Tenured in Japan

This posting from Japan comes somewhere in the middle of a night (jetlag rules!) in Osaka, before moving to Tokyo where I will be conducting several interviews for The Rewired Brain:  The Deep Structure of Thinking for the Information Age, the book I'm finishing on cognition and digitality and that Viking Press will publish in either late 2010 or early 2011. 

Japan has already been, once, through a magic economic downturn after a period of unprecedented prosperity, much of that prosperity fuelled by the digital global economics. There  are lessons to be learned from Japanese who not only survived the "burst bubble" but thrived not only in business but psychologically, emotionally, in relationships, in recasting their lives out of the mode of the routine, unending ever-working, ever-entertaining, ever-everything "saraiiman" model to something else more creative and productive, whether in the business world or elsewhere.  Now, of course, Japan is experiencing the same global downturn as the rest of the world and some of those who had to adjust to the last bursting of the bubble are remarkably well prepared for this current crisis.  We have much to learn from them, and that's what Part Two of The Rewired Brain is about, applying my new paradigm of cognition to practical circumstances ranging from work, to the world we live in (the environment), to personal and private and inner lives. 

I'm inspired by two digital futurists, writer Alvin Toffler who says that literacy in the 21st century isn't simply reading, writing, and arithmetic but the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.  That?s the lesson of the ?rewired brain.?  And another one, from Doug Englebart, creator of the mouse:  It?s time to shift our paradigm about paradigms.  That?s the plan.  We are long overdue for a new paradigm for how the brain works, for how we come to know the world in this digital age.

But today?s blog posting is going to be autobiographical.  I?ve been told (by my editor, no less) to be cautious about saying too much about The Rewired Brain before it comes out so I?ve been blogging less, as you may have noticed, about cognition and digitality than I used to.   (i.e. ?If you want to know more, you have to read the book . . .?  )

But here?s some backstory.  I would not be writing this book if two important and interconnected events hadn?t happened several years ago, the year I turned thirty.   I came to teach in Japan for a year.  I was tenured back at my home institution, Michigan State University.  

I?ve written about my Japanese experiences in a travel memoir and crosscultural adventure-meditation, Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, but here?s some backstory that might be useful for younger members of the academy.

My tenure committee didn?t want me to come to Japan.  Or at least two of the members were sure that, if I spent my tenure year in Japan instead of politicking, being a good departmental citizen, and otherwise showing my superiors how bright I was, that I wouldn?t get tenure.   That?s big.   And it is key to the concept of the rewired brain, where I argue that every decision (from infancy on) lays a groundwork for future decisions, and the positive or negative feedback from risk-taking is partly what rewires the brain for future decisions.  Literally and figuratively, on neurological, perceptual, conceptual, and behavioral levels simultaneously.

Back to the past:  I had never been outside North America when a note came in our faculty mailboxes at MSU asking if anyone would be willing to fulfill our university?s obligation for a ?swap? where one of our faculty would go to teach at the prestigious women?s university Kobe Jogakuin Daigaku, between Kobe and Osaka, and a Japanese faculty member would come to MSU to teach for a year.  An exchange. It had all been painstakingly arranged  when the American faculty member fell ill and a replacement was needed immediately.  As in get on a plane and go teach in Japan for a year.  Now.  I applied.  It turned out that no one else was free to go.  I got my first passport, started taking a cram course in survival Japanese, packed up my apartment to make it ready for the Japanese professor, and (oh that!) prepared my tenure file.  This was decades ago, before email, and I had to prepare my whole file before leaving town.  In the few weeks I had to get ready for moving to Japan, there was a lot of Xeroxing of articles, papers at conferences, student evaluations, and the book manuscript for a monograph on Bierce and the first few hundred pages of the book that would become Revolution and the Word.

(Junior faculty take note:  I was tenured without a book under contract.  I don?t mean to be naïve here, my tenure dossier was thick, there were hundreds of pages of articles, papers, edited volumes, etc., but my wonderful mentor at MSU, whose position I was in after his retirement, Russell B. Nye, the cultural historian, heard me out when I told him I was planning a book on the role of new technologies of mass printing, literacy, education, mass culture, and new book distribution systems in the founding of the American Republic, and he listened when I said it would take me a decade to write it, and he said ?Go for it!? or, essentially, gave me his backing to take that risk as an untenured prof.  Don't try this without a powerful mentor--or at least don't take my word for it that it will work.  It did in my case, but I'm not advocating it, only telling the dirty secret that I was tenured without a book contract.  If you read my previous blog on Peer Review, you know I think that tenure should be based on multiple criteria and sometimes a university press book is the one and sometimes it is not. You can quote me!) [http://www.hastac.org/node/2105--on peer review and what counts and doesn't]

When two of the three senior people on my tenure committee warned me about the dangers of living in Japan while my tenure case was being decided, they weren?t much worried about the unpublished book factor.   Their worry was quite literally that I would be in Japan and people would forget how invaluable I was (!) and vote against me.  The third person on my committee, the astonishingly prolific Linda Wagner-Martin, said they were being ridiculous and I should do what I wanted.   Good advice.  What I wanted was to live in Japan.  So I told my chair I would take the risk, that I would rather not have tenure than give up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to teach in Japan in order to spend a year smilingly going about my obligations in East Lansing in order that people would vote for me for tenure.

I went to Japan.  I got tenure while I was there.  Both decisions changed my life.  Being bold, taking a risk . . . and finding the right mentors who would back me in the risk.  And going to Japan.

In an early letter home to Linda, I wrote that I couldn?t walk to the local ichiba, the covered farmer?s market, in the morning without finding something else that made me think that yet another behavior was learned, not biology, another deep structure of thinking was learned, not hardwired.  Every day.  I began reading in cognitive sciences back then because so much that was supposedly ?biological? and part of the evolutionary process that made us human turned out to be, well, different in Japan.  Again, I won?t repeat what I said in Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji here, except to say I?ve been formulating a theory of how we learn the world, from birth on, ever since, and have never stopped thinking about  the deep science of cognition; that is rooted in being plopped in a town with only one other ?foreigner,? when I barely knew the language, and I had to learn my way into a new life, largely by getting rid of old baggage.  Learn, unlearn, relearn. 

Here?s one small lesson that came up last night, in a lovely reunion with old friends from that first visit during my tenure year.  Last night, at the home of my dear friends the Okamotos, we talked about the year the curtain went up on classical music auditions and prize competitions in Europe.  Ichiro Okamoto is one of Japan?s great teachers of classical guitar and his students would all go off to Europe because, back then, it was believed that the Japanese could be great technical musicians but did not have (all of these were given as reasons then) the lyricism, the musicality, the free emotional nature to be more than technical wizards.   Then the auditions went blind and something like five of six major competitions held in Europe were one by Japanese students who had trained with Ichiro. Ah, yes, not innate ability of the player but the prejudices of the listener-judges were the issue.  If you could not see who was playing, suddenly Japanese and other Asians were sounding lyrical, emotional, free as well as technically gifted by comparison with brilliant European competitors.  It was a revelation not just for Europeans and Americans?but also for the Asian musicians.  Looking at any orchestra today it is hard to believe that the biggest difference was putting up a curtain.

The Rewired Brain puts up the curtain in many situations.  How do we know when we can't preconceive what we're knowing?  I argue that the digital era, in general, puts up such a curtain since, online, I don?t know if I am collaborating with a colleague or a bright fourteen-year old.  What happens when we judge by doing together, not by credentials?   What happens if ideas are the issue, not who is powerful enough to voice those ideas in a position where they can make a difference?   How does power change not just knowledge, in the Foucauldian disciplinary sense, but ideas themselves, and, beyond, the brain itself? 

Those are ideas I?ve been formulating?what I call the ?deep structure of thinking for the Information Age??since I took the chance on not having tenure in order to spend a year in Japan.  And here?s the final twist:  if I hadn?t gotten tenure, I doubt that I would now be finishing this life-long book project.  I do not have any cynicism about tenure.  Of course there are fools out there who waste this most precious of gifts on stupidity?but in business not everyone is an innovative entrepreneur either.  Why would we think that in academe tenure would make everyone think great and independent thoughts all the time?  That?s stupid logic. 

But without tenure, would we have open source code, would we have the Information Age, would we have the kinds of experiments that have made the Internet the revolutionary thinking tool that it is, not simply a fancy new form of communication but a gateway to a new possibility for worldwide collaborative knowledge-making?  You don?t need tenure and you don?t need to be an academic to be a digital innovator (far from it!). But you need the base of non-profit, no-holds-barred thinking to push and (sigh) authorize innovation and that has come from places like the MIT Media Lab or NCSA or Xerox Parc with its surfeit of academics who have had the incomparable freedom to think big and bold without worrying how to pay for it.   Our society doesn?t pay teachers much but it at least gives them the freedom to think big, and to pass on to students the possibility of ideas that are better than what money we make from them.  

That's why we give profs tenure.  Not to give them a cushy life (any busy academic, as numerous studies show, work more hours per week than even their business colleagues do), but to have a place in society where ideas can be "open source" and the freedom to think boldly without regard for remuneration can be passed on to students so in their lives, where typically there is no equivalent of tenure, they too might be inspired, somehow, sometime, to think boldly, to have that as a resource.  Of course it doesn't always work that way but how many successful people, in recalling a big cognitive breakthrough, point to a teacher in their lives who inspired them and who believed in them when they were willing to take a mental leap, one of those learn/unlearn/relearn risks?  

I was tenured in Japan in more ways than one.  That?s why I?m here now, back in Japan, at the end of this book project that, we?ll say, was my tenure project, started decades ago, and never (that is my hope) completed but, simply, being, over and over again, rewired.