new opening: Service Year Program Administrator at Tisch College

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Peter

This is a one-year limited-term position.

There are currently about 67,000 annual positions for young Americans who choose to conduct service for a whole year. These positions are supported by national programs like AmeriCorps (such as Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, YouthBuild, and City Year), Peace Corps, and the Commonwealth Corps in Massachusetts, and by many other organizations, including Tufts University’s 1+4 Bridge Year program, which offers credit and financial aid for a year of service before Tufts. Americans serve at many ages (from pre-college to retirement) and in many settings, from their own communities to countries around the world.

The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life seeks to hire an administrator to expand the prevalence and visibility of service years in Massachusetts. Service Year Alliance and Tisch College are partnering to support this role. The Administrator will also be expected to collaborate with stakeholders in Massachusetts, particularly the Massachusetts Service Alliance. The Administrator will be expected to consult closely with Service Year Alliance and the Massachusetts Service Alliance and to engage other stakeholders across the Commonwealth. Sectors that the organizer may engage include k-12 education, higher education, local and state governments, nonprofits, and private sector employers. The administrator will assess opportunities to sustain and build in based work in East Boston and/or other geographical communities in Massachusetts. Provides specialized, subject matter knowledge to develop, implement, review and evaluate a university Program or Project in collaboration with Manager or Director. May participate in development of goals and strategies; creates data management and filing systems; develops, analyzes and monitors budgets, grants and contracts; and participates in development and implements marketing and advertising efforts including writing content for website and social media material. May design and represent program externally at conferences, meetings and events.

Basic Requirements:

1-3 years of service experience.
Experience with organizing and network-building.
Knowledge, skills and experience typically acquired through the attainment of a bachelor’s degree and 3 years of experience.
Skills for conducting reliable and independent research.
Excellent communications skills.
Ability to work independently and to collaborate well with diverse stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

Knowledge of or experience in subject matter preferred.
Personal experience with a service year.
Understanding of the service sector nationally.
Understanding the nonprofit sector in Massachusetts Master’s degree in related discipline and 3+ years of experience in related field of study.
Experience ensuring compliance of web page content with W3C and Section 508 (ADA) accessibility standards preferred. Ongoing training will be provided to help keep up with current trends and requirements.

An employee in this position must complete all appropriate background checks at the time of hire, promotion, or transfer.

Equal Opportunity Employer – minority/females/veterans/disability/sexual orientation/gender identity.

Apply here.

opportunities in Civic Science

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Peter

At Tisch College, we are working with many colleagues and peers to help build a field that we call Civic Science. Key players here are our senior fellow for Civic Science, Jonathan Garlick, and our postdoctoral fellow in Civic Science (whom we share with the Kettering Foundation), Samantha Fried.

One of our collaborators in the work is the Rita Allen Foundation, which sends this exciting announcement:

We are excited to announce a new Civic Science Fellowship opening. This Fellow will work for 12 months to advance emerging collaborative work among a group of funders with shared interest in advancing meaningful, inclusive engagement between science and society—including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, and the Rita Allen Foundation. The Fellow will work with each partner foundation, with multidisciplinary fields of research and engagement practice, and with communities underserved by existing science communication efforts to ensure that their goals, objectives, and efforts inform the path forward for the funders’ collaborative efforts. The Fellow will be part of the pilot cohort of Civic Science Fellows—promising leaders from diverse backgrounds who will be embedded in key supportive networks and will work on multidisciplinary projects that connect civic science research, effective engagement practice, scientists, and communities.
The full position description can be found here: http://ritaallen.org/stories/funder-civic-science-fellow/

memory politics

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Peter

I’ve been in Madrid, Munich, and Berlin for a few days of vacation with family, plus the meetings with scholars from Spanish-speaking countries and scholars and activists from the former Soviet bloc that are described in “Civic Studies Goes Global” (July 17). In all, I had conversations with roughly one hundred people, if you include the high school students whom I taught in their school outside of Madrid, a firm of Spanish anarchist architects, grad students from countries like Belarus and Georgia, and even the well-informed guide who led our walking tour of Berlin’s Mitte. We also learned a lot from museum displays in places like the German Historical Museum, and I’m deep into David Blackbourn’s History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century.

Memory politics (how political actors influence what nations or other groups remember) is important everywhere and often generates current divisions. That is true in the United States, where questions of American exceptionalism versus the original sin of white supremacy are at the forefront right now. A leading question is how we should remember our past–not just what we should do next. Similar questions arise in the former Soviet bloc, in Latin America, and practically everywhere I can think of.

Germany does a good job with its memory politics today. The Federal Republic has made an acknowledgement of its Nazi past central to its civic culture–but you can see how that stance evolved, sometimes painfully, in the post-War era. In the library of an agricultural institution, I read a proclamation issued in 1945 on behalf of Bavarian farmers. It denounces the tyranny and war they have just experienced. The farmers express sympathy for the murdered, including an explicit mention of the death camps. But they add that it is “particularly” cruel that the tyranny conscripted Bavarian agricultural workers, since a farmer has Christian love for the land and other people. I admit that my first reaction was that these farmers were probably part of Hitler’s electoral base in 1932. That turns out not to be true–he did much better with Protestant rural voters and lost Bavaria (narrowly) to the Catholic Centre Party in the last free election of Weimar. Still, this document seems like only the first halting step toward an appropriate view of the past.

A fine example of current memory politics–German, but one could imagine similar efforts in other countries–is the exhibition “Beyond Compare: Art from Africa in the Bode-Museum.” Bronzes and other sculptural works from Africa are paired with European sculptures selected from this extraordinary collection. The labels invite us to ask why some things have been categorized as ethnographic objects and others as works of art; how to think about artists whose names are famous or who are anonymous; how aesthetics, faith, and functionality interrelate; how various cultures represent power, gender, and otherness; how these objects found their way to a museum on the Spree; and how sculptures from Europe and Africa have been cleaned and displayed (in this case, the parallels are more evident than the differences), among other questions.

As a whole, the Bode-Museum displays primarily Christian religious objects in a building that recalls a grand renaissance basilica, but its religion is High Culture or Geistesgeschichte, not Catholicism. Its contents are not of local provenance, nor looted from other countries, but purchased on the international market–albeit often as a result of someone else’s looting. And many of the objects are themselves efforts at memory politics, like this 19th-century figure of an ancestor from Hemba in the DRC.

trying to keep myself honest

Posted on July 12, 2019 by Peter

(Madrid) This summer–which is not over yet–has already been full of rich and challenging discussions for which I am grateful.

In June, I spent several days discussing some lesser-known works of Friedrich Hayek with a group of mostly classical liberals/libertarians.

In late June and early July, more than 160 experienced scholars, practitioners, and activists from many countries visited Tisch College for a series of linked events: the American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research, a convening of city staff from 15 Cities of Service, a gathering of Bridge Alliance members, the eleventh annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies, Lead for America’s summer institute, and the Frontiers of Democracy Conference. These people certainly held diverse ideological views, but a strong voice came from participants whom I would associate with intersectional movement politics–people who favor bottom-up, extra-institutional movements to confront white supremacy, patriarchy, and related “-isms.”

And now I am in Madrid for the Ibero-American Meeting on Civic Studies. I am very much enjoying my academic colleagues from Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela who hold diverse views. While here, I have also visited a traditionally “red” working class Madrid neighborhood and met with radical Spanish architects and have heard a senator from the PSOE (socialist) party lecture. They have given me a dose of European social democratic politics. In contrast to intersectional movement politics, this is largely about building mass institutions (unions and parties) for “the people,” understood as singular.

I remain basically an American center-leftist. Barack Obama is my favorite president and have sent a little money to Kamala Harris. But since I fear intellectual complacency and clichés, I am always grateful to have my presumptions challenged. Libertarianism, intersectional movement politics, and social democracy feel like a triangle of ideas that keep me (somewhat) honest from three directions.

I think I hear the classical liberals saying, “Society is too complex to be modeled, let alone regulated or planned, because it is a function of countless individual choices, and the millions of agents can react to any effort to constrain or guide them by changing their behavior. Opportunity costs are ubiquitous and especially difficult to measure. Talk of ‘social justice’ arrogantly replaces what individuals want in their own circumstances with a specific theory of what they should want and implies that someone has the right to enforce that. Instead, policy should be maximally general, durable, and predictable so that individuals can form and implement their own plans in their contexts.”

I think I hear intersectional activists saying, “People are dying as a result of racism and transphobia and sexual violence. That is because other people hold deeply seated world-views that categorize their fellow human beings into hierarchies and create boundaries. These world-views are fundamental causes of injustice and must be challenged. There is no substitute for the people at the top of the hierarchies [people like me] acknowledging their advantages and changing their own lives accordingly.”

And I think I hear the social democrats say, “When large numbers of ordinary people have organized themselves into unions, parties, and social movements, they have countered corporate capital and negotiated mixed economies that have generated equity and security along with prosperity. But such organizations require substantial discipline (constraining individual choice) and broad identities, such as ‘worker’ or ‘citizen.'”

reclaiming our kids’ walk to school

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Peter

(Madrid) In June, I was with an international group, and we were lamenting that no one from any of our respective countries seems very comfortable allowing their children to walk alone to school. We all walked to school when we were kids, even though the crime rate–at least in the US–was much higher then. It seems as if parents raised in the mid-1900s let their late-1900s children walk around dangerous cities, but we are too nervous to let our early-2000s offspring do the same.

Now I am in the very dynamic and impressive MediaLab Prado, a “citizen laboratory that functions as a meeting place for the production of open cultural projects.” And I have just encountered Camino Escola Seguro, A Safe Path to School. In part, it involves knitted safety notices that assure families that local shopkeepers and residents are keeping their eyes on the streets and making them safe for children to walk to school.

I’m not saying this would work everywhere. Maybe it won’t work at all. But I love the spirit of people reclaiming the common resource of a safe walk to school.

What is the appropriate role for higher education at a time of social activism?

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Peter

(Posted in Madrid) In the current issue (and available free online) is my article entitled, “Another Time for Freedom? Lessons from the Civil Rights Era for Today’s Campuses,” Liberal Education, Winter 2019, Vol. 105, No. 1.

This is the first of several pending articles in which I explore the interactions between social movements and institutions. My motive is to encourage people who sit in institutional settings to pay attention not only to activists who make demands but also to the movements to which these activists belong. In order to relate appropriately to a given movement, it’s important to assess whether it has robust internal discussions, whether it is a space for learning, how it develops leaders, what norms it enforces on its members, and other such characteristics. Interpreting a movement is valuable whether you want to be a good ally, merely treat the movement fairly, or actively counter it because you oppose its influence.

In this piece, I use as a hook a fascinating New York Times op-ed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he described the movement that had engulfed Historically Black Colleges and Universities by 1961. A sample passage from my article:

In the model of civic action that King describes, college students plug into national social movements that have leaders and organizations outside higher education. The students’ involvement is youth-driven: students recruit other students to participate. …
Like most participants in social movements, the students King describes in the Times essay have transformational goals. They do not aim to modify the policies and practices of existing institutions—such as their own colleges—but to rebuild or reconstitute the whole society. Student activists, King writes, are “seeking to save the soul of America. . . . One day historians will record this student movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage.” Today, movements like Black Lives Matter and climate activism do not merely advocate specific policies but attempt to fundamentally transform society, from white supremacy to racial equity, or from carbon-dependence to global sustainability.
By contrast, colleges and universities—including the HBCUs of 1961—are institutions. As such, they are inevitably led by people who have extensive experience, who must therefore be older. Institutions can encourage youth voice and can change as a result of social movements. For instance, a range of curricular and policy reforms that promote greater racial equity and diversity can be traced back to the civil rights movement. But institutions will predictably resist more radical transformations. They are not movements; they are targets of movements.
The tension between movements and institutions is inevitable, but higher education has a particular commitment to ideological pluralism and debate. Although pure neutrality is impossible and a misleading ideal, colleges and universities must demonstrate a reasonable degree of impartiality about the contested issues of the day. As academic institutions, they value reflection and “organized skepticism.”¹¹
When today’s colleges and universities go beyond classroom teaching to offer experiential civic education, a typical model involves supporting students to choose and define their own issues and to develop and implement plans of action—not signing them up for specific social movements that will demand sacrifice. Often, an institution’s recruitment takes the form of a general invitation to civic engagement, civic learning, or dialogue, not a call to join a movement.

how to improve the civil society of a school

Posted on July 8, 2019 by Peter

Students learn to be citizens by joining, forming, leading, and influencing extracurricular groups in their own schools. A school’s whole array of groups is its “civil society.” The number, diversity, reach, purpose, vitality, and interconnection of these groups is important for youth development, generally, and for civic education, in particular.

Discussing this topic with teachers this morning, I received an excellent question. How should we encourage all students to participate? What should we do about the fact that 9th-graders sign up for many groups but membership trails off fast? How about the students who are too busy because they work? And what about the kid who wears headphones all day and just doesn’t want to connect?

I think I began my reply with two caveats. First, I don’t know how to motivate teenagers nearly as well as teachers do. And second, some kids really may face serious barriers to membership, no matter how hard you try to include them.

That said, the challenges of a school’s civil society are like those of any civil society. Like teenagers, adults exhibit different degrees of commitment. They drop out when they lose interest or as a response to disagreements. Many free-ride, staying in a group to get its benefits without doing a fair share of the work. Some work extra hard and well but aren’t noticed.

Addressing these problems constitutes Alexis de Tocqueville’s “art and science of association.” It’s never easy but there are good practices. Impose regular penalties for non-contribution but make initial penalties very light so that they are actually enforced and violators can recover easily from being penalized. Keep a clear and public list of who belongs and who doesn’t and clarify what constitutes membership versus exit. Rotate responsibilities. Incorporate low-cost methods of monitoring compliance, such as sign-in sheets. Implement efficient mechanisms for conflict-resolution. (For these principles, see, among other sources: Ostrom, Elinor. “Design principles and threats to sustainable organizations that manage commons.” Santiago, Chile, March. 1999.)

Learning these practices is a core task of civic education. We traditionally learn them only from experience, but it is possible to learn some of them from texts and discussion. Students who learn to lead groups are better placed than any adults to actually generate viable groups in their own schools. Thus I would recommend teaching strategies for recruitment and group-management explicitly, and then encouraging student leaders to be primarily responsible for the vitality of their own civil society.

the ethics of playing hardball with the federal budget

Posted on July 1, 2019 by Peter

Congress must pass appropriation bills by late September and must raise the debt limit by about Oct. 1 to allow the government to pay its bills. Failure to do either will have substantial economic impact. Neglecting to raise the debt limit could be catastrophic, since the federal government has never defaulted before.

A solution could either be a real agreement or a mere patch–a bill that continues current spending levels for a few months and raises the debt limit enough to get us to the next short-term deal.

Since the economy seems fragile, and federal (and state) elections are a mere 16 months away, the political stakes are high. In fact, I think the negotiation over the budget and debt limit is the most important political story of the present moment.

Conventional wisdom holds that an incumbent president has more to lose from a sudden recession than members of Congress do. Thus Donald Trump is probably most at risk if there is no deal. Although most Americans disapprove of his economic policies, I still think his popularity would fall further if we entered a recession.

For their part, the Democrats must decide how hard to bargain. That is an ethically complex question, and it confronts not one actor (an imaginary, monolithic party) but many Democratic members of Congress who have disparate values and interests.

Democrats have good ethical reasons to play hardball. They have policy goals (spending, immigration, climate) that they can advance by forcing Trump to swallow compromises. By pushing hard, they risk a government shutdown or a default, but the moral responsibility for a crisis would be shared. Whatever happens, we are headed for a recession at some point, and the country may be better off if it comes in time to unseat Trump rather than late enough that we must weather the downturn during his second term.

On the other hand, Democrats shouldn’t intentionally drive Trump into an impasse because they are happy to hasten a recession. To see that that is wrong, apply Immanuel Kant’s test of publicity. It is unethical to do something unless you can admit you are doing it. That is especially true of political leaders in a republic, because it is definitive of republics that everyone must explain their actions to everyone else. I don’t think the Democrats could face the electorate saying that they had intentionally driven the economy into recession.

But there is a fine line between: (a) driving a hard bargain for good causes while not worrying overly about the collateral risk to the economy and (b) actively pushing a breakdown in order to cause a recession and win the next election. I would drive right up to the edge of (b) but not over that line.

A subtler question is what to do about raising the domestic discretionary spending limits. Democrats believe that raising these caps will truly help people. However, increasing spending without raising taxes is a fiscal stimulus. As such, it has some potential to forestall a recession. Thus raising the domestic spending limit is win/win for Trump and the congressional Democrats (although an ideological loss for congressional Republicans). The problem is that a win/win deal could get Trump re-elected. I think I would bargain hard on immigration and climate regulation and give way on domestic spending for this year.

the First Ibero-American Meeting of Civic Studies

Posted on June 27, 2019 by Peter

This week is the 11th annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts’ Tisch College, and we are discussing such topics as identities versus interests and opinions and Gandhi versus Jinnah on means and ends. (The links are to my personal ruminations, but in the seminar, we discuss original texts.)

Coming up soon is the First Ibero-American Meeting of Civic Studies, which two of my friends explain in the video:

According to my translation from the website:

Improving a society requires the commitment of its citizens. Based on this conviction, the Camilo José Cela University Foundation presents the First Ibero-American Conference on Civic Studies, following the trail of the pioneering institution of this academic discipline, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life of Tufts University (USA).

The objective is to create a theoretical and methodological framework to promote active citizenship. Civic Studies tries to answer the question “what should we do?” Combining ethical reflection (what is good and right?), analysis of the facts (“what is happening”?) and strategies (” What could work? “). Based on this eminently practical call, Civic Studies tries to make civic education in colleges and universities have a transformational purpose.

The First Ibero-American Meeting of Civic Studies is an initiative of the Camilo José Cela University Foundation. It aims to promote this understanding of civic education in the Ibero-American context. Despite the social and cultural diversity of the countries convened [Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain], the UCJC Foundation believes that the development of this academic discipline can serve to cultivate active citizenship that contributes to the creation of more stable and just societies.
In this first edition, the theme of the meeting will be “The university as generator of citizenship.” We believe in a conception of the university in which both learning and research in any discipline is marked by the civic commitment of its environment. The meeting will involve a week of work between academics and experts with experience in citizenship training: through discussion and deliberation formats, attendees will work from a daily challenge posed by a guest expert, and exchange their own experiences when implementing civic education.”

what the student debt proposals convey

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Peter

Elizabeth Warren proposes to pay off $50,000 of college debt for everyone with household income under $100,000. Bernie Sanders proposes to pay off all $1.5 trillion of today’s student debt. They also offer proposals for making college more affordable later.

I am worried that both of these proposals–especially Sanders’–convey the message that Democrats and liberals represent high-status people who hold and value formal education. The reality is close to that: Democratic voters in 2018 were a coalition of whites with lots of education plus people of color from across the educational spectrum.

Directing financial support to higher education–and specifically retiring the debt of people who have already accumulated college debt–is an indication of the candidates’ priorities. I fear they will alienate people who don’t have or necessarily want advanced formal education. One of the major political cleavages of our age (also seen in Europe) divides knowledge-workers from people who work with their hands. The risk here is placing liberals and Democrats firmly on the knowledge-workers’ side. Or, as Antonio Gramsci would say, the “organic ideology” of a governing class dominated by the intelligentsia will favor spending money on education above almost anything else.

I do understand the following arguments. Education should be understood as a public good, not just an investment in the income prospects of the individual student. We already treat k-12 education as a public good and an entitlement. Since college now confers the same advantage that high school did half a century ago, it should be treated the same.

Furthermore, programs without means tests tend to be protected and reasonably well funded, whereas programs for the poor tend to be poor programs. Examples of successful universal programs include Social Security and Medicare here and most of the European welfare state.

Finally, even when a program covers wealthy people, federal income taxes (as opposed to other taxes) are collected in a pretty progressive way, so most of the cost falls on the wealthy.

On the other hand, as Jordan Weissman notes, one-time debt cancellation is not an entitlement or a program built for sustainability. Moreover, Sanders’ plan involves truly regressive spending. Families earning $173k or more hold an average debt of nearly $50k, which the federal government would hand them as tax-free income under his plan.

You could counter that families in the bottom quartile–who have real need–hold an average of $26k in college debt, usually more than their whole annual household income, and forgiveness would make the most difference to them. But it would also cost $1.5 trillion that could be spent on other things. And yes, even if the President of the United States calls himself a socialist, he’ll have limited resources and will have to choose. For instance, that’s $1.5 trillion that could have been added to a Green New Deal.

These proposals have a communicative goal. They convey that education is a public good and that we should all benefit from government support. The proposals are very unlikely to pass as written, and if they fail, they will prove to be mainly symbolic. Even if they pass, they will still have symbolic elements. For instance, the message that they cover everyone is meant to change opinions about government.

So I worry about what these ideas–especially Sanders’–actually convey. Democrats, especially White Democrats, have typically benefited from formal education and value it in everything they say and do. They admire science, professionals, credentials. If a Democratic president and Congress spend $1.5 trillion to subsidize higher education for people like themselves, that will cement the party’s class position.

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