17 Year Old Boy Meets Real World: Kentucky, 1962

In 1962, I won the Veterans of Foreign Wars’  “Voice of Democracy” award in my hometown of Providence, Kentucky. The contest required students to write speeches on the topic, “What Freedom Means to Me”. The script of that speech, which I delivered to judges, is provided below. Typos have been corrected (used manual typewriters with no correct tapes in those days); otherwise I have, with several deep breaths and a couple of tears for lost youth, provided the script verbatim.

Below that speech is a letter I received from the director of church relations of PROTESTANTS AND OTHER AMERICANS UNITED for Separation of Church and State, dated February 8, 1962. It too is copied verbatim.

I wonder what happened to that 17 year old boy?

I wonder about how quickly our idealism meets the realities and politics and religions of the world, and how we manage to maintain, react, re-adjust, re-affirm? Or do we get bitter and depressed? Or do we just keep on keeping on, doing what we always have, hoping for the best?

One of the great things about having been a teacher for so many years is that I rubbed elbows with 17 year-old college freshmen. Their idealism and naïveté helped keep me balanced. Rather than my brainwashing them, they served to remind me that I don’t have all the answers, and that fresh perspectives from naïve people keep humanity alive.

What Freedom Means to Me

The right to breathe deeply of clean, crisp air in the early morning twilight and know that I am close to God; to feel like an eagle loose from a cage and soaring over snow-capped mountains in the distant horizon. This is freedom.

To me, freedom has, actually, two forms. The first form is the natural freedom a person has. This freedom is found to a certain extent in everyone and every living thing and can’t be taken away by any one or any means. This is the feeling a person has when he is born, that he is a free man—not a dog on a chain or a puppet on a string.

It is the feeling that is responsible for the bringing about of the second phase of the term, as it was this characteristic in men that led them to seek and find the second form, which is, in my opinion, the unleashing of the inborn spirit of freedom into reality so that it can be used to its fullest extent in everyday life without fear.

Thus the two forms are interrelated and form a feeling. To this feeling there is a one-word definition that is very suitable. This word is life.

Without freedom, one doesn’t live, he merely exists, living a life filled with fear and trepidation; fearing to speak or pray. Afraid to answer a knock on a door; afraid he’ll find on the other side of that door an evil, grinning face, and a tommy-gun spitting in his stomach. Dodging from shadows; afraid to trust even your friends; cowering in fear. This is life without freedom.

Freedom is the right for me to know the God put me on this earth as an individual, different from everyone else, not as just one of a million pieces cast from the same mold. To know that I am somebody, someone that means something, not just a tool to be used until it is worn out, then cast away; thrown into a junk heap. To know this fact is freedom.

The right to get out of bed in the morning and go to school, where I have a choice of studies and a right to speak my thoughts and ideas without fear about any subject. This is freedom.

Freedom is my right to go to work knowing that I am benefitting myself and my family, not the “state” or someone sitting in a plush fancy apartment while I live in a pig-sty building with ten-inch cracks in the walls.

Freedom is the feeling within me that I can hold my head up high and not have to worship or bow to anyone. It is this same blessing, though, that gives me the right to worship God in whatever church I please or wherever I please, whenever I please, and however I please without fear, but with joy, reverence, and thankfulness.

Freedom is to me the wonderful objective that was fought for by William Penn in 1675 and by Peter Zenger in 1735. Freedom, the same blessing that was sought after and won by such men as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Munroe, the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, and the countless other men and women through the ages.

To answer the question of what freedom means to me is simply to give my definition of the word freedom. Freedom is life to me; a full, happy, contented life with God, and without fear. Of course, there are days of strife for me and everyone else in the free world, as in the entire world. I, and everyone else, have certain “thorns” in my everyday life, but with these thorns comes the sweetest rose of any age. This rose is freedom, the God-given blessing which I will fight for as long as I have the faintest ray of faith in God, my country, my world, and myself.

Letter From Protestants and Other Americans United

Dear Jim:

It was inspiring to read your speech, “What Freedom Means to Me”, in the Henderson Gleaner and Journal of February 2. I wish I might have heard you deliver it.

We, who are trying to uphold Separation of Church and State and religious liberty, are encouraged to know that a teen-ager has such an understanding of the subject.

In your own grand state of Kentucky one church is exerting pressure on the State Legislature to pass a bill requiring the Protestants of Kentucky to pay $200 tuition to every child enrolled in the parochial schools and free bus transportation. This is not fair, especially when those children are taught that Protestant religions are “counterfeit”, as you will read in the enclosed leaflet, “What Do They Teach in Catholic Schools”. When something is counterfeit you withdraw it from circulation and you destroy it. I hope you will read the enclosed leaflets.

This organization is not anti-catholic, it is for Separation of Church and State. It is just as quick to call attention to Protestant violations as to Catholic.

May God bless you, young friend, and guide you always.

Magical Left-Wing Professors

Wondering about those professors who are brainwashing your youth? Here’s a snapshot of one.

I had retired from a small state university on the East Coast, and was looking for adventures in corporate America. In order to get my first corporate university job, I had to take a personality test and a drug test. Unlike most true academics from the sixties, I passed the urine exam, even though I found myself strangely paranoid about taking it and uneasy about having to take it.

The personality test was fun. I’ve taken these all my adult life (to get jobs selling fruitcakes, to see if I could be a good military officer, etc.) find them fascinating, and had fun taking this one. In the last interview, the academic vice president asked me what I do when I don’t get my own way. I responded with “OK, so tell me how I did on the personality test.” The vice president responded that “it seems like you have a strong will.” I concurred with the findings.

When I asked if they did random drug tests, she looked at me funny.

I sat in my cube in a corporate environment, far from the ivy-covered walls of my imagination, far from the esoteric debates of a faculty senate wrestling over some grammatical issue relating to governance. My desk was clean; one coffee cup adorned it. And I drank decaf by myself. It was quiet, still, business-like. There was no ivy; there was no tradition; there were no students physically present, no hacky sack, no skateboards, no kids smoking —it was an online university.

The faculty members who taught the courses (“adjuncts”) were lesser mortals, just like those in the more traditional universities, who taught online courses filled with 30 to 40 students, for which they were not paid much, and certainly not what they were worth. I was their leader.

I smiled at memos, emailed from the president, urging me not to talk about recent downsizing decisions, indicating that it would not be consistent with good “organizational behavior” practices. I smiled at the president’s consternation with me when I challenged issues/decisions in meetings. I was the only one who did challenge. There were others who had in the past; they were no longer employees of the university.

Professors in traditional universities are required to teach, publish, and serve the university and larger communities in a variety of ways. A day in the life of a professor, as I experienced it for some 25 years, began around 8:00 A.M. Formal meetings of one sort or another—curriculum meetings, space committee meetings, committee on committees meetings, department meetings, senate meetings, etc.—took a piece of the day, sandwiched between courses (one to five courses with 30 to 300 students in each), and involved ritual coffee consumption. Lunch was an important time for meeting colleagues to discuss politics, the university, teaching, and research ideas. By 3:00 P.M. I generally went home, to return by 6:00 P.M. to teach a course or work on projects. By 9:30 P.M. I was home again, sometimes reading or working until the wee hours. There were some days when I spent most of my time at home working on courses or research or training projects, but most days I was at the university. Many days it was exhilarating. Every day was interesting.

Funny, we never discussed how to turn students into left-wing ideologues. I must have missed the memo instructing us to do so. Maybe we should have had a committee on this.

During an interview for my first corporate university professor/administrator job, I was told that I was entering a corporate environment in which I “would not be allowed to behave as a traditional academic”, and would be required to be in my cubicle by 8:00 A.M., take an hour for lunch, and leave the building by 5:00 P.M. The only exception to this rule was when management decided that I needed to work extra hours, for which I would not be paid, because I was in an exempt position. When I told the vice president in the interview that this would be a reduction in hours for me from my usual traditional academic leader role, she looked at me funny.

Are there differences between professorial life in traditional universities and life in corporate universities? Professors in traditional universities still like to believe we run the universities, but most don’t actually believe we do. Corporate universities intentionally communicate that faculty are employees-at-will with invisible time clocks to monitor our face time. Otherwise it’s more or less the same.

We never discussed turning students into lefties in this environment, either. We did discuss students as a part of our revenue-enhancing metrics, however. Free enterprise ruled.

I believe that most people choose to become professors, whether in traditional or corporate universities, because of dreams and ideals. We believe that exploring truths is important. We believe that stimulating other people to explore is also important. We believe that democracies demand that people be educated; i.e., willing and equipped to question conventional wisdom, to go beyond oneself to thinking about other folks in the past, present, and future, about God and evolution, about things seen and unseen, about important issues. We believe that colleges and universities provide people with a relatively safe haven in which to conduct important personal, spiritual, and interpersonal exploration. Universities were not designed, we believe, to ensure employment afterward, but to provide a climate of free expression and exploration the result of which is to ensure that people better contribute to the world, spiritually, politically, fiscally, and in terms of stewardship of the resources we use and manage.

These ideals, dreams, and values are hard to hold onto in the real world of academia, traditional or corporate, and I have watched their erosion in my colleagues and myself over the years. The U.S. has always seemed to be anti-intellectual, but in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a cynical acceleration of this attitude.

And with this cynicism comes the paranoia that results in the belief that somehow professors have the magical power to convert students into non-God-fearing leftist robots. I would laugh but I’m too tired.

Sister Ethyl and the Antichrist

I grew up in small town Kentucky. When I was a kid the town was still alive and vibrant and on Saturday afternoons the two streets that comprised “uptown” were teeming with people, shopping, gossiping, going to the movies. Mr. Kelly, his body twisted from arthritis like an old, wind-blown peach tree, would sit in his red wagon, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and selling pencils.

Sister Ethyl (I’ll leave her last name out, but I do remember it) would stand at the intersection of Broadway and Main with an open Bible in her hand, preaching. The sermon I remember most vividly was a recurring one against the Antichrist. I was a kid so it took a few Saturdays of listening, some reading in my Bible and the library, and some questions to folks (most of whom seemed embarrassed by my questions) for me to figure out who she thought the Antichrist was.

It was the Pope.

It was a message that seemed well received. My town was filled with churches, but there was no Catholic church. There were no Synagogues either, but that’s another story. There were Catholics and Jews, in the town, who, I learned later, had to travel a ways to find their places of worship. I knew who the Jews were—worked for the Coopers and the Erskinds, who were very nice people and good employers—but only knew of one Catholic family. I learned about Jewish traditions at the Methodist Church. The subject of Catholicism never came up during my youth.

In the Wesley Foundation at Western Kentucky University, I found myself occasionally on a Saturday night debating (it never rose to the level of argument, I’m happy to say) whether or not Jews and Catholics went to heaven when they died. Believe it or not, these debates happened. My position was that my Bible said that Jews were God’s chosen people so why would they not go to heaven? Their response: “The Jews killed Jesus.”  My response: “No, the Romans killed Jesus.”

Luckily, my debate opponents did not get my well-intentioned but naively-counter-productive point here as we moved to the subject of Catholics. My position: “I’ve been to mass at the Newman Center and it seems not that different from the Methodist Church. Why wouldn’t Catholics go to heaven?” Their response: “Because they are not really Christians, they worship the Pope, they have their own Bible, and only Christians go to heaven.” In my ignorance I had no quick response.

Obviously, these were not the debates of theological scholars, just folks sitting around with ideas and wondering about them.

The debates were happening as John F. Kennedy was being elected as President, and as he was assassinated.

I have wondered about Sister Ethyl’s message and these debates for 50 years.

In 1970 I married a Catholic woman. When I took her home to meet family and friends, one of my best friends and mentors asked her, “Are you Christian or Catholic?” She, a military brat who did not share my stellar upbringing, was, to say the least, nonplussed.

Since then, I have worked in a Jesuit university and have come to have a deep respect for the works of Catholics, particularly in terms of social justice issues and serving the less fortunate of the world.

The Catholic Church is a large, well-run, powerful, wealthy organization with a specific, evangelical mission. The Church is compelled by its mission to recruit new members to its faith. The Church is compelled to uphold, and lobby for, its specific beliefs and tenets.

Its “CEO”, the Pope, is one of the most powerful men in the world, devout, and absolutely committed to the “rightness” of his beliefs and the church.

No one could expect this to be otherwise, except Sister Ethyl, perhaps.

I believe Catholics are Christian. I do not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist. I also don’t believe he is anything more than a powerful man in a leadership position. I don’t share his beliefs outside the social justice and service realm.

It is in this context that I’m wondering about the position of one of the GOP candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

I respect a presidential candidate who publically affirms his belief in the absolute truth of the tenets his church.

But when a presidential candidate states that Satan, in the form of folks whose ideologies and religions that differ from his, has infiltrated the U.S. using phony Bibles and theologies, I worry. When his response to these “threats” is to implicitly promise to bring the powerful evangelical businessman leader of one of the most powerful evangelical churches in the world, the political head of a powerful religious city-state outside the U.S., to the table as his partner in his presidency of the U.S., I worry a lot.

I see this candidate through the same lens I saw Sister Ethyl and my friends at Western. He has a right to his opinion, obviously. But I disagree with him just as vehemently as I did with Sister Ethyl’s Antichrist position, and my college friends’ “They ain’t going to heaven” stances.

I disagree for the same reasons: my faith, my research, my reason, and my continuing struggle against bigotry, mine and others’.

The U. S. Presidency, CEOs, and Acid Trips

I was reading The Economist (yeah, I know, another of my failings) a few weeks ago. The cover’s headline, “America’s Next CEO?”, made me wonder why we think the U.S. presidency is a chief executive position.

I also wonder when we as a country fell in love with chief executive officers. Is it the money they make? The power they wield? Is it the Don’s comb over and the way his “you’re fired” becomes a fantasy—we’d like to say this to a lot of people and have the same effect?

Why do we think that the answer to all our economic and social woes in this country lies in the election of a CEO?

Here’s an acid-trip dream I had last night.

CEO Trump is elected president. He believes that the biggest problem with the country lies in its “mission, vision, and values proposition” (good MBA concepts). As a good CEO, Trump calls his senior executives into a meeting and they recreate the U.S.’s  mission, vision, and value propositions.  “How are we going to make money unless we have alignment?” asks the CEO.

Secondly, in his first days in the White House, he calls for a summit in which he asks for a U.S. SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats—another MBA 101 concept), and resulting short- and long-term strategic plan for the U.S.

The newly minted vision, mission and strategic plan related to the SWOT are then given to the Congress to implement.

CEO Trump is discouraged that Congress does not act quickly. He calls Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into his office and says “You’re Fired.” Their heads droop and they file out. Then he throws a CEO tantrum and threatens to fire the rest of the Congress if they don’t act on his vision and strategy immediately. They hop to it, hoping for a win.

I woke up in a cold sweat, laughing hysterically, with a vow to stay away from whatever it was that caused this bout of late night flight fright.

Instead, I’m adding insult to injury by putting on my professorial hat. I’m not all that smart, but have had some smart students/CEOs over the years. So, I’ve been going over faded yellow legal pad sheets reflecting almost 30 years of professing about business in leadership and business strategy classes and in executive training rooms to soothe my wondering mind.

Here’s what leaked out.

Businesses: The mission of businesses is the delivery of the best goods and/or services in a particular industry. Bottom line: Businesses are to make the most money possible, resulting in the best possible returns and profits, while keeping the business healthy and growing over some specified period of time.

Businesses are run so as to not act against their best economic interests.

The United States: The mission of U. S. is to maintain its sovereignty and protect its citizens while upholding its constitution, as continually defined by a system of checks and balances. Bottom line: The U.S. keeps its citizens free and safe to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

The U.S. is not a business. The country has no specific, identifiable, goods or services that it delivers in or to any particular industry. Revenues and expenses, while important considerations, are not the sole, or necessarily primary, metrics of this organization. For example, in its history U.S. leaders have opted to wage war to protect its interests, and/or cut taxes and/or increase spending for this or that, even though it was clear that these choices were fiscally questionable. Greater good, or some such concepts, prevailed.

Chief executive officers are almost solely accountable for businesses’ successes. Although they may answer to owners/boards/stockholders, they are specifically, by nature of their positions, charged with keeping the organization fiscally healthy. By virtue of their positions, chief executive officers may make unilateral decisions about the business, and act on them. By the nature of their position, people in the organizations below them, whose jobs are dependent on doing so, say “Yes sir/ma’am”.

Chief executive officers are not elected by the people they lead. While there are political aspects to their jobs, politics does not define the job.

Presidents are responsible to the citizens of the U.S. for their decisions. Their decisions can never be made unilaterally. Even Executive Orders are subject to popular opinions, and the opinions voiced and actions made by the other two branches in relation to the decisions. 

Three branches of government are accountable for the organization called the United States of America, of which the presidency is only one.

Presidents are elected by the people they lead. By design, politics govern the positions.

While it would might be great to have a gunslinger chief executive officer in the White House to entertain old professors like me, I’m thinking that what we see on shows like The Apprentice are not really that entertaining when it comes to our life and liberty as citizens.