Monthly Archives: April 2013

something better than a congressional hearing?

Ted Hesson’s story on ABC News/Univision is headlined “Why Congressional Hearings Aren’t Worth Your Time.” It begins, “There’s a major immigration reform hearing in the Senate today. Don’t bother watching it. The general point of holding these hearings is so that members of Congress can debate a bill and let the public know what’s going on. This hearing won’t do either very well, according to Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, a Massachusetts-based organization that looks at civic engagement among young people.”

I am the only person quoted in the piece, but the headline and message (“don’t bother watching”) are stronger than my own views. Hesson quotes these words later on: “I’d be loath to say [a hearing] is of no value,” Levine said. “We want people to follow these important issues, and it’s one way to do so. But it’s not the greatest.”

In fact, I recognize that hearings have many purposes, including generating a legal record. I also acknowledge–and Hesson quotes me saying–that ordinary, low-profile hearings inform Members of Congress and help them refine their views. “But as a hearing grows in stature, it often turns into political theater. ‘When something is very high profile, they switch into entertainment mode,’ Levine said.”

I liked Hesson’s provocative piece, but these would be my own main points (on sober reflection):

1. Congressional hearings have several purposes, two of which are educating the public about the issue in question and letting us observe our representatives’ interactions. For those two purposes, high-profile hearings are not particularly helpful. They are examples of instrumental action (trying to score points) rather than real communication. I am a policy wonk interested in immigration, but I would never take the time to watch the immigration hearings. That is partly because …

2. High-quality journalism still plays an essential role in explaining issues and controversies. A reliable and skillful journalist can watch the hearings and pull out the salient exchanges. She will also read the bill, talk to staffers off the record, and generally tell a more complete picture. The supposedly unmediated access to the hearing that I could get from C-SPAN does not strike me as particularly useful; I want mediation.  I am glad that we have a right to see the whole event, because someone may make useful sense of it. I would not expect most people–even exemplary citizens–to watch it themselves.

3. Hesson quoted Madison (“the mild voice of reason”) at my suggestion. The Madisonian ideal is that our representatives should deliberate: listening, learning, and changing their views. Our culture does not reward that, generally ignoring nuance and treating changes of opinion as “flip-flopping.” I think the underlying reasons include bad news coverage, bad formats for official discussions, and–especially–a lack of civic engagement in the citizenry as a whole. The late, great Elinor Ostrom noted that the proportion of citizens who served on school boards fell by 95% between 1932 and 1982. That was just one example of diminished engagement. If we don’t have experience deliberating, how will we detect and reward it in Congress?

how terrorism made me a Bostonian

This could be the heart-warming story of a slightly alienated outsider–still relatively new to a city of distinctive character–who realizes that he loves it when he lives through an attack. But I want to explore some problematic aspects of my recent psychological journey.

Terrorism typically creates in-groups. I have seen that happen at various stages of my life: as a child in London during the height of the IRA attacks, as a father and husband in DC on 9/11, and now in #BostonStrong. If you watched Neil Diamond leading the entire swaying Fenway crowd in a chorus of “Sweet Caroline” on Saturday, it was hard not to grin. But membership in such passionate mass communities can do harm as well as good. The psychological dynamics are powerful and require attention.

Last Friday, I got my hair cut, as usual, by a middle-aged woman who has never lived anywhere other than Somerville, MA–traditionally, a working-class Irish and Italian city deep in the Boston metro area. I told her that our kid has moved back from LA to work in Boston, and she said, “Oh yeah, people are so much nicer here.” She caught me smiling in the mirror because Bostonians do not, in fact, have a reputation for niceness. Even moving from DC (the city of northern gentility and southern efficiency), we were struck by the brusque manners and chilliness of Boston. I understand where my hair-cutter is coming from, but my smile was the ironic response of an outsider.

On Monday, we heard about the Marathon bombings from Martha’s Vineyard, where we are fortunate to spend a lot of time. That means we were across some salt water and through some dense woods from Boston, which couldn’t have felt much more remote. I started receiving messages of concern and commiseration. I was (and remain) grateful for these sentiments, but they felt undeserved. Although I replied warmly, I was partly thinking: Of course I’m OK. The bombers have killed one person per two million in the greater Boston area. There were 52 murders in the city alone last year, and this is just three more. What all terrorists want is attention. Let us not give them more than we have to.

I now feel a little guilty admitting that we were on Martha’s Vineyard–so safe and far away–because that places us outside of the circle of the victims. We weren’t there when the bombing happened. But of course, if we had been sitting in our suburban house, we wouldn’t have been there, either. What’s interesting is the psychological mechanism that makes me feel mildly embarrassed that we were outside the community when it was attacked.

As I wrote last week, I was not a victim–not harmed, not frightened, and not even inconvenienced. I could have made myself very sad by reading about the actual victims. And I could have put myself in the picture (so to speak) by drawing personal connections to the events. For example, we have close ties to the high school from which the younger bomber graduated. But to follow the human side of the story closely and emotionally would have been a choice, not an obligation. It was the choice that the terrorists wanted, and not one that would have done the victims any good. I do not think that stoking one’s own emotions of pity and fear in reaction to terrorism is likely to yield good results. What terrorists want is attention, and we do not have to give it to them.

Then flash forward to Friday, when we were under “lock down” just blocks from the Watertown town line. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on the loose within easy jogging distance. It was an eery feeling, reminiscent of DC in the early days after 9/11 (when we also faced the anthrax mail attacks and the Washington-area snipers). A helicopter hovered overhead. You would have had to talk me into opening our own garage door to look inside.

By now, I was shifting toward a full identification with Boston. An Arkansas state representative named Nate Bell tweeted, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?” I was enraged. I wanted to tweet back something like, “Why don’t you come up here and say that to our faces? We’ll show you how Boston liberals ‘cower.'” On any given day, I read many political statements that I strongly disagree with. It was interesting how this one felt like a personal insult, as if my name were “Boston liberal.”

I was supposed to spend that day with organizers of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life. It was a small group of deeply committed activists and intellectuals from Uganda, Britain, Canada, and the US, talking about how to live together with solidarity in deep ethical difference. Since we were under lockdown and I felt responsible for the kids, they met at a private house in Newton and I Skyped in from Belmont. A straight line between us would have run through Watertown. We talked soberly about peace while the sirens blared.

By the next morning, the sense of emotional identification was almost complete. I was humming “Sweet Caroline” all day. But a quiet voice said something like this: We now know that one badly injured 19-year-old was hiding in a boat, and an entire metro area shut down for more than 12 hours. I have sympathy for the police, who were actually in danger (unlike me) and who must have expected to lock down a few towns for an hour or so before they caught Tsarnaev. I can hardly imagine their frustration as the hours passed. But still, if a single fugitive teenager can cause our lives to stop–and ignite a national debate about basic constitutional rights, and turn an outsider into a passionate Bostonian–how strong are we?

I do appreciate the emails and Facebook posts of sympathy. But we must make sure 4/15 doesn’t turn into the tragedy of 9/11 repeated as some kind of cruel farce. Nine-Eleven involved one thousand times more deaths, it was genuinely scary because we assumed that more attacks were imminent–and yet we drastically overreacted. We militarized the nation’s capital, violated the Constitution, invaded two countries, and (at a personal level) altered our behavior and expectations. We should have absorbed 9/11 with far more resilience. The lesson for 4/15 is to move on rapidly and with confidence.

But I still care for Boston more than I used to  …

who is segregated?

The graph below comes from Gary Orfield, John Kucsera, and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, E Pluribus…Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students. It shows that African American and Latino students attend schools with decreasing numbers of White students. The trend by itself could be a natural result of growing diversity in the youth population as a whole. In 1970, 79.1% of all public school students were White; in 2009, that was down to 53.7%.  If a lower proportion of all students are White, then White, Black, and Latino students will (as a mathematical inevitability) attend schools with fewer Whites–see the graph. But the graph also displays something else: a large gap between the White students’ line and the other two. Basically, White students still attend overwhelmingly White schools even though they represent just over half of the nation’s public school kids.

Screen Shot 2013-04-19 at 8.49.22 AM

Orfield et al. make a strong case that persistent (and even rising) racial segregation is bad for students of color:

Schools of concentrated poverty and segregated minority schools are strongly related to an array of factors that limit educational opportunities and outcomes. These include less experienced and less qualified teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, less successful peer groups and inadequate facilities and learning materials.

This is important, but I’d like to suggest an additional perspective. Leaving aside questions of inequality for a moment, we can simply define racial segregation as attending schools without people of a different race. That is true today for some students of color. Fifteen percent of Blacks and 14% of Latinos attend schools that have 99%-100% minority enrollments (although, in some cases, the minorities may come from very diverse racial, cultural, and national backgrounds). But what group is more likely to be isolated? By a large margin, the answer is White students. Only 15.2% of them attend multiracial schools (those with at least a tenth of their students coming from at least three groups), as compared to 27.1% of Black students, 26.2% of Latino students, and 42.1% of Asian students.

I am moved to write this because I just heard the British sociologist John Holmwood make an important point about his country. People of color in the UK are socially, culturally, and economically integrated with individuals from diverse overseas backgrounds and also with White citizens who are working-class or middle-class and who live in metro areas. Two groups in the UK remain segregated: some rural Whites and very wealthy White people. The latter are the ones who are most likely to decry segregation and the supposed failure of multiculturalism. But they are the ones who are segregated.

Frontiers of Democracy 2013: Innovations in Civic Practice, Theory, and Education

 July 18-20, 2013, Medford, MA

Conference Framing and Session Formats

Both in the US and around the world we find ourselves in a dramatic period of civic awakening. We know this work and ideas under different names: public engagement, deliberative and participatory democracy, collaborative governance, educating for democracy and civic learning, public work, building social capital, and strengthening democracy. We promote it using diverse means; we think about it in diverse ways.

With a civic awakening all around us, in US, in the Arab world, in Russia and Burma, in India, Greece, Spain and Hungary, in many countries in Africa and Latin America, it is a good time to rethink what we have been doing and to formulate how it fits into and contributes to this larger effort. At this year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, we considered a wide picture of work and ideas that support and promote civic vitality.

Frontiers of Democracy is sponsored by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, the Democracy Imperative, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

You can register for the conference here. If you just want to add your name to the “Frontiers” email list for very occasional updates, you may enter your information here.

This year, the Center for Engaged Democracy is joining with Frontiers to offer its fourth annual conference on the Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education – from 5:00 pm on Wednesday, July 17 to 4:00 pm on Thursday, July 18, immediately prior to the start of Frontiers of Democracy. We encourage attendees to take advantage of this opportunity to learn more about developing academic programs focused on civic engagement, Core Competencies in Civic Engagement, and on-line civic engagement.  To learn more about and see the agenda for The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education, click here.

Members of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation are invited to join NCDD’s director and several Board members for an informal afternoon meet-up on Thursday, July 18, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm, also immediately before Frontiers begins.  Network, talk about the New England region’s most exciting D&D projects, and explore what is and can be done to strengthen the region’s civic infrastructure.  To register, please visit this page.

In this 4th year of the Frontiers of Democracy conference, we have once again worked to design a program responsive to the times and to the interests of participants. This year’s conference offers four kinds of sessions:

  • Learning Exchanges in Civic Practices (plenary & concurrent sessions, 8 am – 4 pm, Friday, July 19):

Multiple plenary and concurrent sessions intended for both academics and practitioners

Democratic and interactive discussions, rather than traditional academic panels, on topics likely to move the needle on civic renewal. For learning exchanges, the assumption is that everyone has valuable experiences and knowledge to share, and the sessions are designed to shift from the descriptive to the strategic.

  • Mini-Conference in Civic Studies (8 am – 4 pm, Friday, July 19)

One day-long, academic-style conference

Panels in a more traditional academic format, but with a focus on debates of key issues, not the reading of academic papers.

  • Short Takes (four sets – on each day of Frontiers)

Provocative, 10-minute presentations by invited speakers, some live and some via videos pre-recorded for this event. The speakers’ topics will be diverse. Instead of following their presentations with Q&A and plenary discussion, we will go directly into small-group conversations that will be generally inspired by the speakers but not limited to their remarks.

  • Open Space (Saturday, July 20):

Throughout the conference, we ask participants to be thinking about topics that you would like to learn more about, areas of interest that call for more discussion, and strategic alliances and working groups.  On Saturday, participants can convene a group.  Watch for sign-up sheets located in the main rooms of the conference.

the politics of TED

Last year, a minor controversy erupted when liberal millionaire investor Nick Hanauer claimed that his TED talk on economic policy had been banned as too “political.” Chris Anderson, the “curator” of TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design), replied that Hanauer’s talk had not been censored. Rather, it wasn’t chosen for the TED homepage because it was not among the strongest talks available; and one of its flaws was its “explicitly partisan” perspective.

I am inclined to think that this particular dispute is a classically fruitless one about whether an individual’s work should be published in a specific private venue. But it raises a broader issue about the implicit politics of TED. To be sure, individual TED talks range very widely. Some address political issues, and famous politicians have given them. And yet I think the dominant view goes like this:

Lots of important problems could be solved by better design. One person can explain the core of a new design proposal in ten minutes. If the idea is good, it will be persuasive, and so listeners will share it, invest in it, adopt it, or otherwise support it. A lot of what’s wrong with the world today is stupid design and the failure of better design ideas to be heard. Because the Internet lowers the cost of distribution, better ideas will now prevail.

Contrast this to the conception of politics that began with the ancient Athenian assemblies and that is still seen today in legislatures, courtrooms, and meetings convened by community organizers:

People have conflicting values and interests, and they need a place to air their differences so that the community has an opportunity to make binding decisions. Everyone has a right to express his own interests. Adversaries should meet in public so that they answer each other and can be held accountable by the whole community. Politics will be contentious and emotional, but it’s also important to maintain constructive relationships and a common commitment to the process, because we will have to address many more disputes after the one that currently confronts us.

If this were your idea of politics, you would never think to “curate” selected 10-minute talks without Q&A or rebuttals. You’d build a space–physical or virtual–in which people could interact as peers.

Now, there is room for more than one mode of communication in our complex world. I like TED talks and see their value for public debate. Also, they are not necessarily about common or public problems; politics is not even relevant to all of them. You’d sound like a curmudgeon if you challenged TED’s credo: “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.”

But I have met people who see controversial politics as stupid and wasteful and think that there could be a TED-like solution (an “idea worth spreading”) for almost every problem. I was at a meeting in California some months ago in which every participant except me thought that a better design (broadly defined) could solve any social issue. As an example, one person suggested that Nike had done more that any other organization to fight obesity–by making cool sneakers that encouraged running. This was in Santa Monica, where indeed, people run a lot. But see the US obesity trend (left). Nike hired its first ad agency in 1976 and attained 50% of the US market share in 1980. The correlation with obesity does not look too promising (not to mention those sweatshops).

This was only a stray comment, and no doubt, better examples could be cited. Design does relate to obesity in some ways–for example, better urban planning encourages walking. But to implement a better urban plan, you need more than a good idea. You need power, money, and other forms of support. Some of the groups that have power and money right now are manufacturers of heavily subsidized, high-calorie, low-fiber drinks and snacks. They need to be held accountable by old-fashioned politics.

This post relates to the Obama Administration’s preference for “social innovations” over traditional entitlement programs. To be fair, the Administration wants both, but they are willing to trim entitlements at the margin to fund more social innovation, and that seems consistent with the politics of TED.