Monthly Archives: December 2004

the campus newspaper and civil society

“There is a necessary connection between public associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers”–Alexis de Tocqueville.

This week, some colleagues and I have been conducting focus groups with politically and socially active Maryland undergraduates, in order to identify opportunities for leadership, service, and civic participation on campus. We hope to publicize the full range of opportunities to other students; we will also think about how to fill any gaps in the array of student associations and programs.

In both groups of student leaders that I moderated last night, there was tremendous antipathy to the campus newspaper, the Diamondback. Some participants acknowledged that it’s a student product, published daily in color, and free–which is an impressive achievement. Nevertheless, they felt that the newspaper relentlessly criticizes the student organizations that it covers, while utterly ignoring many other groups. Thus, they said, it fails to inform students about opportunities for participation and instead tends to reduce trust and respect for the civic work that students do.

I am not a regular reader of the Diamondback, nor have I asked its editors and writers for their side of the story. But the important questions go far beyond the performance of a particular campus newspaper. In the 1990s, under the heading of “public journalism,” many reporters and editors began to re-consider their role in civil society. They asked whether some of their reflexive assumptions (for example, that good news is never newsworthy; or that all newsmakers are powerful people or criminals) were good or bad for civil society. Those questions prompted deeper ones about the role of the press in a democracy. Is a newspaper a watchdog, a gadfly, a dispassionate truth-teller, the “schoolhouse of the common man,” a forum for debate, or a gateway to civic participation? Each of these roles is problematic in different ways.

Unfortunately, public journalism (seen as a dialogue, not as a batch of projects and programs) has faltered in the mainstream press. Although I haven’t analyzed the Diamondback itself, I suspect that student journalists copy what they take to be professional norms and roles (especially the notion that they are “watchdogs”); and they see student organizations as potential tyrants or malefactors, much as reporters view the state and corporations. Student journalists do not ask whether these roles make sense or are useful on a campus.

academia as a liberal bastion

A lot of people are talking about the dominance of liberals in academia. (See, for instance, Timothy Burke). Some of this discussion was prompted by campaign finance data suggesting that professors at prestigious universities had preferred Kerry by huge margins and, indeed, represented the Democrats’ single strongest financial base. Not only comp-lit professors and ethnographers tend to be leftists. The eminent Harvard biologist (and left-liberal) Richard Lewontin writes:

Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.

My own observations of social scientists and humanists support Lewontin’s claim about natural scientists. But why should liberals predominate in academia? I’ll offer five hypotheses for your consideration and invite you to think of more:

1. Faculty discriminate (consciously or unconsciously) against conservatives when they hire and promote peers. This is a widespread charge from the right; it usually provokes an ad hominem reply from liberals, namely: “How can you believe that decision-makers in a competitive, decentralized business routinely discriminate on the basis of political ideology (even in fields like molecular biology), yet you deny that employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender? If they do discriminate on these grounds, then don’t we need affirmative action for women, minorities, and (possibly) conservatives?” That’s a good debating point, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility that there is some ideological discrimination in academic hiring. The next question is whether some of that (alleged) discrimination is acceptable. For example, biology departments surely “discriminate” against Creationists, thereby excluding one category of conservatives from their ranks. Is that wrong? To what extent does such defensible bias explain the dominance of liberals across the academy?

2. Perhaps academics are a class–not a great stratum of society like the bourgeoisie or the peasantry, but a social/economic group akin to the clergy or the landed gentry in olden times. They make a living in a particular context (competitive but non-profit, secular, globalized, specialized, and very dependent on state subsidies); and this context affects their interests and colors their perspectives. If this is true, we must ask whether the academic “class” is merely biased in its own interests or whether it brings an enlightened perspective to American politics. Other American groups are profoundly influenced by industry and commerce and/or religion, usually Christianity. These powerful forces make us more conservative than any other developed nation. Perhaps a class that is insulated from the market and religion offers a valuable corrective, much as monks countered the dominance of feudal lords in medieval Europe.

3. Perhaps it’s the Schlegels versus the Wilcoxes (the two families in Howard’s End). In other words, perhaps middle class business-people believe that you should make products and meet a payroll. They think it is always problematic to live on tax money or charity and produce products without market value. They know that some people must work in the public sector, but they doubt the efficiency, motives, and merits of public employees. In contrast, academics (along with some writers, teachers, and social workers) believe that business people merely pursue their own narrow, economic interests and manipulate people into consuming disposable “stuff.” Business has no intrinsic merit. The highest calling is education, or scholarship, or creativity. These two perspectives are most consistent with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. (There are other perspectives too, such as the attitude of the military officer class, some of whom believe that their subjection to discipline and physical danger make them more moral than either business people or professors.) In my view, there is truth in the perspectives of both the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes.

4. Perhaps something other than academic culture underlies the tendency for academics to vote Democratic. Maybe the people who dominate universities are (for complex reasons) more likely than average Americans to be Jewish or Asian, to come from big East-coast cities, and to have graduated from college between 1965 and 1975. Perhaps these factors explain a large portion of the correlation between academic employment and partisan identification. On the other hand, professors seem less likely than other Americans to be Black, Latino, or female.

5. Or perhaps conservatives who are seriously interested in politics are happier out of academia, because universities are not very influential compared to think-tanks and Congressional staffs. In September 2003, David Brooks told a now-famous story about the conservative professor Harvey Mansfield: “Last week the professors at Harvard’s government department reviewed the placement records of last year’s doctoral students. Two had not been able to find academic jobs, both of them Mansfield’s students. ‘Well,’ Mansfield quipped, ‘I guess they’ll have to go to Washington and run the country.'”

public attitudes toward civics

The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools has launched a spiffy website loaded with information. (The Campaign must really exist if we have a website.) On the homepage are the results of a new survey that we conducted jointly with the Alliance for Representative Democracy. It’s a survey of public attitudes toward civic education. There is much good news, including the fact that 71% of adults consider it important to “prepare students to be competent and responsible citizens who participate in our democratic society.” (There was no tradeoff question, however, which asked them to say whether they would put less money or time into basic math, reading, and science skills in order to enhance citizenship education.) In any event, I was somewhat disturbed by the answers to an open-ended question about “the most important reason for including civic education programs in k-12 public schools.” My favorite reasons–encouraging civic or political involvement, preparing better leaders, and sustaining democracy–were mentioned by 13% of respondents, total. The most popular answer was “making better members of society.” This result is consistent with research from focus groups in which many parents said that civic education was a way to improve the personal behavior of other people’s children.

who you are

I’ve been in meetings for eight straight days–including the weekend, which was swallowed by the huge Congressional Conference on Civic Education. During this period, eight or ten people have told me that they read my blog. I’m interested in that information, because I have very little other data about my readers. Technorati lists about 40 blogs that currently link to this one; I assume that their authors come here periodically. Otherwise, I don’t know much.

But now I have a theory. I believe that a high proportion of you work in various aspects of civic renewal. You are civic educators or service-learning instructors, you organize deliberations among adults, you register voters, you work to make libraries into truly public spaces, you assist in the democratic development of poor countries, you create software for civic purposes, or you study one or more of these efforts.

Continue reading →

snapshots

Today is the end of CIRCLE’s annual Advisory Board meeting. Our Board, a very distinguished group (the best of whom read this blog!) meets around a long hollow table in a beautiful Greek-revival hotel in Washington. The table is set between rows of white Doric columns, beneath a plaster arch. In front of each participant is a funky contemporary white lamp and a microphone. Speakers rise to show PowerPoint slides of regression outputs and sociograms. African American youth are x percent less engaged than White youth, etc. There is talk of strategic planning and funders’ priorities.

I am paying very close attention to all of this (of course), but occasionally I remember scenes from my recent past. Tuesday, in Madison, Wisconsin: a “break-out” session with some Wisconsin social studies teachers. The assignment is to draw a picture illustrating the themes of a chapter of We The People: The Citizen and the Constitution, a textbook from the Center for Civic Education. My group of three gets the section on the philosophical roots of the American Constitution, something I’m supposed to know about. We draw a scale with a crowned king on one side and some people on the other. The people weigh more than the king: democracy! All the teachers in the room are white. There is a beautiful lake outside, gradually emerging from a thick fog.

Wednesday: College Park, MD. My undergrads are supposed to be thinking about service or research projects that we could undertake together. They are sleep-deprived freshmen, a little alienated by their low place in the college hierarchy. We haven’t really launched any project so far. (This is a four-year, non-credit program, so our lack of progress is not a big problem.) I show a PowerPoint presentation of my ongoing work with high school kids. The undergrads slouch in their chairs, laugh at the appropriate points, but don’t have much to add.

Later on Wednesday, in a Maryland high school. A group of kids are supposed to be interviewing neighbors about food and exercise and bringing full audiocassettes back to class so that we can listen, code, and sort the material. This has worked in the recent past, but today, nobody has any new interviews to share. My five cassette recorders are temporarily missing. Our excellent grad student, Jared, launches a discussion of how corporations control rap music. Three of the young women debate him boisterously and wittily, while the others watch quietly and one seems to fall asleep. All the kids are Black, either African-Americans or Carribbean immigrants. In his other life, Jared makes alternative hip-hop/news CDs that he distributes to more than 600 people. I try to establish this as an example of free, creative, democratic, fulfilling work. But it’s not making him famous; fame is controlled by money.

One more scene comes from my immediate future. This weekend will be the Second Annual Congressional Conference on Civic Education. I will attend as a member of the conference advisory group. Delegations will come to Washington from all 50 states and DC. They include teachers and principals, but also state judges and legislators. There will be speeches by the likes of Cokie Roberts and a “roll-call of the states,” which I envision as an old-fashioned political convention.

Perhaps I should leave the obvious unsaid, but these are four portraits of a single enterprise: the effort to develop the next generation of American citizens. We have a lot of work to do.