Like fat roaches stopped

When the kitchen light flicks on

Jets on the tarmac

(Lisbon, Portugal) I am here for a conference on the humanities. A major question was whether they are “in crisis”–because of falling budgets and enrollments, or deep epistemological and cultural discontents, or technology and pop culture, or all of the above. My own talk was a precis of my book, Reforming the Humanities. Some highlights from the other speakers ….

In the course of his wide-ranging talk, David Damrosch interpreted several texts that happened to be hip-hop (or, in one case, “hip-pop”) videos by singers/entrepreneurs who have migrated across cultural lines, e.g., from Beirut to Paris to Montreal. In the 20th century, a particular conception prevailed of the humanities as purely textual, professional, and located within specific cultures. For example, English professors wrote sole-authored books about novels written by Anglophone authors. Even as they took opposite positions regarding interpretation and authorship, Jacques Derrida and Northrop Frye both wrote dense, unillustrated texts about other texts, for professional colleagues. The future, however, lies with mashups and multimedia and with artists and interpreters who create businesses or other organizations. That was also the case in our past. The typical condition of the arts and humanities is to mix up written text, image, and orality–and cultural products typically cross national lines. Humanists’ specific skills of interpretation and selection remain essential.

Antonio Souza Ribeira gave a penetrating talk about the role of the humanities, virtually free of jargon yet deeply informed by serious thinkers from Goethe to Habermas. My favorite quote (paraphrased): “A friend of mine, an engineering professor whom I have no reason to doubt is intelligent, said to me, ‘What a privilege to be paid to read novels!'” Prof. Souza’s argument: the role of the humanities is to challenge instrumental, means/ends rationality and the divisions among the economy, politics, and society/culture that cause people to think as this engineer does. The humanities have a “reconstructive” task, concerned with the present and the future and not merely understanding the past.

Richard Wolin gave an erudite but also passionate defense of a tradition that began with Renaissance humanism, matured with the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment, and received a full theoretical justification with Kant. This tradition (as I would summarize it) involves developing moral autonomy, good judgment, and civic skills and ethics through the close and collaborative reading of challenging texts. Part of the reason for its decline–Wolin suggested, and I agree–is that humanists themselves doubt this tradition’s value. He specifically cited post-structuralism as an attack on the tradition from within.

As we spoke, apparently the budgets of Portuguese faculties of arts and letters were under review. There is a financial crisis today even if not a philosophical one.

(Washington, DC) In March, courtesy of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), I was able to meet with White House staff to discuss strategies for public engagement and civic renewal. The meeting was informed by a fine draft paper by Brad Rourke. Brad has revised and expanded the draft to produce “An Evolving Relationship: Executive Branch Approaches to Civic Engagement and Philanthropy.” I strongly recommend it as a historical and conceptual overview of efforts–nonpartisan, even though they started with presidential administrations from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama–to enhance citizen engagement. The goal is for citizens to “do things for themselves–identifying and solving community problems, discussing and choosing between different possible solutions, making tradeoffs.” As Brad notes:

Since the 1970’s, public life has become increasingly professionalized. Scholars have noted a tendency for some government initiatives to approach citizens as if government or other institutions are doing the problem-solving, and citizens are receiving the benefits of those solutions. From this standpoint, citizens can best provide ‘input,’ and are ultimately the “customers” of institutional actions, even actions by citizens’ organizations.

However, a more citizen-centric view might be that government and other institutions best come into play in order to do those things citizens cannot do themselves.

[…]

This approach to civic engagement is nascent. At the same time that there is a new energy behind collaboration and participation, there is also new energy behind more negative social forces. Partisanship and polarization are high. Rhetoric in public life is heated. Trust in institutions (not just government) is at all-time lows, as is trust in one another. … For those who care about civic engagement and participation, this is a time that holds both potential and risk.

Rasmussen recently surveyed a national sample and found: “44% believe volunteer activities and organizations are more likely than new government programs to bring about the change needed in the United States. Thirty-seven percent (37%) take the opposite view and say that new government programs and policies will bring about the needed change. ” That result could be taken as evidence of conservatism, but there is a long tradition of grassroots centrist and even leftist activism that makes the same assumption. Michelle Obama, at least year’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service, hammered away on the theme that positive change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Brad’s paper is basically about efforts from the very top–the White House–to enable bottom-up change.

This is the fifth of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons

The Knight report does a great job of showing that healthy communities need information. Information is a “public good,” in the economist’s sense, because excluding people from its benefits is difficult and expensive once the knowledge has been produced. Generating and protecting public goods raises special challenges for which we need effective, grassroots advocacy organizations.

The main challenges facing public goods are, first, that individuals may not be motivated to produce things that benefit everyone (when instead they can “free-ride” on others’ labor), and second, that individuals, firms, and governments may be tempted to privatize public goods for their own advantage. Today, many knowledge artifacts that once would have been rivalrous can be digitized, posted online, and thereby turned into public goods. On the other hand, knowledge can be privatized and monetized, as when intellectual property is over-protected or when university-based research is influenced by corporate funding. It is also possible for knowledge to be under-produced, if there are insufficient incentives to develop it and give it away. For example, too little research is conducted on diseases that affect the poorest people in the world.

Civic knowledge–knowledge of relevance to public or community issues–does not come into existence automatically, nor is it safe from anti-social behavior. The documents in a town archive, the reporting that filled a traditional town newspaper, and the artifacts in a local museum all took money and training to produce, to catalog, and to conserve. Once produced, these goods are fragile. They can literally decay or burn, and they are subject to manipulation or inappropriate privatization.

For example, access to state court decisions in the United States is provided exclusively by private firms, mainly the West Publishing Company and LEXIS/NEXIS. The public’s interest in affordable and convenient access to public law would be undermined if these firms over-charged or provided poor quality.

In 1998, with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended most existing copyrights in the United States for 95 years. Congress thus granted monopoly ownership to works that had been created as long ago as 1903–requiring anyone who wanted to use these works to locate the copyright holder, seek permission, and pay whatever fee is demanded–and asserted a right to extend copyrights as frequently and for as long as it liked. In his dissenting opinion to the court decision that upheld this law, Justice Breyer wrote, “It threatens to interfere with efforts to preserve our Nation’s historical and cultural heritage and efforts to use that heritage, say, to educate our Nation’s children” (537 U.S. 26, 2003, 26). If Justice Breyer was correct, the Sonny Bono Act was an example of knowledge of civic value being turned from a public good into a private commodity by state power at the behest of private interests.

Given such threats, we need associations that play the following roles:

1. Advocacy. Policies to benefit the “knowledge commons” would include protection of free speech, appropriate copyright laws, public subsidies for libraries and archives, and public funds to digitize archives. Beneficial policies are public goods that often lose out to private interests that profit more tangibly from selfish policies. For example, everyone benefits from free access to historical texts, but a few companies profit much more substantially from their own copyrights. Independent, nonprofit associations can rectify this imbalance by recruiting voters, activists, and donors to promote the public interest in government. The American Library Association, for example, has been a strong advocate for knowledge as a commons.

2. Alliances. Communities across the country have information needs and valuable, accumulated public knowledge. Attacks on free information anywhere are threats to free information everywhere. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” That is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote as he and his colleagues built a civil rights movement. As a result of their work, when civil rights were viciously repressed in one location, people got on buses from other places to come and protest. We may not need bus trips, but we do need people in each community to feel that the information commons in other places matters to them as well. In practical terms, that requires networks of associations that have working ties.

3. Education, broadly defined. People do not automatically acquire an understanding and appreciation of valuable civic knowledge, nor the skills necessary to produce and conserve such knowledge. Each generation must transmit to the next the skills, motivations, and understanding necessary to preserve knowledge as a commons. Government-run public schools may have a role in this educational process, but they should not monopolize it. A more pluralistic and independent education depends on private nonprofit associations that recruit and train people to be community historians, archivists, naturalists, artists, or documentary filmmakers (among other roles).

This is the second of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs

Most people and organizations that produce, exchange, and interpret information have their own axes to grind. They have ideological or philosophical commitments as well as interests to promote–and that is perfectly appropriate. Yet we have always been better off when a few institutions declare neutrality. They volunteer for the role of promoting high-quality discussion, debate, and analysis and they try not to drive everyone to a particular conclusion.

An example was the metropolitan daily newspaper as envisioned in the Progressive Era. I realize that no newspaper was ever fully neutral, nor was neutrality ever the highest criterion of excellence. But metro dailies adopted rules and procedures that were influenced by the ideal of neutrality, such as the separation of their editorial pages from their news pages. They could be held accountable for fairness, balance, objectivity, and accuracy. And–to varying but important degrees–they did enhance public dialogue with neutral information.

But the metropolitan daily newspaper is in grim condition today. Public broadcasting stations have a similar mission–and NPR’s audience is rising fast, even as newspapers falter–but broadcasters can’t play this role alone. Nor can civic associations like the League of Women Voters; that sector is also in decline.

Universities must step up. As the folks at Community Wealth note, “Institutions of higher education have an obvious vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. They do not have the option of relocating and thus are of necessity place-based anchors. While corporations, businesses, and residents often flee from economically depressed low-income urban and suburban edge-city neighborhoods, universities remain.”

Moreover, higher education is not just any sector with $136 billion in spending and $100 billion in real estate holdings. The business of colleges and universities is the production and dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of dialogue and debate. They provide an impressive infrastructure for serving their communities’ information needs. And some are already excellent models.

• Portland State University in Oregon has chosen the motto “Let Knowledge Serve the City.” Since the early 1990s, the University has tried to align much of its teaching, research, and outreach to address specific issues in the city. A hallmark of its approach is lengthy, ambitious, multi-year projects that involve formal partnerships between several units within the university and several community-based organizations or networks and local governmental agencies.

  Over a five-year period, as part of one coherent effort to protect a watershed (composed of urban streams), numerous classes of PSU students collected environmental and social data, educated local children and developed high school curricula, created videos, facilitated public discussions of the watershed, and directly cleaned up wetlands and constructed facilities. These classes did not work alone but in close cooperation with each other and with a large array of civic organizations [Dilafruz R. Williams and Daniel O. Bernstine, “Building Capacity for Civic Engagement at Portland State University: A Comprehensive Approach,” in Maureen Kenny, ed., Learning to Serve: Promoting Civil Society through Service Learning (Volume 7 of International Series in Outreach Scholarship), Springer, 2002, pp. 261-2].

  PSU brings impressive resources to such work: 17,000 students, scholars and laboratories, purchasing power and facilities–none of which can be picked up and moved to another location. The university and the city share a fate, and the university understands that. Its commitments extend well beyond watersheds: its partnership with city schools is equally ambitious, and there are other examples. The university has encouraged its faculty to deliberate issues that arise when an educational institution addresses a city’s problems, using Study Circles as the format for these discussions. [Williams and. Bernstine, pp. 270-274.]

Certain networks exist to promote such work nationally, notably Campus Compact (an association of 1,000 college presidents who have committed to “lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education”); the American Democracy Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU); and The Democracy Imperative. Land-grant universities have an especially strong heritage of local public service and a remarkable resource in their extension offices, which exist in virtually every county in the United States.

But significant reforms would have to be achieved before colleges could provide community information hubs.

1. They would have to accept this as one of their important missions, not only in abstract statements, but as a matter of real investment. Providing timely information of local relevance and with input from neighbors trades off against other intellectual pursuits. Overwhelmingly, rewards and prestige flow to scholars whose work is original and generalizable. Communities need work that is true, relevant, and accessible. You can do some of both, but you can’t add the local work without subtracting a bit of something else. Creating community information hubs within higher education requires at least a modest shift of priorities.

2. They would need to aggregate the scattered knowledge produced by their professors, students, and staff. One of the advantages of the traditional metro daily newspaper was its format–a manageable slice of information every day, with the top news on the front page, a few hundred words of debate in the letters column, and space for the occasional in-depth feature. In contrast, a great modern university produces a flood of material for an array of audiences. Universities need to think about common web portals that accumulate and organize all their work relevant to their physical locations.

3. They would need appropriate principles and safeguards. You can do good by going forth into a community to study it, to portray it, and to stir up discussion about it. Or you can do harm. Much depends on how you relate to your fellow citizens off campus. Relationships should be respectful and characterized by learning in both directions. In this context, “research ethics” means far more than the protection of human subjects from harm; ethical research is directed to genuine community interests and needs and builds other people’s capacity for research and debate. Like faculty, students must be fully prepared to do community service well, and held accountable for their impact. One tool that has been proposed to uphold such principles is a community review board (composed of community leaders, faculty, and students), which would have to approve all projects funded as “community service.”

Most of the incentives that prevail in higher education work against becoming community information hubs (see this and this). When the incentives in a free and competitive market undermine the common good, some outside force should reward the behavior that we need. In this case, the federal and state governments and private foundations should channel some of their funds toward local information projects in higher education.