At Campus Compact’s 20th anniversary, Mary Robinson gave the keynote address. She is a distinguished lawyer, former President of Ireland, and former UN Commissioner of Human Rights. At one point, in her soft Irish accent, she read Seamus Heaney’s “The Republic of Conscience,” a poem that he has now given to Amnesty International. Read all 39 lines, but this is how it starts:

When I landed in the republic of conscience

it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man

who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare

the words of our traditional cures and charms

to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

You carried your own burden and very soon

your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

The most interesting case discussed at yesterday’s conference involved an assistant principal at a Texas high school. Some of her students had created a MySpace page that ostensibly belonged to her. They made her seem to be a lesbian and attributed various false and inflammatory opinions to her. She was truly horrified by this experience. She felt violated, and she faced tangible consequences (harassing phone calls, comments at work, etc.).

It seems pretty clear that the assistant principal has standing to sue the students in civil court for defamation. I don’t know the legal standards for defamation, nor the whole truth of the case; but civil courts are competent to decide such matters.

The trickier question is whether the school may make a disciplinary case out of such behavior.

On one hand, the students allegedly defamed a member of the school community. Although they probably made the MySpace page from their home computers, the results can be viewed in the school and may affect working conditions and discipline there. Perhaps the school should be allowed to suspend or otherwise punish the students.

On the other hand, the students exercised speech on their own time. For the school (an arm of the state) to punish speech has First Amendment implications, especially since there would be no due process. The alleged victim in the case would be able to decide that the MySpace page aimed at her was defamatory (not mere satire); and her decision could not be appealed.

I felt very sympathetic to the administrator in this case, but I’m inclined to think that public schools should not be able to punish students for acts of expression undertaken off school property. Some expression is unacceptable and even illegal, but that doesn’t mean that it’s schools’ business.

(By the way, I’m not saying that MySpace and other websites are off limits as sources of evidence of student misbehavior. If a kid posts a comment about breaking school rules, administrators are free to use that information. If you don’t want people to read or see something, don’t post it online.)

(Chicago) I’m here to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Campus Compact, a network of 1,037 colleges and universities. Campus Compact supports and encourages several crucial trends in higher education: a move from “service” to collaboration; a rediscovery of geographical communities; a reflection on colleges’ power as employers, builders, and consumers; and a turn to sophisticated research that requires learning with and from non-academics.

Institutions that embrace such work are recovering their fundamental purposes and missions, which are too often forgotten amid competition to attract the most qualified students and to generate the maximum number of peer-reviewed articles. Those measures of success are essentially pointless; what matters is whether we help our students–and the broader society–to develop through combinations of teaching, service, and research.

In the Campus Compact network, there is now an impressive array of excellent practice. Rigorous research (of which more is needed) is beginning to show the value of service-learning, community-based research, youth-media production, public deliberation, and other forms of engagement. However, such work will not endure or spread unless we can change policies regarding accreditation, tenure, promotion, and funding. Change cannot be accomplished one campus at a time, because institutions are forced to compete with one another. An important role of a network like Campus Compact is to press for reforms that change incentives for many institutions at once.

The value of Campus Compact’s work extends beyond higher education to American democracy as a whole. The formal political system has become highly efficient at manipulating people to obtain outcomes that professionals (consultants, candidates, and lobbyists) have chosen. Sometimes, the professionals’ goals are idealistic. But, as Joe Klein wrote recently, the public “has been sliced and diced by … pollsters, their prejudices and policy priorities cross-tabbed, their favorite words discovered by carefully targeted focus groups.” People know that they are being manipulated, and they resent it.

In contrast, the work that Campus Compact supports is open-ended. Organizers of community-based research or service-learning do not decide what should be done and then motivate, cajole, or manipulate students and community partners into doing it. Instead, they help students and partners make up their own minds about their goals and tactics. This approach reflects the best spirit of liberal education; it builds citizens’ capacities for self-government; and it introduces Americans to a kind of politics that they should also expect from political parties and government agencies.

In several other respects, the work that Campus Compact supports is a powerful alternative to the mainstream of modern American politics.

In general, we invest far too little in the civic education (broadly defined) of young people, even though research finds that early civic experiences have lasting effects. But Campus Compact advocates and encourages effective youth civic development.

In general, our politics is constrained by the fact that investments can quickly be moved away from communities that decide to impose regulations (or cultural norms) that businesses don’t like. But Campus Compact is a network of 1,000 important economic institutions–colleges and universities–that are rooted in their communities and that increasingly see their own interests as tied to their localities.

In general, we treat young people as baskets of problems or potential problems and rely upon surveillance, assessment, diagnosis, discipline, and treatment to stop them from acting in damaging ways. But Campus Compact embodies the alternative approach of “positive youth development,” which recognizes that young people have special assets to contribute to their communities–creativity, energy, idealism, and a fresh outlook. If they are given opportunities to contribute, they develop in healthy ways. While major recent policies (such as the No Child Left Behind Act) have very little to say about providing positive opportunities for youth, Campus Compact and its members take that responsibility on themselves.

In general, our politics is state-centered. Liberals want the government to accept new tasks, such as health insurance; whereas conservatives believe that problems would be mitigated if the state were shrunk. Governments are important, but they are not the only institutions that matter. Furthermore, a state-centered view of politics leaves citizens little to do but inform themselves and vote. Campus Compact epitomizes a citizen-centered politics in which people form relationships with peers, deliberate about their common interests, and then use a range of strategies, some having little to do with the state.

I do not believe that we should turn our current political system upside-down so that it is completely open-ended, citizen-centered, local, and oriented toward youth development. But the overall balance today is wrong, and Campus Compact is helping to restore it.

(On my way to Chicago for Campus Compact’s 20th Anniversary.) On Friday, I heard a good paper by David DeGrazia, who argued for a single-payer health insurance system. Everyone would be insured by the federal government. Healthcare providers would be private companies, but the government would be the only “payer.”

I generally favor this approach, but I asked a devil’s advocate question–just to provoke discussion–and ended by convincing myself that single-payer would pose serious risks.

What would the government pay for, and how would it set prices? If it paid too much, it would waste taxpayers’ money. If it paid too little, services would be inadequate. And if it paid for the wrong things, it would waste money and provide bad services.

The procedural answer is that the government would negotiate with representatives of physicians, nurses, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies to set prices. In principle, the government would represent us, the people, and would set prices in the public interest. But no government represents “the people” in an unproblematic way. Campaign contributions, professional lobbying efforts, differences in seniority among legislators, gaps in voter participation by class, asymmetries in information, differences between swing districts and safe seats, clashes between local and national interests, incumbents’ advantages, organized interests versus general interests, threats to withdraw capital, human ties between lobbyists and officials, prospects of corporate jobs for former public servants–all these factors distort decisions by democratic governments.

Thus I can easily imagine that negotiations between Big Government and Big Medicine would produce excessive payments and bad priorities. Huge hospitals would be built in favored congressional districts, but there would be inadequate preventive care for weak political constituencies, such as the urban poor. Health care would be like defense–lavishly funded, but with striking gaps. Just as we have stealth bombers but not enough body-armor, so we’d have sweetheart deals for Eli Lilly and Co but not enough pediatricians in poor neighborhoods.

This nightmare scenario has not beset Medicare, which is a single-payer system for those over 65. But Medicare sets prices based on market signals. If there were one “payer” for all medicine, there would be no market. Besides, the new Medicare drug benefit is a nightmare.

Probably single-payer wouldn’t be worse than the status quo. We spend more in taxes on health care than the Germans or the French do, yet we must also buy private insurance; and so many people are left uncovered that our health outcomes are poor. All that is true, yet I can easily imagine single-payer evolving into a giant duopoly (government plus medicine) that worked only for those interests. Any advantages over the status quo would be modest, at best.

Since “civic engagement” is my hobby-horse, I’m tempted to say that we need single-payer health care along with a more participatory democracy. Higher turnout, more competitive districts, better informed voters, a revived watchdog press, and procedural innovations such as Citizen’s Juries or Deliberative Polls would help. (Citizens would be randomly selected to set priorities after deliberating.) Maybe community groups could build clinics and hospitals that would enter the negotiations representing genuine grassroots interests.

But civic engagement is quite weak in the United States, and strengthening it is a hard struggle. We democrats can’t “assume” better public participation any more than economists can assume perfect information or efficient markets. Assigning a huge new responsibility to the public sector might stimulate democratic participation. Or it might overwhelm the public’s capacity for self-government, given the civic institutions and habits we have today.