Category Archives: civic theory

the university between a club good and the commons

The late Elinor Ostrom taught us many useful things, including how to analyze complex situations rigorously to reveal ways to improve them. Instead of reacting to the world with anger and confusion, someone who has learned from Ostrom can break down a problem and look for remedies.

I am teaching her work this week to undergraduates, and separately discussing the application of her framework to energy policy with colleagues in engineering. If you happen to want a primer to Ostrom, I have recorded lectures about her basic ideas (Part I, 17 minutes) and their application (Part II , 1 minutes).

To develop the mental habit of analysis, our students and I considered Ostrom’s framework for goods (things of value to anyone). We used her framework to model the situation in which we found ourselves, a classroom at Tufts University.

As shown in the graphic that accompanies this post, Ostrom divided all goods in two ways. Some goods are subtractable, meaning that they can be used up or ruined. But others are not. And some are excludable, meaning that it is possible to prevent individuals from using them. But again, others are not. These two distinctions create four categories.

In a college classroom, the private goods include the students’ property, such as their phones (neatly out of sight in our case) and their clothes. One student pointed out that a chair in the classroom, although legally the property of Tufts, functions as a private good during class because of an effective norm that you can’t take someone’s chair away.

Knowledge can be a pure public good. If I explain Ostrom’s theories, that doesn’t subtract or detract from them. And it is hard to block people from learning about her thought once it’s published.

Tufts is a club good, meaning that students benefit by virtue of being admitted to it. Other students do not detract from the benefits of enrolling, except that a very large student body would begin to dilute the “brand.” Yet it is easy to exclude individuals through the admissions process. I suppose that a diploma is a private good, as are the credits that add up to a degree. But the value of a degree depends on its indicating a club good that is owned by all alumni.

Finally, the learning environment is what Ostrom called a “common pool resource” or “commons,” for short. It is subtractable in the sense that a student (or a professor) can make it worse by acting badly or even by taking space in a classroom without contributing much. However, the learning environment is not very excludable, because it will benefit everyone who is present and wants to take advantage of it.

For me, the interesting question in an institution like mine is the relationship between the commons and the club goods.

Our business model depends on selling a club good. This is not true in other countries with different educational systems, or at least it is less important there. But institutions like Tufts cannot survive financially without charging people to join an exclusive club.

Perhaps it is good for the world that American colleges and universities provide club goods by selecting and labeling their students. For one thing, many people appreciate the club that is their own alma mater. And arguably, the sorting function sends useful signals, transmitting information about people who have graduated from Chicago or Oberlin or Vanderbilt. However, on the whole, I think the competition to generate club goods does harm. It sorts and separates young people, reinforces prior inequalities, and allows colleges to compete for exclusivity instead of offering educational value.

An institution’s value (in the more idealistic sense of that word) involves the commons that we create in which our people learn, grow, and form a community.

Thus we can measure our excellence by the degree to which we leverage our club goods for the commons, or (put another way) how we minimize the exclusivity of our club while maximizing the common-pool resource that we create here.

The cynical take on US higher education says that it maximizes its club goods and uses the commons (i.e., the learning environment) mostly for branding. Frank Bruni satirized that situation in a memorable 2016 piece in which he imagined that Stanford had finally reached the ultimate success, a zero percent admission rate. He wrote:

At first blush, Stanford’s decision would seem to jeopardize its fund-raising. … But over recent years, Stanford administrators noticed that as the school rejected more and more comers, it received bigger and bigger donations, its endowment rising in tandem with its exclusivity, its luster a magnet for Silicon Valley lucre.

In fact just 12 hours after the university’s rejection of all comers, an alumnus stepped forward with a financial gift prodigious enough for Stanford to begin construction on its long-planned Center for Social Justice, a first-ever collaboration of Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava, who also designed the pedestrian bridge that will connect it to the student napping meadows.

But real universities (including Stanford) actually create learning environments for those who get in; they don’t merely issue diplomas to those whom they admit.

A university also generates important pure public goods, new knowledge and culture that disseminate globally. And it can even offer worthwhile private goods, like t-shirts and dorm rooms. But I would focus on the degree to which an institution deploys the resources from its club goods to provide common-pool resources. The more of that, the better.

do the liberal arts accomplish civic education?

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Next weekend, I’ll participate in a discussion at a famous liberal arts college about the various crises facing such institutions.

All the other participants will be liberal arts college professors. Although my institution is a research university, the intersection of the liberal arts and civic learning also matters to me.

First, the crises that confront the liberal arts (from the cost of college to the rise of AI; from Donald Trump to cultural challenges within the academy) also threaten the parts of a university where I work.

Second, we face an important conceptual question whenever we try, at universities like mine and many others that I visit (and in k-12 education) to strengthen civic learning. Are the liberal arts automatically “civic”? In other words, is saving the liberal arts a way to accomplish “education for citizenship” (which will be the title of my talk next weekend)? In practical terms, can we say that a student who has a good basis in the liberal arts is also educated for citizenship? Or is there a distinction between civic and liberal education?

In short, my answer would be that the liberal arts provide education for a good individual life. But the specific question for citizens is how to do good things together. Citizens need collective agency.

Most or perhaps all of the liberal arts are useful for collective agency. A group of people concerned with the condition of their community can benefit from understanding economics, the carbon cycle, liberalism and its critics, and the origins of their language, to name just four examples. However, a mass of such knowledge may not sufficiently inform them about how to act well together. They also need the Tocquevillian art and science of association, the “mother science” in a democracy.

We can learn how to associate effectively and wisely from experience. If one grows up amid functioning voluntary associations and participatory democratic institutions, one may learn how to make them work well without having to study that topic extensively. However, most modern Americans lack such opportunities.

Besides, since the challenges of forming and sustaining effective groups have grown and changed in the 21st century, accumulated experience may not suffice. Civic education requires the explicit study of collective agency, often based on texts.

Note that the scale of collective action ranges from pairs of collaborators to the whole human species. A nation is one “we” among many others.

The precise topics of civic education may vary depending on students’ interests and needs. However, as illustrative examples, it can be very useful to understand how the grassroots leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement formed effective nonviolent organizations, or how a 21st century nonprofit should develop a strategic plan, or how to analyze an argument about values, or how to collect relevant environmental data, or (indeed) what James Madison advises about the problem of factionalism in Federalist #10.

These are classic topics in the liberal arts, likely offered in departments from history and biology to philosophy. What matters is the spirit and purpose of the inquiry, which must involve collective agency. The primary question is not how things work, or how things should be, or what someone thought, but what we (a group to which a person belongs) should do.

Both pedagogy and content are relevant. To learn to govern things together, it is valuable to practice discussing and writing about texts and data. These are forms of pedagogy. But it is also valuable to understand the difference between a labor union and a corporation–that is content, which can be conveyed in a lecture. Both matter.

Three quick historical illustrations may help to convey this ideal.

The earliest attested use of the phrase “liberal arts” occurs in an early and minor work by Cicero, De Inventione (1.35). He is not discussing the liberal arts. The phrase occurs in a long list of ways that people differ. A person can be male or female, strong or weak, Greek or barbarian. (I would like to ask a classicist whether Cicero, a Roman writing in Latin, considered himself a barbarian on account of his country or a Greek because of his education.) A man’s character also depends on “who he had as teachers of the liberal arts” and “who has instructed him in living.”

This brief mention is hardly a theory of the liberal arts. However, Cicero opens the book with this problem: wisdom is moot without eloquence (no one will act wisely unless persuaded), yet eloquence is morally neutral and can be used for evil. His stated objective is to serve “our republic” by uniting wisdom with eloquence. In that context, the liberal arts appear, along with moral exhortation, as ways of making men lead good lives–men who are not only individuals but also citizens of a republic.

Now compare the image of Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts by the remarkable woman Herrad of Landsberg (ca. 1185), which accompanies this post. Here Philosophy is the Queen. Philosophy says that the liberal arts flow from her as seven streams of wisdom, and she gets her wisdom from God. At the bottom of the picture are four bad men (listening to black birds instead of Philosophy) who violate the liberal arts. One of those is a Magician, and another is a Poet, consigned to the bottom because he makes up false stories.

Herrad may have been an exemplary participant and leader of a group–the abbey whose nuns elected her as their abbess in 1167. Nevertheless, her conception of intellectual life is religious as opposed to republican. For her, knowledge is abstract and divine, discovered not created by people. Education leads one up and out of human affairs.

Finally, Hannah Arendt aimed to recover the republican ideals that animated the young Cicero but for modern times. In 1958, she wrote:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.(The Human Condition, p. 4).

Herrad of Landsberg’s truths are definitely beyond speech and relevant to the individual soul, because they are truths about God. But I think the ordinary modern liberal arts also pursue truths beyond “speech” (in Arendt’s idiosyncratic terminology). For example, pure mathematics belongs to the liberal arts. One might think that any science which relies on impersonal methods pursues truths without intrinsically requiring “speech,” and its truths can matter to people. But the liberal arts also involve truths that we make together by talking and acting. That is where the liberal arts and civic education intersect.

How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?

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You might think that the USA must change deeply over the next decade, which will unfold 250 years after the decade in which our republic originally took shape and will include the first eight years after the Trump Administration.

You might also think that this change should be “civic.” Perhaps we need reforms to make our republic and society more civic, or we should change our economy, environment, and other aspects of our world in civic ways–or both.

To advance this conversation, we need sharper definitions of the word “civic” and concrete ideas about what civic reforms should look like in the late 2020s and 2030s.

One of the best places to look is the new special issue of Daedalus entitled “How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?” It grew out of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship and is edited by Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu. It is entirely open-access. I have not yet read every article, but all the contributors are excellent, and the topics are compelling, ranging from congressional reform to high school civic education, from local journalism to tech. platforms.

I offer the concluding contribution, entitled “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture.” The abstract says:

Americans must disagree better to sustain a healthier civic culture. This is not only a matter of individual behavior and values but also a question of institutional design. An example of an institution that generally supported disagreement, conversation, and collaboration in the twentieth century was the metropolitan daily newspaper, but its business model has collapsed. To recover civic culture, we need business models (defined broadly) for new institutions that can enable discussion and self-governance.

In the article, I actually argue that disagreeing well is insufficient. We must also produce and protect common-pool resources. For me, that combination comes close to defining the word “civic.”

To quote a bit more from my piece:

I think the main challenge of our moment is to develop civic organizations that can flourish and grow, teach civic skills and values, and serve as venues for constructive disagreement. The “upswing” that furnishes the title of the book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, … was an impressive period of innovation and expansion in U.S. civil society from 1900 to 1960.6 If we saw a similar civic renaissance today, not only would more people participate in familiar groups that discuss issues and manage common-pool resources (such as congregations and other traditional associations) but new forms would emerge to meet the needs of our time.

For example, during the period that Putnam and Romney Garrett label “the upswing,” reliable daily newspapers became prevalent in the United States. By 1972, 69 percent of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) that they read a newspaper “every day.”7 It is easy enough to envision a daily publication about serious matters, written by professionals to inform a whole community. The hard part is the business model. Why would many people pay for such a product? The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and occasional readers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily; the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

Also during the upswing, many colleges and universities offered some measure of civic education while contributing knowledge and culture to their communities and serving as significant venues for public debate. Universities collected state subsidies, tuition, philanthropy, and clinical fees, and they offered economic mobility, access to licensed professions, ambitious research prized by industry and the military, vigorous social life, and quasi-professional sports, along with civic benefits. This model is now under considerable stress, though it has not fully collapsed, as with the daily newspaper.8

Similarly, Putnam and Romney Garrett show that after 1910, high schools rapidly spread across the United States and became another pillar of civic culture, not only preparing students to be more capable citizens but also serving as foci for adult community life.9 No national policy made this happen. Instead, most communities found that they needed at least one high school to be economically competitive, and they taxed themselves to build and maintain their own schools. This model worked in many localities, although spending was never adequate in poor communities or for students of color. This model survives, notwithstanding consolidations that have removed high schools from some smaller towns and growing state subsidies for private schools.

Today, it is not hard to envision a social media platform that serves as an excellent venue for disagreeing well. Any platform must use an algorithm to decide what material each user sees, and a good algorithm would favor substantiative content from a deliberately diverse range of views. The question is how to capitalize such a platform so it can expand to rival the huge for-profit social media outlets of the present, which do the opposite for billions of users, favoring material that induces outrage and reinforces users’ prior assumptions. In other words, the problem is the same as the one that confronted proponents of professional journalism circa 1900, but we haven’t yet found a workable business model for our time.

Source: Peter Levine, “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture,” Daedalus 155(3) Summer 2026, pp. 203-207. See also: Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing (a video discussion with me).

Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

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I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.

what it would take for the public to trust science

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On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.