classrooms were in Horace Mann Hall.  My teachers included Nolan Miller, Judson Jerome, and Bob Maurer.  Nolan Miller had coined the phrase “beat generation” in one of his novels.   I enjoyed his fiction writing courses the best, but, after submitting 27 short stories to various pulp magazines for publication and getting 27 rejection form letters, I began rethinking my career choice.  Professor Jerome, a nationally prominent poet, despaired the lack of social and financial support for the literary arts in our society and suggested that Psychology or Sociology would be better majors for aspiring writers.  I followed his advice and promptly changed my major to Psychology, a decision that would shape my adult life and career.  My psychology profs included Clarence Leuba (a post-Watsonian behaviorist), Bill John (a cognitive social psychologist from Harvard), and Erling Eng (who drew from Jungian psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, and experiential learning techniques).  I became an Eng groupie.  

The Antioch Library

Antioch’s library, like the rest of the campus, operated on an honor system where you checked out your own books.  I spent a lot of time browsing in the stacks and doing homework at the library’s tables.  One of my best Viking Hall friends liked to read the newspaper there.  He’d cut a small hole in the center of the paper so that he could look unobtrusively at the girls walking by.

The College Gym

The Gym was close to South Hall, and I spent a lot of time there during my freshman year.  Physical Education was required of first-year-students, and I took tennis, basketball, and boxing (in the latter, most of my opponents were 3 or 4 inches taller and 40 pounds heavier).  Antioch didn’t have any intercollegiate varsity sports but instead supported an active intramural system.  Viking Hall sponsored touch football and basketball teams.  I and Bob P. were the shooting guards on our basketball team, and we were runners-up for the intramural championship.

Greywood Hall

In my third year I lived in Greywood Hall, a small dorm on the edge of campus.  I shared a room with my Viking Hall friend John N. and an acquaintance from California whose hobby was making keys.  The grinding of the key machine was difficult to study by, but we eventually got used to it.  Most nights John and I would go out at midnight to the 68 drive-in at the north edge of town and enjoy pie and a cup of coffee.   

Corry Hall

I lived in Corry Hall for a couple of years, including 1958-59 when Katja was in France and Austria on a year abroad program.   The upperclass hall members had less to do with one another than had been the case in my freshman year.  In my fourth year I was a freshman hall advisor in Corry.  I was too quiet and shy for the role and did a half-baked job.

Birch Hall

Birch Hall, the main upperclass women’s dorm, was designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen and constructed in 1943.  After she came back from Europe, Katja lived here with her best friend, Judy F.  Unlike most schools in the 1950’s, men and women were welcome to hang out in one another’s dorm rooms until curfew time at 10 p.m. on weekdays or midnight on weekends, so I was a regular visitor to Birch Hall.      

Student Union

When we arrived at Antioch in 1955 the college cafeteria was housed in a pair of quonset huts that had been built on campus during World War II for military purposes.  The new student union building was completed during our third year, and it housed the cafeteria, bookstore, coffee shop (C-shop, a popular evening hangout), student government offices, and the Antioch News Record.  Sitting on the Student Union steps and shooting the breeze was a favorite pastime.  

Antioch Inn

The Antioch Inn occupied the west end of the Student Union Building.  It offered a restaurant geared to adult visitors to the campus and several hotel rooms upstairs.  Katja worked as a waitress in the restaurant, and sometimes my first-year roommate Ted R. and I would have supper there, getting deluxe service.  Katja and I got married at Antioch after our graduation in 1960, and our parents and siblings (Steve, Peter, Vicki, Ami, David) stayed at the Antioch Inn.  We had our wedding reception there in a big upstairs room.

When we drove into Yellow Springs on our recent trip, Katja remarked that we’d spent the most significant years of our lives at Antioch.  I’d have to agree.  My memories are of phenomenal friends, errant ways (e.g., smoking, drinking too much beer), co-oping in New York City and San Francisco, existentialism, psychoanalysis, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, Com’s Tavern, late night intellectual conversations, romance, jazz, anti-conformity of all sorts.  I made my long-term career choice while at Antioch (social psychology), found and married my life partner, and gained credentials for admission to graduate study at the University of Michigan.  We even chose to live in Cincinnati years later partly because of its proximity to Antioch and Yellow Springs.  I had some of my most rewarding life experiences at Antioch, as well as some of my most personally difficult and painful experiences.  I did some of the stupidest things in my life there, and some of the most adventurous.  A lot of these memories came back into mind during our visit.  We’ll have to go back again soon.

Love

Dave   

My OLLI Anxiety Dream

Dear George,

I probably had my first academic nightmares in grade school, though I remember them most clearly from college and graduate school.  They even persisted for decades after I’d finished school altogether.  One of my most common dreams was that I’d registered for a difficult course, but then completely forgotten it and never attended class.  Suddenly it was time to take the final exam, and I didn’t know a single thing.  When I became a college teacher  myself in adulthood, this scary dream morphed into an alternate version.  I started dreaming that it was the first day of the semester and that I’d forgotten I’d been assigned to teach a course in a field that I knew absolutely nothing about, e.g., geology.  I had to go and face a classroom full of skeptical students and publicly reveal my incompetence.

Katja and I have become students at the university again, but now it’s in what’s billed as an anxiety-free atmosphere.  We’re enrolled in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a program which offers 80 plus courses per quarter for people age 50 and over.  This term we’ve been going to “Behind the Scenes in the Arts,” “Hebrew Union College: The Pride of Clifton Avenue,” and “Writing Down Your Life Stories,” a class in which members take turns reading a personal story that they’ve written that week.  OLLI involves no tests, no grades or quizzes, and usually no homework.  Thus, you get all the perks of interesting content and new information, but with few of the pressures of a regular college education.

I thought that OLLI was anxiety-free until I had a brand new academic dream last week. I dreamt I was in an OLLI singing class.  I was sitting in the second row, and the teacher asked the woman across the aisle from me to sing the song she’d prepared for this week’s class.  The woman proceeded to sing an aria from a famous opera.  She had a beautiful voice.  I realized that she was enrolled in the class because she was an accomplished singer who loved to sing.  In fact, everybody in the class appeared to be a great singer except me.  I was taking it because I’m a terrible singer and hoped that I might get just a little bit better.

When the woman finished, everyone clapped, and the teacher asked if I would like to go next.  I paused for a moment, then said that I’d like to tell a story first.  The teacher looked surprised but said o.k.  I said, “When I was in fourth grade my teacher, Miss Hunnefeld, started a glee club at our school.  Every week we met after school to practice so we could perform for the Lion’s Club at the end of the year.  One day Miss Hunnefeld walked up and down the front row, listening carefully to everyone in the group.  She stopped right in front of me and said that I was out of tune.  She asked me to sing a line by myself but, even with three or four tries, my voice sounded flat and off key.  Miss Hunnefeld said I seemed to be tone deaf.  She said I could stay in the Glee Club and be in the Lions’ Club performance, but I had to promise never to sing out loud again.  So I went to practice after school for the rest of the spring and mouthed the words as my classmates sang.  Every now and then I would sneak in a note out loud, but my singing career had essentially come to an abrupt end.”

That, of course, is a true story.  My singing class teacher smiled sympathetically.  Then she asked what I was going to sing today.  My mind started racing.  I couldn’t think of a single song I knew.  The teacher handed me her songbook.  I scanned the titles, but I’d never heard of any of them.  Finally I remembered my favorite song from grade school, so I sang that.

Centa, Sweet Centa

Refuses her polenta

Don’t scold her

Don’t hold her

She’ll eat never a bite today

Gather buds, yellow and red and blue

Twist a knot yellow and blue and red

Patience, lad, cheerily bide your time

Girlish moods are quickly fled

When I got to the end of the song, the teacher gave me a funny look and started to say something.   I never found out what she was going to say because that was the moment I woke up.  I realized immediately it was all just a dream.  What a relief!  I wasn’t in a singing class at all – there is no singing class in OLLI.   Then I realized that the singing class in my dream was pretty similar to my writing class, since students in that class take turns presenting stories they’ve written to the whole group.  I wondered if my dream were really about my writing class.  How could that be?  It’s true that I’ve suffered some writer’s block recently and have been apprehensive about reading material in class.  But it can’t be as bad as having to sing in front of a group.  I am objectively horrible at singing, and everyone would agree about that.  But I’m certain I can do better as a writer.   I guess my unconscious mind doesn’t see any difference though.  It’s interesting how our inner insecurities gnaw away at us, whether or not they have any firm grounding in reality.  I also decided that my OLLI class must be important to my emotional life since it’s now taken a central place in my rich collection of anxiety dreams.

Love,

Dave


G-Mail Comments:

-Judy J-K (Feb. 22): Hi David,  I enjoy your stories about our 4th grade teacher.  I'm not sure I've spelled her last name correctly, but she certainly made an impression on me.  I was a few years (49-50) behind you in school, so it is not surprising that some things in her class were different from  your experience--though it is possible that I've forgotten a lot.  As I recall in her classroom management technique, we all were lined up around the room and responded 'perfect' or 'not perfect' with respect to a relatively short list of rules written on a small bit of blackboard on the southeast side of the room.  I don't recall any other way a person got ahead and advanced in rank.  As an over-scrupulous, 'good Catholic' girl I never achieved any rank.  My memory is that only Don ( Deetce? I've never spelled it before) Hofer and I ended up the year at the bottom of the class.  I even played Jacob's Ladder on the piano for the class as well. If going to church would have earned me points I should have achieved some rank!  I'm convinced that my fear of lightening was heightened by her stories of God punishing sinners with a bolt of lightening.  Have other former Washington  students sent you stories?  I'd love to hear them.  Judy Johnson Kropf

-Ann B (2-20):  Thanks for posting such a nice  picture of my mother.  Just wanted to let you know that you had a horrible music teacher, I would have never treated you that way and of course I would have taught you to sing in tune. John has 6 more days to work!  He is going to do some contingent work in March, then officially done.  Love, Ann

-Phyllis S-S (2-19):  Dear Dave,  So will you read your life story out loud?  Ah the nightmares the night before......    Phyllis

Who Was I?/Who Am I?

Dear George,

Back when I was teaching Social Psychology, I’d always ask people to do the “Who Am I?” test on the first day of class.  This is a commonly used self-concept measure.  Individuals are given a sheet of paper with twenty numbered lines and asked to give twenty answers to the question, “Who Am I?”  The task is very open-ended to allow people to describe themselves in their own unique terms.  [Note to the reader: You might enjoy trying out the Who Am I? test before reading further.  Results are often thought-provoking.] 

While students were completing the task in class, I’d do it for myself as well.  There was typically continuity from one year to the next, and there were also meaningful changes.  Last week I was thumbing through some old files, and I ran across a copy of a Who Am I? test that I filled out in 1997.  Before looking at it, I decided to try out the measure again. 

Some parts of one’s self, of course, remain quite stable over time. When I compared my Who Am I? responses in 1997 and 2014, half of my current statements were either identical to or very similar to those I made almost two decades ago.  Most of the stable responses referred to major social roles. “Husband” and “father” were among my initial responses in 1997, and they were among the first this time too. Both times I mentioned close friendships and other family ties. I described myself each time as having grown up in my hometown of Menominee, Michigan, and I said then and now that I was a resident of Clifton, our Cincinnati neighborhood.  In 1997 I said I was “a loner”; in 2014, “a shy person”. 

People frequently make some sort of age-related statement on the Who Am I? test.  In 1997 I said, “Getting older”.  This year I simply wrote down my actual age.  I no longer think of myself as “getting older”. Either I just don’t want to think about it, or, more likely, I’ve decided I’ve already arrived.

All the rest of my 2014 responses pointed to major changes in my picture of self.  In 1997 I was working full time, and the biggest cluster of my self-references were job–related. I described myself as a “Social psychologist”; as a “College prof. at UC”; as “Teacher of this class”; as “Grumpy and dissatisfied about work these days”; and as “Someone who hasn’t accomplished his goals.”  It’s clear that work was a big chunk of my personal identity.

Having been retired for five years, my image of self now takes on a whole new flavor.  This time I made only one job-related reference, and it was in the past tense: “former social psychologist.”  In its place I put down my new role of “retired person”.  And the biggest cluster of my statements referred to activities that I’ve taken up since retiring: “blog writer”, “photo guy”, “line dancer”, “OLLI member”.  I also identified myself by a family role that I didn’t have in 1997, i.e., “grandfather”.

I’m glad I re-did the Who Am I? test.  Sometimes I get anxious about being in a rut.  The results of this exercise, though, point not only to changes over time, but to new and satisfying parts of my life.  Sometimes researchers code Who Am I? responses as positive and negative, yielding a measure of overall life satisfaction.  When I did this, 70% of my 1997 responses were positive, and 30% were negative.  For 2014, 90% were positive and 10% were negative.  It looks like life is on the upswing.  I’ve always been skeptical of the notion of “The Golden Years.”  However, my “Who Am I?” portrait nowadays is more “golden” than I anticipated.

Love,

Dave      

G-mail Comments

-Vicki L (1-29): Hi D,

I guess my first response would be "I'm jealous". Thing is, the scorers would misinterpret this as a 'negative' response. But being jealous of your relative contentment is actually a 'plus' for me - my growing capacity to feel uncomfortable feelings! I don't know....  Meantime, your blog was very interesting and entertaining. So far in my life, I've never been willing to openly take a shot at the question: "Who Are You"?.  We'll talk further in the gazebo. Love, Sis  

 -Ami G (1-28):  What is an Olli member?

-David L to Ami (1-29):  Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (courses for people over 50 at the university).  

The Meaning of Dukkha

Dear George,

Recently Katja and I went to a lecture at the university on the paradoxes of Buddhism, and it jogged our minds.  The speaker dealt primarily with Buddha’s concept of dukkha.  He presented it as the most central idea in classical Buddhism.  Buddha stated, “I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha” (1).  [Note: numbers in quotes refer to sources at end.]   As I understand it, Buddha regarded dukkha as the fundamental feature of the human condition.  The original translation of “dukkha” from the Pali language into English was “suffering”, and that’s often given as the meaning of the word.  However,  modern translators note that there’s no single word in English that encompasses the complex, multi-faceted meanings of dukkha in Pali and that the term implies a host of concepts such as anxiety, stress, discontent, frustration, conflict, misery, etc.  Thus dukkha entails a wide range of negative affective states, from mild irritation to extreme pain and suffering.  The notion of “unsatisfactoriness” perhaps comes closest to capturing the broad meaning of dukkha.  Dr. Kingsley Heendeniya (4) has defined dukkha in the following way:  “Dukkha is sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair, separation from loved ones, from associating with those you do not like and from not getting what you want.”

Buddha’s teachings about dukkha are given most fully in the Four Noble Truths (6).  The four truths are: (1) the truth of dukkha; (2) the truth of the origin of dukkha; (3) the truth of the cessation of dukkha; and (4) the truth of the path leading to the cessation of dukkha.  Thus, the Four Noble Truths explain the nature of dukkha, the conditions which give rise to dukkha, and how dukkha can be overcome.

The First Noble Truth addresses the nature and pervasiveness of dukkha in people’s lives.  Human existence is difficult and imperfect, and people inevitably experience pain, suffering, discontent, conflict, etc.  Buddha referred to three different categories of dukkha.  The first is “ordinary suffering”.  It includes the physical and mental suffering inevitably associated with birth, aging, illness, and dying.  In addition, “ordinary suffering” includes negative emotions from experiencing events and outcomes that we find unpleasant and undesirable.  This may occur because we fail to attain outcomes that we want, or because we receive outcomes that we don’t want.  For Buddha, “union with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha…”  (5)  These are simply pervasive aspects of everyone’s daily lives.

A second source of dukkha has to do with change.  In Buddhist thinking, all objects and events are constantly in a process of change, and consequently all life forms are impermanent.  Change is intrinsically stressful.  Dukkha (e.g., frustration, discontent) results from striving to hold onto things in the face of change. 

The third pattern of dukkha is termed “conditioned states” or “all-pervasive suffering,” and it refers to a form of unsatisfactoriness that characterizes all aspects of existence.  In essence, we experience dissatisfaction because things and events virtually never live up to our standards or expectations (5).

The second noble truth involves the origins of dukkha.  In Buddhist thought, dukkha results from cravings, accompanied by ignorance of the true nature of things.  Such cravings include desires for sensory pleasures; cravings for something solid and enduring (e.g., wealth, fame) and domination of others; and cravings to disconnect ourselves from pain and avoid suffering.  In addition, dukkha has been interpreted as resulting from three disturbed emotional states associated with cravings: (1) Ignorance (bewilderment about the nature of the self and reality); (2) Attachment (to pleasurable outcomes); and (3) Aversion (a fear of not getting what we want, or of getting what we don’t want) (6).

The third noble truth is that the cessation of dukkha is possible.  This is the goal of spiritual practice in Buddhism.  The causes of dukkha can be eliminated when individuals achieve a genuine understanding of the origins of suffering in craving and ignorance.  When the causes of suffering cease in one’s mind, this constitutes nirvana (enlightenment and a freeing of the spiritual self from attachment to worldly things).  In Buddha’s words:  "And this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha: the remainderless fading and cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, and letting go of that very craving" (SN 56.11) (2).

The fourth noble truth specifies a path to the cessation of dukkha, the Noble Eightfold Path.  It involves eight dimensions of human action and thought: Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration (6).

I think everyone can readily find instances of dukkha in their lives.  For myself,

the loss of my two brothers and my brother-in-law over the past eight years has radically altered my life in painful ways.  Katja recently spent five days in the hospital, and they’ve been unable to come up with any clear diagnosis of her nagging problems.  My hearing is doing poorly and is a daily source of consternation.  One of our young relatives faces major surgery in the coming year.  Beyond these clear and dramatic examples, though, the further implication of Buddhism is that virtually all experiences involve dukkha.  A trivial example of this occurred when I took the dogs out for a walk the other morning.   With dukkha already on my mind, I noticed how badly cracked our sidewalk is and how much of it will need replacement in the near future.  I worried about the brown patches on the small evergreens next to our house and what that meant for their longevity.  I worried still more for the giant yew bush in our front yard that the tree people have been trying to save.  I picked up litter and cigarette butts on the lawn, annoyed at the irresponsible people who had dropped it there.  All this, of course, illustrates the extent to which dukkha is a standard part of the environment and of ourselves. 

I think dukkha is also implied by the connotations that we attach to our cultural meanings of “reality”.  We commonly think of “” as something abrasive that we have to come to terms with.  Thus, we refer to “harsh reality” or “cold reality” or the “facts of life”.  In all these instances, reality is contrasted to our wishes, dreams, desires, and ideals.  That discrepancy between what we wish for and the reality that we face is another way of getting at the meaning of dukkha.  It ties into the Buddhist admonition that the cessation of craving is the route to the elimination of dukkha. 

I find myself convinced by the argument that dukkha is at the essence of human consciousness.  As human beings, we engage in a constant process of evaluating objects and events on a good-bad continnum.  We experience ourselves, others, every aspect of our worlds as pleasing or painful, desirable or unwanted, useful or a waste.  Moreover, we don’t make such evaluations in a vacuum, but rather we assess current events in terms of standards or expectations that we’ve acquired from the broader culture and/or from our own life histories.  Because our standards of what’s good or desirable tend to be idealized, immediate events typically fall short, and the experience of dukkha (or dissatisfaction) is the consequence. 

Reducing or eliminating dukkha seems a foreboding challenge.  Doing so by eliminating craving would seem to make sense, but isn’t striving to satisfy cravings a major avenue to human pleasure?  I personally think of Buddhist philosophy as emphasizing coming to terms with human reality and accepting and embracing events for what they are, e.g., “going with the flow,” rather than what we wish they were.   That’s easier said than done, though I’m struggling to work at it.

Love,

Dave

SOURCES:  (1) = www.accesstoinsight.org, “Dukkha”; (2) = www.accesstoinsight.org, “Cessation of Dukkha”; (3) = www.buddhasociety.com, “The Word of the Buddha”; (4) = www.centrebouddhique.net, “The Buddha’s Concept of Dukkha”; (5) = wikipedia.org, “Dukkha”; (6) = wikipedia.org, “The Four Noble Truths”