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Foucault the engaged scholar

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I admit that I had long understood Michel Foucault as a “universal intellectual” — a thinker who conveys an original and general stance to the public, the nation, or the masses, serving as their conscience. If this intellectual is radically critical of the status quo, and his audience is the whole public, then the implication is: Revolution! Examples of revolutionary universal intellectuals include Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre.

Placed in that tradition, Foucault can be frustrating. He held a distinctive and original (albeit evolving) stance, he participated in radical politics in Tunisia and France, and he reached a global audience, yet he eschewed recommendations and explicit moral judgments. He seemed to conceal his own views, to the extent that he held them.

My take on Foucault has been changed (and my appraisal has been much improved) by reading three interviews conducted between 1976 and 1981 that are included in Rabinow’s and Rose’s The Essential Foucault anthology. These conversations have also revised my understanding of his major works.

In the 1976 interview, Foucault describes “universal intellectuals” as I did at the start of this post, but he says that “some years have passed since the intellectual has been called upon to play this role” (1976, 312). A universal intellectual works alone and addresses everyone. In contrast, a “specific intellectual”–a type that emerges after World War II (1976, 313)–works within an institution where knowledge and power come together. Examples include nuclear physicists, psychiatrists, social workers, magistrates, administrators, planners, and educators. They possess genuine knowledge that gives them influence. Since the failed revolution of 1968, it has become clear that beneficial social change depends on them, not on revolutionaries who fight the state (1976, 305). Specific intellectuals are becoming politically conscious and connected across disciplines and national borders (1976, 313).

And Foucault works with them. He doesn’t go into much detail about his own activities in these interviews, but we know that psychiatrists have read his works about mental illness and sexuality, prison administrators have read his book on prisons, and people who train professionals have assigned his texts; and he acknowledges their influence on him. Thus his audience is not “the people,” and his contribution is not a philosophy. Instead, he is a professional historian who contributes information and insights to various conversations that are also informed by the behavioral and social sciences and law.

In a 1981 interview, Didier Erihon suggests that “criticism carried about by intellectuals doesn’t lead to anything” (1981, 171). This is meant as a challenge to Foucault, whom Erihon assumes is an intellectual.

Foucault first notes that the previous twenty years have seen substantial changes–beneficial ones, I presume–in views of mental illness, imprisonment, and gender relations, issues on which he had worked intensively.

Next, he observes that progress does not result from political decisions alone; any policy requires implementation, and its impact depends on the people who implement it. At any rate, that is how I would gloss these words:

Furthermore, there are no reforms in themselves. Reforms do not come about in empty space, independently of those who make them. One cannot avoid considering those who will have to administer this transformation (1981, 171).

It follows that to influence the “assumptions” and “familiar notions” of practitioners is “utterly indispensable for any transformation” (172). (Compare my recent post on institutions).

Foucault concludes his response by criticizing the ways that universal intellectuals (whether famous or aspiring to fame) typically criticize society. He says, “A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. …. Criticism consists in uncovering [everyday] thought and trying to change it” (1981, 172).

The key point, for me, is that “trying to change” something requires a strategy, and Foucault wants to abandon the strategy of changing everything all at once by telling The People that society is bad and should be different. His alternative strategy is to engage well-placed practitioners.

In the 1980 interview, Foucault elaborates his doubts about criticism that takes the form of denouncing existing things, ideas, or people:

It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps its one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible (1980, 176).

Foucault diagnoses Parisian intellectuals’ love of denouncing each other as a result of their “deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read.” This anxiety motivates the “need to wage an ‘ideological struggle’ or to root out ‘dangerous thoughts'” (1980, 177).

The interviewer counters, “But don’t you think our period is really lacking in great writers and minds capable of dealing with its problems?” (1980, 177). Later, the same interviewer asks, “If everything is going badly, how do we make a start?” (1980, 178).

Foucault resists both pessimistic premises. “But everything isn’t going badly,” he exclaims (1980, 178). He describes a “plethora,” an “overabundance” of interesting ideas and people who have pent-up curiosity. The task, he proposes, is to “multiply the channels, the bridges, the means of information” so that more people with “thirst for knowledge” can learn from more other people (1980, 177).

In a passage that reminds me of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1924), Foucault describes his “dream of a new age of curiosity” (1980, 178). He says, “I like the word [curiosity]. It evokes ‘care’; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.” (1980, 177). In the age of curiosity that he envisions, “people must be constantly able to plug into culture in as many ways as possible” (178-9).

Given Foucault’s understanding of his own role as a “specific intellectual,” he must have been at least somewhat concerned about his reputation. He was not only a historical specialist who helped fellow practitioners to become conscious of shared prejudices and to discover alternatives. He was also (and mainly) a world-famous French philosopher, a purported representative of movements like post-structuralism and postmodernism, whose public lectures on general subjects in venues like the Collège de France and UC-Berkeley were packed with aspiring philosophers, and whose interviews about the condition of the world were published in Le Monde and Libération.

I am not sure how he navigated this tension, not having read the biographies. But it’s clear that it worried him. In the 1980 interview, part of a series on major intellectuals in Le Monde, Foucault asks not to be named. The interview (still archived on Le Monde’s website), is headlined, “The Masked Philosopher.” It begins:

Here is a French writer of some renown. Author of several books whose success has been affirmed well beyond our borders, he is an independent thinker: he is not linked to any fashion, to any party. However, he only agreed to grant us an interview about the status of the intellectual and the place of culture and philosophy in society on one explicit condition: to remain anonymous. Why this discretion? Out of modesty, calculation or fear? The question deserved to be asked–even if, by the end of this conversation, the mystery will undoubtedly have dissipated for the most perceptive of our readers…

Foucault explains that he would like to try being anonymous “out of nostalgia for a time when, since I was quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (my translation). In other words, we cannot hear Foucault well unless we shake the model of a famous thinker who offers big ideas. He wants us, instead, to ask whether the claims about specific phenomena that we find in his works ring true or false and whether they are useful or not for our purposes.

Sources: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1976), “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), and “So is it Important to Think?” (1981), all in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault (The New Press, 2003), but I retranslated the 1980 interview myself because of a misplaced modifier in the anthology. See also: Vincent Colapietro, “Foucault’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Genealogies: Mapping Our Historical Situations and Locating Our Philosophical Maps,” Cognitio, 13/2 (2012), p. 187-218; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; and Civically Engaged Research in Political Science

civic themes at #APSA2024

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Anyone who is attending this year’s annual American Political Science Association meeting in Philadelphia and who is curious about engaged research might consider:

“Cutting Edge Community Empowerment through Civically Engaged Research: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel“

This session will include five original papers and 8 responses, almost all by people who have been part of our annual Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. There will also be an ICER reception on September 7 from 7:30-9:00 PM, which anyone at APSA can attend. ICER will continue in 2025 and beyond, so these are good opportunities if you think you might be interested.

Another aspect of this year’s meeting is a mini-conference on “Civic Learning on Campus” (part 1 and part 2). One of my contributions to that strand will be a talk about Elinor Ostrom’s 1997 APSA presidential address. In that talk, she defined civic education as learning to address problems of collective action at all scales, not as studying the national government.

Finally, the Civic Studies Group brings you a panel on Innovations and Theories for Public Engagement, with papers on forms of self-governance at the community level.

a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

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Hannah Cox, James Fisher, and I have published a short piece in an outlet called eCampus News. The whole text is here, and I’ll paste the beginning here:

AI is difficult to understand, and its future is even harder to predict. Whenever we face complex and uncertain change, we need mental models to make preliminary sense of what is happening.

So far, many of the models that people are using for AI are metaphors, referring to things that we understand better, such as talking birds, the printing press, a monster, conventional corporations, or the Industrial Revolution. Such metaphors are really shorthand for elaborate models that incorporate factual assumptions, predictions, and value-judgments. No one can be sure which model is wisest, but we should be forming explicit models so that we can share them with other people, test them against new information, and revise them accordingly.

“Forming models” may not be exactly how a group of Tufts undergraduates understood their task when they chose to hold discussions of AI in education, but they certainly believed that they should form and exchange ideas about this topic. For an hour, these students considered the implications of using AI as a research and educational tool, academic dishonesty, big tech companies, attempts to regulate AI, and related issues. They allowed us to observe and record their discussion, and we derived a visual model from what they said.

We present this model [see above] as a starting point for anyone else’s reflections on AI in education. The Tufts students are not necessarily representative of college students in general, nor are they exceptionally expert on AI. But they are thoughtful people active in higher education who can help others to enter a critical conversation.

Our method for deriving a diagram from their discussion is unusual and requires an explanation. In almost every comment that a student made, at least two ideas were linked together. For instance, one student said: “If not regulated correctly, AI tools might lead students to abuse the technology in dishonest ways.” We interpret that comment as a link between two ideas: lack of regulation and academic dishonesty. When the three of us analyzed their whole conversation, we found 32 such ideas and 175 connections among them.

The graphic shows the 12 ideas that were most commonly mentioned and linked to others. The size of each dot reflects the number of times each idea was linked to another. The direction of the arrow indicated which factor caused or explained another.

The rest of the published article explores the content and meaning of the diagram a bit.

I am interested in the methodology that we employed here, for two reasons.

First, it’s a form of qualitative research–drawing on Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) and related methods. As such, it yields a representation of a body of text and a description of what the participants said.

Second, it’s a way for a group to co-create a shared framework for understanding any issue. The graphic doesn’t represent their agreement but rather a common space for disagreement and dialogue. As such, it resembles forms of participatory modeling (Voinov et al, 2018). These techniques can be practically useful for groups that discuss what to do.

Our method was not dramatically innovative, but we did something a bit novel by coding ideas as nodes and the relationships between pairs of ideas as links.

Source: Alexey Voinov et al, “Tools and methods in participatory modeling: Selecting the right tool for the job,” Environmental Modelling & Software, vol 19 (2018), pp. 232-255. See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT; People are not Points in Space; different kinds of social models; social education as learning to improve models

phenomenology of nostalgia

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The other day, I saw on social media that my 40th high-school reunion will happen next spring. I felt a pang. This sensation passed, and while it lasted, it offered some sweetness along with a sense of loss. I would not swallow a pill that prevented similar reactions in the future. Still, it was an interesting feeling that might tell me something about my personality or even about the nature of time and identity.

I suspect that my nostalgia reflected a mistake: a desire for something impossible (backward time-travel) or a failure to appreciate the living present sufficiently. Although I would refuse a cure, I might want to assess my response critically and direct my mind differently.

Marshawn Brewer offers a brilliant “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia” (Brewer 2023) that has influenced the following thoughts, but I’ll concentrate on exploring my own experiences and won’t try to compare my first-person account to his broader (and better informed) study.

First, I notice that nostalgia focuses me on one period from my distant past, and the rest of my life seems to vanish, in a mildly distressing fashion. When we middle-aged people think, “High school seems like yesterday!”, it feels as if there weren’t many days between then and now. This is because we cannot think about many times at once. I could make myself nostalgic about virtually any intervening year–but only one at a time. I have the momentary sensation that I’ve thrown away the intervening years; they are somehow gone.

We might assume that experiences and settings are harder to recollect the longer ago they happened, much as objects tend to be smaller and fuzzier the further they are located from our eyes. But that analogy doesn’t hold. Distant memories often come back more forcefully than recent ones. Indeed, “middle-aged and elderly people [tend] to access more personal memories from approximately 10–30 years of age” than from other times in their past (Munawar, Kuhn, and Haque 2018). From my perspective, the decades of the 30s and 40s have a disproportionate tendency to fade away.

If I pause to focus on my teenage years, a certain scene comes into my mind. The first image happens to be a meeting of the Latin Club in the cafeteria after school. This is probably a composite or partial invention, but it is based on memories. I can move from that image to innumerable others from the same period in my life, but (as Brewer notes), nostalgia quickly adopts one setting or another–a physical location that is suffused with a certain atmosphere. It would be hard to feel nostalgic without this sense of place, which connects the word to its etymology (nostos plus alpos = home-pain). Insofar as the feeling is bitter-sweet, the bitterness is a sense that one cannot go back to a place that one recalls. And if I were to return to the high school cafeteria, it would not seem to be the place that I remember.

By the way, I don’t see myself in the cafeteria; I see that room from my perspective, as if I inhabited my 17-year-old body again. I think my recollection is mostly visual, although I wonder if I am also summoning other senses. Certainly, a sound or smell can trigger nostalgia.

I was enrolled in high school for the standard four years, a brief period. However, Brewer notes that nostalgia has “an aeonic temporality” (from the word “aeon,” meaning an indefinite or very long period of time). Here Brewer cites J.G. Hart, who is worth quoting:

the time of my nostalgic past does not know a passing or fleeting character. Nostalgia is not about passing time but about eras, seasons or aeons. It is not about dates but about “times” (which in actual historical fact might have been quite long or quite short) which are enshrined in a kind of atemporal (i.e., non-fleeting) dimension : “the three days vacation with you in Wisconsin,” “our time at college,” etc. This “aeonic” character of the nostalgic world resembles the time of the mythic world. … In the nostalgic having of a non-fleeting aeon the themes of death, aging and illness are out of place (Hart 1973, pp. 406-7).

Childhood seems to have this aeonic character, perhaps in part because we gradually emerge into full awareness and the ability to use language. We cannot remember the beginning of our own childhoods. Regular events, such as birthdays, feel as if they recurred endlessly, even though we can actually celebrate no more than a dozen of our own birthdays between the onset of memory and adulthood. Parents and siblings take on an outsized and permanent or recurrent (once-upon-a-time) character. Like the gods in myths, these relatives have “back-stories” about how they came to be, but while our own story unfolds, they do not seem to change (cf. Hart, 414-15).

I write here of “we,” but I realize that experiences vary. I happen to have had a stable childhood, which would encourage my feelings of timelessness. Later, I had the opportunity to be a parent; and since then, we have watched the years when we raised our children recede–in turn–into memory. While I was a young parent, my own childhood seemed like the template or baseline reality, and I self-consciously inhabited my new role of fatherhood. At that time, my childhood seemed “aeonic,” while parenthood was a matter of specific events and changes that we adults planned or dealt with. But now that second wave of life increasingly has the same character as the first, echoing it. It is another once-upon-a-time.

Indeed, the things that I recall and miss are often my identities. At one time, I was a young guy, a novice at everything, a learner. Later, I was the dad of young kids, someone who played with Legos and read bedtime stories. I am not entitled to think of myself as either of those things anymore.

A Victorian house on a stately street,
Formal, ornate. The bell breaks the silence.
Would a gift have been wise--something to eat? 
When to shift from pleasantries to science?
A ticking clock, long rows of serious books,
China, polished wood, a distant dog barks.
Pay attention, this might have some value.
It's rude to seek help without taking advice.
Now say what you've really come for, shall you?
Then: time to go? Did our talking suffice?
Not for years now have I been the visitor.
This is my parlor and I am the grey one,
The host, the ear, the kindly inquisitor.
How can it be that it's my turn to play one?
    ("The Student," 2021)

For me, nostalgia is not really a feeling that things were better in the past. My life has tended to improve. Rather, it’s the feeling that I used to have one set of identities in one context–for instance, as a graduate student–and those are now gone.

I agree with Brewer that nostalgia involves regret for a whole situation that feels harmonious or integrated, which suggests some alienation from the present. But I can remind myself that I was mildly alienated in the past–and frequently already nostalgic in those days–and I would guess that I am more comfortable in my current identities than in my previous ones. It’s just that I can’t inhabit the old roles as well. I cannot be both the deferential but ambitious graduate student and the avuncular advisor, and I should learn to accept that reality.

We can even be nostalgic about the present. I take that to be the meaning of Basho’s lines (as translated here by Jane Hirshfield):

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

This is an example of mono no aware, that cultivated sense that the present is sublime and also transitory. It is a sad longing to experience what one is (in fact) experiencing.

Perhaps nostalgia-for-now is a desire to see the present in the simplified, comprehensive way that we recollect our own distant pasts. I feel that I know what it was like to be 17 years old: that identity comes to me in an instant. But what is it like to be me, now? I perceive a whole set of changing experiences, emotions, moods, and beliefs, and I’m not sure what they add up to. I want my “now” to resemble how I (falsely) imagine my past–as coherent. Hart writes:

Nostalgia is an instance of one of these unique moments of “gathering.” In it the dispersed projects of life find their unity …. We do not thematically have ourselves together; we are not perpetually in possession of ourselves. But there is a “synthesis in the making” and there are especial moments when I come to grasp my life more or less as a whole (Hart 1973, p. 405).

Nostalgia-for-the-present is a temptation for me, and I am not sure whether to accept (or even nurture) it or to learn to avoid it. Is it a way of appreciating the living moment, as Basho seems to? Or is it a neurotic distancing from the only thing that’s real–the now?

A final point of self-criticism: I believe that my pang of regret at the passing of 40 years is not only nostalgia for the past. At least as significant is my alarm that the future is shortening. Nostalgia looks backward, but one motivation (I believe–at least in my own case) is a desire to travel back to those times so that the end of my life would be further in the future. The ambitious graduate student has more years ahead than the kindly old mentor. To regret that difference is a kind of greediness, an unwise stinginess about time.

See: Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; K. Munawar, S.K, Kuhn, and S. Haque, “Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systematic review,” PLoS One. 2018 Dec 11;13(12); J.G. Hart, “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6, 397–420 (1973). See also: “nostalgia for now,” “there are tears of things,” “the student,” “Midlife,” “when the lotus bloomed,” “to whom it may concern,” and “echoes.”

in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”

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In a 1972 article that has been cited nearly 15,000 times, Cohen, March and Olsen wrote that “an organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

Cohen and colleagues derived their “garbage-can model” by observing a university. To illustrate it, we might imagine a professor who consistently advocates that a new position be created in a specific field. As time passes, this professor presents her proposal as a solution to many different problems. Sometimes it’s a way of meeting students’ declared needs; other times, a way of preparing them for the job market or challenging their values.

This professor drifts in and out of various conversations, sometimes serving on a key committee, sometimes absent on leave. And she is just one of a few thousand advocates for competing proposals who compose the faculty and the administration. In the institution as a whole, there is no explicit, shared understanding of what problems should be solved. People keep throwing diverse proposals into the bin, with constantly shifting rationales.

This is my hypothetical example, but I think it illustrates the formal model of Cohen et al. (which they represent with a Fortran program). They debunk the assumption that organizations are “vehicles for solving well-defined problems or structures within which conflict is resolved through bargaining.” And they conclude, “It is clear that the garbage can process does not resolve problems well.”

In his classic book from the subsequent decade, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, John W. Kingdon cites the garbage-can model and comments, “On the face of it, this looks a lot like the federal government” (Kingdon 1984, p. 85). Kingdon develops a respected model of “organized anarchy” to describe US policymaking that draws heavily on the article by Cohen et al. However Kingdon is a bit less judgmental. He notes, “messy processes have their virtues” (p. 183). I would like to explore those benefits.

One basic assumption I would offer is that programs never simply work. Schools, doctor’s appointments, rural development projects, therapy sessions–these things are either beneficial, neutral, or harmful depending on how they are implemented. Human capital is always essential–i.e., the preparation, selection, and motivation of the people involved. And these people must always attend to the specific context and the communities they serve. Therefore, we can hardly ever demonstrate in the abstract that a proposal is the solution to a problem. Instead, individuals and groups are entitled to work on making their favored initiatives beneficial. Individuals ought to be loyal to specific ideas and to the other people who support them.

The other assumption is that we often rationalize when we make arguments. When we say why we favor a decision, the reason we give is not actually the explanation of our view. We originally favored a given position for reasons that are often opaque even to ourselves, and these reasons may involve bias and self-interest. We then come up with rationales for public consumption.

However, the psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that when we listen to other people rationalize, we are decently good at assessing their arguments and sometimes open to changing our views as a result. Kingdon anticipates their point when he writes about policymaking in Washington, DC:

Even if argumentation is nothing more than rationalization, it is still important. Some events may be governed by lobbying influence or by judgments about clout at the polls, but government officials still try to reason their way through problems.

Kingdon 1984, 126.

Consistent with his account, I would posit that officials mostly “reason” by critically assessing and comparing the rationalizations that are given to them by interested parties.

If these two assumptions are correct, then it may be healthy for an organization to consist of many advocates who are loyal to their own ideas and able to change the rationales for their proposals as their audiences and circumstances shift. Other people should listen to their rationalizations and decide what to do. Those who make proposals should be held accountable for helping to implement them if their ideas are adopted.

To use an example from Kingdon, advocates of federal funds for urban mass transportation first argued that it would cut traffic, then that it would reduce pollution, and then that it would diminish US reliance on foreign oil. A transit advocate told Kingdon, “You want to do something and you ask, ‘What will work this year? What’s hot this year that I can hang this on?” (p. 173).

I know little about mass transit advocates during the period that Kingdon describes (ending in the early ’80s). Some of them may have been self-interested in the narrowest sense, e.g., paid to lobby on behalf of companies that would win contracts to build mass transit. Others may have manifested a higher form of self-interest. For example, if you love New York City, you might have a bias for mass transit, because federal funds for subways would flow to your community. Still others may have favored mass transportation for a mix of reasons, from personal experience to political ideology to loyalty to colleagues.

I don’t think the best question is why people really want what they advocate. The important question is whether the federal government should fund mass transit. Subways and buses are “solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer.” It is good to have such options.

This example comes from federal policy, but similar behavior is familiar in universities and other parts of civil society. As the winds shift, an advocate of community service may switch her rationale from democracy, to job-training, to social-emotional learning. Again, this is not bad if service projects have some merit. It should not surprise us that the same intervention may serve multiple goals. More importantly, it is not really true or false that service projects are good. They will be beneficial or harmful–for various purposes in various contexts–depending on how the people involved use them. (The same is true of mass transit, which has sometimes had catastrophic effects.) What we want are committed advocates for a range of plausible ideas, and it’s much less important what they advocate.

This means that when I look out at my own institution and others, I am reasonably tolerant of the messiness of what Cohen et al. would call the “garbage can.” A large organization should include many people who have partly incompatible underlying values and who want to do different things. There may be some value to discussing shared goals in larger forums, such as faculty meetings, but we shouldn’t hope for consensus about both means and ends. Key questions are often of this type:

  • If we did what Person A advocates, would we be able to count on that person and others to carry it forward? How much should we rely on their dedication, ethics, and skill?
  • If we decided to do what A wants, what are some immediate steps for which we already have the necessary resources, and how far would those steps take us? Do we have a prospect of finding additional support later on?
  • Since Person B is advocating something else, what can we do for B if we say yes to A? Can we simply acknowledge that B has lost out for now and thank them for their forbearance? Or do we risk losing them? Could we satisfy both A and B? (But what about C and D and E?)

In short, I’m pretty comfortable with moving from an organization-centered model, in which the goal is to “solve well-defined problems,” to a people-centered model, in which the goal is to enable individuals to advocate, act, and thereby grow in skill and wisdom.

This is a case for decentralization and against elaborate planning. I admit that I have a hard time taking strategic planning documents seriously and am much more interested in assessing the commitment and resources of various people in my environment. I have less tolerance for arguments of the form “This should be done” than for arguments that begin, “I want to be able to help us do this.”

I also tend to expect the most dynamic ideas to come from people who are directly involved in the organization’s work (e.g., professors who are currently teaching and researching, or civil servants who conduct federal programs, or indeed their students and service-recipients). I view senior leaders as people whose necessary task is to allocate scarce resources among the ideas that come before them. Leaders should consider the strength of arguments, but they should be equally concerned to attract and retain diverse talent. And, of course, leaders need to be accountable–not only for their specific decisions but also for the overall climate of the organization.

Following the line of argument from Cohen et al. to Kingdon, I have combined a university and the federal government into the same discussion. Obviously, they differ. For one thing, there are almost 3 million federal employees, whose salaries are paid by more than 300 million residents, who affect 7 billion human beings. These numbers are orders of magnitude larger than those in any educational institution. As a result, there must be much more distance between the formal decision-makers in the federal government (members of Congress and the cabinet) and frontline workers than should exist in any university. Still, Kingdon saw genuine similarities, and we might adopt similar fundamental values in both cases.

Sources: Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25; Kingdon, J W. 1984/2011. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Updated 2nd ed. Longman York, NY: HarperCollins; Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2017. See also: democracy’s sovereignty; loyalty in intellectual work (from 2017); making our models explicit; a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.