Polls versus Thought

If just one little civics lesson could be instilled in the children of the world, it should perhaps be the one in this comment relating to the crooked Enron Corporation:

A whistle-blower, literally speaking, is someone who spots a criminal robbing a bank and blows a whistle, alerting the police. That's not Sherron Watkins.

What the Enron vice president did was write a memo to the bank robber, suggesting he stop robbing the bank and offering ways to avoid getting caught. Then she met with the robber, who said he didn't believe he was robbing the bank, but said he'd investigate to find out for sure.

Watkins has been hailed as a whistle-blower so often it's starting to sound like part of her name. But a whistle-blower is someone who alerts the public. She never did.

What she did was send an anonymous memo to Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, raising "suspicions of accounting improprieties." After she identified herself, Lay met with her for about an hour to discuss her concerns and she gave him additional information detailing her allegations, according to a memo from Vinson & Elkins, the law firm Enron then hired to "conduct an investigation."

[Edited excerpt from Sherron Watkins Had Whistle, But Blew It, by Dan Ackman, Forbes magazine, February 14, 2002.]

The Cambridge summer school urged students to provide feedback by completing a questionnaire at the conclusion of the program, before they left Cambridge.

Jacques, an elderly Dutch man who'd been in the program several times before in previous summers and was a returning student, informed me that he'd told literature program director Fred Parker that this year's program had suffered a considerable decline in quality over previous years.

"Please," Dr. Parker reportedly replied, "fill out a questionnaire."

Even if there were one or two problems with the program, even if it was somehow less than perfect, the summer school offered everyone the opportunity to unburden himself thoroughly and frankly.

The benefit of questionnaires from the school's point of view was plain: Students achieved catharsis and got a reinforced sense of the school's good faith in wishing to address anything that had failed to satisfy them.

And the cost? Well ... there was a pile of questionnaires. Lord knew what they did with them.

The business argument favoring questionnaires was staggeringly simple.

The message I got from summer school director Sarah Ormrod when she and I discussed my "Downside" piece was similar to the one Jacques got from Dr. Parker. You'll perhaps have noticed that my essay offered specific criticisms of the plenary lectures. Ormrod had nothing to say about these. All she could do, she told me, was study the questionnaires that were returned at the end of the program and see what others thought. My points were one person's opinion. She dwelt at length on how varied the students' backgrounds were and how all of them had different opinions.

But could she not inquire into the merits of my criticisms, I asked, rather than merely surveying people's opinions?

She hadn't personally attended the lectures, she told me. And she wasn't a literature specialist herself.

Reader, were the criticisms in my essay so abstruse? No they weren't. But Ormrod evidently had not the least wish to directly explore any one of them.

Dr. Parker had attended at least the Paton-Walsh lecture I'd commented upon, I pointed out. Since Ormrod and Parker were both frequently in and around the summer school office, it seemed straightforward for Ormrod at least to check whether Paton-Walsh had really told her audience that the idea of unique human personalities was only 500 years old because the OED showed no earlier use of the word "personality."

Well, she could ask Dr. Parker about the Paton-Walsh lecture, she offered. But she didn't seem infused with any great determination to do that. And if she did, she never followed up with me.

She did have this argument to offer in defense of the lectures: Hadn't I derived anything positive from them? If I had, then that was something, wasn't it?

Parker's initial, emailed response, when I'd passed "The Downside" to him along with my request to meet, resembled Ormrod's in some respects:

From: Fred Parker
To: Uriel Wittenberg
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 2:21 PM
Subject: summer school plenary lectures

Dear Uriel Wittenberg,

I picked up your paper on the plenary lectures this morning; I'm sorry you haven't enjoyed them more, but grateful to you for passing on your thoughts. I take a little comfort from the variety of your criticisms - if we are offering what you call 'LitCrit', at least we are doing so across a range of different voices and approaches - and also from the fact that we have, at least, stimulated reflection and dissent, which is surely one function of university teaching in the humanities. I notice, by the way, that your criterion for effective communication - a significant consensus in the audience in 'identifying clearly made points' - is not one that Shakespeare himself would pass. But I shall certainly be checking the questionnaire responses carefully to see how widely your views are shared, and may well be scheduling more poetry readings next year in any case.

Yours sincerely,

Fred Parker

Like Ormrod, Parker had been determined to look on the bright side of my criticisms. And he too was resolved to weigh students' opinions -- in the aggregate -- while declining to respond to any objection or complaint specifically.

Ormrod also mentioned, in our talk, that she had the sense I'd been conducting a campaign against the program.

Really? What had given her that impression?

Well, she answered, one day I'd visited the summer school office and requested 100 copies of my "Downside" piece.

This was amazing. Another failed conversation! --this time, between the summer school director and her staff of 3 or 4 in the summer school office.

I'd come by, once, to request ten copies. Not a hundred. And when informed of the photocopying charge, I'd decided to get two. How did communication mangle simple facts like this?

Ormrod accepted my assurance that she'd been misinformed.

While the school had been encouraging students to write out their feedback and quietly hand it in to them -- to the administration, that is -- I'd urged students to share their written feedback with each other. Unfortunately, I seem to have been the sole student to follow this advice. I wrote "The Downside" during the first of the three weeks of the program, after attending four unsatisfactory plenary lectures in four days (after which I stopped going to the plenaries), and in fact ended up giving out perhaps 20 copies to fellow students.

And by the way, I wasn't buttonholing students in classrooms and corridors. I would usually offer a copy to people with whom I happened to be talking. (No doubt some of those 20 copies were shared, so more ultimately read it.)

I mentioned above that I'd received an anonymous letter responding to "The Downside." I was with a few fellow students at the time -- Janine, referred to earlier; Motoko, an elderly Japanese lady; and Ludmilla, a French lady in her 50's -- and they all had a look at it. Janine and Ludmilla expressed disgust and found it asinine. Ludmilla added that it wasn't even worth reading if the writer didn't have the courage to identify himself. Motoko agreed with the letter. (She was a peace-loving soul, but her thoughts were often obscure, perhaps because her English was quite weak.)

I showed the letter to Ormrod too, in the course of our talk. After reading it, she told me: "I feel just the same way as this writer." I reproduce the letter here to convey an idea of Ormrod's perspective:

Mr. Wittenberg,

I take great offence to your essay. Not because you have stated your opinion, (because I believe all are entitled to express their opinion) but instead because I believe by your words you include me in your opinion.

I would think you knew when passing your paper, "The Downside" around, you knew you would get a response and if this is true, than this has certainly been accomplished. But otherwise, a great movie once said, "Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups."

What I would like you to see is that there is something to learn from everything. It is ignorant to not grasp anything. To not want to grasp anything is your loss. I may not find each plenary enlightening and wonderful, but I will take something away from the lecturer. Otherwise, I just wasted an hour of my life. And life is just too short for that.

I believe your own words work against you, because you have taken something "thoroughly normal," and treated it as remarkably negative. Did you not expect to come to Cambridge and be surrounded by scholarly and well educated writers, professors, and researchers? And furthermore be lectured by also their words and opinions? I find it a grave loss to you that you have mentioned in your essay four plenary lectures and gathered nothing but negativity and criticism to pass along from them.

I am a student. I am young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and yearning for knowledge. Many students are in my same, respectable boat. There are many non-English majors, such as criminal justice, nursing, general studies, and several others at the other end of the spectrum from literature. But we all came from different ends of the world for this Cambridge English literature program. We are here based on a passion for English. I was lucky enough to be granted credit by my college, subsequently allowing my graduation in December. You have the luxury of freedom. I have five papers to research and write, and attendance requirements to abide by.

I value everyone's opinion, scholar or not. Unfortunately, I cannot respect yours, because you do not even respect my being here, for I am receiving credit. I do not know if my words will mean anything to you. Even though, (like the plenary lecturers) I took thoughtful time and consideration for this letter. You may see it also as a waste of time. But as I am attempting to "communicate" with you, as you wish Cambridge would do more of, I hope that one day you might be able to find something good in everything.

Sincerely,

A Cambridge International Summer School Student

(Continued....)