My new article entitled “Civic Studies,” in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly (Vol 32, No 1 (2014) is meant to be an overview in just a few pages. I also argue for the importance of conservative thought and suggest that much civic engagement work is conservative–in the best sense.
A poem for the summer of Ferguson, Gaza, ISIS, and Ukraine: Bertolt Brecht’s An die Nachgeborenen (1939), in my translation from the very simple and direct German.
I
Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.
What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need?
It’s true: I earn a living.
But believe me, that’s just a coincidence. Nothing
of what I do entitles me to eat my fill.
It’s a coincidence that I am spared. (If my luck stops, I’m lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink! Be glad that you did!
But how can I eat and drink if
What I eat is snatched from the hungry,
My glass of water from someone dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would like to be wise.
The old books say what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and spend the short time
You’ve got without fear.
Do without violence.
Return good for evil.
Not fulfilling desires but forgetting
Counts as wisdom.
I can’t do any of that:
Truly I live in dark times!
II
I came to the cities in a time of disorder.
When famine ruled.
I came among the people in a time of turmoil
And I rebelled with them.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.
I ate my food between slaughters.
Murder lay over my sleep.
I loved carelessly
And I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.
In my time, roads led into the swamp.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
I could do very little. But without me,
Rulers would have sat more securely, or so I hoped.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.
Energies were low. The goal
Was far in the distance,
Clearly visible, though for me
Hard to reach.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.
III
You who you will emerge from the flood
In which we have sunk,
Think
When you speak of our weaknesses
And of the dark time
That you have escaped.
For we went, changing countries more often than shoes,
In class wars,* desperate
When there was only injustice and no outrage.
This we knew:
Even hatred of humiliation
Distorts the features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when
one can help another,
Think of us
Forgivingly.
*I translate Brecht’s phrase literally, although I do not agree that in his time or ours the situation can be adequately described as die Kriege der Klassen.
(Washington, DC) This is #7 in an occasional series. See also #6, from late July.
Tenure-track Assistant Professor, Department of Public and Community Service Studies at Providence College. “We invite applicants with teaching and scholarly interests that focus on service learning and community-based research, with particular expertise in the area of diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The first interdisciplinary major of its kind in the United States, since 1994 the Public and Community Service Department has partnered with nearby communities and organizations in the City of Providence.
Research Postdoc, The Center for Promise, Tufts University and America’s Promise Alliance. The Center conducts applied research, exploring how all children and youth experience the key developmental supports they need to thrive and graduate from high school ready for college, work, and life. Given the collaborative culture of the Center, the person appointed to this post-doctoral position will work on multiple projects. However, his or her primary assignment will be on the following two projects. From Re-engagement to Graduation and Developing within a Youth System.
Senior program officer for the Democracy Fund, The Open Society Foundations. The senior program officer will have primary responsibility for work on two strategic goals:
Senior Public Engagement Associate, Public Agenda. Public Agenda is a nonprofit organization that helps diverse leaders and citizens navigate complex, divisive issues. The Senior Public Engagement Associate works with the Public Engagement (PE) team to develop, coordinate and implement engagement projects across a range of issues areas around the country.
Tomorrow at the American Political Science Association, I’ll be joining Hahrie C. Han (Wellesley College), Cathy J. Cohen (University of Chicago), and Joseph Kahne (Mills College) on a panel on Civic Education after the Digital Revolution Date (10:15 AM-12:00 PM, Omni Palladian Ballroom, DC).
This is one topic I’d like to discuss: Students should understand and be able to critically assess the basic rules and structure of the Internet, much as they should understand and be able to criticize the US Constitution. But the Internet is harder to grasp, for both teachers and students. How should the “constitution of cyberspace” be taught (if at all)?
The US government as an institution that students should understand in order to critically assess it. To be sure, the government is large and complex, it has changed over time, and it has both proponents and sharp critics. Yet it has one fundamental document (the US Constitution) and one impressive justification (in the Federalist Papers) that provide focal points of debate. Students can learn a lot by reading the Constitution, some of the Federalist Papers, and some critics of the Constitution and then applying their knowledge through discussions of historical and current controversies.
In contrast, Web 2.0 has no constitution and no Federalist Papers. I admire perceptive theorists of the new media landscape: Benkler (2006), boyd (2008), Castells (2000), Lessig (2000), Shirky (2008), Sunstein (2007), and others. None of these authors would claim to be the James Madison of cyberspace. They did not have the authority to write its fundamental rules, and they do not offer highly general justifications of it. Their writing is too difficult to be assigned directly in most k-12 classrooms. Their scholarship has not been digested for youth audiences, nor has it prominent expression in political discourse. If there is a Gettysburg Address for the new media environment, I have not seen it.
I do not presume that the US Constitution is preferable to the rules of cyberspace or that the framers of the Constitution are more admirable than the architects of the digital world. The Constitution requires critical evaluation; the Internet has attractive features. I would simply assert that it is harder to understand cyberspace than the US government because only the latter has an authoritative code (the Constitution) and official justifications that we can read and critically evaluate.
I notice that Americans under the age of 30 are now saying “based off of” instead of “based on.” I Googled to see if that was a trend and found this handy graph by Ann Curzan:
In published books, “based on” still outnumbers “based off of” by a ratio of 100,000:1, but “based off” has risen (from zero instances) since ca. 1980. Of course, books do not provide a representative sample of all communication, since young adults publish relatively few of them, and young authors tend to be copy-edited by older people. In speech and emails, “based off of” is clearly becoming more common.
I personally prefer “based on” because one preposition is neater than two in a row, and the metaphor makes more sense if something is on rather than “off of” a base. I concede, however, that language evolves and there is nothing sacrosanct about which prepositions follow each verb. (And if I’m going to complain, the use of “around” to indicate a topic seems worse.)