Monthly Archives: January 2014

when east and west were one

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(Washington, DC) I am highly skeptical of distinctions between “eastern” and “western” thought, considering the enormous diversity within both domains, the thousands of years of interaction between the two, and the arbitrariness of any border. (Why, for example, should a body of water less than 2,000 feet across be considered to divide two continents, Europe from Asia?)

But if you are committed to the distinction, it’s worth taking a look at the Milinda Pandha.  This is a dialogue written originally in Sanskrit or Pali before the year 200 CE. It describes a dialogue between a Greek king of India named Milinda (who is probably Menander I) and a Buddhist sage named Nagasena.

Menander I is well attested in Greek and Indian texts and archaeological evidence as a Greek king who converted to, and patronized, Buddhism. Here he is on a silver coin that reads “King Menander the Just” in Greek on one side and “Great King Menander, follower of the Dharma” in the Kharosthi script of South Asia on the other.

Nagasena is not known outside of this dialogue, wherein he is described as the son of a Brahmin who, having quickly exhausted the Vedic scriptures, studied Buddhism under a Greek monk named Dhammarakkhita (“Protected by the Dharma”).

Compared to a Platonic dialogue, the Milinda Pandha includes more fantastical details. The gods, for example, are directly involved. But it paints appealing portraits of the human characters. Menander goes around stumping sages with metaphysical paradoxes until he meets Nagasena, who bests him on a couple of those exchanges. Then the King simply asks questions about Buddhist doctrine and Nagasena answers with illustrative similes. The King replies after each one, “Very good, Nagasena!”

I can read the text only through the 19th century English translation of T. W. Rhys Davids. As far as I can tell, the perspective of the original document is orthodox Theravada Buddhism. Thus I am glimpsing Menander I through layers of interpretation, Asian and English; and it is hard to imagine how this European-born king of ancient India might actually have thought. But he and Nagasena seem to share the same social and cultural horizon, and the differences between them stem only from their respective roles as monarch and sage:

The king said: ‘Reverend Sir, will you discuss with me again?’

‘If your Majesty will discuss as a scholar (pandit), well; but if you will discuss as a king, no.’

‘How is it then that scholars discuss?’

‘When scholars talk a matter over one with another then is there a winding up, an unravelling; one or other is convicted of error, and he then acknowledges his mistake; distinctions are drawn, and contra-distinctions; and yet thereby they are not angered. Thus do scholars, O king, discuss.’

‘And how do kings discuss?’

‘When a king, your Majesty, discusses a matter, and he advances a point, if any one differ from him on that point, he is apt to fine him, saying: “Inflict such and such a punishment upon that fellow!” Thus, your Majesty, do kings discuss.

‘Very well. It is as a scholar, not as a king, that I will discuss. Let your reverence talk unrestrainedly, as you would with a brother, or a novice, or a lay disciple, or even with a servant. Be not afraid!’

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Reflecting on the Recent History of the Commons

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It’s clear that commoners will not only have to make history themselves, outside of ordinary channels, but to write and preserve that history as well.  My colleagues Silke Helfrich and Michel Bauwens are off to a great start.  Independently, they’ve prepared two useful syntheses of some of the more significant recent developments in the commons and P2P worlds.

Silke prepared a timeline that identifies landmarks in the commons movement from the past several years.  The piece just appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of STIR magazine (about which I will have more to say below).  The timeline is on Silke’s blog as well.  Among the highlights: 

The rise of Remix the Commons (2010 – present), an evolving multimedia project about the key ideas and practices of the commons.

The Atmospheric Trust Litigation (2011 – present), which is filing lawsuits under the public trust doctrine to force state governments and the U.S. Government to protect the atmosphere as common property.

The world’s first Open Knowledge Festival in Finland, a week’s events in September 2012, in Helsinki, Finland.  (The next Open Knowledge Festival will be in Berlin in July 2014.)

The Constitutional Assembly of the Commons held with 700 participants at the occupied Teatro Valley, a revered opera house in Rome, in April 2013.

The timeline also has some great illustrations by Hey Monkey Riot.

Meanwhile, Michel Bauwens posted the “Most Important P2P-Related Projects and Trends in 2013.”  He cautions that “most important” “does not mean any blanket endorsement, nor ‘best.’  It just means that it is an important project.”  

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Community Participation in Racial Justice Efforts

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As we reflected this week on the meaning of Martin Luther King’s example for our work, we took quite a bit of inspiration  from one of the stories shared in the most recent newsletter from our partners at Everyday Democracy that we wanted to share with you. The story of this Virginia town’s struggle to confront racism is a glimpse into what it might look like for our field to deal more with questions of justice in our democracy. You can read the story and see the video below, or find the piece on EvDem’s website here.

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In 2006, racial tensions rose among Lynchburg, Va., residents as a result of the death of Clarence Beard Jr., a black man who died during a struggle with two white police officers. City leaders looked for a way to help residents grapple with issues of racism and racial equity in their increasingly diverse city. To make progress, they knew they needed to work together to address these racial tensions.

With the support from community, the city initiated the Community Dialogue on Race and Racism. To indicate their commitment to inclusion and systemic change, they recently renamed themselves “Many Voices – One Community” (MVOC). Their efforts have involved more than 2,000 people in dialogues, action forums, and task forces.

Many participants gained a new understanding of how racism and racial equity affect them on a daily basis: “I think what struck me most was…all the different ways that we could evade the issue of racism and not want to acknowledge our own involvement,” one participant commented. “I think it unsettles us in a good way. I think it’s both terrifying and at the same time, welcoming.”

The new understanding and new relationships that have formed continue to generate action. Action teams meet regularly to plan and implement ideas that emerge from the dialogue groups. Plans are in place to expand the program in the faith community, schools, and local businesses. Their efforts have led to:

  • A partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau to educate the public about the census and encourage people to be counted.
  • Improved diversity training in the Lynchburg Police Department, the Criminal Justice Academy, and the City of Lynchburg.
  • Efforts to bring more diversity to the workforce at the police department, and in local businesses and on boards and commissions in the city.
  • The creation of a non-profit organization, Beacon of Hope, that provides support for all students to have access to resources in order to reduce the achievement gap.
  • A Racial Support Group to help resolve institutional racial conflict.

With all of this, racial incidents and disparities have continued in the community. The leaders of MVOC know there is much work still to do.

So, in the fall of 2013, the dedicated MVOC organizers convened Lynchburg’s first Race, Poverty and Social Justice Conference. Plenaries and workshops provided participants with insights and tools for advancing justice in a variety of community arenas including policing, economic development, the arts and health care. In the conference opening, Everyday Democracy director Martha McCoy described a long-term vision of a just Lynchburg, noting “We need each other. We can’t do it alone. We can’t get to the beloved community by ourselves.”

The Feigned Public Sphere

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In theory, there’s this great “public sphere” where everyone can come together as equals and openly discuss ideas and opinions, collectively coming to a mutual understanding of what is right and good.

The problem with that sentence is its reliance on the first two words: in theory.

Unfortunately, actualization of that public sphere is far from the reality of most people’s every day life. There are numerous reasons and explanations for this, but there is one I find particularly intriguing.

As Jürgen Habermas writes in The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article:

“Large organizations strive for political compromises with the state and with each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible. But at the same time the large organizations must assure themselves of at least plebiscitary support from the mass of the population through an apparent display of openness.”

So, Habermas says, the reality shakes out that the people in power make back room deals while engaging the public only insofar as is necessary to avoid losing their power.

Here’s my question: It is better to have no public sphere – totalitarian regimes and institutions which actively reject public input – or to have a courtesy public sphere – regimes and institutions which only make empty gestures towards public engagement?

The question itself is a false one – I see no reason why these two options need to exist alone and in simple opposition to each other. But I find the question compelling nonetheless. Like the game of asking, would you rather be loved and forgotten or hated and remembered?

So, if you’ll play this game with me, which is worse?

I’m no fan of totalitarian regimes. At first glance, it seems hard to imagine suggesting something worse than that. In many ways, having no public sphere seems like obviously the worse state.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something terribly insidious about a feigned public sphere. It’s the kind of system seen in the disutopian worlds of 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

The governments in those books speak passionately in support of peace, equality, sunshine and rainbows. But to the observant few and to us outside readers, their actions reveal their darker intentions.The truth is, these fictional governments are totalitarian regimes.

The thing is – their citizens don’t know it.

And perhaps that how it is with most totalitarian regimes – the majority accept the rhetoric, while a troubled few find themselves imprisoned or worse, for daring to raise an eyebrow in question.

So which is worse?

Maybe there’s not much difference.

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50 Core American Documents

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I was a little amused to receive a letter that began, “As a leader in the Conservative Movement, you know that ideas matter.” The letter continued, “At Ashbrook we teach young Americans about the big ideas that define America by using original historical documents–avoiding the distortions that textbooks introduce to the story of American history.”

Although I am less worried than Ashbrook is about distortion in classrooms and textbooks, I am grateful for the volume that came with the letter: 50 Core American Documents: Required Reading for Students, Teachers, and Citizens, edited by Christopher Burkett.

It collects quite diverse perspectives. For example, John C. Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill” denounces (as a “dangerous error” and an unnecessary insertion into the Declaration of Independence) the clause that “all men are created equal.” But the very next document is Frederick Douglass’ great speech for equality, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Calhoun should be read; he reminds us that secession was driven by hostility to human rights. But I might have chosen his Senate speech arguing that slavery was a “positive good” as a more illustrative historical example. And if I had chosen Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill,” I would not have deleted the beginning. The excerpt in the 5o Core Documents begins:

The first question which offers itself for consideration is — Have the Northern States the power which they claim, to prevent the Southern people from emigrating freely, with their property, into territories belonging to the United States, and to monopolize them for their exclusive benefit? …

In the quoted excerpt, the nature of the “property” under discussion is not clarified; the question is presented as one of interstate migration and commerce. But Calhoun actually began his speech with slavery. This is his first sentence:

There is a very striking difference between the position on which the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States stand, in reference to the subject under consideration.

Texts won’t teach or explain themselves. They must be presented in some way. Political texts make complete sense only in institutional and historical contexts. For instance, a reader must understand that John C. Calhoun was a Senator, that the Senate has specific powers, and that Calhoun represented South Carolina as a slaveholder and apologist for slavery when the Senate was deciding whether to admit new states (such as Oregon) as slave or free soil. Students cannot avoid an interpretive framework that has some kind of ideological valence. Thus I don’t fully endorse the premise that an anthology of original texts suffices.

I am also not so keen on presenting history as a series of statements by national leaders (even if some of them are insurgents and critics). Ordinary people have roles as well, and they can be given voice. But certainly this volume presents a welcome diversity of views, including, for example, presidential defenses of the New Deal and Great Society. The idea of choosing fifty documents is worthy, and I would recommend the book as well as the website on which all the contents are available free. Although it makes some debatable choices about which texts to include and how to excerpt them, the debate is valuable.

Meanwhile, the Pioneer Institute, which is generally considered conservative, held a terrific session on the Civil Rights Movement with the goal of deepening how it is taught in k-12 schools. They invited my colleague Peniel Joseph, who said, “we live in the belly of the beast… we live in the American Gulag”; and Robert P. Moses, “who blasted a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that he said invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act.” Jamie Gass, director of Pioneer’s Center for School Reform, writes:

Where one comes down on any one aspect of history matters very little. People will always disagree — otherwise, historians would have little to do. But learning about the depth and richness of our nation’s civil rights movement, the injustices that existed and still persist, the blood that was shed, lives lost and destroyed, and the real progress that has emerged, ought not to be an adjunct or afterthought in our schools. It should, rather, be front and center in every curriculum.

Our civic responsibility as Americans demands nothing less.

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Messaging, Short and Sweet: Can you help us gather examples of effective communication in dialogue and deliberation?

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At the 2012 NCDD Seattle conference a small group of us started a quest. We shared a desire to see dialogue and deliberation (D & D) become more widely understood, experienced, and available. But, we also knew that when many people hear words like “dialogue,” they envision scenes from political talk shows, “open mic” style municipal meetings, or dogmatic speeches from family, friends, and colleagues. The rich possibilities for successful engagement do not seem widely understood.

What to do? We decided to create a collection of specific, concrete examples of messages that practitioners have effectively used to help the general public or elected officials understand concepts related to D & D. Then, we’ll share the collection with you.

Can you help us? Can you provide specific examples of messages that have worked well for you?

Types of messages can include:

  • metaphors
  • brief anecdotes
  • evocative language
  • images
  • video clips
  • mini-experiences for potential participants
  • others

Please add your examples to the Comments section by clicking “Add Comments” above.

We look forward to working on this challenge from a variety of different angles, here, at the NCDD Listserv, and on Facebook. As we gather examples, we’ll post new queries to help flesh out the collection, and we’ll add some concrete memory ticklers to bring out treasures you may have forgotten.

Once we’ve gathered examples, we’ll organize them in a way we hope makes it easy for you to find what you need when you face a communication challenge. We’ll share the collection in as a document available among the free resources at the NCDD site.

We look forward to working with you on this project!

We are:

Myles Alexander, Project Coordinator at Kansas State University
Laura Chasin, Founder and Board Member at The Public Conversations Project
Kim Crowley, Principal Consultant at Training & Development Support

With help from:

Lisa Pytlik Zillig, Research Specialist at the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center
Nancy Glock-Grueneich, Faculty at Shandong Youth Univ. of Political Science
Sandy Heierbacher, Director, NCDD

Fiction Friday: The Journalist

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Breaking STOP
Suspect in custody STOP
Trial of the century STOP

In every hand, pocket, and street corner, digital devices flashed minute by minute updates.

The whole city held its breath.

People wanted to celebrate. To shout with anger, joy, or relief. The long darkness was over at last. The fear, the uncertainty, the grief were starting to dissipate.

But most people knew not to celebrate too soon. They had a suspect, that was all. She was innocent until proven guilty. They didn’t have all the facts and they shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It was too soon to respond. Their hearts beat faster, their minds raced to imagine what was next. But facing the exhilarating rush of emotion, most were able to with hold their judgements. It was too soon to respond.

Nadim stared at his computer screen, furiously typing updates in one window while shooting off messages in the next.

At almost the same moment he’d broken the story he’d started petitioning his editor. He’d never had the chance to serve on a trial news delegation, and he wasn’t going to miss this opportunity.

This was his story, he told himself as he crouched over his computer in the police department lobby.

He didn’t care how long the trial would last, how long he would spend sequestered away with the other members of the media delegation. This was an opportunity to see history unfold.

And it was a tremendous responsibility. He’d have to get to know every detail of the case. To live side by side with the jury, to see what they saw, experience what they experienced.

He’d keep detailed notes and file articles that would be posted nowhere.

And then, when the trial was over, he’d have to make sense of it all. The media blackout the covered the case would be lifted and he would have to report, fully and genuinely, what happened, how it happened, and importantly, why it happened.

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programs for poor people are poor programs

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Georgetown Law professor David A. Super argues that the technical problems with the Obamacare website are unusual mainly in their mildness and the degree to which they have been rapidly addressed. Obamacare was heavily scrutinized because of the political stakes for the president–and because many middle-class American voters were trying to use the website. The White House jumped to address the initial failure. But when only poor people are involved, services can be far worse and nothing is done to address errors. Among the “epic” meltdowns that Super lists, Georgia recently neglected to send renewal notices to 66,000 food stamp recipients and then terminated their benefits for failure to respond to the unsent messages.

He cites failures in electronic services, but the adage that “programs for poor people are poor programs” also applies to face-to-face services like policing, health services, and (too often) k-12 education.

The ideological valence of this point is complicated. Progressives (like me) believe that poor state services for poor people should receive more attention; this is a core explanation of social inequities. But in making this point, we are indicting governmental agencies, the very tools we want to use to address inequality and suffering. At a minimum, the argument for more state action requires an extra step: some plausible strategy for improving the quality and responsiveness of state services.

One piece of that strategy may be adequate investment: decent services always cost money. But we know that some urban school systems have high per-student spending and still deliver unsatisfactory education. So cash per recipient hardly guarantees success.

Another piece of the strategy may be political empowerment. The White House jumped to fix Obamacare because voters were mobilized. But voter turnout among poor people is low. That is one reason that leaders don’t care about welfare services. But again, political empowerment is no panacea. Some cities have demographically representative electorates and leaders and still deliver poor results.

The people who most emphasize poor quality in governmental services are reformers who want to disrupt unionized bureaucracies by introducing competition or radical decentralization. I am not talking only about glib politicians, but also about hard-working founders of charter schools and social enterprises. They are usually labeled “conservatives,” but the label can be confusing. Witness the way that charter schools appeal to both left and right, or the scrambled ideological debate about education reform. Some people hold inconsistent views about unionized public services, defending prison and police forces while demonizing teachers and social workers–or vice-versa.

In my book We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, and in other work, I argue for culture-change within institutions and communities: the Gramscian “long march,” if you like that kind of terminology. The very concept of “service” needs to change, because citizens who interact with government are more than service-recipients. Market mechanisms may have a place, but markets have special limitations for the delivery of welfare and education. (See also this post on housing vouchers.) Top-down reforms may sometimes do some good, but technocrats always set objectives incompatible with the legitimate values of diverse poor people, and top-down reforms always run out of steam. Serious improvement does require political empowerment, but that does not mean more voting alone. Better skills, better processes, more collaboration, more discussion, and better relationships are essential. Of course, the question is how we can get that–and I do have some suggestions in my book.

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What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)

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by flickr user ChrisM70

by flickr user ChrisM70

I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the reviewer is googling phrases maybe she’ll find this, so I want to say up front: I believe in what I wrote there. But I also have doubts about the progressive push towards education for all, the idea that through education we can all shed the demands of material labor, or that the value (and cost!) of an education should be totally disconnected from its role is securing a job.

Automation v. Education

The Economist recently gave voice to this particular error in its article on how technology will increasingly be automating office workers out of their jobs, which will widen the already broad inequality between those who must compete with machines and computers, and those whose jobs cannot (yet) be reduced to an algorithm. Here’s how they put it:

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking.

Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work. The definition of “a state education” may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages.

Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed.

What value, then, is an education, if it won’t prevent the technological obsolescence of our skills? Put simply: if there are going to be ditches (which are required for plumbing, among other things) then there are going to be ditch diggers, or ditch-digging-machine-operators, or ditch-digging-machine-programmers. The move to automation replaces many operators with a few programmers, enriching the educated programmer at the expense of the uneducated operator, and that’s the move that should concern us, since it violates a basic rule of maximin: the people hurt are both more numerous and more needy than the people helped.

The standard economic argument is that lower prices help the poorest the most, and that freedom from unskilled labor allows workers to do something more rewarding, something that requires an education but cannot be imagined under the current political economy that requires so many to dig ditches. It’s like the old joke:

An industrialist is visiting a construction site and watching a newly-invented steamshovel in its first job. The union foreman complains that its job could be done by a dozen men with shovels, each earning a decent wage. The industrialist retorts it could be done by a hundred men with spoons.

Usually I prefer state-level redistribution through a basic income guarantee, but sometimes I think it makes more sense to fight for higher wages for the folks doing the digging than it does to hope that everyone will be able to escape that life if they could only get a Bachelor’s degree or a PhD. That hope in education has an ideological function that exceeds its aspirational and inspirational effects.

Who is the Ruling Class?

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…”

So wrote Karl Marx in the The German Ideology. I’m not entirely sure that there is a single ruling class in American politics, in the sense Marx articulated it, but if there is one, it’s the folks with Bachelor’s degrees, the modern bourgeoisie. We are often-enough regaled by politicians with solicitations to the “middle-class” or “working Americans” that we might be tempted to identify these groups as the ruling class, but about 60% of the population participates in the workforce, and exactly 60% of the population are in the middle three quintiles of income sometimes identified as the middle class. I would argue that these groups are too large to have conjoined interests or ideas.

On the other hand, we are sometimes assured that the very rich and very few (for instance, the top 1%) are in fact governing the US, and that the masses don’t perceive the truth of this dominance because of ideology. If I’m right about the college educated, then it’s much too convenient to limit the ruling class to bankers and stock brokers and identify neoliberalism as the ruling idea; if the traditional bourgeoisie still exercises a great deal of control, then even the very rich must still win over that larger group in order to maintain their wealth. Arguably the 99% v. 1% language of Occupy was a clever rhetorical strategy for enlisting the support of the larger ruling class with the interests of the proletariat. It may be that billionaires manipulate the agenda, but the baseline agenda the wealthy are trying to steer is set by the merely well-off.

Another possibility is that that larger class really does share class interests with the 1%, so Occupy was unsuccessful because the ruling class’s ideas can’t be moved by rhetoric if its interests are at stake. (As I understand it, this is Marx’s point: ideology is believing that ideas matter more than practices.)

Bourgeois Ideology

So what does that class (to which I and my readers probably belong) have in common?

  • We are college educated.
  • We work in offices, with computers.
  • We are employed, and if we are in relationships we probably cohabitate with our partners who are also employed.
  • We live in cities or “suburbs” which have been adopted by some metropolitan area.
  • We own our own home (though this may be changing.)
  • We often don’t live near where we were born, or in the same city as our families.
  • We are likely to work in education, health-care, technology, management, or the public sector.
  • Our careers tend to benefit from globalization.
  • We are predominantly white.
  • We have very little contact with police, prisons, or the criminal justice system unless we are employed by those institutions (which many of us are.)

If what I’ve described above is correct, then perhaps these would be the ruling ideas:

  • Education is for everyone, and more equal educational access will create a more equal society.
  • Office-work is difficult and valuable, and education ought to prepare us for it.
  • Jobs and workplace regulations are the primary mode by which the state ought to see to the public’s good.
  • Marriage is good for everyone; even homosexuals should marry.
  • Urban life is better than rural life.
  • The American Dream should require (and subsidize) home ownership even if that punishes renters and those too poor to afford a home.
  • Family ties matter less than economic success.
  • Education, health-case, technology, and the public sector are the “best” jobs and ought to be subsidized.
  • Globablization is good.
  • Race is irrelevant.
  • The criminal justice system should supply entertaining plot lines for movies and television, but it is not otherwise relevant. Probably most people in prison belong there.

To be clear, while I’m not advocating these ideas, I believe (or act as if I believe) many of them. If those ideas are fundamentally aligned with my class-interest, it would be more surprising if I didn’t believe them. It’s not simply a coincidence that those with the most power and influence in society never have their fundamental interests questioned in our politics. That’s what makes them ideological, that these aren’t partisan issues: no one contests the value of education or marriage, and very rarely do they contest the important of home ownership.

Another possibility is that the top 20%-30% of Americans are not members of some ruling class, that the class is either much smaller than that or that there really isn’t such a thing as as single ruling class any longer, just a number of different social groups that align themselves in ways that they can succeed and govern on some topics and not others. For instance, none of the possible ruling ideas I mentioned included things that are quite clearly also governing American culture and politics, like support for the elderly through Medicare and Social Security (unless you think the elderly are the true ruling class), or America’s military role in the world (unless you think the military is the ruling class). Ideas like meritocracy and personal responsibility, patriotism and faith are frequently rejected by the richest two quartiles, precisely because they conflict with the values instilled by higher education and urban life.

If those ideas are also “ruling” in some way, then we would expect that those who hold them would be the true ruling class if all ruling ideas must belong to the ruling class. Perhaps instead, ruling ideas come from all the classes. Indeed, other ideas aren’t even “ruling ideas” so much as deeply felt constitutional claims, like the important of markets and prices for mediating our economic interactions, the idea that personal property and capital property should be governed by similar rules, or the assumption that inequality can ever be justified by increased productivity or merit. These ideas no longer have their source in a single class, even if they once did, just as in some sense American’s deep commitment to the idea of democracy and one-person-one-vote is a classless idea, at least in the US.

(It should be pointed out that what I have just written in the last paragraph is almost precisely the position being lampooned by Marx in The German Ideology. Ironic, eh?)

At What Cost?

I worry that the cultural promotion of the value of education is ideological, often, because I both benefit from it and yet also regularly watch how “College For All” seems to be disadvantaging a lot of my students. My fellow progressives who rail against the false equality of opportunity that makes the poor think they will someday be millionaires ought to understand why college can’t be an exit from the working class for everyone. Sure, anyone can be a millionaire or good at college, but everyone can’t. It’s a meritocratic institution, not an equalizer, and very little of the so-called college wage premium goes to those who graduate from community colleges and unselective four year universities. The inequality is built into our political economy!

I mean no disrepect to my students, either. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to appreciate the priorities of those who are actually choosing between homework and subsistence labor, for instance, or attendance and childcare. I’ve only been working at an unselective institution for three years, after seven years at selective universities, and the difference is palpable. I watched one student’s children so she could take exams without leaving them accessible to her abusive ex. She barely passed, and we both called that a victory: she hadn’t had much time to study, and had to read her notes through a hell of a black eye. Was education really the most important thing to do for her? What did she learn that she’ll remember later?

What about the student who I have cried with because she is dying from cancer: her husband just left her because the chemo makes her not want to have sex, and all she wants to do is graduate before she dies? Or the student who discovered she was pregnant and came to me because she didn’t know what to do? Or my student whose brother was shot and broke down in class? Or my student who was followed into class and physically threatened? Or my student who thought she had to be a nursing major until she realized she was really good at philosophy, but is still majoring in nursing to be practical? Or my student who asked me to help him figure out how to transfer when he realized that the only way he’d get a good education in computer science was if he left us? Or my students who are also incarcerated?

Rights and Privileges

I’m not saying that they don’t deserve an education: they do! Those are almost all people who will have college diplomas or already have them. Most of them are women. They won’t dig ditches, but they will work in jobs that only require a college degree nominally, where the skills they’ve often failed to learn are irrelevant. The diploma will prove that they have grit and conscientiousness, and give them a leg up in a job market where signaling such things are necessary, but they, like most people, will not remember what Modus Ponens is or how the the Rawlsian original position is supposed to help us think about justice.

There’s a difference between saying, “Right now, you have more important things to do than your logic homework, and that’s okay,” and saying, “Because you are poor, you don’t deserve a college education.” My students in prison are much better academically than the ones who are free, just because they have the time to focus on their studies, and I think there is a lot of value in the work that we do together. But no Pell Grants means no credit, and a felony record means that the skills they learn may never be put to work.

Maybe there’s a difference between “deserving” and “needing” an education. Most people don’t need a college diploma, certainly not to do their jobs, and probably not to be good citizens. They need a union or a basic income guarantee or a social minimum or a citizen capital grant or workplace democracy. But increasingly the only people who still have unions and political power are the people who also have college degrees, and those of us in that group like to pretend that increasing subsidies for bourgeois students (our kids) will help the ditch-diggers, too. That’s a bit too convenient, isn’t it?

Insights from the Latino Participatory Research Project

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In case you missed it, we wanted to share a post from the inCommon blog, a project of our partners at the Davenport Institute, about a project in Oregon that holds valuable insights and best practices for engaging Latino/a populations. You can read the post below or find the original here.

DavenportInst-logoLike many part of the US, Lane County, Oregon is seeing tremendous growth in its Latino population. Unwilling just to say “this is a traditionally difficult population to engage,”  the Latino Participatory Research Project is looking at ways to reach out to the Latino community to build lasting relationships for public engagement:

The Latino Participatory Research Project, led by University of Oregon Professor Gerardo Sandoval in partnership with Sightline Institute, was completed in the Spring of 2013. The project developed best practices and test outreach strategies to reach the Latino community and identified economic and social indicators of importance to the Latino community through outreach and participation with the Latino community. The project utilized a wide range of methods including individual interviews with Latino leaders and immigrants, small focus groups, and two interactive community planning workshops that engaged almost 100 people. Two local community-based organizations that serve the Latino Community, Huerto de la Familia and Downtown Languages, helped organize and recruit participants for the community workshops. Unique and valuable resources developed during the project below are linked below, and should be used for all efforts to connect with and better understand this unique community in Lane County.

You can read more and find links to the studies, reports, suggestions, and resources of the Latino Participatory Research Project here.