Andrew DelBanco has a thought provoking article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the possible renewal of the academic in public discourse as a result of the Obama election.  He summarizes the arguments Richard Hofstadter lays out in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to explain why Americans periodically reject “eggheads” in public discourse.  But Just when you think he’s going to go into the traditional paean to the value of the academic, he doesn’t go out like that!

Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust.

Word!

We as academics need to engage in a broader discussion about how we should engage in public life before we proclaim our role as a birthright.  There is nothing wrong with a society that is reflexively mis-trusting of anyone making truth claims.  DelBanco rightly points out the inherent hypocrisy in much of the academy:

Academics certainly talk a lot about social justice, but how credible are we when, for instance, our wealthiest and most prestigious universities admit such a minuscule percentage of students (often fewer than 10 percent) from low-income families?

Our political culture is founded on a healthy skepticism of authority.  Rather than resist this role for the public or see ourselves as “society’s teachers,” we should embrace it as a challenge.

I hope and demand for my students that they see me as the authority figure in the classroom with skepticism and mis-trust.  They should be asking themselves “what am I getting out of this?”  I don’t think my jog is to challenge this question, but rather I think my job is to broaden out what our students mean by the question.  I want my students to reconsider the “what,” “I,” “getting,” and “this” part of that question.

I am particularly fond of this part of DelBanco’s article where he recounts a former student’s assessment of what he was taught in DelBanco’s courses:

“What you say about preparation for modern life and citizenship and all that is fine, but you miss the main point.” With some trepidation I asked what he meant. “What the core really taught me,” he replied, “is how to enjoy life.”

I think my public role is to help develop thinking, feeling human beings, and to be developed by the experience at the same time. I’m not sure that it happening all the time, but that’s the goal.

Good magazine has a useful illustration of the world’s most frequently used subway systems (seen here in miniature).  While the illustration doesn’t tell us something we don’t already know — that other countries use mass transit at greater rates than we do, it does illustrate the degree of difference.  I for one was surprised to learn how much more the Mexico City and Moscow subway systems were utilized than their counterparts in Boston and Chicago.  It does help contextualize our energy consumption patterns.

HT: Planetizen

Here in California, we’ve seemingly survived another “meltdown” over the state budget.  What that means is that we get a temporary reprieve until the next budget cycle where the “crisis” will resume.  What’s unique about California is that we repeat this budget dance every year with a new batch of dancers.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 140, a measure that restricted terms of service in the State Assembly to six years and service in the state senate to eight years.  The measure was crafted in large part by Republicans seeking to weaken the power of the powerful, charismatic then Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.  But the measure also captured the imagination of California voters.  The lore of the citizen legislator has been with us since the founding.  it harkens back to the story of Cincinattus who was summoned to leave his plow and help Rome defeat the Aequians.  Once Rome’s foes had been vanquished, he returned to the plow.

In California, it is fashionable to beat up on the term limits idea.  Indeed it has led to less experienced members, weaker committee structures, a “permanent campaign” mode and more lobbying influence, among other things.   This led California voters to approve a reform of legislative term limits in 2008 (Proposition 93) that limited members to 12 total years of service in the California legislature.

Despite term limits many problems, I’m concerned that we in California focus so much on rules because we don’t want to address the deeper issue of our state political culture.  We can tinker all we want with the rules of the game in Sacramento, but the underlying problem is a belief that “they” in Sacramento are corrupt and that California’s renewal is contingent on throwing this particular set of “bums” out.  Californians need to begin “owning” problems rather than passing them off as the result of politicians who are either “in the pocket of lobbyists” or “hate poor people.”  My political scientist brethren might argue that partisan conflict is an inevitable and healthy part of a democratic system.  But underlying that healthy conflict must be a fundamental sense of efficacy and investment in the system.  The perception that the California citizen is somehow detached from the work of government is more corrosive than any term limit or proposition.

The “citizen legislator” as a concept can work if the citizens see themselves as full members of the state rather than as victims of “corrupt politicians.”  Now back to my plow.

One of the nice things about teaching at a Lutheran college is the opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue between faith and reason.  This afternoon, I have the privilege of giving a response to a talk given by one of my esteemed colleagues, the Reverend Kapp Johnson, a faculty member of California Lutheran University’s schools of Business and Religion.  His talk will explore Martin Luther’s conception of freedom.  Since I am a blogger, I must blog about it, so blog I will.

Rev. Johnson seeks to make a distinction between our modern conception of freedom and the Christian view of liberty as expressed by Martin Luther. He uses a passage from Robert Bellah’s classic Habits of the Heart to highlight the problem with modernity’s conception of liberty:

Within modern individualism, the self becomes the central, if not the only reality.  Moral discussions become detached from any social or cultural foundations which could give them broader relevance.  The self and its feelings become the only moral criteria.

Many have developed this communitarian critique of modernity.  All sociology graduate students (and lucky Political Science grade students) get their healthy dose of Durkheim and his notion of anomie.  An individual based conception of freedom inevitably leads to a society with competing conceptions of justice and the good life which creates an intellectual and spiritual morass.

I thank the Rev. Johnson for introducing me to a very interesting set of propositions Martin Luther makes in a 1520 essay called The Freedom of a Christian.  In this essay, he sets out a pair of contradictory premises:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

and:

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

Rev. Johnson interprets Luther (I think correctly) to mean that freedom is not so much an external phenomenon but rather a result of one’s inner spiritual nature.  Freedom for Luther is submission to Christ through faith.  This freedom allows for a  “joyous exchange” of the “sinner’s “sins, death, and damnation” for Christ’s “grace, life and salvation.”  This freedom then allows the believer to become a “dutiful servant” which, to quote Rev. Johnson from his prepared remarks “thrusts the Christian back into human life.”

Luther argues that obedience to god frees us from the mine field of our impulses and desires and focuses us directly on “the approal of God.”  Our engagement with the world, is then not motivated by any instrumental ends (i.e. getting to heaven) but rather results from the “freedom” found in faith:

The works themselves do no justify [the Christian] before God, but [the Christian] does the works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God and considers nothing except the approval of God, whom he would most scrupulously obey in all things.

Coming from the perspective of a social scientist, I have a few discussion points that I plan on bringing up later today:

1) I’d be wary of setting up a strawman.  If the distinction is between Christain faith and complete nihlism, then the playing field is tilted towards the former.  If the distinction is between Christain faith and non-Christain faith, then the terrain is more level.

2) Rev. Johnson makes an elegant case for one variety of what Isaiah Berlin refered to in a famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty as “positive freedom” or freedom to fullly realize one’s self.  However in Berlin’s essay, he ultimately comes down on the side of negative liberty, or freedom from state interference, as the best means of organizing a society because humankind cannot arrive at a consensus over which form of positive freedom to institute.

3)  The hallmark of post-modernity is a levelling of the distinction between sacred and profane.  Durkheim argues that what holds society together in the modern world is a shared agreement on the primacy of the individual and an agreement on rules to preserve its autonomy(rationality).  One could argue that system was not bad and that the problem is the re-emergence of religion and multiculturalism to challenge modernity’s conception of freedom.  See my post about the distinction beteween the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.

4) Even if I granted that Luther’s view of Christian freedom was preferable to an individualist/modernity based view of freedom, on what basis could we claim that it’s preferable to any other religiously grounded freedom claim.  Why isn’t Siddhartha’s call to “renounce the self” any more or less valid than the Christian claim?

Many of us post to Facebook, perhaps unaware of what can happen to that content and who has rights to it.  All of this came to a head a few days ago, as Facebook’s new terms of service (TOS) came to light and were met with a range of reactions from dismay to outrage.  

I’ve been reading Convergence Culture and being in Jane Jacob’s adopted home, I couldn’t help but think of how the social space of Facebook relates to how social interactions are shaped by governance and polity in online realms, as well as the idea of a commons that is a privatized space, as opposed to a public one.

While I’m resigned to the fact that there is no privacy online and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that Facebook is being used by collections departments to locate unstealthy credit defaulters (true story), I do bristle at the idea of content being appropriated by companies hosting these web commons.

Why?  I’m using the private space of Facebook, why should I feel that what I post is still my intellectual property?  Am I being unreasonable?  After all, I push the boundaries of fair use quite a bit.

Can social network sites really be sites of democratic action, when they can ultimately be censored, not as a matter of public policy, but rather corporate TOS?  On the other side of the Web 2.0 fence, how much freedom should an organization grant users?

I feel that what any site engaging in Web 2.0 should do if they want to use content posted by users is…to simply ask them for permission.  It’s simple good manners and building of social capital.  I do think privatized social spaces or commons can be used for civic engagement, but I find emerging technologies being developed up here in Canada that allow content to be fed from multiple sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) into one location to be rather interesting.  More on this in a future post.  I feel the overlap of Web 2.0 with open source will make us all rethink ownership and privacy and force organizations to ponder what intellectual property really means, what the risks are in terms of what the courts are stating, and how to implement processes.  Or not.  That devil inertia.

Image by Juliana Sohn / www.julianasohn.com

Courtney Martin in Utne Reader writes about Dennis Dalton, a political science professor at Barnard College who opens his class up to the residents of the Harlem neighborhood in which the school is located:

Many Harlemites have turned Dalton’s courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to “I’m not telling.

This article has me reeling. I spend my day as a social scientist trying to get people (mostly young people) to wrestle with social issues, to reflect on why they occur and to consider how we might address them. But we do these things within the confines of these tightly consigned boxes. New technology allows us to expand beyond these boxes to bring images and ideas to our students, but even then, their presentation is tightly controlled and structured.

We can bring students the reality of the world “out there” via service learning or study abroad, but the institution remains untouched. We send our students out to gain information about humanity and bring it back to spaces that we tightly control for the purposes of organized, structured learning. They and we are better off for the study abroad experience, but why should we stop there.  A real engagement with the world “out there” requires students to experience it where they live.  I think Martin is on to something when she says writes:

If Dalton’s lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God’s children but as Plato’s philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.

There may be practical reasons for why universities don’t just let anyone enter their campuses to take courses (fear of lawsuit, monetary incentives). But as long as universities see themselves as distinct entities from the publics they serve, they will only partially fulfill their mission.  And I’ll have students looking at their watches when it’s five minutes ’till.

In the Independent (UK), Johann Hari asks the question: Why Should I Respect Oppressive Religions? You know he’s on to a hop topic because the comments section is 10 pages long! In the article, he lays out a distinction between the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights that emphasizes the preservation of freedom for the individual and the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, a document that subsumes or contextualizes (you pick your favorite term) freedom to the dictates of shar#ah law. Hari quotes a key passage from the Islamic declaration:

the limits set by the shar#ah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community.

The question I pose to my students and others is whether and/or how the Islamic declaration is “wrong”? The philosopher Alasdair McIntyre claims that liberalism is unable to provide us with a working morality because there is no agreed upon definition of justice. In modernity there exists a protection of rights, but no framework for what should be done with those rights? We are left to ultimately seek out a framework on our own with differing levels of success. Why should the rights in the Universal Declaration be considered absolute? Do we have a ethical or moral imperative to enforce their universality? I encourage you to read the Hari article and reflect upon our obligations if we truly adhere to the UN declaration.

A topic of contention in my courses is whether the U.S. government is beginning its gradual decline into Socialism with the passage and imminent signing of a massive stimulus bill. John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney have a thought provoking article at Monthly Review where they assess the prospects for a “New New Deal.” While the article is worth a read in its own right, they provide some very useful charts on American domestic spending over time and in comparison to other countries.

The crux of their argument is that federal “consumption” has maxed our at around 15% of GDP since the New Deal era. Even during the 1930’s, domestic spending was restricted to what they call “ad hoc salvage,” not massive public works. This graph traces the U.S. government’s domestic consumption/spending since the 1930’s.

Their argument is that this 15% cap is held in place by monopoly capital, a term used by Economist Paul Sweezy in a 1966 book of the same title. The theory is that entrenched elite oligarchs have little desire for government to spend beyond a basic level of domestic investment and thus collude to keep domestic spending down.

They suggest that weak labor unions and an excessively pro-private capital political culture is to blame for our underinvestment. As evidence, they provide comparative info on government spending as a percentage of GDP. And they advocate for increased government expenditure and call for a major restructuring of our political economy to make it happen (after all this is published in Monthly Review).

While I’m not big a big believer of the coordinative abilities of a superstructure to ensure a 15% “cap,” it does provide food for thought. I’m more disposed to believe that a path dependent process exists where Congress and the president, for political reasons, look askance at raising or lowering domestic public spending much beyond the previous year’s levels (at least until the last administration).

At the very least, it provides ammunition for those semi-heated classroom discussions on the perceived U.S. slide into socialism.

E.B. Boyd has a fascinating piece at AlterNet on the use of Google Maps as a mobilizing tool. The article describes efforts by Rebecca Moore to convince her neighbors to mobilize against a logging plan under consideration in the Santa Cruz mountains. Moore, a Google employee (important part of the story), used Google Earth tools to create a visual 3-D tour of the proposed logging area that she presented at a community meeting of 300 residents. Here’s Boyd’s depiction of that meeting:

At first the audience was quiet. But as soon as Moore began to guide the room through the canyon they all knew, people started leaning forward. Real images of the actual trees, roads and buildings in their community popped up. The logging area was marked in a translucent red, clearly bumping up right next to the roads, homes and businesses where audience members lived and played. Using Google Earth’s ruler tool, Moore showed them exactly how far logging would take place from their houses and communities. She showed them the locations of proposed helicopter landing pads for logs that couldn’t be removed by truck and demonstrated how closely timber-laden choppers might pass the local day care center and schools.

This speaks to an understudied area of research: the use of on-line tools to overcome collective action barriers to mobilization. Public policy/social problem scholars emphasize the role of frames, stories, narratives, tropes, etc. in getting individuals to contribute resources to a collective effort. But very little research (that I know of anyway) looks at how the ways in which those stories are presented have an impact on overcoming collective action. An interesting line of research would look at how and when on-line tools are effective at mobilizing constituencies. What are the conditions? Does this only work for NIMBY efforts? Can people be mobilized to act upon issues in which they are not directly impacted?

Christian Welzel and Ronald Ingelhart have a provocatively titled article in the newest edition of the Journal of Democracy called The Role of Ordinary People in Democratization. Breifly, they argue that an emphasis on human development plays a larger role in democratization when you construct “democratic” as more than simply having free and fair elections (electoral democracy). They find that that when you construct democracy as “effective,” which they define as: preserving human rights/civil liberties while being anti-corrupt in addition to free and fair elections, the role of “ordinary people” matters. Here’s a key quote from their article:

Thus, the HDI (human development index) explains fully 60 percent of the variation in effective democracy. In other words, the HDI explains almost twice as much of the variance in effective democracy as it does in electoral democracy.

The upshot of this finding is that we need to figure out how you move from encouraging formal democracy (open electoral processes) to helping build political cultures of engaged, active citizens that expect and demand an active role in decision-making.