Interview
The 60-Day Conversation, or a Chat with
Board Chair, Roger Blumberg
Not a fan of the 60-second interview format, Roger and Mary-Kim exchanged emails on a few issues. Not quite a conversation, nor quite an interview, we share this exchange here for your reading pleasure.
Mary-Kim: You've taught a course called Computers and Human Values that explores the effect of technological innovation on contemporary society. In your syllabus, you suggest that our use of email (for example) has had impact not only on our ideas about technology but about more fundamental questions of human interactions. Was there a particular moment that brought this idea into focus for you?
Roger: When I began teaching at Brown in the late 1990s, I noticed that the culture of faculty office hours that I had enjoyed as a student and in my first years of teaching, had become impoverished and, in many cases, had practically disappeared; and I thought email had a great deal to do with the change. When I was a student, my friends and I would go to office hours to ask questions about assignments, but they also served as a source of interesting conversations with the teachers and with other students. It often happened that a small group of us would be gathered at the office at the same time because the amount of time allotted to office hours was usually small, and the more senior or famous the teacher the smaller the number of hours he or she felt required to schedule. This would sometimes lead to interesting discussions not just about coursework but about things that were happening on campus and in the wider world. When I began teaching at Columbia in the 1980s, a number of university faculty had email accounts and used email with some frequency, but none of the students had email, and the office hours culture was very similar to the one I enjoyed as a student. I enjoyed the teacher's side of this culture as well. Students would stop by with all sorts of questions, grave and trivial and everything in between. Because my courses often involved mathematics, and thus problem sets assigned as homework, students often come by in small groups to ask about the more difficult problems. I also had a set of undergraduate advisees who would come by periodically, and many of them would know my students, and this led to a variety of conversations as well. But as email has become ubiquitous on campus, and universities have required students to use email for registration, applications, and various other forms of communication, fewer students seem to make good use of office hours. Perhaps there are fewer office hours now that faculty spend significant amounts of time answering student email. Nearly all of the traditional "quick questions" about coursework come by email now, mostly because the students assume a visit will "waste time" (theirs and mine), but of course many of these quick questions don't have such quick answers, and the opportunities for learning they might have inspired face-to-face and with other students, are often lost or diminished in email. Anyway, if I had to pick a "moment" when I was aware of how much a simple technology like email could change an educational way of life, I suppose that was it.
MKA: Do you recall when your own use of email changed how you thought about/participated in personal interactions?
RB: I hope my use of email hasn't changed my personal interactions very much, and I think it's possible and worthwhile to resist losing control of relationships and even correspondence when new technologies come along. But it's not easy, and it's foolish to miss out on all the opportunities for relationships and correspondence that email and other computing technologies make possible. As you know, my first reaction to the "60 second interview" was to criticize the format as an unfortunate consequence of computing. But I think we've pretty well subverted it already, don't you think?
MKA: I've heard you talk about Earl Shorris and his Clemente Course in the Humanities. What is it about his philosophy - at least as pertains to Clemente - that is most compelling to you?
RB: The basic rationale for the Clemente Course combines the observation that the humanities actually provide the most "practical" education for life and work in the post-modern society, with the modern philosophical claim that the best education for our best students is really the best education for all. Shorris attributes this latter claim to Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Hutchins almost certainly learned it from John Dewey. But it's the combination that Shorris uses to justify the Clemente course, and for all that we can and should debate the meaning of "best", I think Shorris has it right.
MKA: Have you had an idea for a humanities program or project that you would particularly like to see someone working on in Rhode Island? That you might like to work on?
RB: I think most of us at RICH get ideas for interesting local projects and programs all the time. It's a difficult thing to control! One theme that seems to unite all the projects I've been thinking about lately is making it more likely that people will encounter the humanities in striking, meaningful ways, and have humanities experiences that change their lives, as they do the things they "normally" do. To take a simple example, a friend of mine was trying to fill in his family tree at a library in Redbank, New Jersey, and he stumbled upon the digital archive of local newspapers that were contemporary with the members of his family he was using the census data to find. He began reading these old papers, on the same computer he had been using for the census investigations, and what began as a fairly routine search for personal history, ended up a fascinating exploration of life and news reporting in the 1870s in Redbank. He has now become someone with a serious passion for learning and thinking about history (and modern media) this way, through contemporary newspapers, and anyone who hears him talk about it senses his excitement.
It's not that such experiences aren't possible for many of us now; I can go over to the Rhode Island Historical Society and find Rhode Island papers from the 1870s, but I would like to support projects and programs that cause more people to discover and become excited about historical and cultural possibilities in their everyday lives. I note that, at Brown, the Libraries have been sponsoring weekly "Talk to a Librarian" sessions, in the lobbies of various academic buildings, and each session features a particular resource that might be of interest to students and faculty affiliated with the departments housed in the building. The idea is simply to make it more likely that students will discover the resources available to them as they go about their normal day. What might be the impact of "Talk to a Historian" or "Talk to an Economist" or "Talk to a Linguist" sessions were they held weekly at local libraries, supermarkets, airports, or at beaches in the summertime?
MKA: You've been commissioned to write the history of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, ten years from now. How do you characterize this moment in the Council's history? How do you characterize your tenure as Board Chair?
RB: This was the moment, just before the anonymous donation of ten million dollars and the changes in Washington that revived federal funding of the Humanities, when RICH began to develop its themed projects and programming for which it later became so valued and admired. This was the moment when the Council figured out how to use its limited staff and financial resources (in ways so remarkably clever and efficient that Conde-Nast's successful series of Humanities & Economics periodicals are thought to have been inspired by RICH ) in order to reach more Rhode Islanders through its grants and its own programs, and to become a source of support for and coordination of humanities activities and institutions throughout the State. This was also the moment at which the Council began coordinating efforts with other regional Councils to increase support for programs and projects in mutually beneficial ways. For most Americans, of course, this moment came to be known as the formative leadership triumph that began the distinguished public service career of NEH Chair Arnold. As for the tenure of Blumberg as Chair, it was reasonably successful until the infamous interview controversy, and the dramatic removal -- which contributed to several important amendments to Roberts Rules of Order -- during his failed attempt to institute the 60-Day Conversation.