Monthly Archives: April 2014

an empirical study of the humanities

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The strongest arguments for the humanities are not about their effects. In order to decide whether any given outcome or impact is desirable, we must have a considered opinion of what is good. The humanities are the disciplines that address that question. We do not consider matters of value because doing so has good results; we do it to decide which results are good. So I have argued in a set of books and articles, the latest of which is Reforming the Humanities.

At the same time, however, the humanities are real practices and activities, taking time, costing money, and engaging people in the world. They exist in colleges and universities and also in k-12 schools and in a wide variety of community settings: book clubs, historical associations, museums, and the like. Participating in those activities and organizations will have effects, and it is worth studying them. The National Endowment for the Humanities does not conduct or support much empirical research on the humanities, and the whole topic is little studied. Yet the public humanities have reached substantial scale. As Elizabeth Lynn has written, “There are now 56 state humanities councils [that] receive more than one-third of all NEH program funds (over $40 million in FY2011) and they raise almost as many dollars in state and private funds. Each year they conduct many thousands of programs nation wide, providing what former NEH Chairman Jim Leach has called the ‘finest outreach education in the humanities in the world today.’”

As a contribution to the empirical research on the humanities, CIRCLE was very pleased to collaborate with Indiana Humanities on a study of the public humanities in the Hoosier State, as part of a national effort called “Humanities at the Crossroads.”

CIRCLE studies civic engagement, and the humanities do not overlap perfectly with civic activity. If we apply the ancient distinction between the active and the contemplative life, civic engagement is active, and sometimes the humanities are contemplative. Nevertheless, we saw a study of the humanities as relevant to our civic mission for two main reasons.

First, the public humanities give explicit attention to questions of ethics and values. That means they play an essential role in our civil society. As one participant in our study said, “I think that people appreciate the opportunity to come together and discuss pertinent topics. I do believe they see these activities as enrichment and community building opportunities.”

Second, people and organizations involved with the humanities form a network. Civil society is not just a list of separate organizations; the whole is (or should be) greater than the sum of its parts. Our study with Indiana Humanities was an opportunity to assess the whole network of public humanities organizations in one state, as a model for further research on the humanities and on other aspects of civic engagement.

Indiana HumanitiesBecause we took a network approach, we were able to reveal practically significant findings that would have been invisible otherwise. For example, we did not detect a statewide network organized around the humanities per se. As the small graphic to the left suggests, historical associations were more prominent and central. Although history is certainly one of the humanities, the lack of a network for the humanities (as a whole) presents challenges. For example, it makes it harder to connect the community-based humanities to universities, where literature is a much larger field than history. And it means that there is no coherent public voice for the humanities when they come under threat.

On the other hand, we found a large number of people and organizations concerned with the humanities in Indiana. By surveying an original sample known to Indiana Humanities and asking respondents to name others with whom they work, we found 2,147 individuals thought to be involved in the humanities within the state.  Of those, 390 gave us data on their own activities. They told us that the humanities are as popular as or even more popular than in the past and that their activities contribute to the “sense of place” that every community wants to enhance. We also found that humanities organizations in Indiana are lean and longstanding. More than 20 percent have been in existence for a century or more, but funding sources for the humanities are flat or in decline.

These and many other findings are presented in Felicia M. Sullivan, Nancy N. Conner, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Peter Levine and Elizabeth Lynn, “Humanities at the Crossroads: An Indiana Case Study” (CIRCLE, in collaboration with Indiana Humanities, 2014).

the political advantages of organized religion

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A piece of mine entitled “If Millennials Leave Religion, then What?” was published by the Religion News Service and picked up by the Washington Post yesterday. In it, I acknowledge the drawbacks of religion (viewed from a secular, political perspective), but I also catalog its advantages and argue that we don’t yet have a secular alternative that fills the traditional civic and political functions of churches and other religious congregations.

The piece had to be cut for length, which is fine (and I was able to select the cuts). But here, I would like to share one section that was deleted for length. In the published version, I alluded to the “depth” of religion. This is what I meant:

Mark Warren’s wonderful book about faith-based organizing, Dry Bones Rattling, begins with a vignette of Father Al Jost reading from the Book of Ezekiel to a group of Latina parishioners from poor neighborhoods in San Antonio. He chooses the version by African-American songwriter James Weldon Johnson: “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.” Those lyrics derive from the Shakespearean poetry of the King James Version: “Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Father Jost’s listeners might hear those resonances, or some might recall the Spanish (“¡Huesos secos!”) or the Latin of the Church in which they were raised.

In any case, the effects are palpable. The women are nervous before Father Jost speaks, but they respond “with a resounding ‘Amen’ and [stride] onto the stage to the sounds of a mariachi band … exuding confidence and collective determination.”

I propose that the original quality and the long history of Ezekiel’s poetry explain its political power. Secular equivalents must match this depth of resonance.

the Midwestern public universities

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(Madison, WI) I am here very briefly for a meeting, having come from this morning from Urbana/Champaign. My calendar for this six month period also shows days in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Chicago, and Detroit.

I don’t think the full glory of our Midwestern state universities is sufficiently appreciated. As an academic myself, I am prone to overestimate the importance of higher education. But in my mind, this region is a prairie studded with fine research institutions, like Greek city states or walled Renaissance towns, each boasting its famous thinkers and its cosmopolitan reach, each tied to the state that sustains it (and each, unfortunately, ready to send a mercenary army into symbolic battle with the others). Champaign, IL–just for example–houses the second biggest university library in America, whose 13 million volumes put it behind only Harvard. I am reminded of what the late Tony Judt once wrote:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

I am not as critical as Judt of the “scrubscape” and its people. But I agree that there’s something miraculous about these huge intellectual conglomerates rising from the fruited plain at the command of their state legislatures. Hopping around the region on commuter planes, you see professorial types with the New York Review spread on their knees and kids in college hoodies. I know that the universities’ funding is now mostly private and their students come increasingly from a global elite. I know they can be ivory towers or tools of Monsanto or the NSA. And yet, when people assess our era centuries from now, I think the great Midwestern public universities will warrant respect.

Review of We Are the Ones

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(Urbana/Champaign, IL) I am here to talk to a public audience about the arguments of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Meanwhile, I’d recommend Michael McQuarrie’s new review of my book (along with Ben Barber’s If Mayors Ran the World). It’s a good, thoughtful article. I appreciate his summary of my book and his partially critical response.

In the final chapter, I say that a movement for civic renewal should expect and welcome vibrant debate, and three likely topics of debate will be: whether economic reforms must precede political empowerment; the role of anger and conflict versus civility and consensus; and the ideological placement of the civic renewal movement (on the left, at the center, aiming for neutrality, or very broad). McQuarrie meets my hopes by staking out strong positions on exactly those issues.

He also reads me as taking the opposite position from him on some of these questions, when I was trying to be more neutral–considering both the pros and the cons and letting readers end where they like. Thus I would like to respond to certain portions of his review, not because they’re necessarily unfair, but as an opportunity to clarify my own views and engage the debate. For example:

The title of Levine’s book—We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For—is an inspiring call to action, and in this sense, at least, is similar to Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1946). However, rather than arguing for the possibilities of popular power, Levine is more interested in establishing the potential of citizen engagement for policy. Much of the book seems oriented around questions like “What are the measurable effects of community engagement on school effectiveness?” Levine’s form betrays a shift within the civic renewal movement, as it gains a foothold in foundations, academia, and even the White House. In the process it is becoming more communitarian in its celebration of the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense. In terms of practice, contemporary advocates of the civic renewal movement emphasize correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences. In contrast, many in this tradition from Tocqueville on argued that civic virtue could only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality. Challenging elites with popular power and cries that they are economic parasites, once central to populist activism and discourse, have been trimmed away in Levine’s account to make room for the idea that inequality can be overcome through a more virtuous and deliberative politics.

I do collect evidence that civic engagement boosts social outcomes. That’s because I don’t believe that many citizens, let alone powerful institutional actors, are ready to support active citizenship unless they believe it pays off in terms of better schools, safer streets, or a healthier environment.

I am a hard-headed researcher, so I will only claim that civic engagement has such benefits if it really does. In fact, instrumental arguments will carry us only so far. Civic engagement may not always improve communities. It may generate desirable outcomes, but less cheaply and reliably than other strategies would. It may boost outcomes (like “school effectiveness”) that we trivialize when we try to quantify them, thereby erasing deeply contested value questions. And it may degenerate into mere social hygiene if it is viewed as a tool for social improvement rather than a right of democratic citizens and an aspect of the good life.

On the other hand, arguing for civic engagement as a right will not obtain funding, education, media coverage, or legal authorization for civic engagement. Instrumental arguments, if handled right, can be helpful. They are ammunition for a peaceful army of engaged citizens.

I would like to think that I am not a communitarian (celebrating “the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense”) or merely a deliberative democrat (viewing “correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences”). I am certainly not a technocrat, and I offer a pretty sharp critique of expertise in chapter 4. With McQuarrie, I believe in power and conflict. Activist social movements must hold governments accountable. They will be–and should be–angry at the powers that be and at their fellow citizens who stand in their way. The strategies I recommend at the end of the book are aimed at bolstering their efforts. I do not for a moment count on policymakers to open doors willingly.

I do, however, reject the argument that “civic virtue [can] only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality.” Effective activism is more common in Tanzania and India than in the US. It has often arisen from the poorest strata of American society, starting with slaves in the antebellum era.

The problem with putting economic equality first and expecting civic renewal to follow is that someone must then pursue economic equality without a popular following. Who will that be, why will the succeed, and why should we trust them if they do? Saul Alinsky was a great theorist, but his popular movements ended in disaster. I denounce the political influence of economic elites, because that is a valid critique and because political reform is required for civic empowerment. I would not personally denounce economic elites as economic parasites because I am not sure that is true, and I know it will divide a potentially broader coalition.

I wrote a book in the late 1990s about the Progressive Era (and actually discarded some detailed historical research I had done for reasons of length and coherence). Reflecting on that history, I would now say that some Progressive Era reforms were elitist and downright damaging. Others were populist and “civic,” in my terms (deliberative, collaborative, and relational). Robert M. La Follette, Jane Addams, and John Dewey were their paragons.

To the extent that these valuable reforms flourished, it was partly because economic radicals (Socialists and agrarian populists) challenged the government and capital. That made elites amenable to sharing some power. But the actual reforms enacted from 1900-1914 did not challenge economic inequality. Progressive reforms were indeed about reducing the political influence of money and increasing deliberative popular influence over government. Typically, the inventors and proponents of these civic reforms were not Socialists or populists. They had broader and more centrist coalitions, including many people who would have bristled at a depiction of the wealthy as parasites. The left movements may have won space for civic reforms, but the civic reforms had different origins and motivations.

Coming back to our present day: I would welcome more effective left-populist grassroots mobilizing on economic issues. I think it would change the balance of power in ways that would help civic reformers. But I think we also need a civic blueprint: a vision of how our democracy should look if we had the power to demand it. That’s what I hope to offer in We Are the Ones–along with strategies for civic reform and topics for the movement to debate. McQuarrie has joined the debate in a most welcome way.