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Geography Doctoral Candidate, Coordinator for Hornsby Bend Center for Environmental Research, former NRM student July 13, 2000 K: And this [TLC] is an undergraduate degree program, or? M: Right now it is, and it's not even a degree program (K: Okay. Yeah, lots of questions.) Yeah, what we're doing is writing that - at this point there's only, I think a 12 hour requirement - like a student that enrolls in 12 hours during their time at UT gets this designation that they had a "concentration" in this - K: Who is - who are the professors doing this? M: Well there's three that are kind of on the "TLC Board" or whatever, and that's Sam Wilson, Peg Syverson, and Lester Faigley. (K: Okay.) And they're both - two of them are anthropology - no, two are English, and one is Anthropology. But, there's people from Communications school, we're trying to get Computer Science in there, Natural Science. I think it would be really cool if Dick Richardson could cross-list or something - K: Well, the reason I asked, too, is that, you know, geographers have done a lot of work on this, and - (M: Definitely. And I think that "Geographer's Craft" was cross-listed, which is why - ) Yeah, but see, that's computers - they don't - it's not a cultural program at all. That's just GIS, techie-stuff, so. I'm thinking more - historically, that's what - transformation of landscape and culture through human action, is basically what geography studies, and if you think through trying to define what technology is, it breaks down into that, because to say that the first tool-makers, the first farmers, were not using technology, is just to keep the focus on - M: Oh, yeah! I took a class last fall was basically "The Origins of Agriculture," but it had a much more high-fallutin' name - maybe it was - "Beginnings of Food Production," or something like that. And it was - that was my - I might have been unconsciously trying to get this kind of grounding. But, I'm not sure if TLC's will be that broad. (K: right.) Or at least, never have a - I'm not sure if a TLC class would have something that focused on this. Maybe a - definitele geography - K: Well, it's a place that you could take courses too to get a broader grounding. They're going to keep the focus on the role of computer technology, and - because, there's a wealth of scholarship around the role of technologies in transforming human settlements, transforming cities, and there're people in the Geography department who have built their careers around that stuff. They don't use the same language, right, that Peg might use, but it's the same thing. M: Can you think of some folks that come to mind? K: Well, agriculture is one of the main strengths of the department, and Carl Bootser, who is a National Science Fellow, is the famous guy in the department. And, other agriculturalists are Bill Doolittle and the chairman (garbled), and they're looking at, primarily now Latin America, and transformations. Bootser's doing Mexico now - he did a lot of his early, really well-known work on the Mediterannean and Egypt, and - There's a famous German geographer, Wittvogel (sp) who wrote a treatise on hydrological societies, that he looked at the development of civilization around the control of water. Water technologies, irrigation technologies, and, some very controversial, sort of environmental deterministic stuff, and so Bootser was part of a whole generation of folks that tried to redress and change what Wittvogel had done. And then, who else is there? The challenge of the Geography department is it's going through what all departments do - a generational change, and so there are a lot of new faculty coming in, and, I'm not certain of what they'll be like. Geographer's Craft, those folks - Ken Foote, who taught that, is gone. He's out of here. And Ken was an interesting character; if he'd been around, stayed around, he's someone to talk to, because Ken was very much a cultural geographer that got caught up in that GIS wave, and I think really got out of here, to get out of that. Because you can make a career around it, and he did, and he got big grants, and - M: Yeah, see - I don't know a lot about that - It's probably a pretty good microcosm of what happens in a lot of fields. Can you tell me about that - GIS - what is it - somebody, is it sort of too much focus on the technology - K: Well, every - I've been in graduate school for too long. (laugh) When I was an undergraduate, from '80 to '84, it was the first wave of PCs, and computer learning, and we had computer literacy courses, and I was a philosophy major. But my advisor, who was a Sartrean existentialist was doing an Artifical Intelligence program, so he dragged me into that, and I was his research assistant after I graduated, and so when I started graduate school - the first round - in '86, AI was the sexy thing to do, and everybody was trying to get into that. But for me it was just something we did in order to do philosophy, and to think about what humans were, and how we define ourself differently, our intellegence differently than machine intelligence. And, there was a whole wave of students at that time, who were trying to get into AI work, and Cognitive Science, and in fact, UT - part of the reason I got money to come here was - I was to be a cognitive scientist. The first semester, did all of those seminars, and realized - number one, that most of the students were doing it because they were intrigued, they were captivated by the technology. But, there wasn't within that group, much of a - much insight or concern for what that meant about humans. So there was a wave of people - seeing that they could get jobs - you know, all of the Defense Department money supports Artificial Intelligence work, and so that was the sexy thing to do back in the late '80s, mid-80s; then it morphed into Cognitive Science, and that's still pretty hot - not that there are jobs in it. When I shifted over to Geography, I saw the same thing going on with GIS. Undergraduates see that as a way to get jobs, they see that as the way to be a professional geographer. And this fixation still on computers, the way this technology to define what you are. And yet, that takes so much time to master that technology, that the students don't learn anything about geography. You know. They could just as well be Computer Science majors. So, that technology defines then the parameters of what they learn. And I'm always very skeptical of that process of becoming enamored with the latest gadget, because it'll be out-moded in 5 years. We'll have computers that can do that without having much detailed knowledge of the inner workings of GIS programs. And that's already happening, so, built-in to it is a way of making those careers obsolete. And I think Ken Foote understands that, and Ken, most of his writing has been on some really interesting things in Geography. He had an award-winning book 2 years ago, _Shadowed Ground_, where he - He's always been intrigued with places of disaster, or dark commemoration, and how they're either remembered or forgotten. So he travelled around the country and went to places like Wounded Knee, the Haymarket Riot site in Chicago, and wrote about that. So, to me, those are the more lasting, profound questions, and the - it's always sad to see what happens to - especially undergraduates - they get caught up in that process, and then they come out of that undergraduate experience knowing very little. (M: If you know how to use the tool, it's pretty - ) Yeah, and you know, I can train a monkey to use the tool, in a sense - I don't mean to demean it too much, but, frankly, the - to me, that obsession with tools and the latest gadgets really distracts from the far more important issues and questions of culture and ethics, and the social structures that need to be sustained. Technology won't do that, right? That's - those are human choices that have to be made. So, students we're not training very well to face any of that. They're not equipped to even engage the questions. They know how to make layers on a map, but they don't know any history, they don't know - something that I think is really crucial to understand - any ecology, or ecological theory. And this is just in geography, right, where we're supposed to think about human-land interactions, that's our science, and our - our "social science." So to the extent that technology can being them back to that, it's of interest to me. So at Hornsby Bend we have to do GIS work, so I'm going to try and drag some of the more promising students out of that - you know, let them do - get the GIS experience - but, much like Dick's doing with his course, begin to present these ideas, and force upon them the reality of what it is to learn outside of the context of academia. Where everybody knows the technology is outmoded. I mean, you're - the jobs that the students are getting are just, jobs of exploitation, right - you get someone a couple of years, you train them, but, the employers know that there's not a long-term commitment to those positions. Because the technology's going to change, it's going to move on, and - it's just another kind of factory work, really. You know, everybody here's excited with software and web-work now. And if it's about making money, that's great. But, you know that 10 years from now, we'll look back on this, we'll say, "what an interesting thing... that we were doing!" you know. (M: "We didn't have any perspective at all!") Right. Dick tells a great story - he and I were out to lunch one time - a dinner one time, at Conan's, and they had these placemats with, you know, all these information bits on it, and there was a timeline with the development of computer technology. Well, one of the dates on there was '72 or '73 when, the video-game "Pong" came out. And I'm like, "Wow! I - I didn't realize it was that early that Pong came out!" Cos, you know, my generation, that was the game. I hated it. You know, Pong was the little tennis match. (M: Yes.) And Dick started laughing, and I said, "What're you laughing about?" He said, "My RA's for his genetics research on fruit flies invented it." And what happened was, back in the early 70s they - to do gene sequencing, they had random number generating machines. And, they used those to do all the calculations with a ticker-tape machine to figure out what genes were where and just ran these things and - the ticker-tape would stretch for 30 feet down the hallway. But there were bugs in the program - in the random number generating program, where at times, it would stop being random, it would generate two of the same numbers or sequence number, and they would try to figure out when that happened, and then, figure out why. So these poor - these two poor guys would spend hours crawling on their hands and knees on the floor looking at the tape to find these mistakes. And Dick walked in one day on them and said, "You know, what we always do on the farm, you know, hay-making is really hard work, but you make it fun. You find ways to - so you guys should make it a game!" And they looked at eachother and said, "Hmm." Well, they went into the lab and they hooked up an oscilliscope to it, and the oscilliscope, you know, would run, and then whenever it would hit a random number, it would lock. And they showed it to Dick, and Dick said, "Well, I mean, you're going to have to sit there and watch this thing. What fun is that? Make it do something!" So the next week, they came back and they showed him, and it went back and forth and back and forth, and then it would lock up, and he said, "Okay, well, that's interesting, but, you're still gonna have to sit there!" So they came back the next week and they'd put two little paddles in, so that they could bounce the thing back and forth. Pong. And it was just fascinating to listen to that sequence of - from a very - that's where technology is great, right? There was a technological innovation - and then we make a big to-do about these ridiculous video games out now - (M: you still see the - there's pieces of Pong in every game.) Mm-hmm. Right, yeah, there's - the basic idea's the same. Watching something move across a screen. To me, it's the height of insanity. M: What do you - I think you have a daughter or two, maybe? (K: nope.) It sounded like - (K: Oh! I have - my girlfriend's sister lives with us, now, and we have a two-year-old. Her two-year-old. So yes, we're a commune, now.) I was going to ask what you thought about computers in schools, and video games. K: Well, video games I think are silly, but I mean, kids today are so attuned to staring at the screen and doing things - I'm very concerned with that whole process - at the same time, we just got a $52,000 grant to meet the aid - build this big web interface for Hornsby Bend and the elementary students who we're going to work with, and - (M: Yeah - I saw that was going to be served at the school, too - instead of Angelfire.) Yeah. Oh, yeah, and that Angelfire thing we've got to get rid of. Dick's trying to get a server and we'll put it in his lab, but - And that's another good story, because, two years ago we - Rob Fergus and I decided we needed a web site for Hornsby Bend, and so, in an afternoon, we sat down on Angelfire and put together this web site. And, since that day, we said, we've got to get it off of this thing, because it's a pain in the butt. And we've just been too busy to do that. So this summer - by the end of this summer, it'll be on a UT server, we hope. But now - one of the wonderful things about the web is that you can extend that education. What's sad about that, is we need need to do that because we've so impoverished the educational experience of these students, right? They can't get out of the classroom. We can get them to Hornsby Bend three times a year. Three field trips. But because of the TAAS test, and those weekly "teaks" (sp) that that they have to check off on the way to take that test, to take them out of the classroom would be to put them behind. So what we have to do, to allow them - (laugh) what I think is a fundamental childhood experience of being out in nature, and (M: absolutely) learning science through direct experience - we have to create this web-world for them. They'll still come to Hornsby Bend, but in between, they'll be able to draw on that experience through the web, and then match that up with up "teaks" - the weekly targets that they have to meet - towards that ridiculous TAAS test. So, in once sense, that whole video/online world is useful, but it's only that way because we've screwed up everything else, right. We've locked them in to these sterile buildings and classrooms, we've not allowed them the freedom to learn as humans have learned for thousands of years, and so we try to compensate with these games. And that it takes that to engage a child is - I think it's obsene. Right, and I see this with Sierra - the two-year-old with us now - she had been living in an apartment before coming to live with us, and her mother isn't really into nature, cos she has allergies for everything, but she wants Sierra to learn that. Well, we are - and we have the whole yard filled native plants and herbs and - so she's gotten, in the last month and a half with us, to spend a lot of time outside, tasting things, and smelling flowers, and - And you can see in her a real schizophrenia between wanting to sit down and watch videos, which is a great way to silence her, to engage her, but she sits ther like I used to, as a kid, just - staring. No physical activity involved. And then, taking her outside, and doing the work of teaching her what plants you can touch or not touch, what things you can taste. Really fundamental lessons there. So, the significance of that, I'm still pondering. There are huge things going on there. And I see that with the grade-school students that come out to Hornsby now. Most of them are profoundly disoriented outside of the classroom, outside of walls. Cos they don't spend much time out there. And, it's very sad to see, because they don't - they literally don't know what to do. Disoriented in a very deep sense. "What can I touch or not touch, what tone of voice can I use here, what's real and not real?" Right, I mean, there's a sense that - M: This is at Hornsby Bend? (K: yeah.) They're just - like right when they get out of the bus or something? K: Yeah, well it takes time. The 4th graders, by the third time they visited, began to know how to be in that place. I had some kids come - this girl was probably a 6th grader, her sister was a 5th grader - on Tuesday they came for a tour, and I took them into the greenhouse, we had duckweed growing across the aquatic ponds of the greenhouse, and the girl tried to walk on it. And of course got her shoes all soaked, and she said that she thought it was Astroturf. You know, that impoverishment of experience, that she couldn't even conceptually imagine that was water, and not solid. She learned a great lesson in that moment, but... (pause) M: You're worried about the - you're concerned about the - some of those, not just the technologies, but the way that we're teaching children, we're bringing children up, impoverishing their experience of the natural world - K: Yeah, I think - in the "made world," you know. It's not about having contact with what's traditionally is called "nature," because that dichotomy is just a strange disease that we have that we need to get over, but to the extent that technologies distance us from the fundamental truth that we're biological beings, with limitations - finite beings. To that extent, technology's really dangerous. Because, part of what's happening, I believe, in this century, is a coming to terms with some of the ecological insights that we've had, coming to terms, again, with our biology. And that's what the industrial revolution, and the process of the development of modern science has - it's part of a delusion of that period that we're trying to overcome now. So to the extent that we can use these new technologies to do that, fine, but they're only - again, they're only tools... to understand what is happening - what kind of cultural structure, social structures need to be changed to allow that kind of engagement again with life. That's what's interesting to me. M: I've often wondered about that, how - you know, if there's - it's almost like it's all there - it's all there - the ecology is there, it's a consciousness. And if it's possible for technology to - sort of flip the coin and it could be a positive - have a positive effect on that. K: It could, but all tools are morally neutral (laugh) (M: yeah.) They're just - they're things. And, the challenge is to know the ideas and the values behind the introduction of these things. Most of it, in this culture, is done for profit, right? And so, immediately, to me, it's suspect. So the medical technologies, the Human Genome Project, agricultural technologies, GIS, and GTS, those things are being used in ways that are destructive. Because of course, the way that we set up capitalism here, or it's set us up, is destructive. M: That's a question I've had too - you said that technology is morally neutral; you think it's just - because I've heard folks say that there is no such thing as a morally - almost every technology has some value put in to it. K: It has moral implications, yeah. But that's people; we're the value-makers. It's the - the machines are - until we really do create intelligent machines which - Did Dick give you the Bill Joy article out of _Wired_? (M: I think I've read that one.) Okay. (M: Sure. He doesn't write for _Wired_ very often, does he?) No, no. (M: Sure, yeah, I've read that. We actually were given a copy of that in a TLC class.) Okay. This was a couple of months ago, and it was Bill Joy, and you know who he is, the - (M: yeah.) Bill Joy just saying, "I'm scared shitless." (laugh) "I'm scared." And it was real interesting because, my experience being involved with AI and cognitive science relatively early on - I ran away from there because I was terrified by those guys. I thought that, and I still believe, that to the extent that evil is ignoring the implications of what you do, (M: right.) there's some basic evil involved in that whole development of technology, and unwillingness to think through the implications of what we're doing in the development of these technologies, a resistance to demonstrating any concern for the social impacts of it beyond trumpetting the wonders and joys that it brings to society. Yet all of them are self-serving, right, because they're all - they all make a huge profit off of it. And in that sense, you know, Bill Gates is a deeply evil man, you know? I mean, he's now trying to make up for it, cos they're gonna break up his empire, and his wife, I think, is yelling at him to - "You know, we could probably afford to give a couple billion away..." So, in once sense, I agree, yeah, all of these have moral, social implications, but what we do to try and avoid engaging the really difficuly analysis of what that means, we blame the machines. And, to a certain extent, like genetic modification now, crops and agriculture, the Human Genome Project; there we really should try and slow down the machine development (laugh) so we at least begin to try and come to terms with the implications of it. And that's what Bill Joy's article was about - that he overhears this conversation between a computer scientist and John Searle, the philosopher, at a conference, where they're arguing over what intelligence, intelligent machines will do to us. And of course the science fiction idea is always that they'll just say, "You poor, inadequate, carbon-based units (laugh) need to just be replaced." And, it clicked in his head, that, you know, it's on the verge of becoming reality. That the AI people really see the next ten years, we'll probably have intelligent machines. But - machines that can learn in a robust sense. Then, with the development of nanotechnology, we can create little machines that mimic photosynthesis. Well, if those get loose, they obviously are going to - and they'll mimic it to a much greater efficiency than the 10 percent efficiency that plants have. (gesturing to closeby vine) Well, what happens, then? And then, the Human Genome Project, and the implications of that, and it's an article about that terror that suddenly came over him, and then trying to come to terms with it, and - to balance that initial extreme reaction. But it's a very sobering article written by someone who has made his career around developing new technologies, and is enamored with it. And so he's not saying, "Oh, we've got to stop all of this," it's more, "We've got to really think about what this means!" (M: To think critically about it.) And he's not well equipped to do that, as I read the article. You know, he's really searching for philosophers, and thinkers, and poets, to find a way to speak his fear. Well, those guys have never read anything, right? And so that's why, for me, education is just so critical. M: Well, what kind of education? As you were saying earlier, there's a vocational education, and - K: And that's just to create workers, right. As we define vocational education. But if you look at the origins of vocational education, the kind of John Dewey idea of education, it was to make good citizens, which meant a moral education, education in civics, and then, behind it, was the idea that in all cul - in all civilizations, there are workers, and there are thinkers, and people have to find ways to get a place in that. What we're doing right now at the University is vocational education. And that's depressing to me. M: What do you think the motivation behind that is; what's the relationship between UT and the private sector? Why is it a vocational - (K: I think you know the answer to that question! (laugh)) Well, no, I get a lot of different answers to that. K: Well, it depends if I'm feeling cynical today. (laugh) You know, I - M: I guess, even ideally, what would the - your ideal. What would be the relationship between UT and the community be? To help nourish independent thinking, or civic - K: Yeah, I mean, well. I no longer like speaking in ideals, cos of course that's a way of simplifying the issue. It's not at all a simple thing. The Universities need to think about what their job is. Right now, we know what this University's job is. It's to demonstrate that its students get employed afterwards. Cos that's how we're measured, right? Those rankings, and that kind of game. So it's not as simple as whether Universities need to do something different, right? And yet, in some ways it's very simple, it's choices of professors like the ones you've been talking to, saying, "Well, we're going to teach differently, and I'm going to teach some things that will make these students uncomfortable (laugh) about the choices they're making." So in some sense, the change is a real simple thing to do, but if you try to think through why a University like UT is set up the way it is, everything is implicated, because nothing is disconnected, right? (M: yes.) The basic ecological insight is, everything is connected. And that's a really old philosophical understanding that we conveniently forgot; in the 1600s, we decided we'd just ignore that, and try doing it differently. So - M: So, you feel like the institutional set-up is the way it is, because of - institutional set-ups everywhere, I guess. It's not like UT could change very simply without - K: Well, I don't know, cos see - growing up at the end of the Cold War (laugh), in a - my father was career military, so - I had no hope for relatively peaceful social change between the U.S. and the Soviet Empire, and that happened; and, I lived in Hungary from '90 to '92 as a Peace Corps volunteer, and I watched it happen all around me, and so that gave me a lot of hope about the resilience and willingness of people to change. It was not some Utopian process, it still isn't, but what I learned in that time was to not assume that anything is impossible, nor that anything is as simple as, "Well, we just change." But, all of my academic training up to that point was to think in terms of big change; we had to reform education, challenge the institutions - and, at one level, of course, we have to do that, but the change is always surprising, and from a direction that is unexpected, and the most significant changes come from the ground up, and they're incremental, at varying rates. You know, the change that happened in '89 in Central and Eastern Europe, was one that had begun - like in Hungary, in '56, with the revolution there. And it it had just been gradually reforming itself. And even more than that, the way that we talk about these periods as some discrete unit is just a language of convenience to employ historians, or political scientists. Because of course, there are no periods, it's all continuous. And to live through that, in those years, was a real education about social change. Cos I got there when the Communists were still in power at the local level, the Russian army was still in Hungary, there was still the Soviet Union across the border, on the river that I was working on; so if I floated across the middle of the river, I was in the Soviet Union, and back to Hungary, and - And you know, the Russian soldiers were on the street, and they were just guys, they were just 18-year-olds, and the border guards were 18-year-olds, and it was all a joke to them, just as, for my generation, this - Reagan administration was a joke. And so, there's a diversity and complexity there that humbles me and makes me very (laugh) shy of saying I understand anything! Geography's been a real help because one of the key concepts in cultural, human geography is the notion of place, and what places are, as opposed to "spaces." You know, the old Newtonian stuff that leads us to build monstrosities like this (pointing to a bank building across Congress Ave.) as opposed to structures like these old structures, right, that Capital Commerce building is an old jewelry store (points to a small building at 9th and Congress). I mean, look at that! Well, that - and look at the building next to it that's empty now - M: Are you familiar with Wes Jackson? (K: yes.) I discovered him last fall - it was the Origins of Agriculture, but we could research anything we wanted pertaining to agriculture. K: _Becoming Native to this Place_, yeah. M: Yeah, a lot of his thinking stayed with me, I know. K: Well, you should read Wendell Berry. M: Yeah, it seemed like they had a lot of connections. K: And the Dick Richardson connection is Wes and Dick were grad students together at North Carolina. M: Wow, he didn't say that; I think I talked to him about that book. K: Well, he doesn't say stuff at first, and he and Wes have known eachother since the early 60s, and the work that he's done, I think is significant, the Land Institute up in Kansas, and the - but, there are no original ideas in what he's done, he learned a lot from Wendell Berry, and really Wendell is the thinker of the two. Wes is a geneticist and a strong personality, and you need some of that to stand up and say some of the stuff he says. But if you sit down and look through what Berry's done, it's really someone who much more deeply has engaged the implications of place, and the role of agriculture and the _Unsettling of America_, the book that Berry wrote in the 70s, is really insightful about about what we've done to the economic structure in the U.S. I think Wes learned from that, and built himself around that. M: It seemed almost - I've never read Wendell Berry, but - It seemed almost like when I was reading Wes, he was just tapping into these things that are kind of perennial. (K: yeah.) And so, it wasn't like, even Wendell Berry's ideas were "original" - (K: Oh, right, exactly, yeah.) And I thought a lot about - How can - I'm sure there's - there's got to be an analogy to "perennial polyculture" in things besides agriculture. (K: yes. very good, yeah!) Integrities to the way things are made, or even in an institution; I don't know what they are, but it was like it was a good thinking experiment. K: Well, but yeah, that's a good, that's right. And Berry would agree with you. He's not - he's telling a very old story. And as a poet he know that, and a lot of his essays are built around looking at Spencer, looking at Shakespeare, looking at - he does a lot on the Greeks, and Homer. You know, think of the story of Oddyseus, right? Of journeying home - he was trying to find his home. And this is the theme in Berry of how do we find home? How do we make home? And to the extent that technologies allow us to do that - he has a famous essay, Berry does, on why he doesn't use a computer. And he got into big trouble with the feminists because in it, his wife does the typing up of his manuscripts and they jumped all over him for exploiting his wife, and he wrote this stunning rebuttal of "how dare you think my wife is that stupid?" Which, I mean, they've always worked as a team in doing this stuff, and if you go into his writings, it's always there. And his point - the whole notion of being a Luddite, which, he and I both are - what the Luddites rebel against was not the technology, it was how it was being deployed. It was being deployed to destroy their communities, and they understood that. And the only thing they could truly fight against were the machines, and what Berry was trying to say was, we've got to choose how we deploy this technology, and the criteria of profit, and what is profitable and efficient, as the criteria of choice is anti-human, inhuman. You have to find rationales that are based on human terms and human values and human concerns, and for Berry that is the community, and health, and wholeness; and so he uses the small family farm, which he knows best, and I know best, having grown up on one, as a model - you could substitute models of polycultures - the neighborhood in a city, right? What a functional neighborhood is, as opposed to a dysfunctional one, and then how do you make Congress Avenue a functional one? Well, look what Little City did - but they had to fight to get - you know there was an ordinance that they couldn't put these chairs on the sidewalk. And to do that transforms the - well, we've taken the street back. But we still fight with these cars. What are the things that you have to do to make spaces places. To build in multifunctionality to allow for human freedom to express itself as opposed to defined spaces where you can only do certain things. The classroom - right? We all know how to go into a classroom, sit down in a chair, and be quiet. We don't leave our chairs until we're allowed to, we don't speak until we've learned to put up our hands - that kind of indoctrination is terrifying to me. When I taught in Hungary, I taught in a high school; walked in the first day - all the students jumped to attention. And said in Hungarian, "Good morning, teacher, sir." And part of my job was to teach American culture, so, I said, "OK, I'm gonna walk back into the room, and I want all of you to be making noise and playing," and they couldn't do it. And so it took us months to get them to learn to ignore me! (laugh) I mean that kind of - (M: American culture? You were teaching them - ) Yeah, it's part of what Peace Corps does. And you're going to try and do projects, but, primarily what you're doing - it's a cross-cultural exhange; you're learning that culture's culture, and you're sharing your culture. In that sense, it's a great subversive program, because, what happens of course, is all the Americans - most of the Americans that go through Peace Corps, come back with a pretty deep dislike of American culture (laugh) because they realize how shallow it is, and how rich the human experience of other cultures is. Where, life still turns around family and food, and conversation - it doesn't turn around technology. Those people are not sitting around talking on a cellphone or thinking about how to get a cellphone, or their pager going off, or their computer. Since there isn't that, you have to actually talk to people and create your own entertainment. So, Peace Corps, I - even though I have profound misgivings about the whole organization, having been part of it for too long - the subversive side of it is great. And I've watched it change - (M: That's something, yeah, I can see being really transformative.) Yeah. (M: Never actually heard of Peace Corps in Eastern Europe, though.) I was in the first group, back in '90. They sent us into Hungary - what was then Czechoslovakia (sp), and Poland. And now they're everywhere. In the "Stans" in Central Asia; we call it the "Stans;" Uzebekastan... All across Russia. M: Have you ever heard of Paul Agre - I think that's what he's called - he writes something called the "Red Rock Eater"? He - I just read something by him that - it was all about why he left AI, and he's turned - engineer turned social scientist. I'll see if I can dig it up - (K: Yeah, yeah, give me a reference.) You'd probably enjoy it. K: Well, it's - having been a philosopher turned social scientist, and before that, a farmer, it - to me - and to get back to your point about polycultures, that's what what we need to educate for, that, that we educate for specialization, and narrowness of knowledge, is the most dangerous thing in this culture. And that's what the Universities have to address, and to wrap it up in Liberal Arts; fine, you know. I'm the embodiment of Liberal Arts, really, and I was a philosophy/ English literature double-major, with poly-sci minors and did the first two years of Environmental Science. That kind of freedom to jump between disciplines and encouragement to follow what you want to know; and then they give you a label at the end - OK. That's what we have to find a way to do, and that's part of what I want to do at the Center for Environmental Research, is to take students, and just rip them out of here, and throw them into a context where nobody cares whether you're a social scientist (laugh) or an engineer or a poet, or whatever; it's, it's "what do you do, what can you accomplish here? what do you know?" You know, "Great, you're a political science major - I don't know what you know, show me!" M: You mean, undergrads, that you'd do this with? I mean, what what would that be - is it generally self-designed, or team-oriented? K: We don't know, the - and yeah, this is something I wanted to talk to you about; we just got this EPA grant on Tuesday, that Dick, Pat, my girlfriend Elizabeth, and I wrote last Fall. It's a good story, this is - I'll tell you the story. Back in '96, Elizabeth, who's a - just finished as an undergraduate - she and I, and another friend, who worked at Water/Wastewater, created a program called Enviromentors. Elizabeth runs a program called the Austin Youth Riverwatch Program. It's with at-risk kids, and kids that technically aren't at-risk; as she points out, all high school students are at-risk, it doesn't matter - (side ends) K: There you go. And the Enviromentors is our little way to give students from Geography an opportunity to help. I mean, we did a Web search and we didn't find anyone else using that name, so, that worked - we did that in '96, '97, and a number of undergraduates went through that. Two of them ended up in the Peace Corps, in Tanzinia, and then, at the same time, Elizabeth was working for a Health and Human Services program, that employs kids in the summer - it's called, now, the Work-based Learning Program, and so, we started that at Hornsby Bend in '97, and one of the students that came - UT students that came out of Enviromentors did that that summer, and we started building trails. And that was also at-risk kids. So now that we've moved to the point where I'm employed out at the CER at Hornsby Bend, we decided, "OK, let's try and get a grant, and move that whole program to the CER, and pay UT in turns to work on some of our projects at Hornsby, and they have have to turn around and teach high school and elementary school students what they're learning, in the same moment." Which is what we all have to do in the real world; there's no break between learning and teaching, right? That whole artificial thing. So last December we spent days and days crafting this proposal and finally got it sent in, and didn't hear anything, and then we - Dick called, and they were like, "Oh, our funding's all screwed up, we may not even do this this year, and - But you had a really good proposal, and we'll call you," and then, last week, he got a call that said, "Well, we sent you a rejection letter, but ignore it, because we think we can come up with the money, but we don't know." So we're dangling on this, and on Tuesday, Maureen McReynolds, my boss at the Wastewater Utility, got a rejection, with our evaluation, saying, "Sorry, no money." (M: That was the one to ignore, though?) We didn't know. She didn't know! And so she e-mails Dick saying, you know, "We blew it," and Dick said, "Well, maybe that's the one we're supposed to ignore. I'll call them tomorrow - " And he was real busy, and that night, he went down to the office at Patterson, and there's a FAX waiting for him, saying, "We funded you." And he runs upstairs, and there's a phone message - he hadn't looked at any of this stuff, and at 11 at night, he calls me at home, saying, "We got the money!" And so now, we have to scramble and put together an internship program; what we had proposed was 3 interns a semester, and then 6 for the Summer. And primarily, students that came out of his Natural Resource Management course, because that's a project-based learning course. Now, we're sequenced where we're going to have to start this Fall, Spring, and then do Summer, which is much better, actually. And we have to figure out how we plug in interns this Fall. But what those interns will do will work on 3 different project areas. This is what we proposed in it - urban sustainability and what the treatment facility does out there, and that person would work with Jodie Slagel (sp), an engineer who's a partner in this; one will work with our bird observatory, and avian biodiversity, urban avian biodiversity; and then one would work with me on our restoration projects, and - but we have latitude on what that is. And it'll be 10 hours a week, a paid internship; and I've got to go in and look, cos Elizabeth set the salaries, so they're to be adequate, cos we had not idea. And so, through this year, we'll have - in the 6 - we want to do 6 differet students, to get that experience, and then 6 next summer. M: And this internship would - you'd pull kids from UT and then - where do the - how do the high school students get there - K: OK, and the high school students will be students in Elizabeth's Austin Youth Riverwatch program. And then, the elementary school students are the Hornsby Elementary school students who come to Hornsby as a field lab. So, a big part of the internship is going to be developing the Web resources that will help teach those students. And what we want to do is to try and build an online infrastructure that shares the information that the undergraduates are learning, and then facilitates communication between all of those groups. And beyond that, we have some models - cos one of Dick's Ph.D students teaches now at Berkeley, and in Berkeley, she teaches 4th-graders, and is part of an online mentoring science education program. (M: I think I - I think he told me about that.) Yeah. And so we can take some of that model, learning technologies from there; we can make up our own; and then, we have money in the budget that - the elementary school students come 3 times a year, and this year, we'll work with both 4th and 5th grade classes, so that's a total of 200 students. And then, Elizabeth's students - we put money in the budget for field trips each semester, and then in the summer. And the UT students, what we'll ask of them, is to go along on those trips, so that they have both that experience interacting, and then, Elizabeth's students test water quality in the river at Hornsby, so they'll get that context. But beyond that, we're not quite sure how it's all to work. Cos this was an idea back in December of, "OK, maybe this is how it works." Well, now, Hornsby's a different place, and we've moved, and so we have to think, how does this all interact, and then, what kind of student do we want? We definitely want an Engineering student, to corrupt them (facetious), get a Biology student, and then, Geography, or some Liberal Arts, to try and get that spread. So it's something to keep in mind; we'll keep you posted on what it becomes. (M: it really sounds fantastic.) Yeah - (M: If you get some kids that are willing - they want that.) Yes. That's always been the key at Hornsby. (M: They can't be just like, "Oh, alright, student internship.") None of those will make it through the selection process, and the way that we've done that in the past, is, we'll bring students out, and stand them in the odor plume from the thickening building, and they'll run away, at that point. (laugh) Well there - I'm serious - that's one of the ways that we do it, because that's always an indication that this person doesn't understand, you know. It - I love that about Hornsby Bend, because it's a fundamental reality of human existence, and if you don't want to deal with that - (M: Yeah, I've got to visit; If I manange - somebody with a car!) Yeah. Well, and that's part of what we're figuring out now, is transportation for the students, so that students without cars aren't eliminated from doing it. But, it's not that we want people to say, "Oh, I love that smell." It's more, it's like taking a science student, a biology student out on their first field trip, and if it's too hot for them, they're not going to make it as a biologist, you know? It - what we've deliberately set up at Hornsby for all the student experiences is hurdles of frustration to get over, to work with kids. These kids don't want to work with you. "I mean, you're a white rich kid - why should I work with you? Why should I believe that you'll even come back next week - there's been others before who've done that." All the kids have to go through that. And then, in terms of projects, it's collaborative. It's not something where we lead anyone around by the hand; again, because we don't have time. And we want them to understand, this is what you're gonna confront in jobs, and if you're gonna be successful, you've got to get in and not expect to be led around by the hand. And if you develop those skills, you're gonna do fine. And that's what Dick's course is aimed at. And that's what we were already doing at Hornsby, so when Dick and I met, we just clicked. And I took his course as a graduate student, but it was fun, because I'd already done that course about ten years before, and so, right away, it was, "How can we collaborate on these things?" My friend Rob Fergus also took the course at the time I did, and then the next year, we supervised teams - well, the next two years, teams from that course - Elizabeth took that course, and she led a team, and - (M: I think that that's how I got your name - ) Okay. (M: Is it Elizabeth Welsh?) Yes. (M: Right, and you both have sort of a testimonial - "This is a great class.") Right. Yeah, and you need to talk to Elizabeth, cos her perspective is a perspective from an undergraduate, but she's - (M: You and your friend Rob were team leaders - ) Yeah. And that course has drawn a lot of Geography graduate students into it. And it's finding ways of being subversive that is the challenge, because, most students need almost to be tricked into learning, right? Cos by the time you're a freshman at University, you've had 12 years of indoctrination into how to play the game of learning, of educating. So you almost have to re-learn how to learn. M: I just saw an article in the _New York Times_ that just made me really sad; it was that kids in 6th grade are already practicing for the SAT, and - the whole impetus behind that was that, that's what you've got to do to be a - you know, a successful, have a successful career and that kind of thing, and they're 12 years old, 11 years old - ! (K: Well, it's what happens in Hungary and England - ) I think that that's - Yeah, it's not - people come to University with all these preconceptions of what it's for, that - K: Yeah. I used to get in trouble with my students at UT, as a TA, cos, for the discussion section, I would always point out to them that they'd already blown it, you know. (laugh) Cos if you're not at Harvard or Yale or Stanford, Princeton, what's the point? And I had two - one year I did that, and I had two guys in there who went to Phillips-Exeter, a private school, and had chosen to come to UT, and they were pissed at me! (laugh) They said, "We went to Phillips-Exeter; we chose to come here, cos we wanted ..." It was fun. But, you can't win that game; there's no - (pause) M: Yeah, I can - that's why I definitely can understand that - I think was Peg takes a different tack, but, she wouldn't call it - she would use different words. I think that that's kind of what she's about, too - sort of tricking kids into looking at what they're doing differently, and, so that was - And it's actually, like Natural Resource Management, it sounded like, you go in there, you think it's, maybe it'll be cool, on the - I've heard a lot about it, actually - on the surface it looks like it's, you know, one thing, though it really seems like a process of just discovering values, and working in teams, and - K: And Dick is delightful because the technology is one of the huge barriers in that course, and I think it's similar for Peg's course. And Dick has profound faith in, almost a religious faith in those computer technologies, and I have a well-grounded skepticism of it. But each year he goes in with this hopefulness of, "OK, we've figured it out, how the Online Learning Record's gonna work," and this year, they just used Office 2000, it was all integrated, and so the first month of that course, the students just seem deeply pissed off at Dick for acting like this works, and it's all screwed up. And this year, I had to come in and intervene; he was off one Thursday night, so he asked me to come in and lead the class, and - we were about a month into the course, three weeks into the course, and I walked in and I said, "This course sucks, doesn't it?" They all just went, "We hate it! He told us to do this and it won't work and it's all screwed up and I don't know how to do it!" And what's good about that, it is, it's a very real experience, right? Right now at Hornsby, we have all these recycled Macintoches, cos we had no computers; so I pulled them out of the dumpster, cos the City threw them all away, cos they switched over to Dell. And Rob Fergus and I have for weeks been trying to get them hooked up and set up, and they just are horrible, you know. We haven't used Macintoshes for so long, and none of our printers want to work with it, and we tried to set up a scanner on one, and it just ignores it, and that's reality. And it's not - it's what you do with failure, it's not failure that you should be scared of. With Dick's course, it's just built in naturally; it's not a pedagogical device at all (laugh), he just can't help himself, cos he's so hopeful, and - usually Pat plays the role of the "good cop," coming in and mothering the class, through that process - So yeah, it's a course that can be real transformative with students. And then others just give up. And, so be it, what can you do? But it's that percentage that start to flourish under that kind of structure that gives you a lot of hope. So, I don't know Peg's course, I've never really looked at it. M: I think she's - I know that her Learning Records - that's where OLR's come from (K: Yeah.) I think she might have been the first at UT; (K: yeah.) Though it's that totally different subject matter, but it's that - the learner will - kind of go in the direction that he or she needs to. (K: right.) And it's not - and it's also, like you said, learning from failures and there's no penalty for making a mistake. And that model is just about developing in a lot of different dimensions. (mention of _Cognition in the Wild_) K: Well, yeah, much of Cog-sci theory is the search for metaphors, and that's - the AI project I was working on was teaching the computer to write poetry. And we chose that deliberately, because of the conceit behind it, you know, that humans are the creators of metaphors, and poetry the embodiment of that, and, if you could get a computer to write meaningful, seemingly profound poetry, well, what does that mean? And, it wasn't that we - the goal wasn't to get a computer to write poetry, the goal was to understand what the hell poetry is, and metaphors, and how humans deploy them. And, Cog-sci is a lot of that; of trying - you know, Marvin Minsky in the '80s wrote _Society of Mind_, and tried to use that as a way of talking about how the brain works, but it's always trapped, because behind all of it is the mechanistic metaphor, and of course, we're not machines, that - coming to terms with that has been really hard for something that calls itself a science. And - right? Cos - so then, it's fun to watch these books spin out, there've been countless books like that, "OK, here's the metaphor that's gonna capture it." And, much like you were saying about Berry - it's already been done; it's fun to watch, cos they revert to metaphors that were used long ago to talk about what humans are. And I think the challenge is to integrate that very old, ancient understanding with the new way that we talk about minds, and brains, and who we are. And that's fine, that I like. M: Do you work with underpriveleged children? Do they have - computers at the school, or - K: Very limited; in fact, Rob Fergus and I are trying to get a Dell Foundation grant done by tomorrow (laugh) to try and get them some; they'll have - especially Dell Valley, they may have a computer lab. One for the school, and then they'll have one computer in the classroom. So there's hardly any way to get the students on a computer. So in this grant, we're going to ask for 2 or 3 computers; or, Rob had a pretty good idea last night - one computer and a projector for each classroom. Because, you know, we probably won't get enough computer - you know, when it seats 3 kids at every computer, it still doesn't really work, or if - you know, every 2 kids has a computer, it still - so we'll probably ask for a projector; but yeah, it's very limited. And in some ways, it's just a sad joke, because now the hope in improving education is getting computers in the classroom; well, no... (laugh) That's not - that just gets computers in a classroom. It has to be rethinking what we want for education. And, but it still is a bottleneck when working with kids from disadvantaged schools. Cos even if you get the computers into those schools, it's not enough, because they don't pay and retain teachers good enough to use them well. They don't have administrators who are far-sighted enough to keep ahead of the technology, and then, they come from families where that's - there's so much distraction going on at home, if they have a home, or anything that we would recognize as a home, that they have no energy leftover to learn. So that - there's a very deep process at work, right. And it's very discouraging at times. And it makes you really angry. In a city that's incredibly rich, now. (M: 22,000 millionaires.) And millions of sport-utility vehicles. M: Do you see things like access to internet, access to education - some inequities in Austin? Are those - I think you might have a different perspective on that, because there's, you know - the 'digital divide' issue; for some people, it's as simple as, "give everybody access," that's what the solution is; but I don't know - it's an answer to one way of phrasing the problem. K: Yeah, the "digital divide." You know, we love alliteration! That's - I'm guilty of that too. We call the the 4th grade program the "Living Lab." And we typed it up, we did a 'net search on it, and there were about 50 of them across the country! (laugh) "Living Labs." So any - if it's alliterative, choose another name. But, the digital divide is another oversimplification, yeah. I mean, the divides are not about information; the divides are about opportunities. You can put as many computers as you want out there, and make no difference. Talk about divides, talk about black and white, and hispanic and black, and white and hispanic. There's nothing new behind that divide, and computer's ain't gonna solve that. And then the divide between rich and poor, and all that this digital stuff has done is to make that even more extreme. And you see that in Austin. Elizabeth deliberately takes her kids, and drives through West Austin, to show them, and they always say, "Man, these are really neat, big houses, but, where are the people? (laugh) I wouldn't want to live over here, I mean, there're no people out!" (laugh) And then you go into the eastside and down where we live, and people are hanging out; that, to them, is community; over there, there's nothing, just rich houses. So they get it. But how to have the rich address that, I don't have much hope in it. M: I think, when you were talking about neighborhoods, and dysfunctional neighborhoods, I realized I grew up in a dysfunctional neighborhood, in the suburbs of Houston (K: Oh my God.) I don't know if you've ever been to Houston. (K: Oh yeah.) The suburbs of Houston, so, for a lot of reasons I fell in love with Austin, but, you can walk around and see your neighbors, you can walk to the grocer, you can walk to the laundry; there's places where people can have that, and - K: Yeah, I love Austin, and I chose to come here, and to come back here, and now, to do this crazy thing I'm doing, which is really a crazy thing to do; but it looks like we'll pull it off, it really scares me! (laugh) Because, I was happy with failure, you know, and I just - Austin is a great city to live in, because there are those communities. My favorite Austin story that sort of sums up South Austin, where I live - one of the students - one the first EnviroMentor UT students was an older guy, a mature undergraduate, as they call them! My age; former drug addict/alcoholic, from Long Island. I come from the East Coast, so Chris and I could actually use appropriate swear words. And, Chris came in one day and he told me this story, he said, "Man, I totalled my truck - my truck got totalled last night, down - " He was in the Zilker neighborhood, which is where Elizabeth grew up - and he said, "But it was so cool. I'm going through this intersection, and this guy just smacks and spins my truck around; I end up wedged on the sidewalk, and I'm sitting there, and I'm OK. And I get out of the truck, and a guy comes running out of his house, and he says, 'Man, are you OK? Are you OK?'" And Chris said, "You know, in that moment, I realized, 'I'm OK, you know, I'm clean, I got no drugs to try and hide in the truck now,'" cos in the past he'd have accidents and he'd have to get his stash out of the truck, right? And he said, "You know, I was kind of in shock, and I was telling this guy this stuff, you know? And he misunderstood; he said, 'You mean you got stuff in the truck? Here, I'll clean it out before the cops get here! Just tell me where it is, I'll hide it in my house!'" (laugh) And Chris said, "You know what? That's South Austin." (laugh) But it is! It is, I mean, that's - that's part of why I like the city and living in those neighborhoods. But there're huge problems, and there're huge inequities, and, right now it's - when Austin's in this boom-cycle, or Houston, those are even more stark. And it's, I think, good to live around that, because it, you can't delude yourself that things are better that they are. To stay close to that, for me, has always been really important. M: One, actually, a neat function - and it's kind of - there's a lot of paradoxes to it, and contradictions, but, TLC's also got a couple of interns working with Human Code; have you ever heard of it? It's just down the block - a couple of them are working for them - that's a software complany/education/instructional technology kind of stuff (K: Okay.) - On Austin FreeNet, and that's - you know, to me, it's a start. You know, it's a wealthy, booming economy kind of giving back something - it's to get more people on computers, but - it's a start, you know. K: Yeah, when we - one of the first FreeNets was in Southeastern Ohio; I have a Masters from Ohio University, so - some of the folks I knew down there started the FreeNet, and - that's a great idea - any way to be subversive (laugh) is good, and - but again, that's just a way to use computers and to share information; so that's a component of it, but, when I see Human Code or Dell funding homeless shelters, I'll feel a little more comforting; funding neighborhood gardens, or - And there was a great exchange on NPR - they had Ted Turner - I heard this one morning - it was one of those West Coast, high-technology - think-about-what-we're-doing-with information technology and communications, and they had, I forget which high-tech guru billionaire, and Ted Turner. And the high-tech guru billionaire got up and said, you know, "What we need is to support Freenets and computers in classrooms, information technology access, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and it will really help, and we're doing that." And Ted Turner got up (laugh), and this is just great (laugh), he got up and said, "You know what, all you high-tech guys, I think you're full of shit!" (laugh) He said, "The day that you put money into agriculture, is the day I'll think about listening to you. The day that you start building schools, is the day I'll start listening to you. All you guys talk about is ways to sell your goddamned computers!" And he's doing this in part, to laugh at himself, cos he's - but I like that about Ted Turner, I mean he's an idiot, in some ways, but, I mean there's been some stuff that maybe Jane Fonda taught him, (laugh) and he's bought up millions of acres in the West and he's putting buffalo back on them - but it was lovely; the exchange that went on - cos then the high-tech guy got up and said, "Well, yeah, I agree with you, I mean, we need to do more or that," Ted Turner got back up and said, "Okay, you want to do some stuff? Here's some stuff that you can do. I mean, we all are here, rich as hell, and we're telling poor people we're gonna help them. They know we aren't. The day we start doing stuff that changes that fundamentally - that's the day that they'll trust us." And that's how I feel about it. You know, and that's why I'm at a sewage plant, cos it anchors you in some really fundamental ways - we grow crops there, we deal with the waste of the city, and we're in the poorest section of Travis County. Alright. All right. Let's work from here, and what can you do from here, that starts to change lives and practices and how does information technology fit into that, you know? But yeah, I think that most of what high-tech industry has done is self-serving. And it's hopeful that there are people within it that are trying to change within that culture. But I'm just real skeptical of it. M: There's a lot of intertia. (laugh) (K: That's a good way - ) I definitely think that it's something that - I mean, there's plenty of - I've met plenty of just basically "green geeks," for instance, (K: yeah.) but there's just inertia of aligning the values with actions. K: Well, it's (garble) to be able to make - my brother-in-law has a software company up in Boston, and his employees coming in right out of college - he's got to pay them 60-80 thousand to get good people. And he started this from nothing; he did it as a way - he was up at the University of Chicago, and it was a way to pay the bills on the side, and then, there were some contracts, and then all of a sudden, he's running a company. And so Dong Tsu (sp) is always - and he likes doing it, I mean he likes playing with code, and so that's satisfying to him - but the whole weird - he told me a couple weeks ago about this, about the sociology of that world, and it's always really unnerving to him. His mother came to the U.S. from Korea with nothing; she grew up with nothing. And so, the stuff that we can get with the money now doesn't really interest him. Having something interesting to do is what it's been about, but he said, for folks coming in now, it's about the 60-80 thousand dollars in stock options. And so he finds it really hard to find people to hire who - to whom - that's incidental to doing interesting work. There's inertia there, and there's expectation, and then the whole economy's being structured around it, so even those corporate leaders don't have a choice about what they do or don't do. Because the game must be played. We must stay in this economic expansion in the glorious ag now, it's about the 60-80 thousand dollars in stock options. And so he finds it really hard to find people to hire who - to whom - that's incidental to doing interesting work. There's inertia there, and there's expectation, and then the whole economy's being structured around it, so even those corporate leaders don't have a choice about what they do or don't do. Because the game must be played. We must stay in this "economic expansion in the glorious age." M: Well, that's a whole other dimension, there's - you were speaking about ethical and social implications, but work enjoyment and - K: Well, Wendell Berry's phrase is 'find good work.' And the Buddhists have the idea of 'right livelihood.' (M: right.) And that's the goal. You find something that is right for you to do. And it's an old Greek notion - Aristotle - to do things the right way, at the right time, at the right moment, means to be virtuous, and there isn't anything about - there isn't any of that in the education process or - that vocational process. A "vocation" - a large animal vet - my brother-in-law's father that I grew up working for - Doc always talked about his job as a vet was his "vocation," the farm was his "avocation." And of course, what he lived for was his avocation. And what you try to do is put those together to be happy. And he had done that. And that was a really deep lesson to me, to see, "Oh, okay - there's something to aim at." Cos my father didn't have that - cos he just - military offered a career, and you go and do it, and it was good career, and good retirement, but he - you know, suffered a stroke, and lived out a miserable existence at the end of his life, cos he did something he hated. (M: right.) How do you find a way to do something that you love, and make a living from it? And then do it - M: I think that's what a lot of high-tech people are really trapped in - I mean, there are folks that are - like your friend that just loves coding; it doesn't matter if he's making money or not (laugh), but there's a lot of people just poured into high-tech cos that's where the money is. It's not like they're really compelled towards doing quality work. K: And that's easy, seductive, and there are pathways into that now, but again, this is an educational failing - what we try to give students are those career pathways, right? And it's good that people learn that, but that needs to be coupled with: okay, there's all these career pathways - that's the easy part - now you've got to choose what works for you. Don't choose it because these guys make the most money. To get that message through is the challenge. And it's always been - for me, it's been really a struggle resisting the academic career pathway, because that's been repeatedly offered to me. And what always bothered me about it is that it was almost too easy. That struggle was so much a part of the learning, and to just sit back and follow an easy route through is just not something that is satisfying. (M: And academic like, teaching at a University?) Yeah. It - you'll get that too, right? You're gonna come out of University, you'll probably have pretty good grades, you've done this kind of innovative program - well the option open to you is graduate school, and if you don't go to graduate school, then what are you doing? (M: right.) Elizabeth just went through that; she graduated with honors in Geography; all around her she watched her peers head off to graduate school; and the professors are sort of looking at her, saying, "Well what are you gonna do now?" Meaning - "what graduate school are you gonna go to?" And fortunately, I'm around, and Dick and Pat are around, saying to her, "Elizabeth, you run your own environmental program. You don't have to prove anything - you can go to graduate school anytime! That's why they're going to graduate school; to get to that point of doing what they want to do - you've already done it." It was really hard on her ego to not take those steps. And that pressure is on any good student. That's why a lot of pretty bad graduate students end up at programs. M: I think that - I did something similar with undergrad - I didn't go in immediately and - I went in kicking and screaming, because I didn't know what else to do, but then I took four years off after the first - so I think I have a much different perspective than most of my classmates. K: Is it disconcerting, in a classroom? (M: You mean with age?) Yeah. M: No, the age is not the - has not been a - (K: With experience level, and maturity, and - ?) Yeah, yeah, I can see outside of it. And I think having gone and done some other work, makes a big difference. I don't think it's a maturity thing; I mean, maybe it's a maturity thing, but it's also just having been out of school. A lot of people are just - they're students for the first 23 years of their lives. Or they're - I think we don't stop learning, but - learning in certain ways. K: Yeah, I think, ideally, coming out of high school, there should be two years of enforced community service (laugh) you know. Yeah, and so, then they can go on. Just to have some of those life-lessons that help you when you get back in there, to make choices about - M: One thing that really helped is that I taught pre-school for awhile, and it's - you know, I really - I feel like it's - University is a blessing, and it's a luxury - but I can imagine just teaching pre-school afterwards. And I don't think that too many people have that luxury. (K: No, I doubt that.) It's supposed to a step up, or something. So I don't have as much attachment - there's also the time away that helped. K: Well, what do you want to figure out at University, what's the question? M: This is it, really; I mean, this project - I just kind of came into it through a lot of synergy, and so it feels like where I'm supposed to be. This interviewing process has been almost - more - I almost wish that I could design it into the program itself - just being exposed to a lot of different points of view. It's pretty intensive. K: Have you read Studs Terkel? Studs Terkel's stuff on working? Studs is a famous Chicago report who has written these incredible books on oral history. His most famous one was "Working." Oh, he went out and interviewed people about their jobs, working-class people, and just put down what they told him. But, beautiful, beautiful books; and so, what you're doing is very much, that oral history model of Studs Terkel, and he trained people like Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers comes out of hero-worship of Studs Terkel. (laugh) And you should check out some of his stuff. And he did - there's a wonderful oral history of veterans of World War II, on what their experience was, before and after the war - and he doesn't - I mean, he's a progressive politically, but he just lets people speak. For me, when I was at University, and found those books, it was just stunning to me. Cos you could listen to those voices - of people that I knew. My father was a veteran of World War II, so reading that book was like listening to the stories of his friends all over again. And what Terkel is really good at is letting those voices speak, and reveal the complexity of the experience of working, of war. And I think that's the same case with trying to figure out the motivation of people who want to learn, and do that for you. There's no simple answer behind that, no simple story behind it. M: Oh yeah. I have a set of specific questions to ask, but they're very broad - I wonder, "maybe this is stuff that is not on folks' minds?" And so it's been really interesting to find - I mean, you start from one point - "technology - how it's effecting culture and society - " and, I've had great conversations. K: Everything's connected, so. What's exciting to me, is I think there's a real change occuring. It's indeterminate right now, but when you get someone like me, working with Dick Richardson, Peg Syverson, some of the students that've come out, a sewage engineer like Jodie Slagel; all of us talking about the same stuff - clearly there's something happening. And around that I build a couple shreds of hope. M: I feel a big part of TLC is having these conversations. It's not that there's - you know, in the Computer Science department, say, or - and it sounds like Geography, to a large extent, also - has those conversations, but there they are a little more focused. Like, say, Computer Science - K: Well, it's a known squat, right? And your program is something that is forming itself. And there's a - you know, an Urban Issues program, too - where, the conversation is going on. M: Yeah, I've wondered about that, too - what kind of connections there could be there. And I don't know too much about it yet. There's so much to research! (laugh) K: Well, that tells you that you're on the right track; there are all these connections and richness. M: Oh yeah. I just know - I basically know - in the whole - you know, "organized" level, there's no connections within the University, yet - there's many friendships, of course - K: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about interdisciplinary exchange. (M: Working in collaborations, and what could come from that.) But see, the funding structures aren't set up around collaboration, right? And that's why there's a resistance to them, from deans, and chairmen; you know - graduate students are not encouraged to jump across disciplines; we just do it in spite of what they say, and - now, for me, I'm starting to interact with the University as a pseudo-University entity; this research center is also UT; well, right away, the counsel I'm getting is, "You know, Provost can't give any money - you've got to work with department chairs and individual professors in different disciplines to get money to funnel in." Which, fortunately, I don't really need to do, but, you could see how that would reinforce the same structures. (M: right, yeah.) And, you don't get advanced - you don't get paid for doing any interdisciplinary work - you don't. You get penalized for that. Cos you're "not really" doing Geography, or you're "not really" doing Philosophy, or you're "not really" doing Biology. Dick Richardson is very much an outcast in - even in the Integrative Biology department, and not respected - because nobody knows what he's doing. "You're not doing science." And that's the stigma that you'll get. (M: So it's not "slottable," or - ) It's not labwork! Yeah, what you do, if you want to be a scientist, you do labwork. If you don't do that, then, you're a "fieldperson," which is a term of derision; but that's still better than being a policy person, like Dick has become. So, in the social sciences, you have a similar thing. In the social sciences, it's the next - it's a - one shell is removed. Geography is tricky, though. Geography, we do have labwork. If you're a physical geographer, we have labs in the basement of you building. Fieldwork is what you do if you're a geographer. And policy - much less policy at a local place, is just obscene. So in my case, I came - (M: You're being facetious?) No, no, I don't think I'm being - it was a pretty strong reaction to what I was doing, because I came in - as a Peace Corps volunteer, I started a river conservation foundation in Hungary; it was the first Peace Corps environmental project in Eastern Europe, so - very sexy, and I'm the only one they've had in the department for 20 years, who's worked on Central Europe. I had my own river; I'm the only - no one's written on this river in English, da-da-da-da-da... And I've given that up. To work on a sewage plant in Austin, Texas - that's just absurd and obscene. Cos there's a call to the exotic - If you do fieldwork, it better be rainforest, or somewhere way out there. And Hungary was enough of a sexy thing, because of Eastern European studies -- M: Right. See, to me, that's even logical. I mean, that's an institution that's in Austin, Texas - K: Academia is profoundly anti-place and anti-local. You do not succeed as an academic by staying home. You move. And you do not get rooted in the community that you're in, both for pragmatic reasons - you're next job is gonna be elsewhere, right, if tenure's not in the works - and then, if you do get tenure - well, you're an academic, you're not supposed to be on City Council, or - you don't get rewarded for that. In fact, you're gonna get penalized. No, they're not looking to move forward. And that - that's a disease. There is a real problem there. Because, we don't encourage committment to places. So, we go to exotic places; and then you can never be at home in that place - cos you're not from there. (tape end)
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