Author Archives: Peter Levine

a generational shift leftward?

David Madland and Amanda Logan have published a report for the Center for American Progress entitled “The Progressive Generation: How Young Adults Think About the Economy” (pdf). They assert that today’s young people are more favorable toward government-funded health care and unions than older people are today, and–more interestingly–than older generations were when they were young. The Millennials also support education spending, even if it requires tax increases; and (more generally) they like government intervention.

I would only offer two caveats. First, the Millennials seem fairly genial or favorable toward most institutions, compared to their predecessors. According to the CAP report, young people are favorable to business as well as government; they like both corporate profits and government regulation. This is not contradictory–in fact, I think I agree with it. But it raises the question of whether the Millennials are progressive, or just (relatively) positive. On the other hand, they are not at all positive toward the press or President Bush. So maybe they are picking the institutions they like, and government is one of them.

The other caveat is that the following may no longer be true:

The general thrust of academic literature … is that political ideas and attachments that are developed in early adulthood tend to last. Research suggests that a socialization process occurs that leads young adults to hold onto the party identification and opinions that they developed in their formative years.

This theory is important, because it suggests that today’s youth will remain progressive as they age. It is plausible, but the direct evidence comes from decades ago when party identification was more a matter of ascribed identity (e.g., ethnic background) than of ideology. Also, the evidence comes from a time when people developed their political identity during adolescence. I think that political socialization may have shifted later in the lifecourse, along with many other aspects of human development. That change would raise doubts about directly comparing today’s young adults with their predecessors 30 or 40 years ago.

New York’s golden age

A very brief stop in Manhattan last Friday prompted some thoughts about what New York City represents. Between 1920 and 1960, the apogee of American civilization was built in that place, or so I would argue.

I acknowledge some bias, because New York formed both of my parents. These days, I especially think of my father in connection with the city. He lived almost half of his life there and it shaped his identity. Much of the time that I spent in New York, from my early childhood until recent years, was with him; and he was a nostalgic person who would often reminisce about his youth. One of the last times I saw him in reasonably good health was last spring, when we walked together all the way from the Upper West Side to the Metropolitan Museum.

But even adjusting for my prejudices, I think New York City in the mid-20th century was a splendid achievement that embodied some (not all) of the best qualities of the United States as a whole. We could start with high culture: New York was the world’s center of modernism in painting, music, architecture, poetry, and fiction after the Second World War. New York’s high culture had diverse sources, including the Bohemia of Greenwich Village, the Harlem Renaissance, the uptown galleries, the old magazines and publishing houses (privately owned and not out to maximize profit), academic programs at Columbia and The New School–among other universities, the clusters of exiled Europeans, and well-endowed “establishment” institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum and the Metropolitan Opera.

A second layer was commercial culture, for it was private capital that erected the Chrysler Building, lit the lights of Time Square, published The New York Times and New Yorker magazine, and put on Broadway shows. And third–not below the others but on a par with them–were the city’s various vernacular cultures: the lower-middle-class secular Jewish Brooklyn that nourished my Dad plus many others, including Spanish Harlem, the Irish-Catholic neighborhoods, the African American church, and on and on.

Culture does not make a civilization, but New York had the other essential components as well. Its institutions, although certainly imperfect, were impressive. The public schools, for example, enrolled around one million students and had a high reputation. City University represented another huge and successful foray into public education. The subways, the parks, and the harbor worked well–notwithstanding inequality, segregation, and corruption that were inexcusable but less destructive than we have seen in other times and places. New York developed impressive leaders–TR, FDR, LaGuardia–who were both disciplined and inspired by a tough and engaged citizenry. There were elites and masses, insiders and outsiders, but these relationships were dynamic and flexible.

I don’t want to exaggerate or romanticize, but I suppose I have in the back of my mind a rather pessimistic account of how human beings live together in large numbers. It ought to be possible to surpass the model of New York City ca. 1950, but we have rarely done so.

Finally, I don’t mean to suggest that the city is entirely in decline. There are respects in which it has improved. But I think the magic balance has been gone since the harbor shed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs, the schools went into crisis, and the yuppies took over Bohemia. The most wonderful parts of New York today are either legacies of the mid-20th-century city or reprises of its spirit. For instance, the mix of immigrant communities in today’s Queens seems a worthy successor of Brooklyn in the 1930s.

evaluating community projects

(At Fordham in New York City for the day) Here is a further reflection on the “Tenure Report” from Imagining America, which I summarized on Wednesday. I think if I were involved in campus politics or administration, I might advocate one strategic reform to promote “engagement.” I would argue that projects undertaken in communities ought to be assessed on a par with peer-reviewed publications for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion. Standards for evaluating such projects should be rigorous and stringent, so that most would not be deemed fully successful. Launching a community project is no more commendable than opening Microsoft Word and starting to type; in either case, one is accountable for the quality and impact of what one achieves. An impressive community project should be:

Generative: producing a substantial array of performances, events, programs, exhibitions, curricula, experiments, organizations, institutions, policies, maps, research instruments, data, peer-reviewed publications, college courses, and/or graduate student work.
Intellectually ambitious: driven by challenging and innovative hypotheses, narratives, or methodologies and designed to test the organizers’ own presumptions and biases.
Coherent: capable of being summarized in one story about its purposes, activities, and results. (Although a project should be flexible over time and should include diverse people and agendas, the whole should be worth more than the sum of its parts).
Ethically responsible: sustained (no “drive-by scholarship”), accountable to relevant people inside and outside the academy, transparent, including real dialog with all the participants.
Effective: demonstrating real outcomes appropriate to its own objectives at a reasonable cost in terms of money, time, and political capital.

Methods of assessing the quality of projects will vary, but one should at least consider using portfolios and peer reviews by independent, reliable community members.

“the buzzy philosophy element”

I’m spending occasional moments cleaning out my office after 15 years. It’s an excavation into the forgotten past. For example, I had no recollection of this letter from a British editor. The subject is Something to Hide, my novel that was later published by St. Martin’s in the US:

This started off quite well–or intriguingly at least–with the themes of philosophy and conspiracy nicely built, the characters of Zach and Kate making slow but steady progress and the plot structure being established. Somewhere, though, Levine fucked up and from halfway through this winds down into a rather dull trudge through overly familiar political-thriller scenes, tedious shoot-outs and not nearly enough about the historical conspiracy so nicely hinted at in the early stages. It ends up as dull and routine which was a shame after the promising start.

I can imagine that this might do something in the US all the same–it has certain parochial characteristics which would normally prevent it being done in the UK but which America seems to like. The buzzy philosophy element would certainly provide an angle in marketing terms and even though it’s dull, the book has a certain charm. I don’t really fancy this for Arrow at all, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if it sold for a quite a lot in the US.

For the record: there are no shoot-outs, it sold for very little in the US, and I’ll take “dull” but with “a certain charm” as a compliment. It’s better than “dull and charmless.”

tenure, promotion, and civic engagement

“Scholarship in Public” (pdf) is a very important new paper published by Imagining America on behalf of a strong group called the Tenure Team that includes the historian Thomas Bender, Dean Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia Journalism School, several college presidents, and many of the smartest people who think about public engagement.

“Publicly engaged academic work” means various kinds of collaborations between university-based scholars or artists and laypeople in their communities. It generates public products, such as museum exhibitions, radio programs, k-12 curricula (and sometimes even whole schools), databases, maps, and websites–as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and books. It often involves comprehensive projects that generate numerous artifacts for different audiences–in contrast to standard academic work, which tends to produce one publication at a time. These projects create knowledge and understanding that we cannot obtain anywhere else, while strengthening culture, community, and democracy.

Public engagement also serves some professors’ valid and worthy personal objectives. Craig Calhoun, a Tenure Team member and one of the most insightful people in the business, notes an enthusiasm in our culture today for “making things, …. making and building institutions, rather than only commenting on the institutions.” He says, “You have a lot of the smartest young people trying to build something, and I think that carries over to academia, where people are saying, ‘I want to do that. I want to create.'”

But public engagement must be done well. Even ambitious, well-intentioned, and labor-intensive projects can fail, just as books and lab experiments can fail. Public engagement can also be superficial or trivial. I know departments in which some scholars labor hard in the library or lab in the hopes of being able to make presentations at international scholarly conferences. Others give occasional lectures–which they might also present to their own undergraduates–at local churches or civic groups. These local lectures or performances may be covered in the local press, but they are not scholarship. Rewarding such superficial projects with promotion, tenure, and other awards is unfair. Worse, it submerges the much more difficult and ambitious work that deserves the name of “public scholarship” or “public art.”

As Calhoun says, “This is about making scholarship better, making knowledge better. It is not about concessions in the quality of scholarship and knowledge.” That means that public scholarship must be critically assessed, not given a pass because it is well-intentioned. Critical assessment will require new techniques, and the report suggests several: use community partners as peer-reviewers; evaluate projects rather than individual publications; allow professors to assemble portfolios; develop plans for projects and evaluation when new professors are hired.

The report also tackles a sensitive and important issue within this field, which is the role of minority professors. Obviously, academics who are African American, Native American, or Latino may want to pursue highly academic and theoretical research. But a disproportionate number of minority scholars are involved in community-engaged work, because they tend to be motivated to change society; they often have roots and networks outside academia; and they may have cultural skills that allow them to “cross over” effectively. If these scholars work in partnerships with laypeople, and such work is not rewarded, their careers suffer. This is also a problem for whites, but scholars of color face an extra layer of obstacles. The negative stereotypes that persist against them in academia often take the form of an assumption that it is just to hire a person of color even if his or her academic work is weaker. That’s highly patronizing to the individual scholar. And if a minority professor’s work takes the form of community projects, then the stereotype about minorities reinforces the stereotype about civic engagement, and vice-versa, adding up to an almost insurmountable barrier to success.

The solution, again, is to create rigorous, independent, tough measures of quality for civic engagement. Then any professor, including a scholar of color, can choose to try public projects, and the ambitious and successful ones will bring just rewards.