In recent entries, I considered what might define a “public intellectual.” (I’m being interviewed on that topic for an article.) I then spent the last three days in the company of the Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge. To me, she is a perfect example of what a public intellectual should be. Not many people who hold very distinguished professorships at Harvard would take three days to attend a “researcher & practitioner” meeting on any subject, especially if most of the practitioners ran small, little-known organizations, and the researchers were mostly junior professors. Jane Mansbridge not only attended; she participated modestly but helpfully in every breakout session, listened to every story, developed relationships with many people in the room, and seemed to care about every phrase that was written on a flip chart.
Monthly Archives: October 2003
competing forms of deliberation
We are now two days into the “Researcher & Practitoner” meeting that I described yesterday. We tried to get consensus (among 40 people) on a set of factual statements about public deliberation that we could post on a website for public use. For the most part, the academics in the group rejected the statements that the practitioners proposed, on the ground that the research base was too weak. Therefore, we harvested a very long list of plausible, informed hypotheses about deliberation. This may be a more useful product than a set of consensus propositions.
The conversation has generally been very rich and disciplined (and hard to summarize). Instead, I’ll report the following thought that occurred to me. We seem to have a choice between two general approaches. We can randomly select people to deliberate on a public issue (giving them incentives to participate, as if in a kind of jury); or we can try to motivate a large and diverse segment of the population to seek out voluntary opportunities for deliberation. Both approaches are widely used by practitioners in the field of Deliberative Democracy.
call for papers
I’m on my way to the National 4-H Center for a meeting organized by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. We’re calling it a “Research & Practitioner Meeting,” because it combines leading scholars who study public deliberation with practitioners who run actual public discussion forums. Our goals are to set an ambitious research agenda for the field, and also to pick some small projects that can be funded out of our existing money. I was on the planning committee for the conference, so I’m excited about it.
Connected to this conference is a proposed book that John Gastil has organized, although I’m the co-editor. Anyone who might like to write a chapter on a particular approach to public deliberation should check out the Call for Papers that John has written.
On a completely unrelated note, I had a chance last week to meet Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski. With the loss of Senator Wellstone, she is the only community organizer in the Senate. Not knowing anything about me, she said that America needs a new progressive era. I couldn’t help replying that I had written a book with that very title. I’m sure this made me sound like a self-promoting academic; and if I were going to promote myself, I would have preferred to tell her about our community work in Prince George’s County. In any case, she then made a speech in support of Americorps, which she has championed since it was created.
the capabilities approach
I was just refreshing my memory about the “capabilities approach” pioneered by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. (I have been asked to comment on a paper about “positive youth development,” and I thought that Sen’s ideas would be relevant and helpful.) The rough idea is that we ought to implement social policies that maximize people’s capabilities. The important human capabilities can be listed, although theorists differ somewhat about what belongs on the list. Enhancing capabilities is better than maximizing a set of behaviors or goods, because people should be able to choose what to own and how to behave, within broad limits; and different things are valued in different cultures. Thus trying to maximize goods or behaviors is too prescriptive. Enhancing capabilities is also better than simply giving people what they say they want or need. People can want completely bad things, e.g., crack cocaine. Or they can want too much, as in the case of Hollywood actors who want to have six Hummers. Or they can want too little, which is a common problem among the world’s very poor.
hard-headed research on service-learning
I am going to give a plenary address to the annual Service-Learning Research Conference in a few weeks. (“Service-learning” means a combination of community service with academic work on the same topic: a common approach today.) I’m going to argue that research on service-learning needs to be much more tough-minded. Proponents need to show that average service-learning programs produce better outcomes over the long term than rival approaches, considering not only the benefits but also the costs (in time and money) and the risks. Such research requires random assignment of students to service-learning projects and to rival methods, and then long-term follow-up.