I’m back from a meeting of people who practice and advocate mixed-methods research (research that integrates quantitative and qualitative data). They have identified barriers or biases against such work. Editors and reviewers tend to be either quantitative or qualitative experts, journals impose tight word limits that are frustrating if you want to describe two complementary methods, and so on.

A more general question is how any type of scholarship gains legitimacy. I have observed several efforts to legitimize new methods, such as Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participant Action Research (PAR), as well as defenses of older methods that are being squeezed out, such as philosophical argumentation within the discipline of political science.

It is worth considering what gives scholarly methods legitimacy in the first place. I would offer a roughly Weberian theory. For Weber, “modernity” means secularization and specialization. Under those two conditions:

1. It pays to demonstrate a specialized skill or capacity, because desirable social roles are now doled out to specialists—not (or at least not officially) to people who have social rank and pedigree.
2. Specialists not only receive, but they also need, tools and methods that require scarce resources. A particle physicist needs a supercollider, to name an extreme example. If you can’t get access to the necessary instruments, you can’t practice the trade.
3. The society as a whole lacks confident, consensus beliefs about ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics (the classic four pillars of philosophy). But you can’t talk or think very well without having beliefs about those matters, and it’s difficult to justify them satisfactorily to people who disagree. Therefore, we make routine progress within smaller communities that share beliefs or that may even be defined by their shared beliefs.

You can see the result of these conditions in the development of academic fields. For instance, classicists used to be numerous and influential in universities. They possessed specialized skills: fluency in Greek and Latin and the experience of having already read all the major ancient classics at least once. These texts were widely believed to be better (ethically and aesthetically) than most or all of what had been written since. However, whole categories of people could not read them; for instance, very few women were taught Greek or Latin. They certainly couldn’t see the rare ancient manuscripts needed for the philological work of establishing authentic texts. Thus, being a classicist was rewarded with status and with scare resources, such as access to teaching jobs and libraries.

As the Greco-Roman classics receded in importance and lost their privileged place in the culture, people began to want to study modern literature. But virtually everyone in a country like England could read works in English. How then could English literature professors justify their special social role? One step was to develop a canon of difficult works that could claim to be as valuable as the ancient classics were. Having read Shakespeare and Milton set you apart a bit. Another step was to introduce philology and epigraphy to the study of modern texts. (That also required direct access to manuscripts and rare printed volumes). And a third step was to develop specialized and non-intuitive ways of reading, such as by applying theoretical frameworks.

Already in the eighteenth century, the editors of The Literary Magazine could claim legitimacy on the basis of specialization: “a selection has been made of men qualified for the different parts of the work, and each has the employment assigned him, which he is supposed most able to discharge” (quoted in Kramnick 2002).

At that time, there was still considerable consensus about values. In modernity, however, ethical, metaphysical, epistemological, and aesthetic values are seen as controversial and perhaps culturally relative. Fortunately, you needn’t justify a given philosophical premise in order to write an ordinary work of literary criticism today; you can just cite a major theorist who has been deemed legitimate within the scholarly community. Names of theorists become tokens that justify premises, much as scripture might justify spiritual assumptions within a traditional religion.

This is a purely external, sociological explanation of the development of modern literary criticism. I believe that the discipline yields valuable insights, so I welcome its development. Indeed, if literary criticism produced little public value, it might collapse. Specialized occupations need public support in the long run. Still, a Weberian perspective allows us to identify specialization and a reliance on canonical theorists as two responses to modernity, irrespective of whether the resulting scholarship is any good.

Most disciplines have used these means to capture scarce positions that bring status and resources.

• Many natural and some social sciences use advanced mathematical techniques, which are difficult to learn. Physics and economics enjoy relative prestige in part because they use harder math than kindred disciplines do.
• Many natural scientists need expensive instruments.
• Ethnographers seem at first to be doing what anyone can do—observing human beings in their settings. But if you have done fieldwork in an isolated village in the global South, you have bona fides to be an ethnographer instead of a layperson.
• Quantitative social science requires not only math skills but also large-n data, which is expensive to collect.
• Qualitative researchers who achieve inter-rater reliability among numerous observers have the budgets and institutional support to hire and train those observers.
• Some humanistic research requires access to rare objects.
• Some practitioners of CPBR and PAR have social capital and cultural fluency in both academia and in highly disadvantaged communities. Their ability to code-switch sets them apart.

Within these communities, certain philosophical premises are typically shared. For instance, in most of the social sciences (both qualitative and quantitative), a moral value is something that a person or group holds and that has causes and consequences. It is not something that can be shown to be right or wrong, better or worse. However, a belief about the divine is incompatible with science and thus (implicitly) false. Among theologians, obviously, both of those assumptions are widely rejected. You have to be a kind of moral relativist to speak the language of social science, but that is a minority position in philosophy and theology.

Under such conditions, an approach like mixed-methods research struggles for legitimacy. Perhaps integrating quantitative and qualitative data would yield the most reliable findings under a range of common circumstances. However, the Weberian logic of modernity encourages some researchers to maximize their specialization in math, others to maximize their specialization in ethnography; and mixed methods fall uncomfortably in between.

One solution is a Weberian judo move: as experts criticize your lack of expertise, use their momentum against them by defining what you do as a difficult new specialization. That was one tactic recommended in the conversation about mixed methods. I find it more interesting to think about ways to combat the harmful consequences of modernity in intellectual life so that we begin to assign legitimacy differently. Obviously, the ideal way would be to reward solutions to public (including cultural) problems, rather than academic methods for their own sake. But that is a hard shift to accomplish.

[Citing Jonathan Brody Kramnick, “Literary Criticism Among the Disciplines,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 35, Number 3, Spring 2002, pp. 343-360. See also the future of classics and why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics.]

(Los Angeles) Academics and scholars most commonly relate to institutions, movements, or fields of practice by assessing them. They identify the underlying theory or rationale of a given practical effort and assess its plausibility and its consistency with principles of justice. They also observe the actual performance of the practice to date and render judgments about success or failure.

Since my undergraduate days, I’ve instinctively adopted a different stance toward fields of practice. I’ve seen them basically as groups of people. I’ve never taken their theories completely seriously, because I expect them to evolve. And I’ve never seen the empirical data about success or failure so far as dispositive, because I assume that efforts will fail until they are refined and improved. You can start from many premises and get good results if you are open to reflection and change. The theory is less important than it seems.

Fields of practice are working communities of people who are either worth joining or not. What inclines me to want to join a group is a sense of its members’ motivations (in a very general sense) and their capacity or potential. Once I feel that I’m part of the group, I adopt a stance of loyalty. That doesn’t prevent me from making critical comments, either privately or publicly, if that seems helpful to the cause, but it does pose a question about any possible communication: is it helpful?

In this general mode, I’ve found myself part of the following fields or movements since my undergraduate days in the late 1980s:

• service-learning
• public deliberation and dialogue
• university/community partnerships
• campaign finance reform
• public or civic journalism
• k-12 civic education
• relational community organizing
• certain political campaigns
• Action Civics

Clearly, these efforts share some principles or norms. Of the enormous variety of projects and groups that are active around us, most wouldn’t appeal to me as much as these. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I tried to analyze and defend the norms underlying the fields that I most admire in generic terms. Still, I don’t go around looking for movements that match all these principles. Instead, I tend to join movements that seem appealing and then try to reflect on their emergent principles.

Relating to fields of practice in this way sometimes causes misunderstandings. I’ve noticed that sometimes people expect me to endorse the underlying “theory of change” of a given field very strongly and are disappointed when I won’t. I usually cannot say that a given strategy or premise is the best one available, because I don’t really believe that. Instead, I think that a field or movement turns into what people make of it. So I see myself as a member who wants to make the movement as good as it can be, not as an independent scholar who has judged the movement and found it superior to others.

See also:  loyalty to place in the age of jet-set academia; bringing loyalty back; Albert O. Hirschman on exit, voice, and loyalty; and “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies‘” (because I see Ostrom as having a similar stance).

(Cincinnati) At several critical points during the past century, college students have been at the vanguard of social change. Their agendas have not always been desirable; fascism, for example, had a student wing. But student activism is an important phenomenon. I think four frames of reference are most common for explaining it:

Age effects: Traditionally, most college students have been young. During young adulthood, individuals become aware of the social world but are still forming their identities and opinions. That gives them a certain critical detachment that is favorable to radical activism. They are also not overly burdened by experiences of political failure. Using that framework, we would expect younger adults consistently to be more active.

Generational effects: People who come of age during the same historical moment may form a shared and lasting identity as members of a given generation. The classic example (analyzed by Karl Mannheim in his seminal article) is the experience of being drafted into WWI. With this framework in mind, we might presume, for example, that German college students became highly active after 1965 because they shared the experience of growing up in prosperous homes with suppressed memories of the Nazi past. People born around the same time in contexts as different as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union might even share a common generational identity (e.g., as children of The Sixties) if some of their formative experiences were similar.

Historical effects: Major events can affect people differently depending on their social circumstances. For instance, when a war breaks out, only the young single men may be drafted. A budget crisis can cause the government to cut funds for higher education; then college students see their fees go up. With this framework in mind, we would expect college students to become activated soon after major events affect them specifically.

Class effects: College students come disproportionately from middle-class or wealthy homes. Thanks to college, they are destined for positions in the top half of the income distribution. We might then interpret college student activism as “bourgeois” activism and ask why the bourgeoisie is, or is not, activated at a given moment.

I would like to add a fifth type of explanation, derived from some thoughts in Offe (1985). College students may face specific material circumstances that encourage–or discourage–them from being politically active. These circumstances are variables that will influence students’ levels and forms of engagement even of we hold age, generation, class, and historical moment constant. In other words, these are consequences of how college is organized socially.

Offe argued that certain demographic groups predominated in the New Social Movements of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Second Wave feminism and environmentalism. Two especially active groups were “housewives” (his word) and college students. He proposed that both groups were exposed to explicit discipline that provoked them to criticize social norms. Married women faced explicit coercion from their husbands; students, from their universities and parents. Yet both enjoyed a degree of flexibility about how to employ their time. That meant that they were able to protest if they wanted to.

I think we can elaborate on these explanations. Typically, college students who attend large institutions along with many other full-time students experience the following material circumstances:

• A great deal of fluid social interaction, not limited to a nuclear family or work unit. That means that students can easily find and select into activist groups.
• A concentrated population of other youth, which attracts political actors looking for support. Politicians speak on campuses; they don’t go around to fast food franchises hoping to talk to all the service workers.
• Some useful non-cash assets for social-movement participation, such as flexible time, access to information and ideas, and connections to well-positioned adults.
• A significant level of protection for free speech, especially as compared to workers in for-profit enterprises (and often in state bureaucracies).
• Institutions designed for political discourse and communication, such as student newspapers and governments.
• Some encouragement, via the curriculum, to think critically.
• Some ability to choose courses of study and career pathways, which they can use as leverage over parents and universities. For instance, a student may be able to threaten to go into social work instead of accounting and then negotiate with tuition-paying parents. Threatening to drop out may also offer leverage.

If these factors matter, then we would expect the level of college student activism to vary when they change. For instance, if students lose their ability to choose courses of study because the job market is bad, they will have less leverage. If their freedom of speech is reduced, that will either suppress activism or serve as a form of explicit discipline that prompts them to revolt.

See also basic theories of civic development; the New Social Movements of the seventies, eighties, and today and to what extent can colleges promote upward mobility.  Reference: Offe, Claus, “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research, vol. 52, no. 1 (Winter 1985), pp. 817-68.

The Talloires Network Leaders Conference (TNLC) 2017 convenes 21-24 June 2017 at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico.

The conference will explore the theme, “Social Responsibility and Human Dignity in Higher Education Engagement.” Within this overarching theme, the conference will explore three sub-themes:

• The right to education and the responsibility to be socially inclusive and to promote quality education to all
• The right to leadership opportunities and economic mobility and the responsibility to create prosperous communities and societies
• The right to a livelihood and the responsibility to prepare people for employment and entrepreneurship, and to contribute to economic development

The Conference Program is available here.

Featured speakers include rectors and chancellors from several countries, a former US ambassador to Mexico, and cultural figures. Register here. Veracruz travel logistics here. Conference materials en Espanol.

Potential employers of young workers tend to value degrees (high school and college), courses, majors and grades, and previous jobs. Those are all experiences that a person completes, rather than direct evidence of one’s capacity to do a given task. In a tight market, employers can raise the bar, so that–for example–65% of new openings for executive assistants and executive secretaries now require a BA, even though only 19% of the people who now hold such jobs have college degrees. This is bad news for the two-thirds of young people who have not attained at least a bachelors degree. It’s also a potential loss for employers, who may be missing the people who would do the best work although they haven’t accumulated the most highly-valued experiences. One widely promoted solution–getting everyone through college–seems both unrealistic and needlessly expensive.

Why do employers use college degrees and other major experiences to select employees? I would propose these explanations:

1. Employers are actually looking for concrete skills, such as the ability to write a coherent memo or schedule a meeting. In the absence of direct measures of such skills, they use college completion as a rough proxy. That is unfortunate because it isn’t a precise measure, it can discriminate on the basis of social class, and it drives colleges and universities to advertise highly concrete skills as their outcomes even though that distorts their real educational mission.
2. Employers have a more general theory of “merit,” which may encompass broad literacy and numeracy, self-discipline, social skills, critical thinking, etc. Employers may feel, furthermore, that the competition to enter and then complete a selective college is a measure of such merit. They need not believe that merit is innate to use it as a selection criterion. Success in school could result from investments in the home, community, school, and college, and still be an indicator of value for an enterprise. The content of the education may be fairly unimportant to the employers; the point is that school/college is a difficult competition, and those who get through it are more likely to contribute to their enterprise. By the way, if this theory applies, then getting everyone through college would only raise the goalposts; employers would start looking for graduate degrees. The idea of general “merit,” however, is highly problematic–not only morally, but also because completing a fancy college may not show that you are well suited to a particular job. Once again, the most truly qualified candidates may be left aside, which is waste of human potential as well as an injustice.
3. Employers may value the goods that liberal education explicitly promises: genuinely critical thinking, reflection on the good life, sensitivity to culture, truth about nature and humankind, etc. This explanation may apply in a few workplaces, but I must say I am cynical about it. Most organizations have fixed ends or objectives and are really only interested in critical reflection about means (if they’re open to criticism at all). But the heart of a liberal education is critical reflection about ends: about the nature of a good life and a good society. Starting with Socrates, some have concluded that if you are seriously critical of ends, then you must be independent of institutions, although that might make you a poor employee in most organizations. In the classic text that first defined “the liberal arts,” Seneca wrote, “I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making.” To be sure, Seneca was a slave-owning aristocrat who had plenty of money to start with. One can find a compromise between the highest goals of a liberal education and the need to put food on the table. But the two objectives at least seem in tension.
4. A variant of the previous theory is that employers seek a certain kind of cultural capital that results from a liberal education. When they choose employees from colleges like the ones they attended, it’s not because they prefer radical thinkers. It’s because they want to work with people who know and appreciate the same body of culture. This variant of the theory requires less idealistic assumptions than #3, but I still doubt that it applies in most organizations (other than small white-collar enterprises).

To the extent that the first theory applies, it would make sense to measure a diversity of concrete skills, one at a time, and provide portable certificates for individuals who can demonstrate them. That would allow people who demonstrate a given skill to win relevant jobs even though they may not be on a path to college. It would allow employers to choose more appropriate workers, and perhaps with less invidious bias. It would allow colleges that actually teach specific skills to gain credit for doing so. It would make space for organizations like my own to certify concrete political and civic skills that might lead to jobs or leadership roles. At the same time, it would relieve colleges from having to sell their bachelors degrees as indicators of concrete skills. Instead, they could offer genuine liberal education.

I acknowledge the risk. If prospective students only care about jobs, or are forced by economic circumstances to put employment first, and if employers only care about concrete job skills, then organizations that teach and certify job skills could put the liberal arts (k-16) out of business. But I think that maybe the liberal arts would be better off claiming that they enhance the soul and the community, instead of living off an inefficiency in the labor market.

See also: Bourdieu in the college admissions office; games, digital badges, and alternative assessments in civics; the controversy over badges.