Author Archives: Peter

network dynamics in conversation

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(Dayton, OH) It is in conversations–face-to-face or virtual, oral or written, small or massive, formal or informal–that we form our views of public issues, hold ourselves accountable for our reasons and actions, check our assumptions, expand our horizons, gain the satisfaction of being recognized, display eloquence, and develop enough will to act together.

Some conversations are better than others, and we need to understand more about the differences. I think that mapping conversations as evolving networks is a promising strategy. At least three relevant phenomena can be modeled in network terms:

  1. As we discuss, we collaboratively construct networks of ideas. I say that I favor marriage equality because adults who love and commit to each other should have the protection of law, and because people should be treated equally regardless of sexual orientation. In those sentences, I have put several ideas together into a structure. You can add to my structure by posing other ideas, whether they connect to mine or conflict with mine. The group’s epistemic network expands and changes as we talk.
  2. We also form and change social networks during a discussion. The nodes in a social network are people, and the links between pairs of people can be characterized by knowledge, trust, respect, affection, etc (or their opposites). People who converse may already belong to the same social networks. Their discussions may develop and alter their social networks.
  3. We make “meta” comments about the conversation. For instance, I might ask you to clarify what you meant when you said P. Or I might say I agree with you, or withdraw my comment, or propose that the truth lies between what I said and that you said. These are interesting moments because they are about both the epistemic and the social network that already exists, and they can affect those networks. In an important 1983 article, Berkowitz and Gibbs called them “transacts” and found they led to learning when children used them.

Consider some subtle cases and how they might be modeled in network terms.

  1. Person A only cares about influencing her boss, B, who sits at the head of the table, but she chooses to turn toward everyone else in a meeting and address them. In social network terms, her talk is literally directed at a whole set of peers, but there is a more significant network connection between her and just one other person.
  2. A says P, and B pays no attention because B thinks that A is a fool. C says P, and B agrees with it because B thinks that C is smart. In this case, the social network affects the epistemic network.
  3. A wants B to like her, so she withdraws point P that she had made earlier because B objected to it. With that concession, the social network changes in one way, the epistemic network in a different way. B says, “I appreciate your flexibility, but really, you should insist on what you believe.” B’s meta-comment puts P back on the epistemic map and affects the social network.

In technical terms, I’d measure the epistemic network by representing transcripts of discussions as ideas and links (the links being arguments of various kinds) and probably locating the nodes on a two-dimensional plane that reflect key dimensions of disagreement in the conversation. I’d watch the network change as the participants talk.

I’d measure social networks by asking people to characterize the ties between them and each of the other participants, before and after the discussion.

Finally, I might model the relevant personal beliefs of each participant before and after a discussion as a network of ideas and links, which I would derive from a private interview or short essay. I would be interested in how much of the private network ends up in public and how much the public discussion affects the private network.

The point of all this measurement is to provide data that is useful for evaluative judgment. So the normative questions (“What makes a good discussion?” “How should you participate in discussions?”) are central. I think they deserve more exploration than we have had so far, although philosophers have certainly contributed criteria.

For instance, Jurgen Habermas wrote that in an ideal discussion, “no force except that of the better argument is exercised” (Habermas 1975, p. 108). He would want an epistemic network composed of objectively defensible ideas and links to influence the participants, completely independent of their places in a social network. Just because everyone knows and admires A but dislikes B, it doesn’t mean that people should absorb A’s ideas and ignore B’s ideas.

Another example: Olivia Newman argues that a good discussion in a liberal democracy won’t produce a single hierarchical framework of ideas, but will rather encompass numerous clusters of ideas that are only loosely connected. That shape reflects value pluralism while still allowing mutual learning. Thus a group’s epistemic network should be clustered but not overly centralized.

We might add that good discussants should continue to add new nodes and connections as long as the conversation continues (not repeat points already made); that

See also a method for mapping discussions as networks and assessing a discussion.

thinking like a citizen–about schools

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In Education, Justice & Democracy, edited by Danielle S. Allen and Rob Reich, all the chapters address the topic of educational equality in the US. The section headings are “ideals,” “constraints,” and “strategies.” In a longish review essay for Theory & Research in Education, I argue that good citizens explore just these three issues whenever they consider any important topic. In fact, you might define good citizens as people who take  ideals, constraints (or, I would say, “facts”), and strategies seriously and act accordingly. However, the three issues are badly segregated in modern intellectual life, with whole disciplines given over to the assumption that one should seek value-free facts, other disciplines happy to explore values without thinking about strategies, and some professional programs focused on strategies with a narrow conception of ideals. What we call “Civic Studies” is a deliberate effort to reintegrate thinking about social concerns from a citizen’s perspective, which inevitably combines ideals, constrains, and strategies. I chose to review this volume because it exemplifies Civic Studies, although I offer some critical thoughts about parts of the book.

My review is in Theory and Research in Education, July 2015, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 235-238, or on Academia.edu.

a co-op model for a college

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Here is a model for a new kind of college that I think could compete well with the available choices today, put beneficial pressure on the whole market, and avoid the “institutional isomorphism” that makes so many of our colleges and universities similar to each other. In a sentence: It is a co-op college in which the faculty and students jointly produce scholarship and learning at low cost. The college is organized democratically, but not because democratic values are intrinsically superior or identical to intellectual values. (I have argued against those claims here.) Rather, the organization of this college is democratic and participatory because it is a common property regime. That form of economic organization can be highly successful, but only when all participants feel that they have a voice to match their obligations.

I’d suggest these features:

Location: It would be a commuter college (no dorms) in a large metro area with a shortage of high-quality existing slots for undergraduates. Los Angeles is an example. The facilities could be relatively cheaply reconfigured buildings, such as a former school.

Business model: The sticker price would be $11,000. With a student/faculty ratio of 10:1, that yields $110k per professor, which is plenty to cover salaries and benefits plus facilities and a small support staff for maintenance, IT, and accounting. (The mean associate professor’s salary in English is $62,000; in the natural sciences, $67,590). These numbers would compare favorably to UCLA–which I respect deeply–where the average student pays $13,723 and the student/faculty ratio is 17:1. I envision a student body of 1,000 and a faculty of 100.

Professors’ responsibilities: The teaching load would be two courses per semester. Faculty would be expected to be active researchers. They would also populate committees that would fully handle admissions, counseling, curriculum, hiring, tenure and promotion, discipline, and external relations. Especially heavy responsibilities, such as chairing a major committee, might earn a course release. There would be no full-time administrators, but professors would serve elected terms as leaders with titles like president, provost, and dean, and would have limited course loads for the duration. The whole faculty would also meet for deliberations and governance.

Student responsibilities: Students would meet as a kind of legislative body in a bicameral arrangement with the faculty for some decision-making purposes. Some students would also be elected to serve on committees along with faculty and to provide other forms of leadership. For instance, instead of coaches and extramural athletics, there would be strong student-led intramurals and club sports. Although faculty would be involved in counseling of various kinds, students would also play essential roles in helping their peers. Some jobs might be eligible for Federal Work Study, which would reduce the $11k sticker price for those with greater need.

A board of trustees. The faculty and students would elect a board of trustees, including a few of their own number along with prominent outsiders. This board would serve as an accountability and review committee and would be able to lend their blessing to the whole enterprise.

Culture: I would recommend not especially targeting zealous proponents of alternative economics for either the student body or the faculty. I believe groups dominated by people with that kind of motivation tend to devolve into ideological hair-splitting and factional strife. (See Jenny Mansbridge‘s work on 1960s communes–or think of the French Revolution.) Instead, I would be looking for pragmatists with maturity and people-skills, along with academic excellence and diversity of various kinds. I’d recruit the faculty from a generation of talented and dedicated younger scholars who are facing a terrible job market. I’d look for students with a high potential to benefit from the experience–in other words, not necessarily the highest test scores or GPAs, but serious interest in learning in a no-frills environment.

Curriculum: This would be developed and modified by the group, deliberatively over time. It would be disappointing if the results failed to be unusual. That would be a waste of the opportunity to innovate, given the absence of traditional silos and barriers. But it wouldn’t necessarily be wise to create one curriculum for everyone. Diversity and choice are not only intellectual values; they prevent self-governing groups from splintering over matters of principle. Specifically, there is a kind of conversation that goes: “‘X is important, so X should be a required topic of study for all.’ ‘Well, if X is important, so is Y, and why isn’t that required?'” (Repeat endlessly.) I’d expect some coherence and some distinctiveness to emerge in a wholly new college with a democratic process, but if I were in the deliberations, I’d probably be a voice for individual choice.

my political views in 10 minutes

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Tufts has created and released this 10-minute video, based on a talk of mine. I found it a good exercise to write, memorize, and present everything that I hold most central for a general audience in that span of time. The presentation ranges from the individual networks of ideas that each of us brings into public life to strategies for enhancing civic engagement at the national level. It proposes a universal definition of good citizenship as well as a diagnostic account of our current condition in the US in 2015 and some suggestions for reforms. It’s my best shot at summarizing all of my life’s work so far (minus some thoughts about methodology in the human sciences and a critical argument about modernity that I have advanced in my books about Nietzsche and Dante). Of course, I have created none of this on my own but owe everything valuable to colleagues and collaborators.

how national policies sucked the power out of local government and disempowered citizens

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Phillip Longman makes an extraordinarily important argument in an Atlantic article entitled “Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged” (although I would be very curious what economic historians and other relevant experts think about it). Here is my restatement:

  1. When businesses are mostly local, local governments can regulate them. Citizens can also influence them directly by applying social pressure.
  2. When citizens have the experience of influencing economic institutions directly or through representative local governments, they feel empowered and want to act at the state and national levels as well.
  3. Between 1788 and about 1970, federal and state governments and courts instituted a remarkable series of policies explicitly designed to favor local firms. An economic outcome of these policies was a strong convergence of income and prices across the US, as each community captured a lot of its own wealth. Firms were also accountable to local governments, and business owners were highly active in local civic affairs.
  4. Since 1970s, all branches of government have removed those policies. Income and prices have diverged dramatically. Wealth has flowed to the big coastal cities.
  5. Local and state governments have become less capable of regulating businesses. Firms also receive less social pressure because they tend to locate in culturally friendly cities and do their business nationally. Big business leaders are uninvolved in local civic life but increasingly focused on Washington.

Carolyn Bouchard, a diabetic with a slowly healing shoulder fracture, hurried to see her doctor after Matt Bevin was elected governor here this month. Ms. Bouchard, 60, said she was sick of politics and had not bothered voting. But she knew enough about Mr. Bevin, a conservative Republican who rails against the Affordable Care Act, to be nervous about the coverage she gained under the law last year.

“I thought, ‘Before my insurance changes, I’d better go in,’ ” she said as she waited at Family Health Centers, a community clinic here.

Longman summarizes policies enacted to increase local control over business until 1970s–and their repeal since then. Consider, for example, the US Postal Service monopoly (which guaranteed equal prices and service for all addresses), heavy regulation of railroad, telegraph, and television companies, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Robinson-Patman Act (against chain retail stores), the Miller-Tydings Act (against retail discounting), the Celler-Kefauver Act (antitrust provisions), Brown Shoe Co., Inc. v. United States (blocking a retail merger), and FCC regulations that mandated airline service to smaller markets and equal ticket prices per mile.

These were all policies that restrained national business competition but allowed geographical communities to compete against the big cities of the coasts. Once these rules were gone, capital became more mobile and consumers probably got the benefits of lower prices–but it became impossible to govern at the local level, and citizens were taught to be “sick of politics” because the politicians who were closest to them could no longer achieve much on their behalf.

See also: the Democrats’ problem is social capital; the European city as site of citizenship; and wealth-building strategies for communities.

save the date for Frontiers of Democracy 2016

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Please save the date for Frontiers of Democracy: June 23-25, 2016 at Tufts University’s downtown Boston campus.

Frontiers is an annual conference that draws scholars and practitioners who strive to understand and improve people’s engagement with government, with communities, and with each other. The format of Frontiers is highly interactive; most of the concurrent sessions are “learning exchanges” rather than presentations or panels. We welcome proposals for learning exchanges for 2016. Please use this form to submit ideas.

We aim to explore the circumstances of democracy today and a breadth of civic practices that include deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing and development, civic learning and political engagement, the role of higher education in democracy, Civic Studies, media reform and citizen media production, civic  technology, civic environmentalism, and common pool resource management. See more about past years here.

You can enter your information here to let us know that you are interested in attending and to ensure that you receive additional information about the agenda and registering for Frontiers.

All are welcome at Frontiers, a public conference that follows immediately after the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a 2-week seminar for scholars, practitioners, and advanced graduate students. The Summer Institute requires an application, and admissions decisions are usually made in May. Prospective applicants should sign up here for more information.

Ginwright on Blacklivesmatter

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Shawn Ginwright is one of the best analysts of the #Blacklivesmatter movement. These are excerpts from his article “Radically Healing Black Lives: A Love Note to Justice“* that help explain what is happening in America today.

First, a great statement of why the movement emphasizes Blacknesss and yet is for all:

A love ethic is an unconditional desire for human dignity, meaningful existence, and hope. #Blacklivesmatter is a movement of dignity, meaning, and hope in a critical moment when race in general, and Blackness in particular, has become a third rail, and avoided in policy debates. The statement “Black lives matter” also gives others permission to practice courageous love and to celebrate and protect the dignity and humanity of all people.

And here is Ginwright on the double agenda–changing systems and healing people:

Healing justice is an emerging movement that seeks both (a) collective healing and well-being, and also (b) transforming the institutions and relationships that are causing the harm in the first place (Wallace, 2012). …

Young community leaders increasingly acknowledge that both organizing and healing together are required for lasting community change. Both strategies, braided together, make a more complete and durable fabric in our efforts to transform oppression, and hold the power to restore a more humane, and redemptive process toward community change. …

[By analogy,] environmental justice activists view policies that promote pollution and fossil fuels as harmful to the earth and our environment. Much of their activism focuses on protecting the environment from harm created by lack of awareness or concern for the natural environment. Similarly, healing justice activists view policies that promote violence, stress, hopelessness in schools and communities, as harmful to our collective well-being, human dignity, and hope. Rather than viewing well-being as an individual act of self-care, healing justice advocates view the practice of healing as political action.

*from New Directions for Student Leadership, no. 148 (2015), pp. 33-44.

call for CIRCLE pieces on the relationship between electoral and broader civic engagement

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CIRCLE has been soliciting and editing guest posts for the home page, which amount to short publications that reach the field of youth civic engagement pretty broadly. The latest call went out today:

CIRCLE is seeking proposals for guest posts to our website, civicyouth.org, focused on relationships between electoral engagement and civic life and democracy more generally.

Over the next year, a great deal of time and money will be spent on reaching voters—including young voters—in the U.S. We would like to convene a conversation about whether and how efforts to promote youth electoral engagement (e.g. voting, learning about candidate positions, volunteering for a campaign) help to increase the prevalence, equity, and quality of youth civic skills, attitudes and engagement generally. We define civic engagement broadly. Questions to discuss could include:

  • What are the ways in which electoral engagement is integrated with other forms of engagement and how is this best done? Does the focus on youth voter engagement also strengthen other forms of engagement? What opportunities would facilitate this link?
  • How are skills and attitudes developed or furthered as a part of electoral engagement related to non-election civic activities?

We are looking for proposals from a variety of perspectives, including people who run youth programs, researchers, funders, teachers, etc. We will consider proposals that share or reflect on qualitative and/or quantitative data, as well as program evaluations and reflections on programs and theoretical arguments. We will give preference to posts that discuss any connection to K-12 schools and curricula, households as settings for discussions or civic activities, or ways in which young people learn and practice being civic through cultural and peer influences.

Returning to our Roots: a new white paper on educating for democracy

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GCwhitepaperReleased today is a strategy paper entitled Returning to Our Roots: Educating for Democracy. The authors are Generation Citizen plus a committee from other groups, including my CIRCLE colleagues and me. I’m pleased to have been part of the discussions that generated this paper. It is distinctive in that it puts political engagement at the center of civic education and addresses both schools and out-of-school opportunities.

Generation Citizens’ executive director, Scott Warren, also has a piece entitled “Student protests reveal thirst for a dialogue on democratic process” in the Hechinger Report. Scott uses this article to summarize the recommendations of the report.

ideological currents in the current crises

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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? – Brecht, from An die Nachgeborenen (1939)

Racist incidents and youth protests in the USA (including the successful protests at Yale), terror in Paris and Beirut, war in the Levant–these are vastly different topics, and yet they all feed one 24/7 stream of commentary, social media, private conversation, and presidential politics in which themes seem to recur and recombine. Everyone has different views, but I think I discern at least three importantly distinct political philosophies in the mix:

1. A kind of liberalism that we might call, with Judith Shklar, the liberalism of fear. This perspective starts with an abhorrence of deliberate cruelty, especially at a large scale. The premise is that people are more or less capable of living decent lives if left alone, although they may need and deserve economic assistance that they can use as they wish. The worst danger comes from states. Governments must be restrained by general rules that prevent tyranny even if they also block some good ideas.

From this perspective, a private college like Yale is state-like, a threat to its members even if its leaders happen to be benign at the moment. Not only free speech rules but also autonomy for departments, decentralized hiring, tenure, a very flexible curriculum–these are all constitution-like protections against tyranny. If someone proposes a good idea, such as a required course, the question becomes: Why won’t that turn into a bunch of bad course requirements? Do you really trust the administration and the dominant culture that it represents to legislate what courses students must take?

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a fundamental threat to freedom and happiness. But the debate within the liberalism of fear is whether to pull out all the stops in attacking ISIS or rather to be concerned that European states and the USA will violate civil and human rights in the name of fighting ISIS.

2. A kind of radicalism that draws on critical race and gender studies, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and postcolonialism. It observes some people oppressing many other people in a wide variety of settings, often inadvertently. Oppression is built into cultures and mentalities and requires changes in people’s ideas as well as rules and practices.

From this perspective, a private institution like Yale is not only an organization that has chosen official rules to regulate its members. It is also a place dominated by certain cultural norms and populated by people who have been selected and invited (rather than rejected or excluded). Almost everyone thinks that members of the Yale community should have specific rights, such as free assembly and tenure, but this perspective attends to other issues as well. It notes that the whole community has been formed and shaped to have a certain character. The institution’s pervasive culture is biased against some of its members–not to mention the many people who were not allowed in at all. These biases must be challenged.

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a terrible threat to diversity and inclusion, but the question quickly arises whether one contributing cause of terrorism may be the biased behavior of countries like France and the United States toward our own religious minorities and toward the Middle East.

3. Views that confidently propose a character for public life, either within a given institution or across a whole society. When John Kasich proposes an institute to spread Judaeo-Christian values, he certainly presumes that the US should have a dominant and unifying culture, but other people have other visions of what a good society should look like. The French republican tradition, for example, is egalitarian, nationalistic, and anti-clerical. It has little in common with US conservatism except for its willingness to argue that every citizen can be, and should be, part of one community with one set of norms. People who are saying, “Don’t pray for Paris–religion is what caused the problem” are invoking a particular idea of France as secular. Some years ago, Emmanuel Todd was sure that Muslim immigrant youth in France were rioting because they have “embraced … the fundamental values of French society, such as … the dyad of liberty-equality” and because they have inherited political norms from the ancient “peasant family structures in the Parisian basin.” He seems to have changed his tune lately, but his view was perfectly franco-republican in its assumption of a unitary egalitarian political culture.

From this perspective, an institution like Yale has a powerful culture and character that may not appeal to, or serve, everyone equally. The question is, what should that character be? Political and critical? Scientific and rationalistic? Nurturing and inclusive? Competitive and demanding? Eurocentric? Postcolonial and cosmopolitan?

Meanwhile, ISIS is an evil threat for this third perspective, but not because its leaders espouse a particular vision that all must follow. Rather, ISIS has a vision that is bleak and cruel and conflicts with the ethos of, say, secular, fun-loving Paris or capitalistic, Christian-infused America.

These are simplified views. I have ignored many complications–to name one, the question of whether a private voluntary association like Yale is very much like a state. As I wrote at the outset, everyone has a position of her own. For myself, I struggle to combine elements of all three views because all seem to me to embody some wisdom.