This page is for memories, dedicated to the students, faculty, and staff of the old, real Unity College, and the people that made it. You know who you are.
This is likely to be a popular topic. Full disclosure: I was "around" the political process at the start of the PSLF scheme. It was a recommendation in a 2003 paper I wrote for Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly.
Here's the question: How can you succeed with student loan forgiveness?
Aimee and I have some experience with this because in February 2020 we managed to get our loans forgiven, all $110,000 of them. This sounds like a lot, but remember it was the cost of a BA and a BS, two MS's, and two PhD's. This was without counting the tuition remission and research assistant stipends we also had.
We also got nearly $10,000 of payments that we had already made refunded. Without this event, losing our jobs at Unity College would have been a much bigger family financial disaster than it was.
First up, what is PSLF?
PLSF is federal student loan forgiveness for all government and non-profit employees. Your loans have to be federal subsidized or unsubsidized loans, not private for-profit loans. If you don't know the difference you need extra help and had better email us separately. And you must be employed by the government, (federal, state, or local), or a "qualifying" IRS 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit charitable institution. Again, if you don't know the difference between government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations, a) you should have taken economics in college!, and b) you need extra help and should email us separately.
But many students that won jobs after taking degrees at the old, "real" Unity College will qualify.
(If you are reading this and are a student at the new, purely online Unity College, you need a different kind of help. There are pedagogical reasons why so many of the old students are employed in their target jobs.)
How long does it take? Ten years qualifying payments or 120 payments on time and the rest of your loans are forgiven. There's no limit to how much, at least not right now. But, and this is a timely warning, Congress is very likely to overhaul the system completely after the Biden inauguration, so you should stay tuned. I'll add updates to the bottom of the page as necessary.
How do I start? You have to be enrolled in an income-driven repayment scheme (IDR) and your loans must be consolidated under Pennsylvania's FedLoan program. Fedloan is the federal contractor for all ordinary PLSF loan forgiveness processes. FedLoan has a seven-step start page here. Scroll down a little to expand the seven steps:
What if I haven't been in an IDR? Congress realized that a lot of former students had been counseled by loan providers, including state and federal government ones like FedLoan, out of IDR schemes, so they approved Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) to give these folks a window of opportunity for forgiveness (section 3 of the Act). The amount authorized is limited, but hasn't all been used yet because of how crap FedLoan is. (More on dealing with this below.) DoE has a start page for TEPSLF here:
PSLF or TEPSLF? If you work for government or qualifying non-profit and are in an IDR scheme and make 120 on-time payments, you qualify for PSLF. If you work for government or a non-profit, and have made payments under a different scheme, you may still qualify for TEPSLF.
What if I've already made 120 payments? If you made 120 on-time payments that qualify as IDR for PSLF, you'll get forgiveness under that program. If you made 120 payments under a different repayment program, you may qualify for TEPSLF if there's enough of the tranche of money that Congress authorized left. or if they allocate more money. Both PSLF and TEPSLF allow for backdating of payments, so approval can happen in less than ten (further) years with that program if you have kept up. And even if you missed a payment, or were in forbearance for a month, that will only be one extra month of payments. (When we first started work at Unity College the pay wasn't very good, and so there were a couple times we asked for forbearance so we could pay an auto repair bill or buy a necessary household item. Or get married! We asked for and got forbearance to have more money to pay for our wedding. Not that it was a particularly "big" wedding. But that's how tight things were. There's a reason we had to build our own house!)
First step: You have to reconsolidate your loans under an IDR with FedLoan to begin PSLF or TEPSLF. It's advisable to do this in any case, because consolidation saves money and time, and, to be honest, none of the loan servicers are much better than FedLoan. Beware for-profit consolidation schemes. These vultures will charge high interest and drive you bankrupt. And there's no forgiveness if you are foolish enough to consolidate with a private student loan company.
This is all too difficult. What do I do? It is way too freakin' difficult. The paperwork is unnecessarily difficult, even before FedLoan loses your papers and miscounts your payments! We have PhDs and are good readers, writers, and critical thinkers, but it still took us four solid months to figure it all out and qualify. The reading level for the documentation is way too high, probably around grade fourteen or fifteen (sophomore/junior in college) and it's very disorganized. And this is even before you get deeper into it and start reading the actual laws or the results of the various court cases, which we found ourselves doing before we won forgiveness. (As we tried to explain to you when we were your teachers, reading and writing are very important college skills -- more important than knowing how to dart monkeys or electroshock fish! Here's a great example!) But they could have made it easier. The DoE under Betsy DeVos is/was a terrible basket case. FedLoan lost our paperwork several times and gave us several different counts of qualifying payments. Congress really needs to fix this, but a new Secretary of Education will help, one that is actually an educator.
Be patient, be "Zen" and plug away at it. "Keep calm and carry on." Take a break if you need to, and get some rest, then come back to it. There are also counselors and lawyers who are beginning to specialize in PSLF and TEPSLF, but, of course, this "high priced help" comes with a cost.
But email us with any specific questions you may have and we'll try to help.
If all else fails? If you run into trouble with FedLoan, and almost everyone does because they lose paperwork all the time, you can then go to something called the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman and appeal.
It's this last step that worked for us: The Ombudsman will still send you back to FedLoan almost immediately, but you'll be in a different department that works much faster. They'll get back to you very quickly and if you have a good case it will take a month or two more and you'll be done.
This is primarily because of the various lawsuits that have been brought against DeVos, the DoE, and FedLoan. There's a little-known federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA requires all government procedures to be consistent and rational. In particular, a federal agency or contractor (DoE or FedLoan) cannot treat people differently under the law. If one person gets forgiveness, all other people with the same relevant characteristics must also get the same consideration, or they can sue. The Trump Administration fell afoul of this law many, many times during its four years' reign, and DeVos was the very worst offender. They just couldn't get it together to treat people fairly and consistently under just about any law they tinkered with. (Especially if you were poor, of color, or Muslim. But "deplorables," from Mar-a-Largo members to Proud Boys got lots of help and support!)
Keep your bill stubs! I'm a packrat. I have all our paid bills filed for the last twenty years, since I moved to Maine in 2000. It helped enormously that we had nearly a full set of payment stubs for all our loan payments. Each previous payment date and amount, the loan provider, and in most cases the payment plan was documented on the stub. This meant that we could prove if necessary, and in in court if needed, that we had made the payments, putting FedLoan and DoE at risk of an APA lawsuit if they didn't follow the law. This record helped focus the ombudsman on FedLoan's deficiencies, not any of ours. They obviously couldn't pin any deficiency on us because we had such a good paper trail. As the ombudsman process got going, I went through all our saved bills (which are filed chronologically by biweekly pay periods), pulled out the loan payment stubs, made a spreadsheet of each amount, loan provider, and payment plan (when recorded), and also an electronic photocopy of the whole stack. I sent both electronically to the ombudsman. We had changed student loan providers as the government changed the system over the years, and so there were some stubs that didn't give the payment plan, and we had lost four or five monthly stubs, but we had enough to make the Ombudsman force FedLoan to check the records more carefully. So keep your payment stubs. This is usually the top two thirds of each bill, after you rip off the payment slip and send it in with your check. If you pay online, save similar records electronically.
Of course, now Aimee doesn't get to complain about my packrat habits, at least with regard to bill-filing! Car parts, hardware, and nuts and bolts are a different category, though (apparently).
Bottom line: It's a major pain to jump through all the hoops, took us hours of work and frustration, but considering the pay-off ($110K for both of our PhDs), they were well-paid hours in the end!
"Let’s start with the force field. No-one tells you about this when you start teaching, but it’s as true as the live-long day, the truest word I’ll ever say. The average developed world teenager comes with a supernatural force-field around them that inhibits communication from any person older than them, but especially teachers. Learning to identify and penetrate this force field at will, on a regular basis, is ana priorirequirement to be successful in teaching liberal arts classes."
(I wrote this as part of a critical essay for the CHE this spring. They turned it down. But I still like it. You can read the whole thing here for free.)
The phrase "MIG and TIG" is misleading, although it alliterates nicely and so somehow stays in the lexicon. There are actually five choices for welding steel, of which TIG is the least useful under normal circumstances. In order of usefulness: 1) arc-welding, AKA "stick welding," using flux-covered welding rod, where the flux prevents oxidation of the molten metal; 2) MIG or "metal inert gas" typically using argon gas as a shield to prevent oxidation; 3) "flux-core" welding, typically using the same equipment as MIG, only without the gas; 4) oxy-acetylene welding and brazing that uses a gas torch and filler rod; and lastly 5) "tungsten inert gas" or TIG which uses separate welding or "filler" rod and an expensive tungsten electrode, needs two hands at all times and so is horrible for vehicle or boat work, but can more easily be adapted to metals other than mild steel. Most welders only need the first three. In a pinch you can do 95% of what you need to do around a workshop, farm, or shop with a stick welder, although having the other types makes life much easier. If you can learn to weld with a stick welder, you can easily pick up the other types in very short order, so it's best to start with stick welding, then add MIG and flux-core, which often use the same welding sets these days anyway. In forty-plus years of welding I've never needed TIG, and I've only used oxy-acetylene welding equipment for heat during other mechanical procedures, or for brazing, not for actual welding. I regularly use all of the other three. I use stick for heavy steel fabrication and cutting, flux-core for most vehicle welding, and MIG for some bodywork when I need an especially good finish. I also have an aluminum "spool" adapter for my MIG/flux-core welder, and cast-iron rod for my stick welder, a classic Lincoln-Electric "tombstone", negating most of the need for the other two types of equipment. The best way to learn to weld is to get shown the basics by someone, then practice. There's no shortcut, and in fact, all you'll do different in a class is learn the theory a bit better, then get shortchanged on the practice because there isn't a vo-tech or community college in the country that can afford to let you practice as much as you actually need to. And a certificate won't do you any good if your welds fall apart because you can't practice. You can pick up a cheap but functional stick welder at Harbor Freight for a Benjamin, less than the tuition at the vo-tech AND you'll then have your own welder. It will come with a cheap and nasty but functional welder's hammer. You'll need to buy some one-eight mild steel rod and find some scrap steel to practice on. A good light-operated welding mask, good welding gloves AKA "gauntlets", a long-sleeved coat made of something that doesn't burn or melt, and a place to work outside that won't catch fire are also needed. A hand grinder with a selection of heads (cutting, grinding, steel brush wheel) and googles are also very helpful, but optional at this stage. Work outside because fumes are nasty. Have an ABC-type fire extinguisher handy. Then practice, practice, practice. The best advice I ever got for welding was "focus on the molten pool." The pool of molten metal is all-important and your ability to put that pool where you need it and to shape it makes you a good welder or not.
I occasionally get emails and FB messages from students and former students asking how Aimee and I are doing, given the recent hostile takeover of the college and the loss of our jobs.
This very useful chart came across my FB feed today and I studied it carefully. It's quite relevant.
The short answer to the question is in my title: "Thriving."
Why? When we just lost our jobs?
As responsible, diligent, and ethical faculty members of the real Unity College, we had been in conflict with the administration since the early 2010s. Our Peace Church background didn't help much. Neither of us ever feels the need to lie or kow-tow to those in power. It's literally "against our religion." And so, by "speaking truth to power," we made sure that the last two Unity College administrations understood that two of their highly qualified and experienced senior faculty disagreed with their strategy for the college.
Their two strategies differed greatly, by the way. Dr. Mulkey wanted to focus the college on climate change education and research. He was quite saddened to discover that he was instead directed by the board to raise money from rich people and find ways to grow the college by teaching more of the usual kinds of students, who present as primarily interested in bachelors degrees that qualify them for positions as game wardens or wildlife technicians, not as climate scientists. Setting the students' priorities first never seemed to come to mind. One response he adopted, for lack of any other, was to lecture them, over and over and over again about climate change. I still have several of his slideshows. They are quite good. But our students, the majority of whom had a tenth-grade reading level, found them hard to comprehend and boring, and eventually just laughed at him or complained to his face. I felt a little sorry for him, because even if his methods were wrong, prioritizing climate change was correct. Experienced UC faculty, like myself, had ways of teaching climate change that didn't involve as much lecture, and so had more success.
But he wouldn't listen to any of us when we tried to tell him any of this. So we disagreed.
The students (or their parents) are paying. They need education that meets them where they are. That is what they pay for. This is a moral imperative. You have to teach the students in front of you. That's the job. And most of those students at that time, by far the majority, perhaps 99.5%, were never going to be climate scientists.
Had he been less volatile, there was room for compromise. We could have shown him how to raise money for climate education while also properly teaching the students in front of him. But he decided, before he ever really bothered to get to know us, that we didn't come up to his standards, and planned to replace us with "proper" researchers.
Dr. Khoury, for his part, wanted to put his dissertation into action, and create an online, for-profit college in which the price of faculty labor was bid down to the lowest possible level (making sure you were left with the least capable and least experienced faculty), and in which student engagement and experiential learning )post-recruitment) was an afterthought. Eventually he got his wish.
But this will be the death of the institution as we knew it. Unity College was founded as a peace protest against the Vietnam War. It became an environmental school in the 1970s and 1980s when such a thing was essentially unheard of and likely to be unpopular. It became famous during the 2000s because of its place-based, Kurt Hahn-style experiential education. Giving up on experiential place-based environmental education is giving up on the soul of the college.
It also had a reputation for being led by its faculty, for including faculty and staff in decision-making, and for being the best place to work in Waldo County.
My wife and I were among the faculty who earned that reputation.
So Aimee and I fought both the Mulkey and Khoury programs tooth and nail, voting down initiatives in faculty meetings, designing better ones, bolstering faculty morale, making sure students were not sidelined. We won against Dr. Mulkey in the end. His violent temper and frustration at our unwillingness to give up on teaching the students in front of us using experiential approaches, to instead spending our time and students' money planning and implementing his egotistical program, which we felt impractical, led to outburst after outburst, and eventually they became, in the jargon of HR professionals, "documented" and "actionable." He quit after a particularly loud one was witnessed by unimpeachable observers.
Dr. Khoury, who keeps his shouting for behind closed doors, seems to think he's won, but I tend to think the whole despicable scheme he's created is fragile enough to one day collapse around his ears. There's a difference between being a striver and being a schemer. You sow what you reap.
All this took a toll. For most of this decade 2011-2020, my working life was carried on in the space between the red and orange zones above. Quakers are supposed to struggle against dishonesty, unfairness, and greed, so we didn't really question whether or not we had to do it. We didn't give ourselves the option. We never seriously thought about applying for other jobs. But we know that one day we might have to quit or be fired and so we made careful plans, socking money away against that day, and planning out a new business for me to run in retirement (while I write my book).
This planning allowed us the freedom to continue to oppose the administration's plans. Other faculty were forced by financial circumstance to be more circumspect -- although in retrospect, with 20-20 hindsight, they might now realize they were going to lose their jobs anyway and so should have perhaps been more vociferous while they had the chance.
The the pandemic struck and provided an opportunity for Melik to rid himself of his "turbulent priests."
Our business is now bringing in revenue, if not yet profit, and the day when it will be profitable is not far off. The process of making the business was about a six-month daily physical workout, which despite some pulled muscles, was cathartic and likely to extend my life.
So I'm happy to report that now I'm in the green zone of the chart. In my newfound and only somewhat unexpected semi-retirement, I sleep well, get exercise, play with my kid more, and am generally more content. I "chop wood and carry water." I can't ask for much more from life. I miss teaching, but I expect I'll teach again after Covid is over. There are other colleges in Maine.
Aimee, for her part, has a new job where she is constantly amazed at how well they treat her.
Most importantly, and relevant to the chart, our consciences are clear.
Everyone should read this and circulate it. Like some of the people consulted, I don't believe that there are enough of the totally batshit crazy Trump loyalists to successfully pull off the kind of coup that the government officials are warning against in Suskind's article. The 42% approval rating is soft in this regard. Most ordinary people, when it comes down to the wire, shy away from violence and are not actually good at it, and so there won't be enough truly violent and practiced extremists within the core Trump brigade. The real threat is manipulation. There will likely be some incidents, and these can get blown out of all proportion very easily. And like the article says, there are some people who will believe just about anything that comes out of this guy's mouth, even unto their own deaths from Covid. The rest of us have to be ready to counter this manipulation in real time on the day. Particularly, don't "take the bait." Don't let them set fire to the Reichstag. Remember, most of the vote is already in the bag and "too big to rig." If you find yourself in a confrontation on Election Day, don't take matters into your own hands. Back away, then call the police and make them do their job, even if they appear to be biased themselves. Even if a local incident isn't resolved, it's better to keep the peace. The complete and very rapid crash of the economy, particularly the stock market, that will take place if any larger scale unrest develops will be the decisive factor. That will mobilize support for stability very quickly. Have faith. Keep calm. Carry on.
It's always important when trying to use reason to unpack any difficult and complex situation to clearly identify the purpose of the inquiry. A problem statement is the usual technique. Problem statements in academia are generally short, but that's deceiving. The work of trying to identify and narrow down specifics for a research proposal or a dissertation can take weeks, months, even years. But this is a primary means by which we use reason to solve societal problems. Medicine, policy, engineering, all require succinct and well-thought out problem statements.
In this case I've had several weeks since the lay-offs, and several months since the Covid closure, and I'm getting to a point where I begin to feel I can be objective. I'll never be completely so, of course. But for example in one obvious source of bias, I'm not angling for my job back. I'm a good deal happier in my current employment of rental house fixer-upper than I was working at the college for at least the last decade. I'm losing weight, sleeping well, and content in my labour. I particularly appreciate that I can more consistently use reason and my own Quaker-ish version of Zen in my daily work. This is largely because I now work alone, for the most part, without so many other egos to feed, students, administrators, other faculty. But the problems I work on have solutions and you can see the results, which is gratifying. Life is more complete and I can enjoy the cooling fall air and the changing leaves.
Neither do I think that, just because one small environmental college is going south, others can't fill the gap. There are lots of other providers of similar services with good ideas and decent planning and leadership that will. I know this from first hand because I worked for some of them before I came to Unity.
My concern is primarily for the particular usefulness of the institution we used to call Unity College.
So, first up, what has happened? The college has shifted primarily to online programming and closed its main residential campus. This is primarily because of the Covid 19 pandemic, but the specific response is a choice. There were other choices, including options that would not have entailed the harms detailed below. So for instance, plans could have been made to furlough faculty and staff and reopen campus in Fall 2021. This is just one example of a different path. There are probably many others.
Various promises have been made that this is temporary, that there will, one day in the future when the pandemic has abated, again be face-to-face classes, albeit within the "hybrid" model and most likely not on the main campus, which the Board has authorized for sale. If these undertakings pan out, they potentially modify or reduce the harm. It's not, however, reasonable to take them completely into account because they may not pan out. These are contingencies whose likelihood is dependent on events and probabilistic and must be discussed as such.
So what specific harm has been done?
The mission has been set aside. Of all the mistakes a non-profit entity can make, this is the most problematic. Here is the current mission statement: "Through the framework of sustainability science, Unity College provides a liberal arts education that emphasizes the environment and natural resources. Through experiential and collaborative learning, our graduates emerge as responsible citizens, environmental stewards, and visionary leaders." The administration must now explain how they plan to provide "experiential and collaborative learning" to train citizens, stewards and leaders without a specific environmental place and in the absence of functional community. The first is key to the college's heritage. The environmental movement is about how humans relate to the planet and their place on it, and without a specific location, the context is lost. Environmentalism depends on attachment to place. This may be a spiritual, romantic, or pre-analytical attachment, but without it the motivation to conserve is less. Community is also very important. One reason the alumni are so anguished about the situation is that the college modeled functioning, diverse, inclusive community for many decades. Not every alumni experienced this, it's true. But many if not most did, and you can see clear evidence for this in their posts to the alumni Facebook page. The community we made was an extension of the mission, not the mission itself, it's true. But it made the mission work and provided the college with a unique niche. It wasn't perfect, but then no community ever is. If you don't believe me, you should talk to some of the disabled, gay, trans, or PoC among our alumni. But clear evidence is available through the alumni FaceBook page and in news reporting.
Current residential students will not receive the education they transacted for. A contract has been broken. They signed up for an experiential curriculum offered under a certain catalog year and calendar, and that curriculum and calendar is no longer available. Key essential equipment and even the campus setting are now being prepared for sale, suggesting finality. They are offered instead different classes via a different teaching modality with different faculty, often less qualified or unqualified to teach the classes they have been assigned, and under a different calendar, all impositions that many prior residential students will clearly not prefer. Their parents are also concerned. The evidence for this is in comments to various social media, but including the college's official FaceBook page, and the Linked-In pages. This would be tolerable and meet accreditation standards if it were temporary, but the closure of the main campus and ongoing sale of the assets shows that it will not be.
The college community has been divided. A loosely integrated but strong community of Unity students, alumni, faculty, workers, local community members, and other friends nation- and world-wide provided moral and material support for the college and its mission. It is very unlikely that the alumni community and most faculty and other workers who experienced the institution prior to the "fall" will support it to the same degree and with the same passion in its new modality. The community is now clearly divided between this for the changes and those against, and likely broken or lost. Again, evidence is present in social media and news reporting.
The local community has been negated and abandoned. Norms of community behavior have been broken. Good faith and integrity have been set aside in favor of short-term strategy and short term gain. Owners of local business feel especially concerned. Evidence is available in social media, news reporting, and probably some law suits that will shortly be filed.
Collegiate norms of shared governance and collective decision making have been abandoned. The college used to teach about how to be a community by being a community, with opportunity for every student, faculty, or staff member to have a voice through their respective deliberative bodies. Faculty in particular are supposed to be in charge of the curriculum, not administrators, nor even the Board of Trustees. NECHE standard 3.15 makes this abundantly clear. Faculty were allowed to attend the online Covid19 planning response meetings, but no formal faculty meetings were held using proper procedure to vote on the Fall 2020 curriculum changes, which are considerable. Our tradition has always been to use parliamentary procedure and Roberts Rules to vote catalog measure up or down or and them. This system allows each person to have their say. The new curriculum has thus not been approved. It is also being taught, in many cases, by part-time faculty, or even full-time ones not qualified for the classes they are assigned. The evidence for this is in the college's LMS and Registrar's records and not available for public view, but trustees should be able to demand to see it. Parliamentary procedure has been incrementally set aside in the last several years in favor of hierarchical or corporate leadership. Faculty were not able to voice their disagreement to these changes without fear of retaliation, nor we we told we would be laid off until the actual day, August 3rd.
Why has this happened? Because at some level a decision was made that the gains from the online modality would offset the loss of the traditional program. This could only be true if you discounted the value of the intangible losses: community, integrity, attachment to place.
Who is responsible for these five clear harms? The Board of Trustees of the college is responsible. It delegates this responsibility to the President, but remains the primary authority. All of the college's material and social capital (or goodwill, if you prefer), built up over fifty years of striving by the alumni, faculty and staff, is in their hands. They must choose how to use that collective capital and goodwill to meet the mission. In this case they have chosen to abandon a large portion of both material and social capital, to sell it off or trade it at low bid, including the beloved campus setting, in exchange for vague promises of the superiority and accessibility of the online modality. This has been posited to them as an either/or option, when it was not. The social capital in particular has been marked down in value, when it should have been husbanded and tended. This is what the alumni and community members and parents are telling us. But the campus won't get high bid either. A recent campus auction for a similar college, a competitor, netted about twenty percent of the appraisal.
So this is a clear mistake. First and foremost it's a moral error, but it's also a business error, and a failure of leadership, of trustees not interrogating facts and asking hard questions.
Regular readers and most students and former students will already know that Aimee and I were among a large group of Unity College faculty who were laid off August 3rd 2020 because of low enrollment due to the Covid19 pandemic. A little later that same week a local news article reported that the college campus would perhaps be sold.
Since then neither of us has said much about this. Aimee has been occasionally active on the Unity College Alumni Community FaceBook page, while I've been essentially silent. The reason for this is that we were waiting on our severance contracts to be fulfilled.
As condition for, essentially, "going quietly," the college offered us a severance package. As a consequence, we agreed not to take part in any lawsuit against the college. Contrary to rumors, there is no non-disclosure agreement or NDA. There is only the agreement that we not sue the college. We remained silent for so long because we didn't want to stir up any trouble that might hinder the severance contract being fulfilled by the college. There's a lot of bad feeling and some definite paranoia and we felt that stirring up this hornets' nest might just perhaps work out badly. At least we didn't want to take a chance.
We agreed to all this because, of course, we are parents. Our teaching jobs were likely forfeit in any case, and we have a kid to look after whose school has been delayed and, once it finally starts, will be be less than half time, two days a week. One of us at least has to look after the kid, and so cannot work a normal full-time job, even if the other one might. The severance offers a lifeline for the next few months while the pandemic continues or possibly worsens into fall.
The contract is now fulfilled, meaning that Aimee and I and possibly other faculty members in the same situation may now discuss the college's situation with less fear. (It would be fairly difficult for the college to find a way to take the money back now that it's safely in our accounts.)
I choose to hold this discussion on my blog, not the alumni page or other social media. This blog is mine and always has been. It dates to 2007, prior to the time when the college had easily-accessible facilities to host faculty web pages or social media. It contains a record of nearly fourteen years of my twenty years teaching at Unity College. I was told a long time ago, long before the current administration, to get rid of it, because it wasn't part of a centrally-controlled college PR program, but didn't. I did begin to use it less, and so skated "under the radar" with it. But I never completely stopped using it, and still control it under my own passwords and encryption.
So, despite a long association with my work at Unity College, the blog is mine, privately owned by me, and not easy to hack. Blog commentary is under my control. I can enforce a certain decorum, and, what is more important to me, employ reason rather than emotion in deconstructing what has happened. This is of course an emotional situation, but adding fuel to those flames doesn't help us repair the damage.
First up, there's a limit to how useful any of this can be. We are not going to bring back the old Unity College. It's probably gone for ever. But those of you that know anything about the Quaker tradition will have heard of the idea of "bearing witness." That's what I want to do here, bear witness to the injustice and wrong-headedness of what has happened, and lay out the poor consequences.
Second up, Covid 19 was primarily responsible for the closure of the traditional academic programs of the college and the close of the residential campus. I'm content to stipulate to that. Doing so was a provision of the severance, and I agreed to it, but I wouldn't have agreed to it if it wasn't true. But it was never the only explanation and never could be. The background is complex and lengthy. Most readers won't have patience for it. But I tend to lay it out, or as much of it as I can do, right here for posterity. Not exhaustively, but comprehensively. It will take a good while to document it all.
That's all I have for today. I have work to do. I may not be employed by the college any more, but I am still employed, rebuilding a fixer-upper house that Aimee and I bought this spring to use as a rental.
This is about half of my Spring 2020 Firefox bookmark list, where I saved materials to pass on to students or use in class. These lists were always rebooted at the start of each new semester or they'd get too long. This was one way of collating and curating them, especially the most up-to-date material not found in textbooks.
Notice the last item.
There are two things I grieve for right now. One is my students. I hear their confusion and pain in their FaceBook and other social media posts. More or less powerless to help, all we can do is offer counsel and bear witness.
The other is knowledge. I spent a lifetime learning to process and manipulate the ideas in this particular branch of reason. I will spend the next few months learning again how to use those skills in new settings.
A useful quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by R.Pirsig, 1977, chapter 13.
(In context, the Narrator (Pirsig) is explaining an episode of McCarthyism at Montana State in the '50s in which his younger, mentally-ill self was involved as a faculty member.
Just FYI, and in case you were worried, I used reason all day today, fixing up an old house for a family investment, and getting generators ready for tonight's storm. I'm grieving, as is Aimee, but "fetch wood, carry water".)
"The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
"In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.
"But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church
to exist.
"Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations."
What's the cure for systematic prejudice? How do you change a mind that believes it's made up already, and doesn't wish to change at all? That's been on my mind for years, but especially just recently. The only thing I've ever found that worked, even imperfectly, was face-to-face, in-person Socratic classroom or similar informal discussion hosted by a skilled teacher and mentor that has the stage presence and moral authority to guide discussion and testimony, even that which is hard to hear, experiencing what other people have to say and being guided intellectually and emotionally to put yourself in their shoes. Where have I experienced anything like this? In high school, when I had some very good teachers; in some (not all) Christian churches, and at meetings of other religions; but most frequently in liberal arts classes and related college activities with my students and faculty and teaching staff colleagues for the thirty-two years I've been involved in American education. If you want to live in a better world, you need to change minds. A lot of people simply don't change their minds when presented with new, better ideas. But that's what good educators do. We change minds. It's not easy. I wish it was, but it isn't. And it only works some of the time. But what kind of a world would we live in if it had never worked at all, ever, for all of history? We'd all be at each other's throats, sitting on each other's necks, one against one, group against group, clan against clan, nation against nation, for all history, whenever we got the chance. I tell my Maine students, many of whom are Franco-American, that when the Klan first organized in Maine in the 1920s it was to get rid of them. Think about that! Just because you think you're in the privileged group now doesn't mean it was always that way, nor will it always be that way. Better start treating people the way you'd like to be treated. And be willing to change your mind. And come fall, vote for a better world, one that supports mind-changing education. It's our only hope.
A version of this is available for each of my classes. This one is for Global Change.
When you get done with everything in this announcement, you're done with the study materials for GL4003. (You still have the final exam to take.)
It's up to me now to try to make some sense out of climate change and the fate of humanity. I'm going to do so based on some of my own life experiences and academic thought. There's a strict limit to how useful this kind of thing is. Instructors shouldn't inflict their own history or ideas on students too forcefully. Too much, and it slops over into egotism. It can also be very confusing for weaker students, whose understanding of key ideas may have been shaky to begin, to endure having an instructor picking apart those ideas at a much higher level. But in the end, I feel you have a right to know what I think about all these big questions, particularly since I've been in this business a long time.
I've been working on this problem since about 1984 when I first became interested in environmental sustainability. At the time I was a corporal in Her Majesty's most excellent Royal Air Force, an engine propulsion technician-supervisor and trade trainer, and a mountain rescue "troop." (MR team members in this branch of the UK service are called "troops," for some reason long lost to history.) Always an avid outdoorsman, in the UK working-class style (which tilts to mountaineering, hill-walking, and associated activities and away from hook-and-bullet sports), I'd become interested in the natural history of the British mountains. I found what study materials I needed in the local university libraries and became a self-taught geologist and moderately expert in the ethnography of the British Isles. The UK mountains are filled with Roman camps and bronze and iron age villages and hill forts, so this too was natural curiosity. I just wanted to know why the landscape I saw around me was the way it was. My buddies on the team thought I was strange, but the British are generally tolerant of eccentricity, so they were still good to me, and still are.
My researches in natural history eventually led to my discovery of the then-relatively new idea that humans were simply not going to be able to keep growing in both population and scale of economic impact on planet earth -- that there would eventually be some kind of carrying capacity for humans. This was a problem for me because we were then deep into one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, the Reagan arms build-up, and my job was clearly to fight that war, or at least help do so. I wanted instead to join the environmental movement and work on this problem because I saw it was more important. This was the early days of modern environmentalism, which for me meant Greenpeace and the Green Party, both of which I joined. I thought that neither side had it right. Untrammeled industrial development would be the end of all humanity, not just the other side.
The Royal Air Force was remarkably good about things. They let me go two years early through a compassionate discharge (still an "honorable discharge"), and allowed me to keep my pension (which will kick in shortly). I also stayed friendly with my buddies on the MR teams. I've even had some come talk to my classes at Unity College.
But I was discharged. And I immediately went to live in a so-called sustainable commune. It didn't take too long to discover the denizens of the commune were quite nuts and incredibly blinkered to reality. Too much meditation, not enough hard thinking. But I was introduced to green building and solar power. I also worked in education for the first time there, through the commune's Youth Program. And a lot of the residents were American. I married an American girl there in 1986 (not Aimee), and a year later, tired of the commune, we found ourselves in California.
Eventually I was able to go to college in the US, and went right through to the PhD, twelve years studying ecology and ecological economics full time. I studied under Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, one of the founders of ecological economics, which is a pretty big deal in my circles. I got the job at Unity College in fall 2000, and have been here ever since. I'd rather teach here than somewhere more ritzy, Colby or CoA. I may be fooling myself, but you guys seem a bit more deserving. Most of the time.
But my life's real work hasn't changed so very much from what it was in 1984. I still do a little search and rescue. I still fix things, and teach people how to fix things, although these days they are buildings and solar panels, not aircraft. And I think and teach and write about human ecology and ecological economics. (Here's an example.)
Being a military veteran in the environmental movement, especially teaching at an environmental college, gives me a somewhat unique perspective, one that I think you deserve to hear.
Veterans are rare in the environmental movement. I've learned to be more tolerant of some conservative viewpoints than many environmentalists often are. I believe that we need the military and by extension the police services to protect us from bad countries and bad people. But I don't think that gives them license to abuse human rights. Human rights are instead what they are there to protect. I believe that some aspects of environmentalism are overblown. But that doesn't mean to say that I'm foolish enough to disbelieve what scientists are telling us about climate change and other limits to human growth.
I appreciate service. I still serve, or try to, through my work in SAR. Right now the health care workers are heroes. I deeply dislike selfishness, especially civic selfishness. There are times when we clearly are all "in this together." Imagining that it's a good idea to "open up" the economy when there are clearly still millions of people carrying this virus is a recipe for disaster, especially for old folk, and an opinion quite ignorant of the science basis for epidemiology. It will kill people.
This is important: Just because one person or a group of people consistently holds the same particular set of ideas doesn't mean to say they have the right set. Some of their ideas could be right, for sure. But some are probably wrong. And this is especially likely if the consistency of these ideas is rigidly enforced within the group and the group tries hard to make everyone adopt the same set: if you believe a, then to be part of this tribe, you have to also believe b, c, d, and e with the same foolish intensity. This is as true for left wing nut jobs as it is for right wing nut jobs. (They're all nut jobs in the end.)
You can for instance, understand that climate change is happening and a terrible problem for humanity and still be a moderate second amendment advocate. You just have to think about it a bit harder than the others in your peer group may do, accept belief a, but reject belief b. But that doesn't mean that it would be smart if everyone gets to have their own bazooka! Imagine how hard that would be for the police. Moderation is nearly always wise.
I also realized from the commune experience that if I wanted to live sustainably and create a resilient lifestyle for my family, we would probably do better if we did it mostly ourselves and didn't try to rely on other people too much. Self-improvement is, as Adam Smith believed, the best motivator. Call this environmental libertarianism if you want. But this too can only go so far. I need to rely on government and other people and businesses from time to time too.
This spring, particularly with the lockdown and the power cuts, I feel somewhat vindicated to be a homesteader, although it has taken years of very hard work to get the farm where we want it to be. Our farm is safe, healthy, and productive. We have useful things to do, planting food and birthing lambs and stacking firewood, and that gives healthy exercise, even under lockdown. We can go outdoors as much as we want. We have water, food, heat, and shelter, and even solar electricity, all from our own resources. This is good because it saves stress on other resources, which are then available for other people. But I also see the farming and homesteading we do as an adjunct to teaching sustainability. If I think society needs to be more resilient, I should be capable of modeling that resilience. It's only fair on you, and, to boot, true to the ethic of service.
So, now you know why I do what I do and how long I've been doing it, let's talk about what I think is going to happen with climate change and renewable energy.
My ideas on this have changed dramatically since 2016 when leading climate scientist James Hansen and several eminent colleagues came out with the paper I now build much of this class around, Hansen et al 2016.
Below is the movie in which Hansen explains the paper in lay terms. Unless you think you remember it really, really well, the movie is required. This time you may wish to take notes at key points. There will be questions on the exam.
Here is the text of the movie for those who like me, read faster than they listen.
Basically, and this is repetitious, I know, but very important, Hansen and his co-authors hypothesize that we are either close to or have passed a point of no return with regard to Greenland and Antarctic ice melt. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to collapse. This changes the calculation with regard to climate change mitigation. Because the melting can't be stopped, mitigation of greenhouse gases won't help. Instead we'll need to adapt, and perhaps very quickly, to the rising seas.
This means that the current prediction from the IPCC (page 25) for only three further feet of sea level rise this century is probably off. We may get instead several meters. We may get meter-scale sea level rise as soon as the late 2060s, or even earlier. The current doubling time for Antarctic ice loss is six years. We are currently getting about 4mm of sea level rise per year. Assume all this water ends in the ocean. Do the math with me:
Sea level rise due to Antarctic and Greenland melting may easily go even faster than this. Some important ice scientists expect it to do so (although not all). It certainly has melted faster in other geological periods. We still need to mitigate, because to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere risks another climate catastrophe after this first one. But, as Hansen states, we will know within a few years if the pace of Antarctic and Greenland melting is keeping up with this scenario, decelerating, or accelerating yet faster.
I've been a major advocate for rapid mitigation for a long time now. Here's an example of some of my work, in which I try to reconcile mitigation with Keynesian economics and geopolitical realism. Notice that Vladimir Putin is mentioned in my talk as a "fossil elite" trying to hold onto power as the leader of an oil state. I don't claim any particular prescience, but this was a full year before he interfered in the US election. It didn't work out well for him in the end because of the US Congress's refusal to go along with the Trump administration's efforts to reduce sanctions, and now the oil price war and the corona virus, to which Russia is highly vulnerable because Putin delayed the response, and there's no free press to tell anyone what's really happening. So the 2016 election interference was a tactical success and a strategic failure. But you can be sure that he likes the tactic and is trying it again. (This movie is also required.)
Mitigation means reducing the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency. A big problem with mitigation has been the way that conservative groups and corporations have lied to the public and managed to convince a lot of people that mitigation is an environmental hoax. This deliberate effort to mislead the public is one reason why, for instance, a lot of second amendment advocates feel they need to also oppose climate science. You can see the same phenomena in almost all conservative causes from same-sex marriage to abortion. It all gets lumped in together and as I said above, if the tribe is required to believe one dogma, they have to believe all. This is partly explained by the Yale "Cultural Cognition" work, but not completely.
Denialism has been the bane of my life since the 1990s. My PhD thesis was essentially an attempt to to find a way around conservative denialism through understanding religious advocacy for the climate. Despite the college's mission, I've had climate deniers in every single one of my Unity College classes since Fall 2000. Most of them have gone away thinking differently, but there has often been enormous friction as I challenge their mistaken ideas.
In the movie I make clear that the problem with climate change mitigation is that it is opposed by "fossil elites," my term for the owners of fossil fuel capital, who will resist to the end the devaluation of that capital, even though they have children and grandchildren. Some of these fossil elites are de-facto owners of nation-states (or at least kleptocracies). They use their money to fund denial propaganda. Ordinary Americans that embrace denialism, especially if they are themselves vulnerable to climate impacts, are to them what Stalin called "useful idiots."
That's one problem. The other is that mitigation as proposed by some left wing thinkers and even some climate scientists might cause a recession. A recession might weaken the democracies vis-a-vis the dictators and fossil elites, and lead to a setback for mitigation. This is why the Green New Deal is a superior approach. It uses Keynesian thinking to avoid the trap of recessionary mitigation. This is what I advocated in the movie above, before the GND came out. Again, I don't claim prescience. It's an obvious solution. And it turns out others were working on this idea long before me.
That still leaves denialism. Unless we defeat it, we won't get mitigation in time. Fossil elites have bought themselves time on the throne by funding denialism, including casting doubt on renewable energy's effectiveness and cost-efficiency, even though renewable energy prices are lower than fossil energy. As I said, I have beat myself to death for many years now tackling denialism in the classroom and in public. At times it has driven me close to despair.
But these new data from Greenland and Antarctica may mean I no longer have to do so. If Hansen is right, mitigation can't help us stop sea level rise in any case, and we will soon have very convincing proof that the rise is accelerating (by 2025 or at least 2030). By the time we have this proof, denialism will be yet weaker because the average age of climate deniers is quite old. (It's already weakening over time.)
This, to be honest, and despite the bad news that caused it, has been something of a relief. We won't get mitigation in time to head off this first great climate disaster, and that is bad. But this disaster, along with the aging out of denialists, will be the end of denialism, and we should get some sane mitigation policy shortly thereafter.
Hansen shows that a regional cooling in the north Atlantic, or even a general global cooling, will accompany such vast ice melt, by adding cool water to the parts of the oceans where thermohaline circulation starts, hindering poleward movement of atmospheric heat, and by the melting ice just cooling the oceans, period. That should help human agriculture, previously in grave danger from warming. The bad news is that this increased temperature gradient will lead to superstorms. But you can't have everything. I think humanity and liberal democracy will survive sea level rise and superstorms. I doubt it would survive the collapse of global agriculture. Here's the relevant graphic from the paper. The accompanying explanation is section 3.4 on page 3766 and 3767.
So I'm optimistic for a partial resolution soon. It's not a great basis for optimism, to be sure. We'll lose Florida, or much of it, and quite a lot of some major east coast cities. Adapting to the loss will be very hard and will cause great disruption, something we've had practice in recently. But we will enter a new political reality in which it will become almost impossible to deny human-caused climate change.
The bad news is, this is just the beginning of the Great Human Ecological Crisis of the 21st Century. Scientists believe that there are other ecological limits or boundaries to human economic growth looming in the background.
This is usually covered in your Environmental Issues and Insights core class. Here's a quick reminder:
In this video there are nine planetary boundaries, but of course, others may surface. A few years ago it was proposed that "novel entities" are a similar human ecological issue. Novel entities are chemicals or diseases introduced into human habitat, often by economic growth, as human development expands into wild habitats to find disease or finds new chemicals both of which we have had little exposure to.
Examples include PCBs, Agent Orange, Ebola, and now the novel corona virus. Just as Ebola found a way to get from African wildlife into the human population, so has Covid 19. And I should think we are not done yet with pandemics and poisons. And don't forget the superstorms.
So this is, as Churchill said of appeasement,
"...only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time."
Apologies. I'm fond of Churchill's rhetoric. It can be bracing in a crisis. At least my parents and grandparents thought so at the time. But, in other more prosaic words, you are all going to have interesting lives. I hope it works out well for you. But keep smiling and remember, a couple generations ago there were lots of people still alive, like my own grandparents, who had survived the Great War, the Great Depression, World War 2, and much of the Cold War. You won't have it nearly that bad. (My grandfather, a British Army private in both WW1 and WW2, taught me how to garden. I think of him every time I plant something.)
Another thing to remember: The planet has melted down before. It knows how to do it and survive. It's the humans we have to worry about. And especially democracy. That's what is really threatened by all these ecological problems and especially the fossil elites. I'll be dead by the time this is all worked out, and your generation will be in charge. If you manage to save democracy, you'll have done well. I'll be rooting for you.
Just listen to the scientists (or be one), and don't buy a house on the coast.
I got done with experimenting with formats and platforms to finish out the semester. From here on out all your material will be accessed through Canvas. If you don't have Internet at home you can use your smart phone to get most materials, but be sure to get the college's Canvas ap for your smart phone first. It will save time.
I say this is the "unofficial" version because after making the video I realized I was wearing my scruffy old farm-work sweater with the hole in the elbow. But it's lambing season here on the farm and so that's how I dress. I was bottled feeding a lamb earlier and got lamb replacer all over a better sweater.
So I guess I'll have to make the video again before I post it "officially" to Canvas, wearing slightly tidier clothes!
But here you are, for all the diehards who know that the blog is still my go-to. I'm still experimenting with formats and applications, but this is an early preview of how I plan to teach online for the rest of the semester. I'm also testing how easy it is to post You-Tube to the blog, as well as how well students can access the materials via computer and/or cell phone.
I'm planning to use You Tube video-lectures much like this, as well as narrated PowerPoint slides, which will be available either in PowerPoint or YouTube versions, and various kinds of online-discussion/commentary for the participation portion of each class. The Canvas page for each course will have the official list of assignments, organized via the announcements page. If you have or get the Canvas ap for your phone, you'll be able to access all the YouTube materials on your phone, which should be a convenience to you.
Like I said, I'm just getting started here. I have the rest of the break to work this out. The official start date for the rest of the semester (week 10 through 15) is March 30th.
Watch this space for more to come, as well as via Canvas.
Scientists all around the world are watching with dismay the politicians get it wrong again and again. When will we learn this lesson?
Remember, folks: "Nature bats last" may be a slogan or even a bumper sticker, but it's also a fact. Humans like to convince themselves that they are all powerful creatures, but we don't have the last say.
PLIOMAX: the international effort to determine the Pliocene sea level highstand, has its landing page linked below. This is an example of an effort to explore climate "analogs" in order to determine key parameters of global change in the next few decades and centuries. An analog might be a geological era or event that offers a good guide to the planet's behavior under similar conditions of forcing and coupled circulation.
You may remember that Hansen et al 2016 depended heavily on the Eemian analog for sea level rise and the future of the WAIS. Analogs stand in some contrast and/or tension with models, both GCMs and Ice Sheet Models. This was carefully expressed in Hansen et al 2016.
This arrived a little late for our discussions of the economics of the American Revolution this semester, but it's never too late to learn a little more history.
A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all.
But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them.
So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum.
If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.
