Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy

I'm be fortunate to be part of the efforts to bring this wonderful show together. The National Institute for Civil Discourse and New Voice Strategies have brought this together! Learn more by visiting Divided We Fall TV. 

DIVIDED WE FALL: UNITY WITHOUT TRAGEDY brings ordinary citizens together to wrestle with the complex issues that divide our nation. Breaking out of partisan echo chambers to listen to one another, the participants - equal numbers of whom strongly approve and disapprove of President Donald Trump - explore what it means to be an American.

"He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.”

The Belleville-News Democrat, the local paper from the community in which James T. Hodgkinson lived, provides a perspective that I think we need to attend to in the midst of this highly publicized act of violence towards members of Congress and their staff with a gun.

The paper quotes a neighbor of Hodgkinson:

Aaron Meurer is a neighbor of the Hodgkinsons and said he noticed in the last two months James had been gone. The alleged shooter’s wife Suzanne told him her husband was travelling. 

“She said that he went on a trip. She wasn’t real specific,” said Meurer, unclear whether the couple had split up recently.”He’s been gone for the last two months, so I haven’t seen him around too often.” 

Meurer said he occasionally cut his neighbor’s grass to help out. He didn’t know the neighbors well, just socialized from the lawn, and said his neighbor would fire guns on his rural property, commonplace in the open area outside of Belleville. 

“I knew he was a Democrat, a pretty hardcore one. I know he wasn’t happy when Trump got elected but he seemed like a nice enough guy,” recalled Meurer, who said the couple lived across the street for about six years. 

“He seemed like he was sem-retired, he was home a lot. He used to garden a couple of years ago,”said Meurer, who runs his own trimming and removal service. “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” 

Meurer said during the campaign Hodgkinson had a lone Bernie Sanders sign near the road in his front yard. He thought that Hodgkinson had raised foster kids who had grown up. He also thought there were grandchildren who visited occasionally. 

“We were neighbors but we didn’t talk every day. When we saw them in the yard we’d say 'hi' and go on our way,” said Meurer. “He seemed like a normal guy, a regular guy.” 

Meurer suggested that perhaps “this Democratic rhetoric made him snap. I know he was a pretty hardcore Democrat.”

What is most concerning to me right now, aside from the vast availability of high capacity firearms and this being the 154th mass shooting in 165 days, is the rhetoric we use to speak of our fellow citizens and how we identify so strongly with/against political parties. As Meurer said, “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” Have we come to a point that we can't share our humanity with someone if they don't share our political affiliation? Disagree passionately. Debate policies. And consider that your view might not be as airtight as you maybe thought. When we demonize the other, we create a space that, with the wrong ingredients, makes members of Congress become targets rather than fellow citizens with differing views.

Art from my mother's college days hanging in my home office. 

The National Institute for Civil Discourse is leading the Revive Civility and Respect campaign and it seems we need to figure out how to engage one another about the significant issues and challenges we face--even when we disagree deeply. We can do this locally. Here in Kansas we organized Kitchen Table Conversations about what it means to be a citizens and a member of a community. A dear friend and colleague in Kentucky inspired me to do this. The point is, we need to be able to talk with neighbors, colleagues, and coworkers about the issues that matter to us. Retreating into enclaves or disconnecting all together can lead people to take detrimental and sometimes deadly action. 

I'm sure I share many of Hodkinsons' frustrations with the current administration, but I know that actions like today only hurt us, not help. After listening to the Speaker of the House and Minority Leader today speak about the day's events, I would love to see a bit of a reset in how we approach our national politics. A serious challenge is that we have made everything partisan. Republican Senate leadership left a seat vacant on the Supreme Court because of partisan politics. We are on the verge of having millions lose health coverage, in part, because the oft-demonized President Obama's name is connected with the otherwise conservative healthcare model we have in the United States. We need better ways to engage, disagree, and deliberate. 

People across the country and the world are watching and listening, taking in the rhetoric and being shaped by the discourse that immerses them. We can do better. We must. We need to have things to talk about with neighbors regardless of which box they marked at the last election.

Speech by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu on monuments to Confederate leaders

Seeing beyond categories #OpenYourWorld

It's an ad. They want to sell you beer. But it also speaks to the importance of engaging with others as people. We have differences. Sometimes rather significantly. But it helps to be able to recognize and respect the other as much as possible so we can work through those differences.

Bubbles

It has been nearly four years since I've done anything with this blog. In many regards, it feels like a vestige tail from a digital animal long gone. Yet, here it is. And it is particularly because it is something that feels out of place that I would like to start using this more.

Since I last did anything here, I've become more active via Facebook and Twitter. I've written academic articles and am working on a number of projects that get at the heart of the types of questions I want to explore professionally. I hope to outline some of that work here in the future. So this is a reintroduction of sorts. While I will continue to write, post, and engage through various media, it seems like a step back from the always immediate and ever-present cycle of news.

I realize that, in my own little way, I contribute to the constant process of refreshing of News Feeds and the like. It makes me think of one of my favorite lines from a writer that I should turn to more often than I have in recent years. This is the first of two points I want to make.

In an essay published in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice, Thomas Merton has an amazingly timely and insightful remark that I often think of when I'm finding myself consumed by "news," particularly the immediate and round-the-clock process we now see through uncritical eyes. Here is Merton's quote:

What was on TV? I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too. 

This leads to my second point: not only might we be well-served to step back a bit, but we would also seemingly benefit from speaking and engaging with others unlike ourselves. As we know from the "blue" and "red" feeds that shape our lives, and this great SNL skit below, we largely live in our own bubbles and (mostly) like it that way.

John Oliver has also done a great job pointing out, in more detail, our bubbles.

I argue that we can and should engage with those around us, particularly those who don't share our political views. A recent story in the Manhattan Mercury about my work spells this out a bit more. I made a similar point in a USA Today interview: we can't scapegoat or honestly clump everyone who doesn't agree with me into some category, as easy or as comforting as that might be.

“This racial stuff to me is BS and I’m tired of hearing it. I have it made because I’m a white male? I’m prejudiced? That shit is long ago." pic.twitter.com/s6X6imuKfQ

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) November 20, 2016

So what is to be done? Here are some interesting/thoughtful/provocative links to help us see beyond our bubbles.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html 
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump/#!
• http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/18/liberals-should-stop-ranting-and-seek-out-silent-trump-voters-like-me/

I hope to, with some regularity, write here rather than always posting and sharing via Twitter and Facebook. You're welcome and encouraged to follow here. You can sign up for RSS, but I will also make these posts available through other media. But as Merton helpfully reminds me, there is a benefit to stepping back. I am easily consumed by information, but I'm not always sure it's helpful. I'm going to try to do my part make sense of our work, not only through the algorithm Facebook thinks I want but through a more critical perspective and one that is open to others.

Citizens or Consumers?

Writing about health care reform, Paul Krugman poses a very important question: "How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as 'consumers'?" It's a good question. Taking the time to read Krugman's article is well worth the few minutes in order to better understand some of the changes being suggested by Republicans. Medicare is at the heart of the matter and it has a profound way of shaping our next (current?) election cycle. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly put together a video stressing the impact of such a move away from Medicare as we know it to a voucher system that will somehow work with private insurance.



But stepping back from some of the political positioning of the Democrats and Republicans, how does language of the market shape our democracy? Lizabeth Cohen studied 20th Century America and classified it as a "Consumers' Republic." When did we shift our thinking to apply the consumer model to everything?

 

The book that really made me think about the use of language and how we think about citizens was Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services. It made concrete what I was thinking at the time. I felt--and feel--strongly that we're transforming the role and relationship of government with citizens. But more than that, we're changing the ways that citizens think of themselves, how they act and engage in the world. If we wholehearted adopt market language, what changes occur? Are we more than we buy? One of the challenges we face in the United States is the dramatic shift away from active citizenship to a model that makes us more like Amazon. I love the ease and ability of order books or (nearly) anything else on their website, but when we make government replicate that model we radically alter institutions.

But rather than talk about abstract "government," we can see how a consumer model changes many other institutions as well. Cooperative Extension is everywhere. But in recent decades and years, there has been a strong push to replicate the Amazon (or insert some other amazing one-click shopping type of website here). Where are the relationships between Extension educators and community members? Norman Rockwell's depiction of the County Agent has been replaced by a digitized button.

This..

...or this?

Fundamentally, we must ask: What kind of people do we want to be? The challenge is that we must also ask what kind of people we want to be, together. Market language and thinking gives each individual a "vote" but only to the degree that their decision-making based on purchases turns citizens into an aggregate that does little to recognize the human person and his or her ability to be a relational being. But if we embrace this notion that we're simply consumers, we are little more than data. I don't want to be data. I am a citizen.

Rhetoric and Reality: What is a University?

I write this with a sense of sadness and hope. In recent days, the decision has been made by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) to close the Department of Education. The decision was made based on the future prospects of the Department of Education being a preeminent faculty and program. In short, because of an institutional mission focused on technical, scientific research, the contribution of education is marginal to CALS desire to be the world's greatest college of agriculture. I do not argue that the Department of Education's existence within CALS in unique, but I do want to challenge the assumptions made about the scholarship and contribution of education to CALS, Cornell, and higher education. We find ourselves in this most difficult situation because of a lack of understanding -- or a devaluing -- of education's role in shaping how and what we know. We, as members of the education community, are complicit in this confusion and thus must speak out and engage others to do all that is possible to call attention to education's role in our institutions and world. 


We don't have to look very far to see the disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Here at Cornell, we are doing a phenomenally poor job at recognizing the disconnect. Some striking examples of this failure to recognize the role of education have emerged in the days following the announcement of the Department of Education closing. The first deals with the recent gift of $80 million to support sustainability research and what we claim we're doing with this tremendous gift and opportunity. The second deals with the need for investment and support of the humanities. 


I have noted the contradictions and omissions in this work previously, but I feel the need to stress that education has a central role as part of this initiative. The exclusion of educators and scholars of education isn't something new. It has been this way. But what I want to stress is that now is a time when the Cornell community should truly reflect on what it is we claim to be doing and what actually occurs. As Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp said, 

"Achieving a sustainable world will require increased awareness, policy changes and an inclusive approach....And Cornell is ideally positioned to lead the current discussion and help shape the next generation of leaders."

Cornell is an ideal institution if we understand ourselves as such. There are academic silos that are so deeply entrenched in this institution that we can't even recognize that interdisciplinary means more than engineers speaking with chemists. Krupp continued,

"Great universities like Cornell need to speak up about global warming. There's an ethical dimension here....There's also the opportunity for Cornell to be involved in a way unique in American universities -- to create the examples and the constituents that make policy."

We do need to speak up about global warming, but as long as we try to deal with ethical issues as if they were technical issues, we'll continue to lament larger society for not "getting it" when we as a land grant institution have only done part of the work we are charged to do. We should be more than a factory creating information. However, what we're doing is feeding the "overapplication of scientific rationality to public policy making"(Frank Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment (Durham: Duke, 2000), p. ix). We don't take seriously that non-experts have something to say about an issue like sustainability. It doesn't show up in anything that we say, but Cornell continues to operate with the deficit model as a starting point. We have the knowledge and skills. We need to fix these problems. The way we do that is through scientific research. All of these statements are true, but I would amend them. I would say, 

"We have the knowledge and skills to contribute meaningfully to the work but not all. We need to fix these problems collaboratively with others, especially those who are impacted by decisions. The way we do that is through scientific research as part of a larger conception of scholarship that takes seriously local knowledge and the multiple forms of research within the Academy."

This is what I would like us to be saying and doing. This requires much more conversation and collaboration than we have seen or experienced. We may continually be building new science buildings for researchers to cross departmental boundaries, but if those scientists don't even know that there is a Department of Education, then we've failed as a community of scholars. We are a university, a "whole." But do we act like it. Gregory A. Petsko has captured this in an open letter to the president of SUNY Albany. To quote Petsko: 

I know one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything. Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I hope I've just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I'm willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word 'university' derives from the Latin 'universitas', meaning 'the whole'. You can't be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.

This leads me to the second point that I found ironic in recent days. President Skorton, in his State of the University Address on October 29, has called for the hiring of new faculty members humanities. The article in the Cornell Chronicle notes that,

"Far from being irrelevant in the digital age, the arts and humanities not only teach the basic skills of critical and contextual thinking, communication and ethics but also have value as disciplines of research and critical analysis in their own right. And on a fundamental level, they teach us what it means to be human, he said." 

This comment is something I wholeheartedly agree with, and I would argue that much of what takes places within the field of education asks these deeply important questions about what it means to be a person in today's world. I would argue that the college and university administration have failed in understanding what it is that happens within the Department of Education. Yes, there are aspects of technical training with the department, but so much more than that takes place. Read through the description of the Adult and Extension Education program here at Cornell. Read it. This isn't technical training, and this is simply one program among others that will continue to lose support as the department moves toward closure. I believe that if others actually knew what we think about and do, they wouldn't be closing it down. Education is much more than simply teacher preparation (and by no means am I demeaning teacher education). What I mean to say is that education engages questions about what it means to be a citizen in communities, states, or the world. There is serious engagement with some of the most important questions about who we are and how we might live with one another in the future taking place within classes that will be cut from the curriculum without much concern.


To close, I want to paraphrase a new friend and colleague that I would never have met had it not been for an education course. In response to the frustration of the call for support for the humanities while killing education he wrote, 

"we need to redefine the scope of education to include the values and ideals that the president mentioned in defining liberal arts and humanities. it's the soul of the university --it's how we transform an elitist institution into something relevant to people across the state and the world. it's also how we connect every school, college and department in cornell." 

Exactly. Let us begin that work. We're meeting tonight with those who are wanting to be involved in the conversation about the future of education here at Cornell. We're meeting tonight at 5:00pm in 231 Warren Hall. Please come and invite others. You can find out more information at http://cornelleducation.info. If you're not able to make it tonight, we're going to begin a community conversation about the future of education at Cornell on Tuesday evening at 5:00pm in 360 Warren Hall. The image below is the flyer we're passing around with the hope that we might have a truly inclusive conservation about education. With this in mind, please encourage and invite those outside of the field of education to participate. We want and need many voices. For too long we've all stayed insular in our work. We can no longer afford to do so. 

Click to enlarge.

We are a truly great university. Let us enliven the spirit of collegiality and collaboration. Let us be a "whole" in a way that draws from our diverse strengths to contribute to the work addressing some of the most pressing problems facing humanity and our time. If we want to be one of the best universities in the world, let us prove it through the meaningful work that changes the world for the better by being contributors to that work rather than dominating it because we feel we have the answers and others simply need to listen to us. Problems such as sustainability are multifaceted. They aren't only technical. There are political, social, and ethical dimensions that must be considered. We all need to be part of this work, including those who study education.

Obama and Othering

The many Obamas.

There is a high level of anger and frustration in the United States these days and many reasons to feel so. Employment still remains a high concern for many citizens and opportunities continue to disappear. The hope of many cities to return to glory days isn't little more that a wishful dream. With the continual departure of jobs to cheaper factories and cheaper labor costs, once jobs disappear it is unlikely they will return. When economic times get tough, the once stable and manageable relationships among citizens become a little bit less so.

One of the "Faces" of the Tea Party.

It almost seems like an afterthought, but there has been tremendous change during the last couple years: the election of Obama as president, a very large domestic policy shift with equally divisive laws enacted, and an undercurrent that things are changing. The ability of someone like Glenn Beck to become an overnight leader highlights the feeling that many Americans have about the changes taking place. The Tea Party Movement has become a force to be reckoned with, both for those on the left and right of politics. What we know about this movement is that it is composed of predominantly white, male, married, over 45, and Republican folks. What has emerged as an "angry" group of citizens wanting to reclaim and take back their  country highlights the sense of normalcy and identity for citizens who long for yesteryear. However, these fond memories are amnesic because we've been growing further and further apart for quite a while. MSNBC has done a really interesting photoblog of some of the faces of the Tea Party.

Some of the most striking examples of this distance and identification of the "other" has been growing considerably just in the last few years, especially as Obama emerged as a candidate and then when he was elected to office. Just today, there are stories about Obama being portrayed a a terrorist, gangster, Mexican bandit, and as a gay man. It has only recently been taken down. It had the title, "Vote DemocRAT." Nice. Billboards, the American way to advertise, have highlighted the feelings across the country by those who see Obama as something quite distinct from themselves. You know, black. 

So I'm left to wonder: what would make everything all right for those who oppose everything going on today with regards to Democratic control, legislation, and the highest office held by none other than Barack Obama?