Monthly Archives: May 2006

sites for youth discussion and debate

Several ambitious websites try to give young Americans a voice in politics and policy:

  • The Youth Policy Action Center is an elaborate site that supports discussion of issues, provides links to opportunities for voting and volunteering, puts people in touch with like-minded peers, and shows off youth-produced videos and other media. It’s a product of about 80 leading youth-oriented organizations.
  • The Association of Young Americans is an “AARP for youth,” an idea that I floated in an earlier post. The AYP website provides issue briefs, mostly on economic matters of special relevance to the younger generations of Americans, and forums for discussion.
  • The Constitutional Rights Foundation–a group that I work with fairly often–has launched CRF Forum: For Youth, by Youth. Again, there is a discussion forum, a set of issue briefs, and opportunities to become involved. CRF is also running a photo contest. It’s great to organize contests for young media-creators, because their lack of audience is a big problem.
  • WireTap is part of the AlterNet network, and it dates back to 1998. Its large audience consists of young (18-25) progressives. Its website provides blogs, news stories, and columns–often on economic issues like the prices of textbooks.

    • “debating, counselling, prophesying, voting”

    John Saltmarsh, a chaplain in the parliamentary army during the English Civil War (1642-6), wrote that “the interest of the people in Christ’s kingdom is not only an interest of … submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting.” We don’t often think of these words together. However, consultation should precede voting, and prophesying can be a political act, as in the Civil Rights movement.

    One of Salmarsh’s colleagues, another chaplain named William Dell, asserted that anyone might preach in his own way, since “unity is Christian, uniformity antichristian.” He welcomed diverse voices and opinions because “the variety of forms in the world is the beauty of the world.” John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor while they were in Leiden (1609-20), said that everyone should be encouraged to speak publicly after a sermon. At the Bell Alley Baptist Church in London in the mid-1600s, public debates were held as part of religious observances. Around the same time, George Fox, the first Quaker, used to travel from church to church provoking public arguments. Once, he recalled,

    I began to speak to [the minister after a sermon] and he began to oppose me. I told him his glass [half-hour] was gone, his time was out; the place was as free for me as for him; and he accused me that I had broken the law in speaking to him in his time in the morning, and I told him he had broken the law in speaking in my time.

    Modern American evangelical Christianity can be traced back to men like Saltmarsh and Dell and to the general atmosphere in the 1640s and 1650s. Radical protestants disagreed about many matters of theology (as do modern evangelicals), but they fought for the right to dispute in public. That is a valuable heritage for Americans who favor civil liberties and public deliberation. It is also, perhaps, an argument against mega-churches and TV ministries, which are very much one-way performances.

    There was another face of 17th-century protestant politics. It was Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Parliament that, in 1656, criminalized “disturbances” in churches, reinstating a law that had been passed under the Catholic Queen Mary in the 16th century, but now to suppress Quakers instead of Calvinists. Today, the pious are still influenced by Puritanism, but it is worth remembering that some protestant fundamentalists have found in free debate the essence of their faith.

    [Quotations from Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside-Down, 1972]

    loyalty to place in the age of jet-set academia

    I grew up with Jason Stanley, who wrote a thoughtful post on the Leiter Report about changes in academia since our days as fellow faculty-brats. His father, Prof. Manfred Stanley (whom I knew well and miss) was committed to his institution and community, to such a point that the idea of moving “bewildered him.”

    He tended to value conferences, reading groups, and the development of links between the university and the community at least as much as his own written work. … His own production clearly suffered from his other activities. For example, he spent years working with a poor town near Syracuse on a project concerning the responsibility of companies to the communities they abandon. A lot emerged from this project; a documentary, several town-meetings, and a civics class for high school students in that town. But very few publications emerged from it. He also viewed his obligations to his community as extending to his family. For example, he sent his children to Syracuse city public schools. As a professor at the local good university, he felt an extra obligation to be a member of the community, rather than a lesser obligation.

    Jason believes that our “generation of academics is quite different.” We change institutions regularly, or hope to do so. We think of ourselves as “free agents,” willing to obtain better salaries, working conditions, and status by moving or threatening to move. Our communities are not composed of colleagues, let alone neighbors and fellow citizens, but specialists in our field whom we “see at conferences and talks, and chat with on e-mail and on the phone.”

    I think at the deepest level what has happened is a form of Weberian rationization. (That seems a fitting theory to apply in a post that invokes Manny Stanley.) Increasingly, the whole population of college-bound students and faculty have in mind the same criteria of excellence. They rank all institutions on one great Chain of Being that has Harvard and MIT at (or near) the top, and the local community college near the bottom. Lew Friedland and Shauna Morimoto find (pdf) that all high school students in one midwestern town– including those who are struggling in school–envision the same status hierarchy and believe that their life-prospects will be determined by how high they can rise on it.

    When everyone is trying to move up a single scale, certain practical consequences result. Actual, published rankings circulate and are influential. Rising in the rankings makes an institution more competitive, thus allowing it to admit better qualified students who are easier and more fun to teach. In turn, the rankings are affected by institutions’ international reputation for research. As in any Weberian system, quantifiable and generalizable criteria begin to count: e.g., the number of publications, or the rate of publication in the most competitive journals. Professors are highly aware of their institutions’ reputations and are very tempted to try to move up when possible. Hence there’s a lot of moving around. Building a local reputation (on or off campus) doesn’t increase one’s market value, so we put our energy into national publications for the people who might write us recommendation letters.

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