What are our Demons? How do we slay them?

 

What are our Demons? How do we slay them?

 

 

Let us pray.

 

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[1]  Amen.

 

My connection to CS Lewis

 

Ever since I was a boy, I have been a fan of Clive Staples Lewis and his writings.  Better known as CS Lewis, a contemporary of JRR Tolkien and the other Inklings of the 20^th century British literature juggernaut, he looms large for Christianity to this day.  This devout atheist, turned Christian apologist, has become among the foremost authors, for many to turn to, in order to understand our shared faith.

 

My first encounter with Lewis, was through a pantomime play that was a part of a supported arts program for the schools in the Syracuse area as a boy.  The group put on an adaption of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which, thanks to some great teachers, encouraged us to read the tale ourselves in Lewis’ original prose.  And so, asking my parents, they got me the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, and I devoured it.  Not long after followed a reading of Prince Caspian, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Horse and His Boy, The Prince and the Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, and, of course, The Last Battle.  The 7 Chronicles, were perfect for a boy who was intrigued with history including knights and archers, still mystified by magic, and loved the possibility of a make-believe place that one needed only find the right apple tree to be whisked away to.  While made explicit at the end of the Dawn Treader, little did I put together that this was a long analogy for the story of Christ, God, and his power to transform and perpetuate grace through and with the world around us.

 

So it wasn’t until later in life, late in my high school years, that I realized that Lewis was not first and foremost a children’s tale author or a fantasy writer, but instead was a professor of medieval literature and a thorough going Christian writer.  The first book I pulled in of what most call his apologetic works, was Mere Christianity.  This rather effective and powerful work helps to provide a pathway from unbelief to belief in a way that continues to echo for many people to this day.  Certainly, it must be said of Lewis, that he was a man of his Edwardian context, fully complete with its rather masculine chauvinism and its heady assumptions about the order of society.  But if you understand that, and appreciate the occasional foibles in the context from which he wrote, his works just leap off the page and remain very relevant to us.  They are, perhaps, among the best books to explain many of the core theologies we embrace as Christians generally, but even more for those of an Anglican, Lutheran, and even Roman Catholic persuasion.

 

“So what does Lewis have to do with today’s lessons?” you are probably asking yourselves.  And that is certainly a valid question.  There are two of his works that are exceptionally helpful touchstones to help understand the thrust of the lessons today.  The first, is “The Problem of Pain.”  The Second is “The Screwtape Letters.”  If you are familiar with one or both of these works, I hope to do them justice as we proceed.  If not, well, I hope to do as my teachers in elementary school once did and encourage you to read them for yourself (you will not be sorry you did).

 

The Problem of Pain

 

All powerful God?  Why not end the pain?

 

Let’s first start with our lesson from Isaiah and address the proverbial elephant in the room.  The prophet lays out in no uncertain terms, a vision of God that is all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful.  Isaiah states, “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, …”[2]  He goes on, “To whom, then, will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.  Lift up your eyes on high and see:  Who created these?  He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.”[3]  Concluding with “Have you not known?  Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.”[4]  Our God is indeed an awesome God!

 

But if this is true, if God is omnipotent, if God is omniscient, if God is omnipresent, if God is omnibenevolent, and “God is love”[5], how is there pain?  How are there demons?  How can there be suffering in this world?  This is the conundrum that inevitably has to be addressed in our faith.  It is the often insurmountable elephant that make people of all ages, genders, nationalities, cultures, and more “loose faith” and call into question everything.  Yes, Isaiah, we hear you, God is everything and anything.  God is the great “I AM who I AM”[6].  But if that is true, then how unconscionable it must be to believe in a God that continues to allow pain and suffering and disease and demons of all varieties to exist in creation.  It’s downright unethical, false, and untrue to say this is a God of love, if this God is all that Isaiah says he is, and this God has not stopped evil and pain and all the ills of the world, that this God so clearly, as Isaiah tells us, has the power to solve it all in a flash.

 

And this question, this accusation, is at the center of CS Lewis’ book, the Problem of Pain[7].  Lewis knew well this question and all of the arguments made to tear down God in this way, because he made them himself in his years as a strident atheist.  So, in his text, Lewis takes this question head on and with vigor.  To do so, he returns to the story we find in Genesis chapter 3, and the fall of humanity.  Just to remind us all, this is the story of when our first parents ate from “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”[8] and fulfilled the prophesy that the serpent uttered to them that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”[9]  Lewis explains that this story is a metaphor, an allegory, that persists for all times and all places.  He borrows heavily from St. Augustine’s discussion of the doctrine of original sin[10], in that we, thanks to this act, have an inward turning, a selfishness, or “concupiscence” [11], that we have a hard time breaking free from and ultimately is the cause of the suffering, pain, and evil in creation.  And Lewis goes on to highlight that all of this is because, even though God is indeed the God Isaiah describes, he did not step in, he has not quelled every pain, disease, and demon, because he also is the God that gave us “free will”.

 

 

Free will is the blessing and curse

 

As Lewis, again borrowing from Augustine, explains it, God created us in his image, we are, and fundamentally supposed to be, good.  And we were created with perfect free will, the ability to choose, because God loved us and still loves us, and wants us not as slaves or servants but as friends[12].  Before the fall, we only knew this perfect relationship, even as we had the power to choose otherwise.  But by now knowing good from evil, the choice is not so easy and we are rife with making bad choices.  Paul, in his letter that we read from today’s lectionary, helps make this clear.  He states that “[f]or if I do this of my own will, I have a wage, but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission.”[13]  What Paul is getting at is that when we use our “freedom of the will” the results are merely earthly.  But if we submit to the will of God, we are pulled into not only the earthly benefits, but the heavenly ones.  Luther, for his part, rightly called out the reality of our situation in his text “The Bondage of the Will”.  Luther, in contrast with his interlocutor Erasmus, acknowledged that this side of the Fall, any expression of “our will” really is to be in rebellion to God and his perfect will.  “Free will” is, in reality, anything but freeing.  The “gift” of the knowledge of good and evil, is to fall into sin, over and over again.  And while we are indeed baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are in constant need to refresh that baptism through confession and forgiveness, the very thing we open our weekly worship with.  Free will is a curse, in reality, when it comes to the things that matter most, us and our relationship with God.

 

But why did God give us this not so “free will”?  Again, he did so that we could love him as he loves us, not as a demand, not as servants, but as friends, as requited lovers.  So, we live in a world of pain and suffering, and evil and demons, not because God is impotent, or uncaring, or immoral, or anything we might blame Him for.  No, the problem of pain is a creation of ours, because God empowered us to love as he loves, to be free as he is free, but instead of giving up and giving in to Him and his grace, we want control, we are selfish, we want our will to pervade.  God can and, when asked, intervenes in the creation and with us, but he seeks not to impose his will on us.  So when we are choosing “not God” and “not God’s way”, we are choosing other than the path of love and peace and all the good that his power and might and knowledge and wisdom give us.  And that then brings us to the very subject of demons, the very real demons we have in our midst, and the gospel lesson for today.

 

Modern Demons

 

Demons, what are they?

 

Our gospel lesson from this week and last week speak about Jesus and his casting out demons.  Last week, it was that “… there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’  But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be quiet and come out of him!’  And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”[14]  This week we hear “[t]hat evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons.  And the whole city was gathered around the door.  And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.”[15]

 

We, living in an era of much advanced medical science, might question the very existence of demons, but I am here to tell you they are very much among us.

 

It is here that I now turn to the other work of CS Lewis that I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, “The Screwtape Letters”.  This work of allegorical fiction, if you are not familiar, is a collection of letters between a senior demon named Screwtape and his nephew, Wormwood, a junior tempter[16].  Terming the human subject of Wormwood’s endeavors his “patient”, Screwtape advises Wormwood in all of the many ways he can “inhabit” the patient in a devilish effort to corrupt and ultimately have the patient turn from God entirely.  And what are the “demons” that Wormwood uses?  Ahh yes, sex, love, pride, envy, gluttony, war, religion, and much, much more.  In essence, as Lewis relays through Uncle Screwtape, it’s all the vices we fall into over and over again as humanity.  And Screwtape makes it clear that knowing better and being intelligent doesn’t prevent us from letting these little demons in.  As Screwtape offers, “... the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."[17]  And I think a simple perusal of our own lives, never mind the news or what we see in our neighbors, bears truth to the realities that these demons are no less present today than they were in Lewis’ time or any time in human history.

 

How do we slay them?

 

So the question then begs, how do we slay our demons?  How to we solve the problem of pain we have brought on ourselves?  Paul, in our second lesson starts to get at that answer.  He writes that “[f]or though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might gain all the more.  To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to gain Jews.  To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might gain those under the law.  To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not outside God’s law but am within Christ’s law) so that I might gain those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, so that I might gain the weak.  I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”[18]  To expel the demons that inhabit us all too often, we need to “put on Christ”[19] in all his manifestations as the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord of our devotion.  We need to be weak for the weak, we need to be bound for those that are bound, and we need to be “slave to all” so that we are not slaves to sin.  This is precisely why the demons in our gospel stories are so petrified by Jesus and his disciples.  Because they cannot inhabit them any longer with any foothold.  If Christ is in us, we are no longer ourselves, we are “… put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”[20]  And that Spirit is the one that resides in our very hearts, and writes the law of Christ there for eternity.

 

Conclusion, Eustace and his baptism

 

To conclude, I have one last thing to offer that helps me think about our lessons today and how we deal with demons and suffering in our lives.  In CS Lewis’ chronicle, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, there is memorable scene that helps us bring together baptism, pain, and becoming renewed after we have been inhabited by our demons.

 

Eustace, one of the child characters in the story, is a disagreeable sod of a child, who is only happy when he is causing others misery through the first parts of the tale.  And the tale is one of sailing on a grand ship to far off lands, visiting islands and mystical places along the way.  On one of the mystical islands they stop at, Eustace through his greed and spite, starts to steal from a dragon’s treasure trove, only to be turned into a dragon himself.  Having slipped on a gold bracelet in human form, when turned into a dragon, it pinched and chaffed at his arm with great pain, such that he sought relief any way he could.  After many attempts to solve this through his own force or through other human means, he was visited by Aslan the Lion, who is the God character in the Narnian universe.  Eustace resorted to trying to rip his very skin off, but it wasn’t until Aslan told him that Aslan himself had to tear off the dragon skin, that he finally would get relief, and be turned again into a boy.  To describe this, Eustace recalled that, “[t]he very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart.  And when he [Aslan] began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I had ever felt.  The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.  You know – if you’ve ever picked a scab of a sore place.  It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”  “Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me in the water.  It smarted like anything but only for a moment.  After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone away from my arm.”[21]

 

To defeat our demons, we need to be willing to shed our dragon skins, to give up our “free will” and give in to God’s will.  When we do, life can become “perfectly delicious” and the pain can recede from our lives and those around us.

 

Amen.

---

[1] Psalm 19:14

[2] Isaiah 40:22

[3] Isaiah 40:25-26

[4] Isaiah 40:28

[5] 1 John 4:8b or 1 John 4:16a

[6] Exodus 3:14

[7] Summary at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain

[8] Genesis 2:17

[9] Genesis 3:5

[10] Cf. Confessions

[11] https://mereorthodoxy.com/augustine-concupiscence-friendship

[12] Cf John 15:5

[13] 1 Cor. 9:17

[14] Mark 1:23-26

[15] Mark 1:32-34

[16] Summary at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters

[17] Letter XII, The Screwtape Letters

[18] 1 Corinthians 9:19-23

[19] Cf. Romans 13:14

[20] 1 Peter 3:18

[21] The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, pp 90-91

The High Risk in Risk Aversion

One of the things that I have learned by being a construction professional and US Army officer, is that risk is a thing that needs to be managed. I learned early on, and have had it reinforced through practice, that all risks should be managed by the party, in any construction project/mission, that has the best tools and control of that risk in the effort. To that, I want to be clear, to manage risk is to not avoid risk or be averse to risk, because doing so only shifts the risk away from your control or awareness, and is almost always the riskier proposition.

What do I mean by this? Let’s start with my experience on the contractor/construction manager/executor side of things. One of the pesky things that happens in any construction project/military mission is the need to maintain physical safety protocols and conduct cleanup/housekeeping. Safety is a paramount focus on any construction or military training site. There are oodles of training sessions given and ongoing emphasis to make sure jobs are “safe”. The reality is that construction has numerous and varied ongoing risks to personal life and limb throughout the process. It’s just a risky business in that way. And it requires diligence and an “all hands on deck” approach to mitigating those risks from becoming a hazard that could hurt someone. So when it comes to making sure we have all of the safety measures in place, who holds responsibility is a matter of a “both everyone and no one” quandary. By that, I mean technically everyone from the worker to the employer to the owner has the responsibility to take ownership of job site safety, but that also means no one individual has ultimate responsibility for all, each and every, of the job site safety measures.

As a contractor/executor side of this, I’m probably the best person to manage safety focused risks on the job site. But how does it get done? In working for several organizations, I can tell you there’s a range of responses. On one extreme, one approach by the CM/GC was to assign this entirely to the trade contractors (primarily through the various trade contracts), without any real mechanism to ensure that there was consistency across how said trade contractors approached or executed their safety measures. This risk averse approach, took all liability away from the firm I worked for at the cost of creating varied and in some cases inherently more risky conditions.  One such example was as it related to how labeling protocols resulted in floor hole coverings that had one person mistake it for a work platform before they were told it wasn’t safe location to work. Or another example was where a trade contractor would orally promise to use chain link fencing to barricade a part of the site, to only opt to later install orange plastic construction barrier (a significant downgrade), to which there was not any real recourse. This “hands off” because “we don’t own it” approach was problematic at best and (based on the random/perhaps not random OSHA inspection we went through) was lucky not to cause serious injury.

This was as opposed to another firm I worked for that literally had prescribed safety boards for each site, with mandated first aid and other PPE kits, a required safety manual (that subs had to sign off on), regular and educational safety inspections, and a “we want to control our sites” approach to job site safety. It was night and day. Yes, we took on, because of our direct involvement as the GC, liability as a result of having trade contractors comply to our standards. But, by doing so we actually reduced the risks on the job and resulted in no recorded injuries across numerous job sites over many years (reducing actual liability exposure, with a corresponding decreased premium rate). It was clear then, as much as it is clear now, taking the risk averse approach only heightens and actually creates more risk. I had similar experiences working on the owners side, where in one case “it’s all the contractor’s responsibility” risk averse approach was the mantra as opposed to “this is our installation, and we have to take case of everyone on it, even the workers of the contractors on site” approach. The latter was a clear example of an underlying philosophy that one should own/embrace the risk so you can manage it effectively.

And this applies beyond construction. It can be in financial matters, political decision making, and even operational approaches.  Recently, I was discussing the need to update the computer purchase recommendations for our academic department for incoming students. Some years ago, prior to and upon my assumption of the role of Department Executive Officer (XO), it was abundantly clear that the general university computer recommendations were just not sufficient for upper division courses in our area, because the university base model was based on functionality at the least common denominator level for all programs (resulting in a lack of disk space, memory, etc. for various applications in engineering). The previous leadership took the risk averse approach, in that they didn’t want to be held responsible for recommending something different than the IT department had given as they’d have to answer if those recommendations were insufficient or more expensive (eg they’d get blamed not the department leadership). I, on the other hand, was much more concerned with the complaints that were regularly being voiced, and corresponded to, about how we should have told them they needed X or Y capacity and how they couldn’t use their laptop to do course work because they were seriously deficient (thus relying on campus computer labs, which became an acute problem during the COVID pandemic). The question was which risk are you dealing with? Being held to account for telling people what they need or being held to account for failing to do so?

My approach was not the risk averse one, it was the risk management one. I drafted a memo, laying out open ended but specific specs, making clear the pros and cons of what was needed and giving two levels. Knowing well that most families only buy a laptop only once for their loved one’s collegiate experience, they were written to enable the computer purchased upon arrival to, more likely than not, function all the way to the end of that experience and still keep up with software updates 4 to 5 years hence. You know how many complaints we received? Zero, none, nada, not even a one. There were some concerns raised once or twice about cost, but once they were aware of the intent (laid out up front of the recommendations as a clear rationale for them), in every case they were thankful. And more often than not, when parents, students, and others would ask about similar recommendations for other majors, the refrain was “I wish others did this too so we’d know what to buy that would last the duration”. Yes, there’s a risk in putting out something that went above and beyond what IT put out, but what was the down side? Appreciation and an exhibition of better performance for the students with an ending of the constant litany of complaints on why they didn’t know answer couldn’t function the way they wanted to?  Was that really a problem? The bigger risk? Answer, no.  They’re really weren’t any downsides at all, other than having to periodically update the recommendations. Managing the risk, in other words, was less risky than avoiding or being averse to it. WE have the responsibility to make OUR students be in the best position possible to succeed in OUR curricula in OUR department based on what WE know. We can and should manage this risk and not leave it up to others who know less, are less likely to receive the complaints, and are less equipped to resolve the problem ahead of it becoming a problem.

Risk management is about knowingly and carefully assuming risks while putting in place mechanisms and tools to mitigate the potential downsides of those risks should they occur (as well as building in capacity to deal with the unknowns).  Life is risky, period. Everything we do has risks. Some are greater and others smaller. And, yes, there is absolutely such a thing as taking on too much risk. But here is the thing, avoiding risk, being risk averse, is actually doing just that, assuming too much risk. It’s an attempt to push out of the way that thing that you have a very important part of the pie in addressing. The mere fact you’ve chosen to avoid or be averse to it doesn’t make the risk go away. No you’ve made a deliberate choice (a bad one I’d surmise). It just means others (or no one) is going to manage it, and they may or may not do it well or be equipped to address it so as to not have the downsides actually occur. That is inherently the more risky proposition. While I fully get that it’s prudent to insulate yourself from financial and other legal liability, especially in a litigious environment like the United States, that doesn’t mean you avoid risk. There are tools for those things, like insurance, peer review, checks and balances, and so forth. But none of those are avoiding or being averse, they are part of a comprehensive risk management process that enables you to better address the risks. And they also help you avoid the trap of perceiving risks that aren’t really there (or if they are they were just ones you’ve been blind or adverse to recognizing and managing properly).

In conclusion, manage risk don’t be averse to it.  And in that, risk, if you’re going to choose to avoid it and do a stiff arm against actively managing it, it either a) needs to not be a risk at all (and not an opportunity either, meaning it’s a waste of time), b) you have 100% confidence in whomever or whatever will be in place to manage it outside your control, OR c) you’re fully willing to accept the consequences when your aversion ends up biting you in the proverbial forth point of contact.  Any of these should be a last resort to working to managing the risk appropriately and by the best parties to do so effectively.

Avoiding Lobotomy - Again

As a junior officer in the US Army, and commonly spoken in the undercurrent among both Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and junior officers alike, is the “Field Officer lobotomy”(https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/v5taom/majors_whats_wrong_with_you/).  This is the thing that happens, somewhere in the development of an officer, typically when they are a Major, when they seemingly forget the basics of how the Army runs, and get lost into some rabbit hole while stuck in the long period between company command and battalion command.  It’s as if we just loose sense of what is “common sense” as well as being grounded in (and with) the very challenging realities of troops at the company level and below.  It’s as if all the staff and broadening “special assignments” time you spend puts you into some esoteric death spiral.  Sure you’re smart or capable, etc, but you’ve become this amorphous blob of uncertainty, indecision, and constant incapability because you’ve lost that command touch.  The vast majority of officers succumb at some point, as if they become “company men” or “women”, and accept the utter stupidity and core failings in the systems instead of seeking to work to challenge them and make for better systems or simply level with folks about the absurdity of it all.

In my military career, I worked really hard, I mean really hard, to not get/have said lobotomy.  Part of this was done by not taking the “normal path”, by eschewing just going with the flow from above as a way to get ahead.  Sure I didn’t run away from the core traditional command assignments (company and battalion command), but I found a way to do things that were impactful and as pragmatic as possible, in between.  That said, when it came to late 2016 and what I was going to do as I reached 20 years of service, I decided that micromanaging whether Johnny Joe or Jane soldier went to their dental appointment as a the way I was being measured as a commander in the Army Reserve, was ludicrous.  While it wasn’t the only reason to opt to decline a full command assignment (medical, career, and family reasons were more prominent), avoiding becoming lobotomized was also on the list.  Soldiers who served with me can tell you how successful or not I was at that task.  By summer 2017, however, I was heading to retirement, lest I succumbed.

So I am now on the cusp of yet another one of those “lobotomy” points.  In 2014 I went to the “dark side” in my career in the AEC (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) world:  I became a full time professor.  This said, I did so in a fashion that was atypical; I did not possess a doctorate.  In academia, these days, holding a PhD is normally the minimum prerequisite for such a role.  But instead I was hired to be a full time instructor and Director of the much more pragmatic Construction Engineering Management program at my alma mater, Clarkson.  If we look back at the history of engineering education, it was not until the 1970s that it became common that those serving as professors held doctorates.  Rather, it was more critical, nay the minimum prerequisite, that you had experience and knowledge that came from practice, demonstrated through licensure and robust professional credentials otherwise, rather than a having a background primarily as a researcher.  At Clarkson in particular, who’s motto is “a workman who needn’t not to be ashamed”, it was very common/valued that most faculty were consultants on the side and had a large portfolio of practical experience before and during their appointments.  Academia, for a variety of reasons, has turned to become research first, practical knowledge second, as the resume required in most settings.  And akin to the above undercurrent in the Army, it’s pretty much the unwritten rule that PhD means you have “pilled high and deep” a wall of theoretical knowledge that makes you lose the ability to have common sense or be grounded in the practical aspects of life.  And that stereotype is way too often more true than false, including a number of my colleagues in my department and beyond.

As I said, I am on the cusp of crossing that PhD line.  Not counting my chickens before they’re hatched, I still have to figure out how to get this last course done and finish the edits to my dissertation by the end of April, but the light outside that tunnel is very bright at this point.  So, if that happens, it’ll be Dr. Backus, fitting in with the crowd that is academia.  Now, strictly speaking, I did not have to pursue this.  I am a Professor of Practice at this point, something academia is finally realizing is needed; not, therefore, requiring a doctorate.  That said, there’s still a barrier to those without one to academic leadership (as was put by one person, “Erik doesn’t have a PhD so he can’t become chair, and shouldn’t remain as XO of the department”).  As I’ve seen time and time again, I’m more or less convinced that the fetish academia has with research, and the normal track for preparation and promotion for professors, is neither good nor healthy long term for the greater academy.  Running a lab, doing fundamental research, and publishing papers, does not prepare you well for become a leader of a department, school, college, etc.  And the things that are needed (eg organizational management & training, practical knowledge, leadership skills, etc.), are seen as almost anathema to gaining tenure and promotion (distractions, as one colleague put it).

So here am I, at that crossroads, about to become “one of them”, a “true academic”, with a doctorate and all to prove it.  I have no intent nor do I desire to work to gain tenure, expecting to remain a Professor of Practice through to retirement (although, I’d be very welcome, many years hence, to be considered for professor emeritus status, should that come about).  I made this pursuit, however, because it will open the doors to more senior leadership academically, given the current way things work, and it will alleviate my rather constant requirements to correct students from referring to me as “Doctor Backus” when I don’t have one.  I have always been a deep and big thinker.  I love learning, I remain ever curious and interested in expanding knowledge.  So I am not allergic to research (there’s parts of it I really like) and have been doing research even as far back as my Masters and in other roles in the military and when I was a practitioner in facilities organizations.  But I really think studying the ability to generate electrical power from lobsters (https://improbable.com/2013/02/06/renewable-power-source-search-lobsters/ ), while novel and cool, is utterly impractical and I am really not that interested in it.  I’m not saying that there isn’t a need for researching such things if they can lead to some real breakthrough, but it’s not my bag.  And to that, I hope it never becomes “my bag” as I stay rooted in the much more pragmatic, like making sure my students actually know how a toilet works, have had the experience of actually hammering a nail, as well as being able to do structural analysis, understand how to do concrete batch designs, size heating and cooling equipment, and build safer, better, and more resilient/sustainable infrastructure & buildings. I just do not want to be lobotomized away from what my experience and continuing practice allow me to do to bring value to my students, in the immediate sense, and through them, for the broader AEC community as a result.

I am going to say, hitting this milestone is something I remain sheepish and humble about.  The resume, so long as things finish as they should, will now list getting a PhD in 2023 (long removed from my Masters in 2004, so a late return to getting a terminal degree).  I will remain a bit of a unicorn, not fitting in exactly and pushing back against the consensus on what the broader academy needs to look like to remain relevant.  I do not believe one can be “over educated” as some seem to think happens here, when you’ve done a pursuit for a doctorate.  But I do get that we cannot and should not stare down our noses or exhibit the too often seen elitism that comes being in an academic ivory tower (evidenced just this week as senior academics poo-pooed the idea that a long-term decades-experienced, successful senior manager in the AEC world was not capable of teaching a masters level course in the “business of construction”, because he lacked an advance degree in business).  And I think engineering education, in particular, needs to return more to the practical, hands on, even trade skill training and education, that keeps us rooted.  I just don’t want to fit the moniker, I don’t want to be unable to relate to, empathize with, and understand the plumber, carpenter, iron worker in the field.  To me, being at the top of what I do means I help tomorrow’s construction (and, more broadly, AEC) leaders, grow in ways that brings better solutions than we come to today, working together and respectfully across backgrounds and experiences.  I just can’t succumb to a PhD lobotomy, in other words.  To that end, I hope those around me keep me grounded accordingly.

When the Going gets Tough (in education), the Tough (educators) get Going?

When the Going gets Tough (in education), the Tough (educators) Get Going?

I’ll admit it, I live in academia.  My full time job is to educate the engineers of tomorrow.  I really like this job, and I think I do it well (although, I will be candid, I continue to be amazed at many of my colleagues who are better than I).  This said, after 5 years in academia full time, I still don’t fully fit in, and probably never will.  There are things like the constant need to relate to academic year vice summer in discussions around salary and research grants or the idea that you give someone up to 6 years to prove themselves, investing millions into them, and then you summarily fire them when they don’t get tenure (instead of converting them over to teaching faculty; recognizing that research isn’t the end-all, be-all for what makes a good educator at post-secondary institutions).  The whole business model and metrics around academic research continues to drive me nuts (like it just doesn’t make sense to me that you count success as high research expenditures, vice any kind of measurement of research outcomes; and to me those outcomes don’t have to always be monetary returns, but why isn’t that a part of the picture).  I also get driven nuts over how many of us live in a bit of la la land when it comes to entitlement, especially as it has come into stark relief amidst planning for return to classes this fall.

 

Now, let me be clear, we have to take COVID-19 seriously and we have to make preparations.  We have to account for individual risk factors and do what we can to mitigate those enhanced risks that exist over the pre-COVID “normal” levels of risk in everyday life.  I am not talking about that.  What I am talking about, however, is how quickly, when we look to put mitigation measures in place, words like “untenable” or “unrealistic” come out, in response to the inconveniences that come with them.  There are things that are indeed untenable, unrealistic, and so forth (for instance the ability to control the behavior of collegiate students at 2 am on Sunday morning of any given weekend such that a surge spread of COVID might be controlled, not likely), but the reactions actually aren’t to those things.  The reactions are too often in response to what amounts to rather trivial inconveniences when you step back and look at them, thus making them poster children for ridicule.

 

Before I cite some examples of this, let me fully disclose my role in our (Clarkson University’s) fall semester in-person teaching planning.[i]  Given my background in college and university facilities,[ii] and that the Director of Facilities and Services parted company early in the outset of the effects of the COVID outbreak at Clarkson, I have voluntarily stepped in to help the facilities response team in several aspects of the plan.  Namely I have been figuring out the occupancy limits in campus buildings, first as it relates to code occupancy, then as is relates to the state guidelines for social distancing.  I also have a team of students, working with a colleague of mine, that are doing socially distanced classroom layouts for both fixed seat classrooms as well as temporary classrooms, in places like the campus field house, as well as determining campus path routing to minimize the chance of spread during pedestrian movements on campus, inside our interlinked academic core.  So on top of my other roles, I have stepped in to help where my expertise can be of some hoped for value and been working in concert with many team members to do as best we can within the guidance provided.

 

So that being disclosed, let me cite some examples of what I am talking about as it relates to the level of privilege in academia in the midst of our ongoing response.  This first example comes from an email I received about the draft plan for one-way hallways in a major academic building on campus.  The author writes, “One way traffic makes sense in main circulating corridors.  However, on branch hallways, it results in some flow patterns that aren't tenable.  In XX building, the faculty office halls require faculty to go out into a stairwell, go downstairs and outside, then come back in the front entrance.  Even if the stairs could be two-way, it would mean going up or down stairs every time a faculty member needs to get somewhere.”  “Two principles have to be that people who need to use elevators can access them without stairs, and outdoor walking is minimized (as much as I prefer outdoor walking!).”

 

So let’s break this down, because you have to walk outside or being required to use a stairwell for able bodied persons (the plan has a blanket exemption for traffic plans for all those that have a mobility impairment), the plan is not “tenable”?  Further, while I am getting numerous questions about the adequacy of fresh air ventilation generally in buildings, the rubric should be that we give preference for indoor mobility over outdoor?  The email brought up good points that allowed us to make some better modifications to the traffic flow for this building, but as I also said in my reply, “what is tenable vice desirable, from an objective point of view, are perhaps different.”  As someone who literally slept under a vehicle for 2 months in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, I am sorry, but really?  The imposition of you, an able-bodied person, having to alter your route and being inconvenienced with having to go up or down a flight of stairs or routing outside for less than a minute or two (even if it’s raining, snowing or sleeting), is really a fairly small sacrifice in the big picture.

 

The second example I will cite is about a classroom set-up situation.  It comes from a fellow faulty member that has been vociferous in their concerns about face-to-face instruction in the fall, especially as it relates to ventilation, contact, and so forth.  This person contacted me about a particular classroom set-up.  My colleague writes, “I am surprised  that there are three seats in a row at one table, but what really horrifies me is that there is one seat right on the first seat at the table before the podium.  That forces me to be behind the monitor for 90 mins, which is unrealistic.”  So to break this down, what is really “horrific” is that the faculty member will have to stand in a particular location during their lectures for an hour an half class in order to maintain social distancing.  Not to be too flippant, but apparently students have now become the enemy?  Their conclusion was that the occupancy for the room was too high, and should be lowered.[iii]  So, in essence, I don’t want to have to modify my delivery to be static, so we need to change the room to accommodate me.

 

I have cited these two examples because they really get at the point I am trying to make.  Look, all of this sucks.  It really does.  I agree we should have made a much more concerted evaluation of whether we should have even tried in-person instruction in the fall, with all of its economic, social, and reputational aspects.  That said, candidly, I think I would have probably come up on the side of “giving it a try” for in-person education this fall.[iv]  Without question one of the things I learned, and learned well, from my service in the US Army, is that when you are in the “suck” you need to make the best of it.  Wallowing and complaining about the fact that things suck, doesn’t help you get out of it; rather it makes it “suck” more.  Instead, get over yourself, stop being selfish, and figure out how to mitigate the worst of it driving yourself out of it as fast as possible.  Afterwards, sure, figure out how not to get stuck in the same “suck” again, but don’t fixate on it when you are in the midst of it.[v]  COVID-19 sucks; teaching in-person in the midst of this pandemic has up-ticked the risk for sure.  But we have to step back a bit and get a grip, this isn’t the black plague nor is it going to be if we stay level headed.

 

Folks, let’s get real.  Is having to walk another 300 yards before or after going to the bathroom really make life unbearable?  Is it really that bad that you will have to modify your pedagogical approach for the coming semester to give the most students the best chance to learn?  What we need to get past, as academics, is that we are not the privileged children we think we are.  Look Socrates went to trial and was put to death.  There has been and always will be risk to our profession; one we need to accept, even, especially, when we are called to be inconvenienced.  This fall, we need to expect and live into the undesirable (in all its forms, including online education and more), it’ll make us better for it.  And if you are so concerned, there are outs:  instruct 100% virtually or look to pre-record you lectures and “flip” the classroom so that your face to face engagement isn’t you talking at your students but you dialoging with them through such mediums as Zoom, discussion boards, or what not.  All of this is more work, but frankly, if we’ve been paying attention (and I have), this is what we have been warned we will need to adjust to sooner rather than later, not just as individual instructors but all of academia.  So, words of wisdom from a soldier, live into the “suck”, get past it, and in the end, you’ll be amazed at how much we benefit from it, both individually as well as collectively.

 

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[i] For more, see the university response website:  https://www.clarkson.edu/future-ready

[ii] Among those this:  https://www.appa.org/standards-codes-landing-page/informatics-work-group/

[iii] With its secondary and tertiary effects of needing to move the class to another room or similar, creating a domino effect.

[iv] A slight counterfactual, in so much as I am absent the full analysis, and believe data should drive decision making more than it does at the institution at the present time; we are too often relying in on an intuitive instead of a deliberate decision making process.

[v] And, as my good battle buddy friend Sam Chisolm says, there is no need to train at living in the “suck”.