three ways of thinking about social reform

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Peter

A group has been discussing how to improve upward economic mobility in the Boston metro area, which is booming but leaving a lot of people behind. I do not know much about economic mobility, nor do I lead an antipoverty organization, so I have found it a privilege to be in the room with people who have real knowledge and clout.

In the discussions so far, I detect three theses. When I mentioned this list, some people felt that they are all true. Indeed, the ideas may fit together in various combinations, but I see tensions among them.

1. We know how to improve the prospects of low-income people; we just don’t have the will to do it. Innovation should be at the political level, changing the balance of power or the messages that resonate.

Probably the strongest evidence for that thesis is international. This OECD publication is one of many that shows poor intergenerational mobility in the US compared to countries like Denmark, Australia, and Norway. The same study finds that public investment in early childhood correlates with better mobility. We don’t invest much in preschool in the US. The reason is arguably that affluent suburbanites don’t vote for it because they don’t need it, while poor people don’t vote for it because they are generally disenfranchised and dispirited. So we need political strategies to change voters’ preferences to shift government.

intergenerational
2. We don’t know how to help people move up the mobility ladder in a post-industrial, knowledge-based, global economy. We need innovative programs and R&D.

Ron Haskins recently wrote, “Despite decades of efforts and trillions of dollars in spending, rigorous evaluations typically find that around 75 percent of programs or practices that are intended to help people do better at school or at work have little or no effect.” That’s a controversial claim; I have previously addressed the complex question of whether to rely on randomized studies. But it is a plausible claim, especially if we restrict it to hands-on service programs (in contrast to entitlement transfers). To be sure, we see more intergenerational mobility in Denmark than in the US, and Denmark has large-scale policies that probably work–but I’ll bet they work less well than they used to, and they may not apply in situations like our massively deindustrialized cities. So there is a case for finding new strategies that really work instead of spending tons of money on things that don’t.

3. People in poor communities should determine their own futures.

Both #1 and #2 can be read as “We should do various things for–or to–people in poor communities.” Clearly, they need resources. But perhaps “we” should show a little more modesty. People in poor communities should not only decide how to use resources but also do the (paid) work of community development, creating their own solutions.

Again, I think these theses can fit together in various ways; many individuals see merit in two or even three of them. But they do pull you in different directions.

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the Civic Studies Institute spreads to Ukraine

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Peter

Thanks to our colleague Dr. Tetyana Kloubert of the University of Augsburg and a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), the Summer Institute of Civic Studies that we hold annually at Tufts is adding a parallel institute in Ukraine, which I will help to teach in 2015. Ukrainian scholars and practitioners are strongly encouraged to apply. We will also consider applications
from Germany, Belarus and Poland. Please feel free to circulate this announcement.

Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education
Call for Applications

We are happy to invite you to participate in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and
Civic Education that will take place in Ukraine from 3-16 August 2015 (at the Chernivitsi National Yuriy Fedkovych University).

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education is organized by a team from Tufts University (Prof. Peter Levine), the University of Maryland (Prof. Karol Soltan) and the University of Augsburg (Dr. Tetyana Kloubert).

Objectives and topics

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education is an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar bringing together advanced graduate students, faculty, and practitioners from diverse fields of study.

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education deals with issues of development of civil society, the role of an individual/citizen in society, the role of education in promoting democracy, the role of institutions in the development of a civil society and questions related to the ethical foundation of civic issues in a (democratic)
society. These topics will be examined in international and comparative perspectives, considering European (especially German) and US-American civic traditions. International examples will be discussed in the context of consolidation of democracy in
Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine.

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education engages participants in challenging discussions such as:

What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

Summer Institutes of Civic Studies have been annually organized by Peter Levine and Karol Soltan at Tufts University since 2009.

How to apply

All application materials must be submitted in English. The application must include the following:

A cover letter telling us why you want to participate in the summer institute and what you would contribute (maximum 2 pages)
A curriculum vitae

All application materials can be sent as an email attachment in DOC or PDF format to
tetyana.kloubert@phil.uni-augsburg.de

Decisions will be announced in April 2015.

The total number of participants will be limited to 20. Ukrainian scholars and practitioners are strongly encouraged to apply. We will also consider the applications
from Germany, Belarus and Poland. We are especially interested in applicants who
have a long term interest in developing the civic potential of Ukraine, and the region.
The working language of the Summer Institute will be English. Your mastery of the
English language must be sufficient to read and understand complex texts from multiple disciplines, and to take part in a lively discussion.

Deadline

For best consideration apply by March 31, 2015.

Expenditures

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education is being funded by the DAAD
(German Academic Exchange Service). Selected participants will be provided with
travel costs, accommodation (in a twin room), meals and full event access.

For more information about the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education,
please contact tetyana.kloubert@phil.uni-augsburg.de

We encourage you to share this message with your networks of people who might be
interested by the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education

Generously funded by DAAD

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two perspectives on our political paralysis

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Peter

Let’s define “governing” in a democracy (and I mean really governing, as opposed to administering or muddling through) as putting an agenda before the people, achieving a mandate, and enacting the agenda before the next election offers a verdict.

No one has governed the United States, in this sense, for at least a quarter century, except for transient and incomplete moments: Reagan cutting taxes in 1980-82, Clinton raising taxes to balance the budget in 1992-4, G.W. Bush cutting taxes and passing the Patriot Act after 9/11, and Obama passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. But those names also remind us of abandoned agendas. Under Reagan, taxes and spending rose as a percentage of GDP and the federal service added a net 230,000 jobs. In retrospect, it’s hard to say what the domestic policy agendas of Clinton or the two Bushes were. Obama stopped governing (in the sense I mean here) when he lost his House majority in 2010. No one expects anything except paralysis through at least 2016. Gallup reports that “2014 was … the first year since 2007 that the economy was not the top ranking issue, and it was the first year ever in Gallup records that dissatisfaction with government topped the list.”

Here are two ways of interpreting this situation.

First, political scientist Juan Linz would note that every presidential system other than the US has collapsed. Individual legislators are not held accountable for the performance of the country but do get credit for criticizing the president. Thus a legislature has every incentive to undermine the executive branch. When the two branches are separately elected, you are bound to see legislative obstructionism (on one side) and executive unilateralism (on the other) whenever power is split.

That is just what we have seen in the US since ca. 1986. Why not before? Because until the 1980s, Congress always had at least three effective political parties, the Democrats being composed of two radically different wings (the Southern conservatives and Northern liberals). Thus a president could normally put two of the three congressional blocs together to obtain a majority. He was basically in the position of a Prime Minister, assembling a majority in the legislature. That opportunity vanished when the parties sorted neatly into left and right, so now we face the Linzian nightmare. Presidents will rule by executive order and congresses will obstruct until the system fails.

Alternatively, political scientist James A. Morone has argued that the US system was designed to avoid governing (in the sense of this post.) That is not only true of the federal constitution, with its famous checks and balances, but also of new institutions that we have developed subsequently, such as the New Deal regulatory agencies and the ACA. They always incorporate numerous veto points because they cannot come into being unless their opponents are mollified by such barriers–and because Americans profoundly fear governing as a form of tyranny.

Morone argues that at several points in American history, the federal government (blocked by design from changing its policies) has become manifestly out of step with a changing country. To name one example, Washington could not recognize unions but was faced with a militant labor movement ca. 1932. In such cases, Americans typically denounce their hobbled government as corrupt and elitist and demand that power shift to “the people.” They are invoking a myth, because the population is not unified; in fact, one of the reasons that government is paralyzed is that it reflects citizens’ conflicting interests. Nevertheless, by invoking “the people,” the reformers win new political rights or procedures (white male suffrage in the Jacksonian Era, regulatory agencies in the Progressive Era, collective bargaining under the New Deal, community action agencies in the 1960s). These new rights and procedures change who is effectively enfranchised and thus shift policy outcomes. Once a new equilibrium is reached, the system returns to paralysis, but in better alignment with the underlying social/economic situation.

If Linz is right, our challenge is largely unprecedented, and we are in big trouble. If Morone is right, we have faced the same circumstance at least five times before and the time now looks ripe for a new set of populist institutional innovations. Based on the past waves of reform, we should expect “an exuberant mix of democratic images and contemporary organizational methods: open meetings, civic education, broad opportunities to participate, professional staff support” (The Democratic Myth, 1990, p. 28). Today that might mean Participatory Budgeting, online games for city planning, and service corps, among other examples. These reforms will adjust the political balance and policy outcomes before they ultimately disappoint by puncturing the myth of a unified people.

Neither argument is exactly rosy, but both should be taken seriously if we hope to find better ways forward.

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author’s colloquium on We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Peter

As I prepare to take a 2-week winter break from blogging, I’ll post the video of me, Jane Mansbridge and Marshall Ganz of the Harvard Kennedy School, and Jenny Sazama, Director & Co-Founder of Youth on Board, talking about my book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For in a discussion moderated by Meira Levinson (Harvard Grad School of Ed). The event was a CMEI Colloquium/Gutman Library Distinguished Author Event last October 21.

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questions about “collective impact”

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Peter

The concept of “Collective Impact” suddenly seems to be everywhere. No meeting is complete without it. FSG defines it as “the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a complex social problem.” And they propose five conditions:

Common Agenda: All participants share a vision for change that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving the problem through agreed-upon actions.

Shared Measurement: All participating organizations agree on the ways success will be measured and reported, with a short list of common indicators identified and used for learning and improvement.

Mutually Reinforcing Activities: A diverse set of stakeholders, typically across sectors, coordinate a set of differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action.

Continuous Communication: All players engage in frequent and structured open communication to build trust, assure mutual objectives, and create common motivation.

Backbone Support: An independent, funded staff dedicated to the initiative provides ongoing support by guiding the initiative’s vision and strategy, supporting aligned activities, establishing shared measurement practices, building public will, advancing policy, and mobilizing resources.

I definitely see the purpose and value of such efforts, but I would pose these questions for critical reflection whenever the framework is being used:

When is a group with a shared agenda and “backbone” organization a “collaboration” or a “community of practice,” and when is it a cartel or a clique?
When is reducing competition among NGOs a valuable a way of reducing waste and allowing them to work toward a broader goal, and when is reducing competition a way of protecting incumbent organizations from challenges by newcomers? (In short, when is a cooperating group a monopoly?)
Who gets to decide on the common agenda, and to whom are they accountable?
What makes you eligible to join the “diverse set of stakeholders”

(A civics textbook would say that the people should ultimately decide on the agenda for their community, mainly by choosing elected representatives who deliberate and vote–all subject to judicial review. We already have a smooth tessellation of political jurisdictions across America, each with its own elected leaders. But in the Collective Impact model, governmental agencies are just some of the “participating organizations.” )

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Foucault and neoliberalism

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Peter

If you’re intellectually and ideologically eclectic, then you will find important ideas all over the map. It will not surprise you to learn that a person generally associated with the left has benefited from F.O. von Hayek or Gary Becker: leading libertarians. An excellent example is James C. Scott, who likes to call himself (I suspect partly for the frisson of it) “a crude Marxist,” but who has been deeply influenced by Hayek. Scott’s analysis of the high-modernist state is indispensable, however you choose to classify it.

On the other hand, if you’re a committed leftist intellectual, it may well come as a surprise to you that Michel Foucault read Hayek and Becker and said positive things about neoliberalism. That is the theme of Daniel Zamora’s forthcoming volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale. In the left magazine The Jacobin, Zamora presents it as puzzling and even potentially scandalous fact that Foucault should have showed “indulgence … toward neoliberalism.”

I do not know the relevant texts and statements by the late Foucault. But I think the affinity between Foucault’s style of critique and libertarianism is important although not very surprising, and I would understand it in the following contexts:

1. The “revolution” of May 1968 was led by activists and intellectuals who considered themselves Marxists and often especially favored Maoism. Yet their successful concrete demands were for greater individual freedom, especially vis-a-vis the state. They won a lower age of consent for sex (1974), abortion rights (1975), freedom of information (1978), and many other reforms traditionally recommended by classical liberals. They also reformed the state by reducing the power of the president, making elections more important, and strengthening NGOs. In Marxist terms, ’68 was a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian one. So it shouldn’t be shocking that perhaps the greatest political thinker of ’68 was a bourgeois liberal (of a kind).

2. The most evident social issue of 19th century Europe was the oppression of the industrial working class. But economic growth made countries like France pervasively affluent by 1968. Industrial jobs had shrunk while social welfare programs and unions had improved the everyday life of those who still had such jobs–to the point where they could reasonably look like a kind of elite. As Zamora perceptively argues in the Jacobin article, the contrast between organized blue-collar workers and various “excluded” populations (new immigrants and disadvantaged racial minorities, the disabled, the very poor) became a central concern. But the “excluded” were not in a position to seize the commanding heights of the economy, or even to win elections, as the proletariat might have been in 1910. They were especially likely to suffer at the hands of the welfare state in poor schools, prisons, clinics, and conscripted armies. The neoliberal solution–reducing barriers to their market participation–might look more attractive than the traditional social-democratic solution of enrolling them in welfare programs that were sites of surveillance and discipline.

2. Many of the great disasters of the 20th century were attributable to high-modernist states that sought to count and measure society in order to control it–sometimes in the interest of laudable goals, like equality. One of the worst such states was Mao’s China, but French intellectuals of 1968 romanticized that regime as some kind of participatory democracy. Their misconception about China gradually faded, and in any case, China became capitalist. More to the point, the left intellectuals of Foucault’s generation were already able to see that other high modernist states were disastrous. It was appropriate and natural for the left to turn away from statism. But once they opposed the state, why should they not become libertarians? As Zamora asks in a follow-up article, “How could we seriously think that discrediting state action in the social domain and abandoning the very idea of social ‘rights’ constitutes progress toward thinking ‘beyond the welfare state’? All it has done is allow the welfare state’s destruction, not a glimpse of something ‘beyond.'” (An alternative could be anarchism, but anarchism in practice often looks like neoliberalism.)

3. Foucault and his generation emphasized a whole range of oppressions and invidious uses of power that might not arise between a capitalist and a worker but rather between a man and a woman, a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, a doctor and a patient, a white person and an immigrant, and other such pairings. They were correct to recognize these problems. But once oppression is seen as multifarious and omnipresent, we no longer want the working class to rule through the state or unions. Individual expressive freedom and various kinds of diversity become high priorities.

Zamora writes:

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a ‘much less bureaucratic’ and ‘much less disciplinarian’ form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.

Foucault “seemed to imagine” this because, indeed, a lightly regulated market economy in an affluent society is less bureaucratic than a social welfare state and does generate autonomy and diversity. Perhaps a market system also reshapes the human psyche in problematic ways. And certainly it generates unequal wealth. But for the reasons stated above, unequal wealth no longer seemed to be the primary domestic economic problem in a country like France ca. 1968. And if markets subtly shape the soul, states do so more blatantly and more uniformly.

To be clear, I am not a libertarian; I want states and other strongly organized bodies to promote equity as well as freedom. Also, I recognize that many people with egalitarian instincts have absorbed libertarian ideas without abandoning the state. They have read Hayek as well as Marx and Foucault. But I think the left still is still wrestling with the realities that led Foucault to say nice things about neoliberalism in his last years.

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what does Russia make?

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Peter

In the waning days of Communism, it seemed as if all the Soviet Union made that anyone else wanted to purchase were Matryoshka doll sets. In reality, the USSR was exporting oil and natural gas. Drops in their market value helped end the regime.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t think of anything that post-Communist Russia makes that anyone else wants to buy, apart from oil and gas–but that could be a prejudice on my part. The Observatory of Economic Complexity allows you to check the real story. More than half of Russia’s exports are oil and gas, and almost 100% are raw materials or other inputs to industrial or food processes, such as sawn wood and fish. The biggest category of finished goods that I can find is gas turbines, valued at $1.5 billion (total). Nuclear reactors follow at $1.27 billion. By way of contrast, Canada also has vast natural resources, but it exports $47 billion worth of cars and $7 billion worth of aircraft, among many other finished products.

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Bernard Williams on truth as a virtue of the humanities

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Peter

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) published Truth and Truthfulness in 2002, when the humanities were still processing criticisms of truth, objectivity, science, the Enlightenment, and related ideals that had arisen with postmodernism. Williams held his own complex epistemology; he certainly wasn’t interested in defending naive positivism or scientism. But he saw that unless the humanities stood for truth as some kind of virtue, there wouldn’t be much of a case for those disciplines.

He recognized that the postmodern critique of truth might be waning. Epistemological radicalism had been more of an issue in 1990 (when I was at the same institution as Williams) than when he published Truth and Truthfulness. But he was prescient about the decade to come:

There is a danger that the decline of the more dramatic confrontations [about postmodernism] may do no more than register an inert cynicism, the kind of calm that in personal relations can follow a series of hysterical rows. If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs the risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

(Anyone recognize evidence of the last three words today?)

Williams’ book is not really about truth but about “the ‘virtues’ of truth, qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people.” Those virtues turn out to be two: Accuracy and Sincerity. Accuracy means trying to figure out what is true about the world and other people, as opposed to what one wishes, assumes, or is told to be true. It means making an “investment” in efforts to distinguish realities from wishes, for example. Sincerity means sharing what one believes with other people. The two virtues are distinct but related. It is, for example, not much good to be sincere about one’s beliefs if they are childish fantasies, nor to struggle to understand reality but keep what you find to yourself.

A third candidate for a virtue of truthfulness would be Authenticity–being true to who you really are. Williams criticizes the strong, Rousseauian version of this candidate virtue on interesting grounds. We don’t know who we really are. The self is not a unitary thing but a mix of values and other mental states that change rapidly, shift with context, and arise in relation to other people. Becoming someone is a “project” undertaken with other people. So the expectation of Authenticity is frustrating in ways that are worse than the quests for Accuracy and Sincerity.

Williams makes the case that any society needs Accuracy and Sincerity. But, as he argued more generally in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, the fact that a society needs X does not give an individual an adequate reason to supply X. One can free-ride instead. Also, there can be morally legitimate reasons to make exceptions. Kant was wrong to conclude that, because language and society depend on a general expectation of truthfulness, you may never lie. It only follows that most people should be truthful most of the time.

Instead of trying to derive grounds for principles of Accuracy and Sincerity, it is better to analyze and positively depict truthfulness as a virtue that gives credit to the person who displays it. We can also connect virtues together. Thus, for example, it takes courage to be Accurate, and compassion to be Sincere. (“Error is cowardice,” as Nietzsche wrote in a passage that Williams quotes.) Accuracy is also linked to freedom, because the struggle to understand nature is governed by one’s own will, in contrast to a struggle against other people’s wills, which limits freedom. I think Williams’ project is to defend truthfulness by linking several virtues into one attractive picture.

Note that virtues are not like Kantian principles; they can be exhibited to various degrees and even to excess. One can, for instance, make too much of an investment in determining the accuracy of a statement whose implications are not sufficiently important. (That is a sign of an obsession.) Or one can rightly withhold information that ought to be private.

Sincerity is a disposition, and it cannot be understood just as the disposition to follow a rule. Of course, there have to be some general considerations to which Sincerity attends, or the disposition would have no content. … But they do not add up to a rule, in the traditional sense of a requirement which is relatively simple and does not leave most of the work to judgement.

I read Truth and Truthfulness to explore a hypothesis that there are three different sets of virtues that are important to a good life, but they do not fit neatly together. One is truth, which Williams parses as Accuracy and Sincerity. A second concerns our relations to other people, which must be just, fair, compassionate, or some relative of those terms. (I deliberately mean this three-part model to allow for much debate about each part). And the third concerns our inner self, for we are entitled to worry about our own peace, equanimity, and/or happiness.

I found Williams helpful in two ways. First, he substantiates the premise that truthfulness is one set of virtues, honorable in themselves and generally useful to society, but sometimes in conflict with other worthy virtues. Again he quotes Nietzsche: “Fundamental Insight: There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity.” Second, Williams offers an impressive model for how to argue on behalf of a large abstract virtue, of which truthfulness is an example. He parses it closely. He shows by means of hypothetical cases that the virtue benefits a society. He shows by means of real history that the virtue has evolved in certain ways to take its current form. He shows that in the course of this history, certain efforts to change the virtue (e.g., Romantic proposals to turn it into Authenticity) have failed. And he links it to other virtues in ways that make it seem appealing.

The result is not the kind of knock-down argument that would convince a cheerful liar to start being Accurate and Sincere. It is, rather, an excavation of the kinds of reasons that lead reasonable people to try to be fairly truthful, even when inaccuracy and insincerity would be easier. I agree with Williams that unless the humanities exemplify that effort, they do not have much of a future.

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questions for the social movement post Ferguson

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Peter

(Washington, DC) The social ferment following the Ferguson verdict looks bigger to me than Occupy, and bigger than the other nascent US social movements that I can recall from personal experience, going back to the 1980s.

That is a subjective impression based on my social networks, personal interests, and preferred news sources, but I have talked to reporters who feel the same way. [link added later.] The unrest taps much deeper and broader concerns than the recent shootings and legal decisions themselves. It is a response to trends as large as the incarceration crisis and the fraught condition of America’s poor communities of color. As my colleague Peniel Joseph writes, “Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-class, and multi-generational Americans have swarmed the streets in vast numbers to not only protest against racial injustice but to expose systemic oppression that has been an open secret since the heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s.” They are developing the “WUNC” elements of a successful social movement that Charles Tilly identified:

Worthiness: moral standing in the eyes of the country;
Unity: Despite demographic, ideological, and regional diversity, a sense that participants stand together;
Numbers: Marches, die-ins, etc., signify that many people stand together;
Commitment: Getting arrested, standing up to speak—these and other actions demonstrate commitment.

Many of my friends are involved in this nascent movement, in body and/or soul, and I see a lot of potential myself. But what I can offer at this moment are some relatively abstract thoughts about the challenges that face such movements in general. (By the way, we should not expect a uniform response to any of these challenges. Internal debates will yield a variety of approaches, and that is healthy.)

1. Participants must decide on their level of diagnosis. Confronted with the Ferguson verdict, some people think the problem is the control that prosecutors exercise over grand juries. Then a solution might involve special prosecutors. A totally different kind of diagnosis says that the problem is racism, as a relatively invariant underlying force in American life. When de jure segregation ended, racism was like a pool of water that needed a new outlet, and mass incarceration followed. In that case, the only solution would be some direct, frontal attack on racism. Many other theories are available, and they are not all mutually exclusive, but they suggest very different strategies. My own view is that social problems can rarely be divided into foundational causes and superficial effects. They are usually complex systems of reciprocal causes. That is an argument against treating the largest available abstraction, such as racism, as the main target. But this is debatable, and it will be debated.

2. Participants must choose a target. Occupy chose Wall Street: that was the original name of the movement. But Occupy never found a way to press Wall Street itself. The institutions that Occupy most effectively challenged were public universities, like UC-Davis, and big cities, like Oakland, where conflicts with the police made the institutions look bad. This was a case, in my opinion, in which one target was chosen but a different one was hit. After Ferguson, the question is again where to direct confrontation and how to make sure that the intended target receives the pressure.

3. Related to the question of diagnoses and targets is the matter of demands. What will the movement call for, and what will it accept?

4. Participants will have to figure out their relationship to formal institutions, such as governments, parties, the mass media, and universities. I have been asked whether I expect the movement to start running candidates or rather to eschew electoral politics because it looks so corrupt and unresponsive. I think it is far too early to say. Social movements often begin in their own spaces, apart from institutions that they perceive as hostile and unreformable. Especially during that phase, it is appropriate for some participants to say that they stand apart from the system. Such statements do not rule out later engagement with formal processes.

5. Participants must demand attention in a competitive space. Social movements typically say that business as usual must stop because their issue is too important to allow regular activities to continue. That is often a valid claim, actually. But it competes against many other such claims. Right now, for instance, a serious case can be made that all Americans must demand criminal prosecution of the torture authorizers during the Bush Administration. Inaction makes us complicit in felonious torture. Not to mention climate change and campaign finance, which just got worse yesterday. Social movements must claim attention while somehow navigating rival claims.

6. The movement will have to address the usual tensions between prominent leadership and decentralized activism; honoring the heritage of past work while demanding new directions and giving space to young leaders; and staying relatively small and pure versus broadening and potentially losing focus.

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journalism students fill the news gap on Miami’s sea level rise

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Peter

Robert Gutsche reports that South Florida news outlets are not covering the rise of sea levels, even though they pose an existential threat to Miami and its environs. Partly as a result of the news silence, “civic and economic leaders in South Florida aren’t talking about what’s ahead for us.” In response, Florida International University journalism students are building Eyes on the Rise to fill this important news gap. Working, in part, with local high school students, the FIU journalism students are collecting their own hydrological data with remote sensors, producing original reporting, raising awareness, and engaging public audiences. This project is a promising approach to educating the college students, and it turns the journalism program into a local news asset–much as medical schools provide health care through teaching hospitals. It thus falls at the intersection of citizen science (and Civic Science), experiential civic education/service-learning at both the college and high school levels, public journalism, media reform, and civic environmentalism.

This, by the way, is one of a dozen projects being funded by the Online News Association that my colleagues and I are currently evaluating. Stay tuned.

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