Steve Jobs, Derrick Bell, and Lessons for Student Affairs Practice

To Post and Where to Post

I wasn't quite sure into what category I should place this post. Technology, due to a focus on Steve Jobs? Maybe. But what to do about Derrick Bell? Try to wedge a post about he and Steve into Access and the Cost of Higher Education, in a roundabout way? Nah, it had to be inserted here, because I see a link between their ideas and work and how both can respectively innovate student affairs practice. Even so, I had my doubts, because when I initially think of post material for "Really, this is unbelievable", I think of stories that seem preposterious, head-scratching, and even infuriating. That can confound, annoy and irritate to the point of actually questioning the sanity of some of one's fellow human beings. But what about stories and insights that astound and captivate in positive, energizing ways? That push, prod, poke at and stretch one's worldview until ideas and actions that were formerly considered radical and non-intuitive (i.e. unbelievable) are now accepted as part of the way (and price, to some) of doing business across professional and business fields?



R.I.P. Who Were These Guys? And Why Should We Care?

Few college students have not heard of the now-proclaimed "Edison of Silicon Valley" -Steven Jobs. An authorized biography is coming soon. Meanwhile, tributes to the late 56-year old college dropout are pouring onto the web at nearly unprecedented rates. A skimming of such articles yields a fairly consistent bio-chronology: Adopted, quarter-Syrian Californian drops out after on a semester's worth of liberal arts classes at Reed College in Oregon, to return home to California due to financial difficulties. He drops acid, does his navel-gazing-trip-to-India and becomes a practicing Buddhist in the process, then returns to pre-Silicon Valley to team with high school buddy Steve Wozniak out of his now practically enshrined San Jose-area garage to begin scheming ways to improve the nascent computer industry's methodologies of doing business. A legend is born. The two friends helped develop, launch and market the Apple II series and then the first computer for the "little guy" -the Apple MacIntosh-two of the most popular computer systems in the world at the time. Then followed Microsoft's adoption of Apple's graphical interface system to universalize Job's vision of computer usage consisting of a 'mouse' and an easily navigable "Windows"-based method of accessing and processing information, instead of continuing to relate to computers by using arcane and alienating coding languages via endless and unforgiving series of keystrokes. And then, after a falling out with and departure from Apple in the 80s -the company he helped found- the shrewd acquisition and development of the first commercial digital film company Pixar. And then selling Pixar to animation behemoth and American mythologizer Disney Inc. for what amounted to billions. And meanwhile, launching an innovative higher ed. and business-oriented computing platform named NeXT (that basically bombed) that invited his return to his beloved Apple in the 90s with the promethean task of saving the company from a looming bankruptcy. No problem, Jobs managed to secure the lifeline funding from his fiercest rival, Bill Gates. Jobs then launched an Apple career sequel even more incredible than his first run, by first approaching and then partnering with music record producers to save a teetering industry brought to its proverbial knees by exponentially pirated and shared music via the web, with a tightly secured and fee generating model accessible via an amazingly simple and intuitive device called I-Tunes; followed by the now globally anticipated and groundbreaking rollouts of the I-Phone and I-Pad that revolutionized mobile phone and personal computer technology and usage.

Upon his death this week, Jobs is already being compared, however imperfectly, to such American titans of technology and industry such as Edison and Ford. But what about Derrick Bell, who also passed away this week? Who was he, and how did he impact our society? What was his legacy? To begin, he was arguably as much of a trailblazer and revolutionary in his field of constitutional law as Jobs was in the general field of technology. Bell was for a time the only African American working for the U.S. Justice Department in the late 1950s. When his dual membership in the NAACP raised doubts about his stance of impartiality with the Feds, Bell resigned to work with Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and many other civil rights crusaders to promote civil rights in the deep South, where Bell supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases. Then he was invited to become the first African American law professor at perhaps the pre-eminent standard bearer and arbiter of American jurisprudence -Harvard Law School. He could have easily rested on such an esteemed laurel, but he jeopardized his position of power and credibility by taking a disputed stand regarding a perceived case of campus discrimination, and resigned to become the nation's first black Law School dean at the University of Oregon. A pattern made itself plainly evident when he eventually resigned over a perception of lack of faculty diversity, and Bell taught at Stanford for a year before returning to Harvard. Then, once again, Bell took a principled stand and eventually took a vow of unpaid leave until Harvard hired a black female onto its tenured faculty (he eventually succeeded, but by then Bell had already left for New York University Law School). More substantively, Bell helped to transform the understanding of first law, and then indirectly many other academic fields such as education, by promulgating and explicating with Alan Freeman the concept of Critical Race Theory in the 1970s, which directly challenged the long-established view in American Law that valid, just, and truthful understandings and judgments of other human beings and their needs and behaviors could be made from afar, by employing rational, empirical, and linear methodologies established and maintained from the objectifying viewpoint of a dominant (i.e. white male) perspective. Bell argued that such a viewpoint is a priori flawed from the very beginning, as it is embedded within racially- and culturally-biased worldviews that perpetually reinforce such bias even when benevolently extended towards the underprivileged, who see and experience the world in starkly different ways than the privileged. Thus, even as other theorists have independently developed and advanced post-modernist interpretations and paradigms that question and re-construct the meaning of truth, reality, and power in personal and social contexts, it is upon Bell's legal legacy and personal example they lean on to an extent when their right to question and confront conventional viewpoints is directly challenged in the workplace and courtroom.

Jobs, Bell, and Innovative Ways to Conceive of Student Affairs Work

Having contextualized this post with some brief biographical perspectives on Jobs and Bell, I now turn to how I believe their work and methods can usefully inform and innovate student affairs work. First of all, in deference to the recently and jointly crafted and published professional competencies by ACPA and NASPA, I submit that our field already has very comprehensive and customized sets of area-appropriate standards to guide student affairs practices. This is all very well and good. But what tends to separate excellence and occasional genius from competence in practice is not merely what one practices, but how one practices. And it is in the how that, I believe, Jobs and Bell really distinguished themselves in their respective fields and beyond. For examples:

1. Jobs and Bell were both obsessive about making their respective fields of knowledge and practice user-friendly for both colleagues and customers, in ways that defied conventional thinking. Neither individual was an ideas-person, exactly. There were many others who came up with more original conceptions of what to make or what cases to argue and challenge. Jobs was legendary for his attention to detail, and for putting himself in the place of his targeted audience when cold-bloodedly analyzing products. As Farhad Manjoo recently put it on Slate magazine recently:

Jobs’ best talent was his ability to spot the pain points in every technology he touched. He could look at anything and tell you why it sucked. This became his standard formula for unveiling new products: He would begin by explaining what was awful about the industry he would soon supplant. Old-style smartphones? They were encumbered with buttons that were there whether you needed them or not, and that remained static for every application you used, leaving very little room for a screen. Portable music players? The ones before the iPod stored too few songs, transferred your music too slowly, didn’t catalog your tracks in any useful way, and were too large and ungainly to carry with you. Pre-iPad tablet PCs? If you got him started on those things, you’d be there all day...Jobs wasn’t Apple’s idea man. Rather, his role was to separate other people’s great ideas from their terrible ones—and to refine the best ideas into workable products.

Like Jobs, Bell revolutionized and legitimized innovative ways regarding how to practice his industry's craft, including formulating and applying the aforementioned critical race theory in viewing, interpreting, and acting upon legal problems from a radically different lens of perspective. But Bell went further, and actively introduced into the formal legal discourse a raw and disquieting way of gathering, communicating, and processing information for professional consideration: First person anecdotes, oral histories, songs, and other forms of qualitative, personal narrative. Unacceptable! The guardians of proper analytic, quantitative, and rational methodologies proclaimed. Bell was ready for the establishment's attempt to discredit and/or co-opt his challenges to their stances of authority. As he stated in his essay, "Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory?"

"....The narrative voice, the teller, is important to critical race theory in a way not understandable by those whose voices are tacitly deemed legitimate and authoritarian. The voice exposes, tells and retells, signals resistance and caring, and reiterates what kind of power is feared most -- the power of commitment to change. Given all of this, you will not be surprised to learn that the legal academy has come to recognize, but is far from ready to embrace, critical race theory, particularly at the faculty level. Indeed, there is now a small but growing body of work that views critical race theory as interesting, but not a "subdiscipline" unto itself and therefore must be amenable to mainstream standards. These writers are not reluctant to tell us what critical race theory ought to be. They question the accuracy of the stories, fail to see their relevance, and want more of an analytical dimension to the work -- all this while claiming that their critiques will give this writing a much-needed "legitimacy" in the academic world. "

In short, Jobs and Bell revolutionized their fields of endeavor by fiercely and unrelentingly placing their respective clientele's experiential realities, stories, and preferences at the very center of their ways of doing business. Practicing their crafts through the eyes and on behalf of the individuals they serviced. Lessons for Student Affairs Practice: How can this first person approach be productively applied to student affairs practice? At first glance, it may seem self-evident from the stated NASPA/ACPA competencies that such a first-person approach is already informing student affairs work. But if first-person was applied with the expertise and zeal of a Jobs or Bell, what might the outcomes look like? Well, for some examples, you might see story-telling or "talking story" (as in the ways of Hawaiian locals) become more of an encouraged and established function between practitioners and students, and between colleagues themselves, in all student affairs areas in order to enhance dialogue, camraderie, understanding, and service. You might see more stimulating and user-friendly study areas that incorporated in the latest in integrated design like calming music and colors, more ergonomic tables and chairs, and more customized study aids and services. You might see financial aid offices provide authorized counseling that efficiently integrated a given student's entire financial situation (all loans, credit card debt balances, current income flows, grants, familial help and the like) to develop personalized mid-to long-term financial management plans that can be transported and continually adjusted. You might see housing services that introduced and modeled more independent living skills to interested students via guided web-based lessons, expert presentations, and via student buddy systems. And so forth.

2. Jobs and Bell were willing to risk monumental failure, to discard ideas, products and even prestigious institutional identities with seeming abandon if that what was required to achieve their visions of success. And to prod themselves and their colleagues to constantly re-examine and improve upon their ways of doing business. Lessons for Student Affairs Practice: For many of us, such serendipitous behavior can come off as arrogant, narcissistic, and even reckless and foolhardy insofar as how our actions can affect those around us, including family members who may come to depend on a certain level of employment stability and income. The key is knowing oneself and one's social and environmental context well enough so that a personal stance or move taken out of principle is only taken after active and respectful dialogue with all stakeholders, including clientele (as appropriate), colleagues, and family members. Meanwhile, every area of student affairs should collaboratively build in a schedule of recurring self-reflective habits that continually re-assess the effectiveness of one's operating paradigms, sets of practices, and operational attitudes. Every area participant/stakeholder's voice needs to be heard, and assessments ought to occasionally be made in non-threatening ways by outsiders with fresh perspectives.

There are many other useful lessons to be drawn from the amazingly productive lives of Steve Jobs and Derrick Bell. Yet, like all other human beings, they were flawed as well, as a detailed review of their biographies will reveal to the open-minded. Yet one can learn from their failures as well as successes, as is the case with our own lives. Our society lost two leading lights these week, but their lessons can continue to inspire us for generations to come.