Category Archives: academia

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

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.

Civic Studies as a response to crises in American higher education

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This is a panel at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, part of a daylong conference on “The Future of the American University: Civic Education, Past and Present.” I am on the panel with Justin Dyer, the dean of the new School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, and our moderator, AEI’s Yuval Levin. I made a case for Civic Studies as a new field and then enjoyed the discussion with my two colleagues and the interesting questions from the audience.

The rest of the day was interesting and valuable and can be explored here.

on the current crisis

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Almost every day, I am in conversations about protests on US college campuses. Some of these encounters take place at Tufts (in committees or one-on-one with students and colleagues), but I have also been part of discussions at Stanford, Harvard, and Providence College, and in DC–just to mention events during April.

In decades past, I would have posted frequent reflections here. These days, I am relatively quiet. I hear the argument that people in positions like mine should speak out more. I think I disagree, for four reasons.

First, although taking positions can be appropriate, or even obligatory, it can create challenges if one wants to facilitate open discussions in settings like classrooms or if one wants to advise and help people who have divergent views. I am privileged to receive requests for advice from people with almost the full range of positions on Israel/Palestine, and my interpretation of my own professional role is that I ought to try to help them all.

Second, I often find myself wrestling with what individuals have said in various settings. Sometimes I am moved, challenged, and educated, and sometimes I am somewhat appalled. However, these tend to be confidential statements that are not suitable for public assessment.

Third, although I believe that everyone has a right to form and express opinions, there is also value in talking when you have a solid basis for your views and listening when you don’t. Restraint is especially important for people in my kind of position (as a full professor and associate dean)–people whose opinions may have more weight than they deserve. Just because I teach Civic Studies does not mean that anyone needs to listen to me about Israel/Palestine.

Fourth, there are other people who should be heard: those whose views are well-informed, complex, and challenging in various ways. I feel an obligation to find and share those voices but not to compete with them. (Just as one example: “Najwan Darwish on living in doubt.”)

For whatever it may be worth, my views on Israel/Palestine would probably align best with “What being pro-Palestine means to me / my platform” by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. He is sharply critical of both Hamas and the Israeli government. My views on campus speech and civil disobedience are libertarian, with a strong tilt toward countering speech with speech instead of banning or punishing it. (And yes, that does also apply to really nasty speech.) In thinking about movement tactics and strategy, I’d go back to Bayard Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics” (1965). I’d interpret nonviolence not as a set of restrictions (i.e., don’t cause physical harm) but as a powerful repertoire of strategies that can accomplish political goals while increasing the odds that the activists themselves will be wise. (Please join this summer’s Frontiers of Democracy conference for more discussion of that topic.) Finally, I would support efforts to promote dialogue and listening across differences, but not to the exclusion of adversarial rhetoric, which is also essential in a democracy.

The previous paragraph was something of a disclosure, and I will regret making it if it discourages people who disagree with any of it from engaging with me.