Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

"What If I Don't?": Declaring a Major, Authority, and a Trumpian Turning Point

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, you have one kind of 

authority, the sort relevant for politics, 

when you can tell or order people to do something 

and they do it, without your needing 

to persuade them or threaten them. — Rich Erlich

My first lesson in "Question Authority!" was asking a real question about changing a college major.

             I had entered the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in Specialized Chemistry, with the goal of becoming a biochemist, and one with a degree from a major institution in the field. The motivation for my decision on a major was in part my name: "Erlich" is the Yiddish variation on "Ehrlich," and I'd grown up on biopics about the famous chemists (in part) Paul Ehrlich, Marie Curie, and Louis Pasteur. 

It wasn't as bad as the lies the movies told about the Indian Wars — which I learned from the US Army had been a time of crime and disgrace for the US Army — but the movies had misled me about the life of a chemist. In the 20^thcentury, chemistry was largely physics and math, and although I did well in school in both, I really preferred words. 

In any event, I'd taken part in a quiet mini-revolt by Specialized Chemistry students who said we'd do like the Chemical Engineering students and take five years to graduate if we had to, but while we were at a major university, we'd try to pick up some more general liberal education, beyond the many required courses in Specialized Chem.

(Eat your hearts out young-folk: Tuition and fees were something like $300 a year or maybe a semester for us — a service charge, actually — with the rest of the cost paid by the generous People of the State of Illinois. [Trust me, I paid them back: with an MA from Cornell, I worked for five years for the U of IL as a teaching fellow, teaching assistant, and "merit instructor" — What did the "merit" mean? About six grand a year less than a real instructor — and made enough to live pretty well on, with some grey-market extra … "emoluments," but still bupkes.)

They later took a 180-degree turn on the matter, but in the early 1960s, the U of I Chem Department didn't want incipient bio-chemists taking biology courses, and my genius adviser — self-taught in literature even as he'd learned to play the cello — couldn't see why I'd need courses in English, my native language. Like, I'd eventually get some literature in my German courses, and I could read on my own … eventually. He well understood I'd have no free time as an undergrad in Specialized Chem.

Anyway, the next semester I took Microbiology 101, the most totally irrelevant history course I could find — "Well we have one that starts in the Neolithic — Paleolithic? — and gets up to Alexander the Great" — and a course known as just "Fiction." And I ended up with an English major and a split minor of Microbiology/History. (The "credentials analyst" said "We've never had one of thosebefore," and kind of assigned me my minor.)

The story here is how I got there.

I liked registering as a Chem major. Student folklore had it that Chem majors had our cards put through the computer right after varsity jocks, and I had pretty much always gotten the courses, sections, and times I wanted. I didn't intend to give that up. Soooo … so when I went into the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to find out about such things, they told me, "You have to file the paper-work to switch from Chemistry into English." And I asked a crucial question: "What if I don't?"

The answer was that they didn't know since no one hadn't before, or at least that they knew of. They told me to come back "later" and when I asked "When?" they told me just not near the beginning of the semester since they were always swamped with work for the first six weeks or so. So, a couple or three years later, when I was ready to graduate, I waited a while into the semester and went in and declared myself an English Major. And talked with the Credentials Analyst — one of the thousands of little old ladies who actually run many non-military offices — and she officially recognized me as an English Major, with a Microbiology/History minor.

And I learned a crucial lesson for moving farther into the 1960s and beyond, "When someone tells you you must do something, it's often a good idea to ask, "What [will you (try to) do to me] if I don't?"

I later learned from my reading Hannah Arendt and such that Authority is giving an order that people follow, without asking "And what if I don't" and without the authority-figure needing to make any threats. I was prepared for that idea a few years earlier when a couple new-initiate brothers in my fraternity asked me, "What would you have done if you gave us pledges an order and we hadn't obeyed?" And I paused and seemed to think for a moment and replied, "Why … why, that never occurred to me." And then I laughed and told them I was amazed when anyone did what I told them to. And I suggested that they go over to the ROTC unit and watch the regular Army officer and noncoms and (for what not to do) take a glance or two at the more asshole-ish cadet officers. The military pros never raised their voices, were always polite — and gave quiet orders at least giving the impression that it never occurred to them that they wouldn't be obeyed.

And after a couple of asshole moves of my own as a new initiate, I had taken care to keep my orders few and reasonable (with good projection but without "raising my voice") — and when I ordered something unusual and really unpleasant (bailing out our sunken patio and basement dining area during a cloud-burst in the middle of the night, say) I knew to lead the work.

Authority is better than tyranny — much better — and free people must often Question Authority (and listen to hear if there's an answer). Whenever there's a "you must," there must always be the potential for "And what if I don't?"

Which brings me to Donald Trump and these our unfortunate days of much misplaced mistrust of institutions and celebrations of "Bad Boys" and "Wild and Crazy" Gals, in which "macho" can be used as a compliment, where "to disrupt" as a generalized verb is used as a Good Thing, whatever disrupted, and a big part of popular culture teaches that following rules and conventions is for wimps. And where a fair number of Americans accept Donald Trump as a capital "L" Leader, opposed by a Deep State and media who are Enemies of the People, and whose main political opponent should be locked up.

            And who features in photo-ops a portrait behind him of Andrew Jackson. 

            Now I certainly prefer Andrew Jackson to Andrew Johnson (also relevant here) and a lot of politicians, but part of Jackson's legend is the attributed line, that Chief Justice "John Marshall has made his decision" and the U.S. Supreme Court along with him; "now let him enforce it!" And in the folklore that came down to me, though not in historical fact, the association of this line with Jackson as prime mover of "The Indian Removal Act" and "the Trail of Tears." That last part is highly historical and adds weight, in his legend, to Andy Jackson as good ol' populist, keeping his promises to his constituents, whatever the price and pain to other people: probably misapplying a phrase from Rudyard Kipling, the suffering of Other, "lesser breeds without the law."

            So, put the case that Robert Mueller has a Federal grand jury subpoena Trump to testify in a case of great importance to the Constitution and the Republic, and the subpoena controversy gets fought out in the courts pretty quickly up to the Supreme Court of the United States. And said Supreme Court tells Mr. Trump he must testify.

            And if his response is "What if I don't?"

            The first and obvious answer is "There will be a Constitutional Crisis." And if Trump responds that he was elected to shake things up, to by-pass the Deep State and its surface bureaucracy and the mare's nest of laws and regulations and customs that block the will of The People, his people? If he responds that he was elected precisely because he was a manly man like Old Hickory, who wins, in spite of the rules of a game rigged against him? That he is one warlock who will hunt the hunters (assuming that Trump knows what a warlock is and is capable of making a joke about a witch hunt).

            Or consider the possibility that Trump just fires Mueller and much of the Justice Department and pardons everyone in the Trumpian orbit charged with crime, including himself? Who will demand that the President respect the Rule of Law, and how many are willing — in Congress to start with — to offer a vigorous response to a Trumpian semi-rhetorical question, "And what if I just {say 'Screw You All!' and} don't?"

            One major reassurance that the American Republic isn't going the way of the Weimar has been that Trump et al. lack a private militia like Hitler's SA (or SS — though that gets complicated). The Tiki-Torch Trolls from Charlottesville and elsewhere don't seem like a major threat, and if they go up against some militarized police department or National Guard unit, they may find themselves bringing AR-15s to a drone fight. Okay, but the latest incarnation of Blackwater and other mercenary firms are around and ready for work, and in a USA that's well-stocked with firearms and smart phones, "flash mob" could take on dangerous meanings.

            As suggested by a caller to the NPR show 1A, it would be a good idea to gets statistics on support for Donald Trump in the various officer corps of the US military, and among our now all-volunteer rank-and-file. It's even more imperative, I think, to get statistics on the extent and depth of support for Mr. Trump among gun owners and, as a subset, gun owners who feel their primary loyalty is to Trump personally and the (White, Christian, straight, manly) American nation he is making great again, and not to some abstract American Republic and un-studied Constitution.

            The American Left and its allies talk a good game of questioning authority, intervening in discourses, disrupting business, and "Revolution Now!" If Trump asks, "What if I don't?" in obeying basic decencies and the rule of law, he may get strong enough support from the Right to get away with it — possibly through two terms or longer.

            Trump said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters." And that may be the case, especially if the shooting victim is Black or Muslim or an Enemy of the People. Certainly, he might offer a whole series of "What if I don't?" responses to demands upon him to obey or enforce the law, or to fulfil a number of boring, wimpy, conventions of everyday decency. 
           And to that question, our Leader and President for Life — or until he gets thoroughly bored — may get get no effective answer.

US School Dress Codes

The admirable NPR discussion show 1A recently had a discussion title, "When School Dress Codes Ban Students’ Bodies." The discussion elicited a lot of comments. Here is mine (lightly edited).

For many years back in the last third or so of the 20th c., the first assignment in my writing courses was "Clothes" ("Write about what you know about; write about what you care about"— and, oh boy, my students knew about clothes). What many of my students most wanted to write and talk about was high school dress codes. Here are some discussion questions we started out with.
=================================

Discussion/Opening Questions:
(1) John T. Molloy [in Dress for Success] says that "Dress codes can work." If you've been places with dress codes—have they worked? If so,
How have they worked? For whom? To what ends? If authority figures have given you different justifications for dress codes than Molloy gives, which justification(s), if any, do you believe? How could you test the theories?
(2) With "code" in the sense of "a set of rules for affecting behavior and/or allowing communication," there were dress codes at your high school, and there are codes at Miami U. at Oxford (MUO). At your high school, who set the rules? How were they enforced? At Miami, what rules have you inferred?
(3) Molloy finds college students prejudiced about clothes; is this true? Are you(se) more prejudiced than high school students or, from Molloy's comments anyway, business executives?

=================================

High school girls' having to kneel so adults in authority could judge the length of their dresses is mentioned in Jerry Farber's satiric essay from 1967 that you can look up under his name and "The Student as ...": "In some high schools, if your skirt looks too short you have to kneel before the principal in a brief allegory of fellatio." Farber's analysis was that dress codes are part of the larger function of American schooling in general to teach Obedience to Authority. What Farber missed in 1967 was that there are always social rules and that the key question are Who makes them, and How are they enforced? At the Oxford, OH, campus of Miami University, groups of students made the rules for their groups and enforced them through usually subtle, sometimes not, peer pressure. The strictness of student rules was clear in the shifts over time from backpack carrying over both shoulders to over one shoulder and than back to both shoulders. I counted 99/100 students obeying the rules, and a student tested the theory by wearing his backpack over both shoulders when the rule was one shoulder. He got looks but elicited a comment only when he buckled the waist straps: *that* was going too far. The one-shoulder rule was robust enough that a male student risked life and limb obeying it while riding a high racing bike in a strong wind next to a busy highway.

Revisiting "Affirmative Consent" at California Colleges

            In his commentary on the recent anti-anti-Semitism resolution of the University of California Board of Regents (Ventura County Star 10 April 2016), Tom Elias suggests watching the implementation of the resolution by University officials.

            There's a principle here to apply to California Senate Bill 967, the 2014 law requiring California's post-secondary schools to develop rules on sexual assault and related offenses, with a requirement for "An affirmative consent standard" to determine "whether consent was given" and the provision that "Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time."

            In some discussions of "affirmative consent," such provisions have been interpreted as requiring "'affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement […]' every step of the way," so I recommend reviewing how the law has been implemented, especially for cases other than vanilla sex between unmarried heterosexual undergraduates hooking up.

            Marital rape can and does occur, but what rules, if any, have officials written for the sex lives of married "students, faculty, and staff"?

            As a quick surf on the web can indicate, people play all sorts of sex games, and in the submission/domination set, the point sometimes is precisely lack of expressed permission. If affirmative consent rules primarily protect women from male predators, will gays and lesbians be allowed to play hardcore S&M games, but not heterosexuals with a male dominant? Such "protection" of women would be problematic.

            As with most regulation of sexual activity, the nitty-gritty, sexually explicit portions of SB-967 and its implementation will have relatively small practical effects. The writing of such laws and regulations, however, is crucial for the worthy effort to protect members of college communities and for the often less worthy extension of the claimed powers of the State over individual lives. 

              A sincere desire to protect "the virtue of our women" was part of the motivation for many of the "parietal regulations" of universities before the student activism of the 1960s. The activism of the 1960s had its problems in terms of gender — male macho and sexism — but we should not go back to the times when undergraduates were subject to what Michael Moffatt called "The Long, Hairy Arm of the Dean." And we definitely should not go to where married undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff have the sexual part of their sex lives micromanaged by college and university administrators and other agents of the State. 

              Effective enforcement of the laws against violence and violation is a better way than getting out a "Vade Mecum: Your Student Guide to Legally Safe Sex While in College," and young Americans, males especially, can be taught that "Yes means yes; no means no," and "Maybe" means back off for a good while. 

===============================

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES: Tom Elias, "UC anti-Semitism fight not over" and California Senate Bill 967, "Student safety: sexual assault," approved by the Governor 28 Sept. 2014 Section 67386 of California's Education Code

                  <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB967>

"Oh, Right; I'm the Mommy now": Mini-Epiphanies (24 March 2013)

         I'm not writing here about those "Eureka!" moments, grand epiphanies or satoris. I've never had grand anything, but I have had the little epiphanies: "ah-hah" moments or "Oh, yeah" moments — or "Oh, shit!" moments on something not just immediate and personal.

         A colleague of mine — call her Katarina for future reference — described hers at a shopping mall one day watching some unattended kids misbehaving. "Harrumph!" she thought, or maybe something stronger. "One of the mothers should do something about that." And then it hit her, "Oh, right; I'm the mommy now" — and she strode over and, figuratively, kicked some tween and teen ass.

         That's an important moment: when we realize we're "the mommy now" or, in unisex formulation, "the adult in the room," or at least the closest responsible person in the mall.

         My experience was somewhat different; it was having confirmed how difficult it could be for me to to be accepted as an adult, and as an authority.

         I started teaching with one course in Rhetoric 101 (College Comp/"Freshman English") at the University of Illinois at Urbana. I was twenty-three- or twenty-four-years old and 5'2" tall (say 157 cm.) and still had my hair, a fair amount of it and still dark. Since I got my course the Friday before classes started, I was definitely "low man in seniority" and ended up teaching in the Armory in a classroom that lacked not only air-conditioning but also ventilation. I arrived early and wore my three-piece weddings, funerals, and interviews suit. I got talking with a nice young woman waiting with me outside the classroom. Eventually:

         "Well," I finally said; "I guess we'd better go in."

         "Nah," she said; "we've got time."

         "I have a lot to write on the blackboard," I said.

         At which point she stepped back, looked me over, kind of pointed, and said with mild amused/bemused disbelief, "You're the teacher?!"

         "Why the hell else would I be in a three-piece suit in this heat?!" I responded. And I walked in.
         That student and I got along, and the class went fine, all things considered. For one thing, they were very tolerant of my ignorance and inexperience, and, well, just good people. Last day of class I took them out for a kind of class party at a local dive. You have one guess who alone of the group got stopped at the bar and had to show two pieces of ID and still got hassled to buy a beer.

         It could have been worse. My ID were legitimate, and I was an adult.

         Part of my entry into adulthood came at age seventeen or eighteen when I took over as president of a charity group and had to deal with a group of guys who'd embezzled the profits of a dance their high school fraternity had run and took off to Florida for a very long weekend. My previous job with the charity was what would later be called "Media Relations," and I was well aware that we couldn't afford the bad publicity of having the guys arrested. So we covered it up; most centrally, I covered up a really reprehensible theft. However, this was not exactly a loss of innocence for me.

         Much later in life, when I was one of "the older guys" on Miami University's Student Affairs Council, another faculty member and I were talking with one of "the younger guys": an Ayn-Rand Libertarian mostly, but a young person who'd just compromised and cut his first political deal. My colleague kidded the guy with an allusion to loss of virginity, and I started to throw in, "Yeah, I remember—" when my colleague cut me off with, "Rich, I don't know anything about your sex life, and God knows I don't want to know anything about your sex life, but politically, you were never a virgin."

         That's an overstatement, but OK; politically, by seventeen or eighteen, by the time I took over as president of that charity — I was no innocent.

         What the theft taught me, what dealing indirectly with the thieves taught me, was the important insight, "Everybody feels justified."

         That was a kind of "Oh, shit" moment.

         As Steven Pinker notes somewhere in his monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), it's a real problem that murderers and others who commit violent acts typically feel justified; indeed they are in their own minds moral people, doing justice upon their victims.

         Not everybody feels justified; some people feel guilt and remorse. But most of us, most of the time, do feel justified, even when we do bad things, even when, indirectly, we steal from crippled children.

         My second confirmation into adulthood came on 23 November 1963. I typed that correctly: 23 November, the day after President John F. Kennedy was murdered.

         I was saddened, and appalled by the murder of President Kennedy, but it didn't shake my vision in the universe or anything like that. Three American presidents had been assassinated before, President Lincoln quite famously; and I knew of the attempts to kill Franklin Roosevelt — and had been alive during the known attempt to kill President Truman. (I only learned of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang in researching this paragraph.) Anyway, however much some of my fellow citizens believed "It can't happen here," in my universe, such shit happened, and "It" — any "it" that happened elsewhere or in earlier times — could indeed "happen here" in the United States.

         Nah, what shook me up a bit was a petty thing, and personal with me.

         When Kennedy died, I put a black ribbon across the seal of our fraternity at the entrance of the house. I was a house officer and had the permission of the chapter president to do so, and it was the custom if we mourned the death of someone in the chapter. I thought we should make some gesture, and the single black ribbon was decorously restrained (the seal was inside).

         One of my fraternity brothers tore off the ribbon, primarily, it got back to me, to get back at me for a gesture he thought stupid — and in part just to hurt me.

         He later apologized, after other Greek houses on campus lowered their flags to half-staff and such, but he threw in that, yeah, he did what he had done mostly just to hurt me.

         This was my introduction to malice: doing harm to another without profit to oneself.
         I ended up writing my master's essay on malice among some of Shakespeare's major villains, and the idea of malice is pretty central to my dissertation. "Everyone feels justified" — or many of us do, much of the time, even when we shouldn't — and "Some people are just no damn good," or, more exactly, many of us will act maliciously, hurting others while not helping ourselves. Or not helping ourselves except insofar as we feed our pride.

         And just how dangerous that occasional maliciousness can be was taught to me by a former student, after he'd graduated and had gone to law school and — before moving to the really big show of international law — served as a small-town Ohio attorney. A young man himself at the time, the attorney told me that his father had never hit him but that as a child and teenager he had feared his father. He had clients, though, who really lived the dumb-ass slogan "No Fear." When I wrote him and checked my memory of what he had said, he wrote back that some of his clients "had no fears or boundaries … they feared no person or adult figure … (one guy, Robert "Rip-Off" Jones was heard to say (moments before his death by gun), 'I'm not afraid of you or your gun.'" These guys "were largely socialized by the streets" and "having no fear was part of their problem, and definitely a problem for others."

         It's definitely a problem for others when "No Fear" and no limits are combined in a large human being with desires to lash out suddenly or (and ethically worse) act with a cold-blooded malice.
         It's probably a good thing none of these guys — or their little sisters — were in the group my colleague Katarina confronted at the mall. I'm not sure many guys with no limits would find themselves saying, "Oh, right; I'm the Daddy now" and start setting limits for others.

         That's a depressing thought, and I won't end on it.

         For another thing I've learned, in an "oh, yeah" moment while reading depressing books on human nastiness — another insight that comes through is, "Well, yeah, but most of us most of the time feel justified because we're doing OK." All of us, at one time or another, can do some really bad shit; but, again, most of us, most of the time, don't.

         I'm sure the first class I taught sensed my fear and noted that I looked sixteen — but they cut me some slack. Sometimes, most of us, can be downright kind.

Teaching Kids to Fail: Another Weird One I'm Kind of For (30 Jan. 2014)

            Okay, I don't think we should teach kids to fail in the sense of encouraging them to fail but in the sense of helping kids learn how to deal with failure. And it's not like parents and teachers, coaches and other adults have to work out failure exercises: when appropriate, just step back and let the kids fail, or succeed, on their own and if they fail, as they say, "be there for them."
            (Usage note: To "be there for someone" means being there, available, not getting hyperactively pro-active on their asses and pushing upon them your aid and comfort.)
            There's a personal story here, as there is with a lot of writing, and this one I'll share. It's a fairly long story, and I'll be meandering to my point, but that's pretty typical of my writing, and I promise I'll get to failure and maybe say a couple other things of note along the way.
            Anyway, senior year in high school, my friend Dan and I found ourselves helping put together the annual new member initiation ceremony for our school's chapter of The National Honor Society (NHS). This was a long time ago, and if I ever knew how Dan and I got roped into the job, I've long since forgotten; but it was nothing onerous, and he and I were up on stage during a tech rehearsal, each holding a copy of the pamphlet from the National office on what was to be done, and our advisor standing around bothering no one as the school orchestra played their one required piece of music, a "March of the Priests" number, I think the one in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida.
            Into this silent, on-stage tableau trundled Mrs. Wilkinson, the Senior Class Advisor and a teacher of long tenure at the school: in Dan's words recently — picture Chris Christie in drag. Mrs. Wilkinson was heading toward the National Honor Society advisor, a new teacher at the school, which is why she had an assignment advising the local NHS chapter, which pretty much did nothing except induct new members and give smart students something nice for our "permanent records."
            Why, Mrs. Wilkinson demanded, was the orchestra playing what I'll call "March of the Priests" and not "Pomp and Circumstances"? She was not talking to me. She was … not tossing the question but pretty much hurling it like a Roman javelin at the NHS advisor, the new teacher.
            I took the question as an actual question and stepped between Mrs. Wilkinson and our advisor, script in hand, and said, "It's 'March of the Priests' because that's what the National initiation calls for, not 'Pomp and Circumstances.'"
            After forty years in the Ed Biz and other bureaucracies and general contexts of human interaction, I can look back and say confidently that what was going on had little to do with music — part of the reason I don't care much if I err in getting the music titles wrong — and much to do with status and a dominance hierarchy. Between two women, such acts are sometimes analyzed as "Queen-Bee Syndrome," but the more exact analogy (with maybe some homology thrown in) is with a large wolf pack. Mrs. Wilkinson certainly saw herself as an analog to the alpha-bitch, and I will use "alpha-bitch" as a term from animal behavior; women readers who have had experiences similar to that of the young teacher may apply "bitch" here with more loaded meanings.
            Anyway, I wasn't being gallant, just naïve, but found myself between Mrs. Wilkinson in medium-high dudgeon and her initial target — with me as a replacement target of opportunity for my effrontery in asserting "it's in the script" as a warrant more powerful than the preferences and will of Mrs. Wilkinson.
            And Dan came to my defense at least as far as looking at his copy and saying something like, "Uh, yeah; it's in the script."
            We were both in trouble.
            This turned out to be a good thing in the long run since my parents didn't have enough experience in such matters to help me out, so I asked Dan's mother, who was highly knowledgeable about psychology. (We had a functioning neighborhood, and Dan and I were raised by it.) Eventually, Dan's mom gave me the crucial bit of information for dealing with such situations: "You have to remember that Mrs. Wilkinson is a very stupid woman," and she gave us the good advice of taking great care in dealing with stupid people in power, however ambiguous it was what power — beyond locker assignments — the Senior Class Advisor had over anybody or anything.
            For sure, Mrs. Wilkinson had enough power to call Dan and me into her office. The new teacher wasn't summoned, and I suspect Mrs. Wilkinson forgot about her while she had Dan and me to properly subordinate.
            I got to her office early, and while we waited for Dan, Mrs. Wilkinson tried to put me at ease by telling me a mildly anti-Semitic joke. She then lit into me with "Why don't you ever take part in school activities?!" I did not point out that National Honor Society was arguably a school activity, and if I hadn't participated in it, I wouldn't be there in her office. What I did point out was that I was fairly active in Key Club but acknowledged that she was correct that I put most of my efforts into groups outside the school.
            "I can never be elected principal," I said.
            Not that I wanted to be principal or the head of any organization, but "I want my views taken seriously; I want clout" — this was Chicago, after all — "and I can't have influence or any authority as a school pupil." So I participated in a year club and a high school fraternity and was an officer in the charity group the fraternity was a part of.
            Warming to my point, if that's the phrase — and getting to my point here — I asked rhetorically about the importance of the tune to which NHS initiates marched down the aisles to get their certificates. Indeed, "Would people be starving in the streets if we messed up the whole assembly?" And then I stated my other reason for not putting my major extracurricular efforts into school-sponsored activities: "You won't let us fail, not if you can help it. So we really can't succeed." Also — I'm not sure how much of this argument I made to Mrs. Wilkinson — also, one needs to learn how to fail, as I well knew since the charity organization in which I did have influence and authority had recently had a pretty big failure and that particular buck, or small steaming bucket of shit, had stopped with me.
            And then Dan arrived, and we performed the required obeisance to Mrs. W. and her authority, and that was the end of the episode.
            Some fifty-three years later, I'll stick with what I believed at seventeen or eighteen. If you really can't fail, you really can't succeed either. If kids don't get experience handling failure, they've missed an important part of an education. This does not mean leaving it up to your two-year-old whether or not to play in traffic. It does mean that somewhere along the line in high school, kids should be encouraged to assume authority and take responsibility; and, if people won't be starving in the streets or some other horrible result would ensue — allowed the freedom to fail.

The Universe of Power is Lumpy, and Identity Is Complex (4 Feb. 2014)

 In academic jargon from the late 20^th century, I can put the Basic point here fairly succinctly: Outside of the simplest societies, and in ways highly sensitive to context, human beings are multiply and complexly situated, with different status- and power-positions in a number of hierarchies of class, caste, age, profession, etc. — in modern times (say 1500 CE-present) often including race.
            Coming down out of high abstraction, this means that if you're Oprah Winfried, you could be refused a close look at a $38,000 purse at the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich, Switzerland, because you are Black; and it may've taken you longer to become a billionaire than if you were a man — but you can find yourself at a boutique for the upper .01% in Zurich, and you can conceive of a handbag running $38,000. It means that if you're Carlos Estavez visiting Oxnard, California, from the Santa Barbara Film Festival, you're less likely to be shot or beaten by our local cops than if you weren't also Charlie Sheen.
            Putting the matter in terms of my personal experience, this —
            One winter holiday season a couple decades back, I was happily surprised to find a card in my mailbox from my editor at Miami University student newspaper, The Miami Student. "Happy Holidays!" the card company wished me, and my editor added a few lines of her own. "Hope all goes well, blah blah. So happy to have had your column for The Student. I'm dropping your column." And then she ended with a sentence or two that I shouldn't worry about the newspaper because she'd found another member of the faculty to replace me, and he was, as I well knew, just a great guy, an incredibly popular teacher in my department, and, she was sure, a most excellent writer.
            Over the next couple of days, I showed the card around, and one of my colleagues joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I just might write one for her since she showed the tact and sensitivity I'd come to associate with editors. (Like many authors, I saved and occasionally savored the more notable of the rejection letters I'd received. The most memorable is still the one I got at the very start of my scholarly career: the editor of PMLA was kind enough to include some comments from the first, and only, reader of a long essay I submitted, a comment that began, "Very interesting opening paragraph, before the whole thing falls flat.")
            As you've probably anticipated, I soon received another letter from the editor of The Miami Student — a note, anyway — requesting a letter of recommendation.
            I was at my office typewriter, I think (it may've been a computer keyboard), composing my response to her, when she stopped at my door, put her head in, and asked me in person for the letter; and I told her to come all the way in and repeated to her what had been the joke that I just might write the letter.
            She was somewhat taken aback, and we get to the point of this story for my point here. "Oh," she replied. "It didn't occur to me I could hurt the feelings of a" (White male?) "professor."
            So I explained to her, in nonfigurative terms, how rejection hurts coming from just about anyone, but that "The universe of power is lumpy" and in this context she was the editor, I was — had been — a staff writer, and she the person with power.
            The upshot, if you're interested, is that I think I did write a brief "RecLet" and (I'm almost positive) she got whatever the RecLet recommended her for. The colleague whose column replaced mine was indeed a hotshot, and sufficiently one that he soon stopped submitting columns to The Student and then moved on to a better job.
            In a similar line, as English Department Student Mediator — i.e., the guy who handled complaints from students — I had to deal with a couple of young women teaching assistants brought up feminist in the era stressing the all-pervasive power of patriarchy. And they couldn't believe that they could hurt, or mess over, a male student. Whether or not they had done so is something I wouldn't reveal if I remembered, and I certainly don't remember. And it's irrelevant. "The universe of power is lumpy," and in their classrooms, most immediately embedded in the student/teacher relationship — most especially as in grades — they held the upper hand.
            Furthermore, at that place and time if their students had threatened them outside the classroom, relying upon the students' status as Whites and males and large and (in one case) a jock, the full police powers of the University and State would have enforced the power of the TA's. However much the cops and coaches might have held them in contempt as women and "civilians," academics and intellectuals, their status in the classroom would have trumped other concerns: the Establishment protects the Establishment, and as Miami U teachers they were part of the local Establishment.
            Centrally, though, were the grades, which were assigned by "The Instructor of Record," which — short of some very fancy and difficult-to-execute bureaucratic footwork — even a lowly Teaching Assistant was. And, once assigned, the grade was the grade, and only the instructor of record or a court order could change it.
            While explaining that they were the power-holders here, I could identify with these young women. I hadn't believed it my first couple semesters as a TA: it took me a while to realize The Power of the Grade.
            As a new teacher in my twenties, my previous experience dealing with freshman had been in my fraternity, where we kept the pledges somewhat uninformed on just who could do what to them — and most of them suspected that I, as a chapter officer, could have them "racked out": with a "rack-out" an extended periods of late-night strenuous Physical Training of the sort Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket would immortally formalize as, "I will PT you all until you fucking die! I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!" Additionally, some suspected — as I learned from a really drunken pledge who pleaded with me not to — some thought we might paddle them. Actually, we didn't paddle pledges, and I personally lacked authority to order a rackout, although I probably could have arranged one if I worked at it, and I certainly could have had a pledge put on one of our nastier work assignments. ("There is more than one way to skin a cat; none of which are pleasant for the cat" — and the grease trap in a large kitchen often needs cleaning.)
            My previous experience dealing with frosh was with guys who thought I could punish them, possibly significantly, and that is what counts: they showed me respect, or at least took care to be deferential outside of ritualized "Saturnalian" pledge entertainments, where they were invited to insult actives. What I had never encountered from pledges in the fraternity was servility, and when I encountered servility in the classroom, it disturbed me.
            I finally said to a class, "Look, I'm maybe five, six years older than most of you; I look younger than half of you; I'm 5'2" tall and 135 pounds, and most of you can beat me up — why the servility?!?" And they reminded me about my giving them grades.
            And I told them that I was an ethical person and really wanted them to argue with me and did actually grade "blind," not looking at the names of the students who'd written the essays and I respected integrity … and, yeah, I gave the grades.
            "The universe of power is lumpy" and a little Jew who got asked to show multiple ID's in bars that sold my students beer without question — I had to work to keep a fair number of students from high-power, hydraulic sucking up.
            Later on in my career, when linguistic "morÄ“s" loosened, I had my students consider the implications of expressions like "to brown-nose" and "suck up to" and consider the fact that if they prostituted their ideas for a grade that made me (figuratively) a professorial "john." But that was later, about the time of my "mediation" service at Miami U and having to explain to a new generation of teachers, especially young women, the variation on the theme by Stan Lee that even with a little bit of power comes responsibility, starting with the responsibility of admitting that in some contexts even members of otherwise oppressed groups can have power.
            Larger issues are involved, though, with that lumpy universe of power, some of them depressing.
            At my fraternity, some wise-ass (who might've been me) illustrated the principle of seniority and hierarchy with a posted drawing of a multi-storey outhouse, imaging the bureaucratic and more generally sociological meaning of the adage "Shit flows down hill."
            That principle can move into the horrific in contexts like the Jewish Police and community councils in too many cases during the Hitlerian Holocaust, or the problems slave women would have found looking for sisterly solidarity from the wives of their masters or even their widowed mistresses. Or with gang leaders in ghettos and barrios having tremendous local power, even if they might have trouble hailing a cab (if their armored Humvee is in the shop) and probably won't apply for membership in "The City Club" — although their children or grandchildren might well be asked to join.
            And here I will stop on that line of thought since it leads back to European ghettos and those Jewish police, death camp Kapos, and tales of survival and complicity I can only think about briefly. So I'm going to tone down the emotional stress and put things a bit more positively —

            If not all, then at least most effective politics is coalition politics, and in an era of "identity" politics effective coalition building is helped by reminding people that their identities are complex and that identity itself is malleable and contextual.
            My personal personal story here is a quick one, from a time I had been about a week in Tokyo and caught myself looking for Black people. Why was I looking for Black people? Well, as an American in Tokyo, I was definitely gaijin, a foreigner, and I found myself feeling like a foreigner and looking for other gaijin, and for sure a Black person would (1) stand out in a crowd, (2) be gaijin, and (3) likely be American. I wasn't the only one feeling that way. A South Korean businessman sort of picked me up and bought me dinner. He was interesting to talk to, but I wondered what the agenda here might be. It was simple; he'd been in Japan for several months was not just gaijin but Korean gaijin, and he just wanted to talk to a fellow foreigner and someone who wouldn't view him with just a touch of something hard to pin down. The people he'd dealt with hadn't been racists, exactly, nor xenophobes nor jingoistic; it was just that for them there were Japanese and gaijin, and Koreans were definitely gaijin, and that was that. Random Blacks on the street, this South Korean businessman, and I were in the same group.
            Another story is less personal, but still low-key and small-scale.
            There was a radio interview I can't cite but recall well in which a young feminist scholar studied a Black church where young women were trying to change things and were running into resistance from their elders, women as well as men. Why would the older women side with the men and oppose an attempt to democratize the church in ways that would give women an equal voice in running the church? Why would the old women reject a voice in hiring ministers and establishing the liturgy and, well, moving the church into the future?
            Why wouldn't these old women join with the young ones to gain power to innovate, or just to do things?
            If you've ever dealt with a group of organized old women, you have guessed by now that they knew exactly what they were doing.
            The reforms that would've given church-women in general more power would have given the old ladies of the "amen corner" less, more exactly, less where it mattered to them. They liked the church the way it was, thank you, and didn't want changes. They lacked the power to innovate, but they had the power to block: a near-absolute power to veto. They couldn't hire the minister — or get a female one — but they sure as hell could get a minister fired, and the one after him and the one after him until they got a leadership that knew not to cross them.
            Increased democratic power for women in that church generally would've meant less of the power for the old women particularly.
            On the other hand, moving from a memory of a sociological story to a memory of a fictional one — there's a minor but important theme in Suzy McKee Charnas's searing feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World (1974). The book shows a world ruled by men in which women are enslaved. That's literally enslaved and brutally enslaved. Still, Walk reminds us that patriarchy isn't rule by men, as such, but rule by some men, the patriarchs: older men with power. It's inferable in the world of Walk that the majority of men would find it in their interest to ally with the enslaved women to depose the patriarchs and democratize their world.
            That ain't gonna happen in Walk to the End of the World. Even as poor Whites and poor Blacks in the real-world USA rarely allied to resist the plantation owners and other power elites, the oppressed young men and the women we see in Walk aren't going to ally. "The universe of power is lumpy" implies that those with power who stay in power keep themselves united and keep opponents or just serious competitors from getting together: divide et impera as they used to say in Latin, "Divide and rule"; if you're already ruling, break up every threatening concentration of power as it forms, preventing competing "lumps."
            More exactly, if you are ruling and wish to continue doing so, you prevent concentration of power that might compete with you. The ideal is to maintain your big lump of power while those below you form groups that you get competing with each other: slashing up and grinding down each other.
            And powerful groups will continue to divide, conquer, and rule so long as so many people, even highly educated and politicized teaching assistants, are unconscious of most of the game.
            So, MORAL to all this: power clumps in weird ways and anyone sufficiently privileged to be literate and reading an essay belongs to some groups who have power and other groups that don't. Ethical political behavior is largely using one's positions of power to help get power and the goodies it brings distributed more equitably. The beginning of such ethical behavior is understanding that the universe of power is lumpy and figuring out where in it one is privileged to be in an empowered lump.

            Next comes a "Basic" not worth an essay, but the one thing I ever said liked by an ethicist colleague of mine: "A lot of morality is learning to direct your aggression up the hierarchy, not down it" — with, I'll add, occasional angled and lateral shots going for appropriate "lumps."

Authority: Academic and Other (8 Feb. 2014)

"… you will respect my authoritah!" — Eric Cartman

            In Joe Haldeman's classic SF/Vietnam-War novel The Forever War (1972 f. — the composition dates are complicated), there's a dialog between newly-minted Major William Mandella and Colonel Jack Kynock, Mandella's "Temporal Orientation Officer" (it has been a long war, involving moving humans through the galaxy faster than light, so time within the novel also gets complicated).
            Relevant here is Kynock's discussion with Mandella of Mandella's psychology, about which Kynock may know more than Mandella, since he's seen Mandella's profile, which is too highly classified for the eyes of a mere major. Mandella questions his own competence for command, and Kynock tells him that, actually, Mandella does "have a certain potential" for leadership. "But it would be along the lines of a teacher or minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll made a hell of a bad officer unless you shape up" (opening of part IV, "Major Mandella").
            That is, "shape up" from the point of view of the Army.
            I found this dialog interesting on more than esthetic grounds. I had been a member of both a high school and college fraternity, had considered a military career, and I ended up teaching. The fraternity experience — the college part at least — I'll weave in and out of this essay. My potential military career story starts with my taking two years of high school ROTC, and then quitting in part because I had stopped growing at 5'2" and, at least at that time, I was two inches too short to be an officer in any of the military services of the United States. I was simultaneously, however, two inches too tall to be "4F" and "unsuitable for military service": so I still had to take two years of college ROTC, face getting my ass drafted and sent to Vietnam, and couldn't even be a cadet platoon sergeant, 'cause it'd look silly to have a platoon march with so short a man in a visible position. I did not have a good attitude toward the University of Illinois ROTC requirement.
            Still, I appreciated getting introduced to history in college ROTC, and spending a few hours a week in a quasi-military context was useful for my fraternity work. I could advise new-initiate active brothers to be alert in ROTC before they dealt with pledges; new initiates, I advised, should imitate the regular Army officers and NCOs and avoid acting like the cadet officers: i.e., they should be polite and confident and not assholes on their way to being fragged by their own troops — although a US-led hot war in Vietnam with fragged second-lieutenants mostly came later. (Not to say that a variety of unfriendly fire bringing down over-eager second lieutenants was something new with Vietnam, but "fragging" as a term was new.)
            Anyway, I took note of the behavior of regular Army officers because I was and am somewhat like William Mandella, but just somewhat; Mandella may be a nicer person than I am — and Joe Haldeman is a much nicer person. In part, I did want to impose my will on other guys, though surprised when I got away with it.
            A new initiate once asked me, "'Lich, what would you have done if one of us pledges hadn't obeyed you?" I paused and said, "Oh. (beat) That never occurred to me." And then I waited another beat until the irony became obvious, and I laughed and admitted to mild amazement each time I was obeyed. The trick, I explained to the guy, is to give an order courteously and sounding like it never crossed your mind that you'd be told to fuck off. And then I passed on that advice to emulate regular Army officers and avoid acting like the cadet variety. (The eventually fragged Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House [1978] had real-world antecedents.)
            So from the frat angle I was interested in authority, and also as a new student of history and just beginning student of human behavior. Older boys and young men are fairly easy to order around, but they're mostly used to taking orders from their parental-age elders. It takes a bit of doing to condition pledges to accept authority from other guys pretty much their own age and additional effort to get active brothers to accept the authority of people they live with, know, and have elected.
            I was intrigued that pledges would take my orders and actives (mostly) follow the rules; and when we had to come up with a new pledge policy after one particularly disastrous semester, I worked with the group devising new policies, even doing a bit of research.
            And, what the hell, I was also interested in my own psychology since I got off as much as the next guy — or almost; we had a couple or three really weird brothers — ahem, I was interested because this side of downright pathology I got off as much as most on the "S" part of the old frat-lodge S&M fun and games.
            As the 1960s wore on though, and as I started my teaching career, my concerns got more serious.
            With the 1960s wearing on, so did the Vietnam War; and, more personally, I saw violence much less deadly but much, much closer to home — I was in Chicago for the riots of 1968 — and I started reading on violence and on authority, most especially Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1963 f. studies of, as stated in the title of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority.
            Less sensationally, I found myself "behind the big desk" in classrooms and in authority, and uncomfortable.
            I had no problem with imposing my will on pledges if I could: I never ordered them to do anything really wrong (for which the next part would not be justification), and they really did have the choice to say "fuck you" to me and follow that up with "and just fuck it!" and depledge. There was strong social pressure to stick with pledging, and moving would be inconvenient; but it could be done.
            All the courses I taught when I started teaching were required courses, and if my students dropped my section, there could be bigger inconveniences than moving from a fraternity into a dorm: like not getting into another section and slowing down their "satisfactory progress toward the degree" and, in some cases, putting in danger a scholarship or a draft deferment.
            More was at stake, and giving a low grade offered me no straight-forward Thomas Hobbesian "sudden glory" or Marquis de Sadean kick from imposing my will on — as in harming — other people. From my high school fraternity on, the bigger kick for me was to indirectly "impose […] ideas on other people," to get them to do what I wanted them to do, by convincing them to do it.
            Or getting them to believe the truth of my interpretation of … whatever.
            I wanted the students to respect and accept my authority as a teacher, but my authority, as someone who knew the material and could help them learn it and pick up some handy skills (like writing and critical thinking).
            Do note my arrogance here: I wanted to be respected for my authority, for what I knew and could do and to teach. I wanted respect for my personal authority, a variety not given me and enforced by the University and the State, but authority totally mine. I did not want subservience from students because as "instructor or record" I would assign each a grade.
            First off, subservience from students as students kind of disgusted me. I hadn't gotten subservience from pledges in either my high school nor college fraternity, and by the time I started teaching it was "been there, done that" for getting obedience. More important perhaps, in the classroom the bureaucratic "authority" of the grade (etc.) undermined my authority as a scholar and teacher and intellectual. I couldn't be sure if I'd convinced a student, or if the student went along with my ideas just to suck up.
            I suspect most of the students also couldn't be sure. Certainly, one guy said in class, looking a little shaken, "I'll write whatever it takes to get an 'A' …; I guess that makes me kind of a whore."
            Uh, yeah.
            I'm not a Christian or a Platonist, and I do not celebrate Mind over body — or even separate the two; but if it is wrong to prostitute one's body for a grade, to suck up to an instructor physically, it is also wrong — if more socially and academically acceptable — to prostitute one's integrity by pretending to agree when one isn't convinced.
            Now there's no problem if a good Christian student starts off an essay with a phrase like, "In a secular, materialist (godless and probably damnable) reading …" — and goes on to apply that approach to a literary text or an issue in history or a problem in evolutionary biology. Indeed, it would be unethical for an instructor to downgrade for such an opening: one can insist that a student know something or other, not that a student believe. As John Stuart Mill stated in a particularly strong illustration of the principle, "[…] there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them." Similarly, it would've been okay if one of my devout Freudian instructors insisted on my handing in a rigorous Freudian reading of, say, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, provided s/he had no problem with a brief cover note noting that I found ideological Freudianism, let's say unpersuasive (let's not say in addition, at least not on a cover letter, "and pernicious as clinical psychology and a little creepy").
            Haldeman's Major William Mandella is a better man than I am because he would want "to lead from empathy, compassion" as a primary motivation. I approve of empathy and compassion, but I'm a bit more into the arrogance of thinking I have something to say — obviously, since I write essays — and as a teacher I was pretty sure I had useful things to teach. That is the sort of authority I wanted acknowledged. I wanted not so much to impose my ideas on my students or anyone else but to have those ideas respected: listened to, considered, thought about, and respected enough to challenge.

            I know and knew that if my teaching didn't lead to credits and grades and a diploma, that I would've had precious few students and soon no job — and might've gotten punched out on my way to be fired. Still, I didn't like that kind of external authority because it undermined authority I that is — so long as my mind holds — intrinsic to me.