Monthly Archives: November 2015

ideological currents in the current crises

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What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need? – Brecht, from An die Nachgeborenen (1939)

Racist incidents and youth protests in the USA (including the successful protests at Yale), terror in Paris and Beirut, war in the Levant–these are vastly different topics, and yet they all feed one 24/7 stream of commentary, social media, private conversation, and presidential politics in which themes seem to recur and recombine. Everyone has different views, but I think I discern at least three importantly distinct political philosophies in the mix:

1. A kind of liberalism that we might call, with Judith Shklar, the liberalism of fear. This perspective starts with an abhorrence of deliberate cruelty, especially at a large scale. The premise is that people are more or less capable of living decent lives if left alone, although they may need and deserve economic assistance that they can use as they wish. The worst danger comes from states. Governments must be restrained by general rules that prevent tyranny even if they also block some good ideas.

From this perspective, a private college like Yale is state-like, a threat to its members even if its leaders happen to be benign at the moment. Not only free speech rules but also autonomy for departments, decentralized hiring, tenure, a very flexible curriculum–these are all constitution-like protections against tyranny. If someone proposes a good idea, such as a required course, the question becomes: Why won’t that turn into a bunch of bad course requirements? Do you really trust the administration and the dominant culture that it represents to legislate what courses students must take?

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a fundamental threat to freedom and happiness. But the debate within the liberalism of fear is whether to pull out all the stops in attacking ISIS or rather to be concerned that European states and the USA will violate civil and human rights in the name of fighting ISIS.

2. A kind of radicalism that draws on critical race and gender studies, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and postcolonialism. It observes some people oppressing many other people in a wide variety of settings, often inadvertently. Oppression is built into cultures and mentalities and requires changes in people’s ideas as well as rules and practices.

From this perspective, a private institution like Yale is not only an organization that has chosen official rules to regulate its members. It is also a place dominated by certain cultural norms and populated by people who have been selected and invited (rather than rejected or excluded). Almost everyone thinks that members of the Yale community should have specific rights, such as free assembly and tenure, but this perspective attends to other issues as well. It notes that the whole community has been formed and shaped to have a certain character. The institution’s pervasive culture is biased against some of its members–not to mention the many people who were not allowed in at all. These biases must be challenged.

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a terrible threat to diversity and inclusion, but the question quickly arises whether one contributing cause of terrorism may be the biased behavior of countries like France and the United States toward our own religious minorities and toward the Middle East.

3. Views that confidently propose a character for public life, either within a given institution or across a whole society. When John Kasich proposes an institute to spread Judaeo-Christian values, he certainly presumes that the US should have a dominant and unifying culture, but other people have other visions of what a good society should look like. The French republican tradition, for example, is egalitarian, nationalistic, and anti-clerical. It has little in common with US conservatism except for its willingness to argue that every citizen can be, and should be, part of one community with one set of norms. People who are saying, “Don’t pray for Paris–religion is what caused the problem” are invoking a particular idea of France as secular. Some years ago, Emmanuel Todd was sure that Muslim immigrant youth in France were rioting because they have “embraced … the fundamental values of French society, such as … the dyad of liberty-equality” and because they have inherited political norms from the ancient “peasant family structures in the Parisian basin.” He seems to have changed his tune lately, but his view was perfectly franco-republican in its assumption of a unitary egalitarian political culture.

From this perspective, an institution like Yale has a powerful culture and character that may not appeal to, or serve, everyone equally. The question is, what should that character be? Political and critical? Scientific and rationalistic? Nurturing and inclusive? Competitive and demanding? Eurocentric? Postcolonial and cosmopolitan?

Meanwhile, ISIS is an evil threat for this third perspective, but not because its leaders espouse a particular vision that all must follow. Rather, ISIS has a vision that is bleak and cruel and conflicts with the ethos of, say, secular, fun-loving Paris or capitalistic, Christian-infused America.

These are simplified views. I have ignored many complications–to name one, the question of whether a private voluntary association like Yale is very much like a state. As I wrote at the outset, everyone has a position of her own. For myself, I struggle to combine elements of all three views because all seem to me to embody some wisdom.

special issue of Diversity & Democracy on political engagement

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The latest issue of Diversity & Democracy (vol. 18, no. 4, fall 2015) was edited by members of my team at Tisch College in conjunction with AAC&U. The topic of the whole issue is “Student and Institutional Engagement in Political Life.” Three specific articles are also by members of our team:

The lineup of the whole issue is excellent, and the topic couldn’t be more timely.

college and the contradictions of capitalism

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National attention has turned to political debates and conflicts at one flagship Land Grant state university and one Ivy League. Mizzou and Yale exemplify the whole higher education system, which is a political flashpoint–for good reasons.

On one hand, universities are designed to stand somewhat aside from the political/economic system, to be independent of the usual power structures, and to supply, teach, and encourage critical analysis. On the other hand, they are absolutely pivotal to maintaining the political/economic system that exists, with all of its flaws as well as its virtues.

Racism is the main topic of the current activism. I fully concur with the importance of racial injustice on campuses. (See Jelani Cobb‘s summary, although Conor Friedersdorf‘s response is also valuable and not diametrically opposed.)

If you want a detailed, sophisticated, critical view of racism in America, higher education is one important place to find it. Many faculty share the critical diagnosis. And the most prestigious universities supply some of the most sophisticated and trenchant criticism.

At the same time, only 4 percent of full professors in America are Black. Young White adults are twice as likely to have a college degree as young African Americans (40% versus 20%), due to an accumulating series of racial gaps in k12 promotion and retention, high school graduation, college admission and retention, and on-time graduation. Their lower college graduation rates are one indication of a generally less supportive and satisfying educational experience for students of color. Given the demographics of faculty and students, the culturally dominant group is almost always White, and they have the whole symbolic heritage of the universities behind them. Finally, these institutions exist in blatantly unjust larger communities. Mizzou is the flagship university of the state that encompasses Ferguson. Yale is in the heart of New Haven, where the NAACP reports that 25% of Black families live below the poverty line, 18.9% of Black children have asthma, and no public school sees more than 28% of its graduates achieve a college degree.

Racial issues are thus unavoidable and supply telling examples of the contradictions built into higher education. But the contradictions extend further. For instance, if you want a trenchant and sophisticated critique of Wall Street, an excellent place to look is in the classrooms and journals of the finest American universities. One stream of critique is economic, but you can also find critical views of the culture, psychology, and even the aesthetics and spirituality of 21st century capitalism. An institution like Mizzou or Yale is designed to be safe from the incentives and pressures that dominate contemporary capitalism so that it can provide an independent view; hence the rules that govern tenure, academic freedom, etc.

Yet these institutions produce the people who actually take over and profit from contemporary global capitalism. The financial services industry employs more members of the Yale class of 2013 (14.8%) than any other other field. Consulting employs another 11.6% of that class. Many more Yalies apply to but don’t get Wall Street jobs right away. And of the 18.2% who go straight to graduate school, many are heading to finance via law school or business school. From a different perspective, we can say that Wall Street is dominated by graduates of institutions like Yale.

So these colleges select the global economic elite, disproportionately choosing the children of the current elite. They expose them to four years of critique of the global economic system–some of it very gentle and subtle, and some fairly blatant. Students see implicit alternatives to contemporary capitalism when they study Dante or Buddha in a seminar room, and they get direct criticisms in social science and philosophy classes. These experiences probably sharpen their minds and skills before they proceed in disproportionate numbers to take over the dominant political/economic institutions of the world and to fund the universities that chose and prepared them so well.

All kinds of odd practices and situations arise. For instance, Yale has $2.4 million of endowment per student, sufficient to generate about $112,000 of annual revenue per student. Given Yale’s faculty/student ratio of 6.1:1, that means the university gets about $683,000 per professor per year from its endowment funds. Yet it charges the students a sticker price of more than $50,000 and constantly solicits its alumni for donations to make enrollment affordable. The institution presents itself as a tax-deductible nonprofit philanthropy devoted to light and truth, yet it is also a corporation with $23.9 billion in the bank. Many of its faculty see themselves as critics of the status quo, yet they work in an institution that replicates it.

I love these places. They have been very good to me–Yale more than any other institution. They have broadened my mind and given me whatever skills and passions I have for analyzing social justice. They create zones of debate and critique that are freer and more vibrant than most other sectors of our society, and they encompass more diversity than most of our neighborhoods and work sites. To the extent that we have any upward mobility, they provide some of the upward paths. They permit and even encourage the criticism that is directed at themselves. At the same time, they are pillars of social injustice. No wonder they stand in the crosshairs today.

a taxonomy of civic engagement measures

Civic engagement is important to measure both as an intrinsic good and as a predictor of various desirable outcomes for the individuals who engage and for their communities and governments. Organizations–from individual schools and nonprofits to the Census Bureau and Corporation for National & Community Service–often ask survey questions that measure it. But there are many available survey measures, and organizations often wonder which ones to use and how to cluster them. Here is a simple table that produces six categories, with sample survey items for each.

Citizens engage … with each other with institutions
by communicating
  • attending meetings
  • discussing public affairs
  • posting/reposting social media about public issues
  • reading/watching news
  • contacting officials
  • contacting media
  • protest/civil disobedience
by acting/working
  • working to fix a community problem
  • volunteering
  • doing one’s job with a public purpose*
  • voting
  • boycotting/buycotting
  • working in government (including AmeriCorps)*
  • social entrepreneurship*
by forming relationships
  • membership in groups
  • leadership roles in groups
  • trust in other people
  • service on boards and advisory committees
  • confidence in institutions

A few observations:

  • Deliberative democracy is the first row. Public work is the whole table.
  • With the exception of trust and confidence, these are measures of action, not of attitudes or knowledge. I include trust and confidence basically as proxies for actual working relationships, which would be ideally measured more directly. Attitudes and knowledge are also crucial, but they would require another table.
  • Asterisks denote constructs that are rarely measured and for which the items seem to be relatively weak.
  • I prefer survey measures of basic constructs that are relatively invariant across contexts. For instance, I don’t care whether people post on Facebook (which we may all stop doing in a few years, anyway), but I do care whether they communicate with fellow citizens about public issues. Likewise, I would count someone as doing public work whether it’s paid or not, so I am less interested in whether people spend hours volunteering than in whether they work on public issues. The challenge is that survey measures of abstract categories are hard to understand, but measures of highly concrete activities (like volunteering hours) tend to miss the point a bit. But we do our best with proxies.
  • One way to turn these separate items into larger wholes is psychometric–looking empirically at which clusters of items go together in a population, because clusters would ostensibly measure underlying psychological factors. I think that is valuable work but not the only way to proceed. These are not strictly psychological measures, manifesting the mental states of individuals. They have a lot to do with institutions and varying social needs. Further, we are not looking for individuals who approximate good citizenship as a psychological state. Rather, we are trying to improve democracy. That may require a division of labor in which, for instance, some people specialize in protest and have low confidence in institution, while others have high trust and volunteer a lot. What kinds of civic engagement we need is a social/political question, not a psychological one.