One school of thought on the commencement flap

Published 5/23/06

It’s college commencement season, that time of year when campus officials bring to the stage speakers who cause graduating seniors to either yawn or express moral outrage in general.

For example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to speak Monday night at Boston College’s commencement ceremony. The “New York Times” reported that demonstrators planned to show their disapproval by wearing protest accessories and handing out anti-war literature. Others said they would turn their backs on Rice when she received her honorary law degree.

Protesting professors and students cited a conflict between BC’s Catholic and Jesuit traditions and the administration’s policy on foreign affairs.

Generally speaking, I see nothing wrong with this form of democratic dissent. On the other hand, I don’t know that I would stand and show my backside to the Secretary of State. In most elementary schools, teachers wouldn’t permit students to stand and make faces during the presentation of a classroom guest.

My main concern, assuming I was a college administrator, would be what happened last Friday when Senator John McCain addressed New School, a university located in Greenwich Village, at Madison Square Garden. The Times reported that, in addition to giving McCain the back-side treatment, students booed, heckled and laughed at the Arizona senator as he gave them their year-end sendoff. And apparently the degree recipients were doing so in their “outside” voices.

Perhaps it all depends on where one’s diploma is pursued. I did my undergraduate work at a minor Midwestern liberal arts college. And maybe “work” is not the right word. But at my school it was absolutely inconceivable that we would have a member of the president’s staff speak at commencement. If such a public figure had appeared on our graduation day, we would have been ignorant oafs to heckle a guest who had accomplished more than most of could ever imagine. In spite of our outrage over the speaker’s political allegiances.

“Outrage” was what the kids expressed at Boston College and New School, concerning their respective commencement speakers.

The Times reported that at the New School ceremony, students yelled, “We’re graduating, not voting!” and “This is all about you. We don’t care!” None of these lines demonstrated the spontaneous creativity of the senior who, following McCain’s quoting of Yeats, blurted, “More poetry!” The fact remains: one person yelling bumper sticker-sized thoughts at another in a public forum is downright childish and is one insult from resembling a Fox News interview.

To add to this year’s commencement fray, one adjunct writing professor resigned his job over Monday night’s appearance of Secretary of State Rice by way of an open letter to Boston College President Father Leahy which appeared in the May 12 edition of the Washington Post.
One has to appreciate such a “statement.” But as an adjunct writing instructor myself, I know that Boston College, despite its great loss, will probably survive this devastation to its English department.

Of course, there’s another angle to this story, and it’s one that college officials, politicians and those of us classified as adults frequently miss. Young people, graduating seniors, that is, can sense a “disconnect” a mile away.

For example, the commencement address that Senator McCain gave at New School in New York was the same one that he gave at Liberty University. Liberty University? Isn’t that the school founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell? Isn’t Jerry Falwell the person McCain called an agent of intolerance within the Republican Party?

And Bob Kerry, president of the New School, has been dismissive of McCain in the national press, questioning the way he “buddies” up to President Bush.

For students informed by a sometimes unreal digital world, such political maneuvering must seem unreal to students. I’m guessing that at their age and as they enter the real world, they want something real—including their commencement speakers.

Given McCain and Falwell’s recent relationship, the senator’s appearance at Liberty seems a little un-real. Some pundits observed that McCain, routinely available to reporters and audience members, left the Liberty ceremony immediately after his speech and before Falwell’s greeting to graduates. According to aides, he had a plane to catch for a speech later that day.

And I’d love to finish this column but I’m already late for a bodybuilding competition this evening...

Local man recalls meeting “mother of television”

Published 5/16/06

When Elma Farnsworth passed away a couple weeks ago, most people—including millions of viewers of TV’s “American Idol”—probably didn’t blink.

But for Anderson’s David Baird, professor of journalism at Anderson University and student of media history, Farnsworth’s death deserved a moment or two of pause and reflection.

Only media students and scholars know that Elma, nicknamed “Pem,” was intimately involved in the invention of the electronic television in the 1920s with husband and visionary Philo Farnsworth. David met and interviewed Pem at her home in Ft. Wayne while he was enrolled in a doctoral course, “History of American Broadcasting,” at Purdue.

“Knowing that she was in the lab where TV was invented, and an eyewitness to such an important invention, it was my ‘brush with history,’ ” says David of the April 1999 interview. “It was like meeting Gutenberg.”

Unfortunately, the Farnsworth name never had the recognition of inventors such as Gutenberg, Edison or Bell. Pem had dedicated her life to telling the story of her husband’s pioneering work, which began when he was just a young boy on an Idaho farm.

As the story goes, Philo Farnsworth first imagined electronic TV while plowing the family’s potato field row by row at age 14.

According to Dave, Pem told him that the challenge for her husband was scanning an image onto a picture tube row by row using an image dissector tube.

In 1927, Farnsworth applied for a patent for a complete electronic television system, including the tube, the same year that he transmitted an image into a receiver in the next room. Elma, who kept logbooks and spot welded tube elements for her husband, earned recognition as “the first woman on TV” when Philo first transmitted human images in 1929.

An unfortunate chapter was introduced into the Farnsworth story when RCA unveiled its own TV, three years after an RCA engineer’s visit to the Farnsworth lab, and challenged several Farnsworth patents. Although the courts ruled in Farnsworth’s favor in the late 1930s, his invention didn’t become part of American living rooms until after his patents expired in 1947.

During his 1999 interview, Dave asked Pem if she and her husband had speculated how TV might affect the world. The interview transcript shows that the Farnsworths thought the advent of television could usher in an era of hope. Pem told Dave that they both believed that peaceful solutions to international conflicts would be possible once rival nations could see images of how differing cultures lived.

But as TV became commercially available, the Farnsworths banished from their home their own invention. “Phil felt there was too much junk on it,” Pem told Dave in the interview. “One time he said, you know, I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.”

However, when the world watched Apollo 11 crew members step off the lunar module and touch the surface of the moon, as Pem remembers it, “He turned to me and said, ‘Pem, this makes it all worthwhile.’ ”

According to Pem, her husband took a few “sidetrips” from his work with TV to invent the incubator and the electron microscope. He held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents when he died in 1971.

Noting that Farnsworth was self taught, suffered from bad health, lost a home in a fire, fought depression and faced years of legal hassles from a corporate giant, Dave says that the life of Pem’s husband is a lesson to students.

“It’s important for students to see that these technologies are developed by real people who battle enormous odds,” he said.

Dave and Purdue communication professor, Robert Ogles, who also made the trip to meet Pem, recently sent a transcript of the interview to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.

On the day of final exams last month, Dave told students about Pem’s death and recalled his brush with history. “I’ll always treasure having that meeting, and it’s a story I will tell until I retire,” he says.

When Dave hits that age and wonders if the meeting ever really happened, he’ll have a tangible reminder. It’s a copy of Pem’s 1990 book “Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier.”

Inscribed just inside are the words: “Best wishes to David. Remember the sky is the limit. The impossible just takes longer. Pem Farnsworth.”

How JCS handles motorists who violate stop arms

Published 5/9/06

After reading this paper’s story about dangers posed by local motorists when they disregard school bus stop-arms (“A passing danger,” April 30), I entertained some thoughts about what I might do if were a bus driver.

As you may recall, THB reporter Lynelle Miller quoted one bus driver who said a day hardly passes that she doesn’t have a vehicle sail through her warning zone. Other bus drivers, as well as parents of bus riders, commented on motorists who honk or make obscene gestures when they have to wait for students to board the big yellow.

G-r-r-r-r-r. I have no patience for impatient drivers—particularly those who endanger the welfare of children on the path to a high school education.

Perhaps that will explain this mental mischief. Here’s how it is in JCS—Jack’s Community Schools--where the motto is “No Child is Left Behind On Account of Motorists Who Are Morons”…

First of all, forget the flimsy little flop arms that apparently some drivers use as an invitation from the game “Red Rover.” Jack’s fleet of Classic Yellow Commando Buses have a patented Door of Swinging Steel® which pivots out from the driver’s side—similar to the flimsy flop arm—and essentially clears the streets of unwanted traffic and secures the area while children enter or exit the bus. The Door of Swinging Steel® can stop drivers dead in their tracks. A poised bus driver on the balls of his feet can return a speeding car like it was a lob over the net. And the faster they come, the faster they leave. To protect children from commuters shooting around from behind the bus, an alert bus driver who keeps one eye on the mirror can shift the door in reverse and basically back hand a reckless motorist.

Pin ball? Kind of.

My warning doors don’t carry the word “Stop” because apparently violating drivers are extremely illiterate anyway. What it does have is a picture of a door—we’ve used the door theme for consistency and understandability—with a number 1 on it with the symbols $$$. (Everyone understands that.) When a second door swings from the passenger side of the bus, not only does it help balance the bus but it provides a picture of a door labeled 2, showing a gent duded up in jail attire. It’s a shorthand way of saying, “Mr. Violator, cross this line and you’ll get whatever’s behind door number 1 or door number 2.” This shorthand is not misunderstood by those who already know the system.

As a bus chauffeur for JCS, I sometimes have to administer the personal touch to wayward drivers. When these antsy drivers hit the horn while innocent children are dawdling to or from the bus, I activate the Door of Swinging Steel ®, seal off the intersection, dismount from the driver’s seat and do my own bit of dawdling over to the window of the honking driver who’s spitting venom by now. Then I’ll say something like, “Hey, pal. You late for a House vote?”

I can’t print the responses of my drivers. Of course, by now there’s a long convoy of cars honking their hoods off as well as a few miles of road rage raging behind my bus.

Since many of the offenders are teenagers with cellphones, my school bus is outfitted with the kind of technology that allows me to cut through all of the electromagnetic radio waves and interrupt conversations of drivers who are about to interrupt my children’s safety zone. You’d be amazed at how drivers slam on their brakes when I make their private call a conference call and say in a deep divine voice, “Excuse me, excuse me. This is God. Put it in park now!!!”

Frequently I write up tickets for their crimes to education. The ticket is actually a free pass to a driver’s temper training seminar which explains that violating a school bus stop-arm law is a criminal offense. The session also provides massage therapy for those fuming with redlight rage. Because in my dreams I’m a busy, busy bus driver, these seminars are handled by my assistant, Misty Meanor.

That’s how it is in JCS.

Pssst. How many e-mail messages are in your inbox?

Published 5/2/06

Like crumpled news clippings stuffed in a file, like John Denver albums in the attic, like a closet full of out-of-fashion pants with pleats, like stale glazed donuts in the bread box, I just can’t seem to throw away yesterday’s e-mail messages. Or last month’s messages, for that matter.

My inbox of e-mail messages provide me with an unofficial “to do” list—things that people want me to do, like “Jack, please rewrite the column about your outsized inbox and do something dog related.” It’s also a cyber library of sorts, containing e-mail newsletters, online editions of newspapers, documents for free-lance writing projects and answered requests for forgotten password numbers. I also save messages from my friends—okay, my friend—so I can simply reply and hit…“Reply.”

Then there are those things you just can’t throw away. On December 1, 2005, I received a “high priority” message with an attached 19-second RealPlayer video entitled, “What your dog really does when you let him out.” In this clip, a white and grey mix of a mutt sits behind his dog house while his master calls from her back door, “Bennett! Time for dinner!” Out of view of the owner, “Bennett” takes a drag on a cigarette and then emits a short human-sounding hack. Many of you would know the name of the Andersonian who sent me this high priority message but I’ll spare him the embarrassment he so richly deserves. The video is quite amusing, for anyone easily amused. That would be my friend. That would be me, too, the one who still has it five months later. (I’d be happy to forward it to you.)

At black tie dinner parties, I tend to corner people and ask questions like, “How many e-mail messages do you keep in your inbox?” It’s a personal question and one that I say in a near whisper, the same tone of voice I would use to say, “How’s the investigation going these days?” It’s just that I’m always curious as to where I stand on the curve compared to the habits of other humans.

So after a couple looks of disbelief at dinner parties and because frankly my inbox had become a litter box, I decided to confront an e-mail stockpile that had accumulated to nearly 300 electronic missives. Give or take 10 or 30.

As I might have done on a daily and orderly basis, I then spent a full hour—or was it a full day?—organizing the messages into various folders, printing them out or just closing my eyes and hitting the “delete” button. I guess my amassing of e-mail is a kind of phobia. A fear that—like my old RCA 33 1/3 “Rocky Mountain High”—I’ll need it at some point and for good reason.

By the end of last week, I had down-sized my inbox to 50-some messages and was ready to conquer the world. “Conquer” being a relative term and because some e-mail induces unnecessary guilt, I’m now unsubscribing to mailers like the Mini Marathon News.

Of course, it’s a constant battle. My son is half way home from college, meaning sometimes he lives here, sometimes there. A few days ago I got three messages from him about softball equipment for our team, and he’s just two doors down the hall. If he had known the fierce battle that his old man was waging with e-mail apoplexy, he might have had the decency to walk down the hall or just yell prices of the chest protectors from his room.

So if you have an issue with one of my pieces, go ahead and compose for me an e-mail message. But instead of hitting “send,” print it out and use conventional U.S. postal procedures. That also saves me the paper and ink from printing it, which I always do before filing readers’ opinions in manila folders marked “Loves Me” or “Loves Me Not.”

Of course, I still have all those e-mails in my Deleted Items Box, which now contains 3364 messages and where they are deleted but not really. Like “An Evening with John Denver,” you never know when you might need one.