Wrestling with Shadows (eBook)

Introduction

After twenty-one years, I can now look back on the troubles that started in July of 2000 with a detached and even slightly amused perspective. Of course, the tale that I am going to tell involves a series of odd coincidences and unusual events that occurred during discussions with people in Asia and the United States in 2000 about the future of education, discussions that unexpectedly propelled me forward to the geopolitical frontline in a manner that set me on course toward confrontations I had never intended.

I have come to believe that some sort of confrontation was inevitable in my career, granted certain characteristics of my personality. At the same time, I feel that I can easily prove the profound illegality, and immorality, of the actions taken against me, and the shameful participation in that process by colleagues, friends, and family.

I had an odd way of looking at my career. I was interested in changing entire systems, not in making progressive modifications to existing institutions, and I did so as someone who likes processes, and who makes friends easily with bureaucrats and administrators. I was also not all that interested in my own career, or my own pay. I assumed that I would be taken care of if the larger mission were successful.

My underlying message was radical change, yet at the same time, change with a respect for the work that the people around me did. That approach meant that I was not easily dismissed as a fanatic or a dreamer, and at the same time, intriguing and exciting to many who longed for real institutional change. In other words, I was in a position to actually change things in a sleepy and hidebound institution like the University of Illinois.

     There was something fundamentally wrong with how I approached my career in the year 2000. I wanted to do something different. I had no desire to aim for a particular career goal or strive to reach a particularly lofty position. I didn’t even desire to get in with the most powerful people at the University of Illinois. Instead, I had a dream to create something unique in a rather ordinary, but quite powerful university. This approach alone was enough to make me a serious threat—although it would take six months for me to figure out what had happened.

One morning in 2000, I sat down at my desk in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and started drafting out a proposal for the future of the university in the age of the internet. The world became a tidal pool full of possibilities in my head. Starting with my neck of the woods, Asian studies, I set down a long-term plan for fixing the educational system of our country. I suggested new rules, new cultural standards, and even new approaches to international relations as part of this proposal. My concept of the future of the university was broad, but the description of the potential of distance learning was compelling, and I was able to communicate it easily to others.

Although money and credit never came to me for that proposal, I found that the potential was endless precisely because I did not demand ownership. There was a line frequently employed by President Harry Truman cited in David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman (which I had read in 1999) that stuck with me: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Although I would later learn that Truman was less of a saint than I had been taught, those words were an initial inspiration that undergirded the strategy I would develop in the summer of 2000.

Unfortunately, this was not the course of action you were supposed to take as an ambitious young man in the United States. You were supposed to pursue your own goals of becoming an established figure in the established establishment. In my field, that meant becoming a professor at Harvard, a dean, or maybe even a senator if I went for the political track. Throwing yourself into policy in the most general sense without some immediate benefit for oneself was not logical. That approach meant that at the University of Illinois, and in the United States, I occupied a space in policy and planning that was wide open. I was alone in trying to respond to the exponential advancement of the internet in a positive and ethical manner through applied incremental policies at all levels.

Individuals like the president (of the University of Illinois or the United States) were supposed to be doing this job, but their focus was on cultivating relations to advance their own goals, and assure they were wealthy when they retired. I began to realize as I progressed that I could have a far greater impact than what anyone could have imagined as an assistant professor of Japanese literature.

I invested my time in the greater good and was convinced that eventually it would pay off in a big way. Some individuals were engaged in strategic planning, but their overall goal was always for money and expansion. I was not exceptionally skilled at academic politics at the beginning, but the experience would make me quite capable by the end. I leave it to the reader to judge what my achievements and failures were. Let me only say that I both believed that my ideas were transformational and that they would be taken up by those above me and implemented (with or without credit for me). I had no idea that I would myself become the center of attention while at the same time becoming a taboo subject in conversation.

Self Confidence

The ambition of Hortense Cohan was the first factor that pushed me onto this odd trajectory. Hortense Cohan was my grandmother, a major force in my early life, even though I did not spend much time with her. Of course, I learned much from my mother, a thoughtful woman with artistic ability and a deep understanding of human nature, and from my father, a focused administrator and who ran complex organizations with remarkable effectiveness.

But it was my grandmother who held on to an incredible level of ambition for her family, especially for her children and grandchildren. It would be fair to say that among her grandchildren, she had locked on to me as the key to the future.

     My grandmother was born as the daughter of Manny Cohan, a self-appointed and self-made patriarch who ran a metal plating business during the Second World War and managed to accumulate a small fortune. He was successful in the 1950s, but most of his riches were lost soon after. It was my grandmother’s greater goal, as a quite sophisticated thinker, to take the family to the next level. She put enormous effort into raising her three sons for success, but above all her oldest son Peter Pastreich, my father, who showed such potential from childhood.

Hortense Cohan believed that my father was invincible and exceptionally talented. She pushed him to strive for the very best and he responded. When he was admitted to Yale and Harvard in 1955 at the age of 16, he was a rare phenomenon even among the ambitious young Jewish boys in Brooklyn. Despite his Jewish background, and lack of connections to old families, my father set out to prove himself as a capable individual among the establishment WASPs. And occasionally he made himself a central figure in a cultural and political sense. He started out as executive director of the St. Louis Symphony, and later established himself as a central figure in symphony management as a CEO of the San Francisco Symphony. He was also widely read, an excellent writer and an effective speaker who intimidated me as a child not so much because of his harsh words (although he was capable of such expressions) but because I thought I could never achieve the sort of competence that he had.

As the oldest son of the oldest son, I was the natural object of my grandmother’s attention. I shared certain key character traits with my father, especially the habit of systematic planning for my own career, and for the building of personal relations and the construction of institutions. Whether it was true or not, my grandmother perceived me as extraordinary. My grandmother spoke to me with a seriousness, delivering her words with an anticipation of what I might achieve. It was as if I was on a mission, and she was my leader. She expected me to read broadly, to engage deeply in my work, and to become a central figure in the world. It did not matter that I did not see her often because I knew she had put such faith in me.

My grandmother was not the only individual who had such influence on me. My mother’s older sister, Jeanne Rouff, encouraged me to be ambitious, to work hard, and strive for more from early on. Jeanne Rouff became the first female lawyer, judge, and supreme court justice in Luxembourg as part of a long battle against innumerable obstacles in a conservative society. She also saw me as the child in my generation who could in the future achieve something similar to her, and said so explicitly. Aunt Jeanne had the habit of asking me serious questions about politics and economics, and then listen with great attention to my responses as if I were a judge or professor. I think that she wanted me to feel that I was entitled to be taken seriously, and that I had an obligation to be diligent in my work. For many years, my Aunt Jeanne’s career was a model for me of what true success should be. ...