Gardella’s phone rang. It was his dad. Peter and Gardella have an interesting relationship–a post-hippie and his anarchist son. Gardella told us about how his father quit smoking when his mom got pregnant. She had told him “not in the house,” with her pregnancy coming along. He gave up all together. That’s sort of the way Peter is, never doing something part way. He indulges completely or not at all. He is also complete with his anger.
Peter’s voice came out of the phone and across the room. I could hear him from the couch. The words were meaningless, just pouring as sounds rather than anything specific. Gardella paced. He changed. His shoulder tense and his arms straighten when he is emotionally charged. He becomes angular in his motions and stance.
I could tell he was upset.
Peter talked in long streams of words. Gardella moved into the spaces between words to insert his own ideas. They agreed. They shared an anger between them. I didn’t know what was going on. Gardella took an opportunity to disentangle himself from the conversation.
“The students are protesting,” he said.
Peter is a professor at a New England liberal arts college. He’s just as political as his son. He carried this news to Gardella, who carried the news to me. No one was happy.
Recently at Pitt, the food service employees were on strike. Gardella shook their hands when we saw them standing in the rain. He walked away with this curling smile on his mouth. His smile of childish glee. Political activism makes him happy in the same way a roller coaster makes me happy. In the same way kittens can make people happy. There was none of this happiness on his face. He was annoyed.
The story came out. The students were protesting because they didn’t like the new president of the college. They wanted the old one back because “he would party with them.”
“They don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s an issue of transparency,” I said to him.
“It’s an issue of transparency,” he repeated.
Gardella told me of the previous president’s sins. He related them with a tone on the border of factual and anarchistic distaste for “the man.” The former president’s mistakes were not the mistakes of someone making a bad decision or three–they were the mistakes of someone willfully damaging something for short term success. They were the mistakes of someone thinking in a short term way. Someone not being held accountable. Of someone working towards a personal gain from a situation, rather than a solid situation.
The students at Peter’s college did not know of these things. They had a narrow view of the truth. They were unable to make a consented, informed decision on their feelings of the situation. To them, a man who liked them was thrown out. These feelings did not reflect a reality that existed behind closed doors and in ivory towers–merely what was shown to them.
This is a problem.
One of the major tenets of FLOS projects is transparency. (It’s in the spirit of transparency that I put my notes and thoughts as I write up here on this blog.) This transparency allows people to see what’s happening: it keeps the people running things honest and allows others to make decisions. Transparency, even when it comes to the actions of the president of a college, is important. In order for people–users, students, and those to whom things are done–to understand the situations around them, they need to have the opportunity. They need to be given the raw tools, the information out of which they can create understanding.