Cantonese Worlds Workshop at UBC #ItsAboutTime

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I recently presented at the Hong Kong-Canada Crosscurrents presents: Cantonese Worlds (May 14-15th, 2015).  Over the last 50 years, migrations between Hong Kong and Canada have transformed cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. Significant changes in real estate, business, philanthropy, and education, as well as cultural transformations in language, popular media, and mass consumption have reshaped societies on both sides of the Pacific. Flows of people, goods, and ideas have been multidirectional--even as hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese became Canadian citizens, Canadians of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage also migrated to Hong Kong for work and family. Counting the estimated 300,000 Canadian passport holders living in Hong Kong would rank it among the ten largest “Canadian” cities.

The Hong Kong-Canada Crosscurrents Project looks back on the last half century in order to understand how the migration of people, goods, and ideas across the Pacific has created a complex crosscurrent of dense and sometimes surprising connections, including the transformation and re-animation of a Cantonese Pacific world that had spanned the ocean for centuries.

Cantonese Worlds is a two-day workshop that aims to begin an important conversation about how to make sense of the transformations of the last 50 years. In gathering leading scholars and observers to lay out an initial set of workshop themes for discussion, this pilot process will help create guiding questions that will shape the next few years of research, outreach, and public education. Initial themes might include, for instance, the role of the Cantonese language historically in shaping linkages between Hong Kong and Canada, or how the resurgence of Cantonese popular culture and music has been a formative element in youth identities. We invite all those interested in examining the last half century of crosscurrents between Hong Kong and Canada to participate in this important undertaking.

In my presentation, Bringing Old Perspectives to New Audiences: a history of BC’s First Bilingual Newspaper, I look back at the last twenty years of a student-run publication called Perspectives Newspaper, which at one time, represented the voice of most Hong Kong students at UBC.  In 2009, this entire collection of newspapers was digitized and archived on UBC's institutional repository cIRcle as part of the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) project.  As I was once the Editor-in-Chief of this newspaper when I was a graduate student, I'm proud that I was able to offer insight into the evolution of the student movement and its context of academic libraries.

Fraser Valley Regional Library, 1930's - 1945 #TBT

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Yes, it's rare and it's kind of unsexy.  But it's #ThrowBackThursday.  So we must deal with it.  This brief historical footage is an experiment by the Government of British Columbia.  In 1930, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded the province a grant of $100,000 to establish and maintain a rural library project for five years. After considering various regions of the province, the Commission selected the Fraser Valley as the site of "BC’s book experiment."

The library’s first director Dr. Helen Gordon Stewart successfully met this challenge. With enormous energy, Stewart went about organizing the district, selecting books, hiring staff and purchasing a truck suitable for use as a book van. She personally visited councils and public meetings, convincing residents and politicians of the value of cooperation and resource sharing that would lead to a viable library system.

At the end of the five years of operation, under its present auspices, it is the hope that the people of the Fraser Valley, whether they reside in large or small centres, or in the out-of-way places, will want the library so much that they will decided to take it over as their own, to be maintained as a municipal service. The success which has already attended the experiment indicates that the Fraser Valley library will become a permanent institution

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It sure did. It's grown to become the largest public library system in British Columbia, spread over 24 community libraries serving nearly 680,000 people in its service area.  Stewart later went on to help establish another historic library system, the Vancouver Island Regional Library (VIRL) system.

Asian Canadian Archives (Re)Visited

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Here is a "digital story" video created by a student at UBC as part of an undergraduate film studies course.   In my work as a librarian, I've had chances to work with community organizations on cultural projects.  The Chinese Canadian Stories is one case where I have collaborated with small organizations across Canada in recovering lost histories about the Headtax and discrimination.  Vivian Wong, Tom Ikeda, Ellen-Rae Cachola, and Florante Peter Ibanez authored a very interesting  piece in "Archives (Re)Imagined Elsewhere" in Through the Archival Looking Glass.

Asian American community-based archives are more than repository for materials for the communities they serve; rather, are spaces where collective memories are created and collective histories represented. In this context, previously marginalized and neglected groups can reclaim their experiences. National records show Asian Americans viewed from the outside as undesirable immigrant-aliens. Archives as community-based organizations in Asian American communities are formed apart from official repositories for Asian Americans to represent and imagine themselves differently.

Community institutions thus challenge the "traditional notions" of archives which often serves as a custodial function primarily for records of bureaucratic organizations such as governments. On the other hand, Asian American archival organizations exist in local communities, separate from institution-based archives, as spaces for Asian Americans to represent themselves, their histories, cultures, identities, and experiences as they see themselves in America.

In the 1960's, Asian American groups began forming responses to their exclusion from mainstream society which ultimately enabled and empowered them to create their own documentation of their experiences within these communities.   The last twenty years has seen an increased insistence and urgency to push the boundaries archival theories, practices, and education in ways that consider alternate approaches to knowing and understanding archives, records, and recordkeeping.

Some of the projects that are worth noting in the Canadian context include the following:

• The Pacific Canada Heritage Centre - Museum of Migration [Link]
• Vancouver Asian Heritage Month's explorASIAN Festival [Link]
• Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia [Link]
• Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) program [Link]

McDonaldization and Higher Education & Academic Libraries

I've been an academic librarian for almost eight years now: how time flies.  One of my favourite writers since I was a student has been Brian Quinn, whose research focuses on the psychosocial aspects of libraries.  One of my first posts featured Quinn's article on librarians as dramaturgists.   Quinn's writing is often fresh and insightful, focusing on different angles and perspectives of librarianship.

In 2000, he put forth the idea that just as society is becoming increasingly "McDonaldized," so is higher education and by extension, academic libraries.  The argument is that we live in an age of mass higher education, in which many students attend college because they see a college education as a means to a more lucrative career, not because they love learning.   Colleges and universities are under pressure from the public and governments to "control costs and maximize efficiency."  I can feel this often in my own line of work, too.

McDonaldization and Efficiency 

Efficiency is the systematic elimination of unnecessary time or effort in the pursuit of an objective.

The fast-food concept of quick service may have had the effect of raising the expectations of library users. Users seem less content with waiting in line for reference assistance and appear less willing to tolerate delays. Some libraries have responded by giving reference staff pagers so they can be “beeped” if a line forms at the service desk. The use of pagers is another example of how services in academic libraries have become efficiently rationalized.

McDonaldization and Calculability

 Calculability is another key characteristic of McDonaldization. Ritzer defined the term calculability as the tendency to measure quality in terms of quantity.

Many college and research libraries also keep extensive statistics on everything from reference transactions, cataloging statistics, and ILL statistics to circulation statistics, entrance gate statistics, and statistics about online transactions. Often the statistics are compiled for use as evidence of the library’s performance to justify requests for budget increases.

McDonaldization and Predictability 

Another key aspect of the rationalization process that is central to McDonaldization is predictability. A rational society is one in which people know what to expect - McDonald's menu is predictable and the food is consistently mediocre no matter which outlet is visited.  A world of McDonald’s is a significantly bland world in which surprise and delight are largely absent.

The collection development process has become more and more standardized, resulting in collection content varying less from one library or type of library to another. . . Many academic libraries use the same vendors, and although particular subject profiles may vary somewhat, the differences often depend more on a particular library’s depth of collecting than on the books themselves.

McDonaldization and Control 

The fourth and final aspect of McDonaldization is control. People represent the most unpredictable aspect of rationalized, bureaucratized systems, so it is people that McDonaldized organizations attempt to control.  Technology is easier to control than humans, so the ultimate goal of McDonaldization is to replace humans with technology.

Academic librarians are typically subject to an elaborate, formalized system of bureaucratic accountability that serves as a form of control. Each librarian’s performance is carefully documented by various means, such as systematized monthly reports to supervisors, annual or semiannual evaluations recorded on standardized forms that must be signed by both librarian and supervisor, less frequent, but periodic, review by promotion and tenure committees, and, more recently, posttenure review committees.

2015:  Recruiting Un-McDonaldized Librarians?  The Response 15 Years Later

So what's a helpless librarian to do in the midst of this scientific Taylor-style Fordist machinery?   Quinn suggests one remedy to counter the alarming trend is to hire un-McDonaldized librarians which would enable an un-McDonaldized culture.  Fifteen years later, Canadian librarian Karen Nicholson furthers the argument, citing that McDonaldization of academic libraries reflects the growing influence of corporate aims and values in the public sector under the neoliberal philosophy of New Public Management (NPM) -- think competition, profitability, risk, value for money, and entrepreneurship -- increasingly buzzwords in our daily lives.  They've seeped into academic librarianship.

Under this system, society is producing "new kinds of workers"—highly flexible, empowered “portfolios” of skills and experiences ready to sacrifice in lean times, enabled through an indoctrinating culture through the use of core values, vision statements, and futurist leaders. 

The American Library Association’s work in defining and promoting “core values” and developing leaders through programs such as Emerging Leaders, a self-propagating initiative that ultimately serves the needs of the ALA itself by “put[ing] participants on the fast track to ALA committee volunteerism,” exemplifies the influence of the new capitalism within the profession of librarianship.

The number of for-profit universities is on the rise, and higher education, in partnership with the private sector, continues to pursue the “expansive markets” of distance learning and e-commerce, as seen by the ubiquity of learning management systems and recent MOOCs phenomena.  This is scary stuff: I'm even taking a sabbatical to figure this all out, too.

So we end with the question that we began with: what are we to do?  I certainly don't have an answer as I am still in the thick of this myself.  Nicholson offers wise words of advice: as a profession, perhaps we need to consider why we do things instead of measuring what we do.  That's a great start:  A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, as the saying goes.

The Price of Admission Is a Steep One For Learning

Price of Admission, although published in 2006, still rings true in academia today.  In an age when tuition fees have continued to ballooned to the point that it has overpriced even the most middle class of students.  It has become a luxurious business.  Journalist Daniel Golden's Price of Admission offers much thought provoking. Many colleges have developed special backchannel routes to admissions for the rich.   Harvard even has what is infamously known as the "Z-list" for “late admissions” which receive the golden preferential treatment.    Of course, universities don't like to admit this, attested to by the numerous "no comments" and "would not responds" during Golden's research.  What are the five categories of that is currently soiling the reputation of academia?

The Wealthy - Money talks.   The so-called prestigious universities justify favoring children of alumni and prospective donors on the grounds that tuition doesn't cover the entire cost of education. Of course, Ivy League institutions reason that private gifts subsidize scholarships, faculty salaries and other needs.  In fact, Golden reports that a recent study of legacies at one elite university found that as a group they are more likely than their classmates to be white, Protestant, and have attended prep schools.  It's known as development preference -- students recommended by the fundraising office, because their non-alumni parents or relatives are considered in a position to help the institution with money or visibility.  These parents may be corporate tycoons, Hollywood celebrities, or politicians in a position to provide earmarked funding.  The offspring, however, often arrive with less than peak credentials.  Harvard even informally has a name for these preferential applicants: the "Z-list."

The Famous - Celebrities and the children of celebrities enhance an institution's visibility.  Brown University chose a different strategy, instead targeting the children of the famous instead of the merely rich, such as Danny DeVito, Kevin Costner, and Hollywood Michael Ovitz are all now happy alumni parents.  Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist saw his son go to Princeton, his alma mater, despite less-than-stellar credentials at the exclusive St. Albans School.  Daniel Golden entertainingly regales us with tales of Hollywood insiders who get the red carpet treatment from the Ivy Leagues, such as mogul Michael Ovitz who wanted to enroll in 1999 and still inexplicably got accepted when Brown admissions officers found the academic record of the younger Ovitz not close to what would be appropriate for an offer of admission.  Pressured to admit him anyway, top administrators looked the other way as the abilities of the elder Ovitz – to host receptions for Brown administrators to raise money, to bring movie stars to campus, and presumably to help build Brown’s endowment - were far too much to pass up.  Brown Ovitz’s son was admitted under "special status," but eventually left but Ovitz’s daughter took the torch and entered Brown.  For all that work, Ovitz reciprocated and arranged campus appearance with Hollywood A-lister Dustin Hoffman, and subsequently hosted a reception at Ovitz’s Brentwood mansion.

"The Legacies" - Nearly all selective private schools, and many public universities, give an admissions edge to legacies, largely to facilitate alumni giving. At most top schools, legacies comprise a large part of the student composition and are accepted at two or three times the rate of other applicants. Some universities accept nearly half of alumni children who apply.   How skewed are the numbers?  As journalist Max Nisen reports,  Harvard's legacy admissions rate hovers around 30% when its overall admissions rate is 5.8%.  For Princeton's class of 2015, 33% of legacy applicants were admitted where the overall admissions rate for that class was 8.5%. Yale reveals that it admits 20 to 25% of legacy applicants while it only admitted 6.7% overall.

Athletes - Although we might believe that team sports on television reflect the diversity of university campuses, we don't realize that colleges often give admissions breaks to athletes in many prep-school sports that ordinary American kids never have a chance to play: crew, horseback riding, sailing, squash, polo, the list goes on.  It essentially comes down to money again, as colleges give preferential treatment toward athletes from these "rich sports" to attract wealthy donors who rowed crew or played squash themselves, want their alma mater to have a winning team, and are eager to pay for the boathouse or the polo ponies.  As such, we are already seeing colleges fund blueblood sports like crew and equestrian events while eliminating men’s teams in "working-class" sports like wrestling and track and field.

Faculty Brats - The admissions break is a side-effect of the tuition subsidy most colleges give to not only the children of faculty, but all types of employees, including secretaries and janitors. The history of the tuition benefit harks back to a time when colleges needed to offer such perks to attract candidates to lowly paid campus jobs.  But times have changed as the benefits offered in higher education are now seen as generous when compared with those in other major industries, which cut back during the recession.

Whereas universities are lax in criteria for some, it's almost exclusive to others.  Hiding behind the guise of affirmative action, some institutions narrow its preferences to particular ethnicities.  "Asians" in the US do not qualify for affirmative action, which colleges generally limit to underrepresented minorities such as blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.  Families that cannot afford to donate to a university must have exemplary scores and grades - and often even such criteria is not enough for admissions to the more prestigious institutions.  Instead subjective factors, such as artistic talent and leadership ability which lead to the rejection of countless valedictorians and students with perfect SAT scores.

Ironically, Daniel Golden himself is from the very institution he seeks to expose - though from a different generation.  Golden was a product of the SAT generation, and was one of the thousands of bright, middle-class public high school students who were able to attend a elite college at least partly because the test helped extend the vision and reach of the Ivy Leagues beyond a cluster of old-boy prep schools.

As a product of a Canadian university, I'm fortunate that there is still a sense of egalitarianism.  Corporatization is slowly seeping into the system, but we still have some time before the resistance becomes futile.  It's said that the relatively level playing field among Canadian universities is  one reason why Canada has the largest proportion of university graduates among G7 countries and the highest percentage of university graduates in the workforce.  It attracts talent from around the world to relocate to Canada.  But how long before we go the Ivy route?   I feel privileged to be among the elite.

Smartcuts - Breaking Conventions In the Name of Innovation

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Smartcuts is an unbelievably entertaining and informative book by technology journalist Shane Snow.   It is not simply about shortcuts, but smartcuts - the ability to accomplish rapid successes and breakthrough innovation with much less that we think.   In short, it argues while incremental progress can be achieved by playing by the rules, successful innovators create transformational change by breaking conventional rules and thought.  Out of Smartcuts emerges nine themes which engages innovation.   I thought it would fun to share with you here.  I'd be interested in hearing your feedback.

1. Hacking the Ladder - We live in an age of non-traditional ladder climbing.  Not just in politics, but business and personal development and education, entertainment, and innovation.  "Paying your dues" in traditional paths are not just slow, they're no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. This leads to true meritocracy.

2. Training with Masters - Data indicates that those who train with successful people who've "been there" tend to achieve success faster.  The winning formula, therefore, is to seek out the world's best and convince them to coach us.  But that's not enough though, as history is full of people who've been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.  It's not surprising, considering the failure rates of workplace mentorship programs.  Training with masters mean developing personal relationships with mentors, asking their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand - caring about the mentors' lives, too.  It's a relationship, not a transaction.

3. Rapid Feedback - It is about asking for feedback at a rate that encourages rejection and pushing oneself to become better instead of becoming a failure.  This type of pure, unadulterated feedback mechanism is a process that helps us adapt, modify, and refine our craft in a safe space that allows for true improvement.

4. Platforms - The platform amplifies the effort and teaches skills in the process of using it.  Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish as paying dues, as Shane Snow puts it.  Innovation pays off when it is amplified by a lever, meaning platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing the wheels or repeating ourselves, so that building on top of a lot of things that exist in the world to maximize efficiency and eliminate redundancy.

5. Catching Waves - While conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike, it's akin to believing if a surfer treads water in the same spot a wave will come along.  However, it doesn't; hence, some people practicing for twenty years never become experts.  A pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot, and neither can innovation.  The secret is to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.  In innovation, one must watch for the trends and anticipate where it will be coming and going before it comes.

6. Superconnecting - No matter that medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.  All great innovators build their careers by collaborating with talented, fast-rising, and well-connected people and by making them look great.  But once they become superconnectors, they continue helping people.  That's how to tell if someone is a giver or a taker in giver's clothing, with the paradigmatic message: If you do it only to success, it probably won't work.  Pay it forward.

7. Momentum - The trick to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.  No one is an "overnight" success - each success story had backlogs of material that became reservoirs, ready to become torrents as soon as the dam was removed.  That's what needs to happen when that big break happens.  The difference between a success and a lucky break is substance.  

8. Simplicity - It's no secret that constraints drive creativity.  Many such great innovations this world has seen have emerged from limited means.  It's important to break down complex equations down to core principles.  It's critical to instill urgency and focus on what's core.

9. 10X Thinking - Vision is what ultimately drives success.  While people are willing to support other people's small dreams with kind words, we're willing to invest lives and money into huge dreams.  The bigger the potential, the more people are willing to back it.  Big causes attract big believers, big investors, big capital, and big talent.  To become not just bigger, but truly better.