Russian Bots, a found poem

When we planned the Encyclopediaof Milwaukee (EMKE) in the late 2000s, we wanted to invite user comments. But also we wanted to be able to moderate the comments. The quality of user comments on news stories was notoriously low, and we were warned that we would spend a lot of time deleting Viagra ads and other spam. So our IT team set up our site so that users have to register before they can comment. A moderator has to release a comment before it is visible to the public. We’ve been open for comments since our first entries went live in March of 2016.

The project is having a long and slow soft launch while we get all 700 entries through our workflow. So it’s not surprising that we did not get a lot of registrations, much less comments, to start off. But beginning around September 2016, we had a noticeable uptick in newly registered accounts.

The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee is a locally-oriented digital history project. We expected that most of the people who wanted to register and leave comments would be from the Milwaukee area. But the handles and domain names of our new registrations did not look like we expected. Many were nonsense words; the extensions weren’t the familiar .com and .orgs; some were clearly spammers; and, fascinatingly, many ended with .ru. As in Russia. These new registrants didn’t leave comments. They just signed up and vanished again. Mysterious, eh?

For a while we just watched the registrations mount. Because digital history projects are collaborative, a whole team of people keeps tabs on site use. We want to make sure we don’t miss a legitimate comment, so I felt obliged to look at all the new user notifications and forward them to my colleagues with a note that I was ignoring this one or that one. Eventually process this got tiresome, especially given the ratio of legitimate users to spammers. So in 2018, we had our IT team install a Stop Spammers plug-in to filter out bots. Between June 20, 2018 and May 20, 2019, it stopped 35,231 registrations.

But I couldn’t get the Russian registrations out of my head. What did they mean? Why did they target the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee? We all know about “Russian interference in the 2016 US election.” But how did the apparently harmless effort to sign up with my digital history project fit in to this picture? Was it a side effect of a fundamentally political project, or was the interference in the election itself a piece of a larger effort? Whatever their political views, historians are intellectually conservative folk. We know that to see the big picture, we need to have all the pieces to look at—or at least enough pieces to be confident that we aren’t missing something huge. I would like to know what these registrations mean, but I’m not ready to pronounce a historical analysis of them.

Instead, I decided to write a poem, to share a sense of the experience and throw out to the world my piece of the picture. That’s why I wrote “Russian bots, a found poem.”

How did I compose this poem? While my students were taking their final exam last week, I found all the user notifications for the EMKE and manually pulled out every username and email address that looked to me like spam. I didn’t think to harvest the time stamps on the registrations so that I could make some inferences about whether they might have originated with people working in other time zones, and I don’t have the technical chops to scrape the data out of my email. I ended up with a list of 214 distinct registrations. I then separated each registration into three component parts: user registration name, the email handle, and the domain name of each email address. Just for fun, I visualized each set of components using WordClouds.com.

Here are the domains. I wanted to keep the @ signs with the domains, but again I am not technically proficient enough to stop the word cloud generator from deleting them.

 Here are the email handles:

Here are the usernames registered on the EMKE website:

To compose the poem, I compiled all three lists back into one dataset and alphabetized them using Excel. My plan was to make an acrostic poem using the first letter of the elements (excluding the @ signs). Based on my dataset, I had the entire English alphabet at my disposal—except Q and X—and many choices within some letter groups. Next I posed the question “Why were so many Encyclopedia of Milwaukee registrations Russian?” and arranged it vertically to create the acrostic. Then I inspected my list of usernames, handles, and domains and chose the ones that seemed most interesting and appealing, matching each to an appropriate letter in the acrostic. I was careful only to use a given option once in the poem even if it appeared multiple times on my list. I’m a humanist, so I felt perfectly comfortable making impressionistic rather than systematic selections. I retained the original capitalization and punctuation. Each of these “words” then became its own line in the poem, which ends with my inserted question mark. I visualized the poem as a picture using Branah.com’stext-to-image converter.

Admit Ivy League Students by Lottery

The time has come to say this aloud. Admission to the most selective colleges and universities in the United States simply is not an academic meritocracy. The current lawsuit against Harvard—accused of discriminating against Asian Americans—charges that admissions staff use not just grades and test scores, not just records of extracurricular activity, but also intangible factors of personality to decide who gets in and access to the treasury of Croesus. How those readings of applicants’ personalities shade over into culture and race seems to be the core of the case. The underlying logic is that applicants who are better students are being passed over because the portraits their portfolios paint are not sparkly enough.

            But for decades it has been the case that the nation’s most selective colleges make their admission decisions not solely on the basis of academic merit. When I was admitted to Princeton back in 1986, getting in was relatively easy—only 80% of applicants were rejected, compared to the 95% routinely rejected today. At some point in the distant past there was an academic cutoff—if your scores were good enough, you got in.* Now there are always fewer seats available than there are valedictorians, people with perfect test scores, and students with flawless GPAs bolstered by extra points for AP and honors classes in the applicant pool. In short, there are far more students who could clearly benefit from the rigorous academics of elite institutions than can be admitted. If you wanted an entering class that was nothing but wrestlers, you could surely build one from the qualified applicants.

            We also know that university admission is not an academic meritocracy because the faculty’s preferences are not the ones used to make most of the decisions. I am haunted by a scene in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel Admission, based on her experience on the decision-making staff at Princeton. Unable to make sense of an applicant’s essay about zombies, the protagonist sends it to a philosophy professor asking whether it is the real deal. The professor responds “Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please.” A student like this is admitted as a rare “one for the faculty.” The balance of the applicant pool can certainly do the work required to earn an Ivy League degree, as testified by graduation rates, but it is their potential contributions to the rest of the university’s community life that tips the scales toward their admission: their prowess in fencing, their French horn, their entrepreneurial spirit, their proven leadership in student government.

There does exist an admissions meritocracy in American universities, one that culminates in the PhD. If you want to go to an academic (as opposed to professional) graduate school, you apply to a department and the faculty of that program decide whether to take you (assuming you meet the minimum criteria set by the university). Although faculty selection processes are surely far from perfect, they are skewed much more to the question of academic achievement than to a holistic view of an applicant’s potential community contributions. But imagine if you will what would happen if faculty got to select as the entering class at Harvard the students with the most potential for earning a PhD. They would pick the people most like themselves. You would get a yard full of nerdy gifted kids gleefully oriented to lab and library and a football team the size of the basketball squad. If Harvard wants to graduate a class that influences every corner of society, then it cannot leave admissions up to a faculty-based predilection for outstanding academic potential.

            So, what is an elite university to do? I suggest a more randomized approach to admissions. Use the admissions staff to identify everyone who is capable of thriving academically at Harvard and its peers. Then hold a lottery for admission among those applicants. Assuming the university doesn’t put its thumb on the scale—for the children of alumni, for “one for the faculty,” for tuba players, for underrepresented minorities, for first-generation college students—you would probably end up with a student body that looked pretty much like the applicant pool AND that would spread itself out into a broad range of post-graduation endeavors. The universities could even put their thumb on the scale for some percentage of the class that it needed politically or socially—or as an experiment to see how this idea works out—and leave the rest up to the lottery admissions. At a 5% admissions rate, it already feels like a lottery from the outside. Maybe it’s time to make it one on the inside as well.

*Unless, of course, you were a member of a group that was systematically excluded (women, African Americans) or capped (Jews). The history of the intersection of inclusive admission criteria and the cranking up of competition to get in is unclear to me. It is simple to say that with the widening of the applicant pools, standards went up and competition became more intense. But without inside information about actual admissions practices, it is hard to when the use of cutoffs shifted to evaluation of non-academic criteria.

Tara Westover’s EDUCATED: A MEMOIR

Tara Westover’s Educated is marketed as 2018’s Hillbilly Elegy. The surface level plot is about how your family—in Westover’s case, insular Mormon survivalists in Idaho—can mess you up, and how education can save you. Westover’s publisher won endorsements from J.D. Vance as well as Vance’s Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua. It is centrally about the redemptive power of education.

Educated’s effectiveness, though, lies in charting the path of education and its political significance. Hillbilly Elegy’s power is in J. D. Vance’s intimate descriptions of the chaos in his family, especially the ever-shifting cast of boyfriends in his mother’s life. Vance grew out of that experience into a moderate Republican, convinced of the power of the disciplined individual to move into a stable and gratifying personal life. Educated’s politics are more basic, not partisan, but about the polis. Westover’s political message lies in her unpacking of how education works. For her first sixteen years, Westover had no formal education. Although she was nominally homeschooled, her formal teaching was limited to reading and basic arithmetic. In its etymological Latin sense, to educate someone is to “lead them out.” Westover’s education leads her inexorably away from her natal family by teaching her how to see the world from multiple perspectives. While education permanently fractures her family, it also liberates her.

            Drawing on the tools from her doctoral studies in history, Westover’s primary sources for reconstructing her escape are her journals and emails and the memories of some of her siblings, as well as her own recollections. It takes some three quarters of the memoir for Westover to unfold the horror at the core of her family. Her father’s extremist stance against public education, the government, and the “Medical Establishment” animate the book from the start. But it is not his beliefs themselves that are the core problem for his daughter. What Westover ultimately cannot live with are the physical and emotional abuse from her brother, her father’s prioritization of his patriarchy and business over his children’s well-being, and her mother’s willful blindness.

Overlapping with her slow recognition of her willingness to rupture the family bond is Westover’s narrative how accessing a formal education allowed her to see the world entirely differently from the paternal indoctrination that shaped her childhood. In the second three quarters of Educated, we slowly watch the scales drift from Westover’s eyes. As she realizes that her new educated worldview will permanently sever her from her family, she falls into a temporary madness, wasting her a fellowship at Harvard binge-watching television instead of working on her scholarship. But by the end Westover has triumphantly earned a PhD with a dissertation that includes, inter alia, an analytical reading of the Mormon sacred texts that she grew up studying with religious eyes—a radical break.

            Westover never went to school until she was seventeen. After teaching herself enough mathematics to win a high-enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young University, Westover begins to learn about events that her parents never bothered to let her know existed, starting with the Holocaust. More important than her ever-increasing knowledge, though, Westover shows herself moving through three essential epistemological problems. First, she has to learn how to distinguish what is true. The process starts in her dormitory, where she is astonished that the roommate with “Juicy” written on her backside goes to church. Initially, most of the other (similarly immodest) Mormon students at BYU seem to be what her family would have called “gentiles.” After several false starts, Westover learns that her roommates and new friends can teach her valuable things about how to get along in the world—including the importance of washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and that you have read the art history textbook, not just look at the images.

            Next, Westover reveals herself discovering the existence and value of perspectives other than the sole view cultivated by her family. That there is more than one way to see the world comes home to her most dramatically when her abusive older brother mocks her face blackened with dirt from summer work and spends months calling her the N-word. Westover narrates how she suddenly connected his taunts with the images of Civil Rights demonstrators she had learned about in a history class at BYU. Recognizing that her family “had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others,” Westover stops laughing along; “The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different.” (pp. 180-181).

            Finally, Westover explores whether one’s own memories can be trusted. In the book, she narrates several events whose exact sequence and details she remains unsure of, even when she was present as a witness to their aftermath—one brother’s burn, and another’s brain injury. Rather than just accept her own versions, historian that she became, Westover consults with the siblings who are still speaking to her to reconstruct what probably happened. She also flags those narratives as potentially unreliable and what the uncertainty over the exact details means for what kind of man her father actually is, softening his portrayal from a dictator to a fallible and flawed man. As further testimony to her intellectual honesty, Westover also marks passages where she has paraphrased emails instead of quoting them directly.

In short, Westover’s memor shows how far she has come from the certainties of the single worldview of her childhood. While there are things that are true, there is also more than one way to see the world, and a careful person acknowledges the limitations of her vision.

In these senses, Educated is a paean to the value of a liberal arts education. The education Westover received at conservative Brigham Young University, and then the venerable University of Cambridge and Harvard University, was not indoctrination in politically liberal values like tolerance, compassion, and the Democratic party—not the brainwashing of “liberal professors” (p. 134) that her father railed against. Instead, it was liberal in its fundamental (again etymological) sense: liberal as free. Westover’s education literally freed her from the bonds (=chains) of her family, whose patriarch systematically forced them to acknowledge only a single point of view—his. Westover shows us that education that is liberal—literally liberal—sets you free.

This praise for education is a vital political message for 2018, which perhaps explains why this book is resonating so deeply with American audiences.[1] If Hillbilly Elegy gives us insight into Trump voters, then Westover’s memoir reminds us how the skills embedded in liberal education—delivered with nuance, modesty, and skepticism—matter in securing American freedom and democracy.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

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[1] As of this writing, Educated is #44 on Amazon’s bestselling books list, with 906 customer reviews. There are a few negative reviews, including one that doubts Educated’s credibility and compares it to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

What I Witnessed at the Walkout

I. I witnessed hundreds of children—fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders—exit the building in complete silence at 10 in the morning.

2. I witnessed my own tall daughter, earlier enraged and drowning in tears, calmly lead off the speakers at the podium and loudly proclaim her right to safety and education.

3. I witnessed children, one two three at a time, realize that they had something to say and discover the courage to say it.

4. I witnessed a snowplow carefully placed at the entrance to the blacktop and city police stationed around the perimeter of the field.

5. I witnessed a child whose mother died of cancer demand safe schools.

6. I witnessed a child whose mother teaches math renounce all guns in schools, his face stretched in passion.

7. I witnessed the principal nervously checking his watch as the allotted twenty minutes ticked past and decide not to silence any child who wished to speak.

8. I witnessed scores of children recognize their need to speak, respectfully duck around their speaking classmates, and wait patiently in line for their turn.

9. I witnessed recording equipment for posterity but no microphones for the speakers.

10. I witnessed the crowd cheer every child who spoke, even the ones whose words I could not make out.

11. I witnessed a child in a T-shirt and no coat decide to watch everything without complaint, for an hour, in 30 degree cold.

12. I witnessed a child stop speaking, overcome by tears, and other children rush up to stand with her to help her finish.

13. I witnessed my own grief blossom into pride, love, and hope.

14. I witnessed a black girl and a white girl, hands clasped, declare themselves best friends and call for everyone’s safety.

15. I witnessed a few planned remarks and scores of impromptu speeches.

16. I witnessed the best thing I have ever seen in a school.

17. I witnessed more than one hundred children find their voices.

A Professor Responds to Parkland

Dear Students

I am going to exercise my privilege as instructor to take a few minutes at the start of our class time to respond to what happened in Floriday yesterday.

The world so often seems like an awful place. When we are whole enough to get beyond our own immediate feelings, I believe that there are three things we can do to address the terribleness of the world.

1. We can influence our government to address the causes and effects of problems. We can urge them to create new laws and programs that will help, and we can urge them to eliminate laws and programs that are dysfunctional.

2. We can respond to distress among our fellow humans with decency and compassion. This means we must take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends; and we should also seek to help those who are consumed by disordered cognitions and emotions, instead of turning away from them.

3. We can create and spread knowledge and ideas. I cannot articulate the depths of my feelings about this, but I know at the core of my being how much education matters.

Although I believe all of these things, I have committed my professional life to the third--the dissemination of knowledge. In that spirit, I refuse to let one murderous person derail what I am able to offer you in the privileged setting of this classroom. If you are too distressed to make good use of today's lesson, I understand that and encourage you to address your emotional needs and take care of yourself. You are welcome to return to class when you are ready. I will be here.

Sincerely

Amanda

[X] High School

Friends,

If you were in a relationship with someone you really cared about—a partner, a parent, a child, a friend—and they said to you, calmly and clearly, “When you say [X], it hurts me.” What would you do? Would you push back, dismiss their feelings and their words, keep doing the thing that hurt your loved one? Or would you say, “I’m sorry that hurts you. Out of respect for your feelings, I will try to choose less hurtful words in the future.”

What if your friend said this?: “When you say [X], it hurts me. And, [X] is bound up in our country’s racist past. It reminds me of numerous other ways that my family and I are devalued because of how other people perceive us, a devaluation whose effects are too legion and devastating for me to recount for you now—and whose effects you are already aware of. When you keep saying [X] despite the fact that I have told you how it hurts me, it tells me that saying [X] is more important to you than our relationship.” Would you persist in saying [X] because your need to say [X] was more important than you need to heal your relationship?

If you went to high school with me, you probably see where this is going. It hurts me—and it hurts you, and it hurts us—that our high school was named after a man who gave his life to keep African Americans enslaved, subject to brutality, families broken, women subjected to unpunishable rape. Why is it more important to you to honor the name of a man who died a century before you were born than it is to heal your relationship with your friends, your classmates, your teachers, and the future students in that school?

JEB Stuart High School

            For the past several years, the Fairfax County School board has been enmeshed in a debate about what to do about the name of my alma mater: J.E.B. Stuart High School. General J.E.B. Stuart was a dashing cavalry officer who died in service of the Confederate army. Since the 1980s, when I attended, the high school has been one of the most ethnically diverse and stably racially integrated in the United States. Not only are there white and black students in significant numbers, but many students with family backgrounds in Asia and a majority from Latino heritage and origin. Photos suggest that the school continues also to have a significant Muslim population whose presence is not reflected in demographic data.

The arguments for dropping or retaining the school’s name are heated. Two of the most common reasons cited for keeping Stuart’s name on the school are that we cannot change history and the costs associated with the change.

It is true that we cannot change the past. But place, institutional, and personal names do change. Think about the name of the place where you live. Is the word for your city or neighborhood indigenous? The city where I work now does have an Ojibwe name that reflects the prevalence of Anishinaabemowin speakers in this area in the 19^th century. But would the earlier Woodland people who built Wisconsin’s effigy mounds have recognized “Milwaukee” as a meaningful name? The airport now named after Ronald Reagan replaced ones named for Herbert Hoover and the place named for George Washington. In the United States, women who marry and divorce routinely change their names, updating their identities to reflect changes in their personal histories. In all of these cases, people have chosen to update names, not to deny history but to reflect what is most meaningful to them in the present.

We do not have to be ruled by decisions made in the past. J.E.B. Stuart High School was named in 1959, as the “massive resistance” strategy came peaked in Virginia. Massive resistance was a political response to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision ordering racial desegregation of public schools. Rather than comply, whites in Virginia shut down public schools. White children could attend private academies. Black families made the wrenching decision to send their children to other states in order to get their educations. The story was different in Northern Virginia, where the postwar population had boomed. In contrast to the rest of the state, the Fairfax County School Board opened new schools. But no one could mistake the insult to African Americans intended by choosing to name a school after a Confederate hero. Black students might get a public education at J.E.B. Stuart High School, but for years afterwards they also carried on their résumés the name of a man who died for the principle that states could decide whether their ancestors were property or were included in the fundamental American value of liberty. The choice of school name was probably also a thumb in the eye of thousands of white “carpetbaggers” who had come south to work in the booming postwar federal government.

The second reason given against the name change is the cost, which would allegedly eat up funds better spent counteracting cuts to important school programs. The Fairfax County School Board website lists $678,000 in projected costs associated with new signage, in-school branding, athletic and band uniforms, and logo-bearing items. This argument is more compelling but still not persuasive. As the site also notes, items such as uniforms normally wear out and are replaced on a regular basis, and other items fall under the purview of the work of the booster club. The difficulty is coming up with all that money at once rather than amortizing it over multiple budget years. Replacing signage is a one-time cost that could potentially be covered by engaging the community and alumni in fundraising. Further, development professionals know how to turn a crisis into a fundraising opportunity. The school district could take advantage of the heightened interest of alumni in this issue to send out an appeal for the funds needed for special education, parental support, and smaller class sizes to raise private money.

            The naming of local institutions like schools, parks, and streets reflects local values. It is up to the Fairfax County School board to decide what it values more right now: retaining a local heritage name that branded the school as one where black students were second-class citizens or finding a new, less divisive name that students and alumni can carry with pride and help them want to give back to the school for generations to come.