Category Archives: Citizens & Civil Society

What is the Primary Goal of Higher Education?

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What is the core purpose of higher education? To educate, perhaps, but education to what end?

Tisch College Dean Alan D. Solomont answered that question today in a new op-ed reflecting on the White House Summit on Civic Learning and National Service which, as I mentioned, my office recently hosted.

As his op-ed describes:

While the [1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy] stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education,” today, society asks colleges and universities to prepare individuals for jobs in a cost-effective and accessible way. That is an important mission in a global economy, but there is a striking gap between 1947 rhetoric and today’s more narrow focus on education for individual economic success.

To modern sensibilities perhaps the idea of “education for democracy” sounds quaint, or perhaps simply idealistic. We’re living in a rough-and-tumble global economy. We face a skills gap. A wage gap. We are desperately trying to adjust to rapidly shifting industries and we are painfully aware that at any moment jobs might go overseas.

Education for democracy might be nice, but workforce development means survival.

There is a reasonableness to that argument, yet it feel oddly hollow and uncompelling.

Nearly half of all young people have no college experience, and, unless we want to consider making higher education free and accessible to all, than it is simply unconscionable to maintain a system that serves to improve economic prosperity for select participants.

Education for democracy – which everyone should have access to from Kindergarten right on up – has a different vision.

This approach imagines a society where everyone has the awareness to see and understand society’s problems, and everyone has the agency to do something about it. A society where people of differing views can hold civil conversations, pushing each other to be better and working to co-create solutions.

Education for democracy isn’t about improving the life of one student, or improving the lives of select students. It is about enriching all our lives, it is about actively, fundamentally, and collectively improving our communities.

The idea is neither quaint, nor idealistic. Indeed – education for democracy is about survival.

If we every hope to be the Just, Free, and Equal society we aspire to be, we must educate our young people not only to espouse these views, but to demonstrate them.

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Archetypes, Foils, and Gender Norms

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Through much of Western history “Man” has been an archetype with woman his convenient foil.

These two tired tropes have served us well in some regards – a simple way to summarize all that is strong and stern, or all that is weak and emotional. A tool for understanding not only ourselves, but our broader social context.

There are, of course, problems with this approach.

Consider, for example, the quote, “The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare.”

At first blush that may sound good. Perhaps I should be flattered. But of course Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote the above in Human, All Too Human, isn’t exactly known for his raging feminist philosophy.

Perhaps because he also liked to write things like, “From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.”

But I’m not sure I find the second quote particularly more problematic than the first. They both take women as a foil – Man is the object of interest, and Woman a mere tool for understanding this more important truth.

One solution seeks to right this historic wrong by flipping the paradigm, making Woman a central concern in her own right. Perhaps it is Woman who should be the archetype with man demoted to foil – little more than a shadow which serves to illustrate its master.

But I find that approach unsatisfactory.

No sentence which begins “Woman is…” will end well for me. Women are not a monolith. Men are not a monolith. And gender is not a two item list.

We’re all individual people. With shared traits and divergent traits. Neither an archetype nor a foil.

We’ve put generations of effort into defining our gender norms. Women are this. Men are that. But which ever way you prioritize that list, a bifurcated system does little to express who we actually are.

I am glad to see efforts to promote strong women, to show real images of women, and to treat women as more than a shadow for the other half of society.

But these efforts are not enough. They still feel too narrow, too defining. Perhaps we need to think more radically – not about what it means to be Woman or what it means to be Man, but about what it means to be a Person.

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All the Truth is Out

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I attended a great talk last night with Matt Bai, author of All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. The national political columnist for Yahoo News, Bai previously was the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine where he covered three presidential campaigns.

His latest book covers the 1987 Gary Hart scandal, when the political career of this leading Democratic candidate “came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce” as tails of his “womanizing” swept tabloids and mainstream press alike.

Bai argues that the Hart affair “marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media,” a point when candidates’ ‘character’ began to draw more fixation than their political experience.”

As the scandal grew in intensity, advisors told Hart to apologize, to be contrite in the face of overwhelming public opinion.

He did not.

As the Chicago Tribune reported in May 1987, “A defiant Gary Hart dropped out of the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination on Friday, delivering an angry speech that blamed news media attention on his personal life for making his candidacy ‘intolerable.’”

The article continues, quoting Hart’s speech:

I say to my children and other frustrated, angry young people: I’m angry, too. I’ve made some mistakes. I said I would, because I’m human. And I did–maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes.

I refuse to submit my friends, my family and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It`s simply an intolerable situation,

I believe I would have been a successful candidate. I know that I would have been a very good president, particularly for these times. But apparently now we`ll never know.

We all better do something to make this system work or we’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, ‘I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.’”

A journalist by training, Bai says his work is to tell an interesting story – not necessarily to present a specific argument. But the story of Gary Hart and the clash of political coverage and celebrity culture raises some interesting questions.

As Bai commented last night, ‘character’ has always been a consideration for political candidates, and it should be to some degree. The question is what should that character look like? How should it be judged?

That is to say, in the face of such intense media scrutiny, would you rather have a candidate who would drop out of the race – or choose to not enter politics – putting his family and friends before his political ambitions?

Or would you rather have the candidate who will say anything, do anything, be anything, to get elected?

Because in the political celebrity media environment, that’s the candidate we’re going to get. And perhaps we should tremble, for that is the candidate we deserve.

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Election Spin and the Voice of The People

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There’s nothing quite like the post-election spin and hype machine, a 24-hour media scramble to interpret the Voice of the People.

CNN reports that “a Republican tide ripped the Senate away from Democrats.” And everyone seems to be jockeying to promote their preferred answer to the question of whether the election was a referendum on the President, the Democrats, or the political system in general.

The people have spoken and our political pundits are here to tell us what they’re saying.

It is times like this when I most appreciate the words of Walter Lippmann, “In this deadly conflict between [the Founding Father's] ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of god.”

We are taught that the essence of a democracy is to revere the voice of the people as, indeed, the voice of God. As the highest form of Truth. And when every election rolls around, we look hopefully to the polls, desperate to understand what The People are trying to tell us.

But, alas, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That is not to say that people, as individuals, are idiots. Lippmann’s view was far more nuanced than that. His disdain for the The People or The Masses should not be confused with a disdain for people.

The challenge, you see, is that, “We have been taught to think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes are variously related.”

The voice of The People is nonsense, not because the people are nonsensical, but because The People is not a coherent whole.

Individual people do individual things for individual reasons. Perhaps there is some meaning we can gather from their collective data, but…a referendum on a person, a party, or an institution?

No. Individual people can declare opposition to those things. The People cannot.

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Youth Turnout in the 2014 Midterms

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I have the pleasure of working with the brilliant team at Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement, CIRCLE does a lot of great work on youth civic engagement broadly defined.

Today, CIRCLE released an exclusive, preliminary youth turnout estimate for yesterday’s 2014 midterm election. As their post today describes:

At least 9.9 million young Americans (ages 18-29), or 21.3%, voted in Tuesday’s midterm election, according to national exit polls, demographic data, and current counts of votes cast.

In a wave election for the GOP, youth still tended to vote Democratic. In the national exit poll data on House races, 18-29 year-olds preferred Democratic candidates by 54% to 43%. In many close Senatorial and gubernatorial races, youth preferred the Democratic candidate, and sometimes they were the only group that did (e.g., in Florida).

In terms of both turnout and vote choice, 2014 actually seems quite typical of a midterm year as far as youth are concerned. Young people made up a similar proportion of voters, and with some exceptions, were more likely to cast ballots for Democrats in tight races.

However, the Senate class of 2008 was not elected in a midterm year. They were elected in 2008, an exceptionally strong year for Democrats, when youth support for Barack Obama set the all-time record in presidential elections. The change from an extraordinary presidential year to a rather typical midterm year hurt the Democratic Senate incumbents. Their advantage among youth voters shrank compared to 2008 in some key states, such as North Carolina (down from 71% in 2008 to 54% in 2014) and Virginia (down from 71% to just 50%). And in some states that had been expected to be competitive this year, the Republican Senatorial candidate won the youth vote along with all older groups–Arkansas and Alaska being examples.

For Republicans, the lesson is they can be competitive among younger voters, although nationally, they still lag behind with that group, and in some states, the Democratic tilt of young voters may pose a problem in years to come.

For Democrats, the message must be to re-engage with young people, who had provided more support in 2008 Senate contests.

You can also see how young people voted in key Senate races below:

YouthDifferenceByState_revised

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Is There an Obligation to Vote?

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Voting is often referred to as a civic duty, yet there is no shortage of Americans who choose not to vote.

People give all sorts of reasons for not voting. The most common reasons are being too busy/having conflicting work or that they were not interested/felt my vote would not count. Illness or disability is also not an uncommon reason for not voting.

Frankly, I don’t put much stock in people’s self-reported reasons for doing or not doing anything. As marketer Clotaire Rapaille – who developed the marketing vision for Hummer – will tell you, people commonly make an instinctual decision then come up with rationalizations to explain it.

But irregardless, many people don’t vote and have stated reasons for not voting. Perhaps some of those people – such as those with illness or disability – literally don’t have the logistic support to vote. But certainly, the majority of non-voters could vote if they tried.

Yet none of this answers the question – is there an obligation to vote?

In many ways voting is irrational. From what I know, I have never been the deciding vote in an election. Given my ideological similarity with those in my ward, city, and state, I am unlikely to ever cast the deciding vote in an election. So, really, in many accurate ways, my vote does not matter.

Of course, if nobody voted that would be a problem. And if no one of my demographic profile – my supposed “voter blocker” – voted that would be a problem, too.

But none of that changes that my own, individual decision to vote is, essentially, irrational. Just as I dismissed people’s reasons for not voting, one could easily dismiss people’s reasons for voting. We have a behavior and we rationalize it afterwards. Perhaps we just invoke terms like civic duty and obligation to make us feel better about this random little deed.

And, still, none of this answers the question – is there an obligation to vote?

I’d like to push this question even further, asking, is there an obligation to be an informed voter? Having an obligation to show up in a cramped room and mindlessly check a few boxes doesn’t seem particularly compelling.

But asking for informed voting is an even greater burden for the individual involved. If I was too busy to vote before, I’m certainly not going to have time to become informed. This demand also raises important questions about what it means to be informed – is the word of a trusted friend enough? What about inferring from party affiliation? What about learning from candidate ads or from the ads of PACs with agendas?

Are you informed if your information is biased?

The answers are entirely unclear.

But does one have an obligation to vote?

Perhaps the question is too narrow. An obligation to show up on designated days and draw some lines? That is uninspiring.

But the doesn’t mean we have no obligation. Anyone who is part of a community benefits from their membership in that community, and anyone who benefits from a community has an obligation to participate in that community.

For me, voting is an essential part of that participation. Even when I’m uninspired by candidates or feel that the system is stuck in a broken status quo. I keep irrationally voting because it is one of many things I do to participate.

I can imagine a society of corruption and rigged elections where refusing to vote could be a more powerful statement than lending legitimacy to the system. But, complain as I might, we don’t seem to be that far gone.

Refusing to vote is not a powerful statement. It is a silent assent. A willingness to be ignored. It is a triumph for those in power, with even less impact than my paltry ballot.

Is there an obligation to vote? Maybe not. But there is an obligation to participate. From inside the system and from outside it. You can do both, and you can do both simultaneously.

And right here, right now, a vote may be a tiny tick in the universe but it is a piece of the larger puzzle, and a piece a good citizen ought to participate in.

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Let’s Stop with the Screen-Shaming

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I read an article this morning about a photographer’s project capturing images of people who are together…but separated by their smart phones.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself in a conversation about how online engagement compares to “traditional” civic engagement. That is to say, is engagement online an acceptable replacement for face to face interaction?

This is a hot topic in many spheres – raising important questions about how we act and interact. Does digital technology open new horizons of global communication or ironically block us each off into our own self-imposed cell?

The answer is entirely unclear.

Probably its a little bit of both.

As framed, of course, the question is misleading. As if all in-person communication is some ideal and digital communication is audacious to think it could ever be equal.

This is a false dichotomy. Different forms of communication work well for different kinds of people and different kinds of communication work well for different kinds of topics.

Face to face interactions are high-context – that is, there are many contextual clues to draw from in interpreting your interaction. Language and words used are a piece of it, but tone, body language, and facial expressions mean everything.

Digital interactions started out exclusively low-context, but they don’t have to be.

But even if you assume low-context discussion spaces, that doesn’t intrinsically mean that deeper dialogue is not possible. It’s just different.

It may be better for some people, it may be worse for some people. It’ll just be different.

To be honest, I personally have a general bias in favor of the in-person experience. I don’t have a smart phone. When I was little, I stopped listen to my walkman on road trips because it distracted me from the experience.

I’m just kind of old fashioned like that.

But what’s best for me is not best for everyone. Just because I’m not big on communicating digitally doesn’t mean that my traditional modes are intrinsically preferable.

If you have a smart phone and you feel like it’s detracting from the life you want to live then by all means, take screen breaks or develop other tools to manage your connection. But your personal distaste for smart phone browsing doesn’t translate into a universal wrong.

So let’s stop screen-shaming. Let’s stop assuming that digital communication needs to meet some theoretic ideal measured against in-person interactions.

Let’s keep asking how to build spaces where people of all backgrounds and communication styles can interact genuinely and respectfully, where they discuss important issues and collectively work to address pressing problems.

We have many real and virtual tools to help build these spaces. And we should take advantage of all of them.

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Implicit Bias

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I had the opportunity today to learn from two impressive Tufts faculty members, Keith Maddox and Sam Sommers. Both social psychologists, Maddox and Sommers specialize in issues of implicit bias, stereotyping, and group interactions.

If you’ve never done it before, I highly encourage you to visit Harvard’s Project Implicit to take an implicit bias test. Through a series of categorizing tasks, the test will show you what biases you have on a number of topics such as race, gender, and sexuality.

I say, “what biases you have” rather than “whether you have biases,” because, unless you are dead, you will have biases.

People need to use short cuts, heuristics, in order to make sense of the complex stimuli we are constantly inundated with. This is a helpful, and often good mechanism. If we could only ever work from complete information, we’d find ourselves practically paralyzed by the enormity of information flooding our way. We literally could not function without these heuristics.

But these snap judgements can also be dangerous. Studies have shown, for example, that we typically form opinions within seconds of meeting someone, and those impressions tend to vary little after being formed.

That might not be a problem if our first impressions were always surprisingly accurate, but in a society with deep preferences favoring people who look a certain way or act a certain way, our heuristic judgements devolve into damaging stereotypes.

So, what is a person to do?

We can’t – and shouldn’t want to – cleanse our minds of all heuristic processes. But neither can we rely on our mental shortcuts to always present us with accurate, unbiased information.

Well, first, you should take the tests. Find out what biases you have. It will be hard. You may not like the results. After all, three quarter of white people and half of black people show a bias favoring Whiteness.

And if you are not biased on that, you are likely biased on something else. But have no doubts that you are biased.

Of course, knowing is half the battle, so get to know what biases you have. Face them. Accept them. The reality is your brain does things that you have little control over, and while we might wish it didn’t…ignoring our biases won’t make them go away.

So recognize your biases and commit to questioning your actions accordingly. Notice when your bias jumps in and push yourself to question your judgements, assumptions, opinions and the actions which flow from those views.

Never settle with the answer that it’s okay, “in this case.” Your brain will always come up with extenuation circumstances to explain why your bias is okay.

This is a critical first step, but in my view it is still not enough. Privilege and power are deeply ingrained to the benefit of some and the determinant of others. Overcoming bias is more than learning not to judge someone by the color of their skin – it is learning to accept them for who they are. It is understanding and expressing that the White way is not intrinsically the right way.

There is no gold star for the 25% of white people who don’t favor Whiteness. There is no person who doesn’t need to be concerned about implicit bias or the very real ways it skews and damages our society.

We are all us members of this society and we each have an obligation to work every day at uncovering our own biases undoing the harm that has haunted us for generations.

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False Barriers of Practicality

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As an individual, it can be hard to say no. Or, at least, taking on too much seems to be a staple of modern life.

But as an institution, even an institution made up of people, it is easy to say no.

There is always too much work to be done. Always too many demands to be met, and too many stakeholders too please. No matter what type of institution operating in what sector, a functional, sustainable institution needs to say no.

And often this is good. A successful institution will only take on those efforts which most closely align with its mission and vision. A successful institution will see more opportunities than it has the capacity to take on. A successful institution will project an air of efficiency and mask the true chaos of the process from the rest of the world.

The problem is the best things, the most important things, aren’t always the easiest.

It is no minor task to build diverse institutions where people of all backgrounds can voice their opinions and engage in rigorous, civil dialogue. The rewards may well be worth it, but the energy and resources needed for this effort often seem monstrous in the face a process that works well enough already.

And well enough is the death knell of these more noble pursuits.

Because in the face of so many opportunities and so little time, well enough is typically the best you can hope for. And adding complications to the process – even in the name of better ends – is generally not taken seriously as a suggestion.

To be fair, I am as guilty of the trap of practicality as anyone. I like things to run simply and smoothly, and my internal voice decries when any complicating factors arise. It’s not that I’m opposed to change, but truth be told…I just want it to work.

It takes a lot just to make things go in the first place, and frankly I often just don’t have the energy to face what it will really take to bring something from well enough to ideal.

But while I can appreciate this reaction in people and institutions, we should none of us settle for that response.

It may be too much to push for ideal all of the time, but neither should we settle for well enough all of the time. As individuals and institutions, we have to push ourselves to take the hard path, the better path. We have to seek to be our best selves and to create the best institutions we can.

It will take a lot of hard, difficult, constant work. But despite the challenges, despite the seeming impracticality, that is the right work to undertake.

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Practicality and Government

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I had the pleasure today of listening to Kathleen Sebelius, former Secretary of Health and Human Services. Former Governor of Kansas, Secretary Sebelius is perhaps best known for overseeing the implementing the Affordable Care Act.

She spoke about many things, including the infamous “eight weeks” of her service while there were problems with the Health Exchange Portal.

But perhaps most interesting was her take on dysfunction in national government.

States, she said, have a more practical approach. There is dissent and disagreement and knock down political fights. But at the end of the day, things get done. Things have to get done.

For one thing, states are mandated to annually pass a budget. So there’s only so far you can kick the can down the road.

That’s not the same at the federal level. In addition to raising issues of gerrymandering and money in politics, Sebelius argued that there’s a growing number of people elected to congress who think that nothing good comes from government.

For four of the five years she was Secretary, the Department of Health and Human Services didn’t have a budget. The government shut down three times.

States, she argued, have to be practical. But for Congress – they can pass the buck indefinitely.

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