Author Archives: Peter Levine

youth engaged from coast to coast

(on the way to Baltimore) I spent the weekend in Seattle learning about youth media projects there. I flew back home (near Boston), and am now heading down to Baltimore for two purposes: to meet the Case Foundation’s grantees in their Make it Your Own competition (which we are evaluating) and to participate in a CIRCLE focus group of young Baltimore adults who have never attended college. The latter is part of a much more ambitious project to talk to young working class adults across America. If you ask them whether they engage in traditional forms of politics, such as voting, most say “no”–but we are looking for alternative forms of politics and social activism that do engage them.

Meanwhile, here’s a souvenir from Seattle. The young woman who speaks at the beginning of this excellent video was one of the high school students I met over the weekend. She is involved with Reel Grrls, a Seattle organization that teaches teenagers to make social and political media. At the same time that this video attacks the consolidation of corporate media, it also embodies an alternative.

We need to think about how programs like Reel Grrls can become much larger and more common. (Today they are tiny boutique programs for self-selected leaders in progressive communities.) Youth media production could be incorporated more widely into school curricula, or funded as part the national and community service programs, or supported by universities, public broadcasting stations, or municipal governments.

the meaning of American democracy in a time of crisis

(posted in Seattle)

The Division of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Taube Philanthropies invite you to attend the first in the Taube Discussion Series on American Values. Speakers:

  • Donna Shalala, President, University of Miami, and former Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (keynote)
  • Moses Boyd, Principal, Integrated Solutions Group of The Washington Group and former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar
  • Peter Levine, Director, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and Research, Tufts University
    As the American economy seems to be in free fall and as Americans consider how much rein should be given to the capitalist ethic, what the role of the government should be, and what individual responsibility is all about, it is appropriate to ask, What is the meaning of “American democracy?” What are the core values that underlie the American society and polity? Have values such as freedom, individual initiative and self-reliance, freedom of inquiry and civil discourse changed? should they change?

Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 9:30-11:30 a.m. (Continental breakfast available at 9:00 a.m.)

6th floor Flom Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington, DC Directions are available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/directionsPlease allow extra time for security; a picture ID is required. This is a free public event, but RSVPs are required. Please respond with acceptances only.

civic learning online

I’m heading out to Seattle this evening for a conference at the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. The topic is how youth can use the new digital media to learn active citizenship. The Center has a separate site on that topic and some practical work underway that I’ll learn more about when I arrive out there. Several of the other participants are bloggers–at least Allison Fine, Howard Rheingold, and Eszter Hargittai. There is also a good project blog, Engaged Youth, to which we’ll all be contributing.

nationalism as the enlargement of human sympathy

I finished Bleak House last night. It’s such an enormous and complex novel that one could talk or write about it forever. But I have a job. So I’ll just offer one thought about Dickens’ moral imagination.

I read Bleak House as nationalistic. Of the many dozens of characters, I believe only one is foreign: the French maid Hortense. She is completely wicked and a Francophobe caricature with her ridiculous accent and irrational passions. A more important character, Mrs Jellyby, foolishly engages in charity work overseas while neglecting her own English household and community. In the end, she is “disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which [turns] out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody–who survived the climate–for rum.” The model of British manhood, Allan Woodcourt, is forced by economic necessity to travel abroad, where he experiences a “terrible shipwreck over in those East Indian seas.” He plays the hero in this crisis and “saves many lives”–presumably British lives.

This drawing of boundaries and discounting of outsiders is unappealing. But Dickens may also be skeptical about the wisdom of trying to help people whom one doesn’t know. (This is Esther Summerson’s explicit view, and she is the moral center of the novel.) The nationalism of the novel is not by any means imperialistic. It is isolationist, and perhaps driven by modesty.

Besides, the drawing of boundaries can mean an enlargement rather than a restriction of one’s moral commitments. Bleak House dramatizes the interconnections among British people. One could cite literally hundreds of examples, but one stark one [warning: plot spoiler coming] is the death of Lady Dedlock. She has been the most fashionable and elegant aristocrat in the land, but she expires in a pauper’s graveyard dressed in the clothes of a peasant whose baby had died from preventable disease. Her body is literally mistaken for that of someone at the opposite end of the social spectrum.

The leading idea of the novel is that all British subjects are one family and they must take care of one another. This is nationalism as mutual responsibility. It’s not a state-centered nationalism that favors political leaders or big bureaucratic programs. In fact, Bleak House seems disturbingly cynical about Parliament and the government as possible sources of reform. Instead, the ideology (if there is a single ideology in this polyphonic book) is one of non-fundamentalist Christian solidarity. That’s not my favorite ideal for our times–but we’d be better off if we had it.

ideological diversity on campuses

On one of my recent visits to a college campus, I met a bunch of students who began by telling me all the excellent ways they are involved in civic and political affairs. One young woman mentioned some hospital volunteering and research overseas. A couple of others said (among other things) that they worked for Democratic candidates. The conversation then turned political and very anti-Republican, with students saying that it was important to vote because the GOP had practically ruined the country over the last eight years.

I noticed some quiet people at the table. I intervened and asked them to speak freely. It turned out that the hospital volunteer was also the president of the Young Republicans on campus. Apparently, she hadn’t wanted to mention that role when we introduced ourselves.

Once, at the University of Maryland, a senior who was working on a scholarship essay “came out to me” as a conservative. A conservative thesis seemed to fit his essay best, as I observed; but he thought he’d better not own up to such ideas. He said I was the first professor to whom he had admitted his conservative leanings.

I don’t think these stories support the right-wing charge that academia has been captured by lefties. If we can generalize from them at all, I think they show our polarization. We have liberal campuses and conservative campuses just as we have liberal zip codes and conservative zip codes. People sort themselves. What we lack are mixed places.

I’m as progressive as the next person, but I think we are losing valuable educational opportunities this way. I used to find that many of Maryland’s best students, who came to me for help with their applications for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, had never encountered conservative ideas. This made them rather naive debaters. A liberal today who cares about homelessness–for example–ought to be very familiar with the thesis that the government worsens homelessness through rent control (which reduces the supply of housing), or that homeless people need spiritual help from “faith-based” organizations. Maybe these ideas are wrong, but they should not be new to college graduates who care about homelessness.