Monthly Archives: April 2009

youth volunteering down, but Kennedy Serve America bill may help

Our new study of youth volunteering rates is getting a lot of coverage. Martha Irvine’s Associated Press story has apparently been picked up by 1,300 outlets, and I did a national CBS radio news interview early this morning. Irvine puts the story well:

    Volunteering has helped define a generation of young Americans who are known for their do-gooder ways. Many high schools require community service before graduation. And these days, donating time to a charitable organization is all but expected on a young person’s college or job application.

    Even so, an analysis of federal data has found that the percentage of teens who volunteer dipped in recent years, ending an upward trend that began after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

    “They’re still volunteering at higher rates than their parents did,” says Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, also known as CIRCLE.

    But, he adds, there’s been “a loss of momentum,” which he hopes recent passage of the federal Serve America Act will help address.

AmeriCorps triples

Yesterday, the President signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act at a ceremony in a Washington, DC charter school that has reclaimed a violence-ridden block. The Act will triple the size of AmeriCorps (if Congress appropriates adequate funds) and will direct the corps members to work on major national challenges: the high school dropout rate, energy conservation, and health disparities. Today’s coverage of the bill and the signing ceremony–predictably–concentrates on the personal interactions among Obama, the eponymous Senator Kennedy, and President Clinton, who planted a tree as part of the day’s events. There’s also some coverage of Michelle Obama’s background as an AmeriCorps grantee, which is appropriate. I would have liked (but didn’t expect) a little more discussion of what “service” is, how it is changing, and what it can accomplish or not accomplish.

Note that the president naturally shifts from talking about direct service to themes of justice, organizing, and social change. In the campaign, he used the phrase “service and active citizenship”; and yesterday he said:

    When I moved to Chicago more than two decades ago to become a community organizer, I wasn’t sure what was waiting for me there, but I had always been inspired by the stories of the civil rights movement, and President Kennedy’s call to service, and I knew I wanted to do my part to advance the cause of justice and equality.

    And it wasn’t easy, but eventually, over time, working with leaders from all across these communities, we began to make a difference — in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plants that had closed down and jobs that had dried up. We began to see a real impact in people’s lives. And I came to realize I wasn’t just helping people, I was receiving something in return, because through service I found a community that embraced me, citizenship that was meaningful, the direction that I had been seeking. I discovered how my own improbable story fit into the larger story of America.

    It’s the same spirit of service I’ve seen across this country. I’ve met countless people of all ages and walks of life who want nothing more than to do their part. I’ve seen a rising generation of young people work and volunteer and turn out in record numbers. They’re a generation that came of age amidst the horrors of 9/11 and Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economic crisis without precedent. And yet, despite all this — or more likely because of it — they’ve become a generation of activists possessed with that most American of ideas, that people who love their country can change it.

“Service” sometimes means serving soup to homeless people or cleaning up a stream–valuable but limited activities. The president talks instead about working with diverse people to address really serious, core problems, such as urban poverty–and to build institutions, such as the SEED charter school. The Act favors such activities, but the AmeriCorps programs will have to change to encourage real public work, planning, learning, and deliberation. The default will be lots of new miscellaneous and temporary positions that provide direct human services. I don’t think anyone inside the modern “service” movement would be satisfied with the default, but we will have to work to avoid it.

Juan Sanchez Cotán

This is a remarkable painting that I saw in the San Diego Museum of Art last week. I like it for two reasons that often seem to apply to great works.

First, it’s good in itself. If you had no idea where it came from, you might guess that it’s a nineteenth-century American work, or possibly even a contemporary painting based on a photograph. Regardless, you might appreciate the striking composition, with a few large items displayed in an asymmetrical curve before a black background–the melon slice and cucumber extending into our space. You might also admire the realism of the fruit contrasted with the almost abstract frame.

But then you find out that it was painted in 1602 by a rather mysterious figure named Juan Sanchez Cotán. Before Cotán, no one had painted fruit or other inanimate objects by themselves–only as details in larger works. Cotán painted several “still life” paintings of fruit around 1600, and then entered a Carthusian monastery where he painted only religious works until his early death. With his fruits and vegetables, Cotán launched a genre that remained very important for Dutch genre painters in the 17th century, for impressionists and post-impressionists, and then for Cubists and other high modernists. Representing vegetables on a table became a means of exploring space and light, of commenting on art, and of making subtle points about affluence and decay.

Thus Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber has qualities that you cannot infer from the image alone. For instance, we can call it “original” and “influential” because we know what comes before and after in the history of art.

Implication: If someone painted exactly the same picture today (whether or not he copied the original), it would be a different work of art with an entirely different significance from Cotán’s painting. Borges explored the same idea in “Pierre Renard, Author of the Quixote.” The fictional Renard writes passages of Don Quixote verbatim without consulting the original book, thereby creating a work that is identical to Cervantes’ masterpiece in terms of the letters on the page, but entirely different in value and purpose.

a theory of free speech on campus

Last Thursday, students at my university (Tufts) assembled to protest an incident described as follows in the Boston Globe:

    The freshman, who is white, approached five men from the group who were practicing a dance for an upcoming cultural show and insisted the dancers teach him their moves, according to the school newspaper and a news release from the Korean Students Association. When the dancers refused and asked him to leave, the freshman responded with expletives, called them “gay,” spat on them, and threatened to kill them, according to one written account. A fight ensued and the dancers pinned the freshman to the floor, put him in a headlock, and let him go only when he said he could not breathe, said a written account of the incident from the Korean Students Association. The freshman then allegedly spewed a string of racial epithets, yelling at the Korean students to “Go back to China.”

The incident (as described by several witnesses, but not yet independently adjudicated) is extremely ugly. It has no place on a campus and requires a response that goes beyond the case itself. But the protest–to judge by comments in the Tufts Daily–was itself controversial, provoking complaints of “political correctness.” At the risk of responding rather abstractly and cerebrally to a raw case, I’d like to say something about speech in academia.

The central value, in my opinion, is not freedom but quality. A university is not like the state, which has to be extremely careful about using its dreadful powers to assess or influence expression. A university is all about influencing expression. Every grade on an essay, every tenure decision, every invitation to a visiting speaker, and every revision of an administrator’s memo is a judgment of quality, with consequences. A university is a voluntary community dedicated to improving discourse. Members are entitled to leave, and the university is entitled to discipline or even expel them for what they say.

We are the heirs of the Free Speech Movement, which dramatically improved colleges by ending bans on political expression and loyalty oaths. We should be grateful to that movement–but understand it correctly. The old rules against political expression had reduced the quality of discourse on campuses by bracketing a whole set of essential questions. Such bans were invidious. But the alternative was not freedom per se; it was a new environment in which discussion of politics was allowed–and even favored.

One famous free speech case, Keyshian v Board of Regents, struck down loyalty oaths in New York State schools on the theory that:

    Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. “The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” … The classroom is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas.” The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”

I’m 100% against loyalty oaths, but I don’t think the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor can really justify freedom in classrooms. First, a marketplace requires incentives. A marketplace of ideas only works if you obtain rewards for being correct. In the classroom–and more broadly, in academic institutions–the main incentives are grades, degrees, speaking invitations, and jobs. These are not handed out neutrally; they are given in recognition of quality. The system that awards these incentives is rather hierarchical and centralized. So there is no market within a university, although universities compete with each other in a market for students. They promise–not freedom–but the ability to assess and reward excellence.

Second, “truth” is not the only mark of quality–contrary to the passage from Keyshian quoted above. Elegance, relevance, originality, respect for others, and social value also count. Universities are in the education business. Their students, and others whom they influence, are supposed to learn to think and speak well. Telling Korean-American students to “go back to China” is thus a failure of higher education. The precise remedy is a matter of judgment, but it certainly cannot be tolerated on grounds of “free speech.”

(See also Justice O’Connor’s theory of academic freedom.)

counter-cultural politics

I ended my AERA presentation last week by saying that the best thing about good youth civic programs is not their impact on the kids whom they engage, nor the chance that they may increase political equality. The best thing about them is that they embody an alternative kind of politics. Excellent classroom discussions of controversial issues, service-learning projects, and youth media-production or youth-led research create examples that help to move the whole society …

  • From the prevailing “deficit model,” in which students (and adult populations, too) are treated as problems or victims, toward a model of people as contributors.
  • From a specialist understanding of education (in which professional teachers educate and kids are measured on tests) to an understanding of education as a community’s task (in which schools play one important role).
  • From a sense that all investments are mobile and contingent to an attitude of commitment.
  • From a government-centered view of politics–in which the main controversy is what the government should and shouldn’t do–to a citizen-centered view, in which the question is how we define and address our problems.
  • From an understanding of politics as zero-sum distribution to an understanding of politics as creativity and the making of meaning.
  • From manipulative or strategic politics to politics as open-ended deliberation about what ought to be done.

My colleagues and I have made these points before, but I was expressly asked to list them on my blog–and here they are.