Results tagged “politics” from Eccentric Eclectica

James Fallows published an interesting essay in the January/February 2010 Atlantic on “How America Can Rise Again.” I think it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read on the American penchant for declension narratives. He points out that Americans have been engaging in jeremiads about the decline of the nation since before there was a nation. The Puritans were complaining about the lost golden age of the colonies just six years after landing in the New World. So from the historical perspective there’s nothing new under the sun. To bolster this argument Fallows mentions The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovitch (another book for the to be read pile).

On the positive side of the ledger Fallows puts America’s openness to immigrants and our schools.

“We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the immigrants, and the universities, we’ll be fine,” James McGregor, an American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told me. “I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be sure they stay.” While, indeed, the United States benefits most when the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of thought with them. Shirley Tilghman, a research biologist who is now the president of Princeton, made a similar point more circumspectly. “U.S. higher education has essentially been our innovation engine,” she told me. “I still do not see the overall model for higher education anywhere else that is better than the model we have in the United States, even with all its challenges at the moment.” Laura Tyson, an economist who has been dean of the business schools at UC Berkeley and the University of London, said, “It can’t be a coincidence that so many innovative companies are located where they are”—in California, Boston, and other university centers. “There is not another country’s system that does as well—although others are trying aggressively to catch up.”

The main problem he sees in contemporary America is public-private partnerships or the lack of them. There are major problems that need to be addressed: jobs, debt, military strength, and overall economic independence. What will happen if America is no longer the wealthiest nation on the planet or the consumer of last resort? We could address these problems but there is no sign that the political infrastructure is up to the task.

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

He goes on to cite another interesting book by Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations. According to Olson special interest groups gain power over time in any governmental system and eventually they nibble away at the public institutions that were once capable of coping with our problems. Fallows concludes that the only way forward is to muddle through as best we can with the gangrenous system.

Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, spoke to the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum on the topic Beyond the Knowledge Wars. The event was held at the Hosmer Public Library in Minneapolis.

Boyte began by discussing the cult of the expert, the ultimate outgrowth of the philosophical positivism and objectivism that dominated intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Objectivity became the byword for intellectual investigation, demanding the removal of all self-interest or awareness from the research process. He summed this up by the advice he once heard given to a sociology Ph.D. - “never research a topic that you are interested in.” The fear of contamination by personal biases and interests pushed academia to extol research over outreach.

There have been many critics of this ethos of detachment, but so far their impact has been minimal. The administration of the University of Minnesota bought into the “ponzi scheme of becoming the third best public research university in the world.” The result was the closing of general college. Further back in time Boyte described some of the changes to the coop-extension program which was transformed away from community building into an expert service provider. Another current of resistance was the tradition of the land grant colleges.

The cult of the expert is expressed in politics as mobilizing - get out the vote, door knocking and canvassing, robo-calls. It is the dominant political formula of our time. Mobilization was originally the strategy of the left, but now all politicians use it. It begins by defining an enemy, frames the issue as good versus evil using a simplified script, and then distributes it to the masses with the subtext that the masses are being victimized. It is the Nader and the PIRG formula, and recently it has been the Rove, Gingrich, and Beck formula. The problem with this view is that it treats people as stereotypes, labels, or abstractions. How will the Southern white male respond to message X? What will the soccer mom think of this commercial?

The apotheosis of this form of politics was seen in 2008 when Mark Penn told Hillary Clinton that the only way she could win was by accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer. Clinton stepped back from that edge. John McCain had a similar moment when he took the microphone from the woman in Minneapolis who accused Obama of being an Arab.

The antidote to this problem, according to Boyte, is an organizing paradigm, a viewpoint that acknowledges the “irreversible, plurality of the human condition.” It is a return to the original meaning of politics - how to deal with people different than the self.

Boyte offered some positive examples of resistance, such as the recent work by the Centers for Disease Control to promote community resilience, or the shift among development economists from only talking about government and market solutions to talking about community power. In St. Paul there is the Jane Addams School for Democracy connecting college students and immigrants and at the University of Minnesota William Doherty is working on a program for citizen professionals.

I basically agree with Mr. Boyte’s critique of the current situation, but the examples of hope seem very small bore compared to the scale of the challenge. I asked him about the reaction to his work among the business community and he basically said that he hadn’t presented the ideas to them. There were some local business alliances working on citizen business issues, such as the Citizens League and Target Corporation, but the overall scope was small.

The question I should have asked is how this message is going to be carried into the suburbs. I support his goals and the programs he works on, like the Jane Addams school and democracy promotion in Africa, but I see the center of the action as the suburbs for two reasons. Practically, the suburbs are where elections are currently won and lost in America. If we can’t convince suburbanites of this critique and the need for a more democratic form of education then change may never come. Ideologically, the problem is there are so few people in the suburbs who know what democracy. We, in the suburbs, are the ultimate ignorant consumers of government service. The attitude is “give me my driver’s license as rapidly as possible and then get out of my way, I need to go to work and pick up the kids for soccer practice.” There is very little citizenship in the suburbs, nor is there very much community.

The vision of a cocreative, relational, community-based future of education is enticing. I look forward to helping to build that future with Mr. Boyte.

Last Saturday I met with some friends from the Minnesota Independent Scholar’s Forum to talk about Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan.

The book is a short, well-written introduction to the many ways people use history for purposes other than understanding or getting to the truth. It parallels Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson. Both MacMillan and Anderson discuss the often contentious moments when history becomes part of nation building and community definition. People use history for many purposes and some of those purposes can be dangerous. Nazi Germany, though a bit of a hackneyed example, shows the risks of reading too much into history.

Early in the discussion someone stated that current history scholarship was much worse than the history written in the late 19th century, back then the scholars actually took part in lengthy exchanges in the journals over ideas and questions of real merit. Today we’ve declined into a bunch of postmodern doubters who don’t believe in history or the truth. I bristled silently through the whole diatribe and let it pass. But the conversation continued and I started hearing some generic arguments about how bad current history education was compared to the great teaching of the past. This was too much, so I spoke up and pulled things back from the brink. We agreed that education was just as bad/good in the past as it is now. In the past there was too much memorizing of dull lists of dates, today there is too much feel good political correctness. (I could’ve argued the latter point about modern political correctness but I didn’t pursue it.) And then my adversary said he had been talking about scholarship not education and the conversation shifted away form the topic. Another in my long list of failed attempts to beat back the beast of declension narratives.

I don’t know why I’m so opposed to these just-so-stories about the decline of something, anything, from a golden age in the past. I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I was talking about poetry and technology. It seems like everywhere I go there is another tale of decline to listen to. I’m beginning to degenerate into quotations - “The past is a different country; they do things differently there.” - attributed to Lesley P. Hartley.

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a psychological temperament at work that makes some people see decline, others see progress, and even fewer see nothing but change. I believe that I’m in the latter camp, neither a believer in ridiculous improvement nor a complainer about fabulous loss. But there is a cost to being a moderate; Aristotle may have praised the golden mean but the only thing in the middle of the road are the unwritten books of authors who didn’t have a axe to grind. I sometimes feel as though my failure to choose between decline and progress is the surest route to the rhetorical doldrums.

History is filled with sudden and gradual changes. The problem I have, and I think it may shared by MacMillan, is when the changes of history are used to make an ideological point about the present in order to advance extrahistorical arguments. The complaints about past historical scholarship I mentioned earlier were made in the service of a larger, hidden complaint about postmodernism. I would rather say that the process of writing history has changed and leave it at that.

But the demand for judgment is never ending. Changes can’t just be acknowledged as changes; they must be evaluated. Was postmodernism a beneficial change for historical scholarship? Are we better or worse off today than we were 100 years ago? The answer to that question puts me into a predicament. I can see evidence for both sides. I’d much rather have the medicine of today than the medicine of the nineteenth century. On the other hand I’d much rather have the streetcar and railroad network of 1900 than the highway mess of 2000.

I’m reluctantly willing to abandon my equanimity and read the former as an example of progress, but reading the latter as a decline raises all sorts of doubts. Perhaps it is a purely political choice: liberals see progress, conservatives see decline.

But this conclusion sticks in my craw even more than the problem I began with. Is it really all just a matter of politics? This feels more like a surrender than an explanation.

I remember wistfully back in the 1980s listening to neoconservatives, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, argue that any comparisons between the bad things that America did oversees and bad things done by the Soviet Union were the height of irresponsibility. Liberals, like Noam Chomsky, were creating a “false equivalence” between the always-working-for-good America and the devil-incarnate-evil-empire Soviet Union. The whole messed-up thread was most salient during the year I was on the high school debate team and the resolution was about American foreign-policy in Latin America. Any argument that the United States supported terrorists or the overthrow of governments almost always got the Kirkpatrick “false equivalency” argument as a response.

I’ve been watching the current town-hall protests by Republicans and other far-right organizations over the past week in astonishment. But the most frustrating thing is the media narrative, present at MPR and the NYT, that the protests at the town-halls are just more of the same protests that liberals launched during the Bush administration. So here are my reasons why this equivalency is actually false:

1. Corporate backing. I don’t recall any corporations backing the anti-war protests during the Bush administration. Former health care executives are running anti-reform campaigns. Two of the major groups involved in organizing the protests are Conservatives for Patients Rights, a group founded by Rick Scott, an ex-hospital executive, and Freedom Works, chaired by the Republican ex-majority leader of the house, Dick Armey.

2. Republican party-leaders have adopted the outrageous rhetoric of the far-right. During the Bush administration liberals couldn’t get any of their party leaders to lend any support to their outrage. Howard Dean argued against the war but even he was forced to back down from some statements, such as his December 2003 statement about the capture of Saddam Hussein. The Democrat party ignored the anti-war left as much as possible. Just remember the utter failure of the impeach Bush meme. Democrats routinely reject the left, Republicans bend over backwards to embrace the fascist right.

3. The current protests at town-halls are designed to stifle debate instead of encourage it. The great frustration of the left during the run-up to the Iraq war was the rejection of debate by the powers that be. Congress and other groups didn’t want to hear any objection to the war. Today Congress wants debate, that’s why they hold the town-halls to hear from their constituents, but the people right-wingers who show up are shutting down the debate before it even starts.

4. There is also a big difference between media coverage of the current protests and the media coverage of anti-Bush protests. Today the town-hall protesters have major media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and more supporting their cause. I don’t remember there being as many prominent media figures supporting the anti-war protesters. I can only name two: Paul Krugman, and Bill Moyers. There were more but they didn’t have a whole network to promote their views like Fox News does today.

I’m struggling to understand and explain a spectrum of opinions about the recession that I see exhibited by conservatives. I have three examples that seem to form a gradient around the idea of self-reliance and group action.

At the extreme is Charles Murray who recently delivered a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. I found the lecture via a link at Matthew Yglesias weblog.

The central core of Murray’s argument is that happiness requires struggle and that government policies that make happiness easier are fundamentally unfair because they take away the struggle for happiness that we all have a right to. If we don’t work hard for our rewards then our victories will taste sour.

Damon Linker at the New Republic calls this Donner Party Conservatism, a term he borrows from John Holbo.

it refers to the brand of conservative thinking that defends America’s relatively minimal welfare state and anemic economic regulations on the grounds that it’s good for people to have to struggle and suffer to get by — just like those plucky, entrepreneurial pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation while trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains back in the winter of 1846-1847. For some Donner Party Conservatives, struggle and suffering are good because they call forth and demand great acts of virtue, which serves to replenish the ever-diminishing stockpile of “moral capital” that our nation has inherited from its (pre-liberal) past. Murray himself argues this point at length. But he also claims that struggle and suffering are good because they are a necessary condition of human happiness.

Michael Gerson made a similar call to virtue in the Washington Post last month in a column on Recession’s Hidden Virtues

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. “One reasonable hypothesis,” argues James Q. Wilson, “is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.” Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes — and that have decayed in our own.

My third example is from last month by David Brooks at the New York Times. He starts his column in the same individualistic place that Murray begins at:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible

But he ends at a different place, much closer to my own political views.

And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

My tentative explanation for these three variations on the theme of individual responsibility and group actions is the fundamental attribution error from psychology. “When we are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, we tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor. We then tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external situational factors.”

Murray is completely captured by the fundamental attribution error. Happiness comes from the individual and institutions, especially the government, are barriers to the achievement of “deep satisfaction.” Gerson is in the middle and Brooks starts with the standard conservative appeal to individualism but then concludes by holding his nose and acknowledging the need stabilize the group even if it means rewarding the foolish.

We tackled the topic of American cultural literacy last night at Socrate’s Cafe and, as always, the topic immediately turned to politics.

A gentleman quoted Patrick Fitzgerald (the attorney involved in the Blagovich scandal) saying that “there is a fine line between politics and criminality.” Extend this to gross generalizations about all politicians and you begin to see the tone of the discussion. He asked whether anyone looking at the American political system from outside would see anything other than criminality.

I replied that there is always a fine line between criminal and non-criminal behavior. One day, Bernard Madoff was running a profitable hedge-fund and the next he was the ringleader of a Ponzi scheme.

My point was twofold. First, I believe there is nothing in politics that makes it an inherently criminal activity. Second, criminality is an ex post facto label that we use to describe behavior that we have rejected as wrong, usually for societal reasons. Sadly I don’t think my argument made a lot of headway. I keep feeling as though I’m talking at orthogonal angles to all the people around me.

Far too many people believe or hope that “good leadership” will get us out of the mess that we are currently in, but an even more pernicious belief is assuming that all politicians are criminal. There are many things wrong with our political system but rampant criminality is not one of them. Just look into the problems faced by Africa over the last 50 years and I think you’ll see that America has a lot of problems to worry about but rampant political criminality is not one of them.

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.

I drove into the Weisman Art Museum last night to listen to Harry Boyte and Don Shelby talk about re-inspiring citizenship in the 21st century. Boyte just released a book called the Citizen Solution about the growing movement to reconnect ourselves to politics and the communities we inhabit.

Shelby started things off by recapping an anecdote about his third grade teacher from the forward to the book. He speculated about Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address - especially the emphasis on the famous phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Did Lincoln emphasize the noun or the prepositions? Is it about the people or the functions of people?

Boyte stood up to tell us about his book and work. He’s seen all of the stories and complaints about the contemporary American loss of citizenship: Bellah, et.al. Habits of the Heart, Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the claims that we are being siloed into partisan and information niches (True Enough by Manjoo), that there has been a decline in mutual trust. (Some of those references are mine.) The Civic Health Index, produced by the National Conference on Citizenship showed an uptick in charitable giving after 9-11 but since then has noticed declines in trust in other people and charity.

Boyte believes there is another story to be told in parallel to the declension narrative. This is the story of self-organized citizens working together to create civic agency, working together to create something outside of, or beyond, predetermined solutions. It’s an emergent phenomenon of people coming together to accomplish something.

Amir Pinnix concluded with his story of becoming a citizen athlete. He spoke about growing up as an only child with his mother in Newark, New Jersey. When he moved to the University of Minnesota he felt that something was missing on campus so he and a friend started SCOPE, Student Committee on Public Engagement. He told us to never give up and never stop trying to improve the world. I particularly liked two quotes “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “you can’t lead folks unless you love folks, you can’t save folks unless you serve folks” (from Cornel West). Pinnix was an impressive speaker so I expect he’ll go far in the future. Google suggest this Star Tribune profile for further reading.

After this we broke into small group discussions at our tables. There were about 8 or 9 tables of 5-10 people. At the tables a staff member or student from the Humphrey Institute posed three question to us.

1. What responsibilities accompany being a citizen?
2. What do we believe is meant by the idea of grassroots politics?
3. What is your dream for the future of our country?

The discussion at my table focused on local community building, reaching out to our neighbors both in person and via technology, trying to create an environment in which we can be open to the possibilities inside ourselves and others.

I was impressed by a story from one my tablemates about her experience moving to a new community. She was initially wary of some of her neighbors asking question about her life. But she realized later that they were the local leaders of the community neighborhood and were asking so they could include her in the community. I thought this summed up the risk and fear that we all face when acting as a citizen? It’s hard to reveal ourselves to others and discouraging when our revelations are met with silence.

I didn’t get to pose my final question to the larger group because time ran out. But I wanted to ask Harry Boyte what if we act and nothing happens, then what?

My friend Eric invited me to come to an Isaiah meeting at Westwood Luthern church last night. He’s been working with the group for the past few years on a bunch of different issues, including affordable housing.

The meeting began with two introductory presentations about the problem of affordable housing. The message is pretty simple to state: the current median home price in Minnesota and the nation is significantly higher than the 30% of income that is the threshold for affordability. Anyone working in a service job - nurse, teacher, retail clerk, janitor, food services - makes, on average, less than needed to afford a home or, in some cases, an apartment rental. The only way for a contemporary family to continue to afford housing is for them to have dual incomes, and even then it’s not easy. No wonder so many people feel harried by work and the constant struggle to achieve that modern euphemism of work/life balance.

After the presentations we broke for 30-minutes of small-group discussion. I was at a table with a couple of city staffers, a woman who works for a local land trust, and two people from Isaiah.

I listened to the discussion and was struck by how it wondered in circles around the “complexity” of the problem. Someone would throw out a potential solution to the problem and then another person would say that it’s all more complicated than that. The person who proposed the solution would agree that it really is complicated and then move onto another thread in the discussion.

I tried to steer the question to ask what the barriers to action were. The responses were simple: people’s attitude, money, recalcitrant contractors, and lack of political will. Again the specter of “complexity” was raised.

As a sometimes complexity scholar I have to wonder whether this is really a true description of the problem or a subtle cop-out. To me the problem doesn’t seem that complex at all. The market fails to provide housing. Local governments can act to alleviate this by altering their building codes and requirements. We can all agree on the nature of the problem and the most likely solution. So what is the real problem here?

One suggestions was money. At a deeper level I agree, greed is always a problem in a market economy. But the requirements for affordable housing that set the model across the nation are not onerous. They’re only onerous to those who have been brainwashed to believe that all government action is bad. If you believe that the government can intervene for a collective benefit then the argument should be practically won.

So what stops us from acting?

I am a strong proponent of complexity. A lot of major problems and issues in the world are complex. But this isn’t one of them. It’s pretty simple and straightforward microeconomics. Give builders an incentive, through regulation, and they will build affordable housing. Builders are already regulated so this shouldn’t be hard. We just have to actually do it.

Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.

I went down to the Minneapolis Convention Center for day 1 of the National Conference on Media reform this afternoon. I skipped the Larry Lessig morning plenary and arrived at about 1 p.m. I wandered through the displays in the ballroom, ate half an over-priced burrito and then headed for the first afternoon panel session.

Panel 1 - Free Speech in the 21st Century

Josh Wolf kicked things off with his account of being imprisoned for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in 2006. Naturally he concluded his talk with a call to support a federal shield law protecting people who do journalism, not just people who are employed as journalists.

C. Edwin Baker made some short comments about First Amendment legal theory. The First Amendment only protects us from government interference with speech. If a corporation seeks to curtail free speech then you’re legally out of luck. Corporations also argue that the first amendment protects them from coercive legislation that might regulate their right to merge, etc. There are two clauses in the First Amendment: one protecting individual speech, the other protecting the institutions of the press.

Caroline Fredrickson spoke about the ACLU free speech campaigns. I was intrigued by the case of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act that is being promoted by Joe Lieberman. The bill attempts to prevent radical Muslim extremists from spreading their message in America. YouTube was asked to remove some videos as a result of this effort. Videos that violated the community terms of service were removed but others were not.

I was tempted to ask about the intersection/overlap between free speech and website terms of service. What is the case law on this issue? How easily can a website remove content that it deems inappropriate? Would this ever become a first amendment issue? If there are any constitutional lawyers who read this please feel free to leave a comment.

Panel 2 - Legislation 2.0: Self-Governance and Policy on the Open Internet

This panel was even better. Right in my personal bailiwick: open-government and all other open knowledge endeavors.

Micha Sifry kicked things off with a short movie showing a nifty use of Google Earth to display congressional earmarks for the defense industry. This was just the beginning of the cool stuff the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

Andre Banks began by describing his project Color of Change which was formed after Katrina to improve the presence of the progressive black population in government. He described the case of the Jena 6 as the perfect storm for online activism. From there Color of Change has made great strides to intervene in the criminal justice system on behalf of the black population.

Matt Stoller went next and talked about a blogging project that took place a year or two ago. Senator Dick Durbin agreed to participate in an online forum around a bill under consideration in Congress. I forget the topic of the bill but the upshot was that new internet tools could penetrate the conversation in Washington D.C. with enough work and persistence.

Russell Newman, a former staffer for Senator Durbin, recounted his experience with the public conversation about the bill from inside the sausage factory. He concluded by emphasizing the banality of policy making: it really is all about access, and a common sense evaluation of legitimacy.

Micha Sifry mentioned a few other projects of interest including qik for streaming video from a cell phone and Open Congress for tracking bills before Congress.

In the Q&A I asked about the sustainability of a project like Open Congress and the transfer of tools like it to the local level. The software that runs Open Congress is open source so it’s available for people to setup on a state or local level. I smell yet another potential project. Long-term sustainability is still up in the air.

One of the most interesting questions from the audience was about dividing resources between old and new institutions. Sifry responded that he would give most of the funding to new institutions. Liberals need to be more adventurous and stop giving to institutions because of sentimentality or past achievements. Others on the panel disagreed and discussion ensued.

One-on-one brainstorming

Instead of going to the Minnesota caucus I met with James O. in an ad-hoc session to discuss his ideas about communicating liberal ideas to the mainstream. He was full of very interesting proposals and thoughts, ranging from recasting the Superman story, creating a new form of found political poetry based on haiku, starting a new political party, and forming a new 24/7 news channel. It was a fun and interesting conversation. I showed him a couple of social software tools like delicious and Twitter. I wish him the best of luck.

Two ideas I really liked were doing a children’s book based on Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I replied that it would be great to make it into a stop motion animated video. I encouraged James to think more about cultural peer production as a method to get his ideas into the world. Perhaps we will work on it together.

I went to the University of MN today to see Mary Poovey speak in the last lecture of the IMPACTS series. Her book, A History of the Modern Fact, was one of the standout readings in my science, technology, and society class last spring.

Her topic tonight was “Reflections of a Worried Feminist, 30 years on.” She outlined the impact of feminist theory and activism on literary studies since the late 1970s and questioned how much benefit it has really had on the disciplines, especially the humanities.

She started with a personal anecdote about her first job at Yale. Soon after her arrival, a colleague pulled her aside and told her she needed to publish a book quickly if she had any hope of getting tenure. She panicked; she had never thought about publishing while she was a graduate student. Today that attitude would be naive. Graduate study has become very professionalized since the 1970s.

Her first project was a study of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the late 1970s and 1980s writing about women was a novel approach to scholarship. But throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the women’s studies movement, feminism, French literary theory, and liberal politics pushed gender into the center of literary studies. And by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural wars were in full swing.

I saw Donald Kaagn fire one of the major volleys in the PC wars at my freshman convocation in 1990. I remember thinking the speech was a bit of a shock to the system, what did we know about the cultural wars raging in the academy. Some background on the “Great Political Correctness Panic.”

According to Poovey the theory wave of the 1980s had two outlets during the next 15 years. One outlet was a broadening of literary scholarship that began to look critically at institutions. Her book on the modern fact was one of the outcomes of this wave and moved away from direct literary sources to examine broader cultural trends. The other outlet was an elaboration of the leftist critique of gender. Gender became the central ideological issue for some literary scholars. She cited Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick and Colonial Desire by Robert Young as two examples of this second outlet.

The two groups had different scholarly approaches and outlooks. The first group - the culturalists - tended to work on 18th and early 19th century topics and focus their literary arguments on broad changes to large categories, such as genre. The second group - the politicists (my terminology for both camps) - tended to focus on the later 19th century and the early 20th century when the problems of colonialism began to come to the fore and would often use literary scholarship to discover the telling allegory that confirmed their existing theoretic positions on the importance of gender.

During the same time period there has been a continual decline in the institutional power of the humanities within the university. The humanities don’t make money or bring in grants like the sciences and so they are marginalized by administrators.

Recently, Poovey has begun to question her belief in the transformative politics of the classroom. She and many others believed that the wave of ethnic and women’s studies departments started during the 1970s would have a liberalizing effect on student politics. If only we taught students how to think like the liberal professorate then the world would become a better place. But this didn’t happen. During the Q&A this was described by an audience member as the “narcissism of the classroom.” Today she has turned her teaching away from political topics to studies about the development of genre and the history of the discipline.

She concluded that we are faced with a choice between teaching as a political activity, which doesn’t seem effective and contributes to the marginalization of imaginative studies, or teaching as a disciplinary act.

In another anecdote she described a recent forum at NYU on the close reading requirement for undergraduate courses. Almost everyone agreed that close reading was useful. But near the end of the discussion one of the graduate students spoke up and said that everything that was said up to that point was useless to her as a radical lesbian teacher. The spirit of the discussion quickly chilled. Many of those who supported the political form of teaching were 20th century Americanists. During the Q&A this bias toward recent American studies seemed to be indicative of a general arrogance on the part of Americans seeing the world and literary studies through their own ideological blinders.

She said that the humanities are being squeezed between an antithetical administration that sees no value in them and a diffuse politics of identity that has no lasting effects. Politics in the classroom, a place that is already highly privileged, does not equal politics in Chinatown or Bed-Stuy. If we continue to politicize the classroom then the discipline of literary studies will lose its value.

For further reading and evidence I offer this commentary at Evolving Thoughts and two recent columns by Stanley Fish on French Theory in America.

I didn’t make it to the final day of Rethinking the University. But here are some concluding notes from day 2. I hope to have more to say about this topic during the upcoming days.

Panel - Surplus Value And The University In Crisis

Morgan Adamson - “Student debt and the finacialization of academic life” Since the early 1970s students have been at the center of experiments in financial life. This trend is in direct reaction to the student movements of the 1960s. with the goal of moving funding for education from state to student. In response to the student activism of the 1960s financial institutions and government created Sallie Mae in 1972. Today this quasi-private company gets an almost 37% profit from student loans. Since the 1970s the university has built an infrastructure to facilitate connections between students and lenders. Moreover, student debtors are exceptional because they can never get away from debt through bankruptcy.

Ellen Messer Davidow - “Situating higher education” Not much to add here. My notes are too sketchy because I was starting to get tired. Will academics ever stop reading papers in front of large audiences? Do these same people read their lectures to students in classrooms?

Elizabeth Kissling - Branding is what you do when there is no difference between your product and others. Kissling is from Eastern Washington University. A few years ago they introduced a new branding campaign - “Start something big and the big red box.” She showed the video to much laughter. She then showed a great editorial cartoon of a student talking to the big red box - “what are you”, “im a metaphor for all your dreams and expectations…”, “man my dreams suck ass.” At the same time as the marketing campaign was being unveiled the university was in protracted contract negotiations with faculty. So the end result of these years is more continget faculty, a costly branding campaign that is an embarrassment, and hiring practices that diminish the distinctiveness the branding campaign promoted.

Jeffrey Williams - “Debt Education” in Dissent 2006. 1982 avg debt $2000, 1992 avg debt $9200, 2002 $18900 from the National Council of Education Statistics, project on student debt. Academia justifies teaching as a progressive endeavor but the rise in student debt teaches different lessons. Two possible solutions might be free higher education which would take a little more than $30 billion to cover all current students or income contingent loans. What academics need to do about debt: develop new methods - ethnography, statistics (ah, methodology, the clarion cry of the academic) ; analyze; propose solutions. Williams concluded by comparing student debt to indentured servitude in early American history.

qa - frameworks: middle of a shift between episteme (Foucault), enveloped by global capital; enfolding of big science by military/industrial complex after ww2 - mentioned from Andrew Pickering; indebting is a political strategy; trilateral commission 1975 - governability, how to control citizen students

The conference continues on from yesterday. I got here late today, in the middle of the second morning session.

Roundtable - inside/outside: the university and the public intellectual

I arrived in time to hear Naomi Scheman make some interesting comments about objectivity as the creation of trust in expertise. But before my thoughts could rush through Galison, Daston, and Giddens her comments were over and it was time for Q&A. There was some interesting back and forth about open access and academic publishing. How are we going to get beyond the current publishing regimen?

Roundtable - labor in neoliberal university

Paula Rabinowitz - Addresses her experience as a department chair during the recent strikes and how it intersected with academic freedom. Academic freedom for research is largely unquestioned, but the current challenge to freedom is in the classroom. Three anecdotes from the strike: she told her dean that she would not cross the picket line so he told her to work from home, she compromised by working at an off-campus cafe — but in one of her classes she got a complaint from a student in her lecture class who staged a sit-in protesting the class being off-campus; then there was a creative writing professor who was challenged with an ethics complaint for teaching/reading literature about work during the strike; and finally a graduate student getting grief for teaching off-campus from another department chair.

Jess Sundin - union worker at UM for 9 years. Neoliberalism is savage capitalism = global capitalism. The tax payers fund plenty of private endeavors - 10 year coca-cola franchise, TCF bank stadium, 3m - guidant - medtronic make billions based on research from the UofM, food services run by aramark, sale of the university hospital, pharmacy benefits make money for self-insured university health plans. Maximizing the profit of the university by eliminating general college, top-3 research university. 2003 strike in the wake of massive layoffs, wage freeze, and health care cuts. 1. workers unwilling to accept terms 2. no way to compel work 3. union willing to fight. Lessons: timing of strike in October was too late, better to walk out at start of school year. 2007 walked out early meant there was less time to build coalitions on campus. 2003 afscme walked lines alone, only union on strike. 2007 coalition of unions. 2003 worked with community partners, this work was fearful to other unions in 2007. Universities will not work with labor, we need to go outside the structure of the university to make change.

Jeff Pilacinski - What will it take to win? We suffer from a failure to organize ourselves. What is the disconnect between academics and activists? Product for activists is also education and the divisions between groups are established by the state and the employer. And they only come together when there is a labor stoppage, between strikes there isn’t much working together. In 2007 more groups participated but still the strike was crushed. We must change how we fight together. What is the difference between on and off campus classes? The production of education continues despite the strike.

Eric Jensen - steward from the teamsters. Mobilizing the neoliberal ideology against the workers by the administration see health care, wage bargaining. In 2003 there was a massive assault by the state government against workers. The university administration complained at the time, by appealing that the university is a public good. It’s not the employers fault, something in the environment causes the problem. Examples from 2003 - claim by administration that the U has no ‘free’ health care, claim that copays are “behavioral modification” to keep people from abusing doctor visits despite the fact that Americans visit doctor’s less than other countries.

QA - product of university is credentialing; teaching during the strike - learning from the struggle. in class teach-ins. faculty governance is meaningless. ; professors conceive of their jobs as a calling, end of the goal is tenured position, a lifetime position — this makes it harder for professors to strike, academics have bought into meritocracy from the start ; most academics do not think of themselves as workers but academics are asked to work more and more today, we are willing to expand our work because we (academics) realize that their lifetime job is a rarity and is in jeopardy ; living wage avengers - trying to build coalitions on a regular basis ; need to defeat the idea of collegiality in faculty governance.

The after lunch panels and discussions.

Roundtable 3 - Valuing the Liberal Arts

Jigna Desai kicked things off with “no time for fancy titles” about her experience in Asian and Women’s studies. She made a few good points about knowledge production as a form of social change, the “driven to discover” U of Mn branding campaign that subscribes to the positivist goal of more creating more facts, and the fact that marketing campaigns always have pictures of diversity. She also observed that the College of Liberal Arts is the center of teaching activity at the University of MN but it is furthest from the the areas of massive financial support. c.f. the recent donation to the medical school by the Masons, and the massive Carlson School of Management where the first day of the conference took place.

Margarat Werry discussed “value, liberalism, the arts: arguments for a viable future.” Arts have historically been underfunded, counter to the central work of university. Arts are activities as opposed to the creation of knowledge. Performance art, especially, is ephemeral and difficult to commodify. The arts appears in the public relations materials for universities but this doesn’t result in increased budgets or salaries. There seems to be an ornamental logic at work, arts add to the capitalist university by showing prospective students, donors, and alumni that self-fashioning can happen in the corporate university. Arts = collective inquiry through doing/action. The arts may be at “vanguard of the neo-liberal university” through the employment paradigms of the creative industries: performance epitomizes the service, or “experience economy,” artists are the ultimate flexible labor, modulating themselves to the current conditions.

Jani Scandura made some general comments about the value of the humanities and mentioned a recent column by Stanley Fish Will the humanities save us?. I particularly liked her comment during the question period about the faculty no longer being a monolithic class or interest of its own. Nowadays the differences in salary between professors can be 5 to 10 times depending on discipline.

Panel 4 - Radical Re-framings

Isaac Kamolo and Eli Meyerhoff on “Creating Commons: divided governance, participatory management, and the enclosure of the university.” Meyerhoff began with a description of the commons as those things that are recognized as accessible to all members. He proposed three types of commons: non-capitalist, capitalist, and anti-capitalist. Enclosure of the commons occurs through the identification of limits to capital, destabilization of commons, struggles over restablization, and the failure of political recomposition. Kamolo applied these ideas to the university. In the 1910s the AAUP reached a bargain with the administration to leave professors alone to publish any work they wished in return for professors leaving the management of the university to the administrations. Today the mantra is participatory governance in which a huge number of committees are created to give the faculty and students the illusion of input into the processes of the university. Some responses to this problem might be to create deeper alliances between workers at the university. So instead of saying “we support university workers” during a strike we should say “we are university workers.” A lot of interesting material here to think about. I didn’t have a chance to ask about open courseware or other technological/electronic commons that are beginning to develop.

Tim ?? from the Counter-Cartographies Collective presented “Mapping the 21st century university.” What does it mean to be a great, 21c, global university? We need to critique corporatization and knowledge factory metaphors. Consider research triangle park in North Carolina, conceived as literally a knowledge factory. During the development of RTP in 1960s university administrators criticized the plan by claiming that corporations wanted universities to be prostitutes for research. The plan was to create a route from pure research, to applied knowledge, to factory floor. Look at the RTP website 4 years ago, focused upon maps, research, triangular geographies. Today the website is focused on people, a transition from factory to affective labor. Companies are now after relationship goals - getting updates at local universities, working over time with grad students. Patent incentives are less salient, they’ve never really made much money for universities and have functioned mostly as a management technique. The largest growth in physical office space on campus has been administrative. Consider Tony Waldrop, whose job description has changed from promoting individual scholarly activities (the knowledge factory model original to research triangle), to a new mission to support interdisciplinary activity and promote economic progress. New spaces are being created that allow collaboration and show, through photos or large open windows into conference rooms, collaboration in process. These photos of students working together end up in marketing brochures, raising enrollment, and pushing the whole edifice forward.

Jack Jackson concluded on “Imperial Knowledge” but I’m afraid my mind was beginning to wander. I did catch some intriguing comparisons between the perceptions of suicide bombers today as terrorists and the writings of Winston Churchill celebrating the sacrifices of potential sticky bombers during WW2.

I had to leave before the day conclude. The rest of the schedule can be seen online.

I rode into Minneapolis today on Metro Transit to attend the first day of a conference entitled “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, and Value.” The conference is a graduate student production that grew out of the AFSCME strike at the University of Minnesota last fall. The strike prompted a lot of questions about the various labor groups that make up the modern university: faculty, students, technicians, clerical workers, etc. so in the best academic tradition the grad students decided to host a conference on the topic and this is what they came up with. Overall the presentations were good.

Panel 1 - Labor in the “Knowledge Factory”

Randal Cohn started off the morning with a paper, “Artificial Discipline,” on the history of design education by listing three broad movements that have characterized design education since the start of the 20th century. Starting with the design history of Nikolaus Pevsner in Pioneers of the Modern Movement, then moving forward to the design method school exemplified by Herbert Simon and Christopher Alexander, and culminating in the design research school. The final part has fully institutionalized itself as a separate academic program, with the attendant research program and a distinct mode of inquiry. Cohn asked where these developments have left art/design education in the university. The art/design distinction naturalizes the scientific authority of design education over artistic inquiry and leaves us asking whether art has been left behind, and feminized, as the creation of beauty and wonder.

Lisa Disch asked us to “Rethink the place of politically committed academic labor in the corporate university.” She outlined the typical progressive academic labor curve started by committed students and faculty. Establish an academic program, then a get greater legitimacy through an official department, create academic journals around progressive topics, form professional associations, etc. But who does the work to get these programs started? Most of the time it is uncompensated labor that is work beyond the normal burdens of faculty and students. And yet this labor is often appropriated by management/administrations to promote the diversity of a school or some other marketing program. Furthermore, these new fields are institutionalized on unequal grounds from programs that are perceived to be financially useful to the university. There is a de facto separation between well-funded, private sectors of the university and underfunded, progressive/public sectors. So what should we do? We could abandon the uncompensated labor behind these causes as was done with the advanced feminist study program at the UofM or we can continue to raise questions from within the university.

Barb Winkler “Laboring in the Knowledge Factory” described her experiences at South Oregon University in the women’s studies department. In the 1970s and 1980s the problem was legitimizing women’s studies as a scholarly activity. Now the challenge from administrations is to be more profitable, and entrepreneurial. Over the last year she has been working on a program to show the value of women’s studies to the administration of her school by bringing community members together for a conference/review of women’s studies. Again this work is largely uncompensated by the administration and carried out during her sabbatical.

Frank Donoghue concluded the first panel with “Against Publication,” which I thought was the most interesting paper of the panel. According to Donoghue and drawing on the recent report of the MLA about tenure, the current academic publishing system has gone crazy. Since 1968 the number of institutions that have ranked publication as central for hiring and tenure decisions has doubled. The MLA links this to the labor shortages of the 1970s; publication was an easy metric to measure, seemingly objective, and easily incorporated into reports and tenure decisions. Over the same time period the university press has been in serious decline. The result is a discipline that only has the time to read monographs in order to evaluate hiring, and tenure. The abundance of publication encourages all of us to read far more narrowly than we would like. A third factor, the contraction of library budgets, may make the entire system unsustainable. We need to rethink what authorship means to us. I particularly enjoyed his quote from a university president around 1910 that said “scholarship [publication] was a professors private endeavor” and shouldn’t be managed/considered by the university.

Panel 2 - Fictions of Autonomy

Kathleen McConnell introduced us to “Advanced Fantasy, a brief history of free universities.” In 1971 there were approximately 110 free universities, on average they had been in existence for 2.5 years. A few years later most of them were gone. Lichtman (sp?) characterized the content of these schools as one-half “craft” work, one-quarter academic, and one-quarter “head trips.” They free universities appealed to students desire for self-discover and self-invention. The neoliberal university coopted many of the free university inventions, including some of the radical academic programs such as gay or women’s studies, but also the rhetoric of education as a form of self-discovery. Education was, and still is, conceived as a form of personal enlightenment. Left behind, or ignored, were the questions of public goods and community. These schools were reluctant to impose problems of communal activity on their students because it was all about freedom. If we replicate any of these experiments today we may have to change this aversion to imposition.

Chris Roberts talked about “The university as temple of truth and Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation.’” For Weber, writing at the end of WW1, the state was no longer adequate as a support for research or education, a new justification for science needed to be found. The keys to this new alignment were objective scholarship and political non-alignment. Weber didn’t want science to be sucked back into the disastrous passions that had led to World War 1. He called for an ascetic rejection of the outside world with the goal of keeping the lecture hall a sacred space, like a temple. The result has been the skepticism of modern scholarship that studies the beliefs of people outside the academy, and, at the same time, claims to not partake of those beliefs.

Eli Thokelson asked about the “Will to knowledge and the university.” Where did the university come from? How do we reconcile the contradictory visions of the university as a reproducer of hegemonic culture and the site of intense cultural protest? Today we have committed to a fantasy of the university as a repository of all human knowledge. Knowledge is reified and commodified in the knowledge economy, but it is also unfinishable. There are three categories of definition of the university: functional - the university commodifies knowledge, maintains social class; nominalist - the university is a heterogeneous collection of unrelated departments kept together only by its name as an institution; and idealist - a realization of universal knowledge.

Ingo Schmidt concluded the morning sessions with “Manufacturing Capital Fetishism” which was basically an attempt to understand why people continue to support neoliberalism when it has no benefit to them. Economics has become the new religion of the contemporary world. Self-fulfillment has been reconceptualized as economic fulfillment and consumption. Class has been unmade or discarded throughout the world. And the Chicago Boyz, in economics, have convinced university management that economic decisions are paramount.

Three years ago I wrote the following about my experience at Socrate’s Cafe here in Minnesota.

I stopped attending for three reasons: 1. every conversation started revolving around politics, which became tiring after the first month and 2. the conversations lacked philosophical sophistication (granted I studied philosophy in college so my standards might be higher than just anyone off the street)…

What became more and more frustrating to me was that each conversation seemed to take place in a vacuum, separated from the previous weeks’ discussion. No one seemed to be connecting the dots that showed how often we returned to politics or the tensions between individual and community. Other topics would recur and no one seemed to notice, except me. But I wasn’t able to convey my frustration at the time and gradually drifted away. There were some other interesting characters in the group. People well worth meeting.

Last night I went back for another taste and discovered that nothing much has changed. The majority of the conversations still center around politics and the level of political discussion still feels stifling.

The topic for last night’s conversation was “How should we choose our leaders?” Most of the comments expressed frustration with the current American political system, veering back and forth between casting poxes upon all houses and generic distrust of politicians.

I tried to steer the conversation to a critique of the media because it seemed like most of the complaints were based on a perceived lack of information or inability to filter the information. I asked if anyone had read the position papers posted on the candidates web sites, only 2 out of a dozen raised their hands. I myself haven’t read the candidates positions so I cast no stones on those who don’t have the time for the issue. But saying that we aren’t getting the information through the media is a different complaint than generic griping about politicians.

Another potentially interesting issue was raised later in the evening regarding how we choose leaders in areas outside of politics but the question quickly sank into oblivion. And this is what frustrates me about these fora. The core of the problems seem to sink beneath the froth way too quickly.

Choosing leaders in our businesses and our community is much closer to our daily experiences. Yet these are the discussions we studiously avoid, in favor of the abstractions of a mediated politics broadcast through media.

I’m reminded of another conversation I tried to start in an SI class. We were talking about the power of corporate CEOs over technology and information policy. I tried to argue that our “leaders” are as constrained as ourselves in what they can do in the world. Sometimes, and I suspect it’s more often than not, they are forced to make decisions based on circumstances instead of principle. That conversation, too, was met with blank stares.

And yet I keep trying to beat this concept of “leadership” back into the ground. Our leaders, if they ever really had any significant power, have lost much of it in the morass of complex systems that compose our modern world. All of it is based on trust, a la Anthony Giddens. We are left with our own spirit of experimentation. We need to accept the reality of not being an employee.

Questions thrown into the well: Has the public sphere ever been really been different, less politicized? How can I intervene to remove the politics?

Thomas Fridman's recent column on the lack of political imagination displayed by Bush after the 9/11 attacks pinpoints the reason why I dislike American politics as a whole. There are no major elected officials who display any vision on terrorism or on foreign affairs in general. Domestically the situation is not much better - in fact it's worse because the deciding line for issues is money.