The inspiration for this essay was an extended personal rant on Trump's failure to accept the reality of his failed 2020 reelection campaign. While I can't say I've experienced the nature and extent of an incumbent POTUS' reelection loss. On his ego, I have experienced numerous adverse incidents in my career and life, most of which I probably won't retell. These injustices have included losing jobs and relationships under freakish, cartoonishly evil circumstances, without the support or knowledge of others. I'll simply discuss one incident in the context of unexpected positive feedback from students, which is relevant in this context. When I was a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow at UH, my department was hybrid, with PLM (production logistics) faculty alongside my MIS discipline, and the chair was PLM and had a personal dislike for me for unknown reasons. (I think he got his share of troublemaking student complaints that I probably never heard about). I never really befriended students or discussed academic politics with them. So one day he called me into his office and vented at me for unclear reasons (usually they don't want to discuss specifics under the fear of instructor reprisals against the student), He then mysteriously rebuked me: "And don't you think you're fooling me one minute by having students seeing me on your behalf!" I literally didn't know what he was talking about. In my life, I never asked for a student's help on my behalf for anything.
I suspect students saw an injustice being done against me and countered it on their own without my knowledge. I know that a similar incident happened later at UTEP. I had disciplined a student for violating my academic honesty policy. She responded by lying to the Dean of Students that I had threatened to blacklist her on the job market. I know because the corrupt, incompetent bastard called, threatening me over the fake accusation. It turned out that the student in question (I was first semester, so I never had her before) had used me as a reference without my knowledge or consent and was worried about employers contacting me. I did end up getting a postcard some weeks later from Eastman Kodak asking for feedback on the student. I wrote back, confirming that I knew the student but had no further comment; I reported it to the university.
UTEP 1990 https://rguillem.blogspot.com/2010/01/miscellany-1610.html
So any way. an east Indian descent student who took the above picture of me before I left the university (he wanted to have the photos of faculty he respected; the last I heard, he had been accepted to the UVA MBA class) had come to me asking for help; he explained he had been on the project team with said cheater in another class; and she had control over access to university resources on the project and had locked him out of resources in retribution for denying the student's lies to the Dean of Students. I had no say in my colleague's class and encouraged him to approach my colleague. I thanked him for defending me to the dean. to which he said indignantly, "I didn't do it as a favor to you; I did it because it was the right thing to do."
I had some reservations with how they typically evaluate teaching at most universities. usually the end of semester subjective ratings, simplistic single-item appraisals. It's not so much the idea of whether I believe in feedback loops (I've written about prototyping in technical communications), but I often got hostile feedback based on student expectations. For many students in the larger cities I taught in, college was just a job ticket needing to be punched, and higher standards than my colleagues' seemed to be at their expense. I remember one student complaining, "I'm acing my history course at a fraction of the time I'm spending trying to pass Dr. Guillemette's class." It was his first coding class, and he was learning new skills. Another student griped that he learned more in my class than any other professor's, but "he deserves none of the credit: I had to do it all by myself." Welcome to college, kid. One student wrote, "He has the hygiene of a frog." (I don't know frogs, but I don't think that was a good thing. I showered daily, washed and rotated clothes, etc.) Another student wrote, "If I have to endure 5 more minutes of Dr. Guillemette's atrocious chalkboard behavior, I'm going to have a primal scream."
I'll never forget my cost accounting prof at UH announcing just before evaluations, "By the way, if you ace my final, you'll get an A in the course no matter what you've done in class to date." On class evaluation days, I usually came to lecture after 15 minutes or so; I remember at UTEP a student showing up around the time as I did. I still recall overhearing another student tell him that he had missed a chance to screw me over.
I recall early in my UTEP database course. over 90% of students didn't know what a linked list was, even though data structures was a prerequisite course. So I basically took a timeout and taught a mini-course on data structures. Students griped too much course for the money, but I wasn't going to let things go on my watch.
Finally, I wanted to discuss an Asian student coed's appraisal at the end of my graduate course of human factors in information systems at Illinois State in Applied Computer Science. After UTEP breached its contract with me, Jane Carey, who had met me at one of her human factors symposia, tipped me off about a 1-year contract at ISU where a faculty member had taken a year off to bootstrap a research program at the university. I got a chance to teach a human factors course (think about fitting technology to users for their relevant task performance). Any regular reader knows my love for quotations; my daily miscellany posts start with one, and I've probably written a couple of essays on wrongfully attributed quotes.
The human factors course was my favorite course ever, reflecting my MIS research orientation. There wasn't a standard text, so I had a collection of papers available at Kinko's. One Asian coed was particularly motivated to write something like a 3-page single-spaced personal review at the end of the course, along with the Cadillac ad essay reproduced below. (A side note: my experience with people from Asia is primarily one of emphasis on education and a hard work ethic. I remember working with a Bangladeshi immigrant who said his family had disowned him for stopping at his MS vs. an MD or PhD.)
She expressed admiration for all the hard work she knew I had put into the course. She tactfully suggested the material went over the heads of most ISU graduate students. [My late Mom thought I would probably suck at teaching, given the fact that I was an overachieving student and would expect the same from my students. Not true.] Once you remember the author and the passage title, it's easy to find. But I hadn't read it in over a decade; I have a huge digital archive, and it took a while to dig it out.
A final note: when I taught a microcomputer applications course in my last semester. I assigned them an open-ended project to develop an application meaningful to themselves. You wouldn't believe how many students wanted to be told what application to do. I had wanted to do something meaningful to their own background. If pushed, I suggested something like a Blockbuster (video store) operation. My favorite was a farmer who set up an immunization schedule for his livestock.
3/13/2019 The Penalty of Leadership by Theodore MacManus
The Penalty of Leadership*
By Theodore MacManus
* This text appeared as an advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post, January 2nd, in the year 1915. Copyright, Cadillac Motor Car Company.
In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction.
When a man's work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be merely mediocre, he will be left severely alone — if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a-wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you, unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius.
Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by.
The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy — but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant.
There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as the human passions — envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains — the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live — lives.
(From Sunrise magazine, January 1952; copyright © 1952 Theosophical University Press)
https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sunrise/01-51-2/s01n04p115_the-penalty-of-leadership.htm 1/1
