What's Up? Adieu to Bonner

How am I doing and other answers revealed

How am I doing?

Aug 5, 2017.  It is with regret that I left Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning (July 5, 2017). Several have asked me how I was doing or how well was I coping. Since it is not always possible to give full responses via Facebook and most awkwardly, my college email account was suddenly shut off in late June, I’ve posted this message to you at my blog site. Another practical note: I would be most happy to write letters of recommendation or follow up with you, especially in regards to the several on-going community-based projects, grants or CBPR research projects that are affected by my departure. 

So to answer: I’m doing very well. In fact, as I joked to James Shields, I must lose my job more often so people will take me to lunch and tell me wonderful things about myself. Thanks to everyone for your warm support.

Current challenges

Right now my challenges are to figure out how to continue the community research projects that I had funneled through Bonner and which involved a dozen or so faculty members from area colleges and universities who formed a collaborative of like-minded researchers, and the many Bonner Scholars and others, Community Scholars, project and site coordinators, team members, college and high school students from across the region, who made these projects a part of their service work requirements. Bonner provided much of the higher order structure required to build and maintain relationships among institutions and communities. These were not small efforts with little to show; based on our work two new academic majors were approved and a $250,000 grant awaits approval. Our group hopes to have a paper published soon. And the trail of products, student presentations and posters too numerous to mention here will be the foundation for future major grant applications. To find a new home for our work or failing that, some creative way forward that does not leave our refugee partners hanging, has occupied most of my time. I have been most fortunate to have received so many notes of your support, care and affection.

New language, same work

When I arrived at Bonner I recast my community work into conventional forms suitable to an academic environment and mindset. Thus neighborhood English classes I’d taught at Rosewood became “learner-centered, culturally appropriate ESOL”, community work in general became “Service Learning”, organized inquiries became “Community-Engaged Scholarship” and system change became “Community-Based Participatory Research”. The value of speaking in these kinds of terms was my ability to converse with academics from a wide range of fields in order to interest them in community work. But true to its name, the Center was about community service and learning, learning from community by being out there. If anyone was mistaken about the nature of the service and learning we promoted there, we only had to refer to the mountain of literature, research and best practices that grounded our work. 

Not the world most academics grew up in

Among the issues I sought to bring to their attention were the startling population changes in Greensboro, especially among Latino and Asian communities, which have been part of larger national trends that all sectors of society have struggled with even though these trends were spotted decades ago. During the Great Recession and before I went to work at Bonner, my work centered on what was happening to our region. In 2010, Greensboro ceased to be a white majority city, visibly different if you walked through places like Rosewood and Cottage Grove or dined and shopped at immigrant-owned businesses on West Market, but remarkably suburban and white if your life limited you to gated housing developments and upscale shopping corridors. From 2012 until 2017 my drive from McAdoo Heights to West Friendly Avenue took me along a route similar to the one I took when I taught there in the 1980’s, essentially a tunnel of exclusivity that had I stayed in would have left me ignorant of all the changes going on. The challenge of our times, amply demonstrated by the election of Trump and his subsequent rule, is to overcome individual and institutional habits that have led to fewer choices, less imagination, hardened mindsets and inability to think beyond rigid values and mission statements, the most dramatic examples of which are the seeming inability of police to respond to crisis situations except by shooting people.

History’s long arc

After 2008 the recovery was extremely slow. Greensboro’s recovery was especially painful as it lagged far behind Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte. My barber spoke about customers from one of the oldest and richest neighborhoods in the city who were skipping haircuts. The choices my wife and I made then, as jobs and opportunities dried up, were to live the values we believed in, in essence those we inherited from our parents. To fully understand those values means to appreciate the spectacular fortune they experienced by having lived when they did following the Second World War. Neither couples were rich but they were modestly successful, which meant they were able to buy homes, raise families and send their kids to college and into a world of choices which today no longer exists. Back then they were able to do this because of the convergence of historical events and governmental activism which oversaw the greatest expansion of the middle class ever seen. Meaning people of modest abilities and talents like our parents were paid better than a living wage. Meaning they could accumulate wealth they could pass on to us after they died. I could never be in such a position based on wages that have been historically flat since the 1970s. Instead, I used my inheritance to pay for my kids’ educations. And when my aunt and uncle died we came into additional money. Not a princely sum, but just enough to pay bills and replace some of the huge losses we, too, suffered in the Great Recession. 

To speak about these events in detail only reinforces how little control we have over our lives and how much we are the beneficiaries of fortune and history. The trick today is to live outside history, that is, in willful ignorance, to credit your good fortune to your own hard work and talents, to blame others for your failure, and in short, to behave like Trump and his supporters. But my parents’ and relatives’ money had a history. The spectacular rise of the United States was based on its wartime industrialization that not only ended the Great Depression but added millions to the workforce. It fought a war in Europe and the Pacific with capacity to spare and at war’s end, unlike all other combatants, had none of its cities, roads, bridges and factories in ruins and no millions of refugees left wandering across its territories seeking to return home or to permanently flee. On a more personal level, this meant every male relative in my family was in the US military except my Uncle George, who was too young. Uncle Ernst was a German Jew who escaped to join the British navy. My father and two brothers all became officers, remarkable feats for Chinese-Americans. My dad was the only one to have seen heavy combat, serving in Italy and France and then leading his platoon into Germany and where their final destination would be Munich and Dachau. Uncle Moe, who was among the last to be drafted from New York’s Chinatown, was captured in a brutal fight just before the Battle of the Bulge. After the war my mother went to Germany as a civilian contracted by the government to assist in the reconstruction and maintenance of order. Her trip was going to be a new college grad’s grand adventure, a way to see the world, an introduction to schnaps, biergarten and a flourishing black market in which anything could be bought for American cigarettes. And there my mom heard all kinds of stories from Germans who “didn’t know” about concentration camps. Betsy’s dad served in the Pacific and eventually became a life-long IBM man. Her uncle saw Nagasaki after the bombing.  My father’s war record helped him get into Civil Service, first as an agent in Narcotics and later in Immigration and Naturalization. In all kinds of ways our families directly benefited from the war. 

The wealth of choices both my wife and I had upon finishing college by far outstrips those that recent grads have. Spending our parents’ war dollars to help today’s refugees and immigrants doesn’t seem to be a stretch to us. Understanding this really depends on whether you feel connected to history, otherwise what we’re doing is just jackass liberalism. The terrific nurse at Glen Haven, an apartment complex full of refugee families, told our Himalayan researchers, Nima, Mamta and Kunga, that upon arrival in the US from Ireland a hundred years ago her mother saw shop signs that read “No Irish Need Apply”. Such stories are only meaningful in receptive ears. Passing on stories that span years, decades and generations is how cultural life is sustained and renewed. It’s the way to bring newcomers into the circle of society. (And — need I mention? — an end to discriminatory laws and practices that jack up the costs for both poor and newcomers.)

Coincidences

In 2008, the young people I did not know then but who I was destined to meet were helping their neighbors and communities while their families watched the Great Recession wipe out their savings. A few years later their community work would help them get into college and qualify as Bonner Scholars and we’d meet. The young people I did know at this time, and who would go on to college, included Lek Siu, Vung Ksor and Sel Mpang. I was on the board of FaithAction and when the director couldn’t attend to deliver a talk, he asked me to address a group of about 30 high schoolers. In the circle of chairs I recognized some of the Bhutanese young men who had been active in the international soccer league I’d helped their leaders put together. José Oliva was there, too. I did not know him at the time. He has woven my talk into his story about the loss and discovery he experienced that day.

New title, same work

Once I had told Jenni, an old art student of mine who graduated in the 1980s, that classroom teaching was not of interest to me anymore. So no wonder, it was the Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning that brought me back into higher ed. Raleigh Bailey, who kindly wrote me a recommendation letter, told me that I’d be working under James and warned me that the pay was going to be low. (Raleigh’s wife is Judy Harvey who was close to retirement after serving as the first Bonner director and then working at the Center for Principled Problem Solving. James showed me the cover of the college newspaper from 1975 whose lead story was a student protest to keep Raleigh. It didn’t work. Raleigh went on to lead Lutheran Family Services, to oversee the arrival of the first Montagnard refugees, and to become the first director of the Center for New North Carolinians.) Jim Keith, who had hosted our first meeting of Montagnard doctors at his home, was also an enthusiastic supporter. Jim is retired and lives nearby. He was one of the first advocates for service learning in the nation, and had a hand in creating both Campus Compact and the Bonner Foundation. But even before interviewing for the job, I’d already met James and learned a lot about Bonner when I accompanied Lek, then accepted as the first Bonner Scholar from the Montagnard Jarai tribe, to freshman orientation. If I took the position as volunteer training coordinator I could extend my work with Lek and her community. (When she was a high school student I had trained her to transcribe and translate interviews with women from her community who talked about the empty refrigerators and kitchen cabinets we saw and the ice cold rooms they lived in during winter time because everyone lost their jobs. The material we collected was part of Jigna Dharod’s food insecurity research that  later would be published in the Journal of Hunger and Nutrition. And Lek would go on to be a key research member on the Montagnard Hypertension Research Project and then graduate with the prestigious Sullivan Award.) James hired me and the next five years unfolded.

The value of research

For me, research was a way to get disconnected academics involved in community. As I learned from Jim Keith, there’s a whole literature dedicated to this topic. Zlotkowski gave a talk at a Campus Compact event warning of higher ed’s continued sell-out to market forces, pulling it further away from its foundations and weakening democratic society. I heard smart critics like Levine and Ramaley. Saltmarsh gave a couple of powerful slideshows at Bonner Foundation events, detailing the structures and culture of higher ed which prevent change, along with solutions for action. Bobby Hackett’s leadership at the Bonner Foundation remained one of the bright lights in our collective endeavors to change higher ed. He believes policy research is the next step for Bonners but in practice I found it too much of a leap for learners to follow. From these sharp minds I developed a strategy to connect the energy of youth,  enthusiastic practitioners of community work, to community-based participatory research, an approach which brings community members and allies to the table as equals. To start, I reached out to teaching faculty who were interested and ready to work with the tiny Montagnard refugee community that’s unique to our area. Since then research presentations and papers have rolled out. Student teams from multiple campuses and led by the five Montagnard Bonner Scholars picked by James were busy and active. A special on PBS was aired nationally in which I appeared. North Carolina’s governor selected two traditional weavers for Heritage Awards. Sharon Morrison, who has been the workhorse of our research team, received the UNC system’s highest teaching award. Over one hundred students had worked as team members on the Montagnard Hypertension Research Project. Other projects were underway. Just maybe, despite Trump and the politics of the age, we could achieve Zlotkowski’s 1995 vision. “The New American College, as a connected institution,” he wrote, “would be committed to improving, in a very intentional way, the human condition.” 

In the meanwhile, filling the gap

“You are doing important work” is what I texted a Muslim student who was trying to help an old school friend born here but whose East African parents lack documentation. Her friend wants to go to college. She’s also talking to a Latina friend, who’s given up trying. Such are some of the situations faced by youth from the New Diversity. We can fancy up her efforts (“community-engaged, off-campus learning”) but we do so at the cost of making academia the star of the show and the center of social change, when clearly it is not. What I love about this story is the deep connection youth feel for one another, their willingness to help one another in the absence of adult help. Until academia determines its place in Trump’s New World Order and can better describe a social vision that matches the aspirations of the New Diversity, the best academics can do is to learn as much as they can from young people like the Muslim student and her struggling friends, learn more about their origins, marriage laws, dating customs, deportation threats, asylum procedures, police shootings and body cameras, domestic violence, suicide, schizophrenia and stress; learn as much as they can about customs, languages, religions, family life, celebrations, births and deaths. Only a tiny bit of their experiences, usually in the form of academic awards and honors, is ever visible to academics. The rest is submerged, like an iceberg. I don’t think it’s their task to push this mountain of ice to the surface so academics can see plainly it. Rather, I think it is up to academics to put on wetsuits and take the deep dive. In 1995 and now, the biggest challenge for American higher ed is to show not just “rigor” (tough classroom standards), but “relevance” and “reach” (getting off the campus). That Trump can start an assault on higher ed (as of just a day ago) with so much Republican fervor (Pew reports the huge distrust they have in higher ed) underlines the disconnection so many see between higher ed and their own lives. Of course our colleges and universities matter, but to use the sports saying, it’s their game to lose. And they’re losing badly.

Brave youth

A few days after Trump’s election I brought a team of Latinx youth to UNC Asheville to present a workshop on the importance of college access for refugee and immigrant families. At first they were pretty depressed (we all were) but I felt it could be a turning point in their lives. I told them to ignore the standard list (academic mindset talk, “rubric”) of do’s and don’ts for public speaking. Don’t worry about introductory light anecdotes, making eye contact or your accent. Since they knew the material by heart, their job was to tell the audience why it mattered. I asked them to be unafraid to speak personally. And they should judge their success based on whether the audience stayed to ask questions or just hurried out for coffee or to check their email. If they truly made an impact then there would be so many questions and conversations that they’d have to be kicked out to make space for the next presenters. And that’s what happened. At the Campus Compact CSNAP conference they were speaking as community organizers and cultural experts, not students. My community work has focused on the improvement of the skills of New Diversity youth so they can confidently participate in democratic social change. Higher ed must play a role, but so must social services, health system, elected officials, local government, public schools, law enforcement, judicial system and the rest. When they disappear from the scene or act irresponsibly then it’s going to be up to youth to speak up and if needed, fill the void, because Black Lives Matter has shown, even when leaders, agencies and organizations say they care they often don’t have the skills or experience to engage in meaningful ways. They might even be speaking from their hearts, but they haven’t invested in the gear and taken the deep plunge.

Never left!

Since leaving I have been plenty busy with meetings of researchers, community partners and youth, some of whom are Bonners and many who attend other colleges and universities. Just the other day we convened a meeting of partners to share and discuss how we might best coordinate with community leaders and families to improve the Bhutanese community’s health. It was if I never left higher ed, or more correctly, it’s as if I never left community work.