Author Archives: Peter Levine

the latest on our local work

For the last year, with generous support from the National Geographic Foundation, my colleagues and I have been working with high school kids to study the environmental causes of obesity in their community and display the results on public maps on the Prince George’s Information Commons website. It has been a tortuous process, frequently derailed by changes in the school’s administration and rules, flawed ideas and plans on my part, turnover among the University of Maryland team, attrition of students, and technical problems. In the latest phase, the kids have been trying to present their ideas in the form of audio segments, mixing voice and music. But the talented graduate student who was helping them had to quit this week for health reasons.

Despite all these problems, various groups of high school and college students with whom I have been working should have produced more than 30 separate research projects on various aspects of their community by the end of this summer. I am starting to envision the Commons website as a kind of magazine about Prince George’s County, with “articles” in various formats (including audio and video) and lots of opportunities for readers to post comments. Blogging software like MovableType could underlie the whole site, although it wouldn’t look or “feel” like a blog. After all, blogging software is essentially a database that displays selected entries on a website. So the Prince George’s Information Commons could consist of a database of research products created by a wide range of students and adult volunteers. The homepage would present short summaries of some recent products, with links to the full results. Each summary could be accompanied by an enticing picture to draw visitors’ interest.

Prince George’s County is a large jurisdiction (pop. 838,000) without its own news media. It receives generally disparaging treatment from the Washington press corps, probably because it’s the suburban county with the lowest income and the largest African American population (62.7%). I didn’t get involved in these projects to try to create a news organ for the community, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

the torture lawyers

My friend and former colleague David Luban has a very useful article in Slate explaining why the lawyers who advised the Bush administration to allow torture (“former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, vice presidential counsel David Addington, Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo, and Pentagon counsel William Haynes”) violated legal ethics. Luban’s analogy between those lawyers and Lynne Stewart–Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman’s defense attorney, recently convicted of conspiring with him–is suggestive but not necessarily tight. The real payoff of Luban’s piece is his explanation of the role of legal advisor versus that of advocate. The Bush lawyers acted as advocates when they were employed to give advice, and that violates legal ethics.

academic freedom

In my usual style, here is a very belated comment on two once-“hot” news stories: Larry Summers and Ward Churchill. For all their differences, these men are both university employees who got into trouble for their public speech. In both cases, “academic freedom” has been cited as a defense.

In my opinion, “academic freedom” is not an individual civil right that academics can wield in conflicts with their employers. Academics, like everyone else, have First Amendment rights, but those are rights against the state. The First Amendment does not require a university to pay us to say anything we like, nor must it grant us academic credit or preferment for our speech. Universities carefully and intensively regulate the speech of their students, professors, and administrators. You can’t receive credit or a degree for your writing unless it fulfills a professor’s assignment and meets all kinds of canonical standards of relevance and rigor. You can’t get tenure unless your work is acceptable to the mainstream discipline in which you work. Even once you have tenure, you can’t win grants, promotions, or opportunities to publish without subjecting your “speech” to peer review for content. Thus if academic freedom were a right of individuals, it would be a myth.

Academic freedom is not an individual civil right, but rather an institutional prerogative. When we support academic freedom, we mean that colleges and universities, scholarly associations, journals, and presses should be free to set their own standards for expression without (much) state interference. In other words, the ideal is autonomy for certain professional associations, not rights for their employees as individuals.

Tenure causes confusion: it makes us think that the central commitment of a university is to the individual autonomy of professors. But tenure only applies to senior faculty (not to students, junior faculty, or administrators). Moreover, it is part of a larger system. It is aimed against one problem–invidious political pressure on professors not to teach or publish unpopular ideas. That is a real threat, but universities also worry about “free speech” that is incompetent, undisciplined, or irrelevant. To address that problem, they put academics through a lengthy and grueling socialization process before they grant tenure. And even after tenure, they apply all kinds of pressure to make faculty express themselves in particular ways.

Which brings me to the two cases of recent weeks. I haven’t made a study of Ward Churchill’s writing, nor do I have time to do so. But there are tenured professors–possibly including Dr. Churchill–who are radical blowhards: offensive and totally lacking in rigor and discipline. Such people are one price we pay for the tenure system. (Some other costs are the burnouts and timeservers on our faculties.) If tenure makes sense, it’s because the advantage of protecting trenchant, insighful radicals outweighs the cost of all those blowhards and timeservers. I don’t know for sure that this price is worth paying–it probably is. In any case, we should evaluate tenure overall, and not let particular cases dominate our thinking. Thus Churchill may have to be allowed to speak offensively and foolishly in order to uphold an institutional rule that is valuable, overall.

As for Larry Summers: some have said that he “modeled” free speech by making a politically incorrect statement about women in science. I would reply that he modeled free speech but without rigor or discipline. Moreover, he is an administrator, and as such his primary duty is to shape and implement policies. Harvard ostensibly has a policy of attracting more female scientists. Summers’ comment undermined Harvard’s policy. As such, it was damaging. He was like a corporate executive who criticizes his company’s product, or a U.S. ambassador who attacks American foreign policy in public. The First Amendment covers his speech, but that only means that he can’t be prosecuted for it. He has no right to be paid for it. If Harvard chooses to retain him, which seems very likely, it will be because Summers’ talents outweigh his mistakes. But his comment about women was a mistake, and “academic freedom” is no excuse.

[Added Feb. 17: It can be courageous and honorable for an employee to attack the policies of his or her organization, if the criticism is valid. However, such a critic must also be prepared to face the consequences. For instance, a US diplomat who criticizes American foreign policy may deserve public praise but ought to submit his or her resignation letter along with the critique. The same applies to a university president who undermines the institution’s policies. But see Andrew Canter’s challenging response in the comments.]

By the way, I don’t have tenure and have never been on a tenure track. I’m fairly grateful not to have gone through the socialization process that tenure would have entailed.

how institutions socialize young people for citizenship

In 1928, Karl Mannheim argued that people tend to form stable civic identities in their late teens. As adolescents emerge from the relatively narrow horizons of their families and neighborhoods, they confront the broader world of governments, ideologies, parties, and nation-states. They must adopt some stance toward this world, whether it is passive acceptance, alienation, enthusiastic embrace, or personal obligation. After people form a stance, the effort required to change their minds is too costly unless major historical events intervene and require a reassessment. Given the relatively low salience of public life, inertia tends to dominate for the rest of our lives.

If Mannheim was even partly right, then it is important to ask how our institutions socialize young people for lifetimes of civic and political participation. The impact of these institutions is likely to change as their structure and behavior evolve. Thus a study of institutional change is crucial for our analysis of political development.

I suspect that the following are some of the most significant ways in which American institutions have changed their effects on political socialization over the past 25 years:

  • Electoral politics: Thanks to sophisticated gerrymandering, there is ever less competition for state legislatures and the US House. As a result, young people grow up without the experience of debate in their communities and may conclude that controversy is unnecessary or artificial, something that Washington political elites stir up for tactical reasons. The lack of competition also means that elected officials are relatively insulated from accountability and relatively uninterested in seeking young people?s support. We know from field experiments that young people often vote when asked. The decline in political competitiveness means that they are less likely to receive a request to vote.
  • Meanwhile, sophisticated marketing strategies and technologies have allowed consultant-driven campaigns to focus their efforts on groups of people with known voting histories. Young people have unknown voting preferences and are relatively unlikely to participate. Thus they are usually left off target lists. To make matters worse, their services as volunteers are not needed as much as in the past, because campaigns depend on expert consultants, mailing lists, and professionally produced advertising.
  • Civil society: As Elinor Ostrom notes, ?Some aspects of the science of association are both counterintuitive and counterintentional, and thus must be taught to each generation as part of the culture of a democratic citizenry.? Associations have incentives to recruit young people and teach them skills necessary for the organizations? maintenance. If associations recruit fewer members, that is bad for political socialization. Unfortunately, some important organizations that once recruited young people have lost membership. The most obvious examples are labor unions. In 2000, just 13% of 15-24s were union members, far less than fifty years ago. Religious congregations can also teach civic skills. But regular religious attendance among high school seniors declined from 41 percent in 1976 to 33 percent in 2000. During this period, high school seniors did not show any major change in attitudes toward religion, but they became considerably less likely to participate in organized religious groups.
  • The news media: The modern mass media are fragmented and allow people to opt out of news more easily than in the past. There also may be more sorting by level of knowledge; some newspapers provide highly sophisticated information to global audiences via the Internet, while other news sources (such as commercial web portals and music radio stations) provide extremely superficial coverage tilted toward entertainment. Organs that might serve diverse audiences, such as metropolitan daily newspapers, are endangered in the current market. Meanwhile, most people feel that news programs have become less civil, perhaps because they must compete more avidly for ratings. Diana Mutz and Byron Reeves have found that people are entertained by angry debates, yet such confrontations reduce trust in government and politics.

    • There is a problem with youth civic engagement, but it’s important not to locate the problem inside young people’s heads if the real cause of their alienation lies in institutions.

    the Iraqi election, suicide bombing, & rational choice theory

    An election is partly a public good, in the precise economist’s sense. If representatives are selected peacefully and officials are made accountable to the majority, that is a good thing for most people. This good is indivisible. I cannot decide to forgo the benefits to me personally of democratic elections, nor sell my stake to someone else. Like national defense or the ozone layer, elections benefit all (or at least the whole majority faction), if they serve anyone.

    There is a well-known problem with public goods. Whether a democratic election occurs depends on many people’s behavior, yet each person benefits regardless of what he or she does. For example, you gain from our political system?whether or not you vote. Thus you may be tempted to free-ride and let others bear the burden of voting. Or you may feel that it’s pointless to promote this public good, since others are unlikely to do their share.

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