(Washington, DC) In 2016, I began a blog post:

The Oberlin College Cultural Appropriation Controversy is almost certainly getting more attention than it deserves because it reinforces critiques of political correctness in higher education. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting case to consider the general questions: What is cultural appropriation, and when is it bad?

Some Oberlin students criticized Oberlin’s dining hall’s bánh mì and General Tso’s chicken as cultural appropriations. …

I tried to offer a nuanced response to the general topic of cultural appropriation. Although I see some legitimacy in some critiques of appropriation, I am worried about the stance that cultural products belong to ethno-cultural groups and cannot be borrowed. I find that view empirically untenable, because culture is always borrowed and shared. And I can think of unsavory examples–like Richard Wagner’s decrying classical music composed by European Jews, partly on the ground that music belonged to Germans and not Jews. I start with enthusiasm for a global cultural commons and opposition to all forms of “enclosure.”

However, we now know that I shouldn’t have been writing about the Oberlin episode at all. No Oberlin students organized to criticize the campus food on political grounds. Instead, the college newspaper asked some individuals their opinions of the college bánh mì and sushi. A majority of those interviewed thought these dishes were poor examples of their genres. The bánh mì was made with ciabatta, and the “chicken sushi” wasn’t sushi at all. It’s not clear that even the individuals who were quoted had political or ethical objections to the food. And even if they did, they were responding to a question. There was no student movement against cultural appropriation.

This story fit some people’s prior assumptions and went viral without being fact-checked. In this case, it was about allegedly spoiled PC students on a liberal campus, but we are all subject to being fooled by virally contagious anecdotes. This phenomenon can happen accidentally, but it can also be made to happen by people with nefarious motives. An example is the shadowy Twitter account that “posted a minute-long video showing the now-iconic confrontation between a Native American elder and the high school students.” This misleading video was carefully designed to play on the ideological priors of liberals.

Looking back at my post, I am relieved that I hedged my opening and I didn’t criticize any students. But I did file away the memory that Oberlin undergraduates had mobilized against the bánh mì, which did not happen. And my post, despite its caveats, played its small role in spreading that misperception. We all need to pay more attention to the reliability of the alleged facts that we use as opportunities for arguments.

See also: what is cultural appropriation?; notes on cultural appropriation after the royal wedding; when is cultural appropriation good or bad?; V.S. Naipaul’s view of culture; cultural mixing and power; a political defense of Hamilton; Maoist chic as Orientalism; and “a different Shakespeare from the one I love”

You can now get the recording and associated slides for the AAC&U webinar entitled “The Confounding Promise of Community: Why It Matters More Than Ever for Student Success.” I was a bit of an outlier because I talked about college students’ learning in social movements, taking as my text a 1961 article by Martin Luther King, Jr. on that topic. My comments were based on my article, “Another Time for Freedom? Lessons from the Civil Rights Era for Today’s Campuses.” For me, “community” meant social movements that may target institutions for change.

The excellent other presenters mainly discussed projects that are based in their colleges and engage the communities around them: Ventura County, CA, San Diego, Newark, NJ, and Queens, NY. I thought they demonstrated that their institutions are components (or even “anchors”) of those communities. So instead of saying that their students “go into” communities, we might conclude that their students belong to communities and learn beyond the classroom.

“The Confounding Promise of Community: Why It Matters More Than Ever for Student Success,” September 19, 2019; Online, 2:00-3:00 p.m. (ET)

In this webinar, I’ll be discussing my recent article in Liberal Education entitled, “Another Time for Freedom? Lessons from the Civil Rights Era for Today’s Campuses.” Other authors in the same special issue of Liberal Education will also share their work.

Webinar Registration
Cost: Free for AAC&U members; $99 for nonmembers
Check your institution’s membership status here. 

What is the role of community—as a concept, an outcome, and an entity—in a liberal education, and how can community contribute to student success? How do students experience community, on and off campus? This webinar will examine emerging definitions of community, ongoing efforts to create inclusive pathways for engagement, and ways community-based practices can advance inclusive excellence. From multiple institutional perspectives, presenters will explore how a collective understanding of community can shape a commitment to equity and student success.

All webinar registrants will be eligible for a 20% discount on copies of the new issue of Liberal Education, which fully explores the webinar topic. In this issue, authors—many of whom are webinar presenters—share research findings, commentary, and recommendations on the confounding promise of community. 

Moderator

Ashley Finley
Senior Advisor to the President and Vice President for Strategic Planning and Partnerships
AAC&U

Presenters

Geoffrey Buhl
Professor, Mathematics and General Education Chair
California State University Channel Islands

Leeva Chung
Professor, Communication Studies
University of San Diego

Marta Elena Esquilin
Associate Dean, Honors Living-Learning Community
Rutgers University-Newark

Jason Leggett
Assistant Professor of Politcal Science and Criminal Justice
Kingsborough Community College

Peter Levine
Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor for Citizenship & Public Affairs
Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life

For the sake of argument, let’s define “engaged scholarship” as …

The organized production of knowledge by groups that include some professional academic researchers and some people who are not academics and belong to the communities, populations, or organizations being studied.

I don’t have a representative sample of projects of engaged scholarship, but I would venture these generalizations:

1. Often the topics are issues that are priorities on the left or center-left, such as health disparities, access to government services, or environmental damage.
2. Often the communities that participate in the research lean left: low-income urban neighborhoods, migrant farmworkers, etc. (In 2004, I met with Penn State faculty interested in community-based research and observed that most did not work in their surrounding communities–conservative central Pennsylvania–but drove to Philadelphia to do their engaged research.)
3. Yet some of the underlying values of this approach can be seen as conservative: a preference for the local and the nonprofit/voluntary sector over Big Government, deep appreciation for local traditions, and a tendency to do something directly about problems rather than trying to win elections to change laws. I’ve even argued that the most authentically Burkean conservative field in the US today is the field that connects universities with communities through service, community-based research, and other partnerships.

Especially given the third point, you’d expect to see conservative engaged scholarship. The academic researchers might vote Republican instead of Democratic or Green, they would work in and with communities that preferred Trump over Clinton, and they would study issues like taxes, regulation, zoning, and abortion (as problems).

But I am hard pressed to find any examples. There are cases in which conservative adolescents conduct research on issues of their choice and scholars support them. But in those cases, the scholars’ focus is usually on the kids and their learning, not the issue that the students have chosen to address.

Why the dearth of conservative engaged scholarship? I can imagine five answers:

1. It’s not missing; I just haven’t found it. Here is one program at Ashland University that might qualify, and maybe there are more.
2. Conservatives are simply scarce in the social sciences and relevant humanities (especially in fields like public health and education, in which applied work is most common), and this scarcity explains why not many conservatives do engaged scholarship.
3. Conservatives have found other rich veins to mine: quantitative economic modeling, Austrian School economics (which is not at all quantitative but is favorable to libertarian principles), constitutional law, and some domains of intellectual history. They’re busy there.
4. Despite not liking government as much as (some) liberals do, conservatives are more aware of its power, including at the local level. Therefore, they are skeptical that working with a local nonprofit on a research study will make nearly as much difference as, say, running for office or advocating ideas that win elections.
5. Principled conservatives haven’t yet figured out that they should embrace engaged scholarship. They should develop experience and exemplary cases that strengthen conservative voices in engaged scholarship.

I hope that the last point is true, because it would be good for the gatherings and networks of engaged scholars if they included more conservative concerns, populations, and thinkers.

See also: America’s authentic conservative movement; the left has become Burkean; ideology in academia and elsewhere; trying to keep myself honest; scholarship on engaged scholarship; engaged political science; loyalty in intellectual work; the state humanities councils, connecting the public to scholarship;

(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.

See also: pay attention to movements, not just activists and events; the value of diversity and discussion within social movements; social movements of the sixties, seventies, and today; a sketch of a theory of social movements

Xiang Zhou has published “Equalization or Selection? Reassessing the ‘Meritocratic Power’ of a College Degree in Intergenerational Income Mobility” in the American Sociological Review–also available here. Like all multivariate statistical models, it’s subject to criticism and should be replicated using other datasets and specifications. But it’s certainly interesting and very well presented.

For background, here is Raj Chetty’s graph from a different source, showing the relationship between Americans’ family incomes when they were growing up and their incomes as adults, both expressed as percentiles.

If it showed a straight line from 0,0 to 100,100 with a slope of one, that would imply a perfect correlation between generations. It would imply zero mobility, although it would be consistent with some random movement up and down the income ladder that would be concealed by displaying averages. Instead, we see a basically straight line from 0,30 to 100,70 with a slope of about .4. People at the very bottom do tend to rise a bunch of ranks (if they survive to adulthood), and people at the very top do average below where their parents were. In short, there is a strong correlation across generations with some reversion to the mean.

The graphs in Zhou’s article use a similar format but they show the data for young US adults depending on whether they graduated from college or not. Graduates are shown in blue, non-graduates in red.

In this first pair, the graphs show the raw data and then the same data reweighted for a bunch of variables that were measured while the subjects were still in high school: their “gender, race, Hispanic status, mother’s years of schooling, father’s presence, number of siblings, urban residence, educational expectation, the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) percentile score.”

It’s clear that you should go to college. A person whose parents were at the 25th income percentile ends up at the 30th percentile if she doesn’t graduate from college, and above the 60th if she does. But the slope is flatter for college students than non-college students without reweighting; and the lines are closer together and parallel when reweighted.

Zhou interprets this pattern to mean that people who are able to attend college (due to financial resources, a high school diploma, motivation, etc.) end up better off than those who are not able to attend, but college itself adds no noticeable benefit. To put it another way, if we used public policy to move everyone to the blue line by making them all college graduates, the slope of the blue line would remain fairly flat and it would cross the y-axis at a lower point, because it’s impossible that everyone in a society should rise to a higher income percentile than their parents.

Here are the same patterns when Zhou distinguishes between selective and non-selective colleges. The slope for the non-selective colleges is steeper (which could imply that they are better at mobility), but the difference between the selective and non-selective colleges is not statistically significant after reweighting.

If Zhou is right, universal college would not improve economic mobility at all. The line would be fairly flat and lower than the current line for college grads. The economic advantages of college are due to stratification, not the experience of being in college.

See also: to what extent can colleges promote upward mobility?; sorting out human welfare, equity and mobility; social capital and economic mobility

Cases for Culture is an initiative that explores “a Hybrid Genre of Scholarship between STEM and the Humanities.” One of the cases on its website is an interdisciplinary study that I am part of. We are investigating the impact of a new arts center on Boston’s Chinatown, with a focus on whether it combats the negative consequences of gentrification. Our team encompasses humanists from Drama & Dance and social scientists from Public Health and Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, with me (a philosopher morphed into some kind of social scientist) as the PI.

The question for this post is: What do the humanities contribute? What can they offer that is not available from the social and behavioral sciences? I’d suggest:

1. Answers to the question: What is this thing? What should we call this human-made practice, artifact, or phenomenon? What adjectives may we apply to it?
2. Is it good? “Good” here is a shorthand for other value-laden concepts, such as “authentic,” “equitable,” “beautiful,” “liberatory,” and many more.

In our study of the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown, I take these to be social science questions: Who attends arts events? Why? What happens to them as a result? What are the broader consequences? How and why is the Center supported?

But I take these to be humanities questions: What are the performances that people see at Pao? For instance, is a given performance rightly named a “classical Chinese opera”? If so, what does that mean? What are its origins and boundaries and how has it varied? Or: what is the building in which Pao is situated? Is it a “modern” high-rise? A work of “Western” architecture? And can we call a specific classical Chinese opera performed in a specific way in a particular 21st-century high-rise in Boston’s Chinatown “authentic,” “traditional,” “innovative,” “appropriated,” “self-conscious,” “popular,” “elitist,” or “subversive”?

To address those questions, one must interpret the cultural product itself. Putting the interpretation together with social scientific findings about causation creates a powerful hybrid. Only through this combination can one say whether it is desirableto introduce a certain genre or style of culture into this social context.

Some caveats:

First, the disciplines are not as sharply distinguishable as I have implied. Any person can contribute to inquiries within any discipline (if given appropriate support and a willingness to learn). And each discipline is continuous with everyday human cognition. Even astrophysics is a distant extension of our ordinary interactions with physical objects and our naked-eye stargazing. Still, disciplines extend our everyday cognition in impressive ways. Like other forms of specialization, they enable greater sophistication. The humanities dramatically extend our everyday capacity for interpreting the deliberate creations of other human beings.

Second, in claiming that the humanities address the question “What is this?” I do not imply that a given artifact has an essence. The Pao Arts Center, for example, is an assemblage of very diverse performances, each performed by many people who have diverse intentions, for notably heterogeneous audiences in a complex space that evolves over time. So any responsible answer to the question, “What is the Pao Arts Center?” must be long and complicated. It’s an essay question, not multiple-choice. But that simply reinforces the importance of the question. A cultural product is not like a chemical compound that has predictable effects in a body. Complex as chemistry may be, culture is much more so.

Third, I don’t mean that humanists monopolize normative (moral, ethical, political, and aesthetic) judgment. All human beings have rights to make their own judgments; claiming expertise about the right and the good is problematic. Still, the humanities tend to pose relatively subtle questions that have normative implications–not “Was that a good show?” but rather “Was that a traditional rendition of the opera?” “In what ways was it innovative?” Expertise is useful for these questions. Also, the humanities demand reasons for normative claims. In a peer-reviewed article, you don’t just assert that a work of art was (for example) “appropriated.” You argue for that thesis. Thus the humanities represent the everyday practice of deliberation–giving reasons for value-laden interpretations–made more sophisticated by specialization.

See also what are the humanities? (basic points for non-humanists); an empirical study of the humanities; can the arts mitigate the harms of gentrification? A project in Boston’s Chinatown; the Tisch Program in Public Humanities; and how to tell if you’re doing good