I thought I’d share the section of the interview that affected me the most:

Q: How does being in one place for a long time teach you who you are?

Deloria: If you live in one place long enough, you begin to lose the defenses you’ve erected in order to survive in industrial civilization, and you fall into the rhythm of the land. You develop a different sense of the natural world and no longer have to think of things in the abstract. You think, instead, of how the land looks and what it’s telling you. I would think many Appalachian people have this sense, especially the ones who’ve lived back in the hills for five or six generations. They have begun to adjust to the land, as opposed to forcing the land to adjust to them. If you talk to them, you’ll find they don’t have many of the abstract concerns that so-called civilized people have.

Q: What sort of abstract concerns?

Deloria: Always wondering who you are. Always trying to prove yourself, to prove that you are good enough, strong enough, rich enough, good-looking enough. Always trying to define yourself in terms of what you do for a living or what your hobbies are or what you can buy. I can see how that would be an effective survival technique in New York City, but if you live in a place where you’re not always having your identity called into question, you don’t need to worry about those things. You can simply be yourself.

Because of the industrial machine, no one really has an identity anymore. So you have to keep giving people numbers and meaningless ways to define themselves. If you look at the bestseller list, you see all these books offering to tell you how to be yourself. Well, when the land gives you a foundation, you don’t have to struggle with that question. If you live a long time in one place, you have an ongoing experiential context. If you don’t, your life is limited to little disconnected experiences. To really feel alive, you’ve got to grab as many of these experiences as you can. Thus, you’ve got MTV and malls and discos.

I try to be thankful every day for the foundation I’ve found in the land that we call Richmond, Indiana.

Here’s a list of 5 business values that I think I learned via Earlham College:

1. You can do good and still do well. While it hasn’t been as black and white as Mark and I may have thought it would be when we started Summersault, we have found that it is generally possible to make ethical decisions and still make money.  When you do make ethical decisions and still make money as a result, it tends to feel better than other approaches.
   
2. It’s okay to fail. Traditional business culture sometimes tells us that failure is to be avoided at all costs (see: AIG bailout).  I’ve learned that experiencing failure – even deep, gut-wrenching, not-sure-I-can-do-this-anymore failure – is an important part of learning how to succeed, and while it may be difficult and even embarrassing to fail, it doesn’t have to be shameful.
3. Honesty and integrity is always the best policy, and isn’t to be taken for granted. I know it’s a bit cliche, but we’re still surprised at how often we encounter forms of dishonesty in the business world – through outright lies, subtle omissions, or other tactics – and so I try not to take it for granted when we meet someone – a client, potential employee, or vendor – who is honest through and through.  By the same token, no matter how difficult or awkward a business situation is, I’ve found that being brutally honest and taking responsibility for my part is the only way to get through it with integrity and relationships intact.
4. You don’t have to detach yourself from the humanity of doing business. Businesses are just groups of people sharing in some common activity or mission.  Those people have emotions, flaws, difficulties, struggles, nuanced joys and irrational, complex driving forces in their lives.  You can’t run a business and expect to ignore or detach yourself from these considerations, and in fact you may have a much better experience if you embrace them.
5. The universe will have its way. Some people think that good business is all about controlling every last detail of every process involved.  Believe me, I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work – the universe will throw things at you that you cannot control, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes you don’t know.  The alternative to trying to control everything that seems to work is to do really good planning, and then be ready to adapt and change (sometimes dramatically in a short period of time) and try not to take it personally.

Not all of these things were taught directly by Earlham (the panel today is in part to help convince students that it’s OK to make money – only at a small liberal arts college ), and maybe I’ve even figured some of them out in spite of my time there (I majored in Computer Science, not Management).  I’ll also note that I’m not by any means claiming to be perfect at living out these values all the time!  But I’m confident that had I not had that educational context and transformative four years, I would be a much different kind of businessperson today.

The Quaker college has tried for decades to get a traffic signal at its entrance, an effort that began soon after Earlham student David Rantanen was killed crossing the highway in 1962. Since then, two more people have died and several more were hit and injured by vehicles on the four-lane highway near the school’s main drive.

While the decision isn’t official, the concession on the part of state highway planners that a signal is needed is a major one.  I cringe when I’m in a car or walking as a pedestrian in that area, as it really is a game of “look both ways about 10 times and then cross your fingers and run for it” for pedestrians.  And while I ascribe no general ill will toward Earlham students on the part of Richmond drivers, it does seem to be a section of road that highlights the inherent disdain that some drivers have for pedestrians in this town.  Sometimes they even speed up a little when students are crossing, instead of slowing down.

The usual criticisms are already resurfacing: why should taxpayers pay for a crossing between two parts of a private campus, why didn’t Earlham just build a pedestrian bridge with its vast vaults of extra cash, etc.  (And as usual, critics are posting their demands for answers in the Pal-Item’s online comment section instead of taking them to the people who can actually answer them, which in my mind means they don’t really want an answer, they just want to complain.)

But I think we can generally address those concerns by remembering that all of us pay for infrastructure like roads, sidewalks, crossing signals, traffic lights, etc. that may or may not directly benefit our own daily commute – it’s nothing new to ask the entities that are responsible for managing that infrastructure to build some new ones in places that are needed.  The lives of pedestrians are no less worth protecting as they cross a public road, just because there happens to be privately owned land on either side…that’s pretty much how every residential street works.

Congratulations to Earlham for creatively staying on this and to the INDOT folks for (finally) taking heed.

The Co-op has always been associated with Earlham, from the time it was started by a group of students in the Runyan desk.

To the contrary, the Co-op was actually started inside of a storage bin. At some point when it got big enough, the organization moved into the largest available compartment of an end table, and then worked its way up to reside in a desk in Runyan Center, but not the desk we know today as Runyan Desk. These details are important.

In all seriousness and despite the misquote, the article touches on the key point that the future of the Co-op, currently located on Earlham’s campus, is a bit uncertain right now. As we try to figure out what model is best (and sustainable) for the organization, the Earlham populations it serves, and the larger Richmond community, we invite feedback from others who are invested in the future of a locally owned food store that focuses on healthy, local, organic products and cooperative values.

I always make a mental note to write down some suggestions for improving this situation, and now that the academic year is ramping up again with plenty of lectures and convocations on the schedule, I thought I’d hold forth. So, here are my 5 tips for how to get the most out of Q & A time at public lectures:

1. Think about the wording of your question in advance – I know this may seem obvious, but many students seem to wait until the microphone is in hand and the whole room is staring at them to compose their thoughts. You’ll save everyone some time if you have a rough version of your question rehearsed in your brain, and you get extra points if you write it out on paper too.
2. Make your question clear and concise – related to the first point, the more circuitous route you take to ask your question, the less chance you have of getting a substantial response. If you need more than two sentences, you’re probably going on too long. Oh, and make sure you actually have a question – stating a bunch of ideas and just waiting for a reaction by your guest is not helpful.
3. Q&A time is not a venue for sharing your own views at length – I can’t count how many lectures I’ve been to where the question-asker takes five minutes to talk about what they think about some topic that may or may not be related to the event itself. Okay, you might have something interesting and insightful to say, but if you can’t sum it up in a sentence and do so as a clearly relevant introduction to your question, then you’re probably losing the attention (and perhaps respect) of the audience. The person at the podium is there for a reason, you’ll get your turn later.
4. Be gracious – again perhaps obvious, but I continue to be jarred by the abrasive and even vitriolic tone of some of the questions I hear asked. No matter how much you disagree with the speaker, no matter how awful you think they are, you will gain very little by insulting, interrupting or embarrassing them. (And for crying out loud, don’t throw food at them – it’s been done, and it has no positive utility.) I believe you can show respect while challenging the speaker, and if you do it well, the challenge may just be met with a worthwhile reflection or response.
5. Don’t follow up unless asked or necessary – a follow-up question is still a second question, and depending on the event format, you may be taking away someone else’s opportunity to ask their question by getting yours in. If the speaker prompts you (“did that answer your question?”) or if the speaker clearly evaded your question, a follow-up can be appropriate, but you should still be open to the possibility that moving on to someone else will yield the best results for everyone involved.

Of course, you’re welcome to take issue with the above. What other tips or advice do you have for folks attending public lectures and hoping to participate in the Question & Answer section?

• Popping Culture Blog by Michelle Manchir: Michelle’s journalistic efforts at the Palladium-Item are some of the more refreshingly comprehensive and useful to come along in a while, and her blog entries are turning out to be similarly insightful.
• Peter Suber of Earlham College Gets Win for Open-Access at Harvard: Peter was a professor of mine at Earlham, and is one of the most interesting and intelligent people I know. He’s been working hard at making scholarly articles available for free online, and this news is certainly a great milestone for that effort.
• WayNet.org allows organizations without 501(c)3 status to apply for fee-waived membership: Now you don’t need to have a letter from The Man if you’re a low-budget not-for-profit organization wanting to join this Wayne County community network association.
• The Palladium-Item is revising its forum posting policy so that it holds its online users to some of the same standards as its letter writers in the print edition. And yet despite some heroic efforts, as I predicted in 2005, the forum remains something of a drowning pool where trolls go to feed.
• Check out my Summersault Weblog entry on adding a free chat room to your website. Any questions? Come ask me in the chat room at live-richmond.com.
• I am searching for the medical term for “an irrational fear of velociraptors” – anyone?

• Richmond Indiana Images of Home – a brief video slideshow with photos by Jim Hair and music by Brian Wallen.
• VotePoke.com – Are you registered to vote? Are you sure?
• Web Masters – Earlham College’s recent Alumni Spotlight article featuring myself and Mark.
• Finding the Time and Place to Do What’s Important – another interesting take by Dave Pollard; I may respond to some of his points in a forthcoming blog entry, if I have time.
• Hacking train tracks – It could work, if we can just get the right angles.

But what I really meant to say was that I appreciate very much that Earlham puts this event on – I imagine that I would have found it incredibly useful and impressive during my last semester there, and part of the reason I participate year after year is to try to make up for that sense of lost time that I experienced learning some of these things (from how to eat properly at a nice restaurant to how to be a young leader in your post-grad destination community) on my own. And of course, I also carry out my super-secret secondary agenda of showing at least some of the students that there are scenarios in which one can graduate from Earlham, stay in Richmond, make a living here, and really love it.

I’ve seen Matt’s studio in Austin and I’m so impressed with the “handmade” nature of so much of what he does – music, carpentry and beyond. He’s quite a guy. You can check out his website (which I designed) at dancingcarpenter.com; you can order a copy of his album Imaginary Muses from there as well.

Not the most positive exchange, but at least the cyclist wasn’t actually hit and hurt or killed. Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the death of Earlham graduate Jessica Bullen after being struck by a driver in Madison, Wisconsin – her story and memorial fund are described here. Even more sadly, Jessica was a strong advocate (in a town that I consider quite biker-friendly already) for cyclists and worked to raise awareness for motorists that inattentive driving could result in a preventable injury or death. My life has been impacted in other ways by similar deaths – a good friend of my family started Fernside, a now internationally known center for grieving children, after her son was killed on his bike as a result of being struck by a car.

I’m not as much of a bike commuter as I want to be, but I ride around town enough to know that many Richmond drivers aren’t really tuned in to the right of way that cyclists have – pretty much the same that motorists have. Indiana Code 9-21-11-2 Section 2. says that “A person riding a bicycle upon a roadway has all the rights and duties under this article that are applicable to a person who drives a vehicle,” with a few small exceptions. Many folks think that because cars are so dominant in size and speed, they enjoy some special protection under law for use of the public streets. It even makes its way into the mindsets of would-be bikers – I can’t count how many people I’ve talked to who have said they would ride their bike to commute around town more if they weren’t so scared of being on the roads that would make that possible because of careless drivers.

Those fears and misconception carry into the unfortunate opinions that develop when a crash does happen. The attorney for Jessica’s killer is quoted as saying that “I don’t think these cases should be crimes,” but as Jessica’s friends and family have said, when a human being loses their life due to the carelessness of others, the issue of whether it was car versus bike doesn’t exempt either party from being held accountable for their actions.

Whether you drive or bike or both or neither, please be careful.