BOOK REVIEW: THE WONDER OF REAL PEOPLE -- ASPIRE TOWARD THE HIGHEST

BOOK REVIEW: THE WONDER OF REAL PEOPLE!

ASPIRE TOWARD THE HIGHEST: Bernie and Rita Turner and the Founding of Walden University by Wade Keller

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 29, 2020

Novelist Paul Theroux writes, “English autobiography generally follows a tradition of dignified reticence that perhaps reflects the restrained manner in which the English distance themselves in their fiction.  The American tendency in the 20^th century was to intrude on the life, at times blurring the line between autobiography and fiction.” 

Having myself written a memoir of my youth as a novel, I approached this book with some caution, mainly because I know the principals, not well, but I know something of their struggle.  Rita and Bernie Turner walked boldly into the jaws of academia in the self-conscious climate of the diploma mill industry common to Florida, and encountered all the havocs one might expect.  They had a legitimate idea of promoting social justice through education but with the naiveté that traditional education was ready to look beyond its walls to an alternative university without walls. 

Author Wade Keller, throwing caution to the wind, allows biography and autobiography to melt into a moving story of two ordinary people of extraordinary gifts who find each other in love and devotion, and discover their strengths are of a kind that not only move mountains, but also move minds.

*     *     *

THE ARCHITECTS OF WALDEN UNIVERSITY TELL THEIR STORIES

BERNIE TURNER

The Turner lives read like a novel of an irrevocable force fed by a common synergy.  Their families came from different sides of the Poland-Russian border but with a common culture in Judaism.  Their early separate lives were as New Yorkers, but otherwise the order and plan gave no hint of a consistent plot.

Bernard L. Turner tells his story first.  He was born July 24, 1926 of Jewish immigrants, David Turnovsky and Julia Gordon.  Home was a tenement house in the Bronx.  His father anglicized his name to Turner.  When he was three, the family moved to Washington Heights, a neighborhood adjacent to Harlem, where his home was above an Irish bar.  His father was a barber in the days before they had electric cutting shears.  Bernie was expected to be a barber, too, but he saw the sores and hairs underneath his father’s nails and vowed somehow to escape that. 

Never disrespectful of his parents, and inclined to humility, there was a nascent combativeness under his skin from the beginning.   He worked from the age of six to eight threading paper bags with a steel string for an outdoor food stand.  He earned five cents an hour.  His older brother discovered him working, and scolded the man who employed him.  This stuck with Bernie who didn’t know there was anything wrong with him stringing the bags in a cold basement with just a candle for light.  He thought since his parents knew that it was all right.

Bernie attended public school.  From the age of ten, he also attended Hebrew school, and had his bar mitzvah when he was thirteen.  It was at this stage that the hidden steel in his personality started to show.

Washington Heights had “gangs” of immigrants of many nationalities.  They protected their turf and as he says, they knew when to do battle and when not to do battle.  He would carry this instinct for survival forward.

When he was in high school, he chose the vocational rather than the academic program feeling he was not up to the latter.  Underestimating his abilities was a trait in his personality.  It didn’t help that he had poor eyesight and lacked corrective glasses.  Even so, he delivered the Herald Tribune newspaper in Harlem after school, and shied away from an apprentice course in barbering, graduating high school at age 16.

World War Two was underway.  He joined the Organized Reserves, and six months later, at age 17 in December 1943 was called up for active duty.  First billed for Cornell University and an engineering support program, an urgent need for infantry came up with him being sent to Fort McClellan in Alabama for basic training.

*     *     *

Reading Bernie’s account of combat in Patton’s Third Army caused me to recall John Dos Passos’s “Three Soldiers” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque.  War is hell and Bernie doesn’t romanticize his experience as he receives The Bronze Star and Combat Infantry Badge. 

We can feel the cold, the insufferable rain, sleet and snow as American soldiers trudge through France often with holes in the soles of their boots, wet sox, depleted rations, broken down equipment, chilled to the bone but constantly moving forward.  Bernie is amazed at one point to meet and talk to a two-star general at the front, thinking generals were always ensconced safely in the rear. 

There is humor in the pathos, camaraderie in a climate of fear and death, and then the shock of the war’s end, now acting as liberators.  When Bernie’s unit reached Dachau, he approached survivors of this concentration camp and they shied away.  He spoke to them in Yiddish and they were still apprehensive.  All had numbers tattooed on their arms.  He learned later they were all survivors of different families.  He writes, “At that time, I didn’t even know what the hell a concentration camp was.  In the barracks we would get a newspaper that was distributed by the Army, and it talked about the atrocities there.”

One night he grabbed a newspaper with a photo of dead Jewish bodies all lined up, and stormed into the basement looking for the German prisoners held there.  He said, “Warum?!” (Why?)  One of the German Waffen SS officer’s answered, “Propaganda.”

*     *     *

Bernie Turner at this point in his life was still a teenager, a boy who from the age of 17 to 19 had had to grow up fast to survive in the unreality of war.  He was coming home a man with a social conscience but with no idea as yet what it was orchestrating.  One could imagine what went through his mind.  Here was a Jewish boy, who saw members of his ethnicity, indeed, people of the region of his own ancestry stripped of their families, their lives, and their loves.  They were people of the Polish-Russian border towns, who had been sought out for extermination for no other reason than being Jewish.

Franz Kafka wrote “The Trial” to display the world of injustice. The book opens with one of the most powerful lines in all literature: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” 

Bernie, who is inclined to understatement, says this of the German people of Dachau:

“It was interesting that either they were ignorant of what was going on themselves, or they were deluding themselves – or at least trying to create the impression that they didn’t know anything.  To the credit of the German people, [today] they have films about the atrocities in those camps, and they mandate that every young kid within a radius of ten or twenty miles of Dachau must come at least once to see that camp and to see that film.  That is an incredible thing for a society to do.”

*     *     *

THE SEED IS PLANTED

As Bernie and Rita Turner approach, evaluate and then deal with one hurdle after another, I thought how critical struggle is in development.  Without struggle there is little possibility of one’s essence surfacing.  One can only know the existence of that essence – not through dreaming or fantasizing or hero-worshiping  –  through struggle.  Struggle is personal.  It is intimate.  It is done alone.  There are no personal trainers or self-help books to displace struggle, or to persuade one that it does not exist or apologize for it in any way.  With struggle, one must embrace one’s fears, doubts, devils, and rise above them, sometimes even soaring, as struggle has wings if one would embrace it and fly. 

Bernie and Rita embraced struggle personally, individually, and then collectively to become a force to reckon with, but it would never have happened if they had not first embraced it, alone.

*     *     *

The United States would be a different place today had WWII not been followed with the GI Bill of Rights.  The GI Bill changed the culture, complexion and complexity of the country.  Chances are I wouldn’t be writing these words had I not received the GI Bill for my graduate education.  Bernie, like millions of other American veterans, was able to acquire a college education.  But first, he had to go back to high school as he had taken a “general diploma” rather than “college preparatory diploma.” 

His first job after graduating from Columbia University was as a buyer in ladies sweaters at Mays Department Store in Brooklyn.  His greatest pleasure was studying the people especially on Saturdays as hordes of women crashed through the door of the store. 

His next job was with the National Industrial Conference Board where he secured information from major industries regarding the cost of living index.  This gave him insight into how corporate society operated.  He was witness to workers being treated as business assets subject to being discarded or replaced at the pleasure of the corporation. 

This inclined him to begin graduate work at the New School for Social Research.  He was blessed there with professors who had escaped Nazi Germany, and was fascinated living in the midst of a time of violent social change.  It also proved a turning point when a professor asked if any student was interested in working as a business agent and organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.  Bernie was.

The union agent job involved interacting on the shop level with people, and organizing workers who were not organized into the union.  He discovered a knack for organization with the conflict resolution skills required of the job.  He writes, “For the first time in my life it dawned on me that I really could be persuasive in a very significant manner.  That might not have registered instantly, but looking back it was a turning point in my life.”

*     *     *

RITA

Rita Raisel Tumorinson was born March 7, 1931 of immigrant parents who came to America from the same region of Russia/Poland as Bernie’s parents.  Rita’s mother was born in Poland to a family that was very poor.  Her grandmother made boots and her grandfather tended an orchard.  They lived in a house of dirt floors.  Rita’s mother, Rose Rothstein, told of gazing at the fruit on the trees attended by her father hoping for the taste of one, but knowing it was not allowed.  In town, she spoke of having to step off the sidewalk into the gutter when a non-Jew approached.  In Poland, rabbis educated only boys.  Girls were not taught to read or write. 

When Rose Rothstein arrived in America, she lived with relatives, and found a job making wigs.  She couldn’t read or write.  She bought a blackboard and taught herself to read Yiddish and a little English. 

It was early twentieth century before WWI.  Benjamin Tumorinson, another young immigrant, went to work in a furniture factory.  In early 1917, he enlisted in the US Army and fought the Germans in France.  Once the war was over Benjamin left the military proud of his US Army service and honorable discharge. 

Instead of returning to the furniture factory, he opened a used furniture store.  Business boomed.  He met and married Rose.  They bought a house with wood floors and thought they were rich, and then the Great Depression hit.  They lost everything, the store and the beautiful house with the wood floors. 

Rita was born during this period.  There was already an older sister.  Her father worked long hours six days a week on Long Island, and only came home to the Bronx one day a week.  Rita took intense satisfaction from her father’s storytelling, which fed her creative verve. 

As a child, she went to evening union meetings with her parents where they sang songs in Yiddish eulogizing the work ethic, emphasizing their cultural heritage and the idea that good things happen to children who adhered to high work ethics.  An uncle who was a writer for a Jewish newspaper had in his wallet the famous quote:

“In Germany the Nazis first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn’t speak up.  Then they came for me and by that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.”

It was a quote Rita would not forget.  She was an avid reader of such series as Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew, then True Confessions where she learned at the age of eleven something of the mysteries of life, subjects that were not discussed by her parents.

She was graceful and honed in the good looks and carriage of a natural beauty with brains.  Her older sister Marilyn became her mentor.  Marilyn received Abraham Lincoln High School’s highest award in bookkeeping, and went on to a successful career in accounting.  Rita followed suit demonstrating quantitative skills and discipline, no doubt influenced by her sister, as well as a valuable asset in the Walden University journey.

Rita’s favorite subject in high school, however, was history and international affairs as it brought the world to the doorstep of her mind.  She excelled as an honor student and was gifted as an independent thinker concerned with the welfare of others.  During WWII, Rita’s father built warships, while her mother monitored food stamp control.  Her father was part of the union’s effort to protect workers’ rights on the job, and beyond.  Rita writes, “My parents had a keen interest in not only what they believed right for the United States, but for the world as well.”  This became part of her mantra. 

*     *     *

The war over and high school behind her Rita announced to her parents she wanted to go to college.  It was 1949.  College and a career were incomprehensible to them.  She should be thinking of marriage and having a family.  Instead of college, she worked at Woolworth’s but college did not die.  Her boss there encouraged her to enroll in Brooklyn College, which in those days was free except for a $25 semester fee, provided you had good grades and could pass the entrance exam.  She worked out a plan to help support the family by being a full-time student and part-time worker.

*     *     *

Bernie and Rita Turner are inclined to an economy of expression in the telling of their story.  That said it is not difficult to imagine Rita’s enthusiasm for college, picturing her spending tons of hours at the Brooklyn University Library, or in the classroom bombarding her professors with questions, challenging them for empirical data.

What evolved from academia for Rita was a special interest in children of learning disabilities, children who were summarily labeled “retarded” and placed in classes for children of low I.Q.  She was surprised and disturbed by the many myths perpetuated concerning children of special needs without challenge.  Her drive to rectify this would become something of a paradigm shift in her work and approach to life.  She came to discover she had a discerning mind and took nothing at face value. 

Outside academia, she had a full social life with her work experience continuing in managing small offices and professional modeling.  She learned to be precise in her accounting practices and to continue the strong work ethic of her parents and her sister, Marilyn.  Meanwhile, she used her natural beauty as an asset to acquire modeling jobs.  She was coming to understand her power base. 

After college, she took a job teaching in a small private school for children of wealthy parents.  It was there she learned that exceptions were made for the wealthy as the school would rather tolerate poor performance than suffer a drop out.

She left that position for a school in Harlem, but declined when she saw how the school was run.  She accepted a position at an on Long Island.  No schools had been built during the four years of the war.   Classrooms were overcrowded.  This required innovative teaching, tutoring and curriculum planning.  Rita thrived.  She discovered her leadership and innovative skills and ability to handle the unanticipated.  “I loved every minute of it,” she explains.  Well that she did because it was like Bernie’s basic training in the army for the challenging years ahead to establish Walden University.

*     *     *

A FORCE OF TWO

We all know that life is filled with serendipity.  We can also recite how great empires have been built when certain people joined forces.  Walden University is such a story in that tradition.  The seed once planted in uncertain soil would defy the elements and grow into an alternative graduate learning institution expanding exponentially. 

That would miss the heart of the story.  This is a love story.  Where this story differs is that love found synergy to overcome one barrier after another.  Greed or gain, envy or jealousy is antithetical to love and to this story.  The focus from the beginning was social justice through an educational institution dedicated to that mission.  A force of two was driven by that love, love of each other, love of a common interest and objective, and love to leave their own footprints in the sands of time.

As electric as Rita was, Bernie was perversely shy.  But when she came by his table at a club, he pushed out a chair and said to this unknown beauty, “sit down,” and she did.  Several months later after they had been dating, he announced to her, “I told my mother that I was getting married.”  Rita said, “What?”   That’s how I found out that we were getting married.”  Doesn’t sound much like a shy person, does it?

Later Rita would say that she knew Bernie was an incredible leader, but didn’t know it.  She admired that modesty in him.  Rita encouraged him to go back to school to study law.  He said he didn’t have that kind of ability.  She remembers smiling to herself, “Oh, but you do.” 

She enrolled at City College of New York (CCNY) for a Master’s Degree in helping children with learning disabilities in reading.  After graduation, she became a reading specialist in the Long Island Centereach School District.  There her innovative approach was successful, but without adequate measuring instruments for reading disabilities.  This opened a whole new channel of personal discovery.  She was called on to develop a testing program to evaluate the effectiveness of basic pre-reading skills, then reading skills, and finally, New York State University at Stony Brook asked her to develop a program to enhance the potential for college freshmen coming from disadvantaged neighborhoods.  Professor Ralph Watkins asked her to design and implement the program, a major opportunity for one so young.

At the same time, she remained active in community action groups that discriminated against single parent mothers, or mothers with histories of drug abuse, or children on the basis of color or assumed learning disabilities.   

She mentioned the offer to her faculty adviser at Hofstra University where she was a doctorate student.  “Of course you shouldn’t take it,” the adviser said, “They should be offering that position to someone like me with more significant knowledge and college level experience.” 

On the way home, her car skidded on a patch of ice, flipped and threw her from the vehicle.  Glass was embedded in her skin, but otherwise she was okay physically if not psychologically.

*     *     *

Bernie, before he met her, had experienced how corporations were run, how profits took precedence over people, and how people were used and discarded indiscriminately as interchangeable parts in a giant corporate machine. 

Rita was hit with the broadside of academia where the politics of tenure and the infighting of childish adults become war games of professors.  The jolt of the near fatal crash woke her up to the emotional high she was enjoying only to have it come crashing down with severe suddenness from the calloused comment of her faculty adviser. 

Rita writes:

“In the midst of all that was going on I received an overwhelming offer I could not refuse.  Bernie noted that we had each successfully fought many battles and done innovative things, and that it was time for us to move on and encourage a younger generation and a larger force to replenish and fight for the social changes needed by our society.”

*     *     *

A DREAM IS BORN

The 1950s and 1960s saw Bernie and Rita honing their skills, Bernie now teaching at the college level.  Rita was showing her skills as an educator and organizer, administrator, accountant and executive.  Three children would grow up tall and straight like their parents, David, Amy and Tammy.  They would move to Naples, Florida.

Often glossed over in success stories is the journey.  The journey here tells the story.  Bernie learned something of what he was made as an infantryman in Patton’s Third Army on the Western front.  After graduating Columbia University, he worked on the National Industrial Conference Board, and saw how bureaucracy works.  At the New School of Social Research he was able to see the connection between his studies and his work as a union organizer in the garment district. 

When they moved to Long Island, he supported Rita in her work in civil rights, the United Nations, and such groups as SANE and Women’s Strike for Peace.

Noteworthy was Rita’s work on the Blaine Amendment for separation of church and state.  The Catholic Church launched an anti-Blaine campaign in Suffolk County in favor of a new constitution and abolishing the Blaine Amendment.  Suffolk County Township was 90 percent Catholic.  Rita and her group, however, prevailed.  The Blaine Amendment was not overturned.  She learned how to go into the den of the enemy and prevail.

*     *     *

Walden University was inauspiciously launched at Naples, Florida at the Cove Inn, where the first of four summer sessions were held between 1971 through 1974.

Florida, which is known as a diploma mill, looked to be having yet another one on the horizon.  Tom Morgan, Naples Bureau Chief for the Miami Herald did a story on Walden in 1971 with the headline, “Motel Ph.D.”  He would eventually change his tune and be a big supporter of Walden.

*     *     *

I’ve chosen in this review to concentrate on the two principals and how they evolved as individuals. Over half of the book is dedicated to this development, and I think, rightly so.  Bernie and Rita combined their strengths, and had the capacity to recognize and neutralize their weaknesses to face their adversaries with a solid front. 

*     *     *

It has been my experience that a small but significant segment of educators, often in elite positions, are vane and exaggerate their assets and hide behind their books and learning as if a carapace that protects them from self-discovery.  They assume the mantle of superiority and punish others not so handicapped.  Titles and honors, and attachment to esteemed institutions are considered their badges of authenticity.  They are a petty group, given to juvenile peccadilloes and dalliances while delighting in the insular protection of a world separate from the world at large.  If it is any consolation, it is as true in the corporate world, but such academics have more time for such exercise. 

Such academics hate change, social or otherwise.  They are true believers, who climb aboard the popular bandwagon of the times, legitimizing their status by writing books that document the ride.  It is unlikely such academics would threaten career status or reputation by entertaining ideas challenging the infallible authority of academia.   

Academia often promotes the idea of progressive education but only as a mantra, as the sad state of education demonstrates.  Education has remained essentially the same for more than a century.  Students continue to jump through the same hoops, are subjected to the same subjects, measured by the same grading system, the same academic progress in grades, the same requirements for college and advanced degrees, and the same ritualistic grind through the minefield of dissertation antics to produce what are called “scholars.”   . 

*     *     *

Bernie and Rita walked into this den of infallible authority with another view based on social justice in all its forms, but primarily based on graduate education that launches scholars, who have already done real work in the real world to enhance their skills to deliver more of a real punch to society in transition and limping badly. 

*     *     *

As you read the second half of this book, the first thing apparent is that Bernie is a team builder without ego.  He is centered with a working moral compass and cannot be thrown off stride.  The Turner’s realized to fulfill their dream of social justice they needed young minds with life experience to work towards that goal.  With only $15,000 in savings, they needed investors.  But as often happens, investors want to see a project up and running at full steam before investing. 

So, Bernie and Rita composed a two-page description of what they planned to do, ran off copies, addressed envelopes and mailed them to several thousand-school administrators across the country.  They received hundreds of replies.  One was from Harold L. Hodgkinson, a graduate of Harvard’s doctoral program.  He would prove instrumental.

The faculty grew with a similar component of well-established and successful academics from major universities. 

Summer sessions were held first in Naples, Florida and then several other places including university campuses.  A month residence was required with a set curriculum in which each doctoral student to qualify had to have a master’s degree and several graduate hours before attending.  Each doctoral student had an advisor with whom the student would stay in touch once the summer session was completed, and the student’s dissertation proposal approved with the research on it underway.  A student might require only one summer session followed by a year to complete the dissertation, but it was not uncommon for students to take several years to complete the doctorate.  Walden University treated every student as an individual, and measured the work accordingly. 

Bernie saw the big picture and had overall vision for a national university, while Rita excelled at administration, finance and admissions management, or the “nuts and bolts” of the operation. 

*     *     *

Bernie could see Walden University was quickly approaching an inevitable barrier.  The book reveals how difficult and yet comical the academic licensure process.  The accreditation is writhe with politics, pettiness, and posturing, which Freud has noted. 

Any school that has had to climb this mountain will appreciate the struggle Bernie and Rita experienced.  Neither of them had Ph.D.’s.  They recruited and hired key administrators with solid academic credentials.  They also attracted important industrialists to serve on the Board of Directors.  One benefactor, Howard F. Hunt, was an alumnus of Walden.  Then in 1991, a permanent home for summer sessions was found at the University of Indiana. 

Rita’s reliable administration and nurturing of students was paying off, but the true dividends came from her work in creating a system of guidance clearly understood by students with comprehensive measuring indices.  This work could stand up in comparison to any university.  Yet, the accreditation process wavered in the wind.   

*     *     *

The battle for accreditation was one that brought out the best in both Bernie and Rita.  By 1990, they had been fighting this battle for twenty years with an idea far ahead of the curve of alternate education and before the idea of on-line education was born.  Walden University was not meant to supplant traditional education, but to make available graduate education without all the hoops, and dog and pony shows that are a part of traditional institutional higher education. 

The book shows the struggle with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).  Clearly, it expected a university to be a place and a space where students and faculty met, and where a comprehensive library for research was at that site.  Walden University had contracts with some 200-university libraries across the country, which was readily available to Walden students across the nation, library facilities greater than found at any Ivy League school.  Sample dissertations were chosen at random by SACS and found outstanding.  At one summer session, SACS interviewed ten students at random and found all had been awarded scholarships to other universities but had chosen Walden.  SACS had little affinity for Walden University, and so Bernie moved on.

He next turned his attention to California, where Dr. Anderson, Vice-President of Graduate Education at the University of Pennsylvania, headed Walden.  California accreditation followed with Walden being listed in the Federal Registry of degree granting universities. 

Walden strove for greater acceptance of its degrees among a larger body of states.  Bernie applied to Minnesota, and it sent a team similar to SACS to review Walden’s application.  The Minnesota team did a thorough job with the Minnesota Higher Education Coordinating Board granting Walden a license to award doctoral degrees in Minnesota in 1979.  It so happened that the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (known commonly as the NCA) had recently accredited Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio, a non-traditional institution. 

Walden had attained licensing but not accreditation.  Bernie decided that the final stumbling block was that neither of them had Ph.D.’s.  Dr. Frederic Hudson of Fielding Graduate University was hired for the summer session in 1987.  In 1988, while Bernie was still president, NCA finally granted Walden candidacy status, a major step leading to accreditation.  Dr. Harold Abel, President of Central Michigan University was hired as president of Walden, taking a two-year leave of absence.  Accreditation followed by NCA.  Nevertheless, as author Wade Keller points out, Walden was still a freestanding non-traditional doctoral institution, and was proprietary in nature, an anomaly to the higher education accreditation system. 

*     *     *

Then, on February 23, 1990, President Abel received a call at his Walden office in Minneapolis, Minnesota that there were some irregularities, and that resubmission and reconsideration of the application was necessary.  Bernie and Rita saw it was the SACS all over again, delay after delay over the past 15 years.   President Abel said to Bernie, “”I think we should sue the bastards,” which they did.  On March 19, 1990, the commission reversed its earlier decision and granted accreditation to Walden. 

*     *     *

With accreditation, Walden grew so fast that a cap on enrollment at 15 percent per year was necessary.  Then Dr. Abel had to return to Central Michigan University after his two year leave-of-absence.  The new president was Dr. Glen Drake.  After being hands on and nurturing the idea of Walden from scratch, it had become difficult for the Turner’s not meddle with Dr. Abel, and now they found it doubly difficult to stay aloof with the new president.

In 1991, the Turner’s decided to sell and let their dream fly on its own.  They sold Walden to Don Ackerman a venture capitalist without quibbling over price or holding out in a bidding war.  Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc. purchased 41 percent of Walden University from Ackerman in 2001.  At the time enrollment was 2,000 students.  By 2003, enrollment was 8,000, and in 2009 it had surpassed 33,000.  Walden now holds two doctorate ceremonies, January and July, with summer sessions on both coasts with more than 4,000 graduates. 

*     *     *

This is a quintessential American story.  It is the manifestation of how an idea can encounter and overcome assumed insurmountable barriers.  It is a love story of two people who found each other in the lonely crowd and built a life together as well as a university.  It is a story of immigrant families who suffered much to arrive on the shores of the United States and settled in New York City.  There they worked hard and instilled in their children the values of industry and independence, and the heritage of their Jewish culture. 

Rita’s father fought in WWI as an American soldier and Bernie fought in WWII as an American infantryman.  It is the story of a family of three devoted children, David, Amy and Tammy, all college graduates and all leading productive lives, until David’s was cut short at the age of 34 in a freak accident in a remote area of Brazil.  There is a chapter reflecting each of the offspring in a family that has grown together in love against the current tide in contradiction of that trend.  It is love that has sustained the family through difficult times and love that carries them forward still aspiring to the highest in new projects such as the Florida Coastal School of Law.

The book is graced with pictures, memorabilia, documentation, and appendices that trace this journey.  It is a book every educator should peruse for its insight, temerity, persistence, dedication, determination and good cheer.  My one regret is that it lacks an index and bibliography.  I look forward to its sequel.

*     *     *

CRYPTIC NOTES AND COMMENTS ON TIME MAGAZINE'S "PERSON OF THE YEAR"

CRYPTIC NOTES ON “MAN OF THE YEAR,” FACEBOOK AND THE FLIPPANT GENERATION



James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 20, 2010

* * *

REFERENCE:

A “letter to the editor” of Time magazine reads:

“I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is a fine young man. But to make him "Man of the Year" in celebration of the Flippant Generation of some 50 million that narcissistically publishes a thousand pictures on Facebook in a self-adoration gallery is a bit much.

"Consider this self-indulgence against the fact that at least 3 billion people in the world with yearly incomes of less than $1,000 are likely to be ruled and exploited by tyrants and lack fresh drinking water, adequate sanitation and housing, and sufficient nutrition to keep body and soul together. It is as if Time lives in the same bubble as this generation, and feels a need to reinforce it. Sad, but I suppose inevitable given the priorities of our culture.”

* * *

It is not a surprise that popular Facebook should generate so many comments. What is a surprise is that people who use it are so apologetic for the attention. The exchange follows represents a running conversation I have with Michael.  I hope it is of some use to you.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

You have such a wonderful ability to summarize inanity. The "self-adoration gallery" is such an appropriate phrase. It almost makes me ashamed to have a Facebook page with "friends" post dramatic occurrences in their lives.

Some of my favorites include, "Leaving White Castle with a sack of burgers." The one that made me stop visiting the site several months ago was, " I've been on Facebook all day. Signing off to walk my dogs."

Still, you answer the inevitable question, "Why Zuckerberg?" Time chooses its person of the year based on influence. The fact that Zuckerberg has, intentionally or not, become a tool of the elitist rich who prefer that we be distracted away from concerns over the abused, homeless and hungry people of the world (and in our own country) is most relevant to the recognition.

His phenomena extend beyond our borders, distracting most of the wired world.

The Internet, which exposed people around the world to concepts like freedom of speech and democracy, was becoming a tool far too dangerous to the power structure. Zuckerberg has alleviated some of their fears. Julian Assange, on the other hand, has heightened them. He has made us realize the elite engage in petty sniping, however at a greater expense. What a surprise the super rich Saudis are threatened by Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability. Okay, I'm going to walk my dog over to White Castle and grab a couple of sliders.

Michael

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I know 2009 - 2010 were rough years, but you kept your wits about you because you have a wonderful mind and a fine love of family and community. With that anchor, you are blessed.

As always, your candor and ability to capture the essence of what I'm trying to say are apparent.

Many correspond with me, people who have been blessed with much and have had much taken away from them in the past two years, or since the economic downturn. They caution me not to mention their names as they have their pride. But I fear they fail to see their plight has something to do with making poor choices. As you point out, there is no socio-economic class immune to the dominant culture and those pulling the strings.

People write who you could say were once rich, earning more than $ million a year, wealth that has disappeared. The irony is there is an up side to this upside down situation.  They are living in estates virtually "free" because banks don’t want to eat their debt, and are waiting for an upsurge in real estate value before foreclosing.

At this time of year, my heart goes out to them. They didn't see this coming, continued to live as if they would always be rich, continued to make poor choices.

They are not bad people but believed in the nonsense of our culture.  It reminds me of the television program, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."  It was popular during the 1980s and 1990s.  People imitated these lifestyles, and builders obligingly built mock houses that resembled their fantasies.  Now we have "American Idols" where literally tens of thousands stand in line forever to be interviewed for selection to the first of several rounds before actually getting a chance to appear on television.  Young people dress, talk, walk and mimic their idols.

It could be argued whether this is a matter of making poor choices or having a poor perspective on what it is to live a worthwhile life in the confines of self-identity, self-reliance, self-direction and, yes, self-determination.

* * *

Last night I watched PBSTV Masterpiece Contemporary’s "Endgame." The title is a metaphor from chess to describe the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

South Africa changed my life. I ran smack into the wall of apartheid in 1968 with its social injustice. What made it more painful is that I had such respect for Afrikaners who had a history similar to American pioneers. I found Afrikaners very much like Iowans. Yet, they had established this terrible system with draconian perfection.

The Afrikaner government had only been in power for twenty years in 1968, and already there had been terrible encounters with the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela who was now in prison.

I was a young American executive treated as if I was somebody in a style well beyond what I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Yet, I had the legacy of the memory of my da, who said, "the day, Jimmy, you forget you are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad is the day you won't know who the hell you are, and they'll have you for lunch." I never forgot, never bought into the hype, and luckily had that anchor that kept me sane.

That said you could say it was my first reality check. I could see how the world of freedom and democracy could be skewed to exclude, indeed, to outlaw the majority population, which was black, and to impose minority rule with an iron hand, which was white. Imagine if you can, there were 14 million Bantu (blacks), 2 million Colored, and 4 million whites of which only 2.5 million were Afrikaners and 1.5 million Brits.

My job was to facilitate the creation of a new company to virtually eliminate competition in our specialty chemical business. It meant cooperating with the political regime because South Africa was a powder keg and could blow up at any time into civil war.

Against this reality, I was obliged to live like an aristocrat to ply my skills. I did it pretty naively until I saw SOWETO, the South West African township where more than a million Bantu lived taking the train into Johannesburg daily with passbooks in hand to work for whites, including me. It was a shock to learn that they could go to jail without charge for 120 days if stopped by police with a delinquent passbook.

The "Endgame" gave viewers a sense of the dramatic release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison in 1990. Majority rule was established a few years later thus avoiding a civil war.

* * *

To put my concern for "Person of the Year" in another context, here in Tampa we have 15,000 homeless on the streets in a county population of 1.2 million.

If that is not bad enough, the city council wants to impose strict rules about panhandling using the rationale that these "drifters" are dregs of society mentally ill, or victims of drug abuse, alcoholism, or crime. In the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times mug shots of three were in the newspaper referencing their criminal past. Literally millions are homeless across our bountiful land, millions more go to bed hungry.

While we can go to the moon, we cannot seem able to solve this problem.

*     *     *

Human kind is a strange breed. There is an NYU professor in photography that has had a camera installed in the back of his head, a very painful process, so that he can study what is going on around him and write a paper on it. The only problem the university administration of NYU has ordered him to wear a cap all the time he is on campus because of the intrusiveness of his research.  He was interviewed on National Public Radio.

* * *

Several people have written to me that Hitler and Stalin were "Men of the Year" for Time. As you point out, the justification was the power of their influence. Together, Hitler and Stalin caused the death of some ten million Jews by estimates I have seen, and more than one hundred million people. We have had modern versions of them in the Balkans and Africa, but not the same distinction. Some of these recent despots have ended up at The Hague for war crimes. Society never got a chance at Hitler, and Stalin became America's great ally in WWII, and then great enemy during the Cold War.

Mark Zuckerberg is obviously a bright, gifted and daring young man. What he has created may eventually evolve into something useful to mankind. Remember many inventions started out as toys of distraction such as the typewriter.

There is no point in faulting him for everyone jumping on his bandwagon. It just saddens me that our consciousness fails to be elevated. We drift so easily back to primitive fascinations. That must have occurred when primitives looked into a melted piece of sand that contained silver and saw their image.

In one sense we cannot escape self-fascination, but in another, we cannot afford such limitation to survive.

Our fascination with Facebook tells me we are starving for social connection. Back to “cut and control" philosophy, given our overwhelming dependence on electronics, social networking has been reduced to sharing pictures and mundane happenings, or something better than nothing, but this is not intimacy.

* * *

Michael, I believe you give the elite more credit than it deserves. I see them very much on automatic pilot as surprised as everyone else with how fads have taken over. They are as insular if not more so than Facebook devotees. Reality is hostile territory beyond the sphere of the elite, who dress, dine, talk, think, live and play to the tempo of a metronome.  

The elite are economic advisers to the president, number crunchers, who have no idea what it is like to run a business, yet they are middle class business experts. I see this glee club Monday through Friday, on "Charlie Rose."  And it is not limited to economic experts.

After a while, the movers and shakers interviewed by Rose all sound the same as if they are talking out of the same voice box. They can be from Iran or Afghanistan, Columbia or Brazil, Canada or New Zealand, Mozambique or Barbados, New York City or San Francisco; close your eyes and you come to think you're listening to a ventriloquist.

There are exceptions.  Film star Sean Penn has done important work in Haiti, the Doctors Without Borders, and the people of relief agencies and various religious groups that don't talk about caring but are involved in it daily around the globe to demonstrate their humanity.

* * *

As for the Internet, the reaction of the West (not only the United States) to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks is revealing. We love secrets in an age where there are no secrets anymore.

The traitor, Bill Haydon in John LeCarre's novel, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1974), claims that secret services are “the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious" (p. 342, hardback edition).

I believe the CIA claims the same relevance.  Certainly, the agency did during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Imagine what would happen to Assange if this were 1974. One wonders if he would be extradited to the United States, tried and imprisoned, or even executed. Daniel Ellsberg of the “Pentagon Papers” fame, who recently applauded Assange, faired pretty well for his crime. Both whistle blowers were published in The New York Times, which tends to throw a wrench into such cases after the fact.

If I am not too wide of the mark, we are becoming a little less paranoid and a little more rational. I withhold final judgment until I see how this WikiLeaks thing is settled.

From your comment, you must have seen the published WikiLeaks in New York Times. I agree they are generally mundane, petty, and absurd. This brings me to another dimension of this.

* * *

One of the reasons for my success in OD work was listening to the grapevine. People in the workplace at the bottom of the ladder know the score better than anyone else. Management would do well to listen to its people instead of thinking the walls don’t have ears. Walls do have ears. Workers have always had that advantage. Too often workers play ignorant and go along to get along doing exactly the opposite of what they know is right because management says so, that is, unless OD becomes their collective voice. That has been my experience.

It was how I came to develop my six passive behaviors and three cultures (comfort, complacency, contribution). I believe conservatively that the "SIX SILENT KILLERS" cost American business $50 billion a year while management thinks it is in control and workers retreat into passivity and leave their minds at home. Occasionally, a whistle blower brings this to management’s attention, only to have the messenger killed.

* * *

On the positive side, I see WikiLeaks despite the damage it may cause or has already caused as a wake up call to a society that it has lost its moral viability. We have become drones of a system where the leadership from Congress to the President, from commerce to industry, and from education to entertainment seems to function as if nobody is in charge.

Whenever that has happened in the past, distraction ruled.  Distraction rules today.

To illustrate, imagine corruption becomes a norm. If so many companies are doing more or less the same, if everybody is in some dodgy business, and gets tired of painting the same picture of dodginess, the inclination is to suddenly turn corruption into aggressive and perceptive marketing.

Continuing my hypothesis, then people on Wall Street come to create and sell derivatives and build up fortunes from nothing but dodgy instruments, and we come to call them smart or brilliant but never criminal.

There is a psychological phenomenon that advertisers and television executives have mastered that illustrates this more graphically.

A television character such as "Dr. House" or a television commercial becomes something everybody loves to hate. If that is not enough, we have a need to share this hatred with friends or anyone who will listen, until we eventually get tired of hating "Dr. House" or that terrible commercial, and suddenly cannot stop ourselves from being obsessed with watching "Dr. House" or buying what the commercial is advertising. This can get scary when seen in another context.

For example, some might say this is a time when United States no longer appears capable of understanding its own revolution, a time when politics no longer seem relevant to everyday life, a time when economics appear a mathematical game of Nobel Laureates, a time when there seems little will for social justice, a time when new technology opens the floodgates with something like WikiLeaks to the chagrin of those in power.

If the psychological phenomenon I have described takes hold we could be waiting for calamity to demonstrate our resilience and rescue strategy. We are so programmed to such crisis management. That is why I say it is scary.

* * *

When I was thirty-five, which is the mean age of Hillsborough County (Tampa), I didn't have such a perspective. Nor was I inclined to listen to an old foggy like myself. Somehow each generation finds the key to go forward. I don’t think it is an exaggeration that this is a more challenging than mine was. For that reason, I hope it can cut through our malarkey and firm ground.

* * *

BB rolls her eyes as she sees me writing yet another long missive. "Do you think anyone reads that stuff?"

I shake my head. "Some.”

“Not many?”

"No, Probably not.”

She shakes her head, and silently leaves my study.

* * *

Perhaps it is a way for me to stay connected. I've always been more comfortable with my books and ideas than with people, more comfortable deskbound and alone in my study than traveling. Yet my many careers always involved working with people. I've traveled more than a million miles in the course of my work, and I still go to Europe every couple of years. Go figure.

It is always a pleasure to hear from you. I hope you and your family have a wonderful year.

Be always well,

Jim

WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?

WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 11, 2010

* * *

Here in Florida there have been hallelujahs from one end of the state to the other. Many elementary and secondary schools have gone from a “C” grade to a “B” grade or an “A” grade.

Teachers have, understandably, been teaching to the state tests, and have been awarded consequently.

Teaching, the most important business of society is a survival game for teachers, and they are learning to play it better and better. I think this whole scheme misses the point.

Public education, which has been evolving for more than a century, going from teacher centered to student centered learning, has placed the onus for success clearly on the shoulders of teachers, when teachers are important but not all inclusive to the learning process. Parents and students complete the triangular process.

* * *

Now, we have a new governor elect in Florida, Rick Scott, who comes from corpocracy where he had a checkered career, but one in which he made a great deal of money. It would appear he plans to make students minions of a corporate manifest to produce a finished product consistent with his healthcare business model.

His plan is to give vouchers to any family that wants them running a dagger through traditional education. Scott’s plan would give the parents of public school students a credit of roughly $5,500 or 85 percent of the expenditure per schoolchild to use for their child’s education. The state would contract with a qualified financial institution to administer the fund and verify appropriate spending from the account. My sense is that this is a nightmare in the making to rival the current educational bureaucracy.

* * *

I am not a trained educator, per se, but one who spent a good deal of my life in school attaining several degrees in both public and private schools. I was a student in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s, and taught at the graduate level as an adjunct professor in the 1980s and 1990s in both land grant institutions and private colleges and universities. I was also a contract consultant to such executive learning institutions as the American Management Association and the Professional Institute. I have also written on education in scores of trade journals and periodicals over the last forty years, and have written several books for mature students in the workforce.

So, in the dichotomy between student and teacher, I have developed some views on traditional education, which I see Governor-elect Rick Scott scrapping without due consideration of the model in place or its culture. It is dangerous to venture beyond a culture without a careful assessment of that culture, or without having a game plan to bring teachers, students and parents on board. Transitional change requires a systemic indoctrination, orientation and implementation strategy. This is the opposite of a wild ride into the future.

* * *

Education has been in the “Present Panic of Now” since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, with a frantic compare and compete strategy of throwing the old out and replacing it with the new with blind optimism, ad infinitum. Governor-elect Scott is only the latest.

The casualties of panic strategies over the last sixty years, to my knowledge, have never been carefully measured. We only know that millions of children have slipped through the cracks.

I know my own children lost their appetite for education, and have done relatively well despite rather than because of their formal education. When I was teaching graduate school, I often had otherwise bright people who could not write or read well, and were going through the motions to gain another degree to win promotion. They were not interested in education or being educated.

These students are now parents of students who face the shock of this extended voucher system, an idea to make education unadulterated job training. Not surprising, this is consistent with corpocracy-think.

* * *

SO, WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?

Over my long life, people who have been disappointed in work and life often have told me it was because “they didn’t have good teachers.” No matter where – Europe, South America, South Africa, or in the United States – it was always the same mantra. I would shake my head and walk away, that is, until I got into the adjunct professor business.

It became clear to me, when I was successful as a teacher; it was because students made me so. It had little to do with me but everything to do with them.

Learning is not a mechanistic business. It is not a business model. It isn’t even a grading system. Learning is an awakening of the person to the world around and beyond that stimulates the mind to grow and grasp its culture and shape its destiny to a measure of consistency fitting to its uniqueness.

* * *

My sister’s son was such a poor high school student that she and my brother-in-law took my nephew to a psychologist to see if he had a learning disability. The psychologist, after examining and testing him, assured the parents, “There is nothing wrong with your son. I noticed he has not missed any school. He is looking for something but hasn’t found it. Once he finds it, he will be fine.”

After high school, he worked as an hourly in a high-tech firm, and quickly reached his maximum pay level. In his twenties, seeing a bleak future, he wondered if a job was all there was to life.

Then one day he was at a friend’s house, and saw his computer. The rest is history. He loved that computer, and the more he learned about it the more he wanted to know. He went back to school, and over a torturous six years, earned his degree in computer science and is now, and has been for years, a successful computer programmer and consultant. Along the way, given his love and passion, he made a lot of teachers successful.

* * *

Learning is not a place but a mindset. For learning to flourish, there has to be a climate conducive to learning, and that is not necessarily a regimented rote-learning curriculum where students memorize and regurgitate what is presented in a quest for grades. You can be an “A” student and not retain as much as a “C” student who is interested in creating conceptual building blocks to understanding a subject.

The late Stephen Jay Gould questioned the idea of intelligence testing in “The Mismeasure of Man” (1981). Others have challenged the relevance of SATs, GREs and other instruments meant to measure learning.

My sense is that the biggest challenge of education is to make the student aware that he or she is the best teacher. Now, that is not meant to be coy. I mean it sincerely. I think the best teacher of the student is the student, where the sense of being a student and learning being the vehicle combine to establish passion and meaning to life.

The second best teacher is an accomplished student in the discipline being studied. No one understands the mind and nuances of the student than another student who has mastered the subject, or is on his or her way to mastering it. Smart students have always known this.

* * *

When I went from a parochial grammar school to a public high school, mainly being recruited because I was an athlete, teachers during my first two years of high school didn’t take me seriously as a student, but other students, accomplished students without a bias against me as a jock, did. I made it my business to eat lunch with them, and to seek their help when I needed it. Without exception, they were obliging.

During my junior and senior years, I would eat lunch in the auditorium and students would come to sit with me to discuss word problems they had in algebra and geometry.

In the process of doing that, I discovered why the good students were so willing to help me: by teaching others we become better students ourselves; by explaining the steps to the solution of problems we acquire a better grasp of the discipline. For the student as teacher it is a win-win proposition for both.

* * *

The role of parents in this learning equation is fundamental.

The first bridge to cross for parents is that it is not all about them. It is not all about their biases for or against education, or how smart or dull they were in school, or even how much education they have had, or they lie about having. It is all about the son or daughter.

Back to what I’ve said earlier, I’ve heard parents tell their children, “I never had any good teachers,” implying that was the reason they have had to struggle.

The statement is erroneous in the first light based on what I’ve said above, but it is erroneous in another light because it suggests that school is a place you have to go to learn for a number of years, and then school and learning is out for life.

School is never out. Everyone gets a report card every day of life. Learning is a lifelong experience. When you stop learning, you start digging a hole in your soul. The irony is that grammar school, high school and college graduations are called “commencements,” and the word means “to have or start or make a beginning.”

* * *

The quickest way for a parent to turn off a child is to act as a know-it-all, or to never be able to say, “I don’t know, but I can find out.”

Children are not stupid. They quickly decipher what parents say to what they expect of them. It doesn’t take much encouragement for a student to think education sucks if the parents do.

My da thought book learning was emasculating and unmanly. “Girls,” he said, “are always reading books. Boys do things. They get jobs. They develop common sense.” He was convinced I had little common sense. I never had a job but was always playing sports or reading books. My mother, a high school graduate, was of another mind. She knew education was the only ticket for a poor kid to break the jinks of poverty.

My da was a good man but only went to the seventh grade. It handicapped him for life in more ways than one.

I’ve known a number of young people in this present generation that have handicapped themselves: girls who have dropped out of school, got pregnant, lived off and on with boyfriends that failed to support their children, living lives going nowhere, and not because they lacked brains or talent or ability.

Notice I didn’t say they lacked opportunity.

Too often young people skate by an opportunity to get an education as if it doesn’t exist. They could go to junior college, night school, or take an on-line course, but that might mean giving up their free time, their nightlife, their friends, their drinking and partying buddies. It always boils down to choices, and many of the also-rans consistently make bad choices.

I’ve known guys, as far back as my generation, who never got educated or developed a value added skill because they were in hock to car and insurance car payments, and “had to work” instead of going to school.

Then I’ve known people who stayed in school and hated every minute of it acquiring degrees and professional credentials that they never used or abused because it was not what they really wanted to do, or to be. Many of them had no idea what they wanted to do or be because they never took the time to think about it; they only knew what they didn’t want to do or be. If this sounds insane, trust me, it is more common than you might think.

Too many people seek a career because they believe they will make a lot of money. They will even enter a profession they hate because of this motivation. This seldom works out to their advantage. Do what you love and the money will follow. It is never the reverse of this.

When you educate yourself to a job, and most education is so directed, it becomes vocational education but without the vocation. Sad.

* * *

There are people reading this that I can hear say, “Why bother? Do you expect to change the educational calculus?”

I will answer by saying many students will succeed despite rather than because of whatever the current educational system. Unfortunately, this is not the majority. These students know they are their own best teachers. They are not afraid to ask embarrassing questions in class, or to seek out the smartest student in the discipline and get his or her reading on the subject. Nor do they limit their learning to the classroom or to their peers. They listen, process and evaluate everything they experience wherever they are. They are a learning machine. They know they cannot stand on the moment but must be organized to grow and develop as long as life pulsates through their spirit.

We need more of them but I sense the system, including the latest rendition of Governor-elect Scott is not geared to produce them. I find that strange because the Governor-elect is the embodiment of what I describe here. His only problem, I suspect, is that he senses he is unique and that the model that worked for him is an aberration, and he must institute something that resembles a regimental departure from his self-learning.

So, the answer is that voucher education will not change anything but will disrupt everything. This is so because of the planned scale without suitable acknowledgement and consideration of teachers, students and parents in the present mode of culture and education.

The first step was not to compose a committee of experts, but to define the problem of education in functional and approachable terms with input from teachers, students and parents.

This is necessary to see and understand before everyone can be expected to be on board. Teachers and parents want the best for students. They are so immersed in the day-today problems that they have little time for the heavy lifting. They need guidance and direction in defining the subsequent steps forward. This takes time, patience, persistence, and prudence, the essentials to building creative consensus in a framework of sustained cooperation. Change is inevitable, but not change for change’s sake.

* * *

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 11, 2011

REFERENCE:

A select few are reading this in manuscript form.  I confess I have been impatient to hear their reaction to what they have read.  An acquaintance reacts to this.

*     *     *

Someone who has read this manuscript has noted my lament at not hearing back from readers, that is, with the exception of two.  That said the comments from these readers have been appreciated and useful.  At first, I hesitated to share what follows, but then thought, is it true what he says?  My sense is what he sees as my intent is just my limits as a writer.  I am simply trying to tell a story climbing to truth as best I can without apologies.  A writer writes:

Fisher, you can't have it both ways, ask readers to read you than dump all over them when they don't read you as you would like.  I'm not sure what your instructions were but I'm confident they were vague. 

You write like you read and most people, me included, don't read all that esoteric stuff you do, well, not all of it.  For example, I can see the influence of Sigmund Freud here.  Obviously, you have had some indoctrination with his doublespeak. 

Less obvious, but I'm sure you would argue the contrary; the influence of James Joyce is here.  I read "Portrait as an Artist as a Young Man," liked it and think you capture the double bind that Catholicism could put on the human soul.  I tried to read "Ulysses," which you apparently devoured.  I did read all the dirty parts, which I found delicious, but not nearly as delicious as your dirty parts.  Nina is fabulous.  She almost makes Devlin human.  Joyce's Molly Malone doesn't hold a candle to her.  

One of my favorite authors is Pete Dexter whom I doubt many of your readers know, although he won the National Book Award for "Paris Trout."  Dexter obviously reads Joyce and shows the same devilish delight you show at men and women colliding with psychic sexual energy. 

There is evidence of the influence of Joseph Conrad's  "Heart of Darkness," which you acknowledge, but also I can see "The Nigger of 'Narcissus'" and "Nostromo" influence.   How many of your readers do you think read Conrad?  I would say between slim and none.

But the presence of Dostoyevsky, which pulsates through the book in dreams and innuendos, guilt and self-flagellation, may be a bit much for readers that are reading the story on one level when you throw two others at them.  Why did you do this?  Or did you feel it added to the story? 

Green Island does have the feel of madness, and how normal madness is in the conscience of civilized man.  That was Dostoyevsky's ploy.  You are as much a moralist as he is without the same pathos.  I've read "Notes from the Underground" and "The Brothers Karamazov," and promised myself one day I would read "The Possessed" and "The Idiot" and "Crime and Punishment," but haven't got around to them.

See what I'm saying?  I'm what you would call a reader of some patience with these obtuse authors, but you relish their company.  Although Green Island is clearly biographical, it is a novel of depth and depression, enlightened leadership and stubborn resolve.  On the other hand, although this might not have been your intention, it offers a view of the decline and fall of Western white man. Clever.

My advice, and you've never taken my advice before, is publish it yourself, and then bind up copyright protection for your family for the next fifty years, when it will be "current," and I suspect considered prophetic like Edward Bellamy's late nineteenth century novel "Looking Backward" predicting life in the early twenty-first century.  

Given what I've said here, I doubt if you will sell ten copies now, but you're loaded so who cares, right?

W.E.B.D