Author Archives: Peter Levine

honoring Dorothy Height

(Washington, DC) Today, at the National Press Club, CIRCLE is leading a significant conference on federal policy and civic skills. Some 70 federal officials, academics, and nonprofit leaders will participate, including 25 who have speaking roles as part of an elaborate program. We will also release a detailed new study of civic skills, showing who has skills, who lacks them, how they are changing, and why they matter.

I think that Dorothy Height’s funeral will be exactly simultaneous with our conference. The President and other luminaries will eulogize her across town while we are in the National Press Club. I am sorry that we have lost Height, yet it seems appropriate to discuss civic skills on a day devoted to celebrating her life. No one among the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement–and perhaps no one in American history–better understood the importance of our topic.

As early as 1952, when Height was invited to teach in India, she described her expertise as “the philosophy and skills of working with people in groups.” A decade later, she led mixed groups of white and African American women in Mississippi who deliberated and worked together to address injustice. This is only one example in a lifetime of such difficult and successful work.

Height knew that the main purpose of activism and service was not to benefit those served, but to strengthen the capacity of the servers for democratic self-governance. As she said, “Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It’s important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It’s the way in which we ourselves grow and develop.”

She also understood that opportunities to develop civic skills are highly unequal (a form of injustice that we describe in today’s release). She said, “We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.”

Height’s lifelong institutional home was The National Council of Negro Women. In her words, its “great strength is that it builds leadership skills in women.” She launched the Dorothy Height Leadership Institute as part of the Council, and today it keeps her light aflame by developing the civic skills of young people.

Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference

Please join Tisch College and CIRCLE for this two-day gathering of educators and activists to explore the theory and practice of citizenship. Through interactive sessions, we will focus on “citizenship” as creativity, agency, and collaboration–not as a form of membership that separates those who are in from those who are out.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We invite proposals for 90-minute “learning exchanges,” which may include short panel presentations with plenty of time for conversation, moderated discussions, workshops, readings, planning sessions, or other types of events. A list of potential topics is below, but we welcome all proposals that fit broadly and creatively within the key theme of the conference, Civic Studies, Civic Practices.

Please use this this form to submit your learning exchange concept. Once you’ve submitted your proposal, we will be in touch to discuss your proposal, answer any questions you might have, or help you flesh out your concept. Proposals should be submitted by a group of at least two people. Teams of scholars and practitioners are preferred.

TOPICS

Citizens and Citizenship – What sort of citizens do we want? What knowledge, actions, and beliefs are important for strong citizens? What actions have citizens taken to actively engage in democratic practices? What institutional structures promote meaningful and engaged citizens? What knowledge, skills, and attitudes could transfer to global citizenship? Which may not? How does in-group and out-group status both define and limit citizenship?

Scale – How can strong/successful civic practices be scaled up and out? Is this a useful focus for civic work?

Civic Studies – Is this a useful field? What are its characteristics, boundaries, and limits? What is its potential theoretically and practically?

Political Reform – What changes in laws and policies are needed to strengthen active citizenship? What should we do to achieve those changes?

Civic Practices – Sessions on particular practices or methods, which may involve – for example – community organizing, media production, deliberation, reflection, or service.

Civic Education – How can we begin to address civic education in an era of education spending reduction, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

PARTICIPANTS

Scholars, students, activists, educators and others interested in this topic are welcome to use this form to register or to submit a presentation proposal.

TIMING

July 23, 10 am through July 24, 4 pm

LODGING

Participants are responsible for their own lodging. Tufts dormitory rooms can be rented by the night in the summer. Please use this link to reserve a room

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference concludes the second annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tisch College. This intensive, two-week interdisciplinary seminar brings together advanced graduate students, faculty and practitioners from diverse fields of study for challenging discussions about the role of civics in society.

an extra’s perspective

Last Thursday night, I boarded a flight from LA to Baltimore. I was coming from Seattle, where I had been meeting with veteran civil rights activists and community organizers, mostly young African American and Latino leaders from big cities. I was on my way to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where I would have conversations with William Kristol and Charles Murray, among others. The LAX-to-BWI flight was my chance for a little sleep between meetings.

Two young people recognized each other as they walked down the jetway to the plane. They had attended the same high school in Baltimore around the same time. The woman asked someone to switch seats so they could sit next to each other. That was bad news for me, because she ended up eight inches behind my head. But it was good news for them. They had so much in common–as I learned during the next five-and-a-half hours. Apartments not far apart, in the general vicinity of Culver City. Jobs in the media industry. Recent breakups. Jewish ancestry. Several drinks later, they were sharing their deepest hopes and dreams. As dawn broke over the east coast, they left the airplane holding hands.

It makes you think about how neat and happy stories feel to the people on the margins, those who are meant only to swell a progress, start a scene or two. The Fatted Calf was not so happy to learn of the return of the Prodigal Son. For every tearful reunion at the top of the Empire State Building, there are dozens of people in the elevator who are just trying to get on with their day. I didn’t begrudge this new couple my night–it was more important to them than to me. But I wished their romantic comedy could have begun elsewhere than in seats 16C and D.

using technology to cut the costs of college

Anya Kamenetz has a good article in The American Prospect about the need for colleges and universities to cut costs. The problem isn’t just predatory lenders or cheap state legislatures; the real costs of college are rising far too fast and imposing unjust burdens on young people and their families. A major cause is probably the failure of higher education to achieve efficiencies that have cut costs in manufacturing and service industries. If everything else gets more efficient, but your activity doesn’t, you become more expensive. That’s the situation with both medical care and higher education.

Kamenetz is excited about initiatives like MIT’s Open Courseware, which is an impressive repository of materials created at MIT that can be used free anywhere else. The materials include notes, syllabuses, readings, illustrations, problem sets, and assignments. It is generous and helpful for MIT to contribute in the way (sometimes at a cost of $15,000 or more for each course, as Kamenetz notes). But the benefits will be substantial only if (a) the expense of developing course materials is normally a significant component of tuition, and (b) “courseware” can be used effectively by faculty who didn’t develop it in the first place. Both premises are possible, but I’m not overly optimistic.

I see two opportunities that might be more important.

First, I’m obsessed by the sheer number of people who are employed per student at particularly expensive colleges and universities. For instance, Harvard employs 2,163 faculty, 5,102 administrators and professional staff, and 4,800 clerical and technical workers for its 19,500 students. Only 18 percent of the total work force are professors. There are three students for every five workers. (I’m counting graduate students as students, even though most also teach, so the ratio is even higher.) Thus I wonder whether there could be significant efficiencies in administration. On the other hand, it may be that most of the administrative and professional staff are involved in externally funded research or clinical medicine, in which case shrinking their numbers doesn’t cut the cost of education.

Second, I do see prospects for new types of course that would be based on computers, would be cheap per student, and would complement the rest of the curriculum. Imagine that we continued to offer a college education that was broadly similar to what we provide today, with seminars, lectures, labs, and office hours. But students were expected to take one course that was a large-scale simulation of a complex phenomenon. They might, for example, be asked to play various roles (appropriate to their majors) in a fictional town that faced a health emergency. Students would have to conduct research, plan, and communicate as part of playing this game. Developing it would be extremely expensive (if it was any good), but it could be offered nationally at a marginal price of just a few dollars per student. Small local teams of faculty could customize the game for their own campus.

I wouldn’t want the computer to do the grading, but it could dramatically cut the costs of assessment by tracking the completion of assignments and scoring multiple-choice tests, leaving only writing to be hand-graded. If ten percent of students’ credits were earned in such courses, the saving would be almost ten percent of tuition. And if these courses were offered in residential universities along with traditional seminars, lectures, and labs, there would be little loss of face-to-face learning and community.

a long journey

Tonight, I fly to Seattle, Washington, for a meeting at the Gates Foundation. It will be a politically progressive gathering; entitled “The Color of Change,” it is devoted to community organizing by young people from ethnic minorities. After somewhat less than 24 hours on the West Coast, I will take the red-eye flight to the other Washington, our Nation’s Capital, for a meeting at one of the big-three conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. The topic, again, will be citizenship, albeit from a different perspective (with a focus on formal knowledge, military service, and the incorporation of immigrants) .

I have many thousands of miles and quite a bit of ideological spectrum to traverse between now and Friday evening (when I’ll be back in Boston), so I’m not going to try to blog for the rest of this week.