Now Published: ‘The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking’

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It's been more a year and a half in the making, but I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead ! 

Inspired by the format and sensibility of The Whole Earth Catalog of the early 1970s (subtitle: "access to tools"), this Catalog has a similar goal: to help people can build a new world, on their own terms, against the grain of a dominant culture that cannot yet see or understand the rising world of commoning. 

The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working. But the good news is….Commoners are building a new world of possibilities right now. There are scores of system-change projects a-borning, but mainstream politics and media regards most of them as too small, local, and trivial to matter....and commoners themselves often do not have a larger sense of the whole of which they are a part. The Commoner’s Catalog seeks to remedy this problem.

The Catalog explains the grand, transformational power of social collaboration – in agricultural commons and digital spaces, in care collectives and gift economies, in urban settings and finance, among many other realms.

The Catalog's many profiles and stories are loosely grouped in 25 thematic sections spanning 114 artfully designed pages. There are sections on water, land, rethinking economics, law and the commons, the more-than-human world, urban commons, peer production, artistic commons, and many others.

I was thrilled when a French commoner-friend received an advance copy and exclaimed, "This is super-cool!" He was responding to the great cover art that illustrator Hugh Dunford Wood made to show the joy and excitement of commoning.

But he also loved the beautiful book design by Angela Lorenzo and the vivid diversity of projects described (great research support from Cameron Conner). I share my friend's reaction. The Commonsverse is a surprising, hopeful world and, and -- when seen in its eclectic glory -- amazingly cool.

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is the publisher of The Commoner's Catalog, and Chelsea Green Publishing is the distributor. The book was released this week in the US. Copies should be available in the United Kingdom and Europe by mid-February. 

To help maximize its reach and impact -- and ensure open access -- I have posted The Commoner's Catalog online as a free "flipbook," licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can read it, and find weblinks for buying it, at commonerscatalog.org.

As an adolescent, I was rocked by The Whole Earth Catalog because it showcased dozens of gritty, obscure, back-to-the-earth experiments. It was also empowering. It said in effect, “You can be more than a passive consumer or anonymous onlooker. You can do cool and significant things yourself, and bring about serious change by heeding your own intuitions and mobilizing your talents. Here’s what other ordinary people are already doing, right now!” 

And so, in this new Catalog, I have tried to call attention to notable peer-driven projects, organizations, websites, books, movements, and individuals. They are a cultural vanguard that more people need to know about. After all, these initiatives are going to help us get through the transitions being driven by unsustainable and unjust market extractivism, relentless economic growth, and climate change.

We may know about one or another example, but it's the broad sweep of such projects that is so amazing.Your entire perspective changes when you can see how community land trusts can open up land to more eco-minded farming and more affordable housing -- how open source platforms and platform cooperatives are empowering workers and users -- how Indigenous models of land and water stewardship offer guidance to us -- and how artistic commons are helping artists reclaim control of their creativity and livelihoods.

I like to quote the Belgian designer Thomas Lommée, who declared, "The next big thing will be a lot of small things." This should be the rallying cry for remaking politics and government, whose fragile, centralized power is increasingly dysfunctional, unjust, cruel, and incapable of dealing with distributed complexity.

If you're already a commoner, or know of folks who would love to learn more, please help spread the word about The Commoner's Catalog. We need to hoist up some new visions of change beyond those declared by the market/state, start some new discussions, find each other, begin new collaborations, and take the commons to a higher level.

 

 

 

 

 

compassion, not sympathy

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This is a passage from Seneca’s On Clemency (written in 55–56 CE):

Pity [1] is a sickness of the soul due to the sight of others’ suffering, or a sadness caused by someone else’s misfortunes which one believes to be undeserved; but no sickness can affect a wise man [2], for his mind is serene and nothing can get through to it that he guards against. Besides, nothing is as becoming to a man as a great soul, but it is impossible to be both great and sad. Sadness breaks the mind into pieces, throws it down, and collects the parts, but this cannot happen to a wise one [3] even in a disaster. Instead, he will repulse any outrage of fortune and shatter it to pieces before him, always maintaining the same appearance–quiet, firm–which he couldn’t do if he were overcome with sadness.

Also to be considered: a wise person discerns the future and makes decisions without interference, yet nothing clear and lucid [4] can flow from turbulence. Sadness is unfitted for discerning circumstances, planning useful tasks, evading dangers, weighing equities. Therefore, the [wise person] will not feel pity, because there cannot be pity without suffering of the soul. [5]

Whatever others who feel pity want to do, he will do freely and with a lofty spirit. He will help those who weep, but not weep with them [6]. He will reach a hand to the drowning, welcome the exile, donate to the poor, not in the abusive way of most people who want to be seen as pitying–they toss something and flinch in disgust at those whom they aid, as if they feared to touch them–but as a man gives to a man from the common pool. He will return the child to the weeping mother, unfasten chains, save people from [gladiatorial] games, and even bury the stinking body, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind, of his own will. Thus the wise person will not pity but will assist and be of use, having been born to help all and for the public good, from which he will distribute shares to all. He will even give from his store to those sufferers who deserve a portion of blame and correction, but he will be even more pleased to assist those who are genuinely unfortunate. Whenever he can, he will counter fortune, for what better use of his powers than to restore what fortune has overturned? He will certainly not cast down his eyes or his soul toward someone who is shriveled or ragged and meagre and leaning on a staff; instead he will do good to all and kindly regard all who suffer, like a god.

Pity is close to suffering [7]; it even has something in common with it and derives from it. You know eyes to be weak if they water at the sight of someone else’s bleariness, just as, by Hercules, it is a disorder and not a case of merriment when people laugh just because others laugh or yawn whenever someone’s mouth opens. Pity is a flaw in the soul of one who feels suffering too much, and he who expects it from a wise person is not so different from someone who expects lamentations at a stranger’s funeral.

Seneca’s De Clementia (2.5.4-2.6.4), trans. Peter Levine

The topic of this book is clemency (clementia) which in modern English means a virtue or prerogative of governors and other rulers. Seneca addresses the young Emperor Nero and urges him to exhibit clemency (I:v). Emperors were sometimes addressed with the honorific “clemens” (similar to “your grace”), presumably to play to their good side.

However, a different meaning of clementia was calmness or mildness. The weather could be clement, and so could a human mind. Anyone could direct this kind of clementia toward anyone else. A better translation than “clemency” might be “compassion.” Seneca contrasts it with misericordia, which I have translated as “pity” to capture its negative connotations. (After all, nobody wants to be pitied.) But misericordia is close to the modern word “sympathy.” So let us consider the differences between clementia as compassion and misericordia as sympathy.

“Sympathy” means feeling some version of the same emotion that another person feels. Your friend is sad, so you feel sad for her and with her. Although I am sympathetic to the emotion of sympathy, Seneca suggests several reasons to avoid it. Feeling the same way as a suffering person does not necessarily help that person. Sympathy often comes with at least a tinge of condescension, since the person who is sympathetic does not actually experience the same circumstances as the one who suffers. By trying to replicate the sufferer’s emotions, you may undermine your ability to help. And by tying your emotions to another person’s state of mind, you expose yourself to fortune. This is not a reliable way to achieve your own happiness.

Instead, those who suffer deserve to be assisted effectively by people who genuinely respect them. The helper should not try to mirror their emotions but should display a different emotion: clear-headed and equitable good-will. To name that emotion “compassion” is a bit confusing, since it has precisely the same root meaning as “sympathy,” which is a suggested translation of misericordia. (Com = sym = with. Passio = pathos = feeling). Nevertheless, compassion seems to be the word we would use for Seneca’s idea of disinterested benign sentiments (2.6.3) that we exercise freely and with a tranquil mind (2.6.2). It can translate the Sanskrit word karuna, which is fundamental in Buddhism.

Seneca also relates this virtue–let’s call it compassion–to a political idea: equal standing and a common claim on the public good. Even though Seneca addresses De clementia to Nero, I think that in this passage, he describes a republican virtue, appropriate for relations among equals who co-own the commonwealth. (It is interesting that he doesn’t actually use “clementia” in these chapters of the book.)

A compassionate person is not exposed to chance. If we feel worse as another person worsens, and better as he improves, then we demonstrate sympathy, which subjects us to fate. But compassion remains unchanged regardless of the state of the sufferer. Compassion can even fill the mind’s attention, thus displacing emotions that are the cause of discomfort.

One question for me: is sympathy a path to compassion or is it a diversion or a dead end? There is a long tradition in Buddhism of cultivating an imaginative identification with another sentient being, feeling its pain, and “exchanging self and other” (e.g., Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara, 7:16) The goal is to shake one’s attachment to oneself and begin a journey from selfishness to concrete sympathy for specific others, and from there to generalized good-will for all, or karuna. I can’t criticize this path without having been taught it properly or seriously tried to practice it, but Seneca makes me wonder whether intense involvement in another’s suffering might detract from the cultivation of compassion rather than setting us on the right track.

Notes: [1] misericordia; [2] gendered in the original (vir); [3] not necessarily gendered; [4] socerumque, which doesn’t make sense to me unless it should read serenumque; [5] ergo non miseretur, quia id sine miseria animi non fit; [6] non accedet = not come near them; [7] Misericordia vicina est miseriae. See also: Horace against the Stoics; how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; empathy, sympathy, compassion, justice; empathy boosts polarization; empathy and justice, “you should be the pupil of everyone all the time” ; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; John Stuart Mill, Stoic; etc.

Jose Luis Vivero Pol: Treat Food as a Commons, not a Commodity

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How is it possible that extreme hunger and food abundance coexist in today's world? Why is it that food, one of the most fundamental necessities of life, is so scarce for so many people even though the global food system produces so much and wastes so much? These questions have long bothered Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist, agricultural engineer, and advocate for treating food as commons.

Studying the reasons for persistent hunger amidst plentiful food, Vivero began to see that the real problem is our societal treatment of food as a commodity -- an object valued by its market price and traded in global markets. The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat. Treating food as a commodity inevitably means that millions of people worldwide will not be able to afford food and therefore must go hungry or eat nutritionally degraded, unhealthy food.

I explored these themes in an interview with Vivero Pol in my latest podcast (Episode #22) on Frontiers of Commoning.  

Vivero Pol works as a PhD Research Fellow of Food Transitions at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He realizes that attempting to decommodify food is a long-term proposition that requires a structural rethinking of our food system. But he emphasizes that food-as-a-commodity is an artificial social construct, not the natural order of life.

Indeed, food commons have been the norm throughout human history, and even in today's hyper-marketized world they remain widely prevalent. In many countries of Europe, the amount of land still managed as commons for growing food is 20 or 30%. In Iceland, 40% of land is still managed as commons.

Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.

At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.

Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.

By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.

This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.

Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds."  He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."

Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.

"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.

You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.

Jose Luis Vivero Pol: Treat Food as a Commons, not a Commodity

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How is it possible that extreme hunger and food abundance coexist in today's world? Why is it that food, one of the most fundamental necessities of life, is so scarce for so many people even though the global food system produces so much and wastes so much? These questions have long bothered Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist, agricultural engineer, and advocate for treating food as commons.

Studying the reasons for persistent hunger amidst plentiful food, Vivero began to see that the real problem is our societal treatment of food as a commodity -- an object valued by its market price and traded in global markets. The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat. Treating food as a commodity inevitably means that millions of people worldwide will not be able to afford food and therefore must go hungry or eat nutritionally degraded, unhealthy food.

I explored these themes in an interview with Vivero Pol in my latest podcast (Episode #22) on Frontiers of Commoning.  

Vivero Pol works as a PhD Research Fellow of Food Transitions at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He realizes that attempting to decommodify food is a long-term proposition that requires a structural rethinking of our food system. But he emphasizes that food-as-a-commodity is an artificial social construct, not the natural order of life.

Indeed, food commons have been the norm throughout human history, and even in today's hyper-marketized world they remain widely prevalent. In many countries of Europe, the amount of land still managed as commons for growing food is 20 or 30%. In Iceland, 40% of land is still managed as commons.

Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.

At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.

Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.

By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.

This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.

Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds."  He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."

Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.

"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.

You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.

coming in April: What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

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“What Should We Do? offers a compelling, thought-provoking, and urgently-needed framework for anyone trying to understand how we can relate to and act with each other to co-create a more just world. I love this book and you will too.” –Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

“Peter Levine makes everyone think more clearly about everything. How fortunate for our country that he’s applied this gift to the realm of civic life. In this insightful and wise book, Levine reveals what it truly means to cooperate, deliberate, and activate—and challenges us to do all three more mindfully.” —Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, and author Become America 

“Peter Levine is among the leading philosophers of civic life of his generation. What Should We Do? is his magnum opus.  It ranges widely from a masterly review of political philosophy to practical suggestions for addressing issues like the Black Lives Matter movement. For anyone concerned about the state of our democracy and what our role should be, this book is must reading.” –Robert D. Putnam, Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, and coauthor of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

More information and a link to pre-order the book are here. From the back cover …

People who want to improve the world must ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Although their specific challenges and topics are enormously diverse, they often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think well about contentious matters) and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.

In What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America’s leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens’ question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his goal is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using these real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively wrestle with these problems so that they don’t destabilize movements.

A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? turns from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. And it offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world.

When the Lotus Bloomed

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Thanks to Cambridge Arts’ Sidewalk Poetry program, this poem is now imprinted in cement at Clarendon Ave. and Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge (Mass.). The text appeared first on my blog. I meant to answer Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali #20, “On the Day When the Lotus Bloomed,” which begins—in Tagore’s own translation from Bengali—“On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.”

By the way, Tagore’s English versions of his own verse are criticized for being sentimental, archaizing, and didactic and less challenging than the originals. For instance, Amit Chaudhuri writes, “Tagore’s English version of the Gitanjali, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913, is what Mother Teresa once was to Calcutta, the royal family to England, and Kingsley to Gandhi: a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what’s behind it.” My response, then, must be even further from Tagore’s Bengali original, which I cannot read. But I think these eight lines convey some of me, and I hope they offer a touch of peace in North Cambridge.

Civic Studies call for proposals for APSA 2022

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Call for proposals from Civic Studies (formerly Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society)

Related Group Chair(s): Peter Levine, Tufts University, peter.levine@tufts.edu and Trygve Throntveit, Minnesota Humanities Center, throntv@gmail.com

The Civic Studies Related Group invites proposals for panels, round tables, and individual papers that make a significant contribution to the civic studies field; articulate a civic studies perspective on some important issue; or contribute to theoretical, empirical, or practical debates in civic studies. We especially encourage proposals that emphasize actual or potential civic responses to current social and political crises, their origins, and possible consequences.

Civic studies is a field defined by diversity yet connected by participants’ commitments to promoting interdisciplinary research, theory, and practice in support of civic renewal: the strengthening of civic (i.e., citizen-powered and citizen-empowering) politics, initiatives, institutions, and culture. Its concern is not with citizenship understood as legal membership in a particular polity, but with guiding civic ideals and a practical ethos embraced by individuals loyal to, empowered by, and invested in the communities they form and re-form together. Its goal is to promote these ideals through improved institutional designs, enhanced public deliberation, new and improved forms of public work among citizens, or clearer and more imaginative political theory.

The civic studies framework adopted in 2007 cites two ideals for the emerging discipline: “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research and theory, including the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School, of Juergen Habermas and critical social theory, Brent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis, and more diffuse traditions such as philosophical pragmatism, Gandhian nonviolence, the African American Freedom Struggle. It supports work on deliberative democracy, on public work, on civic engagement and community organizing, among others.

To propose a session, click here when logged in as an APSA member or else navigate as follows: open the conference platform; click “Submit or Edit a Proposal,” click “Submit a Division, Related Group, or Partner Association Proposal,” scroll down to and click “Related Groups,” and select “Civic Studies.”

APSA members can also join the Civic Studies group (free) at this link.

academic freedom for individuals and for groups

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One type of academic freedom belongs to individuals. A teacher, researcher, or student either has freedom or not. The question is whether academics may say what they wish to say.

This form of freedom is very important, and I am an avid defender of it, although it has some limits. First, academics shouldn’t be able to say literally anything as part of their jobs, including making demonstrably false statements. Second, it is not always clear when this right should become a positive one. Although I shouldn’t be fired for adopting a controversial position, do I have a right to be hired, published, or invited to speak after I’ve done so? (If I have a positive right to speak, then I want my invitation to the University of Hawaii right now.)

Although academic freedom in the individual sense is important, it is not the only kind. I have worked at universities for 29 years. Only for the last three have I had individual academic freedom, safeguarded by tenure and a right to earn my salary primarily by teaching. Before that, I was always involved in collective efforts–team projects–that had funders, staff, and partners. These projects involved communication and advocacy as well as research. I always had to be careful what I said because that could affect my colleagues and allies. On occasion, I said things that had negative consequences for our fundraising or other goals. Much more often, I held my tongue.

Only very rarely did I experience this situation as a lack of freedom. Generally, I thought of myself and my colleagues as being free in the political sense of the word. We could collaboratively develop and implement strategies to influence society. People who opposed us weren’t violating our freedom; they were freely acting at odds with us. Much more common than actual opposition were decisions not to support us for various reasons. If (for instance) someone chose not to approve a grant proposal that we had submitted, that was not a violation of our rights. The alternative would have been to fund us and reject someone else. We operated in a controversial space with numerous decision-makers and finite resources. To the extent that I complained about limitations on our liberty or rights, it was only when arbitrary–from my perspective–bureaucratic rules interfered. I suppose I would have cried foul if administrators within our own institution had blocked us because of their beliefs, but then I would have been complaining about their overstepping their specific responsibilities. More generally, I expected opposition and competition and didn’t think of those as threats to our freedom.

If you want a classic framework for this distinction, Benjamin Constant’s will serve. Normal academic freedom is an example of what Constant called the “liberty of the moderns.” The freedom to collaborate in a contested space is the “liberty of the ancients.”

I think there are epistemological as well as ethical reasons to enhance collaborative, applied forms of research as complements to individual scholarship.* These approaches come under such headings as “transdisciplinary research,” “civically engaged research,” “community-based participatory research” (CPBR), and “participant-action research” (PAR). For such efforts, we need a robust account of academic freedom as the ability to build things together, often in the face of opposition that is legitimate. The question cannot be whether an individual is permitted to say what is in that person’s mind. It should become a question about the resources and rewards available to groups of people who seek to co-create knowledge and thereby change the world.

According to this theory, when the NIH, the Ford Foundation, or the American Political Science Association increases its support for engaged research, freedom is enhanced. (Support can mean money, training–like ICER–or recognition.) However, there will never be enough resources to allow every group to undertake every project it wants to do. Many applicants will be rejected; in fact, competition is desirable. Freedom of this kind is not a yes-or-no matter but an outcome of wise institutional design and allocation of resources.

*See civically engaged research in political science; how to keep political science in touch with politics; methods for engaged research; what must we believe?; civically engaged research in political science; what gives some research methods legitimacy?; etc.

Teaching Honest History: a conversation with Randi Weingarten and Marcia Chatelain

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AFT President Randi Weingarten invited Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain and me to discuss controversies about American history and race in public schools on her podcast. I enjoyed the whole conversation and learned a lot.

You can listen here.

At one point, we discussed the idea of “teaching both sides.” I said that many issues do not have two sides. One view may be correct, or there may be many valid perspectives. I worry that looking for exactly two sides on every issue reinforces partisan polarization. Nevertheless, I see value in identifying issues that have two worthy sides and delving into them. I said that I choose school choice as a signature issue in my public policy course because there are valid arguments on both sides, and it is an opportunity to think about deep value conflicts.

Marcia Chatelain proposed that we really should teach both–or all–sides. Students should study the whole range of opinion. I volunteered that perhaps students should read John C. Calhoun’s defenses of slavery, and she agreed. White supremacy and slavery are parts of history.

I liked her argument and concurred with it. In retrospect, I’d only add that the best way to deal with controversy may vary by discipline. History encompasses all the opinions that people have held, and an important step in historical interpretation involves suspending one’s own judgment to understand what people–even very bad people–were trying to say. Philosophy (and the study of public policy) are inquiries into what is right. In those disciplines, it is more appropriate to be selective and evaluative. At the same time, history is crucial background for reasoning well about ethical and political issues. Anyone who is trying to decide what we should do now ought to know what Calhoun argued, because his deeply and widely held views remain part of our reality. In this sense, history and ethical/political reasoning are complementary, but they do imply different skills–and different educational choices.

See also: “Just teach the facts”; discussing school choice; school choice is a question of values not data; 50 Core American Documents; two dimensions of debate about civics; NAEd Report on Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, etc.

professionals as grizzled veterans or as reflective learners

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In stressful, front-line professions–such as teaching, military service, nursing, or policing–you may encounter the idea of a “professional” as someone who has done the job in one of its harder forms for a long time. People who merely study or teach the topic, or those who have had brief or sheltered experience on the job, are not true professionals.

An alternative sense of a “professional” is someone who has reflected deeply on the role from a variety of perspectives. For instance, reading and talking about the history and sociology of schools may contribute to a teacher’s professional development.

Of course, there are other senses of professionalism apart from these two. I like the idea of “democratic professionalism” developed by Albert Dzur and others: a professional as someone who works with citizens who hold other jobs and roles to strengthen democracy together. There is also a trustee ideal, in which the professional safeguards public values in return for the right to provide certain services.

But those are ideals. In almost any actual professional setting, you can find grizzled veterans telling the newbies how it’s really done, plus formal academic requirements and assessments. These two ways of thinking about professionalism constantly compete for legitimacy, while more idealistic conceptions remain somewhat hidden or marginal.

If veterancy and academic study are the main options, then I’d advocate for a mix of the two. Experience is valuable. It can impart practical wisdom drawn from numerous concrete examples (phronesis). People who have spent years in a job often (not always) deserve respect for their service. Thus there are benefits to hiring veteran professionals as teachers and professors, employing them as mentors, placing students in practical internships, etc.

Yet professionals should also hold a critical stance toward their own role and learn from the concepts and tools of other disciplines. For instance, a teacher is better off understanding the sociology of schools even if the authors of sociology articles would make bad K-12 teachers. Their value does not derive from direct personal experience. Phronesis is useful, but so are other forms of knowledge, including theory and empirical data.

In pretentious settings, such as highly selective college and universities, it can be necessary to fight for the legitimacy of experience and to make space for veteran practitioners. However, in places like police stations and some K-12 schools, it can be hard to make space for critique. Whether teaching professionals in an academic way will improve their practice is an empirical question; the answer will probably vary depending on who teaches what, to whom, and how. There is no guarantee it will work. However, if a profession is going to improve, then at least some people who hold the job must draw insights from outside their field, including from scholarship.

See also: separating populism from anti-intellectualism; Public Work and Democratic Professionalism; Democracy in schools: Albert Dzur talks with principal Donnan Stoicovy; a way forward for high culture.