At the beginning of the Deliberative Democracy conference today, our excellent moderator said that the one factor that affects the quality of a meeting that is in our control is the degree to which we maintain focus. It’s crucial really to be in the room, not distracted by thoughts of going online or checking voicemail or planning one’s next day. I did a good job of focusing, as I will again on Friday for Day Two of the conference. However, her caution was really necessary. I’m finding it almost impossible to be fully “present,” anywhere. My days this summer are almost completely booked and scheduled, and waiting for me late at night is always a very long list of emails to answer. I don’t mind any of this work; in fact, I seek most of it voluntarily. It’s a series of interesting opportunities. It’s also coherent at a conceptual level–all of it connects to “civic renewal” in one way or another. But at a psychological level, I feel increasingly fragmented; unable to concentrate on any task because of the pressure to keep thinking about the other ones. Everyone I know has the same complaint, which suggests that the problem has sociological (or technological) roots; it’s not simply my fault for over-committing myself.

I have an opportunity to teach a special undergraduate seminar next spring. I’m not sure if I’ll accept, because it would mean doing less of something else. However, it’s fun to think about. I’m imagining that students would spend the whole semester producing background materials about k-12 education in Prince George’s County, MD. The materials would be published on a new part of the Prince George’s Commons website to accompany an online public deliberation about local education. The students would collect such useful and relevant background as:

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I think that academics are pretty alienated–especially after last November, but the problem had been building for decades. Often, scholars feel very distant from the mainstream of American culture. In the social sciences, academics tend to be well left of the American mainstream; they also carry the burden of professional expertise, since they think they know good policies (or at least good reasons and evidence), yet political leaders ignore their findings. I have often criticized social scientists for believing they possess knowledge about values and about the future, when actually public opinion is just as legitimate. See, for example, this recent post. There is a good case for more genuine dialogue between social scientists and citizens, and Craig Calhoun of the Social Science Research Council makes that argument as well as anyone.

In the humanities, the problem is a little different. Most humanists don’t believe that they could write a better budget than George W. Bush, or bring democracy to Iraq. They don’t possess technical, analytical tools that give them confidence in their practical judgments and make them critical of foolish politicians and voters. However, they do feel very alienated from mainstream public opinion. Americans tend to be religious, pro-business, culturally traditional, and nationalistic, whereas most people who choose to teach and conduct research in the humanities are secular, critical of money and markets, culturally radical, and cosmopolitan. This gap seems to explain concrete, practical problems in their lives–declining enrollments in humanities courses, less financial support for research, fewer jobs, less fulfilling relationships with students. As Julie Ellison writes in a wonderful essay entitled “The Humanities and the Public Soul” (pdf), the “pressure is felt as coercive, as sabotage of the conditions needed for imagination and reflection.”

Many of my colleagues assume that their main public role is to provide a critical alternative to mainstream culture–and to be subsidized by tax money and tuition for that purpose. It’s a deeply uncomfortable position. Artists, by the way, are in the same boat, as I have argued in an essay entitled “Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum Controversy.”

Ellison, whom I quoted above, is founding director of Imagining America, a consortium of 50 colleges and universities–including my own–that claim to be committed to “public scholarship.”

Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes

? Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;

? Intellectual work that produces a public good;

? Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;

? Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

Ellison promotes public scholarship as a way of overcoming alienation. Professors in the arts and humanities usually hold different political opinions from other citizens; they also struggle with the contrast between their critical stance and the public’s need for hope and inspiration. As Ellison notes, conducting scholarship collaboratively and in public makes these tensions between academic and public values “more pronounced. But at the same time, public scholarship can bring these tendencies into a new and more fruitful balance.” Scholars who collaborate with non-professionals can occasionally find inspiration and insight from that common work.

In another essay on the Imagining America website, Julia Lupton writes (pdf): “The crisis in the humanities–in public funding, in public interest, and in support on our own campuses–is our problem, not so much in the sense that we have caused it (there are multiple systemic factors at work), as in the sense that no one is going to fix it for us.” It’s almost always the case, no matter how unjust a situation may be, that political wisdom starts with recognizing that a problem is ours, that “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Imagining America has contributed a great deal by taking on the humanities’ problems as its own and not being satisfied with blaming philistines and reactionaries for cutting budgets. At the very least, the organization has launched projects that would be deeply satisfying to work on.

One of the most interesting developments in youth politics and culture today is the rise of trans-national youth movements. The anti-globalization protesters and the student critics of sweatshops are the best-known examples, but there are many others. Typically, they are loosely organized; they make heavy use of the Internet, cell phones, and other new technologies; and they employ civil disobedience, boycotts, mass protests, and other tactics as alternatives to voter-mobilization and lawsuits (i.e., state-oriented political actions).

Many months ago, I attended a meeting on these movements, organized by the Social Science Research Council. The SSRC now has a useful web page with the papers that we discussed that day and other resources.

I’m on my way home from Georgia, but still thinking about the conference of young media activists that I attended recently. For me, one of the most hopeful signs was their rejection of the “public-interest” model that first developed around 1970.

Thirty-five years ago, Ralph Nader, John Gardner, and their contemporaries founded a set of well-known organizations (led by Public Citizen and Common Cause) that later spawned second and third generations of similar groups. The innovations of that era also profoundly influenced established groups like the League of Women Voters and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. All these organizations cultivated the same constituency: liberal, largely White, highly educated, predominantly mainline Protestant and Jewish, and born on average around 1940.

The new “public-interest” groups introduced–and have continued to utilize–a set of political technologies: for example, computerized mailing lists that can be used to “alert” people at the grassroots and raise money for lobbyists inside the Beltway. The new groups also developed a common set of funding sources: namely, a total of maybe one million citizens who are willing and able to pay membership dues, plus grantmakers at a finite number of big foundations–many of whom came originally from the Nader-style activist groups.

These groups have developed a similar rhetorical style, which tends to depict “American citizens” as victims of wealthy corporate interests. “American citizens” are understood as a single population with a “common cause,” whose interests equal the “public interest.” Finally, these groups have overlapping goals. They seek stronger and more independent expert regulatory agencies at all levels of government; more judicial oversight of the executive branch; more political power for women and minorities; more legal protection for civic liberties; and more spending on social programs.

All of this, I believe, is now in shambles. The “public-interest” constituency is getting old and is not being replaced. The few interested foundations cannot provide sufficient money, yet they exercise too much leverage on the movement because there are not enough alternative sources of funding. The technologies of mobilization don’t work in today’s noisy environment, when everyone else is also “alerting” reporters and trying to make citizens mad. Besides, mobilizing people doesn’t sustain their interest or tap their knowledge and talent. Both the Beltway lobbyists and the people who pay their salaries are overwhelmingly White and middle class. That is not only unfair; it’s also politically damaging for a liberal movement.

Finally, and most profoundly, the goals of the public-interest movement no longer make sense–and even the participants no longer really believe in them. Regulatory agencies always get captured by special interests. In any case, expert regulation is too centralized and “top-down.” Judicial oversight is not a reliable tool for liberals if many judges use “original intent” or cost-benefit analysis to interpret the Constitution. Even if judges are liberal, the judiciary will simply become a target for populist anger unless liberal ideas have a broader constituency. Increased social spending won’t help if institutions, such as urban school systems and police departments, are profoundly flawed internally. And even when liberal elected leaders have power and are able to distribute goods, rights, and services, the results are not always so great.

For example, during the conference, we watched a sample documentary movie made by a citizens’ group and presented by Scribe.We viewed the video as an example of citizens’ media, but the substance of the film was interesting, too. According to the documentary, the city of Philadelphia has been seizing private homes in established, working-class neighborhoods so that those areas can be redeveloped according to the city plan, without consulting property-owners or communities. The video reflected just one perspective, and I’m sure the case is more complicated. Perhaps the city plan is wise; or perhaps it is a bad plan, but the city government is being manipulated by powerful corporate developers. It is also possible, however, that a Democratic administration that happens to be led by an African American insurgent mayor is using governmental power to trample individual property rights. That is hardly a paradigm case for the left. Friedrich Hayek sounds like a more relevant analyst than Karl Marx.

All this means that we need to new ways to address social injustice without necessarily relying on an activist state. And today’s young lefties, with their fluent use of new technologies, their hunt for independent funding sources, their deep embrace of diversity, and their enthusiasm for “free culture,” may be just the people to develop the new strategies we need.