(2 of 2) My comments at tonight's city council meeting, during public speaking time prior to A-17-02 (funding for One Southern Indiana).

What I'll be saying tonight during regular public speaking time for agenda items. It is a repurposed extract from a recent ON THE AVENUES column. Part 1 is here.

I’m a member of the Leadership Southern Indiana’s Discover class of 2017.

The presence of A-17-02 on tonight’s agenda is ironic, given that in May, One Southern Indiana’s President and CEO, Wendy Dant Chesser, spoke to our class during Community Leadership Day.

Ostensibly Dant Chesser was there to outline steps for effectively leading a non-profit organization. However, the second half of her presentation quickly digressed into the customary advertisement for 1Si, although this time with a twist.

According to Dant Chesser, the large manufacturing conglomerates most eagerly courted by 1Si (as opposed to independent local businesses and grassroots entrepreneurs, who must settle for trickle-down) prefer employees holding one of the six “top earner” university degrees, including subjects like engineering, computers and electronics.

However, according to her, higher education insists on disgorging twice as many graduates who’ve received the six “least useful” (and lowest paying) degree choices, like English, philosophy, geography, history and the like.

It would seem that both Dant Chesser and the often subsidized multinational beneficiaries of the local branch of the neoliberal order, upon whom 1Si depends to make payroll for 14 staffers, are very offended by this educational ratio.

She made no effort to conceal her disdain for people who might view education as something other than vocational training, or that differs from what employers want, and considering the fact that I wasn’t the only humanities major in the room, her summarizing anecdote of choice was tellingly misplaced.

She told us of a recent chat with an art history major who was having trouble in the job market. Well, she said, what did he expect? Art history? What sort of guidance counselor would recommend studying subjects as perennially useless as art history?

Perhaps those guidance counselors grasping that the object of education isn’t always to match obedient hamsters to their proper wheel, but to produce humans capable of thinking. The fact that “fake” news is such a concern these days might enter into this paradigm, wouldn’t you … think?

Seemingly nowhere in Dant Chesser’s narrowly defined world exists the type of broad, individually tailored choices of human aspiration that depart from economic development of the “we’ve always done it this way” variety, which by breathtaking coincidence is the type best calculated to advance the US Chamber of Commerce-approved, specific capitalist format to which 1Si attaches itself.

The real problem might just be that humanities majors have been made aware of trends in the history of thought that differ from hers and the oligarchs she serves, and as such, humanities majors are the ones most likely to question Dant Chesser’s premises.

Which I did, and am doing so again tonight. Because, how did I manage to stay in business 25 years without an engineering degree?

Dan Chesser also informed us that every Southern Indiana resident should unquestioningly accept – notice a pattern yet? – 1Si’s version of the Regional Cities Initiative, so as to provide unanimity in pursuit of a “collective” path forward – and yes, “collective” is precisely the word this crony capitalist enabler used, proving that while irony is dead, the Great Trumpolini didn’t kill it.

As a direct result of past concerns voiced by anti-establishment dissidents, at least the money 1Si is requesting tonight of our council will be put to a specific, directed use: WorkHub, a vocational training initiative.

But first we need to answer two questions: Is this vocational training available to art history majors, or must we collectively denounce the pursuit of non-vocational education before disbursing the dollars to applicants? Can art history majors be cured of their wayward choices, and restored to harmony with multinational corporations?

WorkHub probably is a good program, but absent a public apology by Dant Chesser to humanities majors, which I sadly know isn’t forthcoming, I’d recommend that council withhold the money until my questions are answered. You won’t, so instead I’ll urge you to think carefully about what 1Si is, and what it does. Not all your constituents view it as a panacea.

Thank you.

Design, condescension and movable furniture.

Last week, as it pertains to the design of New Albany's Bicentennial Park by stealth, NAC's Jeff Gillenwater asked Pete Andriot of Rundell Ernstberger Associates a simple, reasonable question:

"When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"

We continue to impatiently tap our feet awaiting Andriot's reply, if any, and Jeff will be posting again on this topic on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'd like to return to a comment of Andriot's that grates more jarringly with each passing day.

"New Albany isn’t ready for movable tables and chairs yet."

My response:

In the absence of substantive input from New Albany's citizenry, exactly how do you know this?

Did Bob Caesar and Shelle England assure you that the simple, guileless folks in New Albany cannot ever grasp such concepts, or absent any apparent desire to query the general populace, did you even go so far as to ask the tiny non-representative membership of the bicentennial committee itself?

Or, rather, did you glance at the history of the park site and conclude that any city so ineptly willing to decimate a historic post office building and permit the devastated footprint to go perpetually to seed over a period of almost 50 years afterward does not deserve to be considered capable of grasping movable furniture?

At this point, I thought it wise to search "movable furniture," and the very first hit reveals a factoid with which Andriot and his firm might readily (and unfortunately) agree: New York City is the sort of place where they're actually ready for movable furniture (see below).

There, but not here ... okay, so why?

Are we that much dumber, and New Yorkers that much smarter, that we can't even be asked by the designer?

Ahh, but maybe it isn't because ordinary New Albanians don't get it.

Maybe it's because the cadre of top-downers, those same suspects, self-appointed to spoon feed us their conventional white bread wisdom without sharing what passes for reasoning, don't understand movable furniture themselves, and the designer has wisely chosen not to offend his somewhat paymasters (a frightened, hands-off city council ensures they operate sans accountability) by instead casually offending those of us in the general populace: after all, if the powers that be were not going to solicit public input for a $750K project, why the hell would the landscape architect care to do so, either?

I suppose that in this sense, the Bicentennial already has become wonderfully and delightfully New Albany, which is to say, the same tired, congenital, wearisome song and dance.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition 2012 Invites You to Draw Up Chair

The Battery Conservancy invites students and professionals from the Americas (Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), to design an iconic moveable outdoor seating element. The winning design will be fabricated for use at The Battery, the 25-acre park at the tip of Manhattan which annually welcomes six million visitors.

Why a Moveable Chair?
As the great urban theorist William Holly Whyte discovered: “Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put.” The Battery’s movable chairs will delight while they invite, animating the park and making it Downtown’s central meeting place.