Considering Martin Luther King and George Orwell together

It has been 30 years since Ronald Reagan signed the legislation designating today and each third Monday of  January Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today is the anniversary of George Orwell's 1950 death, marked this year by the first-ever George Orwell Day.

Orwell and King are rarely considered together. Their careers as writers and activists barely overlapped; I know of no instance where King referenced Orwell's writing.  Orwell's great concern was totalitarianism, King's was racial discrimination.  Even their commemoration days point in different directions, King's (at the request of his family, friends, and political allies) indicating his birth, Orwell's (at the wishes of his estate and publisher) marking his death.

But in three areas their work overlapped.  First, both Orwell and King identified imperialism as a pursuit that corrupted the globe and the nation.  Orwell's term as an imperial policeman in Burma right out of college made him a representative of the British crown and enforcer of British law on the ground. Those years marked his thinking about law and justice, which might seem good in the abstract or the homeland, but which  came up wanting when applied in strange places and real settings.

 King's attention to imperialism came at the end of his life, not the beginning.  But like Orwell, King's recognition of the gap between the abstract good of domestic law, and the injustice of its application overseas, led him to argue that the injustices of a nation's extra-territorial actions corrupts domestic law as well.

Second, both Orwell and King doubted the ability of the state to police itself.  Orwell's attention focused on the nation-state as the location of injustice.  King's attention focused more intently on state and local government.  But both saw that in the 20th century the state both threatened and protected people.  The challenge was to determine how to limit the threat by expanding the areas in which people could speak and act freely.

Here is the third overlap between Orwell and King.  Though today the guardians of King's memory focus on his leadership of marches and his influence on legislation, and most Americans know Orwell from his fiction, both Orwell and King saw plain non-fiction speech as the indispensable tool of freedom.

Today I re-read Orwell's greatest essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946) followed by King's greatest essay, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963). Read one after the other these works make a pair, "Letter" a real-world application of "Politics."  In "Politics", for example, Orwell argues that "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity."  King opens his letter with an attack on the insincerity of clergymen who called the protests in Birmingham "unwise and untimely"  thus blaming protesters for the unjust application of the law in Birmingham. Orwell calls for clear, direct, brief, unflowered language. King obliges: "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here." Or, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Or this: "Anyone who lives inside the United States cannot be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

 Orwell concludes his essay by arguing that "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."  King, after a tightly reasoned opening, lets loose with example after example of how the political use of one word, "wait", covers up generations of murder and lies:

" But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

American political rhetoric, the inaugural address notwithstanding, needs to heed Orwell's advice and King's examples.  Today's rhetoric, like that in 1946 and 1963 is detached from reality, so general as to be incomprehensible, so rigid as to be totalitarian.  Orwell and King knew that such rhetoric was evidence of a debased society.  But they also demonstrated that intent efforts to speak truth, describe reality, and be humble before the challenge of communicating were essential if humans were to live good lives.

The best books I didn't finish in 2012, and what they say about how I ought to live

It has been six weeks since I posted to this blog.  I didn't intend to stop writing; this wasn't some sort of purposeful holiday pause.  I just found myself without anything much to say.

This is a sign in part of my feeling stymied and overwhelmed by work, which is the topic of much of my writing.  Enrollment management is a wonderful but tough business, especially in a time where demographics and economics and culture are all pointing to challenging times for small private institutions of higher education.  I'm confident that I haven't had an interesting thing to say about enrollment management for the past 6 weeks.

I'm wrangling Westminster's strategic planning process as the chair of the strategic planning steering committee.  We are in an early phase--drafting a vision narrative, kicking off a SWOT analysis, seeking feedback.  And because we are in an early phase we are in a time where silence makes more sense than essays do.

So in a holiday season (with lots of flu at our house), rather than write, I've been reading.  There are two types of readers--people who finish books and people who start them.  I start lots of books--many more than I finish.  Here is a list of stuff that I read but didn't finish in 2012; clustered by genre or topic, and then a few self-criticisms in closing.

Poetry
There are poets whose language is simply put but whose poems give me a feeling of being in the presence of something powerful and unspeakable.  In this, they are something like worship.  This year I've been reading three: Zbigniew Herbert, Mary Oliver, and Kay Ryan.

Religion
There is a type of book about religion that is at the confluence of community, ethics, and theology.  Some of the writing that sits in this location is liturgical, some of it is made up of essays, and some is personal narrative with religious overtones.  I'm currently reading these books: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability, Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, Shane Claiborne (and Wilson-Hartgrove), Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, Eric Elnes, The Phoenix Affirmations.

Civic Life
I'm working my way through these books about civic life.  (By civic life I mean that these are books about the civitas.  They touch frequently on politics, but it is not politics but the quality of public life in a particular place that is at the heart of their concerns.) Mary Parker Follet, The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government, Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership, James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, and Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.


What does this list mean?  Clearly there are gaps between what is in my head and what is in my life. My intellectual interests are in local, small-scale responses to issues, especially those that draw on and build local associations, be they civic, cultural, or religious.  And just as clearly, if you looked at my life you probably wouldn't notice that fact.  I commute 70 miles round trip each day to work. I feel estranged from my own religious congregation (and perhaps religion) but can't find a new one.  My neighbors and co-workers think I'm on the political left; but if American conservatism had any Burke left in it I would be a conservative, or if there was a green libertarianism, that is where I would be.

What does your list of unfinished books say about you?

Your vote is not your voice

The National Campus Voter Registration Project is an effort of 50 leading higher education organizations to increase voter registration and turnout among college students. Its slogan? Your Vote, Your Voice.

While it is a lovely slogan, it is exactly not true that "your voice is your vote."  Your voice is your voice.  Your vote is something else.

Here is what I mean.  A voice is communicative.  It expresses emotion, nuance, depth, and meaning.  It can be used to build relationships, to extend discussions, and to solve problems. In a democracy, these things are hallmarks of civic engagement.

A vote is mute, in three ways.  First, it is mute in its casting.  The voting hall is politically silent--no signs, no speeches, no posters.  And the voting booth is as well, since the main characteristic of the vote in the United States is secrecy--"the secret ballot."

Second, it is mute in its impact.  Unless a voter decides to declare his or her vote, it is unknown.  And even if it is known, a vote in itself is powerless.  Voting isn't a race, with the first candidate past a certain number of votes declared the winner.  And in our system, even tightly contested elections are almost never determined by a single vote, and when they are, no one knows whose vote.

Third, a vote hides meaning.  The process of voting for a candidate is one of condensing a whole range of a voter's views, feelings, priorities, interests, and values into a single act that conveys none of them.  Think about it this way.  Does knowing that a person voted for a particular candidate help you know that person more deeply?  Of course not, since what matters in knowing a person is not who they voted for, but why.  Living in a state like Utah, I am confident that the vast majority of my neighbors will be voting for Mitt Romney.  That tells me nothing about them, and does nothing to help us work together for good.

None of this is to say that voting is bad, or useless.  Voting is a ritual, its silence is something that should be applauded, and the sense of duty that often drives it is a valuable thing in a democracy. And the overall uncertainty about the future that is bound up in the vote--uncertainty about the outcome of the election and its impact--is an important reminder of how modest we should be about predicting the future.

Nor is it to say that a voice is always a good thing.  One need only recall all of the pointless "debate" and misleading rhetoric to know that. But only if after one takes the mute act of voting, one goes into public and private venues and explains that vote, does the vote do something for civil society.  And at that point, it does so because of the voice, not the vote.

The tension between the goals of families and the goals of colleges

A couple of weeks ago,  30 Latina 15-year olds and their parents came to Westminster for a days-worth of workshops about getting to and succeeding in college. (The event was co-sponsored by El Observador, the spanish-language publication of the Deseret News. Thanks to them for encouraging college attendance.)

It fell to me to welcome the parents, and to say a few words about the value of a college education, particularly a college education at Westminster. I told them about how connection was at the heart of learning, and how Westminster is built to foster those connections.  And I told the stories of my two daughters, both of whom have made some connections at Westminster that have helped them be better students and better people.  I talked about how Amelia had left Pepperdine because, for all its beauty and quality, she didn't fit there, and how she has found something of a place at Westminster with the  women's lacrosse team.  I showed them her picture from Facebook and told them about how she's spending the summer working in an orphanage in Huehuetenango, Guatemala.  And I shared Lucy's picture as well, surrounded by the friends she has made from China while living on campus, and about her dream to create a major that combines Political Science and Cognitive Neuroscience and her hope to become a diplomat.

I could see in the response of the parents in the audience that they hoped for similar experiences for their daughters, because they loved their daughters, and because access to those experiences would improve the prospects for their families.  This point bears making more clearly.  As the demographics of college students changes; as there are more students of color, and more first-generation students, a college degree is more important not just for students but for their families as well.

In telling the stories about my daughters I was torn. As a father I felt proud. As an administrator I felt also the tension between what higher education thinks is important and what we, as parents, think is essential.  The tension is, in fact, built into the idea of connection.  For it is connection that both makes learning possible and makes families work.  But colleges have failed to take advantage of this continuity.  They have preferred instead to try to weaken one connection (to the family) and replace it with another (to a future that grows out of a college education and relies on the connections of the college, not the family, to succeed).

The idea of weakening one connection and strengthening another has, of course, long been part of the purpose of higher ed.  It became particularly strong in the second half of the 20th century, and is thus the main mode of thought among the people who were socialized during that time in those places.  Many of those people lead colleges today. It is behind the effort to build community in residence halls, to talk about campuses as communities, and to suggest to parents (as campuses sometimes do) that their students will do things at college that they don't want to know about.

It is true, though, that the future promised by the connections of colleges is less certain today than in several generations. It is also true that as college costs rise, more parents will be paying for their children's educations for a longer time than ever before. And so the shift from family networks to college networks, that seemed so rational not long ago, seems more suspect to students and parents than it once did.  Colleges have been slow to realize that, and so we have done less well than we ought at keeping families strong while expanding the opportunities available to families because of the education of their children.

As with the subjects of many posts, I don't know how to resolve these tensions.  I suspect that some of the resolution will be natural, as an increasing number of students will live at home while in school (and in the years after), and figure out one by one how to balance family ties and college ties. Some of it will be attitudinal, as colleges change the way they talk about transitions into college.  (It need not be the case that a move to college means a move away from family ties, or that we should be sanguine about the notion that students will behave worse with classmates than they do with families, or that the only phrase in our lexicon about parents is "helicopter parents"). Some of it will be conceptual, as we stop drawing distinctions between family and college networks. And some of it will be opportunistic, as colleges understand that working with families from the time their children are young is the best way to ensure that those children will be able to afford, attend, and graduate from that college.

Can "community," not curriculum, be higher ed's best response to poverty?

It is a given among the policy classes that higher education is essential for economic improvement because people with college degrees earn more money than those without.  This view, while true as far as it goes, turns discussion of the value of higher education in two directions--cost and curriculum. So if a degree can be completed inexpensively, and in a field where there are employment opportunities, higher ed will have done its job by preparing students for economic well-being.

Ross Douthat's recent review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart makes a point that higher education leaders ought to consider in light of our increasing obligation to be engines of economic well-being.  Douthat writes that:

"Even acknowledging all the challenges (globalization, the decline of manufacturing, mass low-skilled immigration) that have beset blue collar America over the last thirty years, it is still the case that if you marry the mother or father of your children, take work when you can find it and take pride in what you do, attend church and participate as much as possible in the life of your community, and strive to conduct yourself with honesty and integrity, you are very likely to not only escape material poverty, but more importantly to find happiness in life."

Traditionally, colleges and universities have concerned themselves with some of the behaviors that Douthat cites above. But that attention has diminished over time, particularly as it has to do with making long-term commitments, finding fulfillment in work, attending church, and foregrounding values like honesty and integrity.  That higher ed should care about these things ought to be obvious from our roots in helping students to become something.  And it should be assumed in higher education's commitment to civic engagement.  But if we needed any additional impulse to favor these behaviors, let it be that they also contribute to economic well-being.  And inasmuch as the programs that attend to these concerns reside in the co-curriculum, then it is the co-curriculum--the site of community-building on most campuses--that deserves as much attention as the curriculum.

The virtue of holding something back

American culture today (and throughout much of its history) has made a virtue of holding nothing back. Occasionally this is an act of democracy, for keeping secret what shouldn't be is a bad thing, and keeping power in the hands of a few rather than sharing it broadly is another.

But by holding nothing back, I am talking about a cultural tendency to extravaganza, extremism, and violence; to an economic tendency to spend as much as possible, to keep interest rates near zero, to seek growth for growth's sake; to a political tendency to let the winner take all, to propose grandiose responses, to police much of the world; to a personal tendency to want more, to work more, to imagine that doing more is the answer to any challenge.

When the economy is poor, or the future uncertain, this holding nothing back is tinged with desperation, as if throwing everything we have at it must certainly be the solution to the crisis before us.  It makes our culture mean; not solely in the sense of being unkind (though that is certainly the case when a person says whatever is on their mind about an opponent), but also in the sense of being sordid or crass.

For an illustration of what I mean, go see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Get there early to watch the previews. You will see trailers for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, John Carter, and Battleship, among others.  These are all essentially the same movie, with only variations in locale, accent, and the faces of the bad guys accounting for their different names.  In each, some big organization or network hatches an evil conspiracy to destroy the world.  The people you would expect to stop this sort of conspiracy are either involved or so incompetent that a small band of fighters are the only ones who can stop it.  Fortunately the fighters are strong, violent, smart, and possessed of massive destructive capacities (or able to steal them), and so in the end the good guys win by holding nothing back.  No act of violence, no trickery, no weapon is too much.  When, in Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson uses a howitzer to save Holmes' life by toppling a light tower which guards an arsenal built to plunge the world into total war, you know that you long ago escaped the world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and landed right in America, 2011.

So, now, in praise of holding something back.  Whatever you think of Christianity today, the origin story, celebrated during the same season as the release of blockbuster action films, is all about holding something back.  God holds back, placing the hopes and fears of all the years, in an infant born in modest circumstances to modest people, in a backwater town in a backwater portion of the Roman empire.  The story of Jesus' life is similarly modest,  with his service and teachings being directed at the lowly, and with him regularly reticent when asked about his power and purpose.  It is telling that the temptations Jesus overcomes are of wanting it all--his immediate desired gratified, control of all earthly power and finally the power of God. He resists them by holding back what he already knows about himself--that he is god.

The story of Buddha is similarly modest.  He could not become enlightened as an extremist, be it one of wealth or one of asceticism. But his modesty and endurance ultimately led him to awaken, after which modesty remained the hallmark of his preaching and his community of followers. No great buildings for him, no self-aggrandizement (in fact, no self at all).  Distrust of dogma and solutions.  Just consistency, temperance, and the openness to learning that comes from humility.

We can learn from these stories that holding something back is at the basis of human obligation one to another.  To hold something back is to not say the thing that is true but hurtful, it is to ponder things in your heart, it is to have enough in reserve (be it  money, or time, or energy, or love) to be able to feed a person unexpectedly hungry, to welcome strangers, to adjust course in light of new insights, to give a bit more when it is needed, to take less than is offered, to demand less than you might wish, to learn rather than simply to know.

Holding something back, (call it what you will--modesty, temperance, prudence, humility, moderation) is a personal virtue.  It seems to be an imperative if someone wishes to live satisfied and get to know the transcendent better.  It is an educational virtue, for it puts learning not certainty at the heart of schooling.  And it is also a civic virtue, lying at the center of people's ability to govern themselves, to solve problems, to imagine a community built on something more than geography, wealth, and power, to trust others.

We could use more of holding back.

Great speeches: The generosity of Terry Tempest Williams

I've heard four great speeches in the past two weeks--three of them at the  Federation of State Humanities Council conference that concluded this evening. The speech and its classroom cognate the lecture, have settled into a period of disrepute, and rightly so.  Speeches are often given without regard to the audience, and without concern for the learning of the people present.  At many events they are simply an opportunity for someone who is rightly famous for something else to remind us why they are not famous for speaking. (Think, for example, of every awards ceremony you have ever seen on television.)

But done well, a speech is powerful.  More than many "active learning" pedagogies, speeches have the power to convey an emotion that advances an argument.  The activist and writer Terry Tempest Williams does this better than most, using generosity to buttress her view that the only viable future is one based on empathy between humans, other species, and the planet.

Generosity shaped her Federation speech in three ways.  First, while her speech included portions of stories she has told many times before, it was clearly assembled during the first day of the conference, and reflected the discussions, concerns, and hopes of the conference.  This meant the speech was ragged, but it also demonstrated Williams' humility and concern for the well-being of the event and its attendees.  Second, she made sure to acknowledge and thank more than a dozen members of the conference audience with whom she had spoken briefly.  The thanks did not come at the beginning, as they do in the ritualized awards ceremony  speech.  Instead they were sprinkled throughout the speech, and used as supporting evidence for her thesis that active citizens can influence the direction of society for good.  Third, she gave a gift to each member of the audience--a lily bulb to symbolize that love for living things could return humans to right relationships with nature and each other.

I've met Williams several times (she is a Utahn).  Generosity is essential to her nature.  And so the gestures in her speech, which might seem disingenuous coming from other speakers, are natural coming from her.

Generosity is particularly powerful against the dogmatic friends and foes of environmentalism.  It reminds supporters that dogmatic positions are inhumane because they lack generosity.  And it demonstrates to dogmatic opponents that environmentalists can love people as much as they love the land. In both of these acts Williams' generosity makes deeper engagement possible. Put another way, small acts make a passive genre--the speech--into a spur to activity and learning.

Can civic engagement build community?

For years my goal as an educator has been to help students become civically engaged.  It is easy to measure that engagement. If people do something--serve, run for office, protest, vote, start a non-profit, sit on a board, write to the editor, blog, tweet--to help the civic realm, then they are civically engaged.  And that civic engagement would ultimately build community.

In thinking like this, I was not alone.  The bible of the civic engagement movement--Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community--is built around the notion that a decline in civic behaviors leads to a decline in public life.  And the principal product (at least in higher education) of this view--the civic engagement center--measures its success by the number of volunteers, hours donated,  and service learning classes.  The goal of these sorts of organizations, then, is to get programs set up that lead students, citizens, and neighbors to do civic acts, and by so doing them, build community.

I have felt uncomfortable about this assumption--that doing is the goal of civic engagement--for a while.  And my discomfort has grown in the past month as I have had the opportunity to keynote two conferences about civic engagement.  In each conference--the annual Utah Chapter of the American Planning Association meeting, and the Utah State Board of Education's Social Studies and Civic Education in Utah's Schools event--I ended up arguing that the important thing is not doing (though doing is essential) but developing what William James called "the civic temper." It is the civic temper that leads to community.

The phrase comes from James' essay The Moral Equivalent of War in which he argues that a civilized society needs to eschew war but create something like military service to develop in its citizens "toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible...strenuous honor and disinterestedness;" the hallmarks of the civic temper.

According to Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, James was inspired by the way that citizens of San Francisco responded to the earthquake and fire of 1906.  Without being governed, driven, or told what to do, they began to feed each other, care for the sick, and build a community from the rubble of the city.  Their actions, inspired by a sense of empathy, love, and sacrifice, were thwarted by the army and the city government, which moved in and destroyed their efforts in favor of a centralized response to disaster.

That story requires us to ask whether centralized, planned programs can create civic temper, or whether they are more likely to create compliance. (This concern is echoed in Barry Schwartz' Practical Wisdom which argues that rules and incentives--the main tools in the quiver of planned programs--limit the wisdom of people who are driven by them.)

Two of the leading activists and thinkers of the 20th century--Jane Addams and Dorothy Day--suggested that the goal of civic efforts should be to develop civic tempers, not build programs designed to get people to behave civically.  Addams' Hull House and Day's Catholic Worker movement were both built around hospitality, communal work, and the development of deep connections between people who have deeply different backgrounds but profoundly similar needs.

Out of the stories of Addams and Day, a set of priorities emerge, which I suspect lead to the creation of a civic temper, and thus to community.  They are:

• reliance on the moral will of people, not on rules and incentives
• aspiring to lead lives of common responsibility and mutual trust, not lives based around doing certain tasks ("service" for example)
• the development of formal organizations, not permanent organizations
• a focus on replicable outcomes, not scalable inputs.  In other words, there are many local ways to get to the goal of community. 
• Prefer the concrete over the abstract, and the story over "data"
• And, finally, seek for love (or what Addams called "ardor"), over anger

All of these virtues do two things--they help people avoid becoming settled in a program or a rigid approach to public life.  And all of them contribute to a sense of community among human beings. Let me close by saying a final word about love.  In their day-to-day lives people speak about love all the time--of place, of people, of jobs, of a higher power.  It is, in key ways, essential for community.

None of this is to say that doing is useless.  But doing is most effective when it both aims towards and comes from the civic temper.

The sad future of the Provo Tabernacle

On December 18, 2010, the Provo Tabernacle, a historic meetinghouse in the heart of Provo, UT, burned to the ground.  Yesterday, the LDS Church announced that it would rebuild the tabernacle as a temple. The response to the announcement was effusive--with civic leaders and church members thrilled that the building would be restored.

Let me dissent.  It is a good thing that the building will be rebuilt; it is a bad thing that it will be rebuilt as a temple.  The tabernacle was a public building of sorts--owned by the LDS church but open to the community for concerts, meetings, and the occasional funeral of a big-name local.  The temple is a private building, open only to certain members of the LDS Church.  So while the city will have a sparkling new "historic" building that attracts Mormons downtown to shop, sightsee, and visit; the city has lost a public place--a venue where people could gather to sing, and play music, and talk.

Once, 20 years or so ago, St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a series of structural problems with its building that made it impossible for the parish to hold Christmas services there.  The parish moved those services to the Provo Tabernacle, and so on Christmas eve thousands of Catholics and well-wishers celebrated mass in a Mormon building.  That will never happen again.

The tabernacle wasn't a perfect community center.  Its capacity was a bit large for most local arts groups, and the acoustics were sketchy, and it didn't have much in the way of green rooms for performers to warm up in.  Now it won't be a community center at all, though.  That is our loss.

Compromise and reconciliation, democracy and civic engagement

Whatever you may think about the debt ceiling compromise or the debate leading up to it (and I know most people dislike them), they are less important for the quality of our civic life than what comes next.

This fact seems to have been lost on commentators, who continue to debate the wisdom of the compromise, or the economic impact of the Standard and Poors credit rating downgrade, or what it means for the United States' place in the world.  But for our civic life, what we would hope to see after compromise is some sort of reconciliation.  In fact, in both religion and civic theory, it is the reconciliation--the ability to recognize changes in oneself, and to work more effectively with others in the future, that is the real benefit of compromise.

Consider this teaching from the Christian tradition:
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,^[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ ²² But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister^[b][c] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’^[d] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
   ²³ “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, ²⁴ leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.
   ²⁵ “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.


Or consider the work of truth and reconciliation commissions the world over who have helped countries emerge from periods of tyranny into something like democracy. (For an old but still moving work on these commissions read Lawrence Wechsler's A Miracle, A Universe.)


In both instances the injunction to reconcile is the basis for future relationships.  That is, civic life cannot function with citizens who are unable to talk to each other, or who are trying to overlook (ignore) real gaps between them.  And both instances demand that some individuals not just agree to the compromise, but reconcile with their enemies.


Now consider the way we talk about compromise in America.  It is widely acknowledged that compromise is essential for democracy.  It is also assumed that compromise means that both parties fail to get what they want from the agreement.  This is usually true in terms of policy.  Neither Democrats nor Republicans got what they wanted in the debt ceiling negotiations.


Our discussions of compromise, though, entirely overlook the need for reconciliation.  In fact, all of the sides in the debt ceiling compromise told their constituents that the compromise was a short-term solution and that they would still work to reach their big goals.  Or, in other words, compromise was but a short detour from winning their long-term battle.


If you know history you know that this view--compromise now until you can win enough public support to avoid compromise--has a long tradition in American politics.  And traditionally it has led to some horrible compromises.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act, for example, which gave birth to a mini-civil war prior to the real one.


Our civic life needs two things if it is to avoid the sort of poisonous, ineffective compromises that litter our history: First, a civic movement that is committed to reconciliation in public life, that pushes for relationships and repentance before and after compromise.  (Imagine, for example, a law that requires party leaders to meet with a mediator (or play golf together) after every law that passes with a party-line vote.)  Second, leaders who are publicly committed to reconciliation as a goal of their public service. It is here that the irony lies.  With so many legislators who are publicly Christian, why are so few of them publicly committed to Christian behavior?

Public places, contemplation, and E. B. White

My friend Diane VanderPol, the Director of the Giovale Library at Westminster, wisely pointed out that libraries have bucked the decline in public spaces.  In response to my last post she wrote:

I hold out hope for one public something: libraries! In the economic downturn, public libraries have seen increases in numbers of visitors, check outs and program attendance. During the very eras that saw a decline in the private fraternal orders, civic groups, etc, public libraries- as municipally and regionally supported entities full of paid professionals- thrived. Public libraries= the quintessential third places and the last hope for public something! 

Diane's is an important insight because it highlights an exception to the rule of public decline.  But it is even more interesting because it hints at an important but under-appreciated role of public spaces--they are a venue for communal contemplation.

Thinking of public places as refuges goes against most of the literature on those locations, which focuses on their ability to spark deliberation and engagement between citizens.  Think for example, of Robert Putnan's Bowling Alone which uses individual action in public spaces as a metaphor for the decline of community life.  Or consider Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites, which laments the decline in public dialogue that has accompanied the decline in third places. 


Recall for a minute, though, those types of public spaces that have flourished in the past 20 years--libraries, spas, yoga studios, coffee houses, and trail systems.  They all provide people the opportunity to be alone in public.  When I run on the trails near my house I often see other runners.  We always greet each other but never stop to talk.  When my wife and I stop at Starbucks we are surrounded by other couples who engage in quiet conversation, and by individuals alone with newspapers or iPods. Spas fill up with people getting massages or manicures in close physical proximity, but they may never speak to each other.  Yoga classes consist of rooms full of people enacting what has been for millenia a contemplative practice.  And when I have had enough with my office and the pressures flowing through the computer and phone, I get up, walk across campus, and enjoy the peace of being quietly surrounded by dozens of other people who pay me no mind.

I have no great wisdom about why this is the case.  But it is true that those places that once provided contemplation--churches on one hand and homes on the other--have lost their ability to do so.  Home is either a riot of engagement--getting kids to lessons, rushing to make a meal, cleaning house, watching TV while online--or a place of genuine alone-ness.  Churches (at least in the Protestant traditions) have moved away from quiet, solitude, and thoughtfulness to electrified music, non-stop talking, and enforced interactions.  So perhaps we must get into public now to find the conditions we need to be alone.

E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web and essayist for the New Yorker made this point in 1948 when he wrote, "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy."  His insight was a simple one--it takes being around others to experience the solitude that makes us well.  Some public places do that, and we should be grateful for them.

Civility, tragedy, and silence

Two days before the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, one of our MBA students, Julie Ann Jorgenson, was killed in an auto accident.

Representative Giffords' shooting has elicited endless comment and discussion, most of it asking whether immoderate rhetoric leads to immoderate action.  The debate itself has become an emblem of the question, with all sides claiming the right to be aggrieved and highlighting the flaws in their opponents positions. The President is compelled to speak.  All sides agree that the question is something we ought to talk about.

Julie's death was a tragedy--unexpected and unfair.  Her funeral was two days ago.  There were tributes to Julie, but little talk about the questions raised by her death--is life fair? who is to blame? what can be done to ensure it never happens again?  Instead, the funeral was a tribute to her faith, and a time to express sadness and loss in song, and in prayer, and in silence.

In the Book of Job, within a few verses Job, a "perfect man", had every earthly thing taken from him--his wealth, and his children, and his health.  His wife urged him to curse God and die. Then he scraped his boils with a potsherd and sat in the ashes.

Three friends heard of his suffering and traveled to be with him.  "And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

Once the seven days passed Job's friends interrogated him and Job responded with courage before them and before God.  But  those friends sat with Job in the ashes for a week, saying nothing in the presence of his grief.

Silence is an under-rated civic virtue.  It is one that pays tribute to tragedy, that acknowledges the inexplicable, that reminds that words are insufficient for most of the most important things in life--love, joy, pain, awe, suffering, sadness, transcendence, and death.

I know that there is some sort of civic duty that compels journalists and politicians and pundits and public servants to speak about public tragedies, to offer an opinion on everything under the sun.  But there is an equal human duty to fall silent before the suffering of others and rather than explaining, sit in the ashes and bear witness to grief.

Generosity, debt reduction, and civic life

Rates of personal debt and corporate debt are in decline.  Rates of personal savings and corporate savings are up.  Banks are "sitting on" (whatever that means--odd phrase) over one trillion dollars of excess reserves; corporations 3 trillion.

The decline in indebtedness is generally seen as a good thing--a reassertion of the old American value of thrift, a marker of the end of "consumer culture."  I understand this. And I am pleased that banks are re-capitalizing. But I wonder what it means in the context of this fact: in this difficult economic time, rates of personal giving are down, (see also here and here) even while need is up.

Of course the simplest explanation is that people's budgets are tighter, and so they can give less.  Or its variant, that with unemployment at 9.6% there are simply fewer people who can share their wealth.  I am willing to accede to this argument.  But only up to a point.

Because one thing underlies both debt and giving--the belief that making a promise to another entity about our future behavior is a good thing.  Taking out a loan is, at its most basic level, a wager that things will be better in the future.  You make that assumption by connecting with an entity--a bank perhaps, but as often a family member or friend--which is willing to invest in you on the assumption that things will get better too.  (After all, no one loans money on the assumption that it will not be repaid.)

Generosity carries the same assumption--that in giving, both the recipient and the giver will be better off.  The improvement takes place in three places: in the life of the recipient, in the life of the giver, and in the relationship between the two of them.

So when lending and giving are down, there are impacts beyond the economic ones.  And key among those impacts is the effect on civic life.  When there are fewer connections to other people, civic life becomes coarser, less intertwined, more selfish.  We certainly see this in politics; if the decline in giving and lending is being occasioned by a decline in the willingness to wager with others on a better future, we will soon see it in our communities as well.

Seeking the Vice Presidency of the United States in 2012

With Sarah Palin's new reality show and the posturing over tax cuts, don't ask/don't tell, and the START treaty, the election season of 2012 has begun.  And so I believe it is time to announce my candidacy for the Vice President of the United States.

Why seek an office that has been unfavorably compared with a "bucket of warm piss"?  Why not seek the "leader[ship] of the free world"?  For one, seeking the presidency is an act of tremendous self-regard.  For another, once a person declares for the presidency, then the focus is on that person's prospects and personality, not ways of working or orientation to the world.  And more significantly, by starting with the Vice Presidency and building a group--prospective Secretaries of State and Treasury and Defense--voters will have the chance to consider the entire team, not just its most prominent member.  So I'm recruiting for the "minor" positions.  We will get to the presidency when we have some time.

What will we do?  We will not speak of "the American [anything]."  No mention of the American people--there is no such thing, just shifting coalitions of people living in the United States.  No "American economy."  The economy is a complicated system stretching around the globe and focusing in towns and neighborhoods and homes.  There is no line where the American economy ends and others begin.

We will not suggest that the choices are "either/or".  Everything is "neither/and."  For example, the current debate is not about a tax cut for the wealthy or about creating jobs.  It is about both.  And about neither.

We will not take responsibility for anything that we are not responsible for.  Nor will we blame anyone or any other party for something.  The President does not fix or ruin the economy.  No one has that much influence.  We live in an interconnected world--at best we can shake one part of the web.  So we ought not to be too proud of our ability to actually do things, or too quick to claim that our opponents have done something.

We will not solve problems.  Problems, at least serious ones, don't get solved.  They get worked on, and the solution leaves other issues still to work on.  Governments don't solve problems, they pick their favorite version and struggle against it.

We will raise taxes and cut programs because our government is both too poor and too big. We will become increasingly unpopular and be happy with that.

We will point towards a future where groups of people can work on the problems that they favor at the level they can work on them.  We will be libertarian in politics and communitarian in organization.  We will expect that the government of the United States will remain a defender of the liberties of the people who reside in its borders and the setter of aspirations.  But it will not run the programs or make the decisions about how to get to those aspirations.  So we may want all 18-year olds to graduate high school.  Excellent aspiration.  Let communities and schools and parents start working.  In other words, more judiciary, more rule of law; fewer laws, smaller executive branch.  Government as accrediting body.

We will hope for a future where the United States is a big Switzerland--prosperous, free, democratic, neutral, and less concerned about its place on the world stage and the use of power than about helping people and nations work out their difficulties even if it makes us seem weak.

I am of course jesting--a person like me has no chance of becoming Vice President. A platform like this, that focuses on rhetoric and process, means close to nothing in our system. And a plan like this to circumvent the electoral circus and the hubris of the Presidency stands no chance.  But I am serious about the future I would like to see and the pathway to it.  Anyone interested?

Dialogue and civility

Yet another in what is becoming a series of posts about civility.  Earlier this week KSL, one of the state's major news outlets (and an outlet owned by the LDS Church) shut down the comments section of its website.  The reason? "We recognize that our comment boards do not meet our own standards or the expectation of many of our users," (according to a statement posted on the KSL.com website and cited in this article).

As a Mormon I can say that I am not surprised at this step--after all, my church is not just uncomfortable with open discussion of major religious issues in church, but deeply committed to politeness, favoring it over open-ness or honesty. And as an occasional reader of public fora on news sites I can say that I have almost never read a comment that added to the discussion of the topic.

Still, there is much to be concerned about in this step.  At least some supporters of democracy argue that communities need public spaces, or third places, where they can talk, discuss, debate, and disagree about major issues prior to making a decision or taking political action on an issue. (My favorite book on this topic is Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites--a must-read, and a reminder of how much we lost when he died 15 years ago.) 

The big point in the work of third place theorists is that democracy needs an infrastructure that is related to but separate from the decision-making apparatus.  In the past that infrastructure has been physical--pubs, churches, parks, social clubs, etc.)  Today a good chunk of that infrastructure is online.

So when KSL.com shuts down is public fora it is doing two things--first striking a blow for civility by reducing the overall amount of bile that spills out online.  But second it is undermining a piece of the infrastructure that makes democracy possible--hardly a good things for a news outlet (or a church) to do.

It is worth noting in conclusion that colleges and universities could do a lot more than they do in this area.  Many institutions of higher education have almost no real public space, or third places.  Instead they give over all their space either to private uses (offices), or directed uses (classrooms).  What is more, the opportunities for open discussion are severely limited.  Most faculty meetings, for example, are devoted to two things--passing along information in a passive manner, and making decisions on proposals.  We would be well-served to have more open fora to lay the groundwork for better decisions and, therefore, more civilized outcomes to our work.

Incivility and the misunderstanding of leadership

Most of my posts are organized around a question.  This one, though, has a thesis--that a particular variety of incivility is based on the misunderstanding of leadership, both on the part of the uncivil person and the person on the receiving end of the incivility.

Consider this story on NPR today.  The election season is on us bringing attack ads with it.  These ads have many characteristics--the ominous voice-over, the melodrama, and the half-true claims about one candidate or another.  But they also share a particular view of leadership--that a person in elected office somehow causes the events that happen during her/his term of service.

This view of leadership--leader as the cause of all that occurs--is blasphemous.  It is also a view that exists among the leaders as well as among the led.  So, for example, Presidents claim that they (or their administrations) have caused improving economic conditions when they improve.  And when those conditions do not improve, the President's opponents blame the president for the economic downturn.

That a leader causes something to happen is, in all but the most modest cases, not true.  Even in the case of actions tied closely to the leader--making a decision on a policy, for example,--that leader does not wholly cause something to happen.  The decision is in response to an event or an issue, the leader has received advice (usually contradictory) from others, and the outcome of the decision is rarely as clear or as simple as one might hope.

Why do we persist in the belief that leaders are causal agents?  Because it flatters the biases of leaders and the led, because it give free rein to pride rather than humility, because it suggests an explicable world, and because it allows all participants to avoid taking responsibility for the things they actually are responsible for.

A bit more on this last point: incivility is a form of rhetoric, the purpose of which is to limit concrete responses to concrete problems.  Incivility is at its core symbolic--it signals to listeners that they should behave a certain way, or draw certain conclusions on the basis of signs, not signifiers.  So incivility is closer to protest and parade than it is to deliberation or argument.

In this sort of setting, how does one take responsibility?  It is almost impossible.  The leader cannot accept responsibility, for she has been charged with all manner of things that she could not possibly have caused.  And the incivil one cannot take responsibility, for to do so is to undermine the entire thesis of the uncivil act.  After all, if the leader did not cause the whole thing, then the complainer must bear some responsibility as well.

Leaders and complainers both would do well to practice humility in the face of the temptation to be the cause of all things.  And educators would do well to work with students and colleagues on the problems of causation.  Doing so makes it possible for leaders and complainers to bear responsibility for the small things for which we truly can be responsible.  And it allows us to honestly recognize what we all know--that most occurrences are beyond the control of any person, leader or complainer.

Millions of sages on millions of stages

One frequently expressed view of higher education's future is that the availability of content on the web will usher in an age when faculty have less incentive to be sages on stages and more to be guides on the sides of student learning.  It seems equally likely, though, that technology will actually increase the influence of sages on stages.  Here is why:

1. Many online venues for content are "sage-focused."  Consider YouTube, where anyone who wants to can make themselves a sage, presenting their wisdom for free to as many as will take it.  Even "open content" sites are likely to contribute to sage-ness.  Consider MIT's OpenCourseware site.  Seen one way it is an opportunity for students all over the world to direct their learning by getting content from the world's best professors.  Seen another way, it is home to content that is appealing precisely because of the  perceived sagacity of the faculty whose courses are posted there.

2. The current cultural climate, enhanced by social networking and other web trends, is that users seek out those opinions that agree with their own.  Friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, fans of Obama or Palin; Fox or MSNBC, are more likely now than ever to listen only to those with whom they agree.  This tendency enhances the influence of sages, whose power and presence expand with the number of their loyal followers.  Glenn Beck University anyone?

The future of learning, then, may not be about sages becoming guides, but instead about a competition among sages, in the classroom and on the web, for acolytes to follow their every pronouncement.  Not a bright future to be sure, either for learning or for democracy.

Learning and (in)civility

Lionofzion's comment on my recent post about fixing incivility got me thinking about a classic work of research on learning.  LoZ argues that in many instances you can't fix incivility until you get at the reasons why people are uncivil--that as long as one party sees the other as profoundly wrong there is no almost no chance for respect.

I see that point, and it certainly describes one type of incivility--the sort based in, for want of a better word, contempt.  And LoZ is right,  it is almost impossible to fix contempt.  (Gladwell's Blink reports a study suggesting that the strongest predictor of divorce is contempt between spouses, surely a sign of the ability of contempt to ruin relationships.)

Fortunately, not all incivility is at the level of contempt.  Nor is all civility deeply rooted in respect for others.  So the question becomes: how can we distinguish types of civility and incivility, and having distinguished them, support the types that get to a useful, good end? 

Enter the classic work of research on learning, Marton, Hounshell, and Entwistle, The Experience of Learning (known by its fans in Provo, UT as the "Christmas Book" because of its bright red and green cover.)  EoL is one of the first works I know to turn the focus away from teaching to learning, and once focused on learning, EoL asks all sorts of important questions about how and why students learn.

In the opening chapter, Noel Entwistle points out that student approaches to learning follow three rough paths.  Some students are surface learners, motivated by a desire to keep up with course requirements.  Surface learners do not reflect on their learning, they memorize, and they think of knowledge as discrete bits of information.  Strategic learners seek the highest possible grades, and because this is their goal, they direct their work to the preferences of their teachers.  Deep learners are driven by a desire to understand for themselves. They create connections between pieces of information and across their courses.  They aim for learning to become a part of them, indistinguishable from who they think they are deep inside.
 
Both the categories and the motivations of deep, strategic, and surface learning can be applied to civility.  Take, for example, the role of nonviolence in the civil rights movement. Many white Southerners (and some blacks) prided themselves on Southern hospitality.  These people with a surface commitment to civility would be polite to each other in public, while holding the most noxious views of others in private.  Civility was atomistic--to be applied in one case or with one person but not another.

Young activists in the movement were strategic about civility.  The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee embraced non-violence as a tactic, its impact to be measured by its ability to win victories for protesters.  As long as peaceful protest seemed to win the day, SNCC was on board.  But when nonviolence made no headway, or opened the door for unapologetic racists to win the day, SNCC renounced it.  Only the faction of the movement affiliated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and/or the historic nonviolent organizations like Fellowship of Reconciliation made a deep commitment to nonviolence as a way of being, not a way to get something.

This post should not necessarily be read as a condemnation of strategic civility in favor of deep civility.  If you want to get things done--make decisions in faculty meeting, bring about social change, win in an adversarial setting--then strategic civility may be the best tool.  But deep civility holds out another promise--that faculty meetings, civic engagement projects, victories in policy debates, in the courtroom, etc,--are at best partial measures.  There is a more profound option--that a commitment to right relationships with others leads to an entirely other point of view, where civility is a byproduct of the decent, long-suffering, nonviolent people who live along side us. 

How do you fix incivility?

This piece in the New Yorker describes the conditions in the US Senate.  By nearly all accounts, the Senate is incapable of carrying out its deliberative role in a civil way, and as a result it is either paralyzed by the intransigence of the minority party, or diminished by the naked use of power by the majority party.

In one way or another, public deliberations in many other places--state legislatures, shareholder meetings, parent-teacher conferences, faculty meetings--are similarly frustrated.

Incivility in public life has of course birthed many proposals on how to resolve it.  The ones I know of fall into four categories:

1. the pledge: people who would otherwise act uncivilly take a pledge in advance that they will respect each other.  Rebecca Attwood in Inside Higher Education reported on the work of Geoff Shamrock who has created a "Hippocratic Oath" for faculty and administrators.  John Kesler, an attorney and activist in Salt Lake City has proposed a series of rules for civil behavior in Utah's governmental bodies.

2. casuistry: Albert Johnson and Stephen Toulmin wrote the classic book on the virtues of casuistry, or arguing by the specifics of the case. Their position is this: that arguing from abstract moral principles leads to impasses; working from specifics allows people who would otherwise not talk to each other (parties to the abortion debate, for example) can find agreement on specific issues (reducing teen pregnancies in the poor neighborhoods of St. Louis, for example).  Utah leaders are trying this approach on our own tough issues, starting with the designation of public lands as wilderness.

3. first principles: The moral philosopher Michael Sandel proposed in a recent TED talk that debate ought to focus on first principles instead of cases.  His position is this: people on different sides of policy issues may in fact hold similar positions on the core issues behind the policy disagreement. Conservatives and liberals may both value fairness highly, they just see its application differently.  So talking about fairness instead of the details of health care allocations can forge common ground.

4. third parties: Here the view is that a neutral third party with a reputation for fairness and impartiality can help parties to a conflict come to a compromise position at least minimally acceptable to the disagreeing parties.  This approach has somehow lodged itself in the legal system, where confrontation is otherwise seen as the fastest pathway to a victory.

I am certain that each approach works in specific settings (which I guess makes me a casuist), but their differences mask a common assumption--that spoken disagreements can be resolved by more talking.

There is certainly truth here, but people intent on solving incivility might ask whether actions rather than words might do more to resolve disagreement.  There is a hint of this in the history of the Senate, where opponents used to eat, live, and travel together.  Today that happens no longer.

There is poetic and philosophical support to the view as well--Emily Dickinson's injunction to "tell all the truth but tell it slant," Jon Kay's suggestion that goals are best reached via "Obliquity."

But for me the most compelling evidence is experiential: people who work side-by-side on a project unrelated to their disagreement are likely to develop a common bond that can supersede spoken disagreement.  This is the result of many service-learning and neighborhood work projects; it is the wisdom behind mundane committee service; it is an outcome of responding to disaster.

In the long run, of course, none of these solutions is a solution.  They are, instead, responses to problems,  cough drops, not cures for a cough.  But the trend among people worried about incivility seems to be to talk about it.  Why not act instead?

Are we good at discussing but bad at deciding?

Two things about professors seem to be universally believed--that we are good at leading discussions in the classroom and bad at making decisions in the faculty meeting.  I do not know why this is--one would think that people whose professions use discussion to lead to learning would excel at using discussion to lead to decisions. And I am not sure that the beliefs are true--good institutions make lots of good decisions, and bad discussions take place everywhere.  But it is worth considering why discussion and decision are so segregated in our thinking about higher education.

Why is this  the case?  Perhaps it is because professors are, before they are faculty, people. As people they share assumptions and practices about decision-making (and -makers) with the general public, a group characterized by ever-stronger ties with like-minded people and ever more hostile relations with people who disagree.  If this is the case, then the classroom is the location of like-mindedness and meetings the location (at least potentially) for confrontations with those who disagree.  And so discussion is comfortable because it takes place in an atmosphere of consensus, while decisions are difficult because disagreement is the central context.

Or it could be that classroom discussions and university decision-making come from entirely different traditions, so that while they are neighbors on campus they are culturally and intellectually strangers.  There is certainly some truth to this theory. Faculty governance emerged after a long period of conflict with administrators in the late-19th and early-20th centuries,  (for an excellent history of this period read George Marsden's The Soul of the American University) and when it did it adopted a set of practices codified in two earlier periods of conflict--the years of the early republic (when American parliamentary procedure first emerged) and the years of the civil war and reconstruction, when Robert's Rules of Order came to rule public meetings.  The history of learning through discussion is much older, dating to at least to Socrates in the Western tradition, and seems to have flourished independently of institutions of higher learning.

Or perhaps it is the case that there are discussion people and decision people in higher education.  This is certainly the case in the self-image of some faculty.  It is not at all uncommon for a faculty member, in explaining her/his disengagement from contentious governance issues, to say "I'm here because I love to teach,"  or "it is the students who really matter to me,"  implying that while governance is important, it is peripheral to the real work--learning--of the institution.  And it is also the case that administrators, department chairs, and presidents of the faculty senate will sometimes wonder out loud why their colleagues won't join the hard work of joint decision-making, favoring instead the safe harbor of the classroom.

Or maybe there is a distinction in beliefs about what is at stake in classroom discussions and decision-making meetings.  The classroom carries high potential (a person's life may be transformed forever) but low stakes at any one gathering (after all, one dull discussion of Walden does not guarantee that students will forever lead lives of quiet desperation).  Conversely, decision gatherings are often low potential (insert here your favorite story about months spent debating campus policy on the use of chalk to advertise events on campus sidewalks), but high stakes--once a decision is made, the die is set.

Whatever the explanation, higher education needs to focus here, both because the work of most campuses is diminished by poor discussions and poor decision-making; and because the same malady afflicts our public lives.  If you believe in democracy, or politics, or the possibility of people making decisions that shape their lives, then you have to hope that people learn to discuss difficult issues, and then make decent determinations about those issues.  And if you believe that learning can take place in the space between the ideas held by individuals, then you have to hope that we figure out how to take fuller advantage of discussion's reputation.