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How I Was Fired From Teaching at the University of Maryland and Banned From Setting Foot on its Campus

There is much in the news today about sexism and racism, and some complain of a country that has gone too far in “wokeness,” or “cancellation culture.” This is not a new phenomenon. Here is my story:

Toward the end of the 1990s about the time I sold my consulting company, Howell Associates, I became a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs where I lectured on developing seniors housing and on affordable housing finance. I loved the job and enjoyed the opportunity to share knowledge with students, most of whom were adults who were pursuing their continuing education.

Then about 10 years into the job I received a strange voicemail message from the director of the program I was teaching in. “Mr. Howell,” a woman’s voice stated sternly, “There in no place for racists or sexists at the University of Maryland. You are hereby dismissed from your teaching responsibilities and no longer welcomed on our campus.” Then the message ended.

I thought there must be some mistake. I immediately returned the call where I left a return voice message, saying, “I received your message. Could you please explain?”

The next day I received another voice mail message, which stated in an angry tone that I was a racist and a sexist because of the racist and sexist story I told in the class the day before.

For the life of me, I could not figure what she could be talking about, so I called back and got her answering device yet  again and asked for more clarity.  Back came a message that it was because of the terrible racist story I told about the Chinese and that I should call the students I had offended and apologize. She gave me the name and number of the student who was most offended.

Here is the story I told in class, which was true,  when I was trying to explain one of the difficult and maddening issues associated with HUD financing:

I know that this may seem hard to understand and actually it does not make a whole lot of sense, but you do not have to be a rocket scientist to get the picture. This reminds me of an experience I had last week when I was with  one of my clients—the Chinese American Retirement Communities Inc. I was at one of their board meetings and talking to the board about a similar issue in HUD financing. They were bunch of sharp 30 and 40 somethings and very attentive.  Just after I made that comment  about rocket scientists, they all looked briefly at each other and then at me. With a twinkle in her eye and a sheepish grin, a young woman replied, “Mr. Howell, actually we are rocket scientists. All of us. We  work at NASA.”

That was it, the story that got me kicked out of teaching at the University of Maryland and issued a lifetime ban from ever returning to  their campus.

Still curious, I decided to call  the person, a woman, who was the  most offended by my racists remarks, whose surname was American not Chinese. I apologized saying I was not intending to offend anyone, to which she replied she would not accept an apology. When I asked her why she thought the story was racist, she replied that it was  discriminatory and prejudiced to suggest  that all Chinese are smart enough to be rocket scientists.  Okay, I responded, “I get it that I am racist, but why am I sexist?”

She snarled, “Because you said a young woman asked the question. You should have said a young person.”

Then she hung up.

For several months after that incident, I would break out into a cold sweat every time I got within a mile or two of the University of Maryland campus thinking I could be arrested and put in jail. A year passed and then another couple of years. Then I got a call from someone at the University of Maryland who said he was calling on behalf of the director, who had come to the conclusion that by now I must be rehabilitated enough to come back. He confessed they were desperate and could not find anyone to cover the subjects I was teaching. I gladly returned and taught another ten years happily before retiring. 

Happy ending?

Yes, for me. But not for others. The cancellation culture can easily get out of hand.

 

 

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Taking Stock, Autumn 2021

As I return to blog posting after an extended, unexcused absence, I am struck by the times we find ourselves in. The present moment is existential. More is on the table and up for grabs than I can remember.

The vote to raise the debt limit has been postponed to early December. The delay is described as a sort of victory for the Dems. Victory? Today McConnell declared unconditionally that the Republicans will filibuster the bill, an action which will result in the first default in U.S. history. Who knows what this will mean? Will Social Security, Medicare,  Medicaid, unemployment benefits and just about everything else stop paying? Certainly  investors holding treasury bills will not get their money since the federal government will not be able to borrow more money. Will this  mean the government will come to a virtual halt? Experts warn that this will cause a spark that will cause a financial meltdown, massive job losses, skyrocketing interest rates and another Great Depression. Others say that the likely outcome is so severe that the powers that be won’t let it happen. I recall from my history lessons that that is what people said before World War I when the armies were so large, any potential conflict was thought to be so catastrophic that the powers that be would never let it happen.

Then there is the Biden agenda. With no Republican votes, we need every Democrat in the Senate and all but a small handful of Democratic representatives in the House to agree on these two bills that will move America forward. There is actually rare bi-partisan agreement on the infrastructure bill. However, two Democrats in the Senate right now continue to hold out on the “Build Back Better,” social infrastructure bill, saying the price tag is too high. Progressives in the House seem to be willing to budge somewhat on the price tag but insist on tying the two bills together—pass both or nothing. If the result is nothing, the Democrats can pretty much throw in the towel in the 2022 elections as even loyal Democrats like me throw up our hands in despair.

If that is not enough to get your attention, democracy itself is in peril in the United States. The new state voter restriction laws in many red states will make it harder to vote for people who typically do not vote Republican. The new  laws in red states politicizing  vote counting and the vote verification process are serious threats to  trust in the democratic process.  The Trump diehards continue to claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen and that he should be our president. The insurrection on January 6 is being downplayed by Pence and most Republicans as a minor incident at the same time that domestic terrorism is now listed by the CIA as a greater threat than foreign terrorism.

The U.S. Supreme Court is now politicized with  justices appointed by a Democratic president deciding  typically one way and the judges appointed by a Republican deciding the other way. With six judges appointed by a Republican president this does not look good for a woman’s right to choose or blocking the new voting restrictions.

And all this is happening in covid-time in a country still battling the pandemic and  that has never been so divided since the Civil War. And it is happening in a world where the climate crisis is accelerating as sea levels rise, horrific storms increase, and the Greenland ice cap is starting to melt. When the Greenland ice cap goes, so goes the planet Earth as we know it.

What will happen? How will we see our way through this? How can we come together to reach consensus on reasonable solutions to address the problems of inequality, lingering racism, class divisions, trust in government, and saving the planet? What about our children and our grandchildren and their children? What kind of world are we leaving them?  These are the questions that I find myself asking as I try to take stock of where we are in the autumn of 2021.

I am not giving up. There are signs of hope. Maybe the Republicans will back down on opposing raising the debt limit—especially since a financial meltdown will hurt the Republican fat cats and major donors. If not, maybe the Democrats will modify the filibuster rule. Maybe the two Biden agenda bills will pass. A paired down version will be better than nothing. Maybe the Supreme Court will overrule the most onerous voter restriction laws, and maybe it will not overturn Roe v Wade. Maybe we will begin to make inroads on tackling inequality and class and race divisions—and, of course, fighting climate change. Maybe we will get past covid, and no new deadly variant will appear. Maybe, maybe…

My hope is that we will figure out some way to pull through. We have the technology to tackle a lot of the issues, especially those associated with climate change. But do we have the will? The time we find ourselves in is a nail biter. It is indeed an existential moment.

 

 

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GOP Covid Plan Yields Results

Hey, great news! Our plan to convince people not to get  vaccinated is working perfectly. Covid infections are skyrocketing. People are dying right and left. Biden is getting blamed for it, and his popularity is plummeting. We Republicans are geniuses. We will cruise to victory….

Yeah, you are right, boss. The plan is working beyond our highest hopes. There is only one problem: The people who are getting infected and dying vote for us.  If it keeps up like this indefinitely, there won’t be any Republicans left to vote.

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The Last Hurrah: Taking Stock, Midsummer 2021

It is hard to believe we are already past midsummer. The sailboat racing season on Herring Bay is more than half over, and I am happy to report that we have not missed a race. I am less happy to report on our finishes; but, hey, “Second Wind” is a big, heavy cruiser designed for the Caribbean trade winds not the Chesapeake. This will be my last season of sailing since I will be listing “Second Wind” for sale in mid August and am hopeful I will have a buyer by mid September when we return from a final week of cruising on the Chesapeake with old friends. This season is the  Last Hurrah for my sailing adventures except for a planned BVI sailing week starting Christmas day with our children, spouses and grandchildren, 10 of us in all, on the biggest sloop available in the Sunsail fleet—52 feet.

It has been quite a run. The first boat I purchased (with my brother-in-law) was a Sunfish in 1968, which we sailed on weekends for years on Lake Norman near Davidson NC where Embry’s family’s lake house was. The next boat was a 505, a 16-foot sailboat, which at the time was considered one of the fastest racing boats in the world, complete with a trapeze for the crew to use to hang out over the water with feet planted on the gunnels. That boat sadly had issues. After the boat sank in the Potomac on July 4, 1974, I bought a Wayfarer, another popular 16-foot daysailer, which we named “Mother Courage,” which Embry and I raced and cruised on the Chesapeake for the next 15 years, trailering the boat to remote cruising waters on the Bay and  to Lake Huron in Michigan for competition in several U.S. championships. That was followed by another 15 years racing and sailing an Alberg 30, “Amazing Grace,” followed by 10 years mainly racing “Carolina Blue,” a very fast J-30, and finally “Second Wind,” a 39-footer which I owned in the BVIs as part of the Sunsail charter fleet starting in 2009. Unable to sell the boat  down there at the end of the lease with Sunsail, I had it sailed up here to the Chesapeake in 2014 where we have enjoyed both racing and cruising for the last seven years.

Embry and I counted up all the discreet anchorages we have cruised to on the Chesapeake, which number around 90, some multiple times, plus over 20 charters in the Caribbean along with charters with dear friends in exotic locations like the Adriatic Sea, the Mediterranean, the San Juan Islands, the Abacuses  in the Bahamas, and the South Pacific waters surrounding Tahiti. One of my favorites was sailing up to Buzzards Bay off the coast of Massachusetts and back in the late 1980s with my son, Andrew, and his two best friends, just after they all graduated from college, affectionally labeled by Andrew as “The Rite of Passage.” Yes, it has been quite a run.

And now my sailing days are coming to an end. It is time. You don’t see a whole lot of 80-year-olds on sailboats. And for good reason.

 I will turn 80 in April.

But saying goodbye to something you love and that has defined in part who you are is not easy. I marvel about how fast life seems to pass by. And how short our lives seem to be here on this small, blue planet in a universe of trillions and trillions of stars and planets. Eighty-plus years seems like a very long time; and at the same time, it is just a mere grain of sand along a beach that would seem to extend forever. What to make of all this? What does it all mean? These are the questions that all religions try to answer.

But in the end we are mere humans. If we are lucky, some of us  have glimpses of the Divine. But do we humans have all the answers? Please. Embry and I have been loyal churchgoers for most of our  adult lives, but even with a Master of Divinity after my name, I continue to have more questions than answers. Yet I marvel at this miracle of life on this lonely planet in a vast universe with untold mysteries. I can say, like others who are fortunate, that I have been blessed.  I am profoundly grateful. What more is there to say?

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Road Trip 2021: The Indian Mounds

You may have heard of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The ones that are still standing for us modern humans to see include the Great Wall of China, Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, Petra in Jordon, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Taj Mahal in India. The list does not include the Indian mounds near Columbus, Ohio.

In our travels around the world Embry and I actually have seen every one of these spectacular places. They are in fact extraordinary and something to marvel at. We will remember them for as long as we live. But this road trip (Embry’s idea) was to drive to Columbus in search of Indian mounds created by what is called the Hopewell Culture (named for the person who owned the farm where the first mound was discovered in the late Nineteenth Century). The Hopewell Culture includes a number of pre Columbian, Native American civilizations that existed from around 500 BCE to 500 CE, flourishing for about a thousand years in the eastern forests from  Lake Ontario all the way to Florida. The Native Americans that lived in this area did not leave behind giant structures like Machu Picchu or the Great Wall but rather mounds of dirt or earthworks where they buried their dead and honored the sacred. Many of these earthworks are called effigy mounds and are shaped like animals. Effigy mounds were not burial mounds but had spiritual and mystical significance, which no one understands since we do not have any written history or written language from that period.  Most of the mounds have not survived today due mainly to us modern humans destroying them to make room for agriculture and modern settlements, but for some reason the area around Columbus is one of the few places where many of these mounds still exist.

Well, I will have to admit that I was a skeptic about the value of a road trip to see Indian mounds. The Hopewell culture extended through Middle Tennessee where I grew up, and I remember as a child playing on mounds of various sizes in the woods and forests near Nashville. We knew they were Indian mounds because bits and pieces of pottery were always around along with occasional arrowheads. We thought nothing of playing on these sacred places, and my guess is that few remain today as Nashville has expanded. Besides, how interesting could a grass covered mound of dirt be anyway? I suggested to Embry that if she really wanted to see what an Indian mound looked like, all she had to do was to visit virtually any golf course and marvel at the berms around greens and bunkers.

Wrong again. I was correct about the visual impact. We are not talking about oohing and awing over the Great Wall of China. A mound of grass covered dirt is, well, a mound of dirt. We visited a half dozen mounds of various sizes–some over a hundred feet tall– about 40 miles south of Columbus spread out in different locations, mostly in rural and forgotten places. The most famous was the Serpentine effigy, a mound in the shape of a giant serpent, over a football field long and soon to be designated a World Heritage landmark. There was nothing dramatic about viewing the Serpentine earthwork or the other mounds, but still the experience was something special and, yes, there was something sacred about these places.

Human beings lived here over two thousand years ago. The pottery, carvings, and metal work that has come out of the excavated mounds indicates they were sophisticated for their time and that there was a lot of trading happening throughout the eastern part of what is now the United States. We do not know what happened to these people or why centuries before Europeans arrived, the building of mounds stopped. But standing near these sacred places awakens the soul to how connected we are to others who preceded us and how our time as “modern” humans has been so short-lived. We are just a blip on the screen of history of a small, blue planet about four-and-a-half billion years old.

What will happen next, I wonder. What will happen to our civilization? Will those who follow us in some distant future, perhaps many centuries into a post-apocalyptic world, plow over the mounds we have created for our civilization? What will be left? Will we even be remembered some two or three thousand years from now? And what will we be remembered for?  These are the lingering questions that I will associate with the Road Trip 2021, to see the great mounds of the Hopewell Culture .

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Road Trip 2021: The American Immigrant Story

A few years ago I blogged about the Sayderi family  (not their real name), refugees from Afghanistan and Iran, who had moved into our daughter’s family’s basement. The mother and father were probably in their 30s with two daughters age two and five at that time. After two years in the DC area, they had bolted for Columbus, OH, where they settled into an apartment supposedly in a less costly and more attractive neighborhood with better schools. We had kept up with them mainly through weekly Zoom sessions when Embry tutored the oldest daughter, now almost 10, in reading. The big news was that the mother, now in her late 30s, was expecting another child, but other than that we really had no idea as to how well they were doing. Going to see the Indian mounds in the Columbus area would give us a chance to find out and to catchup.

What to expect? Keep in mind that the Sayderi family arrived in the U.S. four years ago with hardly more than the clothes they wore. They were refugees who had been living in Turkey for five years and somehow ended up here as part of a United Nations resettlement program. Neither husband nor wife spoke more than a few words of English, and the husband had been denied any formal education in Afghanistan because when he was of school age, the Taliban controlled the country. Also because he was blind in one eye, he had been denied the chance for his dream job—becoming a truck driver.

Picture yourself in a similar situation: living for years in refugee camps in a foreign land where there was little chance for work and where you were not welcomed, then suddenly uprooted and landing in another foreign country, flat broke, where you knew no one, could not speak the language, and had a medical disability that kept you from working. How would you manage in such a situation?

Between the supportive services provided by Lutheran Social Services and funded by the U.S. government, help from our daughter’s family, our neighborhood church, and us, they were able to settle in, learn some English, get help to restore the husband’s eyesight, get driver’s licenses, buy a car, get the husband a truck driver’s job as a long hauler, and eventually move into their own apartment. Great success story, right?

So it would seem. But still, you never know. What they had had achieved seemed to us like accomplishing the impossible but not without stress, and not without taking an emotional toll. Would Columbus really be any better? The support network in Washington, which enabled them to make such strides, would probably not be available in Columbus. How would they manage?

As we drove into their sprawling apartment complex in what appeared to be a middle class neighborhood, I noted that at least with regard to housing and neighborhood, they probably were better off. We were met with smiling faces and embraces. The two girls now wore headscarves and at age five and nine seemed more grown up. Everyone’s English was a little better. The girls were totally fluent, and the parents were still struggling a bit but getting their points across.

The wife had prepared a huge, delicious mid-day feast of chicken, lamb, and rice, along with fruits and vegetables, which Embry and I enjoyed sitting at a small, elevated table next to the kitchen with the two girls. Our hosts were seated on pillows on beautiful carpets on the floor in the living room beside us. A huge flat screen, smart TV was mounted on the wall behind them. There was not a single additional piece of furniture in the apartment as far as I could tell, except for a bunk bed in the girl’s bedroom, which the girls said they never used. They slept on the floor in their parent’s bedroom. I recalled how much effort by people in our church went into furnishing their apartment in Washington and chuckled. Having western style furniture was not what they were used to or wanted.

When I commented that I was very impressed with how nice their apartment was, the husband said they were moving in one month. Beaming, he pulled out his smart phone and showed me a photo of a  3,100 square foot house with cathedral ceilings listed for $419,000.

“Moving. Bought house. Close in two weeks. Leaving!” he exclaimed.

When I showed my disbelief, the oldest daughter piped in, “Daddy bought us a house and we are moving in three weeks. We are going to Houston.”

His smiling wife elaborated in broken English that he had put down over $100,000, which he had received from fellow long-haul drivers and had his credit approved for the mortgage. She went on to say that she had checked out the schools and they were good. The reason for choosing Houston was that is where his Afghan best friend now lives and where there is a large community of refugees from Afghanistan. As a long hauler you can live anywhere.

This news was followed after lunch by a short ride to a nearby shopping center where a huge 18-wheeler truck was parked carrying parts of a tower crane on the flatbed trailer.

“My truck,” he said proudly, “Own. Own truck.” On his tee shirt were the words “United States of America.”

We were invited to hop in the cab and check out the small “apartment “behind the front seats—bed, refrigerator, hot plate, and storage area along with a mounted computer on the dashboard for logging times on the road and rest stops. Then when we got off, he hopped in and started up the engine. He had two days to deliver the tower crane to Richmond where he would drop off the cargo and await another pickup call from the dispatcher. He would be gone two or three weeks before returning home for a short visit, then off again.

“Is this a great country or what?” I muttered under my breath as I marveled, bordering on disbelief, at what the family has accomplished. By any measure,  their story is one to warrant being  on  poster child placards celebrating the American Immigrant: home owner, independent business man, and a decent income, with one foot surely pointed in the direction of arriving  in the middle class. And all this in only four years.

But at the same time, I realized the sacrifices they are making and the stress in their life. Embry asked me later if I noticed the tears in his eyes when he waved goodbye to his wife and daughters.

 

Next post: the Indian Mounds.

 

 

 

 

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