Category Archives: academia

the lack of diversity in philosophy is blocking its progress

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I’m on vacation this week and most of next, so I’m not blogging. However, a piece of mine has just appeared in Aeon, entitled “The lack of diversity in philosophy is blocking its progress.” It begins:

Philosophy is a remarkably un-diverse discipline. Compared with other scholars who read, interpret and assign texts, philosophers in the United States typically choose a much higher percentage of their sources (often, 100 per cent) from Europe and countries settled by Europeans. Philosophy teachers, too, look homogeneous: 86 per cent of new PhD researchers in philosophy are white, and 72 per cent are male. In the whole country, only about 30 African-American women work as philosophy professors.

being a friend to a project

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The other day, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we were reading a long review article about Positive Youth Development (PYD). PYD can be described as a set of empirical hypotheses with supportive evidence (e.g., that youth flourish best when given opportunities to contribute to their communities). Alternatively, it could be defined as a set of value propositions that may or may not be empirical (e.g., youth have a right to contribute to their communities). It can also be described as a set of programs for young people. Those programs exist because of funding streams and other policies that can be categorized as PYD as well. And it’s a community of people–scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and maybe youth–who are involved with PYD.

Presented with an article, you can read it, learn from it, agree with it, criticize it, assess it, share it, cite it, even assign it. But you can’t be a friend of the article. It exists in its final form and can’t be influenced. It can have fans, but not friends in a recognizable sense of that word.

You can be a friend of something like PYD, assuming that it is a community of people or set of programs. Such a friendship can incorporate criticism–or even require it. For instance, I think PYD should be more political. Youth should have more opportunities to change official systems. I can say that as a friend of PYD, even as part of the PYD community. My friendship is predicated on a decision that PYD has potential, that it is worth engaging. My friendship does not depend on my assent to any particular list of hypotheses or principles, nor my endorsement of any particular program.

I say all of this for two reasons. First, academics learn how to relate to texts as critical readers. We are also supposed to learn how to relate to other scholars as people. But we learn less about how to be friends of communities or movements. Some of us are good friends (in that sense), but it’s not really part of our training.

Second, I think the relationship between empirical hypotheses and actually existing movements is widely misunderstood. It turns out to be true that many youth flourish when offered certain kinds of opportunities to contribute to their communities. That claim of PYD is true because a community of practitioners set about to create such opportunities and made them work. The knowledge that we have gleaned through research on PYD is a product of their efforts. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is subjective or relative. Some programs succeed, others fail, and we can measure the difference. But no program succeeds without being designed and implemented, which requires a prior commitment by some organized group.

The knowledge contained in an article about PYD is thus dependent on people’s work in the world. You can’t be a friend of the article, but you can be a friend of the people upon whom it depends. If the article contains a mistake, you should notice that. If the programs fail to work, you can help them to work better. A community can falter, splinter, or go in the wrong direction, but it can’t be invalidated. That means that a critical response to a publication is disagreement, but a critical response to a movement is action.

the most educated Americans are liberal but not egalitarian (2)

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On Friday, I argued that the most educated Americans may be the most “liberal,” but liberalism is being defined by a whole set of opinions that cover cultural and international issues as well as economic policies. The most educated Americans are the people with the greatest economic advantages, and they are less economically egalitarian than other people, not more so.

This means that we do not have a “What’s the Matter with Kansas”-style situation, in which the least advantaged have forgotten their own interests, nor a situation in which tenured radicals are turning bourgeois students into socialists. Rather, we have a very standard situation in which the most advantaged people are the least enthusiastic about equality. They just qualify as “liberal” because of opinions on other matters.

Here is an additional graph using 2012 American National Election Study data. The question is “Do you agree strongly that society should make sure everyone has equal opportunity?” I show all the breakdowns for education, race, and ideology that have sufficient samples, in descending order of egalitarianism.
inequality3
The general pattern is that you’re less likely to support equal opportunity if you’re White, college-educated, or conservative. Individuals in all three categories are the least supportive of all. But note than less than half of liberals who are White and have college degrees strongly favor equality of opportunity.

I also looked at the pattern by age, prompted in part by the phenomenon of young White college students who feel the Bern. But it’s important not to confuse 2 million young Sanders voters with their whole generation. Below are the percentages of all Americans–and Americans who hold college degrees–who strongly favor equality of opportunity, by age. The sample sizes for each point are between 38 and 96 (i.e., smallish), so I wouldn’t pay attention to the specific zigs and zags. The overall pattern is that young adults are more enthusiastic about equality than those in their 20s and 30s, but college grads are less so than their contemporaries, and their elders (50+) are more concerned than they are.
inequality4

college application Bingo

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We spent last week visiting prospective colleges with my daughter, which is why I was offline. The information sessions and tours are very well done but they do tend to blur because of institutional isomorphism. If you’re getting sleepy on your umpteenth tour, try playing this Bingo game:

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An admissions officer who wanted to command our attention could try saying this instead …

“We have simplified our admissions criteria to two numbers: your combined SAT score and your family’s net worth. If the multiple of those figures exceeds 16 billion, you are in. If it is between 160 million and 16 billion, you’re on the wait list, and we will work our way down until the budget is balanced. Below that, we’ll bank your application fee.

“Because we use these two very different metrics, we admit a diverse student body. Some students are rich but not too bright. Others have awesome standardized test scores but are merely middle class. Once they enroll, these two groups are completely isolated and mutually disdainful. We’d love to find some students who could bridge our two subcultures and promote interaction, but we can’t seem to get any rich geniuses to attend.

“You pay up front for each semester, so it’s in our interest for you to drop out. Most courses are vast lectures with arbitrarily difficult exams meant to weed out the untalented or the merely unfortunate. Since a small number of oppressed junior professors teach huge numbers of students, the rest of the faculty is free to wander around at will.

“Majors are assigned randomly on the first day of freshman year, and all credits must be in the major. Students are encouraged to study abroad, at other US colleges, or indeed anywhere they like, as long as they continue to pay our tuition in full, on time, and in cash. Extensive information about our loan program, interest rates, late fees, and penalties are contained in the prospectus, pp. 1-73.

“You may find that you learn and grow the most by exchanging ideas with your peers in informal settings. Go for it. We don’t really need to hear about it.

“We care about our host community. You can find out the name of it from Google Maps. The townies live on the other side of that barbed wire perimeter.

“Choosing a college is a very personal matter, as each student is utterly unique and unprecedentedly wonderful. For our faculty and administrators, however, you are basically an undifferentiated mass. You pay us and leave us alone; we don’t bother you. It’s all part of our extremely special and deeply considered educational philosophy, which has sustained us for 375 years and made our brand the envy of the world. Thanks so much and please leave your tips in the dish on your way out.”

why we need theory for social change

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Margaret A. Post, Elaine Ward, Nicholas V. Longo, and John Saltmarsh have edited the new volume, Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next-Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education. It’s a great anthology that describes 30 years of work reconnecting higher education to communities and proposes exciting futures for that movement. It highlights the work of a new generation of engaged scholars who are more diverse and in many ways more sophisticated and effective than their predecessors.

I wrote an Afterword entitled “Practice & Theory in the Service of Social Change.” Since many of the chapters by younger scholars are autobiographical, I allowed myself to reflect on my own experience as well.

When I was an undergraduate, I chanced upon a set of early discussions and experiments that helped create the current movement for engaged scholarship. I got to join a Wingspread meeting about national and community service that helped build momentum for George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light initiative and then AmeriCorps under Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, back on campus, my student colleagues and I started a program that provided paid summer service internships for students who agreed to present their work to the local alumni clubs. …

Thanks to my role in student government, the clerical and technical workers’ union asked me to sit at the table in a series of round-the-clock negotiations with the university that narrowly averted a strike. The university’s lawyers studiously ignored my presence because they took the position that there were just two parties in a contractual dispute; questions of public impact and justification were irrelevant, and therefore no representatives of the community had a right to attend. …

Also during my undergraduate years, I encountered deliberative democracy in a seminar on Habermas and during an internship at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH, which was then experimenting with practical deliberative democracy in the form of National Issues Forums.

That was 25-30 years ago, and in many ways, I am still in the same milieu–now a Trustee of Kettering and an Associate Dean of a college that promotes and studies service and civic engagement.

In the “Afterword,” I argue that the movement began as a result of deep and searching questions about the democracy and society as a whole. Some participants were motivated by the Habermasian argument that civil society is a space for the reasonable discourse that should generate public opinion, but it was being “colonized” by the market and bureaucratic states. Some thought more in the spirit of Habits of the Heart (1985) and believed that US society was becoming too atomized. Still others were involved in the debate about neoliberalism and the declining welfare state, either welcoming volunteerism as an alternative or seeing students’ civic engagement as a form of resistance to the market.

So the movement began with a rich and vital discussion of how to change America, which turned into concrete activities like service-learning and deliberative democracy as potential tools or tactics. The subsequent decades have brought much experimentation with those activities, as well as burgeoning research about them: do they work, why, and for whom? But I don’t think we are any clearer about how to change America–and the strategies that seemed to make sense in 1985 may now be obsolete.

In the “Afterword,” I acknowledge the value of the “emotions,” “embodied experiences,” and “personal narratives.” Yet, I argue,

we do face problems that can be posed in abstract and general terms. And I believe that to some degree, our experiences from service-learning, community-based participatory research, and campus/community partnerships have outrun our theories. Put more forcefully: we will be unable to address profound social problems until we strengthen our theoretical understanding of society, and that will come from books, data, and seminar rooms as well as from action in communities. …

This book has a generational focus and looks to younger scholars for new models and solutions. Those scholars will (and should) base many of their ideas on personal experience and identity. Their relatively diverse backgrounds and their relatively deep experience with engagement are assets. Yet I would also look to the next generation for groundbreaking theory, some of it highly abstract and challenging. The theories that are already embedded in their narratives must emerge; they may also need to develop new theoretical insights. We need theories not only about civic engagement, but also about how society works and what causes it to change for the better. Almost every successful social movement I can think of from the past has developed new bodies of such theory. The theories of gender that accompanied Second Wave Feminism or the range of theological and political philosophies that emerged because of the Civil Rights Movement are essential historical examples. I would expect nothing less from The Next Generation of Engagement.