adventures

No one, absolutely no one, likes a censor

After a full day’s worth of working in the home office, we went out for a brief bike ride. I’m still taking it easy, so I did not push hard on the pedals, except when going uphill. And I stayed out of the drops, until the very end of the ride, when I decided to see what that’d feel like. I quickly decided to not do that. My back and I are in careful and close consultation throughout this recovery period.

We saw the sheep, though.

Then, just a few miles from home, we lost the sun.

A few farms later, we found it once again.

It was a 14-mile ride. And another easy one. It was just nice to be outside. Perfect gilet weather, too.

Last night a colleague in Texas shared with me a photo from a mutual colleague in Indiana, which I am assured is a real place, though I’ve never heard of it. The photo was a letter, an incredibly abrasive pink slip. The recipient of that letter had shared it himself, and this was part of a series of events that will be a national story by tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.

What happened, the student media adviser at Indiana University was fired. The incendiary letter framed the dismissal as a “lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the University’s direction for the Student Media Plan is unacceptable,” but this is a move toward censorship. My colleague was fired for doing his job: standing in defense against censorship.

Here’s the first story written in the professional Indy Star, fittingly written by First Amendment reporter Cate Charron, a former editor-in-chief of the IDS. And, most importantly, here are the current editors of the highly regarded, and directly impacted, Indiana Daily Student.

Media School Dean David Tolchinsky terminated Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush on Tuesday afternoon after he refused to censor the Indiana Daily Student.

Ahead of our Oct. 16 newspaper, which was to include a Homecoming guide inside, the Media School directed us to print no news in the paper, an order blatantly in defiance of our editorial independence and the Student Media Charter.

“… nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage,” read Rodenbush’s Oct. 7 email to the IDS co-editors-in-chief, relaying the IU Media School’s directive.

Telling us what we can and cannot print is unlawful censorship, established by legal precedent surrounding speech law on public college campuses.

Administrators ignored Rodenbush, who said he would not tell us what to print or not print in our paper. In a meeting Sept. 25 with administrators, he said doing so would be censorship.

“How do we frame that, you know, in a way that’s not seen as censorship?” Ron McFall, assistant dean of strategy and administration at the Media School, asked in that meeting.

Read the whole thing; it’s quite the stinging letter aimed at the Media School and the university as a whole.

We’ve been gone from there for two-plus years, so I know the prologue, but not the details of what’s transpired recently. I know what I’ve read, how the faculty have no trust in the university president, how everyone on campus still has an acid taste in their mouths after being under a sniper rifle last year, how the university is desperately trying to make the president’s plagiarism problem go away, and how the university is intent on reshaping itself in modern social contexts. (Indiana is a long, long, long way from Herman B. Wells.) I know those things from following the work of the IU student media.

I also know those people. Rodenbush, the now fired adviser, I worked alongside for about five years. That dean? I gave him a tour of the Media School when he was applying for the job. The last quote from that other guy? That quote makes perfect sense coming from him. Go read that again.

There are others in the Media School apparently involved, who are, frankly, not worth the time to type about.

Much will be made of budget issues. In the last few years, for budget reasons, the paper has endured staff cuts and slashed production runs. But student newsrooms are first and foremost learning laboratories. You must allow the students the opportunity to learn to produce so that they are adequately, appropriately, prepared. The building that houses the IDS has a tremendous print newsroom, three television studios, a half-dozen or so podcast studios and even more editing suites. You teach people their craft in these spaces. And, at Indiana, they have always learned it well. I can’t tell you how many Hearst Awards have been won under the IDS masthead, or how many Pulitzer Prize careers the newspaper has launched in its 158 years.

I can tell you this. Now, for editorial reasons, they’re killing the newsprint altogether. Hours after they fired Rodenbush, the university canceled the paper’s print run.

This is a laughable demonstration of university censorship, by any measure. This was a letter the editors wrote today:

The Media School is more focused on censorship than real solutions for student media. Is this really the best use of the university’s resources? Or of ours? Editorial decisions, including the contents of our print product, firmly lie in the hands of the students.

This is not about print. This is about a breach of editorial independence. If IU decides certain types of content are “bad for business,” what stops them from prohibiting stories that hold them to account on our other platforms?

None of this surprises me. I worked in student media for 15 years, including at IU. I defended outlets against censorship, including at IU. I know the low regard that some in The Media School have for student media. There’s often a tension between student media and a university administration, particularly an administration of small caliber. All of this is sad and unfortunate and inappropriate and illegal, but it is not unpredictable.

Jim Rodenbush, who is a real pro, knew this was turning bad. His firing is unfortunate for him and his family, but he’s a great colleague and good at what he does; he won’t be down long.

The student-journalists at IU will suffer. In fact, they already are.

Think of them. They are college students. They have a full course load. Some of them work jobs. They also have lives and responsibilities and their own amusements and problems. They spend some (sometimes a lot) of their free time learning their craft in student-media. They do this in public. They learn in public. They make their mistakes in public. They are often very impressive. They deserve respect. Instead, these people, at 20- or 21-years old feel as if they have targets on their backs. placed there by university and school administrators, people that seemingly do not understand journalism, censorship, the First Amendment, or the true value of student-journalists.

The student body, indeed, the city itself will lose out. Bloomington is almost a newspaper desert at this point. Public media, devastated nationally, is under all sorts of transitions on that campus — who knows what becomes of that. Major media is an hour up the road.

And now, the famed Indiana Daily Student — the third largest employer on campus, winner of 25 Pacemaker Awards (the collegiate equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and previously an incredible recruiting tool — has been reduced to a website and an app.

Letters are being written. IDS alumni are distributing a joint protest letter for signatures. There’s a formal alumni association letter in the works. The journalism faculty will speak up soon, I assume. The name of the great Ernie Pyle, the most famous IDS alumnus, will be invoked. The Student Press Law Center is poised. The story has just begun.

Students will cover it.

adventures / football / history / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — No Comments
14
Oct 25

Between Saturday and the Revolutionary War

This is how my back feels. I carefully squatted down to pick up my mostly empty backpack. I put my mostly empty backpack on my home office chair. I slipped my laptop and my notebook inside. I zipped it up and carried it downstairs. Because I was being helpful, I went back upstairs I did the same for my lovely bride’s backpack. Same procedure, squat, chair, laptop, two notebooks, zipped it. I carried it downstairs. And there near the end of that little trip the muscles around my shoulder where this little incision suggested they might not like me to do that anymore.

So I did not.

How it works this semester is that we drive to one building, where she has her classes, and I drop her off. Then I drive over to the building where our office is, and where my classes are. There’s a parking deck right behind it. (We have, probably, the best parking arrangement on campus.) I go to whatever floor, park, and then walk down the stairs, around the side of the building and about half a block to the door. Up the elevator to the office, and so on. And about the time I got off the elevator, I didn’t want to carry my bag for a while.

Again, this is basically an intense pulled muscle sort of sensation. A “hey, you really shouldn’t” kind of thing. And I am fortunate in that I can obliged that feeling, follow the doctor’s advice and still do the things I need to.

Which, today, was class. In Criticism in Social Media we talked about this story which was OK enough to make two or three small points on. And we also talked about this story, which was worth a bit more dissection. Back with Dodgers, emotional Freddie Freeman details son’s health scare:

Max woke on July 22 with a slight limp and went into full paralysis four days later, prompting Freeman to rush home from a series at the Houston Astros. By Wednesday, doctors removed Max from his ventilator.

Five days after that, Freeman was back in the Dodgers’ lineup for the start of a three-game series with the Philadelphia Phillies, playing first base and batting third. He finished 1-for-4 in the Dodgers’ 5-3 win and was greeted by a long standing ovation before his first at-bat. The Phillies joined the applause from their dugout. The pitch clock was stopped as he stepped out of the batter’s box, removed his helmet and waved to the crowd, before then touching his right hand to his chest.

“I was doing OK tipping my hat and then my dad was sitting first row with my stepmom, and he was — I don’t know if I could call it crying, but he was choked up and teary-eyed,” Freeman said. “That’s what really got me going.”

Max spent eight days in a pediatric intensive care unit before being discharged Saturday. The next day, he began physical therapy.

At my next opportunity, I’m going to have to pick a few stories that aren’t emotional stories, lest I give my class the wrong idea about this. And looking at some of the documentaries I’ve selected for later in the semester … I need to do that soon.

In Organizational Communication in Sports my normal slide deck theme gave away to egregious fandom. And since Auburn got ripped off Saturday — this was one of about four games I’ve watched in three years, and what a clown car the whole thing has become — I turned it into hating on fans. My hope was that it would make for a comedic, and memorable, conversation. So it started with this.

I rather like that shaker theme, though. So I put up all sorts of unflattering photos of Georgia fans — I won’t reproduce them here, but they’re out there — and talked through Social Identity Theory. There was one photo of a Georgia fan, in his best Georgia t-shirt (it only had three stains on it) proudly shaking hands with some klansmen. Then I said, “whereas my guys are good Christian boys.” And here’s a shot of a big chunk of the team praying in the end zone. “And patriotic?” Boy you’ve got no idea!” And then there’s a shot of them celebrating with some ROTC students. It just went on like this for a while, talking about the cognitive choices of Social Identity Theory, the purpose of it all, the In-Group / Out-Group nature of sports. Most of this we all inherently know, but some days you get to put a name and some scholastic explanation to things.

I pointed out that, of course this is unfair. I’m cherry picking these guys in outlandish ways to try to make a point. You can do this with any fan base if you want to. It’s just easier with some then others.

We talked about Presentation of Self, which let me show people dressed up all nice for something as silly as a football game. We talked about Goffman’s notions of front stage and back stage. We talked about social identity as our fandom extends beyond the venue. Look, I’m wearing this tie, and this tasteful lapel pin, and so on. And then we came around to highly identified fans, and I talked about the most highly identified fans I know. And that’s where I played clips of Bama fans.

I ended it with mascots. Here’s a shot of 11-time mascot of the year Aubie in a library. And here’s Rowan’s mascot, with the way the university describe’s Who R U on his own page: fierce, ready to attack, full of aspirations and expectations. I dug up a shot of Rowan’s next football opponent’s mascot, a big black bear that’s goofy in the appropriate sort of mascot ways. Pio is his name, and his site says this bear represents the values and attributes of their students: gritty, confident, persevering, fun-loving and the first in the family to attend college.

Because, ya know, he’s a bear, and not a lot of bears go on to higher education.

The Yankee came to see what that lecture turned into. She said it went well. Said she might steal some of that material the next time she teaches this class.

We left our building and went across the street for a special presentation. Some of the faculty here know the filmmaker Ken Burns, and he graciously allowed them to screen the first episode of his upcoming documentary.

Six episodes, starting next month. We were asked to not discuss it at length, and I’ll respect that. But I’ll say this. Episode one was quite good, I can’t wait for the rest. Also, the voiceover casting is just incredible.

One of the professors, who is a professional film critic, talked a bit. A history professor, a public historian who is a key figure in the ongoing work at a nearby Revolutionary War site also spoke. She’s the perfect kind of historian, in my view. She has such an enthusiasm for her work that it makes you want to be enthusiastic about it, too. Maybe all teachers should be that way. I try to be that way. Maybe it comes through. For Dr. Janofsky, though, it is obvious, and infectious.

She passed around this piece of shot that had recently been pulled from the ground. For 250 years this had been buried beneath the soil, and just before that, it was hurtling at an enemy with great urgency.

Janofsky did not say whose shot this was. I’m assuming they know. We also know a lot about the muzzle velocity of 18th century cannons, and we know there was a fair amount of variation between them having to do with a lot of different variables, the type of shot, the canon, the powder and so on. I’ll just go with a number that keeps popping up for British cannons of the era, 487 meters per second. That’s a bit over 1,000 miles an hour. No one wants to be standing downrange of that, in any century.

And then something controversial, that had nothing to do with work or the Revolutionary War happened. I’m running out of pixels today, so I’ll type about it tomorrow, when there will surely be more to know, anyway.

adventures / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off
10
Oct 25

Cutting pieces off

I went in for a little medical procedure today. This was planned. I am fine. We scheduled this several months ago. There was a mysterious spot no one liked on my back. (I, however, was fine with it. Couldn’t see it. Wasn’t bothering me.) So they did a biopsy. The lab work determined it was the sort of thing that’s not a danger today, but you don’t want it around tomorrow. And so today was that day.

There was bleeding and stitches. I’m calling it a surgery. There was not enough anesthetic. There is never enough anesthetic. For the record, should you be with me when I need medical attention, it is general anesthetic or bust.

The guy asked me what I would like, as I had had time to peruse their generous offerings on the menu, accessible by QR code. I said I’d take the local, and then two regionals, please and thank you. Oh, I played it tough. I said I don’t want to feel the sensation of you tugging on my skin, even in the areas around the professional butchery. In truth, I want to be down the hall, around the corner, and across town at the mall. I don’t want to remember any of this.

Especially when the local begins to wear down. Which did happen. And I don’t want to hear you and your assistant discussing the finer points of the size of the suture material. Get the good stuff. Get it fast. Let’s stop the bleeding and have a blast.

I tried to enter into a discussion with the guy — hey, he let me stay conscious and that was his choice — about all of the things I can and can’t do in the next several weeks of recovery. I think he came to think I was arguing with him, but I saw it as a negotiation. What if I do this, but not hard or well? Finally his colleague laughingly said I can’t do the dishes for two weeks. And yard work, that’s right out. I guess the new phalanx of ninjas will see their training delayed, as well.

I am told the incision was the size of a couple of quarters. And I’m sure it will not feel pleasant tomorrow. I am to treat with alternating dosages of Ibuprofen and Tylenol.

What in the wide world of medicine is going on with these orders?

The dressing has to get changed twice a day for the next two weeks. Stitches come out in 14 days. And, supposedly, I am to take it easy for three to four weeks, though even the derma-guy said, “But you have to live your life.”

So I’ll milk it as long as I can, I guess? Or until I go stir crazy or feel guilty about not pulling my share around here.

Hey, at least the local stayed with me for much of the day. Operating under the idea that I’ll be equally uncomfortable wherever I am, we went to watch an Army-Navy doubleheader. Women’s soccer, and then men’s soccer. I even saw the Goodyear blimp.

The Middies won the women’s game. And before the men played The Leap Frogs jumped onto the field.

You can wind the week down with a lot of work

After a day of committee meetings, and email, and grading, and a bit of class work, I realized that every Friday is like that. Most days are similar. Some days have classes. Not every day has committees.

For a while today was so full, though, that I wrote a To Do list for the afternoon. I’m not a big To Do list guy, but I find that, from time-to-time, it’s an actual productive way to do a bit of cognitive offloading. Plus there’s a little satisfaction of having it all laid out in front of you. Fridays have become a lot of that this semester too: just a big block of uninterrupted time to take on what needs taking on. And, finally, there’s the muted pleasure of scratching a thing off a list. I didn’t use check marks. Didn’t draw a line through an item. I scratched it out aggressively. I don’t know why that is.

Speaking of cognitive offloading, I do a thing in my classes now where I show an AI fail each day. Usually it is an image. I try to find the sports-related one since those are my classes. And I try not to make them all about Google’s AI, which is unrepentantly terrible. If I just showed that thing every day I’d look like I was piling on. Some of these are funny. And sometimes my students ignore them. It is either, I’m not as funny as I think I am — which is not true — or they feel like I’m shaming them about lousy technology that has been marketed to them and they’ve fallen for — which is true, for the most part.

Here’s my next example. The perils of letting AI plan your next trip:

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.

“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”

What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

People will trust the weirdest things.

This is lousy op sec, and of course silly on the face of it, and catty to boot. Great reporting from the Star Tribune.

After the day’s work was done, we hoped on our bikes and rode up the road for a miniature group ride with our neighbor. Here I am, out front. Or, rather, here is my view in the one moment when no one was in front of me.

I’m riding with two All-Americans here. One of them a rather recent All American. I’m just trying to stay close to the drafting lines.

Near the end of the ride, on a false flat, there was a tease of a sprint. And then there was a sprint. My lovely bride spun it up, and the many years and thousands of miles riding with her told me instantly what was happening. So I sat on our friend’s wheel. She went to the inside of the lane and tried to take on the three-time Ironman. I was right in her slipstream, waiting. I figured if she got over I was going to counter attack. It would be beautiful. And then she sat up. Our neighbor is pretty new at this, and probably a bit stronger than she realized, but the other person in that photo is pretty fierce.

So I finished third, which is a perfectly fine way to start the weekend.

adventures / family / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
30
Sep 25

2ENI6S

We went to see a big field hockey game tonight. It was senior night for my god-niece-in-law (just go with it.) My in-laws came down to see their god-granddaughter. (I guess that’s how it works? The field hockey player is the daughter of their goddaughter. This would get confusing pretty quickly after that.) So we all went to her high school together. Her sister is on the junior varsity team, and they played first. The younger Jaguars won their game, and fans trickled in all night. By the time they dragged out the balloon arch for the senior night festivities both sets of her grandparents, her god-grandparents, her god-aunt-and-uncle and a bunch of her friends were there. They made signs and posters and had big Fathead-style faces. It was all quite cute.

She was, I think, the third athlete through the balloon arch. The guy on the PA introduces her and her parents and her little sister. He read off her career highlights, which at this point is something like 10-plus years of field hockey. He had a little sentence or two from the player thanking her family, and a note about what’s next, where she’s going to school, what she’s planning to study.

The sun was going down about that time.

And then, when all the seniors were introduced they went out there and played a game against the Lions. And the seniors went out in style, winning 5-0.

The cool thing was, after dinner, she said she got a piece of the ball on the last goal, though it was credited to one of her teammates. But she was glad for that. The other player hadn’t yet scored this year.

She’s always been a thoughtful girl; she’s going to be a pretty spectacular woman.

Though I guess we’ll do this again during softball season. How many senior nights do you need?

All of them, if you’re the senior.

I mentioned this the last time we went to see her play, but they host their home games on the high school’s football field, which is actually a multipurpose field. They also play their soccer there, and some of their track and field events are held there, too. If you’re sitting on the home side you see the high school in the background. And off to your left is a little building that is probably a field house. The side that faces the parking lot is painted red, and right in the center is the word:

2ENI6S

The graduating class all signed their names in a bit a of condoned graffiti. Though I wonder how the teachers feel about that treatment of the word. And how the class of 2027 will mangle it.

I visited the concession stand tonight and bought a handful of things for various members of our section of fans, a sandwich, three drinks, two pretzels. The students staffing the concession stand could not calculate the price. (It was $16 I told them.)

All of this gives me a great deal of material. So I pointed at this new construction in the western corner of the sports field.

“I hope it is a learning center!”

It is, of course, a new field house. Athletics first, and at all cost. Even at a good school — and their school scores in the top four percent of the state. But still, 2ENI6S, simple math.

We all went to the star players’ for dinner and family revelry. It was a wonderful evening.

In class today we discussed The Concussion Files:

The Post reviewed more than 15,000 pages of documents relating to efforts by more than 100 former players to qualify for settlement benefits, including thousands of pages of confidential medical and legal records. The Post also interviewed more than 100 people involved with the settlement — including players, widows, lawyers and doctors — as well as 10 board-certified neurologists and neuropsychologists for their expertise on how dementia is typically diagnosed.

Among The Post’s findings:

The settlement’s definition for dementia requires more impairment than the standard definition used in the United States. Several doctors who have evaluated players told The Post that if they used the settlement’s definition in regular care, they would routinely fail to diagnose dementia in ailing patients. “I assumed this was written this way, on purpose, just to save the NFL money,” said Carmela Tartaglia, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Toronto.

At least 14 players have, like Cross, failed to qualify for settlement money or medical care and then died, only to have CTE confirmed via autopsy. Eight of these players were diagnosed in life with dementia or a related memory disorder but still failed to qualify for settlement benefits.

In more than 70 cases reviewed by The Post, players were diagnosed with dementia by board-certified doctors, only to see their claims denied by the administrative law firm that oversees the settlement. While the NFL has often blamed denied claims on fraud, none of the denials reviewed by The Post contained allegations of fraud. Instead, records show, settlement review doctors simply overruled physicians who actually evaluated players, often blaming dementia symptoms on other health problems also linked to concussions, including depression and sleep apnea.

The NFL’s network of settlement doctors has been beset by systemic administrative breakdowns since its inception. Former players suffering from dementia wait, on average, more than 15 months just to see doctors and get the records they need to file a claim. Maynard was one of two players The Post found who waited more than two years to get paperwork and died before they could get paid.

In total, court records show, the settlement has approved about 900 dementia claims since it opened in 2017. It has denied nearly 1,100, including almost 300 involving players who were diagnosed by the settlement’s own doctors.

It’s an aggravating story, and it should annoy readers. And some of my students were aggravated by what they read — which leaves some questions about a few other students.

We also talked about this story.

On the face of it, playing chess and competing in the NBA couldn’t be further apart.

One requires monk-like levels of silent concentration – particularly in classical chess – while the other demands physical dominance, peak athleticism and the ability to stay composed in a frenzied atmosphere.

But it seems there is more that links the two sports than initially meets the eye – just ask NBA legend Derrick Rose.

The 2011 NBA MVP has been leading a new and unlikely collaboration between the worlds of chess and professional basketball.

That story didn’t seem to connect, but for different reasons.

Those were in my criticism class, of course. In org comm class we wrapped up the unit on branding. The students broke up into their fantasy football franchise groups and had to do an assignment which asked them to assess the sort of star power that each of their players possess. Then they had to pick three players from their team which would be the most likely pitchmen, and then assign them products or brands they would advertise for. It went well, and it all just goes on the now large stack of things I need to grade.

And that starts tomorrow. I am able to devote an entire day to pecking away at the computer and I am weirdly looking forward to it.