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sanoiro · 7 years ago

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Lucifer 3x22 - Meta Post A: On Doubt, Fear and Expectations.

Before I begin I would like to mention my viewing experience of the episode. I knew that this episode would be a very unconventional one hence why the S&S post was so difficult. It was not a great episode for sure but it gave us some information we needed. What it also did was to raise a sandstorm in order to blind and confuse us with only two more episodes remaining in S3.

Questions were raised such as, Is Marcus really mortal and in love with Chloe? I sincerely doubt he truly is. If this episode told us anything, it was about how fears act out and how we tend to beautify an idea and then turn it into an expectation.

So let’s begin slowly here...

Part 1: Doubt

Let’s assume for a moment that Lucifer’s vulnerability and Marcus’ Mark loss are caused by two very different causes. Not love. I still believe that Lucifer’s vulnerability is caused by Chloe’s feelings but I have come to suspect that perhaps Marcus Mark loss is not.

Why? Because I see a connection between the wings and the mark.

I have mentioned it before but I never gave it enough importance. What if Chloe in 2x18 was the reason Lucifer’s wings returned? The reason would be in this case that she trusted him and forgave him at the end of the episode.

What if Marcus Mark is gone because Chloe trusts him and yes once again she acted as a redeemer. That can also be extended to Amenadie or/and Charlotte if we think about it but we will know for sure in 3x23.

Therefore the fact that Chloe has doubts in 3x22 does not affect Marcus Mark in my opinion her trust and forgiveness does. Additionally, I would also like to add that something smells fishy here. Who would give so much money for a tattoo if that’s what it was in the envelope and not the ring? Again we will know for sure soon... In this part I leave you the exchange between Marcus and Maze:

Maze: If Decker loves you then the Mark should be gone unless she is having second thoughts about you.

Marcus: Well that’s not ent- (Entirely what? Wrong? Yep!)

Part 2: Fear

Let’s talk about fear. As Linda said in 3x21, what are you so afraid of? Lucifer seems to always retract his realisations after an episode because he seems to be afraid of the answers. Funny how he actually nudged Dan to finally admit his feelings for Charlotte but himself took a step back in 3x22.

In 3x22 - All Hands On Decker, we see a Lucifer going through Chloe’s mind but he focuses only on the details that her job has pushed forward and nothing else. We do know that Lucifer can and has seen beyond that in 2x11. But the problem here is that Lucifer in this episode projects his issue on identity and the loss of it on Chloe.

What is also important to connect in this episode is the Driver’s everything, Chloe’s and of course what Lucifer believes it is... As he says to Fredrick in the beginning while trying to imitate Chloe,

Lucifer: Not yet, but my job means everything to me.

Lucifer has not yet grasped what everything is in someone’s life.

Near the end of the episode, Dan reveals why Lucifer calls Chloe, Detective. Dan accuses Lucifer of seeing Chloe only as her job and nothing else while Lucifer contradicts him with the fact that he thinks that calling her Detective is endearing...

Indeed it is because of Lucifer that title carries a noble meaning of justice and rightness. He sees Chloe as the ultimate definition of the word so for him it is endearing but at the same time we learn something more and he does as well.

Your profession does not define your whole identity. Okay, so several if not all industrial sociologists would oppose that thought but in Lucifer’s case, that’s a vital understanding.

His lack of Devil Face and his wings were the sign of his loss of identity. In S2 when Mum asks him why he works with the LAPD he comes to a conclusion that he doesn’t necessarily like punishing people but he is good at it. He sees being the Devil as his job and his job is irreversibly tied to who he is, meaning his identity.

Considering all the above Lucifer comes to a realisation which is that Chloe is not only her job hence why he probably calls her Chloe in 3x24 (perhaps as part of an experiment?). It is also why I believe that in 3x24 he will accept his wings because, in a very interesting move from the writers, no matter of your work or body parts your identity is you and only you can define it (see 3x01).

So an identity cannot be imposed and that is what leads us to Chloe’s part. That of the expectations.

Part 3: Expectations

Chloe in this episode seems for the most part of it uncomfortable with the idea of marriage. Or at least how quickly everything moves. What we also learn is that Chloe married Dan at the courthouse and was back at work after the ceremony.

An anon on Monday asked me more or less if the 2x05 Dan admission he had skipped the wedding plans in order to watch the Body Bag movie was a plot hole. To answer you, no I don’t believe it was. Courthouse weddings also require some planning, minimal but they are still there.

-Interlude-

1) What interests me more though in this episode and which will get us in this section, a bit further away from Chloe, is Marcus’ insistence to marry her... Why did Marcus wanted to marry her? I have a mini-theory which basically goes like this:

Chloe never wed Dan in a church or had the divine blessing so we can assume that for God that marriage was void. Same can be said about Lucifer’s wedding with Candy. Lucifer’s and Candy’s wedding certificate says in join in lawful wedlock, not a holy one which would have been the case if they had been married by a minister and not an officiant (see 3x07). Still, Lucifer seems a bit too conscious about the meaning of wedlock. So I wonder if a religious wedding holds a deeper meaning in this story.

2) What I cannot stop thinking about as well is Lucifer’s 54th wait no... 55th reason of Chloe saying yes. Drugs or as Lucifer explained, she was under the influence. And what if she was EUI aka Engaged Under the Influence?

Now I plead you to not forget what happened in 3x02. That brainwashing act was not a random thing. Moreover, Trixie was at a sleepover date that night and Marcus went to check on her??? Seriously now?

What kind of child - Trixie in particular- would ever want to leave a sleepover. Not to mention that the sleepover was in the next house. So was Trixie manipulated somehow? I wouldn’t be surprised if she was or just found herself at her house the next morning without ny memory of what had happened if she was conscious of course to remember...

3) Finally, Lucifer was really good at delivering the problem with desires:

Lucifer: Well, maybe it's what she thinks she wants, but does she know what she truly desires? 'Cause few do unless I help them. And unfortunately, I can't do that with her.

Chloe cannot be affected by Lucifer’s mojo but Marcus was. Marcus was supposed to be at least a difficult case but it took Lucifer only a second or so although the willingness of the participant might have something to do with that. But what if Marcus was immune to the mojo as well but he can affect Chloe with his powers if he has any that is? We know that Amenadiel was able to make her freeze in time so Marcus’ manipulation might be running deeper than we think.

-End of Interlude-

Now back to Chloe.

In 3x22 we see that Chloe can be open and have fun when she feels safe like she did in 2x04, 2x12 and 3x06. Throughout the episode, she took advantage of the bachelorette party in order to let loose and was shown as a more carefree person but the talk with the bus driver shows us the bittersweet truth.

First, the driver was an excellent addition to the episode and acted obviously as a Deus ex machina which was brilliant as none of the characters had to spill the beans. We have time for that, meaning other characters telling Chloe their observations like Ella did with Marcus to Maze,

We are at this point of the story that the most important thing for me it was that Chloe reached the decision to split from Marcus on her own. No persuasion or manipulation just her and her thoughts something that had to be done in order for the audience but also for Chloe herself to realise that she makes her own decisions in this life/series.

Now about Chloe’s words on the bus.

Well, it just it all happened so fast, and everyone's wondering why I said yes, and I-I'm wondering the same thing myself.

As we said sometimes decisions are not logical and as Lucifer said to Dan sometimes what we truly desire is not apparent to us from the very start.

I don't know, m-maybe I thought that marrying a a safe, steady guy would somehow change me into a different person,

This episode reminded me a lot of 3x08 but in reverse.

Chloe was trying to be something more and yet she believed that by marrying a guy who was stable like her father was, she would probably become the fun one in the relationship. Deep inside her, Chloe is not her work and she knows it but that’s how she is treated. As the boring, strict Detective and perhaps, just perhaps she wanted to free herself from that assumption that even Lucifer carried for the most part.

Yet we see in 3x22 that although Lucifer and Chloe are the exact opposites on how they live their daily lives they are also carrying a very important piece of sobriety (Lucifer) and spontaneousness (Chloe) on different levels which might not always be obvious to the other person but it acts like the glue they need.

In 3x22 Lucifer realised that he can be like Chloe and understood what that meant.

It meant that he was basically insufferable as a partner but that he also carried something in him that was very much alike to Chloe. At the same time, Chloe having her night of fun understands that being wild is not based on the comparison you get to have with your life partner or how you will define your life through them as the strict or fun type in the relationship. You are just yourself and let the relationship balance these qualities. Much like she has done in her partnership with Lucifer.

That’s what happens at the very end of the episode.

Lucifer sees that Chloe is not wearing a ring anymore so he backs off on telling her what he realised about himself, herself and their partnership but I’m sure it will come out soon enough.

Why though?

Because he knows as she does now that no matter how absurd this partnership is for some reason it works. Their differences make them stronger and no, they do not drive them apart but closer. He can be more considerate but at the end of the day, his aloofness is her strength while her seriousness is his. They hold just enough of each other’s qualities to come close and rotate perfectly around each other but have enough differences in order to not collide.

Her last line though was the most confusing one:

that-that maybe this new, spontaneous me would-would somehow inspire the the person that I still am.

I can translate this as I needed a change to make me feel more like myself again. The problem with that though is that there was no balance. As the driver says she has been married for 17 years and

He's my everything. Hopefully, your guy is, too.

At this point, we see Chloe sigh and shake her head.

The problem with Chloe and her relationships both with Dan and Marcus was that she was seeking the steady guy who could make her happy. Unfortunately, there was nothing to challenge her anymore in both cases.

Dan had his job so when she decided to go on with the divorce it hurt her as you remember in 2x01 but also gave her space to feel free and move on again. Dan and Chloe were meant to be friends and parents and thankfully he was a good guy. Marcus once again has the same vibe. Sturdy, responsible, a man who can help me walk but the problem is that Chloe needs to fly.

Remember that she left her house with her child because her husband was not there and she could not trust him after S1.

She leaves Marcus because regardless of what we saw in 3x20 it was herself that was wounded and the idea that she wasn’t worth it. I have come to believe that her breaking down in 3x20 it was mostly because of what Lucifer did in 2x14 than what Marcus said and did in 3x20.

When Marcus in 3x22 tells her that this is about him and her, Chloe stops him and says that is why he cannot marry him. Why? Because it’s about her and Lucifer. Marcus was a rebound a pleasant and honest mistake but after the bus she knows there is not her and him. There is only her and Lucifer on every imaginable level.

Lucifer as we have seen always had an ability to leave an echo lingering behind for her no matter what he did, where he disappeared to. So no matter the drugs, the women, the absurd unreliable self he showed her in S2 and S3 she fell for him.

Not just that but as we see in 3x22 her gut is correct. Lucifer deep down, he cares, he can solve a case, he can be responsible and he deserves her trust so when the driver of the bus tells her she hopes that Chloe’s fiance is also everything for her, Chloe realises that’s not true. Her everything is Lucifer and as @isk12-blog said noticed the next scene from the bus? Lucifer...

The only person she has followed through Hell and back again is Lucifer and she knows he has done the same thing for her no matter his immaturity. In 3x23 I believe we will see their relationship taking a turn because both know they have gone too far. And finally this... The last scene of 3x22.

Chloe plays with her ringless finger. There are no tears but an afterthought of the decision she has made. She has not broken down over losing Marcus as she did in 3x20 because as I’ve said, before the incident in 3x20 and as it is explained by Chloe to Ella in 3x21, corresponds directly with Lucifer’s actions in the past, not Marcus’ harsh words.

So we have Chloe at her desk and Lucifer comes to tell her most probably that he has learned that he has not been a good partner but the fact that she no longer has her ring changes everything. It’s not that she is unattached again it’s the fact that Lucifer understands that there is also something more into their partnership than what he saw in his mock-staged one with Dan.

Like with Linda and the discussion, after Reese shot Lucifer in 3x07, Chloe in 3x22 shows Lucifer instead that she is with him because he showed her who he really is. Yes, he can be more considerate and I believe that he will be in the next episodes but something in his true character has Chloe trust him even more.

You see when you are somebody’s everything it’s not about the good qualities and the immaculate manners nor how adorable someone is because he scratches off the burned side of his toast.

Everything means that for some reason the good and the bad make a person lovable. What you know and you don't know as well and so you take the risk to love everything about that person and that happens unwittingly! With Marcus, Chloe can’t see or feel that everything and so she has her answer.

It’s not about eternity or stability anymore, it’s about loving the unexpected as much as the expected. The greatest achievements and the greatest mistakes so yes, if 3x24 gives us the reveal then Chloe needed this episode to realise that everything about Lucifer and her feelings, was all about.

As we draw closer to the end of this post, did you notice how she invites him as her partner again? Or how she is so open in their partnership?

Sometimes everything is not attainable but something out of it might be so Chloe once again gets back at Lucifer’s side knowing that he might never be perfect or ready for a relationship. When she says “right” that’s when she decides to just go with the flow once more and that word weights as much as her words in 3x20, “We both know that’s not true!”

Finally, I loved how she decided to start stealing the small moments once again with Lucifer... The romantic drives...

Lucifer: Shall we take my car? Chloe: Yes. Lucifer: That’s what I’m talking about!

I hope you enjoyed this meta... I fell in love with the characters once more while writing it. Have a nice week and forgive any moodiness. I cannot be perfect, never claimed to be.

#lucifer season 3 #lucifer 3x22 #All Hands On Decker #lucifer meta #lucifer speculation #Sanoiro just being crazy as usual

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southeastasianists · 7 years ago

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The late Singaporean novelist Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun, published in 1991, is rightly regarded as one of the finest works of literature to come out of the city-state (though probably not according to its government). Politically-minded, and not afraid to amble along a storyline of repression and state-enforced victimhood, it is small wonder Baratham’s writing was often compared to George Orwell’s. A Time magazine’s review of A Candle or the Sun states that it “picks up where George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four left off.” In the negative, both authors’ styles are admittedly a little too heavy with caricature and requisite pathos, especially when it comes to life’s victims. Indeed, A Candle or the Sun might initially catch one’s eye as a Southeast Asian transmutation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Baratham would say in an interview, he wanted to complete the book by 1984 “for Orwell” but couldn’t finish it until the end of 1985. The book is set in 1983. It took another six years to find a publisher, which was Serpent’s Tail, of London.

A more discernible reader, however, might also notice the traces of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. A bored salesman and failing amateur writer (a la Gordon Comstock), Baratham’s protagonist, Hernie Perera, gives up on his artistic dreams, though with the promise of literary success, when he accepts a job offer from an old friend to work at the Ministry of Culture producing propaganda. Both Comstock and Perera are susceptible to hypocrisy gilded in justification, mistreatment of their lovers for their own advancement, and an overestimation of their own literary merits.

Perera’s self-respect is lost (though later redeemed) when he betrays to his new employers his lover Su-May, a member of anti-government Christian sect that is printing a “street paper.” This oppressive state is ominously distant from the story, however. (The setting is clearly Singapore, despite the book’s forewarning that “any similarity of persons, places or events depicted herein to actual persons places or events is purely coincidental.”) Perera does muse on how the state wants a say in even the most minute points of life (“your masters kennel you in neat boxes, doctor your females, control litter size according to pedigree and tell you what names you can give your pups,” to give one example.) And Perera is later chided by the lover of his friend: “Did they never tell you that on this island of paradise of ours trade is a matter of security, education is a matter of security, health is a matter of security, how you wash your underwear is a matter of security.”

The Singaporean academic Ban Kah Choon apparently once described him as a “magician who stands before the unknown to decipher what has yet to be written.” Ignore the pretentiousness and incoherence of this statement; Baratham, after all, was fictionalising fact in A Candle or the Sun: specifically, Operation Spectrum, the Singaporean government’s attempt at McCarthyism. But he was certainly charting a new course in Singaporean literature. And instigators often have to be more obvious. Baratham was at his best when he was at his subtlest, though he often had the habit of repeating his understatements so often they become glaring. Indeed, re-reading A Candle or the Sun in light of the more recent politically-natured novels from Singapore (I’m thinking in particular of Jeremy Tiang’s understated State of Emergency, published in May) one gets the sense that Baratham subscribes to the hammer-to-crack-a-nut cliché.

Three years after A Candle or the Sun was published, Catherine Lim, another Singaporean writer, earned a rebuke from Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for her articles in the Straits Times. Writers on the fringe must not challenge the government, the Prime Minister said. There were suspicions, during the ‘90s, of Baratham being the city-state’s “token liberal,” an author who avoided the sort of criticism and censorship others faced. “You should criticize the faults if you care for the society,” he said in 1996. “Some people say I’m the government’s token liberal. What can I say?”

His background, perhaps, afforded him some protection. Born in 1935, decades before Singapore became an independent nation, he followed his parents’ footsteps into the medical profession. At 36, he finally graduated from the University of Edinburgh, specialising in neurosurgery, after training at the Royal London Hospital. He would later return to Singapore, eventually becoming the head of Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s neurosurgery department. In 1991, the same year A Candle or the Sun was published, he was elected president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons.

His prominence in the medical field, at least in Southeast Asia, was not quite equalled by his literary recognition. A Candle or the Sun became his first published novel, after two collections of short stories, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1992, which he reportedly turned down because, he said, it was awarded based on the panel looking for a “Singapore style of writing” when he considered his work international (most of his work was published by British publishing house, not Singaporean ones). He attempted another novel and a non-fiction book after A Candle or the Sun but it was that work that kept his name in alive among the talking classes.

His death, in 2002, gave chance for his reappraisal as an interlocutor for free speech in Singapore. Teng Qian Xi, writing in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore at the time, offered a retrospective: “The criticism of the Singaporean ethos of conformity and rationality, as well as the questioning of memory, rhetoric and history which I often found forced in his stories became more exciting, less pedagogical in A Candle or the Sun.”

Freedom from speech

I do not know how widely A Candle or the Sun is still read in Singapore. I am told anecdotally that, like Nineteen Eighty-Four is around the world, it’s known by many but read by few. I hope not. Nonetheless, it remains an easy-to-hand reference for free speech matters. Indeed, how little things seem to have changed since it was published. The People’s Action Party (PAP) is still in power, as it has been since Singapore gained its statehood. The country’s media remains closed. MediaCorp dominates television and radio, and is the only terrestrial TV broadcaster. It happens to be controlled by the government-owned investment arm, Temasek Holdings, the CEO of which is Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. As for the newspapers, the Straits Times is owned by Singapore Press Holdings. Its current CEO is Alan Chan, who previously served in several government positions, and its chairman Lee Boon Yang, who served as an MP for the ruling party from 1984 until 2011, and held Cabinet positions during that time.

When Baratham was interviewed after the publication of A Candle or the Sun, he laconically defended himself: “It’s not that I want to irritate, but I just speak my mind… You should criticize the faults if you care for the society.” But this is a concept that still doesn’t find ear among the ruling elite, despite its rhetoric. In February, the Prime Minister commented: “If all you have are people who say, ‘Three bags full, sir’, then soon you start to believe them, and that is disastrous.” On the same day, as the Economist pointed out, a respected former diplomat who now runs a public-policy institute at the National University of Singapore, said Singapore needs “more naysayers [who] attack and challenge every sacred cow.”

Singapore is now a 21st century economy propped up by 20th century politics. And the Sedition Act, on the books since the late 1940s, is still brought out to slap down those naysayers, especially those who criticise the sacred cows, namely religion and race. PM Lee Hsien Loong has defended Singapore’s limits on free expression as a means to safeguard social stability. “In our society, which is multiracial and multi-religious, giving offence to another religious or ethnic group, race, language or religion, is always a very serious matter,” he said. This has been the case since Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister (and the current PM’s father), promised in 1965 to build a multiracial nation. “This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everyone will have his place, equal: language, culture, religion,” he commented that year.

Today, Indeed, Singapore is a multiracial state. And a heavy dose of state-enforcement has gone into defending this idea. Singapore celebrates Racial Harmony Day—July 21, the day when the riots broke out in 1964—and schoolchildren are taught about religion and ethnicity. But the idea that by suppressing “hate-speech” one can improve society reveals hidden impulses behind those who call from restraints. It is, at the same time, utopian and nihilistic.

I’ll take a fairly positive-slanted story from the Straits Times, dated November 8, 2015, as an example. The article’s author describes Singapore as a microcosm, “which pledges to be color-blind in its meritocracy and economic growth by providing opportunities for all”. From these, and numerous other reports, one gets the sense that perhaps the government is justified in trying to silence what it considers hate speech.

But a number of commentators are quoted as saying that Singapore is “nowhere near being a race-blind society” because racist undertones are hidden under the surface of a seemingly cohesive society. They also said that “some people and groups are downright ignorant and biased, others merely tolerate, but others are proactive in understanding and being appreciative”. One sociologist opined that “bubbling beneath our civil veneer, there are prejudices and stereotypes which occasionally surface to trigger bouts of soul-searching”. Indeed, the death of a foreign worker in Little India in 2013 led to a riot of more than 300 people, during which 54 officers and eight civilians were injured.

But silencing any public discourse on race or religion doesn’t seem to have done much good (just as banning mention of food isn’t a cure for malnutrition). As seen over the decades, while tensions remain dormant most of the time, they do have the recurrent habit of bubbling up. Moreover, not talking about the issue doesn’t always mean it will go away. A 2013 survey found that almost half of Singaporeans didn’t have a close friend of another race.

At some point in A Candle or the Sun, Perera is warned: “culture is a matter of security.” So, too, is culture a matter of free speech. While “hate-speech” does exist, all too often free speech is curtailed in Singapore over claims that individuals have offended a religion or race, when what they have really done is criticise the government. A casual glance over the cases of people recently prosecuted for free speech reveals that courts tend to find some facet of religious or racial offence in the person’s comments.

Take the case of the blogger Amos Yee, who was prosecuted twice for wounding religious feeling, not for criticising the government. As Singapore’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Foo Chi Hsia, said in 2015, “Amos Yee was convicted for insulting the faith of Christians…Protection from hate speech is also a basic human right.” Indeed, from this comment one can denote the legal contortionism of the Singaporean government: its citizens have the right of freedom from speech, which, to the government, is more important than freedom of speech. Yee might have gone on a tirade against religion, but his main target for criticism was the government, specifically the death of Lee Kuan Yew, in 2015. He called the late leader “a horrible person”, an “awful leader” and a “dictator,” as the Economist reported. Indeed, the American government was clearly of opinion that Yee was persecuted for his political views when it offered him asylum this year. “This is the modus operandi for the Singapore regime – critics of the government are silenced by civil suit for defamation or criminal prosecutions,” one American immigration judge wrote during Yee’s asylum ruling. To which the Singaporean government responded that America allows “hate speech under the rubric of freedom of speech.”

It is often too easy to defend the freedom of speech for the likes of Baratham, a learned doctor and adroit novelist. Harder, though, to defend the uncouth ramblings of someone like Yee. As I wrote in the Diplomat at the time: “It is clear that most of [Yee’s] comments were crude and inarticulate and, befitting his age, childish. This doesn’t mean, however, he ought not be defended for merely uttering an opinion.”

Taking the candle

George Orwell once described Speakers Corner, in London’s Hyde Park, as “one of the minor wonders of the world.” On my last visit to Singapore, last year, a reposeful afternoon provided me with a moment to visit the city-state’s own attempt at a Speakers Corner, located in Hong Lim Park. Oh, how imitations are inferior. The Economist described it thusly:

[A] spot set up for Singaporeans to exercise their freedom of speech without any restriction whatsoever, beyond the obligation to apply for permission to speak and to comply with the 13 pages of terms and conditions upon which such permissions are predicated, as well as all the relevant laws and constitutional clauses.

That article was about the prosecution of blogger Han Hui Hui who, in 2014, journeyed to Speakers’ Corner to protest the management of the Central Provident Fund, the city-states compulsory social security fund. She was found guilty and fined more than $2,000 last year not for voicing her opinion, a government spokesperson said, but for “loutishly barging into a performance by a group of special-education-needs children, frightening them and denying them the right to be heard.”

But what’s surprising about Speakers’ Corner is that Singapore would even attempt a parody. But, then again, Baratham understood the importance of the masquerade. The real heft of A Candle or the Sun is not in how an oppressive state operates but how people are so ready to sacrifice (and justify sacrificing) freedom for “good housing, safe streets, schools for your children and… three square meals a day and a colour TV,” as Perera says. Indeed, principles are sacrificed with only the slightest enticement by the state, unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In 2013, a survey of 4,000 Singaporeans asked whether they preferred “limits on freedom of expression to prevent social tensions” or “complete freedom of expression even at risk of social tensions.” 40% of respondents went for limits and 37% said complete freedom. The remaining 23 percent had no opinion on the matter, which perhaps says something about public participation in Singaporean society.

If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel that represents what Orwell described as “the dirty-handkerchief side of life” then Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published 17 years earlier, is its saccharine facsimile. Huxley in a letter to Orwell shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

A Candle or the Sun serves somewhat as a synthesis between the censorial warning of both dystopias. Baratham understood that too much jack-booting, never the first port of call for the Singaporean repressors anyway, couldn’t last. (A Candle or the Sun happened to be published the year the Soviet Union collapsed). Equally, permissiveness, unlike in Brave New World, had to be carefully managed: provide a glimpse but never the real thing. Perera, an intelligent man, understands the cognitive dissonance one needs to survive in such a world. A noted passage in A Candle or the Sun finds him musing over whether to take the censorial job. He compares his position to that of a prostitute. “Once I’ve accepted Sam’s job,” he thinks, “I was sure I would have to do things distasteful… I suppose this loss of self-respect is what distressed me. It must be something that all whores grappled with.” But as he soliloquises, he swiftly talks himself round to a justification:

The analogy with prostitutes was a good one. There must be prostitutes who are wives and mothers, who ran families, loved their husbands. Their salvation must lie in an ability to separate in their minds acts which were physically identical.

The psychically identical act, for Perera, was to be able to write artistically and censorially at the same time. In short, selling something that one doesn’t want to, nor believes in. Indeed, from his days running a furniture store, Perera reflects that salesmanship “consisted not of providing people with what they needed, but with that was essential to their dreams.” Shortly afterwards, he comments: “The possibility of winter is essential to the happiness of people living in the tropics.” Dreams, Perera realises, are all too willingly indulged and what people really need (freedom and autonomy) sacrificed. Indeed, do people want the candle (the intimation of freedom) or the sun (the real thing)? The government’s art of salesmanship, as Singapore’s history has shown, makes sure people readily opt for the candle.

• • • • • • • •

Editor’s note: readers interesting in buying The Candle and the Sun can find copies available through Marshall Cavendish or at AbeBooks

#Southeast Asia #Singapore #Gopal Baratham #Literature #People #Fiction #Politics

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sociologyontherock · 5 years ago

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Of Time and Serendipity: Sociological Roots and Surprising Swerves

By Anne Martin-Matthews

In October 2018, I stood on the stage of the Corner Brook Arts and Culture Centre at a Memorial University Convocation ceremony as Dr. Holly Pike, a professor of English at the Grenfell Campus, gave a 10 minute “oration” on my career. I was receiving an Honourary Degree. Her perspective on my career was fascinating (certainly to me, anyway!), in its clever juxtaposition of prospective and retrospective views of time, and how I have integrated both throughout my career. It conveyed a sense of consistency and logic to ways of thinking that I had (apparently) manifested throughout my career – something that I had certainly not “seen” (in myself) before. Few of us have the opportunity of hearing others describe us, and our careers, in this way – with a perspective that was, with Dr. Pike’s deft touch, both thoughtful and reflective (without boring the young graduating class).

At the time, I was keenly aware of how social gerontology considers reminiscence as part of a life-review process, a typical aspect of socialization for old age. Often thought to be an inherently internal, psychological process, reminiscence is generally considered to be adaptive, enabling individuals to assess and reintegrate their lives. A well-known sociologist of aging, Victor Marshall, advanced understanding of a life review as much more than a mental process. He re-conceptualized it as a social process: not just thinking about the past, but also engaging with others in talking about the past, where in true symbolic interactionist fashion others help us in confirming or (re)defining our lives: “When people get help from others in re-writing their auto-biographies, they are more likely to develop ‘a good story’ of their lives” (Victor Marshall, 1980, Last Chapters: A Sociology of Aging and Dying).

Anne Martin-Matthews

This life review of a sociologist’s career is in response to Stephen Riggins’ invitation to write for this newsletter. However, my agreeing to do so, with my own reminiscences and reflections, was prompted by a recent sequence of events. First, in July 2018 came the 40-year milestone anniversary of my first academic appointment, at the University of Guelph. The death of Victor Marshall, my doctoral supervisor, mentor and collaborator, in August 2018, was a genuine loss, and prompted my reflections on how his life and career had impacted my own, as I collaborated with long-time colleagues in publishing about him in the Canadian Journal on Aging (2019, 38(2)). Then, in October, the MUN convocation oration mentioned above. And so, in this process of reminiscence and life review, I hope to convey the “good story” of the career that Newfoundland, Memorial University, and sociology have given me.

Time – and timing – are central features of enquiry for those of us interested in the sociology of aging/social gerontology. In research on aging, we make distinctions between age, cohort and period effects. “Age effects” reflect changes (typically, physical) with the passage of time (typically measured as time since birth; more recently being measured retrospectively in time from death). “Cohort effects” are related to the historical time of a person’s birth, with those born around the same time often sharing a common background and view of the world. So, I am a baby boomer – and that tells you a lot about me, my habits, values and lifestyle. Finally, “period effects” are due to time of measurement, when circumstances and events may have different influences on different age cohorts. So many aspects of (what I now look back on as) a wonderful, dynamic, stimulating career have been influenced by my experience of cohort and period effects.

Typically, I have attributed these influences to a fortuitous serendipity of timing. I was born in St. John’s two years after Newfoundland joined Canada. Thus, I started at MUN in September, 1967, in the glow of Canada’s Centennial Year celebrations, and benefiting from Premier Joey Smallwood’s offer of free tuition to Newfoundlanders as first-year students. My career aspiration was to become a journalist, and hence I enrolled as an English major (taught by prominent Newfoundland scholars such as Patrick O’Flaherty).

As a requirement of my English major, I had to take an Introduction to Sociology and Anthropology course. That brought me to the memorable day of social anthropologist Elliott Leyton’s introduction to the concept of “cultural relativity.” On the board, he wrote: “Nothing that you have ever been taught is true.” This notion truly challenged me – a product of an Irish Catholic family and a Catholic convent-school education – on multiple levels. There was a world view that was an inherent part of being an Irish Catholic in Newfoundland back then; one of the very first things you would know about a person (reflected in their name, or at the very least, which school – in a parochial school system – they attended) was: “are you Protestant or Catholic?” The concept of cultural relativity brought another level of understanding and insight about others’ beliefs, values, and practices. Concepts such as this hooked me on the idea of switching my major to sociology!

In the maze of portable buildings (where the QEII Library now is), at the entrance to the Department of Sociology, graduate students in the department had, at some point in the early 1970s, erected a banner: “Welcome to the Department of Sociology: Home of the Minnesota Mafia.” The banner’s message reflected the many connections between the two sociology departments: Minnesota-trained faculty (such as Roger Krohn and Noel Iverson) had left MUN before my time; but during my two years as a sociology Major (1969-1971), Minnesota-trained faculty included Ralph Matthews, Jack Ross, Robert Stebbins and Fraine Whitney. Other (then) current Minnesota faculty were visiting professors at MUN: I remember a fascinating 1970 summer course in Urban Sociology taught by Gregory Stone, who brought his family to St. John’s and attracted much attention, driving around in a converted hearse, painted white.

One course in particular was an especially impactful experience for me: Fraine Whitney’s research methods class. There, he offered us an opportunity to help Morgan Williamson, a graduate student in sociology, to complete the data collection for his Master’s thesis – subsequently completed under the title “Blackhead Road: A Community Study in Urban Renewal” (1971). Several of us volunteered to be trained to conduct interviews on “the Brow” (now known as Shea Heights). The Brow was a completely “other world” back then: dilapidated housing, no water and sewer facilities, known even then for its “night soil” trucks and what were called “honey buckets.” The lack of basic sanitation services, and the poverty of the living conditions of residents, was unlike anything I had seen in St. John’s. But the people were quite welcoming, and gave me an exceptional opportunity to experience first-hand how sociological inquiry could advance insight and understanding. As I completed my assigned roster of interviews, I became increasingly committed to the idea of a career in sociology.

There were comparatively few female professors during my undergraduate years at Memorial, and in sociology the only one was Lithuanian-born Marina Gorodeckis-Tarulis (briefly at Memorial before returning to her home in Venezuela). In a one-on-one directed studies course that I took with her in the fall of 1970, she strongly encouraged me to consider application to graduate school – an option that I had been completely unaware of prior to that. No other professor had ever, in any way, implied that I might possess the aptitude for a graduate career.

Eventually, I accepted an offer of admission from the Department of Sociology at McMaster University. That decision was influenced by a combination of several factors: McMaster’s generous offer of scholarship support; Hamilton’s proximity to Toronto (where my Dad, who was in the hardware business in St. John’s, would periodically come for trade shows); the familiarity of other MUN sociology grads “going to Mac” too (though, ultimately, they’d be homesick and leave before Christmas); and one of the MUN professors, Ralph Matthews, was moving there too. (I might add that I was third on the “alternate” list for admission to McMaster, after all their “first choices” had made their decisions. This fact – and the subsequent requirement that I take additional sociology courses to make up for the deficiency of a 4-year MUN degree that was not an “Honours” degree – made my receipt, 25 years later, of McMaster’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, all the more sweet, I must say.)

Although I could not have known it at the time, what would become the framing for my entire academic career was, in fact, cast almost immediately upon my arrival in Hamilton. First, I rented a flat in the home of an elderly widow, Mrs. Pelma Erskine, and quickly became aware of – and at times immersed in – her social world of older (often widowed) women, their mutually supportive friendship styles and their issues and concerns.

Second, I enrolled in Victor Marshall’s sociology course on Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology, and chose to present one of the elective readings, David Sudnow’s book Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying. This is an ethnographic study of “death work” in an acute care hospital, and the relevant social treatment associated with dying. Both these experiences opened my eyes to aspects of living as an older person (and a woman, especially) and to the social aspects of dying and death in modern society.

While I retained my core interest in social and organizational aspects of transitional life events and my commitment to my Master’s research on Newfoundland migrants living in Ontario, I was greatly impacted by the timing of a period effect. Almost simultaneously, numerous countries were establishing professional organizations to promote the study of aging and gerontology; Canada was no exception, with the establishment of the Canadian Association on Gerontology (CAG) in 1972.

A newly-minted PhD himself, Victor Marshall was highly involved in building this new field in Canada, and as a founding member of the CAG. His scholarship and enthusiastic advocacy of studies of aging quickly engaged a cadre of my fellow graduate students in sociology at McMaster. The field of social gerontology and the sociology of aging was, quite literally, born in Canada just as I embarked on my graduate studies and, in working with Victor Marshall, I was right at “ground zero.”

No courses yet existed, but I became the Teaching Assistant for the special topics in an “Age-Related Studies” course that Victor Marshall offered at McMaster in 1972, and the next year I enrolled in his graduate directed-readings course, unofficially known as “sociology of aging.” While I took the course out of personal interest (with no particular aspiration beyond that), in the process I researched and wrote a lengthy paper on role changes associated with widowhood in later life – with the purpose of collating and synthesizing a body of inter-disciplinary research (much of it, social psychological) on widowhood. Constructs of role exit, role loss, and widowhood as essentially a “roleless role” pervaded the literature. I became interested in whether role change (or “exit”) was in fact the basis of identity change in widowhood, or if, rather, a redefinition of self, along with the behaviours of particular others and attitudes and structures of society in general, contribute to the social (re)construction of self and identity.

In 1974 (after being “advanced” to the doctoral program and completing PhD course work before I had even started collecting data for my Master’s degree), I completed the MA thesis (“Up-along: Newfoundland Families living in Hamilton, Ontario”), based on interviews with 61 Newfoundland families who had migrated in the previous two decades. (The interview data are now on file in MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies.) I applied Frederic LePlay’s constructs of “stem” and “branch” families, to understand ties to Newfoundland and extent to which Newfoundlanders had established a community (formal and informal) in Hamilton and area. And, indeed, many study participants told me that, “lately, we’re tending to see more of foreign people, too” – foreign people, in this case, meaning non-Newfoundlanders.

On the other hand, I was quite intrigued to find evidence of another pattern: Newfoundland migrant families told me, “The last three years have made a difference with the Newfoundlanders here. With the children growing up and getting married, you go to your children’s houses to visit, instead of your friends…. You visit the kids, and if there’s time, you see your [Newfoundland] friends later. Then the hours are gone when you would have been together.” Quite unexpectedly, then, I was confronted with a generational, age-related explanation for what otherwise might have appeared to be evidence of assimilation of Newfoundlanders into the social life of Hamilton.

While I had hoped that the issues identified in that early widowhood research paper would be the basis of my doctoral dissertation, external constraints rendered this impossible. My PhD studies, initiated when I was still completing the Master’s research on Newfoundland migrants in Hamilton, were funded through a doctoral fellowship in Urban and Regional Affairs, from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. CMHC, understandably, expected my continuing research focus on issues of housing, migration, or urban affairs. In my original proposal to CHMC, I had proposed to study women’s experiences of long-distance family relocation. Thus in order to keep my funding, I pragmatically decided to rekindle my interest in this topic, completing a doctoral dissertation applying Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’ concept of status passage (1971) to examine women’s experiences of relocation and the “moving career.” My commitment to research on aging would have to come in my post-graduate life, it seemed.

I have described, in some detail, this early stage of my career, the stage of developing my sociological roots and training, because, in fact, this was to be the most consistently and overtly sociological phase of my career. For, in 1978, I swerved.

In her best-selling book Becoming (2018), Michelle Obama describes several swerves in her own life: consciously making an abrupt change of direction, often involving moving away from a previously chosen career path. In 1978, on the job market, still ABD at Mac, and only seeking academic work within a 100-kilometre radius of my home life in Hamilton (I had married Ralph Matthews in 1974), I received two job offers from the University of Guelph. One was a one-year contract as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology; the other, a two-year contract as a Lecturer in the Department of Family Studies. The position in Family Studies would allow me to teach courses in social gerontology.

The opportunity to teach social gerontology prevailed. As a result, I spent the next 30 years of my career (20 of them at Guelph, 10 at UBC) in more “applied” social science departments, working alongside colleagues with training in economics, psychology, sociology, education, nutrition and dietetics, and focusing on issues of the life course, aging and behaviour.

But here, once again, the serendipity of timing propelled my career forward. When the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada launched its Strategic Grants Division in 1980, one of the three themes identified was in “Population Aging”! It took a bit of doing to persuade the Senate of the University of Guelph to endorse a proposal initiated by a couple of untenured Assistant Professors in the Department of Family Studies, supported by a senior colleague in sociology and another in psychology – but they did. We developed a competitive bid and won in the 1982 competition (competing against the University of Toronto, I should add). I led the Gerontology Research Centre at the University of Guelph for 12 years, from 1983 until 1995.

Yes, the research and scholarship were primarily “applied social science,” but those years certainly provided me the opportunity to bring a sociologically-informed perspective to my research on aging and later life. And, in a research context that was becoming ever more focused on multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research, I gained valuable experience in collaborating with geographers, psychologists, family economists, and even researchers in nutrition education and public health. This proved useful when, in 1990, I became one of four Co-principal Investigators on CARNET: the Canadian Aging Research Network. CARNET was the first Network of Centre of Excellence led by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and including, among its 26 network members, researchers funded by all three federal funding councils. This level of multi-disciplinary collaboration was unprecedented at the time.

Throughout those years, I maintained my own active research program (independent of the Gerontology Research Centre): writing a book on Widowhood in Later Life; publishing with my doctoral students (some with backgrounds in sociology) and colleagues on the gendered nature of filial care, care and caregiving, social supports in later life, aging and health behaviour, home and community care. Female colleagues in the sociology of aging (Ingrid Connidis, Western; Carolyn Rosenthal, McMaster; and Sarah Matthews at Cleveland State University) assured me that my work was sociological, even as I doubted that I was, any longer, a real sociologist. I recall that my doctoral supervisor, Victor Marshall, who maintained a strong reputation as a sociological theorist while active in research on aging, occasionally let me know that I was going a bit too far into “this caregiving stuff.”

And, of course, I collaborated with Ralph Matthews on several research initiatives – the most substantial being a SSHRC-funded study titled “Social and Psychological Responses to Infertility and its Treatment.” Ralph, indeed, likes to remind me that, despite my many publications in social gerontology and the sociology of aging, my highest citation is of a publication with him titled “Infertility and involuntary childlessness: The transition to non-parenthood,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1986, 48(3): 641-649.

Despite all those years outside a Sociology Department, a major source of academic connection for me became the Research Committee on Aging of the International Sociological Association (ISA). I found a true scholarly and intellectual home there, alongside colleagues with “real” sociological credentials and affiliations. Research Committee 11 provided the perfect context for presentation and discussion of my scholarly interests, the focus on the study of aging in multiple contexts, but quite explicitly within a sociological frame.

By the time I was elected President of the ISA Research Committee on Aging (2010-2014), I had spent more than a decade at the University of British Columbia. Again, there was some serendipity at play in that process: with an email unexpectedly landing in my inbox at the University of Guelph in the fall of 1996, inviting applications for the position of Director of the School of Family and Nutritional Sciences in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at UBC. (The School at UBC was much like the department in which I had spent nearly 20 years at Guelph.) Although another swerve, this time into academic administration, was not something I had ever considered, it became a vehicle for a mid-career move at a time when I was ready for a change. So, instead of moving east (as we had long thought we might do one day), Ralph and I, with two teenagers and a dog, headed west to Vancouver in December 1997.

Having assumed that moving to such a large, research intensive institution after nearly 20 years at a much smaller one would guarantee anonymity (a new little fish in a VERY big pond), I was surprised by the array (and pace) of challenges, opportunities, and some quite unanticipated swerves of those early UBC years. Within six years, I was in the Faculty of Arts, serving as Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, and then, for 10 months, Dean pro tem. Surprisingly (!) enjoying some aspects of academic administration, but worried about its impact on my research career (which I was not yet prepared to abandon), I was just settling back into life as a “regular” faculty member, when the opportunity for making the most unlikely swerve in my career, unexpectedly came along.

It began, of course, with another coincidence of timing, another period effect. In June 2000, the Medical Research Council of Canada and the National Health Research and Development Program of Health Canada (from which I had received funding) merged to become the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). With a mandate to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system, CIHR was composed of 13 national institutes, one of them an Institute of Aging (IA). I had been serving on the IA’s inaugural Institute Advisory Board and was very engaged in that role, working to support the Institute’s Scientific Director in setting a research agenda in aging across biomedical, clinical, health services and policy, and population health research. When the Scientific Director (a geriatrician) resigned unexpectedly, I had the opportunity to apply for a job that, I immediately realized, I really wanted. This was as far away from sociology as I was ever going to get, and yet it afforded the opportunity to help set the national and international research agenda in my field of research, in aging – an extraordinary privilege and opportunity. I became the first (and, to date, only) “card carrying sociologist” to become a Scientific Director of a CIHR Institute – a position I held for two terms, from 2004-2011.

In my Scientific Director position, I was seconded from UBC on a .60 full-time equivalency basis (crazily unrealistic, in truth), but this “balance” enabled me to champion initiatives for the Institute, as well as maintain my own program of research. That research had assumed a particular focus when, in 1999, my mother was paralyzed by stroke, and, as I later wrote (in “Situating ‘home’ at the nexus of the public and private spheres: Aging, gender and home support work in Canada,” Current Sociology, 2007, 55 (2), 229-249), “home care entered my family biography.” For the eight years of my research stipend from CIHR while I was Scientific Director (and otherwise ineligible to apply for CIHR funding), I conducted research on the roles and perspectives of publicly-funded home care workers, older people as clients, and family members at the intersection of the public and private spheres of home-based health and social care services.

At CIHR, I had inherited from my predecessor a commitment to explore the feasibility of a Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging (CLSA); a very “big science” initiative; and I did. I am not a “visionary” and I would not ever have developed the idea for a CLSA – a 20-year study of 50,000 Canadians between the ages of 45 and 80 (at point of entry to the study), to examine the complex interplay between biological, social and behavioural aspects of aging. But I am a “process person,” and once convinced of the unique potential of the CLSA to advance understanding of aging, it became my driving mission to work with the research team to secure CIHR’s support for, and funding of, this ambitious initiative. The CLSA was launched in 2009, with one of its 10 Canadian research sites based in the Health Sciences Complex at Memorial University.

There were other initiatives over those 8 years at CIHR, with an especially meaningful one for me being the launch in 2006 of what has become an annual week-long Summer Program in Aging, bringing graduate students from all fields of aging research together from across Canada. But the CLSA is the key legacy of those years.

I returned full-time back to UBC in 2011, to an appointment in the Department of Sociology! At last, my sociological career had come full circle. (The move into sociology had actually occurred in 2008, while I was still part-time with the CIHR Institute of Aging, fully 30 years after my first academic appointment at Guelph). Aging is a very marginal research focus in this department, and so all but one of my PhD students have come to me via the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program.

Nevertheless, I graduated my first PhD in sociology in 2017. I taught my first (and only) graduate course in Aging and Society in the Department of Sociology the same year (with 2/3 of the course participants coming from disciplines other than sociology). And in 2016, I published a paper, “The Interpretive Perspective on Aging,” in Vern Bengtson and Richard Settersten (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Aging, 3rd ed., pp. 381-400. My name appeared between two bona fide sociologists, my doctoral supervisor Victor Marshall (then at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Julie McMullin of Western University. By then I was beginning to think that, just maybe, I am sociological enough, after all.

Recently, in cleaning out my sociology office (I retain a .20 full-time equivalency appointment in sociology as I assume a new role of Associate Vice-President Health at UBC), I came across a paper that I cited in my 1978 job talk in the Department of Family Studies at the University of Guelph. I could not have imagined then how the words of Stella Jones, in a publication titled The Research Experience, would so aptly capture the essence of my own academic (and, indeed, coast to coast, geographical) journey: Jones described doing research as “analogous to a journey across the country. [It] can be an experience with many serendipitous turns.… The traveler and the researcher alike find that the best laid plans must frequently be altered in transit. Unexpected delays occur; last minute changes in routing are sometimes necessary.… Such unexpected factors may add to or detract from the total travel or research experience” (pp. 327-328).

Certainly, I swerved – and often – between sociology and social gerontology (and various academic footholds around and between), and between scholarship and administration. Best laid plans were, indeed, altered in transit. And, as Dr. Holly Pike so insightfully deduced, my research has indeed juxtaposed prospective and retrospective approaches in the effort to advance understanding. This has become particularly pronounced now that I have become what I have been researching and teaching all through my academic career: a senior citizen. This has occasioned some self-reflexivity in my approach to my research, as I bring the “perspective of time” back to topics that I have researched and written about previously.

But there have also been two constants. While some other contributors to Sociology on the Rock have described themselves as an “accidental sociologist” (Porter, 2008) or a “reluctant sociologist” (Felt, 2012), my roots in sociology run deep. Memorial and McMaster gave me that. Victor Marshall, as my career-long academic mentor, and Ralph Matthews, as the sociologist who has been my life’s partner for 45 years, have kept me grounded in sociology even as more applied science, health research, and academic administration pulled me frequently away.

And then there is that other constant for me – The Rock itself. As I said at the end of my convocation address, “The Future is Aging,” to the graduating class at MUN’s Grenfell campus in October 2018: “For those of you who are from Newfoundland, or feel that you now belong to Newfoundland, I encourage you to honour these roots. This is a special place, and please don’t forget that. I recall how full my heart was at my graduation from Memorial 47 years ago, knowing that I was leaving soon to go to graduate school ‘on the mainland.’ I did not know then that I would not return to live here permanently – though I did marry a Newfoundlander, and have come back countless times almost every year since. I took it as a tremendous compliment when my mother said of me, shortly before she died, ‘Anne left Newfoundland, but Newfoundland never left her.’ Please do not ever lose the Newfoundland in you.” As for me, I’m inclined to think that I never have.

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thesnhuup · 8 years ago

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10 Things I Know About You, Higher Education

As we pass the one-year anniversary of the launch of Academically Speaking and 2017 is well under way, it’s a great moment to consider some of the observations we have made or refined about online education and models for nontraditional students over the last year.

As I noted when we began the blog, Southern New Hampshire University is a microcosm of the national higher education conversation, serving 80,000 students on our century-old, traditional campus; in one of the largest non-profit online colleges in the nation; and in our direct-assessment, competency-based college.

We are often asked about the lessons we have learned or the advice we would give about our experiences. We shared some of that in our annual report, Beyond the Ivory Tower, at the end of last year and here on our blog. Here are some of the key topics that seem to come up in our dialogues when our team presents at conferences or networks at events.

1. Learning Science has become one of those fashionable terms that people throw around almost as much as CBE or adaptive or personalized learning, and like those terms there seems to be little agreement on what exactly it means.

I continue to receive blank or confused stares when I ask well-established academicians to (1) define what it means to learn, (2) explain how learning happens, and (3) tell me what standard for assessment they have employed on their campuses to make sure that it happened (no, grades don’t count).

This lack of purpose and process clarity often is ignored when brilliant minds are employed to teach and exacerbated as those minds settle in and delve further—not into these questions, but into their areas of study. This creates an ironic situation: The smarter they get, the further they get from being able to communicate with novices in their fields.

2. The basic diagram for our educational experiences centers around three things:

Using expert practitioners working in the field paired with academicians teaching in the classroom to determine appropriate standard outcomes at institutional, program and course levels.

Using experts in psychometrics and assessment to figure out the most valid and accurate ways to measure those outcomes.

Creating the most effective (accessible, affordable, adaptable, etc.) learning environment for the various student demographics to acquire the new knowledge or skills necessary to demonstrate mastery on the outcomes when they are assessed.While these seem to be distinct, a key learning we found early on is the critical need for collaboration in all three of these phases. Outcomes remain almost the alpha and omega in this model, yet the design of those outcomes has to consider what measures of assessment are available and even the type of assessment needs to take into consideration the parameters available for a learning environment.JFK set an outcome of getting to the moon, but the outcome would have been unrealistic if he hadn’t recognized the learning process and time it would take to get there.When we first began, theoretically it made sense to have an instructional design team with their expertise working separately from an assessment team: different expertise, after all. But the result was great assessments that couldn’t be mastered in the time frame or given our student body. Upon increasing the collaboration between the two teams, a far more effective learning and assessment environment was achieved, sometimes by re-chunking experiences, sometimes by developing more relatable assessments (NEVER by compromising on ultimate outcomes).

3. When we began to consider accelerated education models for our student body, we committed an error that, in hindsight, was hilarious because it was exactly what we had cautioned many of our colleagues who were entering the online space at other institutions of higher education against.

You can’t just start with what you have and repurpose it. You really do have to take the time to get back to basics; reflect on mission, purpose, outcomes at every level from the institution down to the course section; and then create the student experience based on the new factors involved in the new environment.

Likewise, with acceleration we tried to build modules from current courses, breaking them apart with diagnostics to allow students to “test out” of the formative areas they already had mastery of en route to a common summative experience. Very quickly we realized that the scaffolded and interwoven design of learning in the more traditional versions of online courses did not allow for easy dissection into clean independent units, and even after we did create something viable, it was clear form a gap analysis and early student experiences that the parts did not add up to the sum in a satisfactory way.

Result: same as with converting from face to face to online. Take the time to do it right or you will have to take the time to do it over.

4. Any school that wants to do any type of large-scale, competency-based education program needs to have an early conversation about whether they want to be an institution that simply certifies previously accrued competencies or wants to create an environment where students can build competencies.

The model is very different and far more complicated for the latter, especially if you have a relatively open admission policy. Many students need guiderails as well as structure to progress; that very group of students will require a far more supportive learning environment if they are trying to master competencies for which they have not developed skills. Be prepared for that.

Online education requires a major reality check for those who think they can easily engage and generate quick revenue; competency-based-education requires not just a gut check but a full-bore inspection. Otherwise it will become a money-pit sucking down not only those involved directly but those on the periphery as well.

5. Deliberate design of our disaggregated faculty model has truly exposed some of the unrealistic expectations placed on faculty to be one-size-fits-all expert generalists: advisor, instructor, grader, designer, researcher, committee member and more.

There was evidence of this in my own experience as a faculty member, when students would show up in my office with personal, non-academic issues that I was in no way professionally trained to handle.

It has become far more apparent as we have considered the professional skill sets necessary for each of these roles. Something as seemingly obvious as writing valid assessment questions for a test or creating a supportive learning environment for students with disabilities take skill sets far beyond what most faculty members are prepared for. Future iterations of student experience will require far more collaboration, diversification and specialization than we have considered in the past.

6. There often is a substantial difference between what practitioners in the field and academics in the classroom expect for outcomes in a course of study.

When we begin any new program development we bring in a group comprised of both of these stakeholders, and often they take a while to get to consensus on knowledge, skills, dispositions and abilities expected for success on the first day of a job or profession. Engaging in such an exercise can open eyes on both sides to the limits and possibilities of the classroom.

7. A no-holds-barred conversation about the purpose of general education has resulted in some of our best work to date.

When we came to the table we rather quickly arrived at some common points of agreement, such as:

General education is valuable for the acculturation of traditional college students to broader worldviews and the skill sets necessary to navigate daily life employing those world views.

If we were going to have general education outcomes, there needed to be some clear, common, measurable KPIS in each and every course.

The real challenge came when we considered broad content areas for adult students and began building outcomes and learning environments for them. We still agreed on tackling broad worldviews in areas such as the humanities and social and natural sciences, but it was a real struggle to get out of the weeds to a curriculum that tackled core skills and knowledge — all the more so because every content expert wanted to privilege his/her area of study.

For example, when we raised the question, “What about employing social scientific approach to the world does every graduate need to master?”, the sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, etc., all retreated to their corners and began crafting discipline-specific outcomes rather than thinking about the way the social scientific worldview approaches interactions of cultures, organizations and individuals.

I think several of my literature colleagues stopped breathing for several seconds when I stated that as much as I loved Shakespeare and studied him for my master’s degree, it was not so important that every adult student read Shakespeare, but rather that we equipped them with the ability to read critically whatever it was that they were going to be reading in their lives.We did eventually get there, and then the real hard work began. If you think finding experts to build a general education curriculum with this framework was hard, try finding faculty who can step beyond their area of study and teach such an approach.

8. Good communication, particularly writing, is perhaps the single most important skill college graduates will learn.

Conversely, the essay is probably the single least effective and yet most popular way to assess skill sets when trying to determine competency in professional fields. Writing about something and doing it are not the same, unless of course what you are assessing is actually how well someone writes.

One of the challenges our outcomes and assessment team has worked on is balancing every faculty member’s insistence on effective communication with accurate evaluation of the other skill sets being evaluated, while our faculty training group has worked with instructors to not discard great thinking or performance simply because of poor writing or communication. In these instances the extra academic support provided beyond the immediate content area of the student will often be the difference between success and failure in both the short term and possibly for life.

9. Few things have impressed me more than the accomplishments of both students and faculty in the online environment who have traditionally been labeled disabled.

We have tackled head-on the need to support our most challenged students, and they have repaid our efforts by inspiring us with their brilliance, their determination, and above all, their unique contributions to the various bodies of knowledge. That is equally true of our faculty who, working from their homes, reach out and engage students who have never been successful anywhere before.For the nontraditional student body, it is even more true that motivation trumps intelligence, and the greatest ambassadors I have ever seen are the faculty and students whose voices now have the power to be heard.

10. In a fast-moving culture that prides itself on being agile and responsive, leadership has to ensure that communication is as transparent and effective as possible so team members at every level feel that change is happening with them rather than to them.

My team has often heard me say that God gave us two ears and two eyes but only one mouth for a reason—we should always watch and listen twice as much as we speak. Mastering the listening part of communication is invaluable, particularly in institutions where rapid innovation through iterations is as innate as breathing.

Change in the needs, nature and demands of students as well as the roles of faculty, vendors, technology and administration will only accelerate. To play on a paradigm quote attributed to Henry Ford, there is no need to keep arguing about finding a faster horse: the automobile that is modern education has been invented. It will improve over time, but I wouldn’t be investing in saddles if I were you.

So welcome to a new year! I look forward to continuing the conversation and networking we have started, and to all of us creating the next evolution of higher education.

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