Anonymity
I am undecided about the concept of anonymity. Does it help to stay in the shadows? Is it humility in the best sense of the word? Or is it the ultimate hubris of thinking you are above the need for recognition? Is anonymity cowardly or brave in the most selfless way? Does privacy really matter as much as all the notices sent to us imply, or is it impossible in this day and age of social media and powerful online search engines? Ask yourself if your online image is what you want it to be, then ask yourself how you feel about people checking you out online before you meet.
Today I went to the University of San Diego for a day of meetings to discuss joining the faculty in one capacity or another. This school is set on one of the prettiest spots I have ever seen. It is just north of the City Center high on a Mesa. The architecture of the campus is both like California in its beautiful Spanish mission-style and unlike California in that the University has chosen to control their design to create a consistent and uniform look and feel for all of the buildings. This approach seems contrary to the free-form wild-west approach more common in this state, so its impact is particularly pleasing. I’m sure UCSD and SDSU, both much larger public research universities (each 3-4X the size of USD), have spectacular zoomy modern buildings, but the classiness of the USD campus and it’s location are hard to beat.
My Alma Mater, Cornell, another beautiful campus, recently celebrated its sesquicentennial (150 year anniversary). USD was, by contrast, only founded seventy years ago in 1949. Its co-founder, the Reverend Mother Rosalie Clifton Hill, a vicar of the Society of Sacred Heart said of the campus, “Beauty will attract them; goodness will lead them; but the truth will hold them.” Such is the direction of a Catholic University founded jointly by a Bishop and a Nun as they merged a College for Men with a College for Women. It’s amazing to think that was just a mere seventy years ago since gender-specific colleges have largely faded since then. It was only about that long ago that with a few rare exceptions like Cornell, most men and women attended gender-specific schools. In fact, most women’s’ colleges were started as seminaries and colleges were little more than boys’ clubs. Now there are only four men-only schools in the U.S. where there are several dozen women’s colleges left. And fourteen of those are proponents of a trans-inclusive policy that let’s people who identify as women, regardless of their genetic markers, to matriculate. Anonymity as to gender turns out to be a growing aspect of political correctness.
Going down that factual rabbit hole causes me to wonder about the prevalence of all-black colleges in order to compare that to gender-specific colleges. It is against the federal law to not allow admission on the basis of race, so all-black colleges are not technically black-only. They are designated as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) and there are 107 of them in the U.S. In fact, the biggest race issue that affects U.S colleges and universities is that of affirmative action in college admissions, a generally integrative rather than segregationist policy. While Pew Research survey say the majority of Americans oppose affirmative action, the Supreme Court has recently upheld the use of race consideration in admissions, but has more left it to state-by-state policies. Apparently, anonymity in college admissions is not only not so important, but also impossible to maintain.
So there I was, sitting and talking to people I had never met before. I had sent my resume (or what I prefer to call my Curriculum Vitae when I am in a academic situation where work, life experience, education and publication all count in your assessment). But I got Googled. It’s hardly something any of us can either avoid or claim to be surprised by. Who among us doesn’t take advantage of Google to get an advance reading on situations and people. I would argue that NOT doing so is almost a dereliction of our social duty to know what you are walking into.
I have been forced to take a point-of-view on my Google profile thanks mostly to the profile I have gained particularly over the last decade. Newsworthy things are probably three-to-one favoring negative news rather than positive news, so getting into the press on high-profile projects, jobs, situations or controversies certainly adds spice to one’s life storyline. When I first got myself into Wikipedia a dozen years ago (it only started in 2001), it was on account of the Bear Stearns Asset Management debacle. At first, the story said I was the most senior executive to ever get “deuced”, which was defined as fired for blogging. This was patently untrue and showed a very superficial understanding of what was a much more convoluted and juicy tale of corporate intrigue. But that said, I found it funny and just let it slide rather than take the advice of people who recommended that I hire an internet cleansing service to scrub my online image (however they do that in a medium that touts itself as lasting forever).
I don’t Wiki or Google myself very often, but when I was told today that my Google profile was “very impressive”, I thought it was worth a look to see what might have changed. Someone had adjusted Wikipedia. And then all these other stories about other things I’ve done, books I have written and promoted and all sorts of other interesting pieces were there as well. In fact, I drilled down 10 pages of Google and found so many (probably 60 of the 100 stories) were about me in one form or another. I even saw the New York Times announcement of my first marriage in 1976. No anonymity here whatsoever.
Perhaps the thing that impressed me the most about my Google profile is that I have gotten enough notoriety to significantly outdistance the other famous Richard Marin (that would be Cheech Marin of Cheech & Chong fame). There was a time when I would get woken up at night at my old Hamptons home by some stoner wanting to know in slurred speech if I was Cheech, man? Now I’m beginning to wonder if Cheech is getting calls asking for me. If I can pass the USD Google sniff test, I must have done something right over the last decade to polish my not-so-anonymous Google.