Most successful plant in the world

People call universities to find things out that aren't easily looked up, and for many years all the weird plant related questions have been forwarded to me. I'd like to think it was because of my success at answering such questions, as opposed my being weird. So it was not a surprise when my phone rang recently and someone wanted to know, for an article they were writing, what was the most successful plant in the world?

Now that's an interesting question because it can be answered from several different perspectives depending upon how you define success.

My first idea was that the most successful plant in the world was one of the domesticated grasses, a cereal grain. From its beginning as a wild middle eastern grass wheat has become the most commonly cultivated plant in the world. But rice provides the majority of calories to the majority of the world's people. And altogether cereal grains occupy something like 70% of all tillable land.

Now such plants are successful because they were useful and important to humans. Cereal grains have moved with us and native plant communities removed for the culture of these cereals, and in a manner of speaking cereal grains have become immensely successful. But without human intervention, they would not long persist in such vast areas.

And of course there are weeds. Weeds are adapted to disturbance, so they grow rapidly reproduce quickly, in great numbers, and then disperse widely. You probably didn't need to be told that, but now you know why. Nature produces disturbances, so weeds occur naturally to take advantage of these sites. But the thing that humans do best, and most frequently and thoroughly, is create disturbance, so weeds have greatly benefited by human activities. Agriculture can be defined as a systematic disturbance of natural communities for the purpose of growing domesticated plants and animals. So weeds have greatly prospered and gained great success as a result of human activities too, but they have done it on their own. No wonder such successful plants are so hard to eradicate.

Another concept of successful is longevity. Some aspen or sagebrush clones appear to be 10,000 years old, and that's a long time for one individual to exist. Some bristlecone pines are known to be over 7,000 years old. Such long-lived organisms are certainly successful. Osmunda cinnamomea, the cinnamon fern, certainly is a longevity contender too. 70 million year old fossils of this fern have been found that are virtually identical to the living species. This makes this fern the oldest known species, period, plant or otherwise. I have a fossil fern stem from the Carboniferous era over 300 million years ago that is anatomically identical with modern Osmunda ferns. So the group has been around for a long, long time. Selaginella, a clubmoss, is another genus with a very long history dating to the early Carboniferous, and that makes it the oldest living genus.

If you take a broad definition of plant, then perhaps a particular cyanobacterium (sometimes called blue-green algae), like this one pictured here on the right, might be considered the most successful and influential plant in the entire of Earth history. Sometime 2 to 2.5 or so billion years ago this cyanobacterium became a chloroplast giving rise to all of the other green organisms. When you look outside your window you see green because this incredibly tiny green cell, now functioning as a cellular component in all plants, has been duplicated in countless numbers. Cyanobacteria, including chloroplasts, are the only organisms that use water in photosynthesis for a hydrogen source, which leaves oxygen as a by-product. All of the oxygen that makes up 20% of Earth's atmosphere (and its ozone layer) is a by-product of photosynthesis. Talk about influential! This changed Earth history completely. Aerobic organisms such as ourselves were not possible until there was oxygen in the atmosphere. So in terms of sheer number, ubiquity, and influence, the cyanobacterium that became a chloroplast is probably the most successful green organism in the entire of Earth history. But we are probably wrong to call it a plant.

So there you have it. Depending upon the type of success you were looking for, those are the most successful plants.

The trouble with trying to get religious students to think

The American Center for Law and Justice recently claimed to have championed the rights of a religious student who was being persecuted by professor.

But the Center for Inquiry has another version of the story. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has recently boasted of a "victory" in protecting a college student's rights to religious freedom. In postings on its website and in a radio broadcast on June 4, 2008, the ACLJ has trumpeted the claim that a demand letter one of its staff attorneys sent to Suffolk County Community College prevented a Christian student from receiving a failing grade from a professor who wanted to penalize her because of her religious beliefs.

The CfI says nothing could be further from the truth. "The ACLJ's spurious claim of a legal 'victory' is just slightly less outrageous than its brazen attempt to intimidate a philosophy professor from doing his job—which is to get students to think critically," commented Ronald A. Lindsay, Executive Director of the Council of Secular Humanism, who has talked to the allegedly biased professor. "As far as I can tell," observed Lindsay, "the ACLJ's letter accomplished nothing other than providing an excuse for soliciting donations."

The scholar that the ACLJ falsely accused of bias is a longtime philosophy professor who has taught more than 13,000 students over a period of thirty-six years. He has a well-deserved reputation for fairness, and has served as President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and as an officer in many other organizations. Although the ACLJ's radio broadcast alleged that the professor "hates" the very idea of Christians, this professor has taught students of many different faiths, and no faith, over the years, all without incident until the ACLJ's campaign of vilification. Indeed, after the ACLJ made its baseless accusations, students in this professor's philosophy class, including religious students, defended him, stating that he does not pass judgment on students because of their beliefs, but simply challenges them to examine all beliefs critically, including their own. His students have stated that they cannot identify the professor's own views based either on the course materials or the textbook authored for the class by the professor, and he does not pressure them to adopt any particular position.
"I would not be doing my job as a philosophy professor," explained the professor, "if I did not require students to think about their beliefs and provide reasons in support of their beliefs— not my beliefs or anyone else's beliefs. Critical examination of beliefs, including one's own beliefs, and training in reasoning are among the primary objectives of a philosophy course, and of a liberal education in general. Only professors who are negligent or indifferent allow students to earn good grades simply by providing as a reason for an assertion 'well, this is what I believe'."
The professor will not discuss in detail his interaction with the student who complained to the ACLJ about him, because he does not believe it is appropriate to share the details of a student's coursework with the outside world. However, he does have a right to defend himself against false accusations. The core of the ACLJ's claim is that the student was in danger of failing the class because of the professor's religious bias before the ACLJ intervened. "That claim is preposterous," according to Pecorino. "At no time did I tell her she was in danger of failing. When I had to project a grade for her earlier in the semester, I projected a 'C' and that was when she was most resistant to providing any reasoning to support her assertions. She was not open to examining her own beliefs or to entering into the dialectical process of inquiry in community because, according to her, she already had all the answers." And what of the ACLJ's claim that the student had a failing grade average of 54 prior to the ACLJ's intervention? "That is a misleading use of information. I use a cumulative point system in grading," explained the professor. "In other words, as students progress during the semester, they earn points for each assignment, with a possible total of 100 points by the end of the semester. She at one point probably did have 54 points, but that in no way indicates she was in danger of failing. She had 54 points, not a failing grade average of 54. All students start the semester with 0 points, so by the ACLJ's logic, all students are in danger of failing."

And did the ACLJ's letter influence the professor, either directly or indirectly through pressure from college administrators? "Absolutely not," the professor states. "I received no pressure form my college administrators, only support, and although I was a bit bothered by all the hate emails and other communications that resulted from the ACLJ's campaign against me, I did not let that affect my grading of this student. I take my responsibilities as an educator too seriously for that to happen. The student received a 'B' because she earned a 'B,' no more and no less."
The ACLJ's campaign against this professor cannot be dismissed as insignificant. As the professor observes, "Essentially, the ACLJ is claiming a religious exemption from the obligation of students in public colleges to engage in critical thinking, and this claim strikes at the core of higher education. If permitted to go unchallenged, this claim will weaken our democratic and pluralistic society." Lindsay agrees, adding, "For a democracy to succeed, we need citizens who can provide reasons to support their beliefs. We cannot reason together if all we have are groups of individuals who adamantly insist they have all the answers because of some supernatural revelation and who are unwilling to consider opposing viewpoints. The ACLJ is a very slick, very well-funded organization, and its animosity toward critical thinking is even more troubling than its willingness to distort the facts."

We’ve all had students like this. Only a couple of years ago I had a student in a senior seminar class, a “capstone experience” for biology majors who refused to discuss or even justify their positions or opinions. I had “no right to pass judgment”. Of course I wasn’t passing judgment, I was trying to get students to think and support their positions in a manner scientific. Now that was the catch. It just doesn’t cut much mustard to tell me that human life begins at the moment of conception because the Bible says so (and it doesn’t). Their complaint about my bias against their religious perspective went no further than a dean of undergraduate studies who decided is was perfectly OK that a professor of science would ask science majors to justify positions in a scientific manner. Even then I was not requiring anyone to argue for any particular positions, but interestingly enough, all of the biology majors changed their initial ideas about the beginning of human life, not all in the same way, as they learned more, thought more, and gained more knowledge. Only one student dogmatically stuck to their initial position no matter what; they remained unfazed by new information and new ideas. And if such people are actually model citizens, then demoncracy is indeed in trouble should they ever gain a majority.

And it again brings up the idea that I have blogged about before that religious thinking interferes with learning. I was greatly relieved to learn that this student was not a biology major, but had gotten into the class via some strange non-major major. After this experience I investigated this non-major major and ultimately was instrumental in killing this academic monster.

Of course in this specific instance the Catholic Church jumped on the idea of conception as the beginning of human life because of they wanted a fixed point at which to say an individual with a soul existed. The logical inconsistencies that have arisen as science has moved on are causing all manner of problems unless the faithful just continue to believe. Religion and science may coexist, but dogmatism and science can never coexist.

Field work - snapshots in ecological time

Only other field biologists can appreciate and sympathize with this problem. Studies done in the field cannot control for all the variations in nature, in particular normal variations in weather patterns, and so each study is actually a snapshot in ecological time. The trouble is that we try to extrapolate from these snapshots, and sometimes that doesn't work. And even worse you worry that the effects of weather can overwhelm your treatments.

The effort involved in field work makes the situation even worse. The steadfast effort involved in maintaining long term field studies is beyond most of us. For this reason I really admire Deborah and David Clark whose quarter century survey of tropical forest tree growth in Costa Rica is laudable just for its longevity, its contribution to understanding changes that may accompany global warming notwithstanding (Tropical rain forest tree growth and atmospheric
carbon dynamics linked to interannual temperature variation during 1984–2000. D. A. Clark, S. C. Piper, C. D. Keeling, and D. B. Clark. 2003. PNAS 100:5852-5857.). If you haven't read this paper and want to see good evidence of changes that accompany increases in carbon dioxide and temperature, I recommend it.

In just the 3d year of our field study on the effects of hemiparasitic plants on the prairie community, and already the year to year variation seems destined to swamp any treatment effects. Last year our plots had so many hemiparasite seedlings that we wondered if eradication was a feasible treatment. They just kept sprouting, and we just kept weeding. Those seeds were the product of the 2006 season. The spring of 2008 was very different. It was cold and wet, and this affected the number and/or activities of bumblebees because seeds of our hemiparasite are scarce even though it flowered like crazy. Last year I could collect seeds in huge numbers, nearly 250,000 in about 20 mins. But this year a similar investment in collecting produced a very small volume in comparison. Guess we won't have so many seedlings to remove next year.

But that's not all. Last year produced a bumper crop of seeds, but so far they have not been germinating like last year at all. In 2007 we could find hundreds per square meter, and this year when we decide to monitor seedling mortality, seedlings are hard to find. It makes for easier eradication, but is messing with out demographic study.

That's just how field work goes. And it's why those rare long term studies are so valuable. If we monitored pollination, and seed production, and seed germination for 25 or so years, we would probably understand many of the variables. But when something gives you a significant result, well, dang, you just know it's important and real because everything was working against you getting any results at all.

Biological significance of political boundaries

About a dozen years ago after returning from a couple of months of tropical field work I though wouldn't it be a really great idea to get some of our students out of the familiar agro-urban environments of Lincolnland and teach them about tropical rain forest first hand. This has been a most successful endeavor, although not without having been a gigantic pain at times in terms of logistics, red tape, and other non-educational factors.

Although things had gone along well enough, it was long since past time to have this highly successful education endeavor recognized as a formal course offering. Now any good academic knows what a huge amount of hassle is involved with proposing a new course, even one that has been taught annually, successfully, via a loophole. But still the arguments were strong, and the track record good. So you can imagine my surprise to receive the following question posed by a curriculum committee whose collective intelligence is now exposed as a inconceiveably low.

"How can you justify to the tax payers of Lincolnland your use of limited resources to take students on a tour of tropical rain forest in some Central American country?"

Wow! Such a sheer naked exposition of ignorance has a way of taking my breath away. But the chair of the committee assured me this was a serious question and approval could hang in the balance depending upon the eloquence of my response.

I did my best. I cannot for the life of me think of one single way in which the arbitrary political boundaries of our particular tribe have any bearing upon the biology of organisms, the interrelated web of life, the truly global knowledge that is biology. True, political boundaries do play a great role in making the study of biology and the travel of biologists and their students a trying and more difficult task, what with all their rules and regulations. You see there just isn't a Lincolnland biology, or a 'Mercan" biology, either. There is one biology. The effects of tropical deforestation will not have to apply for a visa or seek papers from the Lincolnland bureaucracy.

I cannot help but wonder what the questioners might think are justifiable topics to teach students in our particular kingdom? Do members of this committee who have approved all manner of "tours" and study abroad courses think rain forest biology less relevant to biology majors than European history or foreign language is to humanities majors? Can well-educated academics actually be so ignorant, so scientifically illiterate? So I am dealing with people who only know human cultural artifacts as matters of significance. Imagine what this committee demands of astronomers! What do you mean our state isn't the exact center of the Universe?

And we take our students on a field trip, during which I am an instructor, an educator. There is a single destination, the class goes there and learns tropical biology through instruction and investigation. I'm not a tour guide and the class is not on a tour. While I know this type of superficial travel is the norm in the humanities, it isn't how we do business in biology. Of course, some institutions do take their biology students on tours, and some have stopped by the particular field station where our field trip takes place. They come, they go, and still my class investigates, studies, and learns. And while the "tour guides" rush around with all the logistics, us instructors, provide direction, send our troops out to learn, while we sit on the veranda drinking excellent coffee and watch the tours pack their gear. The difference between a field trip and a tour are very profound. Want to bet which participants learn more?

Of course our official purpose is to "train people for the work force of Lincolnland". So just by educating students, I'm failing to fulfill my duty to the taxpayers "train". Sit up! Speak! What's one more transgression?

Then there is the truly amazing fact that the students themselves pay for this educational experience in the tropics. The taxpayers aren't supporting this in any direct, substantive means at all. I'd better get a junior colleague to write the response because I'm not sure I can do it without tearing their heads off!

Science education versus religious thinking

A recent commentary (Science Education and the Future of Humankind) by Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, asks, “Can we modify our educational system so that all high school graduates emerge with a science way of thinking?”

And of course he calls upon scientists to get involved especially in educating science teachers. Who can actually argue with this? No question about it, teachers are the key component, especially those in elementary education for two reasons. One, they reach kids during formative stages, and two, they are among the most woefully poorly trained to teach science.

Now I’ve recently commented on increasing the amount of science in liberal arts core curriculum, but I’m not going to hold my breath about any change there. We can probably teach teachers to become better at instructing science, but not without drastically changing the way we educate teachers. Teaching is a profession. Can you name any other profession that does not demand post-graduate education? Part of the problem is that teaching gets the shorted in terms of educational demands. How can anyone become proficient in a subject area and proficient in a profession is a 4-year curriculum? I maintain that it is not possible, although many teachers do manage to do a fine job, it is in spite of their education not as a result of it. Teachers should earn a regular BS/BA degree before embarking upon professional study to become proficient in teaching.

But even this isn’t going to solve the problem because deeply rooted religious beliefs are antithetic to scientific thinking. All those people who seek accommodation between religion and science are on a fool’s errand because very few religious practices are fully compatible with science (Unitarians being the one obvious exception).

I have seen the conflict first-hand in too many students. If they accept an evidence-based way of thinking, their religious experience is threatened and they find themselves faced with accepting ideas that they do not believe or want to accept on the basis of their religious beliefs. If faith is important, then evidence is not, and vice versa.

In a senior seminar class of mostly biology majors I presented a lesson on the morality of stem cell research. I am careful not to present anything that might be considered my position. Most agreed that human life began at conception, except one Jewish student who said it begins at birth. I had them seek information and discuss other ideas of when human life begins. As they got more sophisticated and were exposed to more different ideas, many of them modified their positions as they gained knowledge, for example, in the UK embryos less than 12 days old are used because up until this time twinning can occur. This one simple fact was very significant to many students, as was the idea of brain death and the commencement of higher level brain activity at around the 25th week of development. However a few dogmatically stuck to their guns (“life begins at conception”), forcing them to ignore or dismiss any information that ran counter to their religiously-based positions.

Pitting scientifically based learning in school against religious indoctrination at home and at church will only increase the divide and probably generate more pressure to publically fund religious schools or allow people to opt out of public school taxes on religious grounds.

Lederman is one smart guy, but he hasn’t been down in the educational trenches in a long time, if ever, and he just doesn’t know what most people are thinking.

Yellow Moutan (tree) Peony

The combined demands of gardening and field work often do not leave me with enough time to "smell the roses" especially in May. After a Sunday of garden toil, it only seemed fitting to devote the cocktail hour to enjoying the fruits of all this labor. The shrubs on the far side of the lily pond were alive with migrant birds (redstart, chesnut-sided warbler, orioles, scarlet tanager), and the late afternoon sun often illuminates portions of our gardens with long, low rays.

And there, in quite lovely lighting, was a yellow Moutan peony. After discovering this plant quite by accident many years ago, tree peonies have become quite a favorite of mine. Paeonia suffruticosa is a shrubby plant with big dark green compound leaves and large flowers of diverse colors. Tree peonies often have flowers 7-8 inches in diameter. Although they do not have the biggest flowers, the yellow-flowered ones remain special, probably because yellow-flowered varieties have been absent (until very recently) among standard herbaceous peonies. My other tree peonies have flowers ranging from white across several shades of pink, pale pink, coral, red, to purple, but as if not wanting to be common, the yellow ones always flower later, after the others are nearly done. The flower pictured is about 5 inches across. The flowers only last for 5-7 days, typical enough of flowering trees and shrubs, all of which have brief bursts of reproductive glory. So it is important to take enough time to appreciate these sunlit little suns during their annual display.

Students should learn more about science

An article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention, "Business students should learn more science." Who can argue with that given the technological basis of so much business. The authors of this opinion do a good job of justifying their position, they just don't go far enough. Everyone should learn more science.

Let's take a look at general education at a typical large midwestern public university. Unless you are a science major, students only have to take 7 hours of science courses, about 15% of their common curriculum. Everything else except for math (3 hours required) are subjects that exist because of human activities, and in a very broad sense of the definition, humanities. So students spend 15% of their general education learning about life and the universe, and over 75% learning about human artifacts.

Now I like literature, history, and art as much or more than the next person, and I certainly do not intend to diminish their value, but each and every subdiscipline of human artifact gets a bite from the apple (tree of knowledge), and science gets lumped together for one bite. Sorry, but I think life and the universe being relegated to just 15% of the curriculum says a great deal about our egocentric approach to knowledge, and very little about our appreciation of science.

The point that I'm making is simple: is this a fair balance in terms of what we know? I took an American literature course, and I enjoyed the readings, even the poetry, but quite frankly what transpired in terms of the dialogue and associated writings was just so much subjective opinion. Oh, there is a good exercise there; read something and think creatively about it. But does it really stack up to genetics or evolution? So it's sort of ironic that many of these people are precisely the academics that toss off evolution as "just a theory", which is an extremely, short and succinct phrase for declaring the depth and breadth of your ignorance.

We can take the comparison further. About 90% of the faculty are in the humanities studying human artifacts. That leaves 10% of us in the sciences to study life, the universe, and everything else. When stated this way it doesn't quite seem to balance out does it? Nor does 7 credits to study everything except subjects that study human artifacts.

One of my colleagues has a master's degree in literature, and when pushed they reluctantly will agree that such scholarship pales in comparison to science. Oh, but that isn't politically correct.

Science in theory and practice

My current field work deals with the ecology of a hemiparasitic plant, which is both green and photosynthetic and an obligate parasite. To try and determine why its both green and parasitic, and test our evolutionary stable strategy hypothesis, which differs from the switch-hitter and way-station hypotheses, my collaborator and I designed an experiment. The simplest and most logical treatment was eradication of the hemiparasite.

Hey, sounds so simple "in theory", but in practice its turning out to be a pain, in the back. The hemiparasite is a very successful on our prairie study site, i.e., numerous, and what with other treatments and all combinations, together with replication, the subject of this research must be eradicated from over 50 one-square-meter quadrats. And that alone is not enough because of the root zone (it's a root parasite), so a 50 cm wide buffer zone must be cleared of the hemiparasite around the study quadrat. That's a total of 4 square meters per quadrat! Under good conditions and working quite hard, two of us can do 3-4 quadrats an hour. This amounts to an awful lot of dirty, down-on-hands-and-knees work just for this one treatment. The picture shows the high-tech equipment used in plant ecology, and the recently removed hemiparasitic plant.

This is the problem with field work. You make sound, logical decisions, and get started and it's like grabbing a tiger by the tail. You can't let go or you lose everything, your whole investment. And it's a five year experiment so the treatments must be checked and redone every year.

But that's the way science goes, and what it takes to demonstrate if your ideas are correct and the old ideas wrong. The effort and time explain why so few long term field experiments are done. And I do not recommend such work to young colleagues who lack tenure.

And it's not the work I mind, but just that it's at ground level, and it's much further down, and back up again, than it used to be. Of course, the solution is to have a squad of young backs while I sit back in my research director's chair and point to the next quadrat. Any volunteers?

Wildlife friendly yard to a point

My wife and I own a most excellent property, a big park-like yard right in the middle of our city. Properties like ours are rare, especially when their fate is usually to be subdivided and developed. Indeed, the former owner worried that an unscrupulous buyer would take advantage of a buildable lot to make a quick buck. Our goal is to garden.

Our yard is certified friendly to wildlife, and indeed many animals live in and stop by. Night before last we watched a little red bat swooping over our lily pond to grab drinks of water. The birds are certainly a constant delight. But there are times when my love of wildlife wears a bit thin in the rodent department. The rabbits are a bit annoying, but the fox squirrels and woodchucks can be a downright pain.

My early kitchen garden was coming along quite nicely: spinach, lettuces, broccoli, snap peas, scallions. And they were fenced to keep the rabbits at bay. But a woodchuck pushed under the fence and made quite a nice feast of our early garden. Small gardens only provide a modest meal for such gluttons, and here I publically declare war. Live and let live extends only as far as the boundaries of my garden. I cannot say how it will be done, but with some luck and our superior intellect, a truce will be reached whereby the garden goodies will be eaten by the people raising them and a woodchuck will continue their life of plant consumption elsewhere, a distant elsewhere.

I'm all for ecology within limits. So let this be a warning to the squirrels. A repeat of last year's consumption of every single strawberry long before they were ripe will have severe reprecussions. You've been warned. Exile awaits.

Remembering when gasoline was $3.59 a gallon

A combination of flu and field work, experienced separately, certainly have kept me away from the Phactor.

A funny and illuminating realization came to me yesterday while gassing up the buggy for a trip to my field site. Since the last time I had filled the tank, the prices had increased by over 50 cents a gallon. Yes, they are going up fast, but since I do not drive on a day to day basis at all, I only have to fill up the tank about once a month.

As I was beginning the fill, a fellow on the opposite side of the pump said, "Yikes, have you ever seen anything like these gas prices?" And as I looked at the $3.59, I remembered that yes, I had seen such gas prices before. The interesting and illuminating thing is that I encountered those prices nearly 23 years ago. OK maybe you are too young to have memories that old, and if such prices are setting records, what could I be talking about?

Well, here's a hint. It was called petrol and it was sold by the liter. And I was living in far northern Queensland enjoying my very first sabbatical leave. The reason that I remember the price so precisely is that to get reimbursed for my research travel from an NSF grant I had to calculate the price in dollars per gallon. At that point in time the US dollar had a very favorable exchange rate against the Australian dollar too.

So here's the point I want to make to the citizens of the USA. Welcome to the real world. Citizens of other countries have been living, successfully, with gasoline prices like those that you consider outrageous for decades. People in the USA have been living in a never-never land of cheap gasoline because after WWII our government decided to support the automobile industry and everything that goes with it: cheap fuel, interstate highways, sprawling cities, paving paradise for parking lots, no investment or support for public transportation, atrophy of legs, suburban malls and decline of city centers, and so on.

The transportation policies of the USA were very short-sighted, and now reality is finally arriving in the USA. The cost of gasoline is going to go higher still, but the cost of playing catch-up in building efficient public transport is really going to be shocking. People are going to have to rethink their decisions about where to live, and assess the real costs of country living.

Many of my colleagues protested when parking fees for reserved spots on our campus were increased over 10-fold to pay for construction of parking ramps. Rather than sign their petition, I wrote a letter to the university pleading with them to increase parking fees several times more to promote use of transportation alternatives. Since I live within walking distance of the campus, I had never purchased a parking permit. But most of my many colleagues living in the same neighborhood drive to campus. The most amusing thing is that the only tangible benefit from having been employed by this campus for more than 25 years is a free parking permit. They give me the one thing I had never used. Talk about irony.