It is with a great sense of accomplishment—and no small relief—that I announce a major shift in the Sphere College Project. I am stepping out of the role of President and into the role of Principal Mentor and Chief Education Strategist. Virginia Stewart, a student in the Project for nearly three years, has agreed to assume the role of Interim President. This will allow me to focus on the activities that I need to focus on, and will place into the role of President someone whose skills are a much better fit for the job.
Since this is such a departure from the way institutions are typically run, it may be difficult for some people to understand how a student can also act in the position of President. But this change accomplishes two things: (1) Having been a student, Virginia has a better understanding of what we are doing than almost anyone, and she can speak eloquently and convincingly about her experience; and (2) it demonstrates an important aspect of our philosophy in which members of the administration truly see themselves as students as well. Are there any institutions in which the President is taking courses in areas that truly challenge them and that are far outside their primary area of expertise, and where administrators typically work at learning as hard as the students do? Perhaps there are, but I’m not aware of them. (I would be very interested to learn about them, though.)
So there are some important transitions happening here, and they represent a significant forward shift in our strategy for expanding our operations.
I am delighted that Virginia has agreed to take on this position, at least until we find a permanent replacement. I look forward to supporting her as she carries us to the next phase in the evolution of this project.
This is big. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Chronicle of Higher Education may be loosely described as “the Wall Street Journal of higher education”. An article in Chronicle gives us a level of credibility that is very difficult to achieve otherwise. They wouldn’t waste their resources on something that doesn’t have merit, and they have clearly put a lot of work into the article. Our task at hand now is to leverage the article, to get the word out about it and continue to raise the funds that will support us as we move to become a self-sustainable entity and truly provide students with the resources they need.
Hmm, maybe you can help. Maybe you can point people you know towards the article, particularly people who work in higher education (it does require a subscription). Maybe you can provide a small amount of financial support either directly to Sphere College or perhaps even better at this time to the project I posted at RocketHub. This is a project to raise some funds to help promising youths in the Phoenixville community and to help me survive (yes, it’s like that these days): http://rockethub.com/projects/1831-walk-this-way. And please encourage others to support it as well! You know what to do: facebook, twitter, comment on other blogs, send emails, etc.
The point here is that we are all connected and must help one another out. I’m doing my level best to help members of my community. I’m asking you to assist me in that, and you will benefit as well by living in a more educated, compassionate, sensible and fun community, peaceful in the knowledge that you helped make it all happen.
I gave a talk about Sphere College on Monday at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. The talk seemed to go rather well, and I had some excellent followup conversations afterward, some of which are ongoing via email. One reason we connect with others in this was is because the questions we get help us continue to develop our own ability to convey our ideas to others. During these conversations it became more clear to me precisely what, to my mind, Sphere College really is. In a nutshell…
The system I envision here is of a self-organizing system in which it is not possible for any of the entities—faculty/staff/students, current and future—has sufficient knowledge of the complete system to fully design it beforehand. Human experience is simply too heterogeneous. This implies that the implementation must be discovered on the fly. Communication among the entities begins with rather low fidelity (in the sense of accuracy of reproduction of a signal to its source), complicating the problem. However, the fidelity increases manyfold as the system matures. At all times a sufficient infrastructure must be present to ensure progress toward the common goal, embodied in our mission statement (which was written by the students under my guidance). The function of some of the entities—a minimal number—is to maintain the integrity of the infrastructure. I posit that this system is optimal.
Granted, there are many people to whom the above is not going to make a lot of sense, but think about it while we work on other ways to convey the concept of Sphere College. In the Steering Committee we have been discussing a nice metaphor. More on that at another time.
Note the new header image. Thank you Jonathan Stewart, student of Sphere College and graphic artist, for providing the artwork! Jonathan has also donated a great deal of his time and expertise developing the brochure for the college.
Please join us for a special evening fundraiser for Sphere College on Friday May 7th from 8pm to 12am on the third floor of Molly Maguire’s in Phoenixville. More details, including dress code, are available in the recent blog post, “Black and White Affair”. The event is free and open to the public. Remember to stop by the ATM beforehand so you’ll be able to purchase lots of raffle tickets!
Strategies for funding Sphere College are becoming clearer each day. The contributions that continue to come in help us to purchase supplies, defray costs of incidental expenses like membership of the College to the Phoenixville Area Time Bank, printing of brochures, the creation of a very nice sign we can use at various events, and so on. We are deeply appreciative of your ongoing support.
However, we are spending faster than we are bringing in the funds. We have great need to secure funding for a permanent space, and to hire several people who can form a solid core of the infrastructure of the College. I’m confident that there are high net worth individuals who are deeply passionate about doing good work in their community and who can bring these goals to fruition. I am certain that once they learn about what we’ve been doing and what the future vision of the college is, they will be compelled to provide substantial financial support. I just haven’t met these people yet.
This is where I need your help. There are people out there reading this blog (it’s now getting roughly 80 hits per day compared to 12 hits per day a year ago) who either personally know such an individual, or who know someone who does. I ask you to put me in contact (info (at) spherecollege.org) with one of these individuals in any way you choose. You can introduce me to them directly, or provide me with their contact info and let them know I will be contacting them. I will then sit down with them to discuss what the college is about.
Once all their questions are answered they will clearly see how beneficial it will be for our society for a significantly higher percentage of members of our community to be engaged in educating themselves about the things they are passionate about. It is inevitable that when people follow their passions that they will acquire knowledge that will help them create a more responsive and effective government. Waiting for people who are unable to find a job to resort to means of sustaining themselves that are unhealthy for them is also unhealthy for society. We will end up incarcerating them and paying through the nose for the justice and “correction” system. Instead, we should first provide them with an environment in which they can learn the skills that will allow them to contribute to society, and we should do so in a way that works with their learning styles.
So please take some time to think about who you know who and put me in touch with them. In the meantime, keep your contributions coming. They not only help sustain us as we work to expand, but also demonstrate broad support for the vision of the college. And stay tuned here for developments with Sphere College.
On the heels of the first anniversary celebration on Tuesday night last week we had a fantastic class on Thursday night. The discussion was about Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Why are we reading/discussing Shakespeare? Well, for several reasons. My former students at Ursinus College have been doing book drives collecting texts that Sphere College students can use. In fact, I have stacks of texts in my kitchen waiting to be handed out: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Galileo, Genesis, The Qur’an, The Bhagavad-Gita and more. In Sphere College we go in the direction students choose to go given our interests and the resources at hand. I had a stack of Merchant, and a number of the students thought that it would be a good experience to approach Shakespeare, so there we go.
Shakespeare proves to be a very rich source of material for exploring ‘Self and Other’. Our discussion included gender similarities and differences, the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law, the nature of bargains, morality questions related to charging interest for loans, what the implications are for an economy based on loans for growth, how social norms in one society can affect social attitudes in seemingly remote societies, and other topics.
We’ll be continuing with Merchant this Thursday night, then move on to something brought in by one of the students.
In the meantime, I continue working to build the infrastructure of the College during a time of economic difficulty. But hey, I do love a challenge—particularly one that will have such a huge payoff in its affect on our society: a practical program of education for adults that allows them to go through the transformation they wish to go through. Frankly, I’ve wracked my brain and I can’t think of anything at all that would have greater positive influence. Stay tuned! Help out!
And as always we welcome your financial support. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount—any amount will help. Just visit the DONATE! page and make a small, tax-deductable contribution. It will help us pay for the people who are making this possible (right now that’s me, Michael and Virginia), it will help defray costs for creating and printing brochures and mailing materials, for purchasing supplies, and it will pay for our memberships—we belong to the Phoenixville Area Time Bank, and we very recently joined the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia!
During our first anniversary celebration on Tuesday night I gave a speech about the founding of the College, it’s current state and future vision. I’ve received positive feedback on it, so I thought I would reproduce it here for those who were unable to attend. I’ll also expand on a couple of items that could use some fleshing out.
In class last Thursday night we went around the table talking a bit about our relationship to the material we were studying. I spoke for a bit about myself and the motivation for founding Sphere College, and I thought it would be useful to repeat it here to frame what it is that we’re doing:
I was born and raised in rural South Carolina. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to take as long as it may seem from that introduction! I grew up going around barefoot and saying “ain’t”. Like the childhoods of most people, it was a beautiful and horrible existence, and I thought I was unable to do anything useful in the world.
In the sixth grade I had a math teacher (I don’t recall her name right now, but will find out and add it) told me I had a good brain in my head and I wasn’t using it. (In class I misspoke and said “told me I had a good brain on my head”. We had a bit of a chuckle at that.) What she said caused a shift in my self-image and I cried. A lot. But from then on I excelled at math.
When I went to college I studied music—my mother was a piano teacher—and became a very accomplished musician, performing with some of the best in the world. But while living in NYC I realized that I had not sufficiently satisfied my curiosity for mathematics and computers, so I then became a software engineer. But I knew I loved teaching, so I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
I had become accomplished in the arts and the sciences, but I knew that the humanities was missing, so I sought a job in a small liberal arts college in the northeast so that I could absorb the humanities by being in close proximity with professors who were in the humanities. It worked. I was pleased to land a position on the faculty of Ursinus College. The great advantage of Ursinus was that all professors are expected to teach the freshman seminar course, CIE: Common Intellectual Experience, essentially a humanities course, from time to time. Now, in my first class meeting I explained to the students, “Hey, I’m a Computer Science professor. If you think I’m going to teach this material TO you, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. We’re going to learn this material together.” I think they appreciated my honesty and really dug in.
The material in the class seems to have had the intended effect, not only on the students but on me as well. I came to understand that what I really want to do is to provide an environment in which students can really identify and pursue their dreams.
Ursinus and I parted ways. (Oh, we’re friends… I stay in contact with many of my former colleagues and students. In fact, students at Ursinus go on book drives to collect texts from the CIE classes and donate them to Sphere College.) As I was looking for another college in which to teach, I began as a good software engineer would: by defining my requirements. So I designed the most sensible educational program I could think of.
It makes the most sense to first help the student identify what they want to accomplish with their lives. This would take as long as it takes for the student, and would involve learning more about oneself and others, and how similarly and differently people think, and being aware of important issues facing our society. Once this is established, then the student would need to acquire the skills to accomplish their life goals. This means working with the student to develop an individualized, interdisciplinary curriculum around their passion. Then each students needs to put their knowledge into action while gaining practical experience.
I then thought about who deserves to be able to learn in such a program. The answer was clear: anyone who has the desire to, whether they have money or not. And if everyone has access to this kind of education, then it would likely be transformative for our society.
When I went looking for a college with this kind of program, I didn’t find it. So I decided to start it myself. This satisfied another goal: to remain in Phoenixville, which I had come to love.
So I founded Sphere College. Why the name? Well, I didn’t want to name it after me (Liston College? Liston University? No, thanks.) or the area. And the word “sphere” can be a nice metaphor for many things: the inner and outer self, self and other, an image of perfection for which to strive, and hey, it’s Thelonious Monk’s middle name!
Well, we’ve been going strong for one year now. We’ve got a very solid core group of students who have studied a wide range of material including Gilgamesh, Genesis, Galileo, Goethe, Graph Theory, Game Theory (yeah, lots of ‘G’s there!) the Bhagavad-Gita, Rudolph Steiner, Plato, Aristotle, Wendell Berry, and many other topics. Sure, it’s heavily weighted to the philosophical, but that’s what the students selected. Currently we’re doing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and will soon move on to another topic suggested by a student.
We also have a Steering Committee made up of students and faculty that meets once a week that makes fundamental decisions about how the college will unfold, and we all learn from this process, and a fundraising committee that did a great deal of work putting together the first anniversary celebration. And speaking of faculty, how lucky are we to have Michael Reddy, who has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Chicago, is an accomplished guitarist and woodworker, and has studied Native American shamanism for 20 years, to be on the faculty? Well, pretty lucky. And we’ve done all this on a shoestring budget!
What’s the future vision for Sphere College? Imagine us one year from now with around 100 students and 10 diverse faculty members in a space of our own—which we’re currently working to acquire, by the way—where we are exploring the education that we are passionate about, forming strong relationships with businesses in the area and working together to take the College in its next direction. This to me, and I hope to you, too, seems like a vision worth making a reality.
In just two days Sphere College will reach its first anniversary. We’re celebrating with an event at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville.
It’s been a rewarding, difficult, exciting, growing, bonding, and fascinating year. After the reception at 6pm I’ll be giving a speech at 7pm. I’ve been thinking a lot about the form and content of the speech. I’ve observed many speeches of this kind, but never given one.
Ok, I’ll admit it: giving speeches has never been my forte. To give this kind of speech I have to step very far outside my comfort zone. But this is exactly what I’m asking my students to do in pursuing their education, so I know I must rise to the occasion.
Actually, my greatest concern is not being able to individually thank the many, many people who have made it possible for the College to make it this far. But it is not possible for me to do this. It would end up like those Oscar acceptance speeches, where the actor or director goes on and on. It would be tedious for the audience to hear a list of names of people they don’t know. But there truly are so many people I’m indebted to who have given their time and energy to this seemingly impossible project. So I’m going to have to strike a balance. I’ll do my best.
We do hope you’ll join us for this celebration. Come, share some food with us, meet the students, meet Michael Reddy, meet the members of the Steering Committee, the Advisory Group, the Fundraising Committee, and all the other people who are supporting Sphere College in so many ways. Enjoy the entries to the first annual Sphere College Short Film Contest, and the feature film, Living in Oblivion—a comedy with some fantastic acting. And hey, why not bring a little cash so you can purchase tickets for the very fine raffle items collected by members of the Fundraising Committee, and provide some financial support the ongoing activities of the College?
We look forward to having you celebrate with us on Tuesday night!
Really great class last night. And it was the first night I got to participate completely in the role of student!
I passed the baton to Michael Reddy, who is taking over responsibility for the Thu night class. What a relief to have someone so capable of managing a discussion! And I get to learn along with the other students. That’s a large part of the idea here: a college administration that understands that we’re all learning together.
The discussion last night was a reading, suggested by one of the students, involving the metaphor of the earth as Divine Mother. We learned a lot about Self and Other in the process.
Next up, we’ll consider masculine/feminine in the character Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
The Sphere College Short Film Contest is accepting entries through April 10. Tell your film/video-making friends. Let’s see those submissions!
Nothing is static. Oh, sometimes things may seem static, but really everything is always moving, adjusting, shifting, flowing, contracting, expanding. If we are aware of the changes going on around us as they are happening then we can consciously move with them. It’s a bit like dancing. In my case, I feel like I’m dancing a dance I don’t yet know.
But I’m not the only one in this situation. Today I read a fascinating article in New York Magazine entitled “Betraying Salinger: I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it.” I think I know a bit how the author, Roger Lathbury, felt at times. The fact that ego is the most difficult thing to transcend resonates with me. The challenge is that one must have to have a sufficiently healthy ego in the first place to make the decision to embark on a seemingly impossible journey, then figure out how to keep it in check. It’s a very fine line. But we’re all human and prone to error. The one thing we all share is that we’re all doing the best we can at every moment in time given our knowledge and experience.
So it goes with the College. As I shifted my focus of building the College to space, funding and faculty, attendance at the classes has waned a bit. There is a core group of dedicated students who come to every class. Others, I think, need the college to grow to offer more classes, have a home and generally become more substantial. So we recently made a hard decision—we consolidated the afternoon class into the evening class. On the bright side, we do have a waiting list of people interested in becoming students, and will soon be ready to start working them into college activities.
Meanwhile, we have added one imminently qualified faculty member, Michael Reddy, and we are working to solidify our agreement with another one. And we are making excellent progress towards obtaining a home for the College. I suspect there will be good news to report here in the very near future.
We also agreed that Michael will be taking on responsibility for the Thu evening class, which allows me to focus my efforts on continuing to build the college while he focuses on the quality of the class, a very sensible division of duties. To get things rolling during his transition, we are reading two articles authored by Michael: “Does Digital Dilute Materialism?”, and “Voice-only, Email, and Text–the Goodwill Squeezeplay”. Feel free to read them and post comments.
And like everyone else in the world, I’ll continue to do my best at every moment in time given my knowledge and experience.
What a fantastic class we had Thursday night! Melissa Miles, Organizer of the Eastern Pennsylvania Permaculture Guild, gave an introduction to permaculture—systems-type thinking applied to eco- and cultural-systems. The positive energy she brought to the group was quite evident in the lively discussion we had about effecting change in our community that is respectful of the individual and incorporates sustainable practices. We are currently working with Melissa to see how we can best integrate her with Sphere College.
So it seems now we’re making excellent progress on the faculty side. And we’re also making progress on the administrative side, with Virginia assisting me in my work, and Sue doing project work on behalf of the College. There’s also a very solid core group of students who have been participating in nearly every class for nearly a year. And to demonstrate how dedicated they are, Dudley Carl opted to attend the Sphere class even though there were two competing lectures in areas of great interest to him; thank you, Dudley! The College would simply not succeed without this kind of student participation.
We have, however, seen a wane in the number of students who attend class meetings. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, but I think they can all be summed up as demonstrating that the College needs to reach a position in which it can support a variety of student learning styles. Weekly classes of two hours each does not provide the range of learning environments we need to provide, and now that we have more faculty members we are ready to expand so that we can add more students. To do so, however, simply takes funding. We must pay the faculty and staff, and acquire space so we can expand the class offerings. The funding will happen in three phases: I) direct contributions II) grants III) alumni support. Right now we need direct contributions to be able to continue.
So keeping the balance now means raising funds. Make no mistake: we’re at a critical point in the history of Sphere College. It’s either going to succeed or fail. So, if you would like to see Sphere College grow and expand, and that offering free, high-quality education is a worthwhile strategy for bringing about positive change to our society, then do the following:
* take a moment to click on the “DONATE!” tab and donate some small amount
* take a moment to encourage others to do so, either via direct email or via some social media like facebook
Keep in mind that the Obama campaign raised around $250M and the McCain campaign raised around $63M in donations below $200 (source: http://www.fec.gov). If you can help us find 10,000 people to donate in the $10-$100 range, then we can really take the College to the next level. Please take action right now!
