{"id":5623,"date":"2009-02-06T13:42:18","date_gmt":"2009-02-06T13:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5623"},"modified":"2009-02-06T13:42:18","modified_gmt":"2009-02-06T13:42:18","slug":"free-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5623","title":{"rendered":"free advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My childhood friend Chris Kutz, now a law professor at Berkeley, has organized a blog that consists only of policy proposals by Cal colleagues, including several famous professors. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/ideas.berkeleylawblogs.org\/\">Blue Sky: New Ideas for the Obama Administration.<\/a> Here is an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2009\/01\/24\/INT315F820.DTL&#038;hw=\">op-ed <\/a>in the San Francisco Chronicle that announces it.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Tufts University, where I work, has a <a href=\"http:\/\/tuftsjournal.tufts.edu\/2009\/02_1\/features\/03\/\">webpage <\/a>entitled &#8220;Memo to the President: Faculty weigh in with advice for Barack Obama as he begins his term.&#8221; It&#8217;s not a blog, but each professor contributes a few paragraphs that remind me of blog posts.<\/p>\n<p>These pages make me wonder &#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How many other institutions are also organizing their faculty to write short public memos for the new president?\n<li>Is there much more of this in 2008 than ever before? (So it seems to me, but I could have missed such sites in 2000 and 2004.)\n<li>If so, what&#8217;s the stimulus? I can imagine that more faculty admire Obama than have liked any president in my adult lifetime; that blogging has made professors more prone to write and publicly post short opinion pieces; and that the Presidential Transition Team prompted people to write this sort of statement by inviting comments on change.gov. Those are hypotheses; I don&#8217;t know the real story.\n<li>Assuming that this kind of site is a common development, what does it mean? Is it a sign of productive faculty engagement in public life? A welcome turn to transparency (since earlier generations of faculty would have sent private letters to the president)? A rather quixotic or naive activity? Or a sign of professorial arrogance? I am personally enthusiastic, but this seems a worthy topic of discussion.\n<li>What will happen after the new administration settles in? Will this kind of activity continue, or turn into something different, or go away?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My childhood friend Chris Kutz, now a law professor at Berkeley, has organized a blog that consists only of policy proposals by Cal colleagues, including several famous professors. It&#8217;s called Blue Sky: New Ideas for the Obama Administration. Here is an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that announces it. Meanwhile, Tufts University, where I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}