Monthly Archives: October 2011

Syracuse University: slide or rise?

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(Cincinnati) Although I grew up in Syracuse as a professor’s child, have visited the university as recently as last week, and know more than a dozen SU faculty, I am not really in a position to evaluate the administration of Chancellor Nancy Cantor. She has tried to reorient the university to serving “the public good.” That means making it more accessible to poor and minority students, supporting the redevelopment of the city of Syracuse in partnership with local citizens, and emphasizing scholarship that engages public issues. Her strategy has become a leading national example of “engagement” in higher education. Therefore, the debate about her administration (see, for example, this critical article in the Chronicle of Higher Education) has national implications.

Some results at Syracuse:

  • The proportion of US-born minority students has risen from 18.5 percent to 32 percent.
  • The proportion of incoming students whose family incomes qualify them for federal financial aid has risen from 20 percent to 28 percent.
  • According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “the institution has spent tens of millions of dollars—and attracted much more—to revitalize this sagging Rust Belt city. It has helped refurbish parks, taken over an abandoned building where drug dealers once grew marijuana, and turned an old furniture warehouse into a new home for academic programs in art, drama, and fashion design. The university is encouraging professors to focus their research on the city, while giving free tuition to local high-school graduates.”
  • But the University has slipped from 40th to 62nd on US News and World Report‘s ranking of national universities. The Chronicle quotes some SU professors (all of whom I happen to know) who feel that the investments in financial aid and local redevelopment and the change in admissions standards come at the cost of academic excellence.

I hesitate to make my own judgment because everything depends on quality. Serving the public good is not a matter of intention alone, but requires intellectual excellence–a point very well argued in an Imagining America report by Nancy Cantor and several colleagues. I am too far removed from the scene to be able to assess the quality or impact of SU’s work. But I would make the following broader points:

1. The fate of Syracuse University is inextricably linked to the fate of Syracuse, a hard-hit, post-industrial city. The city’s condition affects the University in the most tangible ways. For instance, talented young faculty will not teach at SU unless the city offers them amenities and feels vibrant.

2. Addressing the condition of our shrinking, post-industrial cities is an immense intellectual challenge, requiring the very highest quality of scholarship across many disciplines. If SU can contribute to that effort, it will distinguish itself intellectually. Moreover, by focusing some of its attention on one great, complex, multifaceted public issue, the university can integrate knowledge and perspectives, becoming more than a shopping mall that offers miscellaneous courses and research products.

3. The diversity of a student body or faculty does not trade off against excellence. Diversity is an educational asset. To be sure, admitting a more diverse class (by race, ethnicity, and economic background) will mean admitting students who start with a wider range of academic skills–including some who are less prepared. But that means they can progress further while they are in college. The ultimate measure of excellence is not whether you admit the smartest kids, but what you teach them. US News & World Report makes little effort to measure “value added,” yet that is what every college should strive for. Competing to admit the students who least need higher education is no way to achieve excellence.

4. The potential dangers I see are: (1) harmful effects on the city if investments are misconceived; (2) failure to support a more diverse student body; and (3) reduced support for forms of scholarship, such as ancient or medieval cultural history or pure mathematics, that feel remote from public concerns. Sometimes these disciplines address live public causes–as in this example from the field of classics. But we do them a disservice if we assess them only on that basis. They have intrinsic rather than pragmatic value.

I raise these potential dangers not because I see them playing out at Syracuse, but because they require vigilance.

For a response to the Chronicle article, follow this new blog by SU graduate students.

should we be talking about non-college youth?

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(Cincinnati) I was in Dayton today for a meeting about “non-college youth” and their civic and political participation.  CIRCLE defines this population as all Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 who have never attended college (including community college). They represent about 43% of their age cohort. Studying how they engage–or don’t engage–in all forms of civic and political life is our major focus. We care because they should have a voice in government and civil society and because engaging as citizens gives them skills, networks, and motivations that help them to flourish in life. I doubt very much that the college attendance rate will rise substantially; therefore, offering young people opportunities outside of college is an important and neglected policy issue.

Yet treating “non-college youth” as a category is problematic for several reasons. First, it’s a negative definition, using a deficit as its basic criterion.

Second, it’s a very large category, encompassing enormous diversity. Just for example, 52% of this group is white, 16% is African American, 27% is Latino, and 3% is Asian or Pacific Islanders. Some are “inner-city” youth, but many live in suburbs, and nearly 20% are rural. (See our fact sheet for details.) The question, given this diversity, is whether any research program or policy should be directed at “non-college youth” as a category. Note also that non-college youth may closely resemble peers who happen to be in college or have some college experience.

Third, “non-college” does not define disadvantage. You can be wealthy and powerful without going to college: Paris Hilton is a non-c0llege youth. On the other hand, you can be deeply disadvantaged and yet in college–especially given our broad definition of the term. The most marginalized and oppressed people have other problems (such as disease, incarceration, or criminal victimization) that make college attendance seem almost beside the point. More than half of “non-college youth” are white, yet young white people are not afflicted nearly as much by poverty, violence, preventable disease, and discrimination as are young people of color.

Yet I continue to see reasons to focus on the non-college 43%. They are almost invisible in a society whose formal leaders and opinion-makers usually hold college degrees. Reporters still routinely equate college students with young people. College attendance itself is a powerful predictor of many important outcomes. For instance, people with any college experience vote at more than twice the rate of their non-college peers. Just because you are not in college, you may need different opportunities and supports. Finally, there can be strength in numbers, and talking about 43% of the population may carry extra weight.

bridging the chasm between scholarly discourse and public opinion

(Dayton, OH) With the exception of some pure research (which I admire), scholarship deals with matters of public concern and is valuable only if it has public impact. The scholarly consensus on climate change is having no impact on public opinion and is not even recognized as a consensus by the public. Such gaps (and there are many other examples) strongly suggest that there is something wrong with the way we operate in academia. The fault is surely shared by other institutions, such as the news media. But I say: no excuses. We professors have 2,000 institutions and 3% of GDP; we should be able to do something about mistrust, misinformation, or lack of attention.

I am moderating a group of Tufts faculty who are concerned about these problems and eager to address it in different ways. These Tisch College Faculty Fellows are profiled here. The come from Arts & Sciences, Engineering, the Medical School, the Dental school, and Veterinary Medicine. Their work is very diverse but all engage public audiences or partners. I hope we will develop models and proposals that are broadly valuable.

does Occupy Wall Street need a demand?

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My thanks to Facebook friends and others who have attended Occupy Wall Street and provided independent reports. The question on my mind is the one that every academic “expert” seems impelled to ask: what do the Occupiers want?

“They have to organize around specific demands and specific targets,” [Occidental Professor Peter] Dreier suggests.”

“But if the movement is to have lasting impact, it will have to develop leaders and clear demands, said Nina Eliasoph, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. … ‘So there is a tension between this emotionally powerful movement,’ she said, ‘and the emptiness of the message itself so far.'”

Nathan Schneider’s FAQ page says:

What are the demands of the protesters? Ugh—the zillion-dollar question. …  In the weeks leading up to September 17, the NYC General Assembly seemed to be veering away from the language of ‘demands’ in the first place, largely because government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically. Instead, to begin with, they opted to make their demand the occupation itself—and the direct democracy taking place there—which in turn may or may not come up with some specific demand. When you think about it, this act is actually a pretty powerful statement against the corruption that Wall Street has come to represent. But since thinking is often too much to ask of the American mass media, the question of demands has turned into a massive PR challenge.

It is a political act to take over Wall Street and turn it into a space for free speech, where diverse views can be expressed and collective decisions made, free from coercion, money,  majority rule, or status. That is a symbolic statement in favor of civil society against both state and market.

The consequences are quite unpredictable. If the idea is to impress the American people with an alternative model of how society should be organized, I think it will fail. The model will look unattractive.

If the idea is to build a coalition or social movement that can gradually coalesce around actionable demands and develop power as voting bloc or durable protest movement, then it has potential. This process will take time and patience. Participants will have to overcome difficult coordination problems, especially since I am confident that they will reject the traditional strategy of revolutionary movements: purging most of their diversity in favor of a disciplined “vanguard.”

If the idea is to demonstrate that a substantial minority of the American people is angry because Washington’s response to the economic crisis has been too timid and overly moderate (not too radical), then I think the objective is worthy. Probably between 14% and 24% of the American people stand to the left of the Obama Administration on economic issues, and they have been largely invisible to the rest of the public. That invisibility has been a problem for the administration itself, whether the White House sees it that way or not. The only potential danger lies in misrepresenting the 14%-24%, which is very diverse and may look different (demographically and ideologically) from the people occupying Wall Street.

Tahrir Square is an inspiration, but the Egyptian protesters had a concrete demand (“Mubarak out!”), and they succeeded because the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood joined them. I think the best guess is that those two institutions will now run the country, with some tolerance for the secular “democracy” movement. That’s a major achievement but not one that looks like a model for the United States.

In Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly analyze mechanisms, processes, and episodes as components of contentious politics. Mechanisms are specific phenomena, such as taking over a public space, clashing with the police, or obtaining media attention. Processes are concatenations of mechanisms. The Civil Rights Movement was a process encompassing many mechanisms, from bus boycotts to training programs; from famous speeches to votes in the Senate. Episodes, finally, are large historical events that result from processes: the fall of Jim Crow or the ancien regime in France.

It seems to me that what we observe on Wall Street is small collection of mechanisms. Similar mechanisms have also been observed in Madison, WI, and overseas. The question is whether they can merge into a process and achieve an historical episode. That will require: 1) collaboration with very different kinds of mechanisms, such as mainstream union organizing efforts and electoral campaigns, and 2) some degree of consensus about objectives. Both require a different set of mechanisms from the ones that have been reported so far from Wall Street–but the sequence is perfectly healthy as long as it progresses to the next stage.

what happened to the civil society debate?

Jean Bethke Elshtain spoke last Friday on the  topic of “Democracy on Trial Revisited.” The title was a reference to her 1995 book Democracy on Trial. Elshtain was one of several famous theorists and public intellectuals who wrote about the crisis of civil society in that period. She also served on prominent committees, including the National Commission on Civic Renewal, of which I was deputy director. Elshtain had her own distinctive positions and concerns, but the whole diverse conversation led directly to the creation of CIRCLE and indirectly influenced such institutions as the Tisch College of Citizenship (both founded in 2000-2001). CIRCLE and Tisch pay my salary, so I am indebted to the civil society debate of the 1990s.

On Friday, Elshtain noted that the civil society debate has faded, leaving relatively little residue. Actually, I think it left a significant legacy in the form of civic renewal work–although that work also has other inspirations and ancestries. But I agree that the national dialogue about civil society is now less prominent than it was in the 1990s. The grassroots repair work continues, as does regular academic research on civic engagement, but most celebrity intellectuals have moved on to other concerns. There is, for example, no national columnist who follows civil society or civic renewal work.

Different issues look salient at different moments. The electoral turnout of young people was one ingredient in the civil society debate of the 1990s. It had declined by about one third between 1972 and 1996, causing alarm. But if you add data from 2000-2008–and delete 1972 on the ground that it was a unique year, immediately following the lowering of the voting age —there is no decline in youth voting. The perspective of 2011 is quite different from that of 1995.

Elshtain was not especially concerned about voting. She argued in the 1990s that democracy was fraying because of incivility and certain forms of identity politics. Politics had become about who we were (our demands for recognition, rights, or redistribution, based on our identities), instead of what we thought was right. Americans were retreating into separate groups that proclaimed their differences, rather than making clams about equality, liberty, or justice for all.

Regardless of one’s value-judgment about identity politics, my sense is that the forms of identity politics that Elshtain found troubling are now quite marginal. For example, in her book, she quoted a gay rights activist who decried all forms of monogamy as heterosexual bias. We have since seen a great movement to expand monogamous legal marriage to gay Americans. I do not know what Elshtain thinks of gay marriage, but it is hardly the kind of separatist retreat into “difference” that she rejected in the 1990s.

On the other hand, some of today’s Tea Partiers strike me as purveyors of identity politics, in Elshtain’s sense. They demand recognition for who they are more than what they want. For example, Governor Perry asks for support because he is “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights, loaded with hollow point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.” The point is that he is not an Ivy-League-educated, northern urbanite like the incumbent president.

There is nothing completely new about this kind of campaign rhetoric, but the country feels more deeply divided along such cultural lines. Identity claims loom larger and seem to drive beliefs and values, rather than the reverse. For example, you choose whether to believe in global warming because of who you are, not because of what you know.

Political discourse was central to Elshtain’s critique in the 1990s. She argued that because of identity politics, we were becoming angry, resentful, segregated, and “in danger of losing democratic civil society.” She presumed that democracy was discussion, debate, or dialogue–now being ruined by the wrong kind of assertions. In fact, the very first word of the book was “disagreement,” and Elshtain’s opening point was that we must learn to disagree well.

Indeed, talk is an important aspect of politics and democracy. But democracy is also a way of organizing the big institutions of society that promise fairly uncontroversial outcomes, such as making the union just, tranquil, and secure and promoting welfare and liberty for all. (See the Preamble of the Constitution.) To be sure, people disagree about such abstractions as liberty and welfare and how to balance them when they conflict. But there is also a lot of agreement that, for example, individuals ought to be safe walking down the street, and real incomes should rise as each generation contributes to the common welfare.

So are we angry because we have retreated into “racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified clans who demand to be ‘recognized’ only or exclusively as ‘different'” (as Elshtain wrote in 1995)? Or are we angry because our big institutions are not realizing the basic promises that all our leaders make? Is mutual dislike the problem, or are we just mad about poor performance?

In 1995, it was possible to view the performance of the American polity favorably (and thus focus on subtler aspects of our discourse and culture that seemed harmful). The economy was growing, we had just invented the Internet, and America felt securely at peace.

But again, to change the time frame changes one’s perspective. The performance of the American polity from 1972-2011 now looks quite poor. Before 1973, median incomes in the United States had always risen in tandem with economic growth. Since that year, annual real income growth has averaged below one percent per year, even though the economy has grown much faster. And since 2000, median families have gained nothing at all even though the overall GDP “pie” has grown.

Nobody argues that this kind of outcome is acceptable or desirable, yet it is what we get–along with two wars, terror attacks, millions of people in prison, and a decaying environment. I suspect that’s why we are cranky and distrustful. It also explains why the civil society debate has faded in favor of other concerns.

Yet it is unfortunate that prominent public intellectuals have turned away from civil society. Certain forms of civic engagement have continued to falter, even if we use the timeframe of 1972-2011. Trust in other people and in all large institutions still declines steadily. The proportion of people who report working together with others on common problems is still falling. Journalism, a key component of civil society, is in crisis with as many as one third of all paid journalists having been laid off.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate that civil society is important for precisely the kinds of large national problems that beset us today. Schools work better when parents participate, teenagers develop better when they have opportunities to serve, and civic engagement may even be a key to economic performance.