Who Teaches the Teachers?

            Hello Everyone. I hope I find you, whoever you are, doing well today. First, an update. Since my last post my list of college teaching positions has expanded. I’m applying to a number of schools that are looking for applied linguists such as myself as well as to a few more generalist positions. Those are the ones where, as I said last time, the school doesn’t specify a particular field of focus they’re looking for in a new hire. So, I am applying to eight places at last count. I think that’s as big as the list will get for now. If I had to pick a number one wish for right now, I’d say Kalamazoo College. They’re a small liberal arts college in Michigan, and they asked for someone who does what I do and who specializes in the sort of teaching methods we use here at Illinois. That is to say, it’s the kind of school I would love to teach at, and it seems to be seeking someone who is qualified in the things I do. So it’s a good fit on both counts. Now I pray that they think the same or that God shows me what he thinks. Meanwhile, the dissertation continues, crushing deadlines loom, the usual. Now I come to my subject for today, professors. What I’m going to say about the duties of teachers will be discussed with reference to college professors in America, but I hope that if you are a teacher elsewhere or at some other level of education, you can and will make the application to your own life. So, I’m going to discuss truth and relativism in our classrooms and offer a solution, something I’d like to see more of at any rate.

 

A Little Linguistic History:

            The noun ‘professor’ is also connected to the verb ‘profess.’ ‘Professor’ came into English from Latin by way of Old French. It comes to us from  the original Latin verb ‘profitieri,’ meaning to lay claim to or to declare. So, a professor is a person who claims knowledge of one sort or another. They also declare that knowledge, ‘professing’ it. We don’t think of college faculty as professing their knowledge, but when you get down into the meaning of the words themselves, that’s just what they do. Distributing and furthering their knowledge  is just what we pay professors to do, and we often times respect them for their knowledge and expertise. That process of knowledge distribution is often what we mean when we talk about another Latin-derived word, ‘education.’ Even in their older Latin forms,  ‘education’ and the verb ‘educate’ evince notions of instruction, leadership and the like. So then, what is it we are supposed to be teaching and professing? At first glance there are myriad answers to this question. Some would answer with engineering, others with philosophy, still others with biology, linguistics, psychology, etc. In short, the answers you’d get cover all the subjects you’d expect to find in college classrooms and coincide with the professor’s training and interests. That’s perfectly fine. Yet—and here we reach the jumping off point of this essay—there is only one thing we should really be teaching and professing no matter our expertise. It is a thing that manifests itself in every discipline and subject from the most obvious to the ones you’d never think people get doctorates in. That thing is the truth. No matter what we teach, we are called upon to teach truthfully, and I’m talking about a little bit more than ‘truth’ as it may be defined in the college code of conduct manual. It means more than getting the facts of one’s area of expertise right or more than not plagiarizing.

 

The Place of Truth:

            Truth, absolute, unshakable truth, is so critical because professors often serve as role models for young students. As students we tend to start out by assuming that our professors have the answers. When you’re a freshman or sophomore and you ask a prof a question, you expect an answer and you assume that answer to be accurate to the best of the professor’s ability whether it concerns reworking a differential equation or what Kant thought about an issue. That’s not an unreasonable expectation given that you’re probably 18 or 19, just starting out in college, and maybe you’re even taking this class because you have to, a class that has nothing to do with what you want to study. So you often take the professor’s answer and go on to write your essay or your term paper.

By the time  you’re a junior or senior, you’ve come a bit further. You’ve developed an interest in something and you’ve started to gain deeper knowledge about it. Maybe you want to go on to grad school, maybe not. By this point your professors are people with whom you have conversations that involve more than you just asking questions and their answering them. You’ve begun to penetrate into the deeper matters of what you’re studying. Finally, as a graduate student, you’re taking the specialized seminars and courses, dialoguing with professors and students about the deepest questions, the uncertainties and gaps in your field of study, and possibly, you’re beginning to find that area of the field you want to stake a claim to and make a contribution to. By the time you’ve staked your claim, you’re probably writing a doctoral dissertation. This, in a very small nutshell, is how learning progresses in college and grad school, and at every stage professors are guiding you, instructing you, correcting you, mentoring you and training you. You’re being trained not only in the knowledge of engineering or English lit or sociology, but also in the methods of critical thinking and analysis that are part of those disciplines. Your professors can and often do shape much of your adult thinking after college.

 

            Truth, however, is a commodity that is all too often in short supply in America’s college classrooms. That’s quite a statement to make, I know. I’m not saying all college professors are liars, and you know me well enough to know that. Nor do I mean that college professors are insincere. In fact, I don’t mean any negative criticism of the characters of those who are, or who become, college professors. Yet, truth is lacking in our classrooms.

            It’s lacking because of the cultural air we breathe in this postmodern age. We find ourselves not wanting to disagree with anyone about anything, lest someone feel slighted or lest some value system be questioned. We find ourselves striving to include everything that everyone believes and holding up everyone’s belief in anything and everything as valid lest we be viewed as other than tolerant. This atmosphere that I’m describing is, of course, the atmosphere produced in a culture of relativism, and nowhere is relativism more passionately advocated and defended than in the college classrooms of America. To give you an idea of what this atmosphere often looks like, allow me to repeat an analogy I made in another blog post in March of last year:

If you are presented with a chocolate cake, you expect certain things to be present, namely chocolate. But our universities would teach you that it is wrong of you to dispute someone else who says that their carrot cake or their fruit cake is also chocolate. You might hear this: “Brad, now that’s pretty insensitive and exclusivist of you. my fruitcake is just as much a chocolate cake to me as yours is to you. You need to be more considerate of my culinary position. Who are you to say that this isn’t a chocolate cake!”

 

            You might argue the point in that post by saying that there’s a difference in my example between fact and opinion. Chocolate, you might say, has certain physical and chemical properties and is what it is even if someone else is mistaken about it. To take my absurd little example just one step further, in today’s climate someone could respond with, “ah, but you see, Brad, chocolate is about much more than the coco and the process that refines it into what you call chocolate. There’s a sense to chocolate, an ineffable experiential quality and relational dynamic between consumer and product that makes their piece of cake as much chocolate in their worldview as that cake is to you in your worldview.”

            I’ll grant you that it’s an absurd example, but it makes my point nicely. On such a basis as the one I just presented, the true chocolate lover is left wrong-footed. You can now hardly defend real chocolate and its genuineness without seeming to call into question the views and thought processes of that other person, something we are enjoined not to do at universities. Rather, our western university training would compel us here to concede that my notions of chocolate are ethnocentric and limited. As any honest person will tell you, however, only one of those people in that made up conversation is right, the one holding the thing that is actually chocolate. Discussions like this one take place every day on hundreds of college campuses concerning any number of topics and questions. Still, I’m not here to go on about relativism itself. I’ve said plenty on the subject in other posts, and you know what I think of it if you’ve read them. Rather, it’s time to consider remedies to it.

 

Talking to the Faculty:

            Campus ministries aren’t news. The University of Illinois has a number of churches close to it that send bible-believing students and youth ministers out to talk to all comers about the claims of Christ on our quod and in our dormitories. The church I attend makes it a special point to set up a table on quod day when everyone’s out and about celebrating and getting moved in and organized. These movements have been around for a good while and have undoubtedly accomplished a great deal. They have, however, one limitation that I see. No one talks to the people teaching these students.

            The general thinking behind school student movements is that those who accept Christ today will be the teachers of tomorrow. Generally, I understand and agree with the thinking. Still, it strikes me as one-sided. What about today’s teachers, I ask? Shouldn’t they have the chance to give the case for Christianity a fair hearing?

            Over the years our news media has been filled with stories about extremists or fringe groups on the margins of the Christian faith. David Koresh for the one and Harold Camping for a more recent example of the other come to mind. Our professors, of whom I may soon become one, are people like anyone else, people who observe these goings on and draw conclusions from them. Unfortunately, they don’t always see Christianity represented in both love and truth. My experience with my professors, spanning as it does three universities and over a decade thus far, suggests that your average college professor is exceptionally skeptical of most religious claims and particularly the claims of Christ. Reasons for that skepticism are numerous. Negative personal experiences with churches or people, exposure to certain modes of biblical criticism which we don’t have time to take apart here, doubt about religion’s place in a scientifically minded world, the list goes on and on. There are so many reasons because there are so many professors.

            Those professors deserve to have someone talk with them, give their doubts a full hearing and answer them point for point. The trouble is that professors are seen as being in the vanguard of the intelligentsia today. They can be seen as intimidating to most folk. Even I, who am not yet a professor and who don’t yet hold a doctorate, have been told that my level of education can be intimidating. That’s never been my intention, and I’m sure most professors would say the same. We academics don’t mean to intimidate the average person or in this case the average Christian.

            One important consequence stemming from the difference in education between your average professor and your average American is, therefore, that most well-meaning churchgoers don’t feel themselves able to discuss and debate the claims of Christ with us academics. It can often also be the case that most people lack the specialized knowledge that forms the basis of, say, a biology professor’s objections. For example, you may not agree with the claims of evolution as it’s presented today, but how many of us could sit down with a biologist and take on Darwin’s theory in specific detail, thesis for thesis and term for term? Not many. Another example, you may know and fervently believe that God created the world, but how many of us would be able (assuming we wanted to in the first place) to sit down with a philosophy professor and discuss questions of epistemology, ontology and theodicy? Not many.

            The truth is, professors’ objections to the claims of Christ are much the same ones people have been raising for at least a couple centuries now. They’re still answerable, but I find few people who want to try. Perhaps it’s easier for a youth minister to sit down with a student who may be closer to their own age and level of education. That student may have the same objections, but the words used to express them are shorter. That’s a joke, by the way. I’m not saying it takes a doctorate to be able to talk to professors intelligently and fluently about Christ, but I sense that most people think it does.

 

A Few Notable Names:

            Take a moment and look up some of these people:  Francis Collins, Alvin Plantinga, Marilynne Robinson, Martin Nowak, Michael McConnell, Simon Morris, and Henrey Schaefer. They’re all professors or retired professors. You probably guessed that. Most are scientists. Admittedly, I put the list together that way and it’s not exhaustive by any means. Schaefer is credited as the inventor of quantum computational chemistry. Collins is a geneticist, a physician and the head of the human genome project to map out all of the genes found in our DNA. Nowak is another biologist, a professor of biology and mathematics. Plantinga is a philosopher with multiple volumes to his name. The list goes on. Each one of those professors is known for being an outstanding scholar, many of them world-renowned in their fields. Every one of them is also a practicing Christian.

            I’ve met people on campus who would be happy to tell you that only fools would believe in the soundness of religious ideas. So, are these people fools? Somehow I just don’t think so. The problem remains, however, that they constitute a small minority among college and university faculties in America.

 

More Participants:

            Most people living in college towns, I’d think, have heard of Campus Crusade for Christ or CRU as it’s known since its recent name change. If you haven’t, I’m talking about the large ministry effort started by Bill Bright and his wife at UCLA in 1951. However, how many have heard of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA in general or its Graduate and Faculty Ministries in particular? InterVarsity (spelled just that way with the capital V in the middle) is another organization devoted to college and university ministries. What’s interesting about them is their development of a graduate and faculty ministry. They recognize that graduate students and professors face unique challenges in the field of academia, and their purpose is to found, encourage and sustain Christians in the halls of our colleges and universities.

            Only trouble is they’re not well-known. For my part, I’d never had an inkling about their existence until yesterday as I prepared this post. What does that tell me? It tells me there need to be more people, whether in a given organization or not, willing to go to our professors and our aspiring faculty and sit down with them to talk about truth and the God who is the God of truth. These need to be people who are knowledgeable about the bible, knowledgeable about the professorial mindset and who can rise to the challenge of answering the hardest and sometimes the most vehemently posed of questions.

            How often in your average applied ethics class will you see professors defending the unborn? How often will you see professors in those classes defending the right and correcting students’ misconceptions about what is wrong. Isn’t that what ethics is for? And where there is legitimate ambiguity about the rightness or wrongness of something, how often do you see professors taking a bible-based, principled stand for an ethical position? You do see those things happen, but I’d like to see more.

 

 

Concluding Comments:

            “The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it be scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth.” (Jeanluke Picard). Relativism and skepticism reign at present. The skeptic says, “de omnibus dubitandum,” or, “doubt everything.” This sort of skepticism is nowhere applied with less hesitation than in the realm of religion in general and, among American academics, the realm of Christianity in particular. What I say back unflinchingly is that if you disbelieve everything, you believe nothing. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis, a professor by the way, who had this to say about our skepticism and our rejection of values, and I’ll let his remark, which is taken from the end of Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, serve as my closing comment:

‘’’ the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

A Prayer Request

            Hello again, everyone. Since my title today is “A Prayer Request,” I want to start by assuring you that there haven’t been any calamities. No deaths, no injuries, nothing of that sort. Still, those aren’t the only things prayer is good for. The job list came out yesterday, and the process starts. First, a little explanation is in order for those of you who aren’t hunting for professorships as I am, and that’d be most people who read my blog. To my friends in grad school who haven’t done this yet, read carefully.

How the College Job Search Works:

            In the field of foreign language studies, many colleges and universities cooperate in a national database of job listings, the Job Index List or JIL, where they post job ads with qualifications and application instructions for job seekers:  whether they want an experienced professor, whether the job’s appropriate for someone starting out, whether they want an expert in film or literature or linguistics etc. So if you want to teach college Spanish, for example, you set the search parameters for Spanish and run your eye down the list of results, weeding out anything that isn’t Spanish and doesn’t match what you’re qualified to do. For example, if your specialty is twentieth-century South American film, you’re probably wasting your time and the hiring department’s time by applying to a job that asks for a medievalist or to a job that asks for a specialist in Spanish linguistics. My language, as you know, is German. My specialty is applied linguistics, which covers things like translation, foreign language teaching and so on. So, for me the first thing to do is weed out everything that asks for literature people. That’s most of them. What’s left as of today are a few post-doctoral fellowships (a sort of stepping stone between being a student and actually being a professor) and a few general positions where the hiring department hasn’t specified a field of specialization they want. In one sense, the second kind of job ad, the open one, is the toughest one to deal with, because anyone and everyone applies for it. The competition is fierce, and you don’t really find out what the department wants until you dig through it and/or have your interview.

            The application process for becoming a college prof is lengthy and uncommon. Most of the time when you want a job, you apply, interview and either get hired or else not. In the college teaching arena, you first apply. That means writing a cover letter, and in this case cover letters are always read. You make  sure your CV is up to date; this is the collegiate equivalent of a resume but with a few more categories of information. These too are scrutinized carefully. You often include a statement of teaching principles, a statement of research interests which talks about the research you’re doing and the kind you’d like to do in future, and up to three letters of recommendation written by professors who know you well, and one of those professors is always your thesis advisor. Some hiring committees want more than those things I listed, some less. Assembling and mailing this packet of information takes time, and a new packet goes out for each position you apply to. Even starting in September, you usually need October and part of November to do this first part. Next comes the initial interviews. Keep in mind that you’re usually throwing your application packet into a pool of 100-200 other applicants. The odds of even landing an initial interview are stiff, so if you get a call or an email inviting you to an interview, you’ve accomplished something worth being proud of.

            The initial interviews happen between about December to late January depending on the college’s timetable. Many schools choose to interview candidates for language positions at the Modern Languages Association conference. This year that’s in Boston, and I’m already presenting a paper there. I hope by the time I get there that I’ll be doing more than just presenting a paper. I hope to interview there as well. By the time you reach that initial interview in January or early February at the very latest, you’re only competing against about 15-20 other people. Most of them are at least as well qualified as yourself. By now the college that’s interviewing you  has weeded out all the obvious poor applicants, people who applied and weren’t really qualified, people who sent in incomplete applications, people who applied an whose materials were sloppily written, etc. If you survive the initial interview and they still want to consider you, you get invited to visit the campus. By now it’s  anywhere from early February  to about the end of March.

            When I was an M.A. student, our department hired both a new German professor and a new department head. I observed the process twice and saw it up close. A campus visit usually means a couple of days on their campus. You’ll meet all the rest of the faculty, who will be very interested in you. After all, these people might have to spend the next twenty years with you. You go through more extensive interviewing. You give a talk about your research. You probably go out to dinner with department chairs and senior faculty, socializing with them as they try to get a feel for who you are as a person and as a scholar. By this stage you’re competing against maybe two to three other people. When we brought potential German faculty to the University of Tennessee, we brought in four professors. They were all superb people, highly motivated individuals, good scholars who knew where they’d been and where they wanted to go. In the end we could, of course, only choose one. So three others lost out at this point. If you survive this interview process, you’re hired. Next comes a contract, the last chance you have to negotiate or fix anything about the terms of employment, and there comes the offer letter which you sign, seal and deliver. You’re hired. You usually notify the college  of your acceptance of the final offer by early April.

            The process is at least six months long with the prospect of rejection dogging you right up to and including the final interview stage. You’re beating odds at every point, and when you start, your odds of getting a job out of the pool of hundreds who applied for the same job are right on par with drawing a straight five card poker hand. Side note:  the odds of drawing a straight out of a deck of 52 cards with nothing wild and excluding straight flushes and royal flushes are 253 : 1. So when you’re stacked up against 200 other applicants, the tension level is comparable. I want to stay sane, however. So I’m going to celebrate every stage I complete. If I get an initial interview either over the phone or at a conference, I’ll be happy about it. If I get invited to a campus, I’ll be very happy about it, and if  I get an offer, even just one, I’ll be delighted beyond expression.

So, here’s what I’ve found thus far. Right now there are postdoctoral fellowships in Indiana and Canada that interest me and a position or two in Michigan and Texas that could be good fits. The Indiana fellowship is through Valparaiso University, a strongly Lutheran  school, and it’s designed for those who’d like to further their faith and develop their academic skills further in a Christian environment. The fellowship’s open to any humanities field, languages included. The Canadian position is a two-year fellowship at the University of Toronto. The field of interest is translation, anything having to do with it, and that’s what I’ve done for the last four years in one guise or another. The German position at the University of Michigan is a generalist position. I have no idea what they really want, and Baylor University in Dallas wants a linguist attached to the linguistics section of its English faculty. I probably qualify enough to apply there. We’ll see.

Praying without Ceasing:

            All of this brings me back to God and prayer which, as I recall, is where I started. As a bible-believing Christian, I take God seriously when he says that he knows what his plans are for me and that they’re good plans (Jeremiah 29:11). That doesn’t make the application process itself any easier. It’s hard to wait and wonder, praying all the while. At least, for me it is. Still, as a wise Christian once observed, “there are no ifs in God’s plan.”

            I want to get married too, and I didn’t want to marry while still in grad school. When we will do that,  where we will do that and how we’ll do it all somewhat depend on the outcome of this and other job searches that I’ll be doing. So, you see, there’s a bit more riding on this than my own employment prospects. At least, that’s often how it feels. That too is in God’s hands. I used the examples of odds before to give you an idea of how not easy and very much not simple this job process is. The truth, however, is that, outside of actually doing the work of making my applications, prayer is my only remedy for sanity. Why prayer and not Paxil, you ask? Good question.

            I’ve heard people say a good deal about prayer, and one of the things that keeps coming up is that so many people believe things about prayer that just aren’t true. Some say to me, “I’ve prayed about it, but I don’t feel any peace about it. I don’t feel easier in my mind or better about it.” Or some will say, “we shouldn’t pray about that. God wants us to pray for our spiritual needs, not this mundane job search or my mortgage payments.” Or some will say in effect, “God’s too busy to deal with little old me and my trivialities,” or they’ll say, “I shouldn’t pray about myself. I should pray about others. I feel selfish when asking for things for just me.” I’ve met Christians and non-Christians who raise this set of objections to praying for our needs. Some of these objections have the flavor of seeming noble, quite the selfless thing. Some of them seem sensible. They have the feel of being reasonable, rational, sensible, of being anything except helpful and truthful.

            Consider with me a moment. “Let us reason together,” as God says in Isaiah. In Matthew 6, starting in verse 5, Jesus says a good deal about prayer. He tells us how we shouldn’t pray, ostentatiously or so that we’re seen doing so like a politician’s prayer. He then gives us a template for praying, the Lord’s prayer. Some treat the Lord’s prayer like a formula, as though the words of this prayer are, themselves, the only prayer we should be praying. Yet, if you look at it as a blueprint for prayer, you quickly see there are a number of things he commands us to ask for. Some are indeed very spiritual:  forgiveness, the willingness and ability to forgive others, for God’s will to be done, to lead us away from temptation and so on. But we also are called on to pray for our daily bread. This conjures up the image of a bread loaf, but applying it to Americans today, it goes beyond food. It suggests God’s interested in our physical needs:  employment, shelter, food, clothing, etc. In fact, Jesus says a lot in verses 5-15 of that chapter about how to pray, what to pray for and so on. Dealing with the first objection, he never says, not once, that praying will bring you an immediate feeling of peace and certainty. It is, I am afraid, not a magic formula. He said in effect, :pray like this.” He did not say, “pray, and you will feel better about your situation.” But it’s clear to me that we are to pray and to pray persistently for our needs.

            This fiction that God is too busy or too divine to be interested in our mundane life events is both common and unfortunate. It’s at the root of what people are thinking when they tell you to pray for your spiritual needs only or if they feel embarrassed about praying for their day to day needs or if they tell you, usually cynically, that God is obviously not listening or not interested. God tells us again and again throughout the bible to call on him. He’s very interested in our human difficulties. In Psalm 50, the psalmist quotes God directly, “call on me in the day of trouble;
    I will deliver you, and you will honor me” (Verse 15). Several hundred years later the prophet Jeremiah again quotes God, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). We pray to a God who is listening, waiting for us to entreat him with our needs. Again in Jeremiah, God speaks and says in part, “you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you” (Jeremiah 29:12).

God’s Answer:

I firmly believe that God answers prayer. Sometimes the answer is something we can figure out. We pray that John’s cancer is cured, and it is. Skeptics would attribute this to medical science alone. I’m not a skeptic. Sometimes, his answer isn’t something we see at the time it’s delivered. Sometimes we have to wait a lifetime. Maybe that man or woman you begged God to let you marry at age 25 wasn’t right for you, and you were 65 when you figured that out. Sometimes, God’s purposes and his answers are unknown and unknowable. I admit that one’s hard. We love answers in our culture, the faster the answer comes, the better. We academics thrive on seeking answers in one form or another. Still, this is God we’re talking about. In the 55^th chapter of Isaiah God makes this point about himself,  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). If you want a glimpse, a glimmer of insight into God’s perspective in saying this, think about how you would explain your decision to move across the world and take up a new job to your three-year-old. Could you explain ideas of promotion, cross-cultural exchange, multinational corporations and trade deals to a three-year-old in minute detail? I doubt it. And if our intellects and abilities to reason are so much more refined, if our access to knowledge and ability for strategic thinking are so much better developed than those of the average three-year-old, how much more so are God’s abilities in those areas developed beyond our capacities?

            Finally, God sometimes says ‘no.’ That one can be harder than the unknown. Our sense of entitlement is vast in America. We hate the word ‘no.’ You can see it in many ways, from the kicking and screaming toddler, to the rejected college applicant, to the denied promotion or the denied marriage proposal. As a culture that thrives on answers, we are very unwilling  to take ‘no’ for one. We demand to know why. We ask God why he does things. In and of itself, asking ‘why’  isn’t irreverent. The whole book of Habakkuk shows us a prophet basically asking, “God, why are you doing this!” We are not, however, guaranteed an answer. To Habakkuk God said essentially, and here I’m paraphrasing, , “I am doing this so that both my wrath against your enemies and, too,  my love for you will be plainer to you than ever before. (Habakkuk 1:5-12). To Job he said, “Where were you when I laid the Earths foundation?” (Job 38:4). When Peter, who is by far my favorite apostle, persisted in quizzing the Lord about his intentions and motives,  Jesus said, “What is that to you? You must follow me” (john 21:22).

            So, we’re not guaranteed the answers we want or that we’ll understand what God does. He doesn’t work on our timetable or on our notions of what should or should not be. “If that’s true,” you may reasonably ask, “what assurances do I have at all that God’s worth trusting with my affairs?” I’ve heard forms of this question too. In strictly human terms, it’s understandable. Would you entrust your financial affairs or your children’s welfare to someone who may or may not do as you ask and whose intentions and motives are sometimes unknown and perhaps unfathomable? No, of course not. Yet, you entrust yourself to others in just that way every time you go to work for a new company, take a bus or an airplane or even get married. So in God’s case, what assurances about his intentions do we have? How do we know that he means well in your search for a spouse or my search for a job? We have an answer again in Jeremiah. In a letter written to the exiles at Babylon, the prophet quotes God,  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). In other words, my friends, one way or the other, it’ll all work out to your good whether you recognize that good or not. It’s not the easiest answer, but on balance, I can live with it.

Pray For Me:

Now, I’m going to ask you to pray with me as I go through the academic job search  for the first time and likely not the last time. I don’t know how it will turn out. I don’t know where I’ll be next year. I could be drawing food stamps and on social security. Who knows? Who indeed knows? I do not know. God knows. Remember that about your own life as well. I don’t know what you’re going through:  unemployment, tragedy in the family, up for promotion at work, trying to buy a house or trying to have a baby. Whatever it is, you too need prayer. So I ask those of you who read this to pray for me, and if you’ve never prayed before, pray for you first. Meanwhile, that’s where I am. It begins.

A Dangerous Mood

            Hello again. The writer and speaker Ravi Zacharias once said something I found very interesting:  “A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling.” In the wake of the 09/11 attacks, we went through a period of nearly hysterical anti-Islam. In World War II we were rabidly anti-Japanese, even going so far as to intern many Japanese-Americans in ghettos and camps in the continental U.S. A further example:  there was a time in this country when you could not easily find employment if you were an atheist and open about it. See the case of Bertrand Russell, dismissed in 1940 from the City College of New York for his atheistic and anti-religious views. All of these are examples of what we might call ‘mood.’ A mood may or may not reflect the legal situation at a given place and time. It may even be that laws themselves often come out of the mood, you could say out of the zeitgeist, of a place at a particular time.  A mood can be a dangerous thing. It can suppress rational thought and even pervert the course of justice e.g. my previous examples. I begin to wonder whether I’m detecting a different sort of mood in this second decade of the 21^st century.

I was at church this morning when a fellow from U. of I. asked me if I’d seen a new report that allegedly demonstrates that there’s been a consistent rise in hostility towards Christians in America. As it happens, I had not seen this report. I didn’t even know it existed, and I was skeptical. After all, no one knows better than a researcher how the presentation of statistics and case precedents can shade, color or distort what is actually going on. If you emphasize certain facts, suppress others, shade your language so that you make this or that point, you can influence your readers to think as you want them to. Our media does it every hour of every day, quite successfully, I might add. So, though I am a Christian, I was immediately suspicious of a report that purported to make that claim.

            I came home with Nicole and Delaney and looked up the report. It runs for 140 pages, and most of that is a listing of over 600 incidents involving attacks upon the expression of Christian faith. Each incident is well cited, so I could look it up if I wanted to. That’s just good research practice on the authors’ part. This blog post isn’t going to be a rehashing of that report. Though I will post a link to it for those who, like me, don’t want to take someone else’s word and want to examine the document for themselves. I’ll present one or two cases, but I’m going to supplement my discussion of the report with my own experience. After twelve years of study at three large state universities, I can say I’ve had plenty of opportunity to examine this mood for myself. My conclusions will be free of paranoia and well-reasoned even if some disagree.

The Report

“Survey of Religious Hostility in America”

By the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Counsel

Introductions by Pres. Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Counsel

Here are two sites where you can, as of this writing, download a full copy of the report as a PDF:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/24/christians-victims-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups-report-says

http://www.westernjournalism.com/report-christians-victims-of-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups/

            Case No. 1:

Barton v. Balch Springs (2004).

            Senior citizens at a senior citizens center in Balch Springs Texas were told that they could no longer pray before meals or listen to inspirational music or sing gospel songs during mealtime. The city had recently passed new legislation forbidding religion in public buildings. The seniors sued and were allegedly told that if they won their suit, their meals would be taken away in that place because, the city argued, praying over government-funded meals demonstrated a constitutional conflict. The Department of Justice opened a probe into the matter as well, and the case was resolved in favor of the seniors. The final ruling held that private religious expression like theirs wasn’t the sort of government-sponsored religious talk that the constitution was designed to prevent.

Case No. 2:

Cenzon-DeCarlo v. Mount Sinai Hospital (2010).

            Catherina Cenzon-Decarlo started work as an operating room nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2004. During the hiring process, she had the opportunity to sign a form as a conscientious objector to certain medical procedures, and in her form Miss Cenzon-Decarlo indicated that she would not perform abortions because of her religious objections to it. Well enough. Abortions, it seemed, were procedures you could be exempted from having to assist with. In May of 2009, she was ordered by the hospital to assist in a late-term abortion and threatened with termination and loss of her license if she did not comply. She lost in both district court and in the 2^nd circuit court. I looked up the circuit court’s ruling, and the court ruled that the laws that gave protection on the grounds of religious objection didn’t make any allowance for private actions. In other words, Catherina was indeed protected from this sort of discrimination under the law, but, and here’s the trick, she had no right to sue under this particular law as a private citizen. On that basis her whole case was dismissed.

Case No. 3:

Nielson and the Freedom From Religion Foundation v. School District Five of Lexington

& Richland Counties (2012).

            For a number of years now, Irmo High in Lexington County South Carolina has allowed its senior class to vote on whether the seniors will have a prayer at their graduation. The class votes, and a volunteer delivers the prayer if the class voted in favor of it. This isn’t something the school makes them do; it’s the students’ decision, and I suppose sometimes no prayer happens. Well, Matthew Nielson felt that his fellow classmates’ tradition was a violation of his constitutional liberties, and he tried to have the school put a stop to it. The school argues that it’s not officially endorsing the event, that it’s a student-initiated thing and so they’re not obligated to quash it. The case is still pending. Nielson is working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to press his suit. Whether he will succeed or not is uncertain.

The American Mood:

            That report contains hundreds of cases. Some were resolved in a way that I agreed with and found legally sound. Others were resolved in a way that I personally didn’t agree with, but that I find legally sound. Still others seem to be neither legally sound nor right. On the plus side, one thing that came up for me as I read is that our judicial system can rule in favor of Christians, even if some radical right-wingers want you to think it never does. Sometimes, as my cases above showed, the Christians won, and that was wonderful for them. Sometimes they lost, and some of those losses, I regard as terribly unjust. My concern isn’t with the law. I’m not a lawyer and will never be one. Nor do I think that a long listing of legal case precedents, no matter whose side they favor, can adequately demonstrate the full extent of a mood.

My question is this:  is there really a mood of intolerance towards Christians in America today? I think there is. I’ve met students who, when stating opinions in my classes, worded their opinions in the most secular, non-sectarian way possible. Then in my office, it would come out that they really felt otherwise or that they didn’t express their whole opinion on the subject. I’ve discovered a number of practicing, professing Christian students during office hour conversations like that. One thing that came up again and again during my years as a graduate teaching assistant is that many Christian students are afraid to make statements about their faith or to bring their faith into opinions on political or moral issues in the classroom. Why? Aren’t our universities built on a free exchange of ideas? If they are, then atheists, agnostics and peoples of every faith should be free to share their opinions. Yet, I’ve observed that Christians in particular feel that they cannot do so.

For my own part, for a long time I had a bible verse in my university email signature. Mostly, no one commented on it. It was in German, and that may have shielded me from attack. One professor in my doctoral program, however, took me aside one afternoon and warned me in the friendliest way imaginable that as I’m going on the academic job market, I might want to take that verse out of my email. She explained that some people might view it as a form of religious proselytizing. As I think about it, I recall that I’ve seen many an email with a signature at the bottom. Often times the signature is a literary or political quote. If I included a verse from the Qur’an or a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, no one would have said a word. But because it was a bible verse, and one from the New Testament, I have to worry about being sued for religious harassment or infringing somebody’s constitutional rights.

I wonder. I could include a quote from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion about how harmful religion is and how it ought to be quashed in some email or statement or other, and nobody would bat an eye. I could write a pro-Islamic statement about peace and Islam in light of our terrorism troubles and describe how the Qur’an is being misused by terrorists, quoting chapter and verse from it and from the hadiths, and I wouldn’t hear a word. I’d probably be lauded as multicultural, inclusive and an agent for intercultural dialogue. I could probably start up a student interest group that explores the ideas and tenets of Jainism, and I’d have no trouble doing so.

Suppose, on the other hand, that I wrote a statement opposing some university initiative, and in doing so, I based my stance on it explicitly on my Christian faith? Supposing I was teaching an applied ethics course and I argued from a Judeo-Christian perspective that there are absolute truths and there are fixed standards of right and wrong? What if a student came to my office and saw me with a braille bible on my desk? They wouldn’t recognize what the braille book is, so they’d ask me, and I’d tell them that it’s part of the bible. In the climate of today, I could then be sued for it. I’d likely win, but the lawsuit would still get filed, I’m sure.

The first amendment can cut both ways. Today, it’s popular to employ it every time you want to suppress a religious display, practice, speech or anything else in the public arena. Yet I argue that it works the other way. Shouldn’t I be free to express my opinions too? You don’t hear about atheists being sued in this country today because they say something non-sectarian. You just don’t see that. But let a student mention God or Jesus Christ in a valedictory speech, let a professor offer a Christian-like opinion, let a person refuse to participate in some work-related function because of religious convictions, and all hell breaks loose. That, in general terms, is the mood of our country in this second decade of the twenty-first century.

It is a mood that succeeds in large part because of postmodern ideals. In the postmodern age, nothing is really true, nothing is really right or really wrong, and all the rest is relative. What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me, so the attitude goes. I think one of the reasons Christianity is attacked so vigorously in this climate is that it asserts that there are truths and there is right and there is wrong. It’s not the only faith that does so. Islam also holds truths to be absolute. Judaism definitely asserts the rightness or wrongness of many things. But it is politically dangerous to challenge those faiths for a number of reasons. In contrast, attacking Christianity is, to put it simply, safe.

Ravi Zacharias once summed up this mood as follows:

Philosophically, you can believe anything so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything so long as you do not claim that it is a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is Eastern, it is granted critical immunity. If western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same of ceremonies from the Eastern fold.

Conclusion:

I’m not going to say that what’s happening in America amounts to religious persecution. Not today, at least. That’s a word that many on the right like to throw about far too frequently. To me, using that word in this country would be a disservice to the Christians of present-day Sudan, to the Christians of ancient Rome and to the Jews who died in the Shoah. Yet, Liberal America isn’t nearly so tolerant as it wants to think itself to be. Christianity is tolerated less and less, and people who believe in the truth of the bible are seen as oddities at best, and as narrow-minded self-righteous bigots at worst. The bible challenges our notions of universalism, of relative truths and self-determined value systems. That makes it, and those who believe in it, unpopular. I wonder uneasily what will happen in America over the course of the rest of my life. I wonder very uneasily indeed.

Why Would You DO This?

            Hello once again. I hope everyone’s having a peaceful Labor Day weekend. Here in Illinois it’s rained for much of the weekend, and while I don’t usually like rain, the mid-west has needed it badly. Delaney and I have been home for exactly three weeks, and she’s settled in nicely. Most of the last three weeks have been spent getting her settled in. On the humorous side of things, I was charged a $13 “new patient fee” at my vet clinic to establish her medical file there. I pointed out that I’d been there with Rudy, my first guide dog, and so, I asked, should I really be charged this fee? “Oh, Sir,” replied the very kind lady at the desk, “you’re not the patient. That’s Delaney.” “But I’m the one paying the fee,” I reasoned. “True,” she said, “but we call you the client. But Delaney is our patient.” ...... One of those interesting moments. Finally, Delaney has taken to Nicole without any troubles. Nicole has, naturally, adopted her.

            I have some blogs planned for the coming weeks, and I look forward to writing them, but first I want to ask you to think with me about texting. Texting is, of course, nothing new, and there’s a lot that could be said about it. First, my own credentials on the subject. As a blind person, I came to texting rather late in the game. Only when I got the Samson Convoy through Verizon did I start to text. It’s convenient for some things, and I keep it as one mode of communication if not necessarily my main means of staying in touch. Now I have an iPhone. The jury’s still out on that one. So, I’ve become more and more aware of the texting culture, for lack of a better term.

            The issue on my mind today came to the for when I read this in a friend’s Facebook status:

If you ever walk behind someone who's texting, you'll discover that not only do they walk VERY slowly, but they have the magical ability to sense which side you're trying to pass them on. They slowly drift in that direction, cutting off any escape, so you have no choice but walk behind them and endure their horribly slow pace and ignorant button-mashing. I bet that 70% of all instances of lateness for faculty and students at UNCG are caused by text-walkers.
AND ANOTHER THING: Have you ever been run into head-on by a text-walker? It's not fun. Just as they can sense anyone trying to pass behind them, they can sense anyone trying to maneuver around them from the front. And with their eyes fixed on their phones all the while, they will mirror your steps until they run into you. This collision, no matter what you did to try and prevent it, is entirely your fault. You know this because their eyes suddenly jolt back up to real life to meet yours in a dirty, accusing glare. In some cases, they harshly remind you to watch where you're going, which suffuses the situation with irony, but unfortunately does nothing for your bruised body, splashed coffee, or trampled toes. You keep walking, with an injured body and injured pride, and hope that they soon walk right into a brick wall.

These comments—and here I’ve only included a portion of what she had to say—make me ask the question once again, are sighted people that stupid? I’ve been in more than one car where the driver insisted on texting while driving, and I have been hit by distracted walking texters. How did I know they were texting? You can hear the click of the buttons as their thumbs wear themselves out. Plus, there’s just a certain dazed air to these people. If they’re not high, not listening to their iPods and not sobbing hysterically, yet they still seem dazed and not quite there when they hit you, they’re probably texting. I’ve been hit by pedestrians and have had several close calls with bicyclists on my campus.

Where does the word ‘stupid’ come into it, you ask? Am I not being a bit too harsh? I think ‘stupid’ is a perfectly justifiable word because these people are dangerous. To make my point, let’s increase the speed of the texters and talk about them in their cars. If you’re talking on your cell while in the car, you probably have a hands-free set, at least these days. Failing all else, you can cradle the phone between your neck and shoulder and keep your eyes on the road. Texting, however, requires you to take at least one eye, possibly both, off the road for up to 5 seconds at a time while you read and reply to the message, the amount of time it takes to drive the length of a football field. How many crashes have there been, not to mention people killed in crashes, that were directly caused by some putz having his or her eyes glued to their phone while they distractedly cruised through an intersection? Legal experts and insurance companies disagree, but it’s in the thousands at the very least and those are just the ones that get reported.

We all know about the instinct for self-preservation. It’s the instinct that makes you want to run or hide when you here gunshots nearby, or it’s the instinct you have to overcome in order to run into a burning building and save a helpless victim. Obviously, it’s less well-honed in quite a number of individuals. Texting while moving, whether in a car, on your bike or your own two feet, has never made sense to me. The first time I heard about it I thought, surely only a handful of very foolish people do this dumb thing. Apparently I was being an optimist. My question is ‘why.’ Why would it occur to you that it’s ok to get into extended text chats while driving your date to dinner or your kids to school? Why do you glare at me, as my friend’s comments above suggest, when you plough into me? It’s your own fault.

The only answer I can find that makes any sense at all is wrapped up in our cultural notion of invincibility. People think, “not to me,” “over there, but not here,” “it’ll happen to that guy, but not me.” This is very youth-like thinking, but it’s not just our teens and young adults that are guilty of it. If it were, I could say that it’s something people grow out of. That, however, does not appear to be the case.

As a blind person I feel myself at greater risk here. I don’t have the option of offering to let me drive if your conversation is that important. I have to either leave your car or take your phone out of your hand. End of options. I haven’t had to do either of these yet, but remember that cab drivers are like anyone else and prone to do it. I know of a driver who wrecked her cab—fortunately without a customer inside—because she didn’t stop in time. She was, guess what, texting while driving. So, this is a practice I have no patience with.

Do I sound irritated? Shouldn’t  I be? I’m always the passenger, and someone’s irresponsibility with their texting not only endangers them—something they’re perfectly free to do at their own risk, this being America—but it puts me at risk. No thanks. I don’t have a tidy solution here. I know that states all over the country are trying to curb this phenomenon. Fort Lee New Jersey has made it illegal to text and walk, the penalty being a $85 ticket. In that state it’s also illegal to text or use a cell phone while driving. In light of these laws, I suppose my point is that they shouldn’t be necessary. Texting while walking or driving is so obviously dangerous that, if just one or two people did it, we could dismiss it and say, “they were just being stupid.” Well, if a whole country is doing it, they’re still being stupid, and personally, I don’t want to pay for someone else’s inattention by being run down in the street by a distracted, texting driver. No thanks.

My Reflections on Guide Dog Training

            Hello again. I’ve been absent from my blog longer than usual, but I’ve also been busier than usual. I’m glad to say that from the end of June onwards, I’ve been with folks and doing things. I was blessed to have friends come up to Champaign for the 4^th of July, and I returned with them to Tennessee for a couple of weeks. Since the end of July, I’ve been spending time in Portland Oregon training with my second guide dog. That being the most important event of the summer, I’m devoting this blog post to that training. No, this isn’t going to be some endless, sappy rambling about how great dogs are and how everyone should have one. No, it won’t be that. This posting is more intended for those who have little experience with guide dogs or service animals generally and who have little to know idea what training with one is really like. My blind friends who have trained with them may choose to skip this blog post, or else not. In any case, no matter how many other people tweet, post Facebook statuses about or even journal their guide dog training, my experiences and reflections remain uniquely mine, and so I’ll offer them to you. I want to write them down now, the day of graduation and the day before I leave. I want my reflections to have the benefit of clear and exacting memory.

Getting here:  it was supposed to be a direct flight from Chicago to Portland. Long story short, I missed it by ninety seconds. Why and how are not important. Suffice it to say there was some mistiming involved, some mine and some not mine, and I missed my plane. Southwest put me on a flight through Vegas at no charge, and I had the pleasure of sitting at my gate in Vegas waiting on my Portland connection and listening to slot machines going non-stop on the concourse. I’ve been through the McCarran Airport before a couple times, but this was the first time I really sat there and took it in. Why wouldn’t there be slots in the Vegas airport, after all? As P. T. Barnum is said to have once commented, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” So I listened to flights being called and passengers being paged against the incongruous background noise of slot machine music and handles being pulled. I didn’t wager, because as I saw it, I’d already lost my bet for the day. Namely, I bet I’d get to Portland on time. I lost.

            Monday, July 30, was the first full day of action. My instructor walked up to me and introduced herself as April. She was the apprentice instructor, the equivalent of a graduate teaching assistant for those who are in the college world. The instructors and supervisors and those in the know call the first full day of a new class Christmas. It’s said all the students can think, talk and breathe that day is the question of what kind of dog they’ll get. A lab? What color? Male or female? It goes on and on. That first day is about familiarizing you with the leash and harness. So, picture a bunch of grown adults walking down a dormitory hallway, one holding the leash or harness or  with the leash attached to a dog-like simulator and the student on the other end giving commands and waiting to see them carried out, or else not. That was our morning. That’s how it started. That morning was all leash and all harness and all simulated work. If only my simulated dog could have run me into a simulated door. Ah well. The doors remained real.

            That afternoon after lunch we were given our dogs. They brought them down to our rooms individually, came in, told us a bit about the dog and left us alone for about twenty minutes. The dog April brought me was a large yellow lab, Malloy. A gentle giant, so to speak. The rest of that Monday was spent working with the dog, basic body positioning and so on for making turns, techniques and hand gestures for getting the dog to move and to stop, etc.

            Tuesday was our first day in downtown Portland. This school is located in the town of Boring, east of Portland in Clackamas County. Since it can afford to, the school leases a good deal of space in downtown Portland at 3^rd and Yamhill, where it maintains a base of operations. Wi-Fi internet, a stocked snack room, kenneling for the dogs, it goes on. We began that day to learn our first rout. A good seven blocks there and seven more back. It wasn’t that they wanted to teach us about Portland per se. So guide dog training differs from more traditional O and M training in that way. We were to learn this rout because working it, we had the opportunity to make the moves and the mistakes through which our instructors were there to teach. Running into a mailbox? Did that. Trying to go straight while the dog decides to hang a left? Did that. Trying to hang a left while the dog’s trying to pull me in the proper direction? Did that too. Had the dog not stop at a curb and step out into the street? Yep Those are typical mistakes both for the dog and the human, and making them in those first days is no poor reflection on the dog or the human being.

            We worked that rout twice a day, every day. I will probably remember it ten years from now:  Up 3^rd from Yamhill, crossing Taylor, Salmon and Main, right to Main, and up Main, crossing 3rd, 4^th and 5^th, left along 5^th, crossing Madison, and don’t forget to take the curving right into Starbucks. We worked that rout through Friday afternoon. For me, it was incredibly tough. Not because of the rout or the exercise. Those were fine, but poor Malloy. It wasn’t working.

            I’m not the fastest walker in the world, but I’m not slow. I’m probably a bit faster than average. I like to move at a nice brisk clip, not a Sunday stroll. Unfortunately, the school had the idea based on their paperwork that I was a slower walker. It happens. Matching a dog with a human handler is no science. More like art. You take the person’s physical size and weight into account, of course. But also their pace, their temperament, their own preferences, and you look through your dogs who are ready and pray you’ll find at least two to choose from. So, we couldn’t get Malloy up to my pace and keep him there. While other students hopped busses and light rails, I was pounding the pavement with my instructor and our class supervisor, motivating my dog and trying to correct and improve my own shortcomings with my physical technique. Malloy’s other problem is that his confidence in himself isn’t as high as I need it to be. He’ll make a great guide, but he needs to be matched with a cautious traveler who likes to puzzle things out. Me? I like to move. If something’s wrong, I’ll solve it on the way. I needed a dog who was, as Jim put it, a doer, not a thinker.

            Saturday, August 4^th, was the hardest day emotionally speaking. We walked and walked and walked, trying this and that and the other, trying to get this dog and myself to begin functioning effectively, but Saturday we admitted defeat. Switching dogs isn’t something that happens all the time, but it’s not rare either. It’s also not easy. Jim, the supervisor, put it this way, “I want to put you on that plane with the thing you came here to get, the best mobility aid possible, and I think we both know, that’s just not Malloy.” I let them take Malloy that afternoon. He’s back in the kennels now awaiting the next class. Whoever gets him will get a fine, fine animal, and I wish them well. But even knowing it was best for me, letting go of Malloy was taxing for me. It wasn’t easy for April either. You invest yourself in these animals, bonding with them emotionally, working with them on unfamiliar streets, trusting your safety and in some cases your life, to them. Then to surrender the dog … even for the best of reasons and the best of intentions, that giving up of the dog is hard. So Sunday I was dogless. The silver lining is that I got to really get away from campus, what with no dog to feed that afternoon, and spend some time with some good friends here in Portland indulging our star trek interests.

            Monday morning, August 6, was crunch time. August 6 was the single longest day of our training, because in addition to the morning and afternoon routs, there was a required night walk. So we didn’t get done until about 10:30 that night. For me, there was even more to do. I had to make an important choice. I took my cane to Portland that day, and it felt odd to walk into that center tapping away and looking for the stairs. Jim took me into his office and told me the deal. There were two dogs on the way with a trainer. I would walk a short rout with each dog in turn and then I’d make my choice. Well, Jim can change his mind, and he changed his mind about the “short” part of his plan for me to walk two “short” routs with the test dogs. If anything, we walked longer ones. I walked ten blocks or so with each dog before making my choice. One dog was a yellow lab, a male. He had a lot going for him, but the female black lab was definitely for me. She had a raw energy and an assertiveness I liked. If I drifted, she’d pull me back online. If I corrected her, she went with it and kept putting one paw in front of the other. So I chose her. As it happened, I chose the dog that Jim and April, my instructor, had in mind for me. Though the other guy would’ve been fine too, Delaney was simply a bit better and had the sort of energy and personality that appealed most to me. So, Delaney it now is. I went on that day to walk my required afternoon rout and my night rout in the town of Gresham.

            The second week of the program at Guide Dogs for the Blind differs markedly from the first week. The first week is all about the basics. You have to learn how to make turns, how to stop and start and how to turn on the move, and a hundred other things that go into the mechanics of walking with a guide dog as well as learning the basics of managing and controlling your animal. They are still dogs, after all, and keeping up their discipline and maintaining your own authority in the pack is crucial. Otherwise, and I know from experience, all hell breaks loose. So that first week everybody walks the same routs and learns the same things. The second week is more about customizing your training to what you need. Supposing one guy lives in Chicago and needs to practice hopping city trains and cruising down congested sidewalks and crossing busy streets, while another girl lives on a college campus in a smaller town or city. She might need a mix of residential neighborhoods, campus classroom buildings and the sort of winding, interconnected paths like what you find on a college campus. And for giggles, supposing you also have the guy who lives in rural West Virginia. He needs to learn how to walk along two-lane blacktop country roads with gravel shoulders or how to walk along the verge of a state highway safely. All of them can be and are accommodated in this program without loss of time or without making students learn a bunch of stuff they’ll never use. You get what you need. With only six students per class, and one instructor for every two students, this is possible in a way that a more traditional program wouldn’t be able to match where the classes are bigger. Also, this customization is one of the reasons the full training can be done in two weeks instead of four.

            One of  the final things we all did together happened Tuesday morning. It’s called traffic check. It involves a supervisor, namely Jim, driving around in his hybrid car, sometimes on battery, swerving in front of, close beside, or behind you, backing out in front of you, making a right turn on red and swinging across your path as you cross the street, or just sitting there in his car blocking the whole sidewalk. Sound scary? For the dogs, it is. We humans knew what was coming, though as I pointed out to April, there’s something to be said for not warning us and forcing us to trust our animals completely. The point of the exercise was to test the reactions of the dogs. Did they stop? Did they back away? Etc. It was also an exercise aimed at showing us how our animals would react to danger without actually endangering us.

            Tuesday was also the day of the vet visit. Mine was uneventful. Delaney is, and pretty much has always been, in excellent health. That afternoon, we walked a rout in a quiet residential neighborhood, and Jim marveled at how much of an improvement Delaney was. We moved quickly and smoothly down those twisting sidewalks and across those off-angled intersections where the sidewalks didn’t line up at the corners. We also drove to another part of Gresham and did sidewalkless travel. That is, it is perfectly safe to walk along the roadside in areas where there are no sidewalks. There are techniques for this. My exposure to it was shorter because I rarely have to.

            Wednesday morning we went downtown. Some people worked escalators, some worked downtown streets, and some people did other things. April and I walked six blocks to 6^th and Main and caught the bus. This was something others had already done while Malloy and I worked out our differences. From there, we hopped a train around 6^th and Davis and took it, just practicing boarding, riding and exiting public transportation with the dog. Wednesday afternoon continued the transportation theme, and we all trooped out to Portland International Airport to practice the technique for passing through airport security. Delaney moved confidently and assertively through the terminal, dodging tables, suitcases and other travelers with a brisk, no nonsense half trot that didn’t brook any hesitation on my end. Not, by that point, that I was inclined to wonder whether she knew what she was doing.

            Thursday, August 9, was completely up to the student and instructor as to how to spend it. We went down to a different area of Portland, to Lloyd’s Center. April asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to challenge myself and my dog. By now, downtown outdoor travel was humdrum. We’d done it, and there wasn’t much more to be said about it. We’d worked in buildings, and there wasn’t much to be said there. So I asked her to direct us through stores, preferably ones with narrow aisles and distractions. We walked through Good Will, through Safeway, and through one other store whose name escapes me. I wasn’t there to shop. I wanted to make Delaney navigate obstacles, negotiate pinpoint turns, and give myself something to think about. So that’s just what we did. It wasn’t flawless, but if it had been, I would not have learned anything, right? It was well-done, though. That afternoon, we walked through Red Sunset Park, which is basically a duck pond and baseball diamond. April and the other instructors tried to get the ducks to come out and distract our dogs, but the ducks weren’t interested.

            Finally, Friday was our fun day. We went to Clackamas Town Center Mall. The guide work point of the exercise was for us to shop independently, navigating the mall and the stores in it as best we could. Otherwise, it was just a chance for us to have fun. Lastly, we sat down after lunch and were given a great deal of information in a large binder both about our dog and about programs and services available to us now..

I graduate this afternoon, and while my puppy raisers, the folks who raise your dog until it enters formal guide dog training, can’t make it here from Colorado to attend, my friends Scot and Christopher will come in from north Portland. We may well leave after that, and so it’s probably better that I write this before graduation, not after. I have some nice jeans and a button-down shirt, about as formal as I mean to get, and I’m the only one looking forward to delivering the brief remarks we’re allowed and encouraged to give at the ceremony.

            The food here has been excellent. There were three choices for each meal each day we were here. Most of those meals came with salads, and I chose vegetarian entrees more than once; they were that good. I drank iced tea with splenda and ate sugar free desserts, keeping my glucose under control. That is, I ate sugar free desserts … most of the time. Let’s be honest there. Most people gain weight on this training from the richness and volume of food. I didn’t. I weigh what I did when I got here.

            I suppose, last but not least, I find myself thinking about the people here. We had some great conversations. Our supervisor, Jim, often sat down with me and he and I talked about the nuts and bolts of training, the theory behind the theory of what we learned, teaching methods for students, teaching methods for dogs, teaching methods for apprentice instructors like mine. April and I often talked about the reasons behind students learning what they learned when they learned it, and she proved very receptive to my questions and ideas on the subject. The students have been fun. I think coming here has allowed Nicole to make a new friend, and my accent talents got something of a workout here.

So, it’s over. Looked at another way, it’s only just beginning. My hope, intention and sincere prayer is that I do things better with this dog than I did with my last one. I let his discipline off the job lapse a bit, and that had consequences. Not that I needed to be a task master, but more attentiveness on my part would have been appropriate. So that is what I’ll do. I leave early Sunday morning. 8:15 to Oakland California, and from there into Chicago, and from there to Champaign by Amtrak. Can you see why I didn’t write this Sunday night? It will be a long day, but I hope and pray it is only the first of many years with this second guide dog. May she be around to witness some great events in my life.

So Sue Me!

            Hello again. It’s been a month or so since my last posting, and I’ve been silent for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been busy. Teaching summer courses can be fun and exhausting. This summer’s beginning German course was a bit of both. I think my co-instructor and friend would agree with that. What is more, I know our students would say the same. The highlight of the course, at least for me, was my getting to perfect my Australian English. When I say ‘perfect,’ I mean that I approached it linguistically, sounds and word segments and listening to the speech of our Australian student. I think after he got over the sheer strangeness of my questions and requests for help with my Australian, he rather got into it. My fiancé, who doesn’t think my Australian accent suits me very well, is resigned. Besides the summer course, I’ve settled into summer dissertation work, all to be done ahead of Fall’s job search. I’m appreciative of both my summer stipend and next year’s Max Kade fellowship, and now work can safely supersede graduate student poverty on the list of things to think about. Work aside, the dentist was fun. Three and a half hours of my life I can’t ever get back, though if it means I keep my teeth, I won’t complain too much.

The other reason I’ve kept silent is that I haven’t had much to say. I try to publish meaningfully, and I suppose we could debate the word ‘meaningful.’ All the same, writing one of these posts takes hours or days, and I like putting things out there that might leave you thinking or laughing or cursing … or all three. For today I thought about a number of things and I settled on lawsuits. Why lawsuits, you ask? No, no one’s suing me that I know of. Rather, I was thinking about the reputation of lawyers in this country. In many other countries the law is a respected and honored profession. Friends from overseas then come over here and ask me why we make all these lawyer jokes. It’s a fair question. What they don’t realize is that in many cases, lawyers bring the scorn and contempt of the American public down on themselves. I want to show you a sampling of lawsuits which, I’m convinced, could only happen here. I suppose Britain, Australia, Canada and the EU might have sunk to this level by now, but somehow I think that these lawsuits have a particularly American flavor to them. One disclaimer. If you’re a lawyer and reading this, ask yourself if you would take these cases. If not, I respect you for it. There are plenty of lawyers who are fed up with frivolous, stupid lawsuits, and you guys should get more acclaim. As I discuss these cases, I’ll try to point out the good guys amongst the legal eagles.

Case No. 1:

Woman Sues Little League Pitcher

The story’s being reprinted all over the place thanks to the Associated Press’s distribution. Since I’m not sure what copyright laws are at play for any given site, I’ll summarize, you research. Elizabeth Lloyd is suing now thirteen-year-old Matthew Migliaccio. She claims that Migliaccio, who was aiding a pitcher at the time, threw the ball recklessly and struck her, Lloyd, in the face. She’s suing him, the boy, for better than a hundred grand in actual damages plus, my favorite, pain and suffering. Funnily enough, her husband’s also suing. This happened two years ago, and the lawsuit info was published today by the AP. Now, here are some things that strike me, no pun intended, about this lawsuit. I wasn’t aware until today that you can legally sue a minor. If a minor commits a serious crime, you have to get special dispensations from the courts to try him as an adult. Not here, apparently. Suing a thirteen-year-old, let alone suing him for something that happened when he was eleven no less? I can’t say I would have thought of it. Did he vandalize her house and brake all her windows? No. Did he kill her pet snake? No. The kid threw a baseball at a little league warm-up, people. If I sound pissed, it’s because I am.

I take my hat off to Anthony Pagano, a lawyer for the family of the child. He calls the suit frivolous and without merit, and he goes on to say that it’s disgusting, his word, that you can sue somebody for something and have it get this far. I would like to say that this suit will be thrown out and that Lloyd and her husband will be tossed out of court on their … ears. But unfortunately, that may not be the case. Yes, it’s a perfectly legal and prosecutable lawsuit. It’s up to a judge to determine whether the Lloyds have a case.

Cases No. 2 and 3:

McDonalds?

These are cases we’ve been hearing about for years, but it’s interesting to look at them. In 1992, Stella Liebeck spilled some coffee down herself as she was trying to add sugar to it while sitting in her nephew’s car. Did it hurt? Well, have you ever spilled a whole cup of coffee all over yourself after it comes fresh from the coffee pot? If you have, you’ll probably answer ‘yes’ to my question. No one’s saying it didn’t hurt like hell. Is McDonalds responsible? Is it their problem? She seemed to think so. A jury agreed and awarded her a sizable chunk in damages, both actual and punitive. The case was later settled for an undisclosed figure. Nowadays if you buy a cup of coffee from McDonald’s, they actually tell you that it’s going to be hot. I learned after wisecracking about that at one location that many franchises have elected to include a verbal warning along with the label on the cup. Thanks, Stella. Now I know my coffee’s truly hot.

Here’s another McDonald’s case we all know about. Remember when you could get a supersized order of fries? Yes, I know they’re unhealthy. If you want healthy food, don’t order fries at all. The point is that you could, once upon a time, supersize your meal. It was a treat to be able to do that. Those days are over. You haven’t been asked if you wanted that supersized since 2004. The case that seems to have started it involved two New York teens who tried to claim that their obesity and diabetes was McDonald’s fault. Here is one instance where the justice system worked, because the judge tossed the case. As that venerable jurist rightly pointed out, you don’t have to eat there. You choose to. Yet, I’d say the girls actually won. Following the 2003 case and Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, “Supersize Me,” in which he claims that this case inspired his film, supersizing disappeared. Does that mean that the New York teens won in spite of losing in court? I’d say so. So, is fast food bad for you? Of course. Should you consume it regularly without exercising as Spurlock does in his film? No. Is the company to blame if you’re irresponsible with your diet and put on the pounds? Speaking as someone who used to weigh close to 300 pounds, I say no. The fact that coffee is hot or that fast food is bad for you is nothing new, common sensical, and should prevent, not encourage, the waste of public money incurred when idiots take McDonald’s to court. Then again, this is America I’m living in.

Case No. 4:

A Few Too Many?

In December 1992, Karen Norman, aged twenty-three, got behind the wheel of her Honda and took off. Unfortunately, Karen was drunk, her blood alcohol level being 0.17 when she was found. For those of you who don’t know about BAC, that’s pretty high. She backed her car off a boat ramp and into Galveston Bay and drowned because she couldn’t unfasten her seatbelt using the emergency release. Her passenger wasn’t buckled in and so escaped the sinking car. This is the only case involving a death that I’m going to deal with. It gets interesting, because Norman’s parents sued Honda. Their claim, as I take it from available records, was that her seatbelt, not her judgment, was defective. The jury actually awarded damages in the case. It took an appeals court ruling to reverse the decision. As far as I can determine, that ended it.

It’s harder for me to be as critical here because someone did, in fact, die. Not impossible though. Who’s fault is it if I drink myself into oblivion and then try driving? You can sue a bartender who failed to cut me off. You can sue a liquor maker who put “too much” alcohol in their product which led to my drunken spree. Apparently, you can even sue the maker of my car if I drop it into the ocean and can’t get out, even though I’ve had double the legal limit and had no business behind the wheel. It’s revenge, not to put too fine a point on it. A tragedy happened, and someone has to pay. That’s how the Normans seem to have seen it. The jury saw it that way too. Not the appeals court.

I don’t know anything about tort reform. I’m not John Grisham and I’m not F. Lee Bailey. Still, what does it say about the practice of law that lawyers take on these cases? You can file a suit yourself without a lawyer, though almost no one does. Why don’t we hear more stories about lawyers and their clients getting slapped with thirty-day jail sentences for wasting a court’s time? I promise you, if a lawyer, hungry for money, knew that he could face a short jail term and a review of his license for filing frivolous lawsuits, you’d see a sharp dip in the numbers of cases like these.

These cases are, as I said before, a mere sampling. I found dozens like them. It could be that there are penalties on the books for frivolous and stupid lawsuits, but you don’t hear about them, and the legal community seems to be unaffected by them. All that tells me is that whatever those penalties are, they’re not stiff enough and/or are not enforced often enough to make them effective. Hence the lawyer jokes. I have my favorites, but I won’t quote them here. Have a good one.