I’m just back from Washington College in Chestertown, MD (a classic liberal arts college), where I taught social studies teachers a little about liberalism and classic republicanism–a standard topic in political theory. I presented liberalism as the combination of the following five ideas:

1. “Individualism,” meaning (specifically) that each and every government institution must make every individual better off than he or she would be otherwise, or else it is oppressive.

2. Politics is a necessary evil, the price of living in a community.

3. The private realm can be clearly distinguished from the public realm, and only the latter may be regulated.

4. The state should not make people good, nor do we need good people to have a good government. A decent polity can instead be preserved through checks-and-balances and other constitutional mechanisms.

5. The government should be neutral with respect to various ways of life, unless those ways of life involve one person violating the rights of another.

Civic republicanism is then a particular criticism of liberalism that says:

1. Political communities have intrinsic value, and are not merely “cooperative venture[s] for mutual advantage? (John Rawls).

2. Politics is desirable and advantageous, because it’s the only place where people can exhibit certain excellences, such as public spiritedness, eloquence, and patriotism.

3. The so-called private realm is often a legitimate public concern. For example, the state should support educational institutions that (to some degree) shape private opinions and beliefs.

4. A good government can only exist where citizens are fairly virtuous; and promoting virtues is an appopriate role for the state.

5. The government should favor certain ways of life over others. Above all, the state should honor lives of public service and civic engagement.

Although almost everyone feels some affinity for both sets of propositions, it’s much harder to make civic republicanism plausible for an American audience than to persuade them of liberalism.

Yesterday, I talked to about 60 high school social studies teachers who are funded by the Annenberg Foundation to conduct an innovative civic education program. After I spoke, one teacher noted a chart in the Civic Mission of Schools report (p. 19), showing how many young people believe they “can make a difference solving problems in [their] community.” The teacher noted that the statistics weren’t too good for any group, but they were particularly low for African American and Latino students. He asked me why.

I said that it really is harder for most Black and Hispanic kids to make a difference, partly because of discrimination against them personally, but mainly because of the difficult problems they are likely to face in their home communities. If you ask an affluent suburban kid whether he believes he can make a difference, he’ll think of a “community problem” and imagine addressing it. Perhaps it’s the lack of a skateboard park; and if he really wanted to do something about that, he could talk to a friend of his mother’s who’s on the town council. So yes, he could make a difference. If you ask an inner-city kid, she thinks, “What are some community problems? Let’s see, there’s unemployment, homelessness, gun violence, drugs, and AIDS. What can I do?” Chances are, she’ll be pessimistic about making a difference.

The problem is, “efficacy” (or more simply, hope and optimism) is a powerful predictor of actual participation. So if people lack efficacy, they don’t vote or organize. Thus we want young people to develop confidence, yet we can’t do it by preaching that they can easily “make a difference.” That just isn’t a plausible message. A lot of the discussion that ensued for the next half-hour concerned practical strategies for increasing efficacy (and persistence) without papering over problems.

I?m on the advisory board of a program for adolescents that?s organized by Temple University in Philadelphia, the Middlesex County Community College in New Jersey, and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I went to Temple today to help plan the program?s evaluation.

This group faces the same problems that bedevil my colleagues and me when we try to evaluate our work with kids in Maryland. Their program is too short (at 50 total hours) to cause substantial changes in the kind of indicators that CIRCLE has collected. With so little instructional time, no one wants to spend hours on evaluation. Because it’s a fairly small group of students, any changes in their responses to a questionnaire between the start and conclusion of the program are unlikely to meet statistical tests of significance. The population in the three sites ranges from adolescents with criminal records (in DC) to 5-to-12 year olds (in New Jersey), so it makes no sense to combine all the sites? data. If students do improve, it?s impossible to tell whether the program is responsible. The best way to tell would be to recruit a larger group of students and to randomly assign some of them to participate in the program and some (the control group) to be assessed without participating. But there?s neither the money nor the will to organize a control group.

The goal of the project?s organizers is to make students more capable of sticking up for themselves politically. They want their students to become confident and to know where to go for political help. Graduates of the program should also be able to work effectively with peers in a political context. With these goals in mind, I suggested conducting the same educational exercise on the first and last day of the program, videotaping the results, and asking an outsider to reflect on any differences. Students would be asked to work in small groups to plan a response to a hypothetical local problem, such as a dangerous street corner or a lack of basketball courts. The small groups would report their plans to the whole class both in writing and orally. Between the beginning and the end of the 50-hour program, we would expect the students? political plans to improve; we would hope that they would become more optimistic about their chances of success; and we would expect them to share the planning, writing, and oral presentation more equitably within their small groups.

Last Friday, Stanley Fish wrote an essay in the New York Times attacking the “Civic Responsibility of Higher Education” and everything that document stands for. Fish is a brilliant Milton critic, controversialist, and builder of academic empires. It’s said that he’s proud to be the model for Morris Zapp, the cigar-chomping, aphorism-dispensing, fast-car-driving, bed-hopping hero/villain of two David Lodge novels, whose ambitions include being the best paid English professor in the world and saying everything that can possibly be said about Jane Austen, so that everyone else will have to shut up about her. The “Civic Responsibility of Higher Education,” meanwhile, is a sober and idealistic statement of the university’s role in democracy, written by some distinguished members of my organization’s Advisory Board and signed by 528 college presidents.

Fish raises some valid concerns. Those of us who work to enhance the civic purposes of higher education must keep in mind the dangers of that enterprise. Colleges are not necessarily good at creating active citizens. Trying to motivate young people to be active in civil society and politics can undermine the search for truth. Scholars can squander their credibility by opining on issues beyond their competence. Tom Ehrlich, one of the authors of “The Civic Responsibility of Higher Education,” quotes a similar warning written by Judge Learned Hand in his magnificent style:

You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt. I am satisfied that a scholar who tries to combine those parts sells his birthright for a mess of pottage; that, when the final count is made, it will be found that the impairment of his powers far outweighs any possible contribution to the causes he has espoused. If he is fit to serve in his calling at all, it is only because he has learned not to serve in any other, for his singleness of mind quickly evaporates in the fires of passions, however holy. (“The Spirit of Liberty,” p. 138)

This is a useful caution, yet I think Fish is wrong to defend the “Ivory Tower” and disparage civic education and engagement in universities. I’d like to respond to four major points in his essay.

1. Colleges should do just one job, the only one for which they are qualified: “performing academic work responsibly and at the highest level.” They should have but one goal: “the search for truth.”

A college that pursued only knowledge and that exclusively hired people qualified for pure scholarship would look like the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton or All Soul’s College, Oxford. It would resemble a university minus the professional schools and occupational training programs, the departments of performing and creative arts, the offices of cooperative extension and tech transfer, the chapels and chaplains, the student centers and dorms, the teaching hospitals and lab schools, the athletic teams and marching bands. Frankly, it wouldn’t admit undergraduates, because education is not itself the “search for truth.”

Such an institution might be a nice place to work, but it’s hard to see how it could be funded. Fish warns, “don’t surrender your academic obligations to the agenda of any non-academic constituency?parents, legislators, trustees or donors.” This sounds right until you realize that these “constituencies” pay our salaries, and they must believe that we are serving valuable purposes. At no time in our history have Americans been satisfied with knowledge as the main purpose of higher education. They’ve paid to train the clergy, to educate young people, to expand access to the middle class, and even to win bowl games, but not primarily to pursue the truth. Consequently, faculty and staff are not (and have never been) solely expert at scholarship and science. They have many other skills.

2. There is a fundamental difference between scholarly argument and what we conventionally call “politics”; and the two should never mix. For example, “a dispute between scholars [about welfare reform] will not be political in the everyday sense of the word, because each side will represent different academic approaches, not different partisan agendas.”

This is a difficult issue, and I’m not satisfied with my own thinking. There is–and should be–an important difference between discussions of policies and issues in the academy, on the one hand, and in the political arena, on the other. But it’s relatively hard to put your finger on the difference. It’s certainly not true that academics take different sides on political issues because of their different academic approaches–as if all those who favored welfare reform were statistical modelers and those who opposed it were ethnographers. Ideology is a major (and appropriate) part of academic debate, as Fish well knows. Conversely, debates in legislatures, courts, and regulatory agencies are not devoid of controversy about research methods.

So there must be a large gray area. Nevertheless, we want scholars to think somewhat differently from activists and politicians: to take a longer view, to be less influenced by immediate tactical concerns, to be less committed to parties, to be more openly engaged with their intellectual opponents, to offer more complex and nuanced views. These values are more attainable in academia than in politics, and we should protect them. Yet they are compatible with “civic engagement,” done right.

3. “Universities could engage in moral and civic education only by deciding in advance which of the competing views of morality and citizenship is the right one, and then devoting academic resources and energy to the task of realizing it. But that task would deform (by replacing) the true task of academic work: the search for truth and the dissemination of it through teaching.”

Here Fish ignores a form of civic education that’s compatible with the classical liberal belief in personal freedom. He assumes that civic education means herding students along particular paths. It can be something quite different: expanding the breadth of their choices as adults by helping them to experience various forms of political and civic participation (along with various forms of artistic creativity, scholarly inquiry, appreciation of nature, and spirituality). Unless young people are explicitly taught about citizenship, they will not be free to choose to be active citizens, because they will know little except consumerism, entertainment, and careerism.

4. There is a zero-sum relationship between scholarship and engagement. “Performing academic work responsibly and at the highest level is a job big enough for any scholar and for any institution. And, as I look around, it does not seem to me that we academics do that job so well that we can now take it upon ourselves to do everyone else’s job too. We should look to the practices in our own shop, narrowly conceived, before we set out to alter the entire world. …”

Fish is right about certain research programs in certain disciplines. If you’re a student of Milton, you might learn something relevant by participating in current debates about religion. But such participation is equally likely to distract you from your best sources of information, which are in the library. There is, however, such a thing as research that contributes important new methods and knowledge to its discipline as a result of close engagement with communities.

For example, I doubt that Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues at the University of Indiana could have made crucial contributions to the theory of collective action if they had not worked closely with people who manage ?common-pool resources? (forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, and grazing lands) on several continents. They have drawn advice and inspiration from these people even as they have provided technical assistance and derived generalizable lessons. Likewise, Jane Mansbridge?s discovery of regular norms in consensus-based democratic organizations arose from her close and collaborative work with such groups.

These examples of engaged scholarship epitomize the “search for truth.” They also provide a way to address a sense of alienation that professors often feel. Many of us enter the profession with idealistic motivations, but find that we only contribute incrementally to the knowledge of fellow specialists, with whom we interact sporadically at conferences or by email. Engaging with communities can be profoundly rejuvenating.

As a Dean, Fish has clashed with “members of Congress, Illinois state representatives and senators, the governor of Illinois, the governor’s budget director, and the governor-appointed Illinois Board of Higher Education.” He says that he views all these people as “ignorant, misinformed, demagogic, dishonest, [and] slipshod.” They simply refuse to leave scholars alone to pursue knowledge (at public expense.) This kind of relationship with the outside world must be downright exhausting for Fish. He might find that civic engagement is a relief.

The First Amendment Schools program would probably surprise many people–especially reporters–who examined it closely. One of its major sponsors is the First Amendment Center, which exists to advocate civil liberties. Its very name implies a commitment to protect and enhance liberties of speech, press, assembly, religion, and petition. Therefore, one might expect that First Amendment Schools would protect civil liberties within their own walls: for instance, by allowing student newspapers to publish without prior review, or by tolerating offensive t-shirts. Participating schools might also promote respect for the First Amendment by teaching students to understand and value a free press, free exercise of religion, and so on.

Indeed, many First Amendment Schools do these things. I don’t think that a school with a very restrictive speech code could participate. However, participating schools do a lot more than grant rights to their own students. They also ask students to learn and practice virtues and obligations of citizenship, such as deliberation, tolerance, and concern for the common good.

I think this is great, because I would like high school graduates to understand the obligations as well as the rights of the press. Journalists do not have to do anything to earn their freedom; they have inalienable rights that students should understand and value. Nevertheless, as consumers and citizens, we can expect reporters to do a great deal.

I personally think that reporters, especially in the broadcast media, are doing a miserable job of supporting our democracy and civil society. We might, for example, expect that a multi-million-dollar industry devoted to collecting important public information might have focused on terrorism before 9-11. There were plenty of public reports that could have alerted them to the importance of this topic. However, as Nightline’s producer, Tom Bettag, said recently:

If there were warnings throughout government about al Qaeda, let the record show that on the three network evening news broadcasts that summer and Nightline, the name ?al Qaeda? wasn?t spoken??not a single time. The record will show that on the week of August 20, three weeks before the attacks, the story most covered on the three network evening news broadcasts was Gary Condit. It got twice as much coverage as the next story (Quoted in PressThink).

In this case, the complaint is a failure to grapple with substance. In other cases, the news media can be charged with ignoring legitimate points of view, with sensationalism, with exploitation, with bias, and with many other sins. I wouldn’t want high school graduates necessarily to share my negative view of the press, but I would hope that they’d become critical readers and viewers. Most of all, I would hope that some of them would respond to the failures of the mainstream media by creating alternatives of their own. In the age of the blog, you don’t need a printing press to become a news producer.

The genius of the First Amendment Schools project is to put the First Amendment in an appropriate context, without compromising individual rights but without forgetting civic obligations.