Monthly Archives: October 2006

variety

(Athens, Georgia): I’ve been at numerous meetings lately. They all concern the civic engagement of young people, but they draw remarkably diverse participants.

At a meeting on digital media and youth civic engagement, 10 out of 11 people seated around a table in a hotel suite at Newark airport have their laptops open while we discuss papers. There’s an official conference “back channel” on which you are free to email everyone present. People talk about “dumping the code” from documents into “wikispaces.” There is a strong air of philosophical anarchism in the room: participants most admire authentic, unregulated youth expression. They also use the term “affordance,” which I must look up on Wikipedia.

At a summit on youth leadership at the Holocaust Museum, a substantial proportion of the audience consists of pastors from rural African American churches that have been burned to the ground by racists. The pastors are diverse in terms of backgrounds, religious denominations, and politics, as I learn from speaking with them. But at the end, they rise in turn to speak in sonorous terms, with rhyming cadences. One denounces the use of “time outs” in discipline. If he’d been given time outs, he says, he’d have simply taken a break and then gone right back into mischief; and by now he’d be in the pen, not a pastor. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

At a downtown Washington Marriott for the annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship, Robert Byrd waves his crutches and invokes the Lord as he delivers a stemwinder of a speech in defense of the Constitution. Not long before him, the Attorney General had stood at the same podium and defended the administration’s policies–of very dubious constitutionality–regarding habeas corpus. Public school kids from Philadelphia watch these luminaries via closed-circuit TV. I have no idea what they’re thinking.

At the University of Georgia, we sit around a long seminar table watching PowerPoint slides with regression coefficients, learning about the effects of John Stewart on young Americans’ political views as measured in surveys. Later, we file into the student union to watch old clips of educational TV shows. Two clips from 1965 stick in my mind. One shows a man sitting behind a desk, reading a long and intensely boring lecture about the law and how men make it to restrain other men’s behavior. This is civic education that makes your skin crawl.

However, we also see footage of CBS’s “Town Meeting of the World” from the same year. Students from Mexico City, London, Paris, and Belgrade ask uncensored questions of Dwight Eisenhower, Thurgood Marshall, and Arthur Goldberg–via satellite connection. The students dress like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day, but they ask incredibly informed and pointed questions. For example, if the United States supports democracy, why (asks a Mexican student) has it invaded Latin American countries 132 times? Eisenhower replies that we renounced intervention under FDR and would never do it again. The student counters with the case of the Dominican Republic, where US Marines had landed earlier the same year. Arthur Goldberg answers rather testily. It is a remarkably unscripted moment. We see more authentic “youth voice” than would ever be allowed on television today. But the same questions still need to be asked.

record low turnout in the primaries

(In Athens, Georgia, for a meeting on youth and the news media.) According to Curtis Gans, dean of the turnout experts, participation in the 44 states that recently held Democratic primaries was 8.4 percent of those eligible to vote, a record low. Turnout in the 40 states that held Republican primaries also set a pathetic record: 7.2 percent.

As Gans notes, this doesn’t mean much for November. In both 1982 and 1994, people stayed home in the primary and then turned out in force for the main event, defeating many incumbents in high-turnout elections. However, the low participation in primaries is itself a problem. Gans says, “the degree of decline (57 percent since 1966) and the level of average turnout … in statewide [primary] races is a danger to American democracy.”

cause c?l?bre

(En route to Chicago for an American Bar Association meeting.) Last week, a leaked National Intelligence Estimate made headlines by asserting that the Iraq war was a ?cause c?l?bre? for jihadists. That topic has since been knocked out of the newspapers by a congressional sex scandal, tragedy in Amish country, and other riveting stories. However, I?ll weigh in belatedly and say that I don?t believe the ?cause c?l?bre? argument was ever a good one to make against the war. First of all, it?s a fancy French phrase. Besides, we sometimes should and must do things that rile up the other side. If (contrary to fact), the invasion of Iraq had been wise, legal, and in the best interests of that nation, it would still have given terrorists a ?cause c?l?bre.?

For me, a sufficient argument against the war is that it violates one of the few substantial elements of international law. Members of the United Nations simply may not invade one another without the explicit authorization of the Security Council. However, this argument is not politically very potent, because it seems legalistic and likely to uphold UN interests against those of the US.

Thus I would emphasize a different argument, which (as Henry Kissinger once said on another topic) has the ?additional merit of being true.? The invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror, but it was a colossal strategic error in that war. It helped the jihadists by knocking off a hated secular dictatorship, under such conditions that fundamentalist movements would likely replace it. It put hundreds of thousands of mostly young Americans right into the Middle East where they were vulnerable to being attacked; more have died there than on 9/11. It created a profound dilemma: Winning the counter-insurgency would require deep and daily engagement with Iraqis, which would be extremely dangerous; whereas protecting US troops in Iraq would require separating them from the population, which would make it impossible for them to succeed. Above all, the invasion made the United State responsible for handling a violent struggle among Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, Arabs and Persians that we are poorly equipped to understand, let alone resolve. And if we fail, the consequences range from a massive loss of credibility, to terrible suffering, to the creation of a jihadist state at the head of the Persian Gulf.

In fact, one could say that there were only two ways for jihadists to achieve a strategic victory against the United States after 9/11: by obtaining and using weapons of mass destruction on US soil, or by luring us into the middle of a civil war in the Mideast. We gave them the latter victory and must devoutly hope to avoid the former. That we also gave terrorist recruiters a ?cause c?l?bre? is almost beside the point.

survey of college students’ civic literacy

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently released a survey showing that college students don’t know much about American history, constitutional principles, and economics; and they hardly gain knowledge over their four years in university. The biggest gains are supposedly found at the least prestigious institutions. At fancy schools like Brown, Georgetown, and Yale, knowledge actually falls between freshman and senior year.

I was all set to praise and quote the report, because it draws attention to topics–civics and history–that I fear we overlook. The failure of prestigious schools to add value would confirm my suspicion that higher education is largely about conferring status–not educating students.

However, I have serious questions about the methodology of the report, which simply surveyed groups of freshmen and seniors and compared the differences. There is no mention of dropout rates. It is very likely that the less prestigious schools, where students apparently showed a lot of improvement, also have high dropout rates. Their seniors score higher than their freshmen because those who make it to senior year are the academically successful survivors of a winnowing-out process.

For example, the report praises Colorado State University for adding 11 points to its students’ knowledge scores. But Colorado State has a 6-year retention rate of only 63%, meaning that four in ten of its students leave without getting a degree. CSU seniors were probably better students back in their freshman year than many of their peers who left without graduating.

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glasses that are partly full

I don’t mean to dwell too long on our new survey (described yesterday), but I find the press coverage an interesting study in subjectiveness. Based on the very same release and oral presentation …

Matt Stearns and Rick Montgomery wrote in the Kansas City Star: “Apathetic, detached? Not today?s young people. A study finds that 15- to 25-year-olds are more involved in their communities than expected.” Their lead is: “Turns out, the seminal rock band The Who was correct: Gloomy stereotypes about civic detachment to the contrary, the kids are all right.”

But David Alexander wrote in Reuters (picked up in the Boston Globe and elsewhere: “Few U.S. youths involved in civic life: study.” His lead is: “Nearly two-thirds of young Americans are disengaged from political and civic life and only a quarter regularly vote, a survey released on Tuesday showed.”

And the Philadelphia Inquirer printed Matt Stearns’ piece under this headline: “Younger folks do their civic duties, a study confirms; Involvement for those 15 to 25 in some cases neared elders’ levels.”

So which is it? All of the above, of course. It’s a mixed story, as we realized when we thought about how to pitch it. I did hope that the headlines would be positive (although I’m not at all surprised to see the negative ones). Perhaps there’s no one valid way to capture a complex picture in one short phrase, which is what a headline must be. But we think a positive summary is closer to the truth in this case.