A PROFESSOR COMMENTS ON THE MISSIVE: THE BEAUTY OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

A PROFESSOR COMMENTS ON THE MISSIVE: THE BEAUTY OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT (July 6, 2011)

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

© July 7, 2011

REFERENCE:

The professor rightly took umbrage at the Neal Bortz college commencement harangue he is alleged to have given at Texas A & M.  Dr. Fitzgibbons has had difficulty getting into my blog.  If any of you have had the same trouble, or have some suggestions to help him, it would be nice to hear from you.  JRF

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PROFESSOR FITZGIBBONS WRITES:

Dear Mr. Fisher,

I intended to post this comment to your blog in response to the “speech” by Neal Bortz. However, neither your “Create Blog” tab nor your “Sign In” tab would allow me to do that. Both tabs took me to a place if I wanted to start my own blog. I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to leave comments.

As for the Bortz “speech,” this was not a speech at all. It was written by Mr. Bortz but was never given as a commencement speech or any other kind of speech according to http://www.snopes.com/. Here is the direct link: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/boortz.asp.

In case you are unfamiliar, Snopes is an amazing and free service that tends to burst the internet bubble on a lot of urban legends, myths, and internet postings that usually, but not always, have little basis in fact.

You were being charitable when you called his ranting a, “provocative style of information sharing.” Like many ultra-conservatives (read: Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, et al) his “either-or” style (as you noted) is off-putting. Talk radio and Fox News is full of them. Unfortunately, most of them are on the Right of the political spectrum

I must share with you that I have only recently stumbled across your blog. I was googling for a particular phrase and your site came up. I have read only a few postings so far, but have like what I have read.

I am one of those dreaded professors that Bortz was railing against. I am a professor of management, starting my 28^th year in the fall. Contrary to Mr. Bortz cliché, I “did” and now I teach. I spent 6 years in industry working in information technology, including a stint in the US Navy (with one tour of Viet Nam). It’s not that I couldn’t “do” Mr. Bortz it’s that I found corporate life creatively stifling, oppressive, and filled with dehumanizing work and managers.

I get glowing student evaluations, not because I am an easy grader or one of those teachers who “entertain” students with jokes and “war stories” of my times in industry and the military. I think I get them (from what I can glean from their comments) is that I challenge them, I tell them things about corporations and society that they were ignorant of, and because I do so with very little varnish. In all humility, I suggest you read some of their comments at http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=125869. I received the College teaching award this year. It was particularly rewarding not because of the peer recognition or the honorarium but because of the 25+ letters I received from alumni supporting my nomination, some from as long ago as 1989.

I have a feeling that I will like more of your blog postings the more I read because I think we share a lot of fundamental views on corporations, managers, workers. May I make a book suggestion to you? I think you will enjoy a truly classic text called, “The Modern Corporation and Private Property” (1932), by Adoph Berle and Gardiner Means. The attribute much of what we now find is wrong with corporate life (and financial services during the 1980s “Savings and Loan Fiasco” as well as our recent financial meltdown to the separation of ownership and control in the modern corporation. Managers, who are just another group of workers, act as if they own the place instead of being just hired hands like everyone else. We see it everywhere: from golden parachutes, corporate corruption, and insider trading to how employees are treated as disposable units of production. I think you will enjoy it.

One last question. Where did you do your doctorate and what was the topic?  And please either fix your blog so I can leave comments or tell me how to do it.

Regards,

Dale Fitzgibbons, Illinois State University

"Be courageous. It's one of the only places left uncrowded." - Anita Roddick

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Professor Fitzgibbons,

I suspected as much about the Neal Bortz piece.  Although I find in Wikipedia, he is quite successful.  And yes, I have read the snopes piece as well. 

A good friend attended the college commencement of his daughter and experienced a similar confection of uncivil remarks by the commencement speaker.  My friend approached some of the faculty after the graduation to get their reaction but they demurred.

 
Speaking of commenting on my blog, philosopher Tibor Machan was recently on C-Span for a three-hour retrospective on his writings and philosophy.  I wrote a piece on my blog kindly towards him.  He found my blog, and commented.  We have exchanged notes. 

I can't imagine spending a full three hours being interviewed, then answering questions of a national if not an international audience, and be able to have all your writings on the tip of your tongue as he did.  I thought he came across as a most interesting man.

Others in academia have managed to get through to my blog.  I am sending this to my nephew who is my blog creator to see what the problem may be.

Thank you for sharing your most interesting career with me.  You have a right to be proud. 

I have a professor friend who regularly corresponds, and is an international consultant in organizational development (OD).  He is at the University of North Florida in Pensacola.  Ken Murrell is his name.  Perhaps you know him.

I did my doctorate dissertation at Walden University, but all my course work at the University of South Florida.  The title of my dissertation was THE POLICE PARADOX: SYSTEMATIC EXPLORATION IN THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA OF THE POLICE AND THE POLICED (1978).  Perhaps a footnote to this would be helpful.

I came back from South Africa after forming a new company of a British affiliate, a South African specialty chemical company and my company's subsidiary, and retired at the ripe old age of thirty-five. 

Corpocracy, my pet word the dysfunctional corporation, and apartheid were too much for me.  I have just completed a novel on the subject titled A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  I’m now looking for a publisher.

It took me six years – going full-time to school year around, and consulting on the side -- to complete undergraduate deficiencies and my graduate course work before writing my Ph.D. in social, organizational, industrial psychology. 

During those six years I did police consulting as an OD consultant from New York City to Miami along the eastern seaboard of the US, while also doing Senior Management Executive Development Seminars for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the continental United States. 

My OD work found me spending nine months in Fairfax County, Virginia with the Fairfax County Police Department after a riot occurred in Herndon.  It involved the relocated African American community, which went up in flames after a white police officer unloaded his service revolver on a 27-year-old black man in a Seven/Eleven store.  The young man had been pushed into a refrigerated cooler, but managed to grab the officer’s nightstick to defend himself before he was killed.  I was told my thesis read like a novel.

The title of my University of South Florida thesis was, A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE POLICE ORGANIZATION: THE ANATOMY OF A RIOT (1976).  

During that same period (1970 – 1980), I spent three months in Raleigh, North Carolina after the police force of some 300 sworn officers threatened to walk off the job.  It was a fascinating piece of OD work unfolding like an Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mystery.

At the beginning of 1980, I joined Honeywell as an OD psychologist, but continuing to work as an adjunct professor for several local colleges and universities, including USF.  Honeywell promoted me to director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd.  I left Honeywell in 1990 and published my second book shortly thereafter, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES.  Several others would follow on that same theme.

Incidentally, Honeywell used me as a consultant while an OD psychologist.  This found me working at MIT at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Mass.  I wrote a long piece on that work for the AQP Journal.  Other journal pieces of which you might be interested appeared in the Journal of Organizational Excellence, and National Productivity Review, to name a few that might interest you.

I mention this because the combination of my police and Honeywell work has been fodder for my books, and scores of journal articles, some of which are profiled on my website, or can be seen in several sites by going to www.google.com and writing in James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.  My blog, alone, has some 643 missives.  Nearly a hundred of these missives have appeared in such publications as Executive Excellence, Personal Excellence and Sales & Marketing Excellence.  I no longer give permission to publishers for personal reasons, preferring people such as you who stumble on my site to profit from these works.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all that we share many of the same ideas.  This is also the case with Dr. Ken Murrell of UNF.  He too is a doer having earned his stripes in the private sector.  I am a corporate guy all the way from laboring summers in a chemical plant while going to college, to a chemist at the same plant, then a chemical sales engineer, and finally a chemical company executive.  I have done extensive consulting in the public sector and find it with the same social diseases as the private sector. 

The most perceptive book I’ve read in the last decade is DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) by William L. Livingston IV.  It came out before the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, and had the answer to that problem, as well as a laboratory analysis of current institutional crisis across the board.

Like you, I am a navy man having spent two years active duty on the USS Salem (CA-139) in the Mediterranean.

Thank you for sharing.

And always be well,

Jim 

PS I have the same affection for Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly as you do, but I do wonder why they are so popular.  And yes, I will look at your student evaluations of you. 

No work in the world is more important than yours.  I have a hometown friend with the same left brain/right brain background as I have, Dr. Donald Farr.  We are the same age, but he is still teaching, still consulting, and still serving hometown friends (300+) on an email network, while preparing 10,000 packages for our troops in Afghanistan.  I write, but like you, he does.  I couldn’t admire such dedication more.

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