October 18, 2016

"H*A*T*E - is that how you spell love in your dictionary?/K*I*C*K pronounced as kind." (Andy Partridge, XTC)

Much is made these days about incivility, in our politics, in our classrooms, in our work environments.  It seems particularly rampant on our college campuses, a sore spot for an industry already nursing many wounds taken from constant jabs by any number of attackers.  The subject seems so important that Inside Higher Ed has had a number of pieces in the last few weeks focused primarily on the role of civility/incivility across college campuses:

How being perceived as nice can impact a female academic (10/13/16);

Saving dysfunctional departments (10/10/16);

A guide to dealing with classroom incivility (10/4/16).

Not to be outdone, The Chronicle of Higher Ed also had a similar piece:

Cruelty and Kindness in Academia (10/11/16).

Among academics especially, we can lament the incivility among our politicians, but we hardly embody the best qualities.  After hearing about my own frustrations with incivility where I work, a friend of mine turned me onto this 2014 Atlantic Monthly article about the importance of kindness in marriages. It made me realize that the findings in this love relationship research should be just as pertinent to any relationship.  After all, is there anything more accurate than "being mean is the death knell of relationships?"

People who don't exhibit kindness and generosity within relationships create "fight-or-flight" instincts.  In the research cited in Atlantic Monthly, couples were more physiologically active (increased heart rate, sweating, so forth) as their relationships deteriorated over time: "Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facts, they were prepared to attack and be attacked."  We shouldn't be surprised that people don't react well from a place of anxiety or fear.  As Warren Zevon sang, "you're a whole different person when you're scared."

Why is it so hard to respond "in kind?" The exchange of a good for a service should be second nature for us, but it isn't.  Ultimately, when everyone is using the same twisted dictionary, our response to workplace bullying often is in kind, but not in kindness.  In good times or bad, there may be no close encounter of any kind.

We need a movie to capture this problem.  I propose Close Encounters of Any Kind (Tagline: We do not have to be alone).  Here's a basic plot summary.

This extraordinarily science fiction adventure focuses on a group of academics attempting to confirm alien-like emotional intelligence. The film starts at an unnamed Midwestern college campus, where campus security is noticing weird acts of human kindness being performed in an academic department. They ask each other what they should do given such an unusual scene, but they eventually decide to do nothing ("I wouldn't know what report to file with HR anyway," says one of them.).

Roy Neary, an adjunct professor, is sent out to cover the class of a full-timer, who has gone missing, leaving only a note saying that she feels motivated to "pay it forward." Roy witnesses an unidentified kindness offering (UKO) between a faculty member and a student, and is convinced he has a warm feeling in his belly to prove it. Neary's colleagues are at first skeptical, then concerned, and eventually fearful, as Roy refuses to accept a "logical" explanation for what he saw and is prepared to give up his home and his family to pursue the "truth" about UKO's. Their fears seemed justified when Roy starts seeing the shape of a heart everywhere he looks, in the deformed cushion of his 35-year old desk chair, in the leftover ramen noodles from his daily lunch, in the piles of coins he scatters randomly on his desk after cashing his paycheck ("This means something," he says, "I know it." "It means you don't have enough to buy a cup of coffee," says his weary wife.).

Neary's obsession eventually puts him in contact with others who've had close encounters with alien altruistic academics, including Jillian, a department chair who gave up tenure because of her UKO experience, a linguistics professor, David Laughlin, and Claude Lacombe, a French researcher who believes that we can use a musical language to pull out random acts of kindness from academics. Ironically, as Roy seeks out confirmation for these unidentified kindness offerings, he becomes more and more unkind:

"I got a thousand god-damn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint with HR. You have no right to make people crazy.  If this is part of a theater class, how come I know everything in such detail?  I've never given a crap about theater before.  How come I know so much?  What the hell is going on around here?  Who the hell are you people?"

Lacombe's theory about the link between a musical language and kindness is put to the test when a band of human resource specialists and underground UKO enthusiasts (including Neary) join for a photo opportunity to confirm contact of the closest encounter with faculty of the surliest nature near a Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.  The film ends with Roy going under the knife for a heart transplant.

I wonder if I could get Spielberg to film this.  It could be his most moving film since "Schindler's List."  Then again, academics may be people even Schindler wouldn't try to save.