"Dear family and friends..." - Dormgrandpop's holiday newsletter

Dear Family and Friends,

When writing end-of-year newsletters my recent practice has been to read over my Dormgrandpop entries for the year and compile a list of topics. Then I sought to summarize the year’s events for me and – more briefly – for family members. This year, my letter is being written late, and with the benefit of reading those of other friends first. Reading these conversational missives, simply summarizing family and events often interspersed with a few pictures, made my previous ones seem a bit pretentious; probably boring. They have become this year’s template.

My four grandchildren are now 6,8 15 and 20. In the fall my 15 year old grandson and I spent four days together Washington DC, which I wrote about in a blog, “Non-Judgmental Listening.” More recently, we gathered at son Bradford’s classically beautiful newly purchased historic home in Kentucky. My granddaughters and I devoted time to an activity I can recommend to other grandparents – “writing books” together. They told their stories, and I recorded them on my iPhone. As our partnership progressed, over a long weekend, both began to do their own writing, just seeking spelling assistance for difficult words. This is a great activity for grandfatherly listening and learning. Bradford continues his passionate pursuit of business growth, with priority given to new ventures in China, India and Southeast Asia, as President of Shaklee International. When we met on our first night in Kentucky, we spent nearly five hours in animated conversation, catching up with one another, discussing our lives, the world’s problems and the respective opportunities/challenges we both face.

While in Kentucky I also had a lengthy visit with my stepson, who now is pursuing his horse-breeding/care-giving business on a magnificent 500-acre farm that he rents near Lexington. I always look forward to our rare times together and the window into a very different, rewarding life-path they provide. Sadly, my oldest grandson could not be with us. His present calling combines college and work as a ski instructor in the west where the family lived for a number of years. Dormgrandpop readers may remember the description of his beautiful high school graduation ceremony that I attended two years ago.

Dormgrandpop readers will also know of my daughter’s activities from my recent blog about her “Holidazzle” project. Along with other members of an active artisan community, she has raised funds for a new Art and Music Center in Safety Harbor, Florida. Her landscape gardening business is successful enough that she has to turn away customers. During an all-too-short Florida visit, we had long talks, I bonded with her new dog “Tinglie,” a miniature Daschund rescued from an animal shelter, participated in a parade hyping a fund raiser for the new art center, and at the fund raiser, urged visitors to add links, for a one-dollar donation, to “the world’s longest holographic bracelet chain.” Since, as far as we know, there are no other such chains, we are hoping this will be enshrined in the Guinness Book of Records. When last I checked, nearly 2,000 visitors had attended the event.

My wife continued to pursue her passions of horseback riding, university teaching, and maintaining the beautiful country home that is her base of operations for these activities. No doubt she will have shared news of her rich lifestyle and remarkable achievements, with those whom she thought might be interested. Like, my daughter, she provides a valuable role model of an individual who is skilled at pursuing her passions and surrounding herself with a nurturing, loving and supportive community.

For me, this has been a transitional year filled with completions and new beginnings. Following my mother’s dictum of “leaving the stage while the audience was still applauding,” I retired from American University. The degree to which others were “still applauding” is for others to judge. Sadly, this necessitated that I give up my AU Anderson Hall apartment that had been my second home for nearly ten years. In making this move, I was empowered by the example of my father who, as he lived into his mid-nineties, survived the life-changes that aging inevitably entails, with grace and good humor. Hopefully, I can emulate his example. I was fortunate to find a beautiful new apartment to purchase within five minutes walk of American University’s campus and to receive an exciting offer at the National University of Singapore, combining teaching system dynamics modeling at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Policy with leadership of the “System Dynamics Initiative” at the University’s Global Asia Institute.

The opportunity to move to Singapore full time, which certainly would have been a possibility, was a tempting but would have unbalanced my life at a time when I need to be giving greater priority to family than in the past. Singapore, is after all, about as far from Washington DC and from wife, children and grandchildren as any place could be. However, as in the past, residing in several worlds, simultaneously, appears to be my karma (the product of the causes and conditions that define my life). As I look to the future, with optimism but also an awareness of life’s vicissitudes. It would seem that I may still have promises to keep – and miles to go before I sleep.

Thanks to all for beautiful end-of-year messages and your patience in staying connected with a not very reliable correspondent. May you be fulfilled and blessed in the New Year

Fondly,

Dormgrandpop

viewing the past year - post holiday newsletter

18 January. Written over the Pacific enroute from Tokyo to DC

Dear Family and Friends,

This was a year of travels and the beginning of transitions. If I am to keep to my self- imposed 1 page length, I can do little more than recount events, with few reflections. As some may recall, I stepped down officially as Director, Center for Teaching Excellence and began a one-year sabbatical in July 2009. In early January, I loaded up books, electronic equipment and other necessaries for a 7-month stay in Singapore as of Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. The environment was welcoming. The Lee Kuan Yew School, located adjacent to Singapore’s Botanical Gardens occupies buildings on the site of what was once “Raffles College,” where the late Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew, Choo Kwa, ranked first in her class and “Minister Mentor” Lee ranked second as secondary school students. I moved into a spacious two-bedroom 10th floor apartment in National University of Singapore subsidized housing. Each day, I could view Singapore awakening from my balcony.

My principal projects were completing a paper drawing lessons from Singapore’s post independence history that would be relevant to global sustainability issues, deepening my knowledge of Singapore’s political economy and promoting the use of System Dynamics computer modeling as a planning tool to Singapore government officials. I pursued these while my wife, her horses and our cats were coping with mountains of snow in the worst winter Washington DC had encountered in years. My Singapore sojourn offered the advantage of easy, inexpensive access to Sri Lanka, where the project to translate Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Development and Terrorism into 16 pamphlet sized booklets (8 in Sinhala, 8 in Tamil) continued to progress. The second two were “launched” in January 2011, just a day or so ago. The summer concluded with presentation of a paper at the Annual System Dynamics Society Meeting in Seoul entitled “The Relevance of Urban Dynamics to Singapore’s Development: Lessons for Moving Beyond the Crisis.” This was co-authored with Lee Kuan Yew School graduate student colleague new friend, Elizabeth Ong Ling Lee.

Full time teaching was the fall semester’s principal agenda, including an undergraduate class “International Development” that was my first attempt and a graduate class “Quantitative Research Methods” that I can taught many times, but not for 10 years. Both classes were relatively large – 25 in the graduate class; 33 in the undergraduate. I had forgotten how long correcting papers can take, especially if one provides fairly extensive comments. Fortunately my students were both bright – and patient – which made things easier.

For Christmas, I drove to Kentucky to spend three days with our four grandchildren, my son, and other family members. Once retirement transition is settled, I intend to spend more time “grand parenting,” Its fun. Wife E… continues to live an intense and interesting life dividing full days and evenings between teaching, riding, caring for her horses and spending time with friends. She won the prize for “most helpful member” at the Old Dominion Endurance Riding Association’s annual banquet. Daughter H…. divides full days between her landscaping, restaurant serving and a new practice – mosaic murals, including an awesomely large and beautiful production in Tarpon Springs Florida. With friends, she has purchased property in Panama that she hopes to develop as a resort. Son J…’s broodmare nurturing business in Kentucky appears to be doing well; he continues to pursue a vocation he loves in some of the most beautiful country in the US. Son B…’s work as President of Shaklee International appears to be thriving. I attended events in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was impressed with his charismatic platform presence before what appeared enthusiastic cadres of salesperson-representatives… That’s all the news one page will allow – my love and best wishes to all in the New Year. Dormgrandpop.

Preparing for a major public lecture - effective, but a bit bizarre and not very "efficient."

At mid day, today, I gave the second lecture in the Global Asia Institute Lecture Series. GAI is one which is one of my affiliations at the National University of Singapore. As at American University, there are many lectures at NUS each week. This one was not at the Lee Kuan Yew School but at the NUS Administration Building, University Hall, in elegant venue on the sixth floor with a gorgeous view of the city. The format seems to be a common one in Singapore and is somewhat similar to higher end luncheon events we initiated when I was Director of AU’s Center for Teaching Excellence (now the Center for Teaching Research and Learning).

Instead of seats in rows there were seven tables, beautifully set for a sit-down buffet lunch, each with an attractive flower arrangement in the Center. Invitations had been sent not only to the NUS community but to outsiders and a few representatives form the Singapore Government, the private sector the diplomatic community were in attendance. The event was billed not as a ‘lecture’ but as a conversation. After my talk of about 45 min, videotaped for posting on the GAI website, GAI Director Seetharam, Ambassador Dayan Jayatilleke (who was Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner and UN Representative in Geneva) and I adjourned to three armchairs on a raised platform and had a real conversation for about 40 min, first with each other and then with members of the audience. Dayan and I have been friends for more than 20 years. His father the former editor of Sri Lanka’s Daily News and then of the Lanka Guardian was one of my Sri Lankan mentors. So our conversation was relaxed and lively, engaged the audience, thought the subject matter was serious.

My approach to giving relatively high profile lectures such as almost always produces good results, but is not what you call efficient. Temperamentally, I now recognize that I will not produce the product I am looking for until the pressure of a deadline looms very close. This is true even if the topic is one on which I have spoken before. On Friday I tinkered and procrastinated. On Saturday I took the day off for a long bicycle ride on Singapore’s east coast. On Sunday I knew I had to get down to business, but decided I needed to read and annotate the Sri Lanka ruling party’s 100 page election manifesto, the Mahinda Chintana and incorporate it in my talk. This took most of the day. With this and that, my anxiety level was not high enough to really dig in until about 6:30 on Monday night. Then I worked until after 11 producing a final draft and printing it out (in case my computer crashed) a precaution I always try to take

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I awoke Tuesday morning at 5:30 realizing that I had left out some important points that needed to be incorporated in an additional section. This improved the paper greatly, but made it too long. I always read my presentations out loud and time them with a stop watch. I hate it when others go over time and make it a priority to know that my talk will be the right length before I step to the lecture. This enables me to relax and pace my delivery. With revisions, my scheduled talk of forty minutes ran 65 minutes. By now it was nine AM and I was working efficiently. I decided to simply make cuts in the hard copy text and read the talk aloud again, making cuts with my marker as I went. With 15 min for breakfast and an extra dose of vitamins, I finished the process at 10:55. Feeling a bit bleary, I took a 10 minute power nap (the advantage of working in my apartment) showered, dressed in my television suit (with the appropriately color matched shirt and tie) and packed up my notes. Even though the temperature outside was over 90, I decided to make the 25 minute walk to University Hall. It was a beautiful morning with flowers blooming and, in the shade of trees along the way, the heat was quite bearable. When I arrived at the venue, I was able to greet some of the guests who were sitting down to lunch (a part of the ritual for these events) and then eat an extremely light vegetarian noodle dish before speaking. The talk lasted 45 minutes and I was sufficiently confident of the length to pace it as I wish. This makes a huge difference in holding the attention of an audience. I used no power points - I rarely do for this sort of event. When I looked out over the room I saw attentive eyes and engaged expressions - this is always reassuring. Afterwards, there were numerous photos to be taken. I hope I get some copies When I returned to my apartment, after 2:30 I felt drained and exhausted, but good. This somewhat bizarre ritual had worked out well again. I don’t really love it but accept that this is what it seems to take for me to produce a quality product. I decided to regenerate myself with a nap before returning to the tasks that I had mostly put off since Friday. And I decided to share my experience by writing this blog. Perhaps it will make student readers feel better about assignments and term-papers they write.

Here is an the abstract of my talk.

Looking beyond the war: Are Sri Lanka’s leaders more likely to learn from history or repeat it?

ABSTRACT

What are the prospects for reconciliation and a lasting political solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, following the government’s military victory over the LTTE and then Mahinda Rajapakse’s strong victory in the recent presidential election? This question is now engaging Sri Lankan political leaders as well as regional and international actors who concern themselves with Sri Lanka. In seeking answers, it will be useful to focus attention on the period before Sri Lanka’s conflict became protracted; before Sri Lanka’s government faced a cohesive, well lead militant group that was unwaveringly single-minded in its objectives.

Under three previous Sri Lankan governments, following elections in 1956, 1970 and 1977, there were lost opportunities to move toward communal reconciliation. Following decisive victories, the policies each government implemented lead, rather, to intensified confrontation accompanied by violence. Each sequence of events made it more likely that the next would catalyze formation of a viable militant movement, leading to protracted conflict. Between 1983 and 1985, that was the outcome. Now Sri Lanka’s government and civil society once again face circumstances where the Tamil community’s aspirations are not irrevocably (if unwillingly) tied to the LTTE’s agenda. There is an opportunity to learn from history rather than repeating it. Does Singapore’s less violent and more prosperous development trajectory also have lessons to offer?