Several weeks ago, an article appeared in the local newspaper, an interview with the new artistic director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.  He’s a product of the local university, where he learned his craft from, among others, Fred Adams, the legendary professor who established and ran for decades the Festival [which has won, among other honors, a Tony for being one of the best regional theatres in the United States].  The new director is an accomplished and effective actor, and there’s no doubt about that.  But what bothered me about the interview was that not a single word appeared about those who mentored, taught, inspired, and hired him, including Fred Adams.  Everything was about the new director, his talents, and his aspirations.  I can’t honestly say whether this was because he never mentioned those who had helped him every step of the way or because the interviewer left any such remarks out of the final story.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter, because, as the story ran, it’s all too symbolic of American culture today.  No one owes anything to anyone.  In fact, it’s even worse than that. Part of this change lies in an attitude that everything important exists only in the here and now, a change in what was once a core American value.  Southern Utah University, for example, exists only because, more than a century ago, a handful of local citizens mortgaged everything they had to come up with the funds to build the first building of the school – the building being required by the state legislature.  They did so because they felt that would offer a better future to their children and their community.  None of them ever received any financial reward, and their act is largely buried in history… except for a few older residents of the town and some university faculty.

Another symptom indicative of this change in public attitudes is reflected in the content of those largely useless student evaluations.  As a senior faculty member, my wife serves on the committee that reviews tenure and promotion applications for faculty. Since faculty members are now required to include all student evaluations and comments, she sees the comments from students across all disciplines in the university, and what is so incredibly disheartening is that there is virtually no real appreciation for professors at any level. The overwhelming majority of the comments – even of professors who have demonstrated incredible teaching effectiveness and who have gone out of their way to help students for years – deal with complaints, often insanely petty.

Part of this trend may be because all too many students don’t seem to know what’s important.  One student praised a professor because he once brought in soft drinks for the class!  Another faculty member was praised for bringing donuts. Exactly what does this have to do with education? Over the years, my wife and other members of her department have done such quiet deeds as paid student medical bills out of their own pockets, created student scholarships with their own funds, and personally helped students financially, offered hundreds of unpaid hours of additional instruction – the list is endless.  Once, say fifteen years ago, students seemed to appreciate such efforts.  Today, they complain if faculty members don’t smile when the students perform [yes… this actually happened.  Twice!].

In the interests of full disclosure, as the saying goes, I probably haven’t offered enough gratitude to those who helped me – but I have offered it, in speeches, in book dedications, and in interviews… and I didn’t forget them, visiting and writing them over the years.  And certainly there are notable exceptions, some very public.  One noted Broadway singer and actress, in giving a concert last week, paid clearly heart-felt tribute upon several occasions to her undergraduate singing teacher.  The problem is that these are exceptions… and becoming more and more infrequent every year.

The noted Isaac Newton once said that he had accomplished so much because he stood “on the shoulders of Giants,” but all of us owe debts to those who preceded us.  We didn’t do it alone, and far too many people who should know this fail, time and time again, to know that, to appreciate it, and to acknowledge it, both privately and publicly.

A little over a week ago, I did something – unintentionally – that I truly wish I could undo, and for which I’m very sorry. I was taking my morning walk with the over-energetic Aussie-Saluki when a car pulled over, and a strange man with a delightful and precise English accent asked me for directions to the Catholic Church.  I was glad to oblige, and promptly stated, “Just go to the end of the road; turn right, and it’s two blocks up.”

Simple enough.

Except… I’m one of those people who have no innate sense of left and right.  I’m not directionally impaired in the sense of getting lost; I almost always know where I am, and have enough sense [acquired painfully from my wife] to ask directions when I don’t.  I’m also very good at providing written directions to others.  But when I’m caught off-guard as I was on that morning, with my thoughts more on other matters, from the plotting of the newest book to what a beautiful morning it was, I often speak before full consideration of my words.

The road used to end where I meant for him to turn, but it hasn’t for more than a year, since the city extended it a half-mile downhill through a winding canyon to meet up with the Cross Hollows Parkway.  Instead, there’s only a stop sign there now.  And… as a result of my left-right confusion, I told the English gentleman to turn right, rather than the correct direction, which was left.

But I didn’t.  About twenty seconds after he drove off, I realized what I had done and started waving and running after the car, Aussie-Saluki delighted that we were running.  Alas, he never looked back… and by the time I got home and went looking for him in the car… he was nowhere to be found.  I just hope he found the right church.

Now… the other side of the story is…  Equally inadvertently, the directions I had given him were precisely correct in taking him to the nearest LDS Stake [church], if almost three-quarters of a mile away, rather than the four blocks to the Catholic Church.

So… either way… I’m either regarded as a directional idiot, theologically challenged in not even knowing which church was which, or determined to steer the poor man away from his church of choice to another faith [even though I’m not a member of either faith].

As so many people have often probably said, I just wish I’d thought through what I’d said a little more carefully…. And because I never knew who he was, this is the only apology I can offer.

The other day I came across a series of articles, seemingly unrelated – except they weren’t.  The first was about why Vietnam is now producing perhaps the majority of great young chess players in the world.  The second was a news report on the Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, and the third was a table of the average salaries of U.S. university professors by area of specialty.

The Vietnamese are producing chess champions and prodigies, it seems, because [gasp!] they pay them.  Gifted young players are paid from $300 to $500 a month to learn and play chess, and the best get all expenses paid to play in tournaments world-wide.  These are substantial incentives in a country where the average monthly family earnings are around $100.  Of course, American teenagers spend more than that monthly on what the Vietnamese would likely consider luxuries, and in the United States young chess players must count on the support of family or charitable organizations… and despite being one of the largest and most prosperous nations in the world, we have comparatively very few international class chess masters.

The finals of the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition were held in Salt Lake City last week, and of the eight finalists, one was Russian, one was Ukrainian, and the other six were Asian. This pattern has been ongoing for close to a decade, if not longer.  We haven’t produced a true giant in piano performance in decades, but then, the top prize is a mere $30,000, hardly worth it for Americans, apparently, not when it takes 15 plus years of study and hours upon hours of daily practice – all for a career in which the top-flight pianists generally make less money than whoever is 150^th on the PGA money list.

All this might just tie in to the salaries of university professors.  The three areas in which university professors’ salaries are the lowest are, respectfully, from the bottom: theology/religion; performing and visual arts; and English.

I’m cynical, I know, but I don’t think that this is coincidental.  In the United States, mainstream religions [who generally require some intensive theological training] are losing members left and right.  The highest-paid performing and visual artists are those who can provide the most spectacular show, not the most technically sound performance, and most “professional” pop singers could not even match the training or technical ability of the average graduate student in voice, but technical ability doesn’t matter, just popularity, as witness American Idol.  As for English, when 60% of all college graduates aren’t fully technically competent in their own language, this does suggest a lack of interest.

The other factor in common in these areas is that the average semi-educated American believes that he or she knows as much as anyone about religion, singing, dancing, acting, and English as anyone.  And that’s reflected in both what professors are paid and in what experts in those fields are paid. The problem is that popular perceptions aren’t always right, regardless of all the mantras about the “wisdom of the crowd.”  The highest paid professors – and professionals – in the United States today are in the field of business and finance.  That’s right – those quant geniuses who brought you all the greatest financial melt-down since the Great Depression, not to mention the “Flash Crash” of a month or so ago when technical glitches resulted in the largest fastest one-day decline in the market ever.  Oh… and just as a matter of national pride, if you will, why do professors of foreign languages get paid 8-10% more than professors of English? Especially when the mastery of English is at a decades-low point?

More to the point, it’s not just about singers, writers, English professors, but about all of society.  We may complain about the financiers and their excesses, but we still allow those excesses.  We may talk about the importance of teachers, police, firefighters, and others who hold society together, but we don’t truly support them where it counts.

As a society, we may not always get what we pay for, but you can bet we won’t get what we don’t pay for.

I noted some time back that the scholar Jacques Barzun had documented in his book From Dawn to Decadence what he believed was the decline of western culture and civilization and predicted its eventual fall.  One of his key indicators was the elevation of credentials and the devaluation of achievement. Along these lines, the June 27^th edition of The New York Times [brought to my attention by an alert reader] carried an article noting the emergence and recognition of multiple high school valedictorians. One high school had 94, and another even had 100!

While many factors have contributed to this kind of absurdity, two factors stand out: (1) rampant grade inflation based on an unwillingness of educators and parents to apply stringent standards that measure true achievement and (2) a society-wide unwillingness to recognize that true excellence is rare – except perhaps in professional sports.

So many problems arise from this tendency to over-praise and over-reward the younger generation that I can’t possibly go into all of them in a blog.  But I do want to address some of those of greater import, not necessarily in order of societal impact, but as I see them.  First of which is the fact that, beyond high school and certainly beyond college, there can’t be multiple “winners.”  There will only be one position at the hospital for a new surgeon, one or two vacancies for new teachers each year at the local school or a handful at most.  Graduate schools only take a limited number of applicants from the overall pool, and they do make choices.  Sometimes, the choices or the grounds on which they’re made may not be fair, just as a bad grade in freshman PE may keep a high school student from becoming valedictorian [if only one is chosen, the way it used to be], but the plain fact is that, in life, economics and need limit what is available, and students need to learn that not everyone gets to be top dog, even if the differences between the contenders seem minuscule,

Second, by recognizing multiple students as “valedictorians,” schools and parents are both devaluing the honor and simultaneously over-emphasizing it as a credential.  As a result, more and more colleges are ignoring whether students are “valedictorians” and relying on other factors, such as, perhaps regrettably, standardized test scores.

Third, like it or not, as former President Jimmy Carter once stated [and for which he was roundly criticized], “Life isn’t fair.”  It may not be “fair” that one teacher somewhere in the past didn’t like this or that student’s performance and gave them an A- rather than an A, and that kept them from being valedictorian.  It’s not “fair” that Ivy League schools now require better grades from their female applicants than from their male applicants because more female students work harder and the schools don’t want to overbalance their student bodies with women.  Unfortunately, what society can do in “legislating” fairness is not only limited, but impossible to produce anything close to absolute fairness in real terms.  All society can do is set legal parameters to prohibit the worst cases.  We, as individuals, then have to do our best to act fairly and learn to work around or live with the instances where “life isn’t fair,” because it isn’t and never will be.

Fourth, frankly, in cases of similar or identical grades, other factors should be weighed.  They certainly are in all other occupational situations in life, because they have to be. When there are limited spaces, decisions will be made to determine who gets the position.  Not observing this practical factor in high school is just another aspect of giving students an inflated view of their own “specialness,” or, if you will, the continuation of the “trophies for everyone” philosophy.

But… is anyone listening?  Apparently not, because there’s more and more grade inflation, more and more valedictorians, and more and more emphasis on how “wonderful” every student is.

Recently, Brad Torgersen made a lengthy comment about why he believed that F&SF, and particularly science fiction, needs to “popularize” itself, because the older “target market” is… well… old and getting older, and the younger readers tend to come to SF through such venues as media tie-in novels, graphic novels, and “popular” fiction.  While he’s absolutely correct in the sense that any vital genre has to attract to new readers in order to continue, he unfortunately is under one major misapprehension – that publishers can “market” fiction the way Harley-Davidson marketed motorcycles.  Like it or not, publishing – and readers – don’t work quite that way.

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s quite a bit of successful marketing in the field, but one reason why there are always opportunities for new authors is that it’s very rare that a publisher can actually “create” a successful book or author.  I know of one such case, and it was enabled by a smart publisher and a fluke set of circumstances that occurred exactly once in the last two decades.  Historically, and practically, what happens far more often is that, of all the new authors published, one or two, if that, each year appeal widely or, if you will, popularly.  Once that happens, a savvy publisher immediately brings all possible marketing tools and expertise to publicize and expand that reading base and highlight what makes that author’s work popular.

In short, there has to be a larger than “usual” reader base to begin with, and the work in question has to be “popularizable.”  I do have, I think it’s fair to say, such a reader base, but, barring some strange circumstances, that reader base isn’t likely to expand wildly to the millions because what and how I write require a certain amount of thought for the fullest appreciation of readers, and the readers who flock to each new multi-million selling new novelistic sensation are looking primarily for either (1) entertainment, (2) a world with the same characters that promises that they can identify with it for years, or (3) a “fast” read, preferably all three, but certainly two out of three.

All this doesn’t mean that publishers can’t do more to expand their readership, but it does mean that such expansion has to begin by considering and publishing books that are likely to appeal to readers beyond those of the traditional audience, without alienating the majority of those traditional readers. And in fact, one way that publishers have been trying to reach beyond the existing audience is by putting out more and more “supernatural” fantasy dealing with vampires, werewolves, and books with more explicit sexual content.  The problem with this approach is that, first, such books tend not to appeal to those who like science fiction and/or tech-oriented publications, as well as also tending to alienate a significant percentage of older readers, as opposed to, as Brad pointed out, media tie-in novels, which appeal across a wider range of ages and backgrounds. Another problem is that writing science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, takes more and more technical experience and education, and fewer and fewer writers have that background.  That’s one reason why SF media tie-in novels are easier to write – most of the technical trappings have been worked out, one way or another.

I don’t have an easy answer, except to say that trying to expand readership by extending the series of authors with “popular” appeal or by copying or trying to latch on to the current fads has limited effectiveness. Personally, I tend to believe that just looking for good books, whether or not they fit into current popularity fads, is the best remedy, but that may just be a reflection of my views and mark me as “dated.”

In any case, Brad has pointed out a real problem facing science fiction, in particular, and one that needs more insight and investigation by editors and publishers in the field.