Category Archives: academia

in North Carolina to promote civic renewal

mapping the civic movement in higher education

Last week, at a conference of scholars interested in the civic mission of colleges and universities, I offered some general remarks about how academia can help strengthen democracy. I said something like this:

Although it’s a complex story, we do not live in a good era for democratic government in the US. Whether measured by levels of participation, citizens’ satisfaction with the political system (broadly defined), gaps in engagement and power by social class, the actual performance of public institutions, or norms of public reason and civility–most of the trends do not look good.

But we do live in an era marked by three potentially exciting developments that are relevant to the conference.

First, the last 30 years have seen interesting and important developments in democratic theory, broadly defined. Civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, communitarianism, sophisticated new versions of populism, and cosmopolitanism are some of the intellectual movements that have real momentum.

I am particularly interested in intellectual movements that are related to practical experiments. I entered this broad field 25 years ago by studying the deliberative democratic philosophy of Jürgen Habermas in a sophomore seminar and then spending a summer at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH. Kettering was then organizing the deliberative events that are still known as National Issues Forums. I am not sure whether Habermas is personally all that interested in such practical experiments, but the next generation of deliberation scholars definitely is interested, and the exchanges between practice and experience have been fruitful.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize one particular stream of democratic theory that is exemplary, that has influenced several of us at the conference, and that deserves recognition today because we recently lost its founders, Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, in rapid succession. Lin Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for revealing how, when, and why groups of people overcome collective action problems to manage common resources. A definition of good citizenship is implicit in her theory: the good citizen is a person who co-manages the commons. That ideal contrasts at least slightly with some other worthy definitions, such as the citizen as an altruistic volunteer, a judicious decision-maker, a or fighter for justice.

Because Lin found that people regularly succeed as good citizens, but only under certain conditions, her theory had profound implications for public policy, for education, and for the strategies of reformers and activists. For her whole life, she was engaged in dialogues and collaborations with all those kinds of people, in her classroom, in Bloomington (where she and Vincent lived), in Indianapolis, in settings around the world, and online–she helped to explain the structure of cyberspace. And yet I would basically want to honor her as a contributor to the intellectual renaissance of democratic thought.

A second stream of work also begins in academia, but it takes higher education itself as the main site of reform. The presenting complaints are: students and professors have lost a sense of mission and calling; they are not learning all that well or flourishing as people; and they are harmfully disconnected from their peers within academia and (even more so) from the broader society. This conversation took roughly its modern shape during the 1980s and has since spawned a whole range of influential practices. For instance, when students collaborate with community-based organizations that have ongoing partnerships with colleges, the theory goes, they can benefit intellectually and psychologically while contributing to the public good. But that requires engaged scholars, robust community partnerships, appropriate pedagogy, etc.–all of which we have been busily developing for the past thirty years.

The third stream is democratic renewal and innovation that emerges from outside academia. I have already mentioned deliberative democracy, which, in practical terms, means recruiting citizens to talk about public issues. That is a large-scale enterprise now. The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation has more than 2,000 individual members who are interested enough in organizing and facilitating public discussions (often linked to local action) that they subscribe to the NCDD mailing list, which is full of practical suggestions.

I also already mentioned the idea of citizens managing common resources. In the robust field of civic environmentalism, people are busy doing that, often applying concepts directly from Ostrom. Just to mention one example, the River Network has formal partnerships with 600 local nonprofits that are involved in managing watersheds. America’s 4,600 community development corporations have financed and built 86,000 housing units. (I don’t want to bury you in statistics but merely suggest that these democratic reform efforts are serious business.) The American Libraries Association is a different example of an organization that thinks of itself as the guardian of a commons–in this case, a “knowledge commons.”

Another thread in the tapestry is contributed by broad-based community organizing, which often has a deliberative aspect (participants talk and decide on strategies and goals), but certainly differs from pure deliberation in its emphasis on action–including “Direct Action” events. The Industrial Areas Foundation has 47 regional affiliates now, most of them capable of drawing 2,000 people to a given event.

Innovations that originate within government and as the result of public policy also deserve mention. Just to name one type, Federally Qualified Health Centers provide health services at the local level. By law, they must have governing boards of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves. They employ 123,000 full-time staff and may have, by my estimate, 120,000 citizen board members.

I could go on. In fact, a book of mine coming out this summer is substantially devoted to mapping the whole field of civic renewal and providing some theoretical underpinning. Maybe it can suffice for this evening to say that there is a lot of civic innovation outside of academia, and I estimate that at least 1 million Americans are actively involved.

By the way, my list of organizations and my count of the civically engaged Americans both depend on what qualifies as authentic “civic engagement.” That is (and ought to be) a contested question, related to fundamental debates about what makes a good society and a good human life. I won’t defend my whole philosophical position here, except to say that the efforts that impress me most always have three dimensions. They are deliberative, involving talking and listening about public issues. They are collaborative, involving actual work that yields public goods or helps build the commonwealth. And they improve civic relationships, which are relationships characterized by mutual respect, appropriate power dynamics, and such civic virtues as loyalty and hope.

Having identified three major streams (intellectual movements, reforms in academia, and civic renewal efforts outside of higher education), my next obvious move is to argue that they must flow together. That’s built into the cliché of “streams.” It’s always easy to say that several important things are going on and now it’s time to combine them. The hard part is actually doing bringing them together. But more than usual, we need combinations of intellectual work and practical experimentation–within and beyond academia–because our students lack compelling political movements that would give their activism shape and purpose. Fortunately, these streams do come together in all kinds of interesting and fruitful experiments that may ultimately produce the political movements we need.

decoding the college tuition sticker price

coming of age politically in different historical moments

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At a fine panel on “The Civic Mission of Higher Education” last week, the panelists basically said:

We should care about college students as whole people, considering their emotional and social well-being as well as their academic success. Engaging with communities benefits students holistically.
Students should not only seek fulfilling and educational experiences, but also fight for justice even if that has costs for themselves. They must ask the really difficult and troubling questions.
Graduate students and others heading for scholarly or intellectual careers face a terrible shortage of traditional jobs, but there are openings for more engaged intellectuals.

All that is true, but putting the three parts together is very difficult. In fact, I doubt that anyone can do it alone–asking profound and troubling questions, taking effective action, finding a relevant career path or calling, and obtaining personal satisfaction and fulfillment along the way. You can do all of that if you belong to a thriving political or social movement, but not if such movements are missing.

In other words, we cannot merely encourage students to ask and explore questions. They must also have a menu of available answers. Meaningful answers are more than ideas or theories. They consist of ideals plus strategies, current leaders and role-models, agendas, institutions, jobs, cultural expressions, and vocabularies, all wrapped up together.

For instance, if you went to Washington with FDR in 1932 or JFK in 1960, you thought you were building something new and great. You had ideas, leaders, agendas, and institutions all ready to embrace you. You could engage in debates within those movements, but you had a structure. In 2008 and 2012, young people voted for the candidate who supported the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, Barack Obama. But very few young people felt called to Washington to work for the federal administrative state. Its heroes are dead, its ideals are fulfilled or compromised, its vocations seem routine.

If you went to Washington with Reagan and the resurgent conservatives of 1980, you also had an agenda, ideals, theories, strategies, and living heroes. My sense is that the conservative movement does not provide any of that for young people today.

A subtle case is the Civil Rights Movement. In Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam shows that the 1,000 young white college volunteers who went to Mississippi in 1963 did not (for the most part) benefit personally from that experience. They tended to struggle with jobs, relationships, and psychological issues later in life. The Civil Rights Movement was certainly a structure that developed leaders. But for that purpose, it worked better in 1955 than in 1963. By the early 1960s, it was beginning to splinter, its dynamic and vibrant debates turning divisive and caustic. Also, an argument had broken out about whether white middle-class leaders has a place in the movement. I think the critics had a point, but for young white volunteers, the argument was pretty alienating. Most moved to the anti-War or Women’s movements, but the transition was tough.

Higher education cannot build social and political movements. Movement-building cannot be an objective of our institutions, which must be more neutral and deliberative than that. But we must reckon with the political and intellectual context in which we work. If our young people lack a choice of vibrant political movements, that will make our educational mission much harder.

religious freedom and non-discrimination at a private university

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What should a university do when a religious student group applies internal rules that are discriminatory? For example, theologically conservative Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and Muslim groups may want to discriminate against gay students or may maintain that clerical roles are only open to men and expect their lay student leaders to endorse those views.

Tufts seeks to protect members of religious groups, women, and gay students against discrimination. When religious associations discriminate, that creates a dilemma. Indeed, the Tufts student government recently withdrew recognition from the Tufts Christian Fellowship on the grounds of discrimination against gays. On appeal, the Committee on Student Life (predominantly professors) ruled that the student government had enforced existing policy appropriately, but that the rules should be changed to accommodate religious freedom. The resulting decision deserves to be read in full, because it is fairly subtle and complex. In summary, it has these features:

(1) It distinguishes between membership and leadership. Tufts Hillel is required to admit Catholic members, but it could (in theory) choose to reserve its officer roles for observant Jews.

(2) It requires religious groups to state explicitly that they dissent from aspects of Tufts non-discrimination policy. For example, if they discriminate against gays, they have to say so. That may harm their overall reputation, but it’s fair enough because they should be accountable for their views. By the way, this policy opens a valuable opportunity to discuss what counts as discrimination. The Tufts Christian Fellowship requires chastity, presumably for all students regardless of sexual orientation. But it is discriminatory if straight students can hold hands when gay students cannot. The transparency policy requires them to make those judgments publicly and to pay the price in public opinion.

(3) It permits discriminatory policies within religious groups only if they are consistent with “doctrine”; and the chaplain’s office must review whether a doctrine really supports any given discrimination. It will be interesting to see how the professionals in the chaplain’s office make those judgments. One consequence will be to put a whole denomination in the hot seat if its representatives on campus assert that its doctrine is in conflict with Tufts anti-discrimination policy.

(4) It encourages pluralism. Tufts has a non-duplication policy: the university won’t recognize, for example, two evangelical Protestant student groups unless they differ in some meaningful way. Given the transparency policy, it is now possible for evangelicals who are pro-equality to create a rival group to the one that has taken a discriminatory stance.

I don’t believe that a university is simply a free speech zone that must give equal recognition and support to all views just because they are freely expressed. A university is primarily in the business of favoring excellent speech and disfavoring bad speech. Some religious speech that is discriminatory should be disfavored. For instance, many denominations were at one time openly racist. If they stuck to those views, a private university would be right to deny them official certification.

So why is it OK to express discriminatory positions about gays and women? I don’t think this is morally acceptable, but the question is what to do about it when the world’s biggest faiths remain widely committed to such discrimination. If a predominantly secular university like Tufts responds by decertifying religious groups that follow their own mainstream doctrines, then I think we will lose religious students and the opportunity to interact with them. The purpose of many religious student associations is to convince and persuade–to make converts or at least strengthen the faith of their own adherents. But conversion runs two ways. If religious students study at a place like Tufts, they are likely to liberalize their views of homosexuality and gender roles. If we chase them away, we lose that opportunity.

Overall, I think the new policy is sophisticated and wise. That’s easy for me to say as a straight man. No one is adopting formal positions that disparage my identity. So I recognize that I may be too tolerant of intolerance against other people. But I think the argument for deliberative accountability and pluralism is pretty strong, and it has the best chance of producing more equitable views in the long run.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal