Monthly Archives: May 2014

become a professor, see the world

Leave a reply

They say that academia is an ivory tower, sheltered from the tumult of human experience. But I’m fortunate, thanks to my job, to meet a very wide range of people in highly diverse settings. In fact, I don’t think many people in other walks of life are as fortunate in that respect. Within the past month, in the line of duty (so to speak), I have

  • Heard a “legalese-hatin’, cowboy-boot-wearin’, unafraid-to-admihuit-it liberal judge who rules from the [Arkansas federal] bench in a rocking chair” tell hootin’-and-hollerin’ jokes at the expense of his own profession.
  • Done a windshield tour of the poorest neighborhood in Champaign (IL), where the small decaying frame houses are scattered on the edge of the prairie.
  • Sat in the hushed office of the president of Duke, amid rubber trees, leaded Gothic windows, and framed honors, discussing the place of the humanities in public life.
  • Visited a game-design studio in Madison, WI, where hip young coders sit on stools of different heights and take breaks playing with Nerf balls and huge inflatable bowling pins.
  • Lectured in the Grecian rotunda of Mr. Jefferson’s University, a World Heritage Site.
  • And heard up-and-coming country singers in a bona fide Nashville honky-tonk on a Friday night.

We may be on the verge of wrecking it–and we certainly need better institutions to govern it–but it’s still a great country and a privilege to be able to see so many facets of it.

(On to DC this evening.)

MoveOn, faith-based organizing, and glimpses of the Great Community

Leave a reply

(Nashville) In the past few days, I have interviewed a prominent leader from MoveOn (the massive liberal online network) and from PICO (a network of community organizers based mainly in religious congregations). It’s fascinating how each sees combining the strengths of their respective organizational types as the essential next step for democracy.

According to my notes, PICO “invests lots and lots of time to connect with people and develop relations. … People begin to understand who they are in a public landscape by engaging with others in contesting for power. … They begin to discover that their voice can matter. … Their appetite [for more engagement] grows as well.” Meanwhile, citizens go on an ideological journey, starting out as relatively conservative and developing views that are more challenging to the status quo, although they would still not identify themselves as progressives. This is deep work, and it builds real power. But “scale is what we are trying to figure out. … How do you get to scale, because we are nowhere near where we want.”

Meanwhile, MoveOn began by channeling the mass voice of liberals, “one collective cry.” But mass petitions are not as effective any more, especially on issues like money-in-politics or climate change. “We need to organize in deeper ways to be taken seriously by those in power.” “Horizontal relations are incredibly important just to motivate people. People care about issues but ultimately they care about people.” “Communities are powerful for accountability for civic action. We are stronger when people are accountable to each other.” MoveOn’s goal is to “move from a list of 8 million to horizontal connectivity.” “A mega movement would radically scale accountability. That would require community.”

PICO has community and accountability, but not mass scale. MoveOn has “tremendous scale and little depth.” The problem is not new, although the solutions may now be dimly visible. John Dewey might as well have written these words (from the Public and its Problems, 1927) yesterday:

We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being. The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

the Power of Democracy in California

Leave a reply

(Durham, NC) For about a year, I have been assisting a task force called “the Power of Democracy” that formed in California under the active leadership of the state’s Chief Justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Members have been thoughtful and dogged about promoting civic learning and civic engagement in their state, working with their state education agency, the legislature, the judiciary, and key nongovernmental organizations, discussing significant policy changes, giving awards, holding public meetings, and otherwise drawing attention to civic education. I am optimistic that real improvements will come in California.

I’m able to write all this now because the Power of Democracy has a new public face in the form of an excellent website. If you explore it, you’ll see a new article by the leader of the California Chamber of Commerce arguing that business needs better civic education; the “six promising practices” of civics (which originated at CIRCLE) used as their definition of what works; and my own analysis of California’s current civic ed. policies. But the most promising aspect of the project is the strong team that has come together to advocate for civic education in a way that emphasizes equity in opportunities and civic action as the desired outcome.