04
Nov
09

College Football: Is it a good investment?

By jeffnearlife Leave a Comment
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Malcolm Gladwell had an amazing article (isn’t all his stuff great, really?) last week about concussions and football.  He goes on in the article to make the argument that dogfighting and football really aren’t all that different, other than the level of hypocrisy that is carried about football (America’s sacred cow of athletics).

Several of these stories are about college players and the rest of the excerpts will give you the scope of the article. Bear in mind that tremendous investments are put into football, some reaping rewards for the college, but at what cost?  Many of my student affairs colleagues talk about social justice and say that one of their life goals is “making a difference”.  Think about what that means as you read the story and the excerpts written below….

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“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter”

“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you’re coming off an injury you’re frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad that this happened to me that I’m overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”

Here is a description of a dogfight given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans and Craig Forsyth in “The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights,” an article they published some years ago in the journal Deviant Behavior. The fight took place in Louisiana between a local dog, Black, owned by a man named L.G., and Snow, whose owner, Rick, had come from Arizona:

The handlers release their dogs and Snow and Black lunge at one another. Snow rears up and overpowers Black, but Black manages to come back with a quick locking of the jaws on Snow’s neck. The crowd is cheering wildly and yelling out bets. Once a dog gets a lock on the other, they will hold on with all their might. The dogs flail back and forth and all the while Black maintains her hold.

It’s the shot ringing out that seals the case against dogfighting. L.G. willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport.

McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he’d been hit too many times in the head.

She has now examined the brains of sixteen ex-athletes, most of them ex-football players. Some had long careers and some played only in college. Some died of dementia. Some died of unrelated causes. Some were old. Some were young. Most were linemen or linebackers, although there was one wide receiver. In one case, a man who had been a linebacker for sixteen years, you could see, without the aid of magnification, that there was trouble: there was a shiny tan layer of scar tissue, right on the surface of the frontal lobe, where the brain had repeatedly slammed into the skull. It was the kind of scar you’d get only if you used your head as a battering ram. You could also see that some of the openings in the brain were larger than you’d expect, as if the surrounding tissue had died and shrunk away. In other cases, everything seemed entirely normal until you looked under the microscope and saw the brown ribbons of tau. But all sixteen of the ex-athlete brains that McKee had examined—those of the two boxers, plus the ones that Nowinski had found for her—had something in common: every one had abnormal tau.

McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. “There’s one last thing,” she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. “This is a kid. I’m not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He’s eighteen years old. He played football. He’d been playing football for a couple of years.” She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. “He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions.” This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.”

Take the experience of a young defensive lineman for the University of North Carolina football team, who suffered two concussions during the 2004 season. His case is one of a number studied by Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the university’s Sports Concussion Research Program. For the past five seasons, Guskiewicz and his team have tracked every one of the football team’s practices and games using a system called HITS, in which six sensors are placed inside the helmet of every player on the field, measuring the force and location of every blow he receives to the head. Using the HITS data, Guskiewicz was able to reconstruct precisely what happened each time the player was injured.

“The first concussion was during preseason. The team was doing two-a-days,” he said, referring to the habit of practicing in both the morning and the evening in the preseason. “It was August 9th, 9:55 A.M. He has an 80-g hit to the front of his head. About ten minutes later, he has a 98-g acceleration to the front of his head.” To put those numbers in perspective, Guskiewicz explained, if you drove your car into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and you weren’t wearing your seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would be around 100 gs: in effect, the player had two car accidents that morning. He survived both without incident. “In the evening session, he experiences this 64-g hit to the same spot, the front of the head. Still not reporting anything. And then this happens.” On his laptop, Guskiewicz ran the video from the practice session. It was a simple drill: the lineman squaring off against an offensive player who wore the number 76. The other player ran toward the lineman and brushed past him, while delivering a glancing blow to the defender’s helmet. “Seventy-six does a little quick elbow. It’s 63 gs, the lowest of the four, but he sustains a concussion.”

“The second injury was nine weeks later,” Guskiewicz continued. “He’s now recovered from the initial injury. It’s a game out in Utah. In warmups, he takes a 76-g blow to the front of his head. Then, on the very first play of the game, on kickoff, he gets popped in the earhole. It’s a 102-g impact. He’s part of the wedge.” He pointed to the screen, where the player was blocking on a kickoff: “Right here.” The player stumbled toward the sideline. “His symptoms were significantly worse than the first injury.” Two days later, during an evaluation in Guskiewicz’s clinic, he had to have a towel put over his head because he couldn’t stand the light. He also had difficulty staying awake. He was sidelined for sixteen days.

When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet the HITS data suggest that practice—the routine part of the sport—can be as dangerous as the games themselves. We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didn’t just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure. And why was the second concussion—in the game at Utah—so much more serious than the first? It’s not because that hit to the side of the head was especially dramatic; it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days.

At one point, while he was discussing his research, Guskiewicz showed a videotape from a 1997 college football game between Arizona and Oregon. In one sequence, a player from Oregon viciously tackles an Arizona player, bringing his head up onto the opposing player’s chin and sending his helmet flying with the force of the blow. To look at it, you’d think that the Arizona player would be knocked unconscious. Instead, he bounces back up. “This guy does not sustain a concussion,” Guskiewicz said. “He has a lip laceration. Lower lip, that’s it. Now, same game, twenty minutes later.” He showed a clip of an Arizona defensive back making a dramatic tackle. He jumps up, and, as he does so, a teammate of his chest-bumps him in celebration. The defensive back falls and hits his head on the ground. “That’s a Grade 2 concussion,” Guskiewicz said. “It’s the fall to the ground, combined with the bounce off the turf.”

The force of the first hit was infinitely greater than the second. But the difference is that the first player saw that he was about to be hit and tensed his neck, which limited the sharp back-and-forth jolt of the head that sends the brain crashing against the sides of the skull. In essence, he was being hit not in the head but in the head, neck, and torso—an area with an effective mass three times greater. In the second case, the player didn’t see the hit coming. His head took the full force of the blow all by itself. That’s why he suffered a concussion. But how do you insure, in a game like football, that a player is never taken by surprise?

Guskiewicz and his colleagues have come up with what they believe is a much better method of understanding concussion. They have done a full cognitive workup of the players on the U.N.C. team, so that they can track whatever effect might arise from the hits each player accumulates during his four years. U.N.C.’s new coach, Butch Davis, has sharply cut back on full-contact practices, reducing the toll on the players’ heads. Guskiewicz says his data show that a disproportionate number of serious head impacts happen on kickoffs, so he wonders whether it might make sense, in theory, anyway, to dispense with them altogether. But, like everyone else who’s worried about football, he still has no idea what the inherent risks of the game are. What if you did everything you could, and banned kickoffs and full-contact practices and used the most state-of-the-art techniques for diagnosing and treating concussion, and behaved as responsibly as Nascar has in the past several years—and players were still getting too many dangerous little hits to the head?

After the tape session, Guskiewicz and one of his colleagues, Jason Mihalik, went outside to watch the U.N.C. football team practice, a short walk down the hill from their office. Only when you see football at close range is it possible to understand the dimensions of the brain-injury problem. The players were huge—much larger than you imagine them being. They moved at astonishing speeds for people of that size, and, long before you saw them, you heard them: the sound of one two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man colliding with another echoed around the practice facility. Mihalik and Guskiewicz walked over to a small building, just off to the side of the field. On the floor was a laptop inside a black storage crate. Next to the computer was an antenna that received the signals from the sensors inside the players’ helmets. Mihalik crouched down and began paging through the data. In one column, the HITS software listed the top hits of the practice up to that point, and every few moments the screen would refresh, reflecting the plays that had just been run on the field. Forty-five minutes into practice, the top eight head blows on the field measured 82 gs, 79 gs, 75 gs, 79 gs, 67 gs, 60 gs, 57 gs, and 53 gs. One player, a running back, had received both the 79 gs and the 60 gs, as well as another hit, measuring 27.9 gs. This wasn’t a full-contact practice. It was “shells.” The players wore only helmets and shoulder pads, and still there were mini car crashes happening all over the field.

Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, “I didn’t want to miss a game.” Once, in the years when he was still playing, he woke up and fell into a wall as he got out of bed. “I start puking all over,” he recalled. “So I said to my wife, ‘Take me to practice.’ I didn’t want to miss practice.” The same season that he was knocked unconscious, he began to have pain in his hips. He received three cortisone shots, and kept playing. At the end of the season, he discovered that he had a herniated disk. He underwent surgery, and four months later was back at training camp. “They put me in full-contact practice from day one,” he said. “After the first day, I knew I wasn’t right. They told me, ‘You’ve had the surgery. You’re fine. You should just fight through it.’ It’s like you’re programmed. You’ve got to go without question—I’m a warrior. I can block that out of my mind. I go out, two days later. Full contact. Two-a-days. My back locks up again. I had re-herniated the same disk that got operated on four months ago, and bulged the disk above it.” As one of Turley’s old coaches once said, “He plays the game as it should be played, all out,” which is to say that he put the game above his own well-being.

Casson is right. There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.

In “Dogmen and Dogfights,” Evans and Forsyth write:
When one views a staged dog fight between pit bulls for the first time, the most macabre aspect of the event is that the only sounds you hear from these dogs are those of crunching bones and cartilage. The dogs rip and tear at each other; their blood, urine and saliva splatter the sides of the pit and clothes of the handlers. . . . The emotions of the dogs are conspicuous, but not so striking, even to themselves, are the passions of the owners of the dogs. Whether they hug a winner or in the rare case, destroy a dying loser, whether they walk away from the carcass or lay crying over it, their fondness for these fighters is manifest. ♦

03
Nov
09

College Athletics: Beer and Circus

By jeffnearlife 4 Comments
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Here’s the main reason I know that college athletics would never go the way of the dinosaur: schools use their athletic programs to draw students.  Someone on Facebook mentioned that they thought that schools used sports as a revenue stream; as I showed yesterday, this is not true.  It’s much more nuanced than that and it’s all about applications and thus tuition as a revenue stream.  If you know much about finance in colleges today, the revenue stream of student tuition is increasingly more powerful in the money pot.

Here are some numbers from a paper published by a VT professor: co

“College basketball teams that make this year’s cut for the Sweet 16 may boost the number of students applying to their schools by as much as 3 percent next year, while the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament, often called “March Madness,” may see a 7 percent to 8 percent jump in applications, according to a Virginia Tech researcher.

Pope combined data from the Peterson’s college guide, which records information about the incoming freshman classes of 330 NCAA Division I colleges and universities, with information on how well these schools did in football and basketball each year from 1983 to 2002. According to the study, the 64 schools that make it into the NCAA basketball championship tournament have a 1 percent increase in student applications the next year, schools in the Sweet 16 have a 3 percent increase, the Final Four have a 4 percent to 5 percent increase, and the championship winner has a 7 percent to 8 percent increase.

In addition, colleges and universities with football teams in the top 20 have a 2.5 percent gain in the number of student applications the next year while teams in the top 10 have a 3 percent gain. Schools that win a football championship see a 7 percent to 8 percent jump in applications. For each school, the spike in the number of applications due to basketball or football success continues for several years before returning to normal.

“These numbers tend to be larger for private schools than for public schools,” Pope said. “For example, private schools in the Sweet 16 see a 4 percent to 5 percent increase in applications compared to a 2 percent to 3 percent increase for public schools.”"

Translation: you win, you get more applications.  More applications (in theory) equals higher enrollment.  Higher enrollment equals more dollars.

In the book “Beer and Circus”, Murray Sperber compares college athletics to Roman gladiatorial contests (more on this later in the week), saying that the sports program is used to distract students from the fact that undergraduate education has declined in quality.  He also explains that big time college sports connect deeply with a culture of binge drinking.

On a personal level, I’ve certainly seen this in action with students and I’ve never been at a school that had a truly elite athletic program.  I can see how the attitude of students at a school with consistently top-ranked athletic programs would fit under Sperber’s assumptions though.

02
Nov
09

The College Sports Cash Cow

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Since I started working at a college, I’ve had a much more difficult time rooting for college sports.  Usually when I tell this to someone, I get multiple bizarre looks, especially from those who know the kind of sports junkie that I am.  If you follow my tweets, you will see a constant barrage of sports tweets during major games but yet I am disinterested by college sports.

I wanted to spend a few posts explaining myself as well as asking some pertinent questions about college sports.

I’m still digging into and learning the numbers but here are a few figures…

The NCAA makes $600 million on their current contract for the college basketball tournament in the spring.

A report from the Indianapolis Star in 2006 found that “athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, and that without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. In fact, most would have lost more than $5 million.”

Here was one particular school’s line from the budget report:

University, Total Total % of operating
Student government outside operating revenue from Reported Adjusted
fees support support revenue outside support Bottom line bottom line
Virginia Tech 5,840,958 324,469 6,165,427 45,730,485 13% 8,265,356 2,099,929

If you’re not into finance, those numbers might be a little difficult to make sense of, but essentially the critical part to notice is that this is a CASH COW football program that is staying afloat largely on student fees.  Most NCAA (or NAIA) programs have nowhere near the potential to generate revenue that most of these programs do.

Now some of you might say, “that’s not so bad”.  But is it?  What are the educational/learning outcomes of athletics for students?  Is collecting 6 million dollars in student fees (at VT, this is essentially $200 per student) a wise use of student funds?

For the athletes, while many of them receive scholarships, their time is often FAR more invested in their sport than in the classroom (especially in the revenue generating football and basketball).

30
Oct
09

Book Review: “Fooled By Randomness” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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I knew what I was getting into here. I had read The Black Swan and it was one of my favorite books. Taleb looks at the world and see it for what it is; whether there’s some power that controls everything or not, we have little control over many events and have incredible difficulty projecting or even guessing the future.

While this fault can provide incredible variety and intrigue to daily life, it can cause havoc in our personal lives and our financial lives if we are not always cognizant of our incredible inability to guess what may come next. My only problem with this book is that Taleb says in 500 pages what probably could have been said in 100. By the time you get to the end of the book, you feel as if you’ve read the same thesis 10 times (yet inexplicably Taleb says that the book continues to grow). While the Black Swan felt like a tight dissertation on our opaque and often pathetic view of the future, fooled by randomness feels like a mess and Taleb’s personal testing ground for his ideas.

Nonetheless, the book is a good read. It helped me to reflect on how much I anticipate that I can figure out how the future will play out and reminded me that you can always use circumstances for your advantage. While we certainly do not want to always plan for the worst, we can act in such a way that things do not have to be perfect for us to profit.

22
Oct
09

Blog Action Day – Climate Change and Our Campuses

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Today is Blog Action Day and the focus this year is climate change.  Since my main focus is colleges and universities, I wanted to highlight an organization that is working to bring green habits and education to our campuses

The Alliance to Save Energy, headquartered in Washington DC has a “Green Campus” program.  Here’s their website  http://www.ase.org/content/article/detail/3037

“Our nation’s institutions of higher education spend a significant portion of their annual operating budgets on utility services, diverting funds from valuable programmatic and community-building activities. The Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Campus Program is leading the way towards campus sustainability by bridging the divide between students and institutional energy costs. Through Green Campus, students are working to save energy on campuses by building general campus awareness, incorporating energy conservation and efficiency into course curricula, and implementing projects targeting energy use, student purchasing decisions, and operational changes.”

21
Oct
09

Interview with Cayce Stone

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This continues my series where I will be interviewing people that I look up to or admire in one way or another. I hope I’ll learn a little something about what makes them tick and hopefully my readers will learn a little something as well. This interview is with Cayce Stone from OrgSync.

Tell me a little bit about your career – what you do now and what your path has been to get there (as general or specific as you want)

Currently I manage a team of professionals that work to spread the word of OrgSync around the country and now the world. We have successfully brought over 100 campuses into our family, and it has been exciting to watch that happen. In my current position I am able to do everything from working with new schools as they learn about how OrgSync easy campus wide communication to explaining how technology can help them improve their campus life. I really do feel like I am helping to improve higher education across the country by increasing student engagement and involvement on campus. We both agree that involvement directly relates to graduation and retention rates and it great to be helping campuses improve that. I was talking with Sacramento State and since OrgSync came and held an onsite training on campus, they have seen a 210% in the number of students registered for organizations and 70 more organizations on campus.

I am lucky in that not only do I get to explain to prospects what OrgSync can do, but I am able to take their ideas and build them into our platform. OrgSync truly is a result of the collective efforts of 100 campuses ideas in one place, and we love doing that. Everyone from the largest universities to the smallest are able to use the same tools to manage and improve campus wide communication.

I had a variety of experiences that got me to where I am today (http://www.orgsync.com/company/team). I did run organizations while in school, and that helped teach me how to manage and lead a team. That is why I love the out of classroom experience that we encourage at OrgSync, because I personally built a company and a career out of my experiences of running student orgs not what I learned on the academic side. I am not belittling academics, but want to help validate that crucial out of classroom experience for students to help them gain a competitive advantage when going onto the next stage of their life. I also spent 8 years in the army which taught me a variety of things, and most of all the difference in good and bad leadership tactics.

I feel like I should start by saying thank you for your years of service – I feel like you mentioned this off-hand to me before, but I didn’t realize the extent of what you had done with the military. By the way, “managed the intelligence and operations center” is one of the coolest sounding job responsibilities I’ve ever heard – beats anything on my resume.

How would you say your experience being “involved” in college helped with where your career has gone? How did those experiences help you figure out where you wanted your own career to go?

I do appreciate the comments, and the military definitely helped build me into what I am. While in school I didn’t know that I would do anything with the knowledge I received as a student leader, I just enjoyed doing it. After school, I did a few others things, and then while talking with Eric decided to do something to help orgs to communicate.  I don’t think that student leaders plan on using that experience to build a career and it rarely does.  I ran a ski and snowboard club in school and would never have thought I would have learned much from it.   I did enjoy the free trips to Colorado, but it was the knowledge that is gained from managing and running an organization of 250-300 people that is powerful.  I learned how to manage a team of officers and provided them oversight guidance to make sure we achieved our larger goal.  That is what I am still currently doing, minus the free Colorado trips.  I provide the vision and help a team of amazing people work to achieve that.

What is gained as a student leader is impossible to quantify, and to put into black in white terms. I know that I never learned as much about things like conflict resolution or how to motivate people in english class, but those skills are needed by every leader in the real world. That is why I think student leaders deserve a GPA boost because they are truly more well rounded and prepared for everything life is and will throw at them.

I really liked what you said about your expectations not being that it would be useful other than for your enjoyment at the time, that gets back to something I’ve talked about regularly with regard to pursuing your interests. Good things tend to come from that even if they might not be the good things you would expect.

You clearly have a passion for student leaders and leadership development. What might be some advice you would give students currently in leadership and what about those who aren’t currently “involved” or in leadership positions?

Enjoy what you do, and do it as best as you can. Life is short, and you have to take pride and pleasure in all areas of life. The best leaders are those that surround themselves with people they respect and enjoy working with, and at times are smarter than they are. It is impossible to truly be passionate at something you don’t enjoy, so find your niche and give it all that you can.  There is nothing more thrilling for a leader than to see their team succeed, so always be striving to make those that work for you as productive as they can be and always give credit to your team.  Don’t take it for yourself.

Students who aren’t involved just haven’t found the group or organization where they belong. When you join a group you need to make sure that you agree with their leadership, and that they have goals similar to your own. If that group exists on campus then join it and enjoy being active with like minded students. Even a member of an organization can be a leader if they have the correct mindset. If you don’t find an organization that shares your vision, then create it. There wasn’t a ski and snowboard club when I came to UT which is one of the largest universities in the country, so I founded it. Find other students that agree with you and start to spread the word. Soon the organization will become your pet project that you enjoy more than you ever expected. Keep sharing with others your passion and what makes your organization different and it will spread. You will quickly realize that you are the biggest asset to your organization, and others will follow the path that you as the leader established.

Being a student leader is anything but easy, but it is one of the most rewarding things you can do. When I reflect on my college life, I think more about the experiences with my organization than the classroom experiences I had. Help make your organizations that same way for other students on campus and you will come out ahead.

One last question (I think), tell me a little bit about your experience with the startup at OrgSync.  I know that many of my peers (including myself) have dreamed of the idea of jumping in on the ground floor of a company and helping it grow. What have you thought of the experience and what would you tell someone who’s considering it?

There isn’t enough space in this blog to list out all of the things I have learned in taking something from a concept into a working reality. I learned more in 6 months here than in 5 years of college, I now understand why other employers always want to hire people with experience. Starting a company is not for the thin skinned or the weak of heart. You will be told no more times than you will remember, but you will never forget a single yes. Frequently there will be obstacles put in your way, and it is how you deal or tackle those that separate the greats from the rest. Never look at something in front of you as an impassable brick wall, but as a hurdle to overcome.  Each challenge is but a learning opportunity to prepare you to better handle the next challenge that will come. I also thoroughly believe that you cannot change the past; all you can do is make the best decision right now that will affect your future.  Know what you want to achieve, and always make the choice the helps you work towards that goal.

Be prepared to work harder than you have ever done before. This is why you need to only start something you are passionate about, don’t do it for money. Money is a great motivator for a short amount of time, but true passion will help you push the company over the goal line. I don’t work 10-12 hours a day, I do something I enjoy and am passionate about. You also need to look at yourself and honestly determine what your personal weaknesses are. Once you have identified your weakness from marketing to development surround yourself with people who have that have that as their strength or skill set. The synergy that you will create is much more powerful than anything you can do on your own. You will need others help in making your dream a reality; just make sure that everyone complements each other’s weaknesses.

You can’t boil the ocean, so don’t try to do too much. You are going to have limited resources and can’t afford to spread yourself thin. Find an area where you excel that is unique, push that niche and stay with it. If you try to do 10 things well you will fail when you could be doing 1 thing flawlessly. After you have built your tree trunk you can spread and build other branches, but the truck needs to be strong enough to support them.

Enjoy what you are doing, and wake up every day with a smile on your face or else you are doing something wrong.

****************

You can keep up with Cayce on Twitter or on the orgsync blog.  For more information on orgsync, check out their page.

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20
Oct
09

Trenton, The Wire, and Jasper Howard

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One of my past-times since I’ve moved to New Jersey is to spend time driving around Trenton.  Just to give you an idea, I live on the outskirts of Trenton, closer to Princeton than I am to the center of Trenton.  For those not familiar, Trenton is really close to Princeton but in no way similar other than they’re both located in New Jersey.

Before I moved up here, I basically knew that Trenton was a rough place that had seen better days.  It’s been rated among the most dangerous cities in the United States and is the opposite of a tourist destination – a tourist repellent, i guess.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve learned about Trenton’s better days.  It’s the site where the revolutionary war turned; that picture of George Washington crossing the delaware River was a depiction of him entering Trenton.  It used to be a city for manufacturing, even boasting on one of the bridges crossing town that “trenton makes, the world takes”.  It’s a historic city and the capital of one of our most important states.

However, I’ve also learned what happened that destroyed Trenton.  The riots of 1968 were especially bad here, as well as in Newark and Camden – two other places that have experienced massive decay.  (For some compelling reading on Trenton’s riots, check out this story).

I say all that to say, the city has seen better days and is still in the process of recovering from it’s worst days, even though they happened nearly 40 years ago.  What I see now is urban decay and it always reminds me of Baltimore….

I was addicted to the Wire for the first 4 seasons, but stopped watching when I moved here because it felt a little too real.  Literally miles from my house, I can drive around and see corner boys, graffiti depicting slain gang heroes, urban decay and poverty.  I don’t need it on TV.

What I loved about the Wire was that it depicted the harsh reality of life as a poor person in a very challenging city.  Classrooms in the schools were a disaster due to the corner kids who had been trained for life on the street corner not in the classroom.  Many of these kids were experiencing very real challenges that I cannot even imagine – crack addicted mothers, absent fathers, constant pressure from drug pushers to work, and friends who had chosen the wrong path.  The ones who just wanted to keep their nose clean and do a good job were faced with never-ending challenges as they tried to navigate this environment, many of them on their own.

Which brings me to Jasper Howard, the student who was stabbed to death after a party at the UConn Student Union on Saturday night, a story I described on my Twitter as “my nightmare”.  Jasper had a tough upbringing in Miami.  One story put it this way

“Howard, known as “Jazz” to his teammates, often talked about his tough time growing up in Miami. His mother, Joangila, worked many jobs to support him and his sisters, Keyondra and Jasmine, who is afflicted withmeningitis.

Howard, the first in his family to go to college, also spoke often about his dream of making it professionally so he could support his family.

“He was a good child, a wonderful, sweet, loving child,” Joangila Howard told CNN affiliate WSVN. “I just hope whoever did it turns himself in. [Jasper] didn’t deserve this.”"

For some reason, I’m sure we’ll find out soon, someone decided to take the life of this young man who was literally THE hope of his family and was simply trying to get an education and take advantage of the opportunities afforded to him by playing football.

I guess I say all this to say – the kids who are forced to grow up in difficult environments like Trenton, Camden, Newark, Baltimore and many other places where poverty ravages lives and families need all the help they can get, from all of us so that they can have the opportunity and the choice to enjoy something different.  I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do have hope when I see things like the young man I saw crossing the street today who had purpose in his eyes and a bookbag on his chest and was not wandering around the corners but instead appeared to be headed home from school.  It’s kids like this who will change lives and communities.

Sadly, Jasper Howard will never get that chance but maybe this tragedy, no matter what the circumstances, will help us all to pause and remember that while shows like The Wire are not real, there are literally millions of kids trying to make the best of themselves and their families.  The rest of us should be doing everything we can to help these courageous kids and keep them safe.

19
Oct
09

Blogger sued by university – YIKES!

By jeffnearlife 3 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
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I was having a case of writer’s block and decided to peruse InsideHigherEd for inspiration.  I ran across this story:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/16/butler (article below)

Yikes.

In my experience, politics often invade the university culture to the point that stirring the pot and not playing the game can land you outside of the university in a hurry.

Obviously there are two sides to this story and most of what we hear in the article is the student side.

Here are a couple things that are painfully obvious:

1) This is TERRIBLE public relations for Butler.  Do you really want to be caught SUING YOUR STUDENTS?  Bad stuff.

2) Butler grossly underestimated how much social media has made you unable to shove anything under the rug.  If someone is involved that knows how to leverage social media, you cannot and will not be able to hide anything.

3) That next to last paragraph really caught my eye.  ”(A) “culture of fear” pervades Butler to the point where being anonymous is often the only way students and faculty members feel they can voice concern.”   I hope that all of our institutions wouldn’t be described this way but I fear they might.  How many times have you heard someone mention that they should hold their tongue around certain people?  Shouldn’t we want honesty about where we’re at?

*************************************************************

“Butler University has sued an undergraduate student for making libelous and defamatory statements about administrators on a blog he kept anonymously.

Details of the case became public last week when Bill Watts, an English professor at Butler, wrote a piece in the student newspaper and sent an e-mail to the university’s Faculty Senate in which he questioned “the practice of suing our own students for their utterances.” The e-mail provoked a written response from Bobby Fong, Butler president, who defended the lawsuit Tuesday at a Faculty Senate meeting, noting that “academic freedom does not provide protection for defamation and harassment.”

Jess Zimmerman, a junior at Butler, created “TrueBU Blog” in October 2008 to chronicle happenings he deemed of import at the institution. Though he managed the blog anonymously under the tongue-in-cheek moniker “Soodo Nym,” he has recently come forward publicly. In addition to posts by Zimmerman, the blog also featured “reports” from other anonymous faculty and student “correspondents.”

In his first post on the blog, Zimmerman writes, “This is not a forum for attack. It is a forum for truth.” He also asks that all commenters and fellow posters “please refrain from making ad hominem attacks,” noting that “they will not be tolerated.”

The blog did not attract much traffic until December 2008, when Zimmerman started chronicling what he viewed as the unfair dismissal of Andrea Gullickson, then chair of the Butler’s School of Music and Zimmerman’s stepmother. (Gullickson, who retained her faculty job, said that until recently, she did not realize the author was her stepson.) In multiple posts, Zimmerman cites various other anonymous sources and internal e-mails in presenting a case as to why he believes Peter Alexander, dean of Butler’s College of Fine Arts, and Jamie Comstock, Butler’s provost, acted “inappropriately and inexcusably” in their handling of Gullickson’s departure. During that month, Zimmerman said, the blog received more than 2,000 hits.

Just before the New Year, Zimmerman took down the blog after receiving an e-mail (to his anonymous account) from the university’s lawyer noting that it was pursuing charges against him.

The Lawsuit

In January, the university filed a libel and defamation suit against “Soodo Nym,” listing numerous statements from his blog that they argue “have harmed the honesty, integrity, and professional reputation of Butler University and two of its high-level administrators.” University officials insist that, at the time the suit was filed, they did not know that Zimmerman was the blog’s author, and they hoped the case would identify the author.

Michael Blickman, one of the university’s lawyers, wrote in an e-mail that the university “had a sense that the blogger could have been [Zimmerman] or another student” but that it also “could have been an outsider.”

As late as Thursday evening, even though Zimmerman had openly admitted to Butler’s student newspaper and to Inside Higher Ed that he was the blogger, Blickman maintained that Zimmerman “has yet to acknowledge this to the university.” As for naming Zimmerman to the suit in place of the current “John Doe,” Blickman said the university “is reserving all options” in the future.

Among the specific statements written by Zimmerman that the university deems libelous include the following description: “Peter Alexander, Dean of the [College of Fine Arts] is power-hungry and afraid of his own shadow. … He drives away talented administrators. He frustrates students within the departments. He hurts the ability of the school to recruit talented students and faculty members. He announces to the campus that the Butler Way, the ideals for which the school and everyone at it stands, mean nothing.”

The university also takes umbrage at Zimmerman’s description of a meeting Alexander had with the School of Music, regarding the departure of Gullickson, a well-liked chair who received favorable reviews from her peers. Zimmerman writes that Alexander “lied” to faculty and left the meeting “embarrassed” for having done so. The university also challenges Zimmerman’s claim that Alexander and Comstock were, as the suit phrases it, “engaged in a conspiracy to misrepresent the circumstances of the departure” of Gullickson as chair.

The university noted in the suit that administrators “have received threatening/harassing emails in connection with the events reports on the TrueBU Blog.” One such e-mail was sent from Zimmerman on Dec. 25, wishing Alexander and Comstock a “very merry Christmas and a good new year,” but adding that “I haven’t forgotten the abuses of power and poor leadership you showed last semester.”

Fong also noted in his written statement Tuesday that Comstock had received another e-mail that made her fear “for her own safety, for her husband for her house and property.” Fong quoted the e-mail as having read, “We can create much more trouble for you than we have so far.” Zimmerman and Gullickson both said they were not responsible for the e-mail and did not know who had penned it.

Identifying the Blogger

Even though the university had filed a suit against “Soodo Nym,” Zimmerman said he was unaware of any legal action being taken against him until early last summer.

Then, Michael Zimmerman, Jess’s father and a biology professor at Butler, did not have his contract as dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences renewed. After hearing that Comstock had openly disparaged him and misrepresented the nature of his departure as dean to members of the college’s Board of Visitors, Michael worked with his lawyer to get Comstock to retract her statements. He said his goal was not to get back his position as dean, noting that like Gullickson, he was content to move on from what he felt was an injustice and return to a teaching position.

In working to get an out-of-court settlement with the university regarding Comstock’s statements about Michael, university attorneys approached Michael’s lawyer with terms that sought to settle not only his complaints but the suit they had filed against his son, Jess, regarding the blog. It was at that point, Michael and Gullickson said they became aware of their son’s sole involvement with the blog.

Dan Altman, Michael and Jess’s attorney, said the university’s attorneys approached them with a settlement that tied both cases together, even though he considered them separate matters. He noted that they made settlement in Michael’s matter contingent upon Jess agreeing to submit to university punishment for the blog and signing away any right of appeal to the university’s decision. Also, the university’s attorneys wanted both father and son to sign confidentiality agreements, mandating that they not speak about either the blog or Michael’s case. Negotiations fell apart a few months ago, he said, when Michael and Jess did not agree to these terms, not knowing what punishment to which Jess would be subjected.

“I don’t think there’s any thing libelous in that blog,” Altman said. “There might be some opinions that Butler people don’t appreciate about certain things, but there’s nothing untruthful. I think the difficulty with the blog is that it was anonymous. If you know where the source is, then there’s a different way to interpret things. If they knew the source, I don’t think they would have interpreted the blog as something that would reach harassment. In regard to the e-mails being cited as harassment, I think any reasonable person would not have interpreted them that way.”

Altman said he believes the case being brought by the university is a strategic lawsuit against public participation [SLAPP], intended to silence his client and burden him with with the cost of legal defense until he ceases his criticism of the administration.

“This isn’t about winning,” Altman continued. “I mean, what damages are they going to get out of a college junior?”

On behalf of the university, Blickman said the case was not a SLAPP and characterized the failed settlement between Michael, Jess and Butler differently.

“Butler University found itself in a position where individuals felt harassed and they believed that Soodo Nym’s mission was to maliciously harm their reputations,” Blickman wrote in an e-mail. “We came to the defense of these individuals. Butler did not know Soodo Nym’s identity until June. We pursued a resolution that we felt was fair for all parties. Regrettably, that did not occur. The university is following its normal and customary processes in handling this matter.”

He also countered that the university’s suit was fair and reasonable, considering what the blog contained.

“Some people mistakenly believe that the Internet is the Wild West where no rules apply,” Blickman wrote. “But that is just wrong. It is simply a venue no different than the newspaper or the town square. If you defame someone on the Internet you should be held accountable. You can’t hope to find shelter from the First Amendment when you engage in serial harassment and defamation. The Founding Fathers certainly could not have imagined the Internet but they surely never intended our First Amendment to protect individuals who engage in malicious conduct that harms others. I suggest that you review each entry in Soodo Nym’s blog. It is not appropriate to consider a single e-mail in isolation. If one reads the entire blog the only reasonable conclusion that can be reached is that Soodo Nym’s comments were defamatory and legally actionable.”

Impressions of the Case

Now that he has identified himself as the blogger, Jess Zimmerman said he has no regrets about anything he wrote under the previously anonymous moniker “Soodo Nym.”

“I’m willing to say that I might not have been as nice as I could have or should have been,” Zimmerman said. “But, being a little mean isn’t harassment, libel or defamation. There can be good reasons for remaining anonymous. Butler being so small is a blessing and a curse. It’s great that everyone knows everyone, but it can make it hard to discuss serious issues. I’m not in the game of playing hindsight is 20/20. I believe I would make the same decision to be anonymous again.”

He was also willing to acknowledge that the situation involving his stepmother might have affected his writing or decision to write. Still, he noted that he would have done the same for anyone “suffering a similar injustice,” calling himself a student who was “concerned” and wanted to “do something to help the situation” by making it public.

Now that he has come forward as the former “TrueBU” blogger, Jess has started a new blog, “I Am John Doe” to chronicle openly the lawsuit being filed against him by the university. He said he feels it will be “less stressful” to “put [his] name on this blog.”

Michael Zimmerman, while making plain that he and his wife played no role in Jess’s blog, said he was “incredibly proud” of how his son has “handled himself,” noting that his blogging was an example of him putting to use the critical thinking skills the university has taught him.

“The question of whether or not he should have been anonymous from the beginning is an interesting one,” he said. “In particular, I don’t think there’s any second guessing or looking back. … I honestly don’t think people should put so much emphasis on his being anonymous. What’s the difference? If what he wrote was appropriate and he had documents to back everything up, what does it matter that he signed it or not?”

Andrea Gullickson expressed a similar sentiment, but said a “culture of fear” pervades Butler to the point where being anonymous is often the only way students and faculty members feel they can voice concern.

Of what her family has gone through at Butler, she said, “We want to move on with our lives.””

16
Oct
09

OrgSync Blog Post

By jeffnearlife Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

If you haven’t already, please check out my blog post on the OrgSync Blog

“Web 2.0 Student Learning Outcomes”

http://blog.orgsync.com/2009/student-learning-outcomes-attributed-to-social-media/

14
Oct
09

Interview with CJ Barnes

By jeffnearlife Leave a Comment
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This is second in my series where I will be interviewing people that I look up to or admire in one way or another. I hope I’ll learn a little something about what makes them tick and hopefully my readers will learn a little something as well. This interview is with CJ Barnes.

Tell me a little about what you do for work these days and how you ended up doing this for a living

These days I am working at the Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service (CSLEPS) at NC State as the Community Service Coordinator. I technically work for the Federal Government through AmeriCorps and their VISTA (Volunteer in Service to America) program. The majority of my work is focused on service projects and service-learning programs. I volunteer with our Alternative Service Break program, advising student leaders that serve as an extension of the office, as well as our weekly mentor program at a local elementary school, among a number of other programs organized by the center.

My primary goal is indirect service by providing the students at NC State the opportunity to gain valuable experience volunteering with various organizations at NC State, in Raleigh, and around the world.

This is not the first professional experience that I have had, but by far the most directed toward my personal passion. I attended NC State for my undergraduate degree in Textile Engineering and graduated in 2005. From there I began working at (engineering company). I worked there for nearly a year, but during that time I realized that a number of the experiences I had in undergrad were more directly correlated with what I wanted to accomplish professionally. This led me to pursue a Masters degree in Student Affairs.

From my personal experience, I realized that providing students with the guidance to realize their personal passion earlier was a goal of mine. I believe my experience before grad school led me to this realization, so it is my hope that I can challenge students today to truly explore the things they are interested in and realize that there are options that they may not have fully considered to date.

You mention experiences in undergrad that were more directly correlated with what you wanted to accomplish professionally. What were those experiences specifically? How do you think they connect with your current job (i know you hinted at this but was wondering if you could elaborate)?

When I was in undergrad I was a Resident Advisor, Community Assistant Coordinator, and an Alternative Service Break team leader to the Dominican Republic. These experiences gave me opportunities to work with students and help them realize the things that they were passionate about, whether that was a club on campus, or a global service issue.

I think these experiences, the team leader position particularly, relate strongly to the work I am doing right now. I get the opportunity in my current position to sit down with students and mentor them on the things that they want to accomplish in life for example I have already spoken specifically about AmeriCorps opportunities with four students and have a meeting set up with another one this upcoming week. I feel like having the opportunity to not only mentor these students but offer them opportunities to get involved on campus is something that my current position allows me to do.

My current job also allows me to set up opportunities for students to participate in service in whichever community they want to participate in, but it also allows me to work with students on the things that they can take away from their experience. This is the portion that a lot of students, myself included during undergrad, do not realize when they get involved in service. They don’t realize the learning that they can do when they perform service. It is my hope that I can help them reflect on their experience and challenge themselves to make a difference in the future.

Have you found it challenging to make the transition from (engineering company) to student affairs? Given the opportunity to go back, would you?

The transition has been a little odd to say the least. My work experience at (engineering company) was very different than it is at State, but in some ways very similar. I am supervised very differently here than I was there, and that has contributed to some of the differences that I feel. Different expectations led to having to take time to get accustomed to the office and the work environment. However, my transition into my position here in CSLEPS has been easier, than say if I had taken a job somewhere else.

I had worked through this office in undergrad as a student leader, and then again as an intern in graduate school. These experiences made the transition a bit easier as I was accustomed to the work that was done in the office and had actually served in a working capacity at one point. To say it has all been easy would be false, but it has definitely been easier here than somewhere new.

As far as returning to (engineering company), I can say with 99% certainty that I wouldn’t return. Not because I don’t think (engineering company) does good things, just mostly because I realized it wasn’t the field I was meant to work in full time. The only way I could foresee returning to (engineering company) would be primarily financial, but even that might not be enough to draw me back to the process improvement field.

So what would be your advice to others that find themselves in a similar position to you when you were at (engineering company), making good money but unhappy with their career direction?

I think it is important for people to weigh the options that they have against their passions. I was in a peculiar position when I quit my job at (engineering company) as I had just gotten married and my wife was/is very supportive of me finding the right fit for me.

It is very important that they weigh the financial aspect of their personal life and whether a career move is going to work for them. I advocate for all people to explore their personal passions and determine if they feel that changing professions outweighs any monetary loss they might experience from changing fields.

I would also recommend sitting down and talking it over with a close friend or significant other. Their insight can help a lot in determining if it is the right choice for them. I personally feel it was the right decision for me, but that may not be the case for everyone. Ultimately, I personally feel that working in something you are truly passionate about is far more rewarding than any amount of money can be.

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