Monthly Archives: May 2011

why civility doesn’t pay

E.J. Dionne describes a recent letter from Catholic professors to Speaker John Boehnher as “civil.” I think that’s right–in a specific and important sense. Note that the letter is deeply critical. For example:

Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.

Those are harsh words. A practicing Catholic like Mr. Boehner should prefer to be called insulting names than to be told that his record is directly contrary to the ancient and consistent magisterium (teaching authority) of the one true Church.

In what sense, then, is the letter “civil”? I think civility’s core value is the attempt to maintain a conversation, to invite a reply from which one might learn and then reply in turn. A civil interlocutor acknowledges that the other person is worthy of engaging and might have something valuable to say. Not everyone is worthy of engaging; civility is not a transcendent virtue–but it has an important place in a democratic society.

So defined, civility is consistent with sharp criticism. It all depends on the context: sometimes you have to be polite or even nice to keep a conversation going; but sometimes a harsh accusation is more effective. The question is whether you are likely to shut down or open up a conversation.

The Catholic academics’ letter explicitly welcomes further dialogue with Mr. Boehner and gives him openings to respond. It begins:

We congratulate you on the occasion of your commencement address to The Catholic University of America. It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching. We write in the hope that this visit will reawaken your familiarity with the teachings of your Church on matters of faith and morals as they relate to governance.

Not only does this letter acknowledge Mr. Boehner’s standing to speak at Catholic University, but it invites him to “dissent” and explain why his position on the federal budget does not contradict the Church “on matters of faith and morals.”

Dionne notes that the letter drew hardly any media attention, in contrast to the protests at Notre Dame against President Obama’s visit in 2009. There could be several reasons for this difference, including the higher profile of a president. But Mr. Boehner is the leader of the national Republican Party and a Catholic, which makes his argument with Catholic theologians arguably more interesting than anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame.

I agree with Dionne that the recent letter was ignored because of its civility. If you say, “John Boehner must not speak at our institution; we do not want to hear him,” that is news. (Attempting to block a scheduled campus speaker follows a well-known news script.) If you say, “John Boehner is welcome to speak at our campus, but his actions violate two thousand years of theological consensus,” the press yawns. Perhaps the substance is too hard for reporters to grasp, or it sounds like just another debate about abstract ideas. In any case, we must find ways to reward civility, or we won’t see much of it.

how to evaluate advocacy

Foundations and rich individuals invest hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to change policy, such as the 20-year struggle for health care reform and the campaign to address global warming. One of those efforts achieved major legislation; the other has fizzled for now. The question arises: How can we tell when and why  investments in advocacy work? If we can’t evaluate them, most donors will be skeptical about spending much money on advocacy. Those who are willing to take the risk won’t know where to invest.

Steve Teles and Mark Schmitt have an important new paper called “The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy” (PDF). It’s short, free of jargon, and largely free of data and citations, but it is based on a remarkable combination of experience and reflection. Teles is author of (among many other publications, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, which is basically an evaluation of a long, complex advocacy effort that was successful in remaking the American judiciary. Schmitt has been an important Senate staffer (hence, a target of advocacy) and a thoughtful participant in DC think tanks and their advocacy efforts.

They argue that the methods appropriate for assessing services cannot work for advocacy efforts. Because of the unpredictability of politics, the many players who focus on any single topic, and the bias toward the status quo (among other reasons), detecting the policy impact of a particular project or organization is virtually impossible.

They don’t quite say this, but it could be a serious error to try to detect causality, as if one could find a replicable recipe for policy change and then put all one’s money into it. Quite the contrary, funders should use what this article (following Teles’ book) calls “a spread-betting approach to making grants.” It’s almost always smart to fund a diverse set of strategies and flavors of reform–the radical outsiders, the expert-driven negotiators, the grassroots organizers, and others–because success depends on a mix of these, in unpredictable proportions.

A corollary of the last point: Don’t try to build some kind of unified coalition, let alone one “go-to” organization. On the contrary, maintain and expand a diverse and somewhat contentious network.

That is good strategic advice, but how to evaluate outcomes? Teles and Schmitt recommend: 1) evaluating a whole portfolio, not individual projects; 2) setting the longest possible time horizon, because failures suddenly become successes, and even the most thrilling legislative victories can disappoint; 3) evaluate the advocates (i.e., organizations and leaders), not the individual projects or strategies, because you want to encourage adaptability and resilience, 4) assess positions in networks if you want to purchase influence; 5) use peer appraisals to assess advocates; and 6) drop all pretense of positivist social science and allow yourself to exercise judgment, or what Aristotle and the contemporary theorist Bent Flyvbjerg calls “phronesis.” (Flyvbjerg is hardly a household name, and his work may not be known in think tanks, but he has shaken up American political science with his radical alternative to standard social science–which resembles the recommendations of Schmitt and Teles. One additional tip he offers is to be attentive to who benefits from any given strategy, even the most idealistic ones.)

If you are interested in this topic, I also recommend Lobbying and Policy Change:Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why by my Tufts colleague Jeffrey Berry and four colleagues. Their book demonstrates that having the most money does not determine success in advocacy. In fact, money explains only about five percent of the variance in outcomes. Strategy counts, but so do uncontrollable factors such as the profound bias in favor of the status quo.

 

alienating Zionism

It is wise to let the odious speak; they make the most eloquent cases against themselves. In the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, the Israeli politician Danny Danon says that U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state would be an opportunity for Israel to “annex the Jewish communities of the West Bank, or as Israelis prefer to refer to our historic heartland, Judea and Samaria.” It would be a chance for Israel to end all financial support for the Palestinian authority, prevent Palestinians from ever becoming Israeli citizens, “right a historic wrong,” and “rectify the mistake we made in 1967 by failing to annex all of the West Bank.” Danon says nothing at all about the interests and rights of the West Bank’s 2.4 million Arabs, “who would continue to live in their own—unannexed—towns.”

Some time ago, Mark Kleiman attended what he considered a racist, anti-Arab gathering and declared himself a former Zionist: “In the immortal words of Sam Goldwyn, ‘Include me out.'” Jonathan Chait sympathized with his reaction to the event but thought the conclusion nonsensical. Chait said, “Zionism is the belief that there should be an Jewish state in some approximation of the land where it existed before the Diaspora.”

Nobody gets to decide (by himself) what a word means, but I see three options.

  1. “Zionism” simply means a belief that there should be a Jewish state in roughly the location it now occupies. If that’s Zionism, include me in, but note that I also believe there should be a Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe in roughly the same location that it occupies today. My feelings are similar for about 190 other countries as well.
  2. Zionism is what Danny Danon thinks it is. He says that seizing much of the West Bank “would further Zionist values and strengthen the State of Israel,” as did a series of previous annexations. If that is Zionism, include me out.
  3. Finally, “Zionism” could mean, not only a passive acknowledgment that Israel has a right to exist, but also an emotional bond with the State of Israel and a willingness to support that country more actively than one supports most others. Indeed, I think that is what the word generally means. Statements like Dolon’s make the emotional bond more difficult for me.

(I wrote most of this early this morning, before the president’s major speech, in which he said, “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled  with permanent occupation.” That is correct, and I would hope it is compatible with “Zionist values.” Danny Dolon’s reaction: “it is now clear that the U.S. President has adopted Yasser Arafat’s infamous ‘Stages Plan’ and the hope to eventually remove the State of Israel from the map.” If you agree with the president and disagree with Dolon, check out J-Street and Americans for Peace Now.)

increasing the odds of success for young people’s civic work

My favorite civic education courses and programs are ones that ask kids to discuss local issues, deliberate about what to do, act together, and then reflect. This seems the best pedagogy, but it presents a consistent challenge.

Middle-class, suburban kids tend to identify problems that they can address effectively within a finite amount of time. For example, they might note that there’s always a traffic jam in the high school parking lot at 3 pm, come up with an alternative traffic plan, and offer it to a principal who is delighted to adopt it. They learn skills, gain confidence, and feel great. Meanwhile, their low-income, urban peers are identifying homicide or the dropout rate as their key concern. They either fail to address such problems or they realize that they will fail and shift to some other objective. Often they decide to raise awareness among their peers, knowing that “awareness” is ultimately not very useful. As a result, their sense of political self-confidence (or “efficacy,” in the jargon) often declines as a result of their work. For evidence, see:

I think this is the great issue in the field. Some possible solutions  include: 1) careful, guided selection of topics for students’ projects, which Fehrman and Schutz recommend; 2) very skillful preparation and reflection, including constructive reflection on the barriers that students encounter (which Ferhman and Schutz also recommend); and/or 3) not starting over with new projects every semester or course. I would advocate more experimentation with cumulative civic projects, in which students are asked to build on what their predecessors began. That reduces their power to choose issues and strategies, but it also gives them more chance of success. After all, most adult community projects don’t start and end within 14 weeks; we build on previous work.

could the college bubble burst?

A search for “college” and “bubble” will yield many articles about rising tuition rates (up by 440 percent since 1985), frantic efforts to attend the most selective colleges, mountains of student debt, and the possibility that this whole system will soon collapse like the market for tulips in baroque Amsterdam. See, for instance, this relatively sober piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I won’t quite join in the denunciations of tuition inflation. Some students receive truly inspiring and enriching college educations whose value is hard to estimate but probably exceeds the price.

Also, at institutions like mine, middle class students qualify for financial aid. It’s smart to charge a sticker price of $50,000 if substantial numbers of families can pay that much, and then offer discounts for the many families who cannot. Setting a lower sticker price would be like leaving money on the table (money that can be used for educational and scholarly purposes). The only drawback–and it’s a serious one–is the misimpression that everyone really pays $50,000. That could (and probably does) dissuade some poor and middle-class students from applying.

In any case, I’m convinced that tuition is rising faster than inflation because of the Baumol Effect, not just a bubble. Sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and retail achieve constant productivity gains because of technology. But colleges basically sell hours of attention by professors. To be more specific, they offer this implicit formula:

Hours with a professor times reputation or qualifications of the professor divided by the number of other students in the room.

If that’s the product, there is no way to cut its cost, which constantly rises relative to other goods. The cost of maintaining a faculty with a distinguished reputation rises even faster whenever the world of science and scholarship expands and research becomes more complex and expensive.

Colleges basically try to get away with alternative products: huge lecture classes, teaching by adjuncts. But savvy students who have strong positions in the admissions market choose institutions that offer as close as possible to the real deal.

Even given these partial justifications, I would be quick to admit that the sector has a problem. Many students do not have deeply enriching experiences in college, if only because they are not prepared or motivated for the best aspects of higher education (seminars on Plato, real scientific work, service-learning). Even for students who do get a good education, the sticker price is awfully high, and neither the Baumol Effect nor financial aid discounts excuses it fully.

Part of the problem is that college is a positional good: you look better in the job market if you graduate from an institution that has a higher rank than others. Colleges that are selective tend to rise on most people’s lists (whether implicit lists or literal rankings like that of US News & World Report.) If the nation’s best students all decided to flood NoName State, its mean SAT scores would rise, its acceptance rate would plummet, and the value of its diploma would soar. But that’s not how the market actually works. Distinguished faculties, ancient campuses, and beautiful facilities are what draw competitive students. These are signals that other strong applicants will apply. Markers of prestige cost money, and once you have them, you can get away with charging high tuition because of the competitive advantage that your diploma will offer.

Because people believe that expensive diplomas offer competitive advantages, the system sustains itself. I think the bubble would burst if:

  1. Prospective students decided en masse that prestigious degrees did not offer tangible benefits. There is some evidence that the benefits have been exaggerated, and if that news gets out, it could burst the bubble. On the other hand, families obtain non-economic advantages from prestige, like the opportunity to brag that their kids go to Stanford.
  2. All the really smart kids decided that they didn’t care about prestige but only about learning. They would all have to decide this at once, because we learn from smart peers in college. As long as the most competitive applicants chose to attend the most prestigious and expensive schools, that is where the smartest peers –and best discussions, and hardest classes–are.
  3. Lots of competitive applicants decided all at once to go to low-cost schools, in which case the prestige of those institutions would rise but the price of prestige would fall, at least temporarily. It’s hard to see this happening, because applicants can’t coordinate their decisions. Hence the most competitive ones apply to expensive and famous institutions.

Because each of these scenarios seems unlikely, I doubt the bubble will burst. But the costs of college are too high. That creates barriers to attendance and encourages harmful economies, such as exploiting adjuncts. The only way I can think of to cut the actual cost of higher education is to find valid alternatives to the formula stated in italics above. An example would be an elaborate computer-based simulation that was as valuable as time with a professor. That would address the Baumol Effect by bringing productivity gains to higher education.