(Brief remarks at an Ash Center/Kennedy School of Government meeting on redistricting reform) I know less than anyone in this room about districting, but I do have experience with several networks of researchers and practitioners who have worked together on aspects of democracy. I’m talking not about specific projects but about partnerships that persist. Reflecting on those experiences, I’d propose three recommendations for any group of researchers and practitioners who come together to work on a problem:

1. Separate the people from their roles

Academics and practitioners of various sorts have official roles that structure their lives. It’s not because of arrogance or naval-gazing that tenure-track academics strive to publish: that’s a requirement. Publication requires originality, generalizability, and advanced methodological proficiency, none of which necessarily matters to practitioners. Meanwhile, practitioners must hit targets negotiated with funders or members, and they cannot spend scarce resources on research unless it advances their goals. Understanding these parameters allows creative solutions to emerge.

To promote a constructive conversation about how to work together, it helps to break down stereotypes about the human beings in these respective roles. In my experience, they tend not to be all that different. Many practitioners are deeply scholarly, in both their attainments and their dispositions and interests. And many scholars are practical people who work for real-world objectives and know how to get things done. Once academics and practitioners learn that they do not have fundamentally different priorities or values, it’s easier for them to focus on the nitty-gritty of incentives and opportunities.

2. Be diplomatic

This should go without saying, but I have seen plenty of cringe-inducing moments. Imagine professors from fancy institutions saying to grassroots organizers who have sacrificed and put their safety on the line for decades, “You don’t know whether your strategy has any impact because you have not done a randomized experiment.” There may actually be some truth to this claim, but it is no way to treat a fellow human being–nor will it encourage a partnership. I have also seen grizzled political organizers dismiss academics, especially young ones, for being politically naive, thereby missing what these scholars can contribute. We can’t work together well unless we treat each other well.

3. Recognize the three dimensions of complex problems

Redistricting is a good example. It is technically complex: massive data and computational power can be used to draw districts that advantage any side. It is normatively contested: good people would prefer districts that are (1) maximally competitive, (2) maximally representative of the partisan divide in a state, (3) maximally representative of the racial demographics of the state, (4) maximally secure for disadvantaged minority representatives, or (5) maximally compact. They prefer processes that are insulated from political pressure or responsive to political organizing. These are decent values but they conflict. Finally, the issue is riven with power: the technical tools and legal authority to redistrict are held by powerful people who use them for their ends.

These three dimensions also arise for most other 21st-century social and political problems. Progress typically demands empirical/methodological sophistication, normative deliberation, and strategic insight.

My claim is that both researchers and practitioners contribute to all three dimensions. Empirical, normative, and strategic sophistication comes from the academy and from practice. It’s a mistake to see academics as the sole custodians of empirical methods or the practitioners (and the public) as the only ones who can think about values or strategies. Questions of ideals and strategies can be investigated with scholarly rigor; practitioners can create and analyze data. We need everyone working on all three tasks.

See also: the Tisch College initiative on gerrymandering; mini-conference on Facts, Values, and Strategies; political science and the public; and twenty-five years of it.

Tisch College has a Program in Public Humanities. As of today, the Program has its own webpage, which I invite you to visit.

The webpage introduces the Program’s director,  Diane O’Donoghue. An art historian, Diane first came to Tisch College as a Faculty Fellow in 2013—working on a Nazi-era restitution project in Vienna—after chairing the Department of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.

The page also describes a major exhibition that celebrated a century of printing in Boston’s Chinese community. In addition to serving scholarly and cultural purposes, this exhibition drew attention to the need for a public library in Chinatown. In January 2017, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced that library services would be restored to the neighborhood.

On the same page, you can read about our current research on the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown, Diane’s spring course on “Public Amnesias and their Discontents,” and past and future presentations on the public humanities.

I have argued that the humanities and civic life have an intrinsic connection. “Humanist” was originally an informal term for someone who taught rhetoric, history and ethics to future public leaders–in contrast to philosophy and theology, which prepared clergymen. Citizens must make ethical judgments in concrete circumstances, and the humanities are disciplines that combine ethics, judgment, and concreteness with analytic and conceptual rigor. In recent decades, the professional humanities have had a somewhat distant or even fraught relationship with public life, but that is changing, thanks to the kinds of scholars, artists, and practitioners who congregate in Imagining America or in the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium, of which Tisch College is a charter member.

From the perspective of Tisch College, Public Humanities is one component of Civic Studies, which also encompasses empirical research on civic engagement in the US and abroad, Civic Science, community-based participatory research, civic math, and other strands of research.

See also: what are the humanities? (basic points for non-humanists); the public purposes of the humanities (a brief history); the state humanities councils, connecting the public to scholarship; and “Rethinking the Humanities“

I’ve been blogging almost daily since January 2003, and I would normally write reflections on something as interesting as the Obama Summit that took place this week as the kickoff event of the new Obama Foundation. However, my motivation to write is somewhat diminished by the fact that my friend Ethan Zuckerman has said everything I would–and very well–in a piece for Medium. To be sure, Ethan and I are similarly positioned, with similar demographics and job descriptions. I am sure there were other ways to perceive the Summit, but I saw the same event that Ethan did and I recommend his report.